Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

IMAGINATIVE TRANSCRIPTS

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WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

IMAGINATIVE TRANSCRIPTS Selected Literary Essays

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Copyright ©  by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.  Madison Avenue, New York, New York  www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spiegelman, Willard. Imaginative transcripts : selected literary essays / Willard Spiegelman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---- . American poetry—History and criticism. . English poetry—History and criticism. . Poetics. . Poetry. I. Title. PSS  .—dc 

 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

FOREWORD

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ood criticism, built on a broad and deep knowledge of literature and enlivened by a capable sensibility is the best friend a poem can have. In the best criticism, the reader is also brought into that circle of friendship. Willard Spiegelman has given faithful and devoted critical attention to a good number of contemporary American poets, but his observations are always informed with broader and deeper poetic knowledge of classical and romantic poetry. This book opens in a movingly personal way in which the reader is led to reenact a scene of awakened awareness to poetry: in its opening chapter— a review of Robert Fagles’ translation of the Aeneid (preceding an earlier essay of Spiegelman’s on Wordsworth’s translation of Virgil)—the author gives us an engrossing bit of almost Proustian recherche of his own learning to read, as a student, a passage from Book I with its celebrated line forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (perhaps some day we will remember these things with joy, where olim—like our Janus-faced “then”—can designate a moment in past or future time). We are led to feel that not only the consequences but the experience of construing lines of poetry—usually thought of as the driest level of reading—can be lastingly fruitful. The relation of past and present is always there in Spiegelman’s work. His first book, Wordsworth’s Heroes, was a fine piece of work; but its being followed by The Didactic Muse, an absolutely first-rate study of contemporary American poetry indicates that a mind and sensibility lying beyond the narrowly professional was at work. Combining sophisticated literary history

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 and criticism of cultural milieus, this book remains, in my opinion, one of the most important studies of contemporary American poetry during the past decade. His last book, Majestic Indolence, had returned to the matter of Romantic poetry, but with a complex moral and aesthetic agenda—a dialectic of passiveness and active creative engagement—perhaps occasioned by some of his thinking about those questions in his previous work on contemporary writers. And in How Poets See World, Spiegelman explored the ways in which, for a number of contemporary poets—and perhaps for true poetry itself—description can never be merely “mere.” The range of these concerns marks the essays in the present volume, in which Spiegelman engages some of the contemporary poets he has previously discussed—Charles Tomlinson (a British poet, but one influenced by strains in American poetry), Amy Clampitt, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—as well as shows more unpredictable choices of critical focus for him, in the essays on the less widely appreciated Donald Justice, Irving Feldman, and Ben Belitt. He also writes of the poetic origins and affiliations of mid-twentieth century opera libretti like The Rake’s Progress and Peter Grimes. Critical generosity and expansiveness shown throughout these pages is always accompanied by the acuteness of his observation. It seems to me to be a truth by no means universally acknowledged today that the more one knows and has engaged with the poetry of the past, the better a position he or she will be in to deal with that of the present. Willard Spiegelman’s powerful, knowing, and sensitive discussions of later twentieth-century American poetry attest to this, as they do to his pragmatic perspective and lack of any theoretical ax to grind that might actually blunt the keenness of his perceptions. —John Hollander

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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ome years ago Helen Vendler casually remarked that I should try to publish a selection of my essays and reviews. At the time, I didn’t think such a thing would be possible. A bit later, Shannon McLachlan, my editor at Oxford University Press, made a similar recommendation, so with her encouragement the project went forward. I am grateful to her, and to her assistant Brendan O’Neill, for their enthusiasm and attention. I wish to acknowledge, as well, the three readers’ reports that also supported this enterprise, and the generous introduction provided by John Hollander. Reading through one’s own work from years past can be a complicated experience. One suffers some embarrassment reviewing ideas and sentences about which one now has second or third thoughts. But one also takes satisfaction in seeing other articulations that seem judicious and true. In any case, it will ultimately be not my job but my reader’s to assess the accuracy of my literary explorations and judgments. The work contained in these pages appeared originally in the following journals: “Unforced Marches,” “The Rake, The Don, The Flute: Auden as Librettist,” “‘All the World’s Plenty, All the Brazen Particulars,’” and “The Comedian as the Letter I, or the Perils of Vaudeville in a PostModern Age” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review; “Repetition and Singularity,” “Jorie Graham Talking,” “ ‘Naked Without My Line-Ends’: Robert Lowell in His Letters,” and “The Achievement of Robert Lowell” in the Kenyon Review; “Poetry in Review: On The Collected Poems of Donald Justice,” and “Poetry in Review: On A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery” in The Yale Review;

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 “Landscape and Knowledge: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” and “‘In the Mash of the Upper and Nether’: Ben Belitt’s Places” in Modern Poetry Studies; “Wordsworth’s Aeneid,” and “Some Lucretian Elements in Wordsworth” in Comparative Literature; “Keats’s ‘Coming Muskrose’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Profound Verdure’” in ELH; “Peter Grimes: The Development of a Hero” in Studies in Romanticism; “Rita Dove, Dancing” in Virginia Quarterly Review; and “The Nineties Revisted” in Contemporary Literature. I am indebted to the editors of these journals for their support of my work. At the beginning of my career Robert Boyers (who is still at the helm of Salmagundi ) and Jerome Mazzaro of the now defunct Modern Poetry Studies accepted my first essays on contemporary poetry. To David Lynn (Kenyon Review), J. D. McClatchy (The Yale Review), and Ben Downing and Hebert Leibowitz (Parnassus), I owe a greater debt, of many years’ standing, for their encouragement, their keen editorial eye and high standards, their honesty, and their judgment. Messrs. Downing and Leibowitz, especially, have helped me hone my critical and literary skills and to become a more clear-sighted reader and writer.

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CONTENTS

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Foreword

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Introduction

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

Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir () 

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Wordsworth’s Aeneid ()



Some Lucretian Elements in Wordsworth () 

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Keats’s “Coming Muskrose” and Shakespeare’s “Profound Verdure” () 

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Peter Grimes: The Development of a Hero () 

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The Rake, The Don, The Flute: W. H. Auden as Librettist () 



Landscape and Knowledge: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop () 





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“In the Mash of the Upper and Nether”: Ben Belitt’s Places () 

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“All the World’s Plenty, All the Brazen Particulars” (): On Ben Belitt 



The Comedian as the Letter I, or the Perils of Vaudeville in a Post-Modern Age: On Irving Feldman () 

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Repetition and Singularity: On Louise Glück, The Seven Ages, and Jorie Graham, Never ()

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Poetry in Review: On the Collected Poems of Donald Justice () 



Rita Dove, Dancing ()



The Nineties Revisited ()



Jorie Graham Talking ()



Poetry in Review: On A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery () 



“Naked without My Line-Ends”: Robert Lowell in His Letters () 

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The Achievement of Robert Lowell () Notes

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Index

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  





INTRODUCTION

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The imaginative transcripts were like clouds, Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible To distinguish. — , “     ” In Wallace Stevens’s last long poem, a Professor Eucalyptus sits and thinks, and looks out “on his balcony,” and takes a walk through neighborhood streets, and practices “scales on his piano.” This poet-philosopher, Stevens’s stand-in, keeps coming back to what his maker calls “the real,” the “ordinary,” the base line, which is also the place where he starts. So do all of us. “The real” includes nature and the cityscape, our daily commonplace life, everything we experience with our bodily senses. For literary scholars it also includes poems, which constitute for us a reality equivalent to what we see outdoors. We keep coming back to “the real” in literature and then we move beyond it, in order to comment upon it. On we go, from the real to the imagined, seesawing between passive response and active engagement, observing and interpreting. Like all poets, professors, and readers, Stevens knew that there is no such thing as “the poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation.” In reading, as in writing, we add to the available store of reality through creative acts of explanation. We enhance the real by bringing ourselves to it. Like Professor Eucalyptus we always seek “the commodious adjective” for what we see. We come at our subject obliquely, “in the intricate evasions

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 of as,” in Stevens’s terms, or we “tell all the truth” but we tell it, necessarily, “slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised. We deviate and we wander. This is what we mean, finally, by literary creation of any sort: a place where “as and is are one.” Dickinson again: “Success in circuit lies.” Most dichotomies, including those I have just traced, tend to blur on closer examination. Stevens’s “imaginative transcripts” depend upon “the transcripts of feeling.” Indeed, they come from them. Perhaps, as Stevens suggests above, the two sets of transcripts are finally indistinguishable. Elsewhere in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” he claims that “the theory of poetry” (and, we might admit, the criticism of poetry) is “the life of poetry.” He also calls it “the theory of life,” at least the life of poet, ordinary reader, and professional or professorial critic. Stevens was a great one for equations, for simple verbs of being, for “X is Y” formulations. These quoted epigrammatic phrases from his most academic poem suggest that life, theory, and practice constitute the three poles of all creative endeavors. Or, to be more precise, they are the three points that by marking a triangle—I’d like to imagine an equilateral one—also make a plane, a clean geometrical figure. But what about Stevens’s clouds? Do they signify his skepticism about our common endeavor? Is nothing solid? Does nothing last? We all wonder. We want at least some of our transcripts to be more than nebulous, insubstantial reflections. We want them to last longer than a moment, longer than our fleeting feelings. Any author, even an academic critic, has more solid expectations of his work, no matter how sober and levelheaded his understanding of time’s depredations and the inevitable replacement of one person’s, or age’s, taste with another. The shelf life of literary criticism is shockingly short, much briefer than the life of the art it discusses. Don Marquis once mordantly observed that publishing a book of poems and waiting for a response is like throwing rose petals into the Grand Canyon and then listening for the echo. All writers, regardless of genre, accept this grim truth, and each hopes that he may evade it. We scholars with our small degree of narcissism long for stability, although we equally acknowledge change as our common destiny. Writing something and then putting it into a journal or book confers a certain, at least marginal, public authority upon it. Many years ago I handed back a set of first papers to students in a poetry course. I told them that they hadn’t done especially well with the Thomas Hardy poem I had asked them to write about. I then explained the poem with, I thought, clarity and irrefutable persuasiveness. One steely-eyed young engineering student raised her hand and said, “That interpretation of the poem you just gave us: did you find it in a book or did you just make it up?” Seldom at a loss for words, I paused momentarily and then replied, “Why would that make any difference?”

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 To which she retorted, “Well, if you had found it in a book it would have some truth to it, but if you just made it up then I don’t understand why it’s any better than anything we make up.” And then I knew I had her: “What do you think the people who write the books do? They make it up themselves!” It is for this student, and her peers during the past several decades, as well as for my colleagues and other professional readers of poetry, that I have continued to make things up and guide them into print. I hope that this student, now a mature woman living a contented life somewhere, might see this book and take satisfaction in learning that I have tried to respond to the challenge she offered to me when she unintentionally dropped the gauntlet many years ago.

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have riffed above on Stevens’s poem, and have reminisced about a particular classroom interchange, as a way of introducing a selection of essays and reviews that cover a range of literary texts from ancient Rome to imperial America. Some have a scholarly cast; others were intended for a more general audience composed of the perhaps mythic “common readers” beloved of Dr. Johnson and Virginia Woolf. As a group the texts represent a series of ordinary evenings and days spent not in New Haven but in other sites of reading, contemplation, and composition. They transcribe my imaginings and my feelings. Both the earliest and the latest written of these look at Virgil’s Aeneid, and as a complementary pair they also bring full circle a career of reading and writing that began more than four decades ago in a high school Latin class where, under the magical spell of an inspiring teacher and a great epic poem, I first became—although I hardly knew it at the time—a literary critic. “Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir,” a review of Robert Fagles’s magisterial translation of the Aeneid, appeared in Parnassus () and describes in its opening pages the thrill of my learning how to read poetry slowly, carefully, and with sensitive attention to every nuance of meaning, sound, grammar and syntax, and form. These are the aspects of any poem that still interest me the most, in particular what Stevens calls “the less legible meanings of sounds,” the overlappings of meaning and music, everything we mean by the word tone. The less legible the meanings, the more we must pursue them. They are also the very things that much academic study of literature, in its effort to “demystify” its subject, has for the most part neglected during the past three decades, as other kinds of study—not semantic but ideological, theoretical, political, and cultural—have preempted what used to be called “close reading.”

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 Poetry has retreated to the periphery of most college curricula. Whereas forty years ago every young assistant professor with a newly minted doctorate could be counted on to have under his or her belt the capacity and willingness to teach an introductory undergraduate course in poetry (and one in Shakespeare), many of today’s young academics are as unready to lead such a course, unless they have had specific training in this arcane genre, as they would be a course in a foreign language. The teaching anthology assembled and edited by the late Reuben Brower, in collaboration with junior colleagues in his Humanities  course at Harvard, was called significantly Beginning with Poems. Poetry was supposed to be where it all started. Poetry instead has become something like a foreign language, having moved to the circumference of the circle whose center it used to occupy. Most university English departments no longer require a study of the genre as part of the training of their undergraduate majors. There are many reasons for such displacement and neglect. One is the fact that poetry, especially lyric poetry, resists the pigeonholing brought about by those ideological or theoretical maneuvers that have as their primary focus the external world, society, history, or even human psychology. Another is the fact that hostile critics have bludgeoned the idea of close reading because some of the famous old “New Critics”—Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren—also adhered to a conservative political stance in other parts of their intellectual lives. But close reading is not an empty exercise or a version of what T. S. Eliot called the “lemon-squeezer school” of literary criticism, although its recent adversaries have accused it of such sterility. Nor is it either logically or politically a reactionary practice, although many of its American adherents, like the quartet above, were conservative Southerners. The Englishmen I. A. Richards, the founder of the movement, and William Empson, the best and least predictable or containable close reader of the past century, always leaned politically to the Left. Fortunately, close reading is making a comeback these days. Scholars as different as Terry Eagleton and Marjorie Perloff have urged us to resume the elementary examination of poems as poems rather than as other things. A student once told me that he had done “race-class-gender” (for years now the equivalent of a single portmanteau term) in his high school English classes, but an emphasis on “tone” and “voice” in an elementary college class sounded “awesome,” like something different, new, and excitingly sweet. The wheel turns. The common literary enterprise, personal and collective, means looking at something as it actually is (in Matthew Arnold’s dictum) and also as it isn’t (in Oscar Wilde’s). We approach our texts and understand them by way of our own tropes and deviations. Twelve years after I finished high school, I wrote my first scholarly essay, on Wordsworth and Virgil, which appeared

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 in Comparative Literature in . Both Wilde, in the nineteenth century, and Harold Bloom, in the twentieth, have observed that the strongest literary commentary is at least a thinly veiled autobiography. Often that autobiography is even more naked, more overt, than the subject under review. The pieces collected here form a partial account of my intellectual growth and interests. We seldom work on poems or other texts for purely objective reasons. Other factors have determined, if not overdetermined, our choices. One’s imaginative transcripts reproduce at various levels the history of one’s feelings as well as one’s critical thoughts. No reader reads more closely than the translator; this is one reason that the proper study of English always benefits from, even depends upon, the study of other languages. Latin poetry has long informed my experience of English and American literature. Whatever I have achieved as scholar and critic has been due in large part to my knowledge, however imperfect, of Latin, as well as French, German, Greek, and Italian. French came in high school, as did Latin; German in college; Greek one summer vacation through the kind agency of a friendly classicist who granted me entry into his Homer course; and Italian began the way it does for many of us: through a combination of Dante, restaurants, operas, and trips to Italy. Words sink in. Turns of phrasing, figures of speech, and colloquialisms gradually become a part of a reader/speaker’s linguistic equipment for understanding reality. We engage with the “real” through language itself. By reading poems, or whole books, in languages other than my native one, I had to work slowly and methodically, alert to the mysteries inherent in words, in language itself. One stumbles in order to learn how to walk upright; one mumbles before reaching fuller powers of articulation. Like the close reading of poems, the study of the so-called dead languages, indeed of most foreign languages, no longer constitutes a major part of literary education in this country, at either the university or the preuniversity level. In spite of the lip service paid to “diversity,” many professors of literature are regrettably monolingual and only marginally interested in how language—their own as well as those of other people—actually works. I put myself in the camp of J. Hillis Miller, who describes approvingly “the linguistic moment,” the point at which we become aware of language itself operating in a poem, or somewhat less frequently in a piece of prose, the point at which the author himself or herself has brought to the fore materials rather than ideas. Such moments abound in “foreign” languages, but they also constitute our literary engagements with the mother tongue. As a child, such revelations came to me through my native English as well as through those languages I didn’t understand easily or naturally. Even one’s first language contains plenty of mysteries, if only because all language is inherently strange and initially unfathomable. A good dictionary

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 ought to be any reader’s best friend. At ten, I heard and then read, or perhaps the other way around, the title of Eugene O’Neill’s play Mourning Becomes Electra. Whatever could it mean? It conjured images of a pre-noon thunderstorm. A patient fifth-grade teacher, and trips to Webster’s and the encyclopedia, offered clarification. Words (“becomes”) can have more than one meaning. Homonymic puns (“Mourning”/“Morning”) can occur. Greek heroines have strange names that sound almost English. All of this came as news to me. A person capable of continuing to delight in such surprise often becomes a writer, even if only a literary critic. The following essays affirm, I hope, three principles. The first is that poems live mainly through their form and their language, what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” however we might measure them. The second is that poets from different times and places, and in different languages, are nevertheless often related to one another, and that a later poet can respond to an earlier one although writing in a different language. Robert Frost said that he first became aware of the speaking voice in poetry through his high school reading of Shakespeare’s plays and—more surprising—Virgil’s Eclogues. The relationship of Virgil to Homer remains the most powerful reminder of Bloom’s theories of literary influence, and it should encourage a return to the best parts of the old “comparative literature” curriculum as well as blending such theories into the teaching of texts in our native tongue. The third governing principle, visible only retrospectively, is the way in which a literary life—in this case my own—constructs itself over time, changing and remaining steady simultaneously. Although I probably could not have predicted it when I was a graduate student, my teaching and writing have had three kinds of focus for three and a half decades: the Greek and Roman classics, the British Romantics, and American poetry of the past sixty years. Two-thirds of this volume consist of essays about and reviews of post–World War II American poetry, a field to which I was drawn only after my official academic career had begun. Before that time, I had billed and sold myself as a Romanticist. (As an undergraduate my passion and taste were all for fiction.) The six canonical British Romantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—still figure heavily in my teaching and writing, although I now look forward from them to Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and others, as well as back from them to Milton, Shakespeare, and the ancients when I teach them. The bridge between them and contemporary American poets is strong and permanent: I am hardly alone in conceiving the history of poetry in English since Wordsworth as, in large part, a series of footnotes and responses to the revolution he set going, with Coleridge’s help, in the  Lyrical Ballads and the preface that followed two years later.

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 After the essays about Virgil, and about Wordsworth and his connections to two Latin precursors, come two further explorations of Romantic poetry, both of them in a comparative mode: an essay on Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and its intertextual relationship with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a study of Peter Grimes, the eponymous hero of Benjamin Britten’s first opera (), in relation to his earlier incarnation in George Crabbe’s The Borough (). From the British Romantic poets, the essays leap to the United States in the post–World War II era. I continue a musical focus in an essay on W. H. Auden as librettist and translator. This piece performs several kinds of bridging: between music and poetry, between languages, and, as always in Auden’s case, between British and American poetry, as well as between high modernism and a postwar, international scene. I was unaware of much contemporary poetry until my early twenties; it had entered neither my curricular study nor my extracurricular awareness until I began reading Robert Lowell and Bishop, first out of curiosity and then for pleasure. Before then, all I knew were the perennial favorites of adolescents, e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas. Allen Ginsberg had made his mark on the zeitgeist with the publication of Howl in , but most college professors would not grant him, or it, the courtesy of close attention. Teaching a course in contemporary American poetry in , I realized that Bishop, then in her late flowering that included the great poems gathered together in Geography III (), owed as much to Wordsworth as she did to Herbert and Hopkins, her two favorite poets. Landscape and description— the way a viewer looks at the world and the emotional as well as the intellectual changes that such looking registers—struck me as major tropes in her work as much as they had been in that of her British precursor. My earliest critical, “imaginative” transcripts also registered transcripts of my feelings, or perhaps vice versa. I began to see “place” wherever I looked; places themselves began to leap from the pages of such diverse poets as the now underrated Ben Belitt, one of the last avatars of high modernism and, later, Charles Wright. I decided to look at, and into, the act of looking itself. Once I began reading contemporary poets closely and imaginatively, it became clear that the ones who meant the most to me, regardless of differences among them in style and temperament, were those who took such acts of looking as seriously as I did. Poets in the high Romantic tradition—Wright and Amy Clampitt, even the more flamboyant Jorie Graham—teach us “how poets see the world,” to borrow the title of my  book about these and other contemporaries. Northrop Frye long ago observed that a person with ideal taste is the one who likes and can understand everything, but few readers can meet the heroic demands of Frye’s encyclopedic standards. Still, even someone with far from catholic tastes can move away from a base, a tonic chord, and

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 outward to other registers and other tonalities. It was natural for me to be drawn to the engaging nostalgias, sophisticated weariness, and formal musical experimentation of Donald Justice and Mark Strand, and the related but differing versions of American Romanticism in A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery. The antic disposition of Irving Feldman and the often clinical austerity of Louise Glück also appealed, although to a different side of my temperament. Likewise, I had taught the poetry of Rita Dove, but it wasn’t until I read American Smooth () that I thought to write about her, and then only because we shared a passion for ballroom dancing. Whoever would have imagined that the waltz or the foxtrot, that quintessential American dance, could connect a poet and one of her academic readers? The volume ends with two pieces about Robert Lowell. He was the one great post-War poet whom I had read, admired, and taught for thirty years, but never written about until quite recently. Perhaps I needed three full decades to absorb the work of the man whose manic ambition and encyclopedic literary absorption return this volume to its beginnings, in Virgil, ancient Rome, and a poet’s epic aspirations. With the publication of Lowell’s ,-page Collected Poems in  I found it instructive, indeed mandatory, to sit down and read straight through—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lord Weary’s Castle to the heartbreaking late Day By Day—in order to survey what Stevens, thinking of his own Collected Poems, referred to as “the planet on the table.” Keats felt like “a watcher of the skies” when he discovered Chapman’s Homer. Likewise, when Lowell’s new planet swam “into my ken,” I realized again the truth that the big books of great poets become part of the “real” to which any serious reader must accommodate himself. Many of my earlier essays on poets (especially Ammons, Ashbery, Auden, Bishop, Clampitt, Ginsberg, Graham, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Charles Tomlinson, and Wright, as well as the British Romantics) have already found a home within the bound covers of other books. In the following sampling from uncollected periodical publications I wish to take the measure of both older and contemporary poetry and, by extension, of myself through an examination of those poets whose visions, language, formal experiments, tones, and music have kept a hold on me. My accounts are, like all accounts, partial, offering only a fragment of the full truth. They are partial, also, insofar as they represent one person’s response to the far richer and more diverse landscape of American poetry that lies beyond these covers. Taken together, these essays signify at second hand an intellectual autobiography, a record of tastes and opinions that follow the arc of one reader’s history. Whether this history, the transcripts of my feelings, intersects with the histories of other readers I leave to them to determine.

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IMAGINATIVE TRANSCRIPTS

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ONE

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UNFORCED MARCHES A Virgilian Memoir ()

I

t’s a clear fall day in mid-October, . Outside, the leaves on the maple and gingko trees are fiery crimson, those of the oak bright yellow. Subtler shades also abound. Open windows give onto high school playing fields, from which the sounds of the marching band, rehearsing for Friday’s football game against our archrivals, float in. Eighteen of us—high school seniors bound mostly for Ivy League colleges and all biting our fingernails about applications whose outcomes we shall not know for another five months—are having the time of our lives. We are reading the Aeneid. Our teacher, Marie Bintner, less than a decade our senior, arrived at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (where Ezra Pound’s and H. D.’s childhood homes then still stood) along with us two years before. Fresh from her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, she has taken (we learn later) to dyeing her hair blonde and wearing high heels just to make sure we understand who’s boss. She is probably a bit more nervous than we are, but we don’t know this. Two years before, when we were sophomores, she led us on the “forced marches” that Caesar took through Gaul with his troops. Last year, she escorted us through the syntactic tangles of Cicero’s orations (“Quo usque tandem, abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?”) It was our patience, not the Roman senate’s, that was being tried. Having gone through all this, having lost our less sympathetic, patient, or linguistically competent fellow students, who fell by the wayside after two or three years of Latin, we are ready for our reward. Virgil is pure heaven. We set out on our unenforced new marches, purely figurative ones now, with wonder



  and something approaching joy. Our task is not easy but it gives pleasure. In the next months, through SAT tests, college interviews, spring fever and “senioritis,” slouching and sloughing off of responsibilities as the end of adolescence draws near, none of us will ever think of skipping class or not doing our Latin homework. This is a testimony to both a great teacher and a great subject. It is first period,  to : in the morning. We are still in Book . The last night of Troy (Book ), Dido and Aeneas (Book ), and the Underworld (Book ) remain terrae incognitae, to be charted during the remainder of the school year. Aeneas, having washed up on the shores of Carthage, is offering hope to his weary Trojan countrymen: “O socii (neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum), o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopia saxa experti; revocate animos maestumque timorem mittite; forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” (.–) Most of us do not use translations to help us. (I have learned from my current students that the words “pony” and “trot,” commonplace in my era, have disappeared from the vocabulary.) Sometimes we work out our assignments in small groups; the telephone comes in handy. Mostly, I lie on my bed with a dictionary and try to piece my way through the tangles. Translation of this sort is like doing a jigsaw or crossword puzzle: the basic principle is to begin with the easy stuff, the obvious words and phrases, and hope that context will help with the more obdurate sections. I see that Scylla and the Cyclops play a part in Aeneas’s exhortations. Mrs. Bintner’s first rule (borrowed, I suppose, from the German) is “Always go for the verb.” This allows us, in ll. –, to pass immediately to the end of the sentence, where we find a simple, first conjugation, third-person single, future tense: “he will give” (“dabit”). Who will give? That’s easy: a god (“deus”), second declension, masculine, nominative. He will give what? “An end” (“finem”). What’s that little “his” doing in the middle? It’s a plural dative pronoun, of course: “God will give an end to these.” And what exactly are “these”? Back to the previous line and a half to find an antecedent noun. It can’t be “socii,” who are clearly the vocative/nominative “comrades” whom Aeneas is addressing, and we’d better skip over the parenthetical phrase as being for the moment unnecessary (thank goodness for our editor’s parentheses, which Virgil did not use). “Passi” must have something to do with “socii” (it turns out to be a past participle used as a noun: “you who have



 :    () suffered”), so the antecedent has to be “graviora,” which sure looks like, and turns out to be, a comparative adjective (neuter plural): “heavier things.” Equally easy, relatively speaking, is the bulk of line : “revocate,” a clear imperative (“call back”), is followed by its noun object, “animos,” but what does it mean to call back your minds or souls? I’d better return to this one, I think; its place and purpose are unambiguous, but its nuanced meaning is not, at least not yet. And then another accusative adjective-noun combination, with the neat suffix “que” (“and”) tailed onto the sadness of “maestum,” the easily recognized cognate “timorem” (“fear”), and the plural imperative “put” (“mittite”), which must mean “put away” or “dismiss.” The speech is coming into focus. Aeneas is encouraging me, his sixteen-year-old reader! The climax comes in the famous formula—we don’t know it’s famous until we are told so, but all of us have heard or used it countless times since then— “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” I—we—have become translators. We are one step away, though this too does not register on me at the time, from being literary critics, and two steps away from being poets ourselves. I always think of what Coleridge said about Shakespeare, that in reading him you become something of a poet yourself—a truth that, in my experience, also applies to reading all poets in foreign languages and, in our own, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. My literary education has really begun. I have read voraciously and promiscuously since childhood, but translation means a different level of apprehension, active not passive. High school English classes are as nothing compared to this. I have begun to develop a taste for, an interest in, and a capacity for understanding poetry only by way of a foreign language. My native tongue would not be as useful precisely because I know all the words, and therefore can move through texts more quickly, thinking I have done my homework. Even my study of French has not had the effect of Latin, because in French class we spend part of our time speaking the language. Thank goodness for the so-called deadness of the classics. Years later I will be struck by Robert Frost’s remark that he first heard the “speaking voice” in poetry by reading, of all things, Virgil’s Eclogues. I will find this extraordinary and comforting in equal measure. Extraordinary in that Frost detected a “speaking” voice in an antique language, at the remove of two millennia, and through pastoral, always deemed the most artificial of poetic genres because of its conventions. (Dr. Johnson on Milton’s Lycidas: “its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.”) But comforting because my experience in school absolutely duplicated Frost’s. Not the pastoral Eclogues but the epic Aeneid ; no matter. Could this really have been almost a half century ago? In suburban Philadelphia, we—middle-class, mostly Jewish, sons and daughters of the



  “greatest generation”—were raised to succeed during that much-maligned decade, the s. By and large we have: become doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, therapists, research scientists, bankers, novelists, business people, labor organizers, architects, State Department officials, and, now, some of us, grandparents. Would we have prospered without Virgil as our pilot? I can’t speak for all the others, but it is difficult for me to imagine the trajectory of my own career, of my life, without his guidance. (Twelve years later, my first scholarly article, “Wordsworth’s Aeneid,” brought together my first poetic love and a more recent one.) Dante knew what he was doing when he chose Virgil as his escort. Let me return, however, to “forsan et haec,” one of those touchstones (“sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” is still  lines and several weeks ahead of us) that continue to haunt Virgil’s readers, his translators, and those poets who have felt the brush of his sadness. A six-word epigrammatic sentence, it epitomizes the compression available to ancient Greek and Latin but not to us moderns. All translations of Virgil and Homer inevitably use more words than their originals. And since the suppleness of Latin syntax cannot be duplicated in English, with its more or less fixed linearity, a translator must find his own way of producing multum in parvo. I am back in . I sit at home with my handy Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary () and try to parse the sentence. The line lacks adjectives and ends with the verb; in theory it should be easy to render. It is not. “Forsan,” I discover, means “by chance.” “Olim” seems to mean “once upon a time.” But wait: it can also mean “one day.” (Cassell’s cites Virgil’s line as an example.) The fact that the verb—whatever it means—is in the future tense (as reflected by that “bit” ending, which we learned several years earlier) confirms this. “Meminisse” turns out to be a semi-Greek infinitive, “to remember,” so now only two puzzles remain. First, I must pin down the meaning of the verb, which I learn comes from “iuvo/iuvare,” “to help, assist,” which certainly doesn’t assist me, but also the more promising “to delight, gratify.” I’m left with “et haec,” which certainly doesn’t seem like a proper subject for a third-person singular verb (though I’ll later learn that plural neuters can in fact take such verbs). “And this will be pleasing, perhaps, to remember in the future?” I’m getting close. The dictionary fortuitously (a word related to “forsan”) serves as a trot, once again citing Virgil’s line as an example of how the verb can be used impersonally: “it is pleasing.” And then it strikes me: “haec” is not a subject but a pronominal object, neuter accusative plural (“these things”). Eureka: “And perhaps one day it will be pleasing to recall these things.” The simple “et” (“and”) doesn’t merit looking up in the dictionary.



 :    () Getting comfy, I have committed an almost fatal error. Too much confidence leads to hubris. It turns out (yet I fail at the time to realize) that the pesky, far from simple “et” can be not only a conjunction but an adverb meaning “also, even.” “Even these things it will be pleasing to remember some day . . . perhaps,” says the intrepid leader, himself doubting the very cliché he is feeding his troops. Despite the characteristic “forsan,” Aeneas wants his speech to encourage his weary countrymen, but Virgil undercuts the leader’s enthusiasm with his follow-up: “spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem” (“he feigns hope in his face, he stifles the deep grief in his heart”). An entire history of both criticism and taste can evolve from a study of translation, so let me make a mini-excursion through the land of “forsan et haec” (which we adolescent wags used to chant as a combination football cheer and magic trick: “Forsan et Hike! Olim Meminisse: You’re a Rabbit!”). Gavin Douglas, in middle Scots, needs sixteen lines to render Virgil’s six, but he finally achieves the mood: “Sum tyme heron to think may help perchaunce / By diuers cacis, seir perrellis and sufferenace.” It also takes Dryden an entire heroic couplet to get it: “An hour will come, with pleasure to relate / Your sorrows past as benefits of fate.” No “forsan” here: it’s all Augustan cheerfulness. Even weirder in its jauntiness is the Victorian effort by John Conington, the Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford, who renders the Aeneid in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, interspersed with other verse forms, especially in the speeches: Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget; This suffering will yield as yet A pleasant tale to tell. The audience of the day — Conington’s translation appeared in —must have caught an echo of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”) and may well have seen Aeneas as a forerunner of muscular Christianity. Not so in the twentieth century: all of the major translations are alert to Aeneas’s tentative, hesitant mood. Rolfe Humphries (): “Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure.” Allen Mandelbaum (): “Perhaps one day you will remember even / these our adversities with pleasure.” Robert Fitzgerald () simply repeats Humphries: “Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / will be a pleasure.” Edward McCrorie () uses the fewest words and a conditional mood: “Remembering all this someday may cheer you.” A month or so after “forsan et haec,” we in Mrs. Binter’s class come upon Laocoön, hurling his spear into the hollow belly of the Trojan horse and expressing his own skepticism: “timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.” By this



  point we are aware that the adverbial “et” can be used with ironic force: “I fear the Greeks especially when bearing gifts.” We are reminded, looking back, of Aeneas’s ambiguous articulation: “perhaps, one day, it will be pleasing to remember even these things” (because they were so horrible), or “it will be pleasing to remember especially these things” (because we will surmount them with heroic prowess). Much complexity in such a trivial word; multum in parvo indeed.

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F

ifteen years after high school, by now a professor myself, I took a summer school course in Homeric Greek taught by a classicist friend. Reading Homer—the greatest poet in part because he is the first—was a walk in the country compared to reading Virgil. Once you have Homer’s limited vocabulary, with its many repeated epithets and other phrases, it’s a relatively simple matter to get the gist of his poetry. But I could never have done this without having read Virgil first. In My Early Life, Winston Churchill, a famously bad student, said something that now hangs, in a calligraphic rendering, on my office wall: “By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence—which is a noble thing. Naturally, I am biased in favour of boys learning English; and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.” Latin as an honor prepared me for Greek as a treat and also for the rest of my life, but not for the reasons they gave us in school. The brightest kids were supposed to take Latin because it would teach them vocabulary and etymology and prepare them for law and medicine, the professions with really difficult lingoes; it had something to do with anatomy and pharmacology, with stare decisis and habeas corpus and other highfalutin terms. An unsubtle snobbism operated: the smartest of us took Latin, the sophisticated ones (mostly girls) took French, and everyone else took Spanish, on the questionable notion that it was easier than the others. (No language is intrinsically more difficult than any other, although it is true that Latin’s syntactical fluidity, as well as its declensions and conjugations, somewhat complicates the process of learning.) Still, the primary reason to read the so-called dead languages is not to amass a larger, fancier vocabulary or to order one’s future vocational arrangements. A colleague in my university’s anthropology department once said at a faculty colloquium on the tired subject of “the value of a liberal arts education” that this was the primary benefit he had received from reading Shakespeare in college. I begged to demur; his remark annoyed me. An unintended



 :    () consequence is merely a collateral benefit, not an essential reason. The reason to read Shakespeare or anyone else is, instead, to generate a specific kind of pleasure, achieved through linguistic mastery and not dissimilar to the mastery of crossword puzzles or other language games. Because it is foreign, Latin poses greater challenges, and then gives greater pleasures. Those pleasures are, first of all, the knowledge of how language works and, second, what it was like to stand with Pliny and watch as Vesuvius erupted, to court with Catullus his Lesbia, and to see with Lucretius the invisible atomic particles that constitute our world.

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“F

orsan et haec”: it is indeed a pleasure, now, years later, to recall these things, especially because reading Robert Fagles’s superb translation of the Aeneid has brought back my schoolboy days. Having already translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, Fagles has now rounded out a lifetime of work in the fields of classical epic. Translation is a game that no one ever wins for all time; each age rediscovers, reinvents, reinterprets the classics, and no one’s translation is ever anything more than a sophisticated assay or assault on the material. I am reminded of Richard Bentley’s famous remark to the greatest translator of the classics in English: “A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you mustn’t call it Homer.” So we won’t call Fagles’s book “Virgil,” but rather “Virgil for our time,” however long that time might be. His triumphant version should remain the one to beat for years to come. Here, for starters, is his rendering of Aeneas’s speech of encouragement to his men: “My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You’ve threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops’ boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.” Fagles has “Englished” Virgil in entirely persuasive ways. His diction and syntax are limpid and straightforward, but he embellishes the surface of



  the verse with many nice and delicate touches. In this passage, for instance, certain alliterations (“weathered worse,” “rocks / resounding . . . rabid,” “brunt . . . boulders,” “call . . . courage,” et al.) and assonances (“resounding . . . howling,” “peace . . . decree”) pass into our ears almost inaudibly, so gentle is their music. Virgil wrote an impossible language. Latin does not lend itself to dactyls, and it was part of Virgil’s uniqueness to have perfected the process—begun by Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus—of hammering, somewhat unnaturally, Homer’s mellifluous hexameters (Greek being a more fluid language) into the rugged sounds of spondee-heavy Latin. In addition, where Homer improvised, weaving his ready-made epithets and formulas into an apparently spontaneous pattern, Virgil is entirely of the library, working by the book in order to make a book. If Homer’s work is the fons et origo, the first flower of epic, then Virgil’s is responsive, an echo and a continuation as well as an original poem in its own right. There’s not a single page that does not have Homer behind it, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly. Virgil was perhaps the first poet to labor under what W. J. Bate called “the burden of the past,” and what Harold Bloom famously reformulated in a Freudian way as “the anxiety of influence.” But, to put it more positively, his Aeneid might be described as the greatest homage ever paid to a precursor poet. This responsiveness works at two levels: a semantic one consisting of story, heroes, and figures of speech (I’ll come to these shortly), and a nonsemantic one of music and prosody. One perfectly dactylic line is Juno’s famous statement at the start of Book , used by Freud on the frontispiece of The Interpretation of Dreams: “flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (in Fagles: “If I cannot sway the heavens, I’ll wake the powers of hell,” an equally elegant, balanced assertion). “Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers,” Pope famously observed in the preface to his own great Iliad. No one can succeed entirely in rendering the artificial bookishness of Virgil. At least Homer’s language, though equally artificial (i.e., poetic), allows his translators to discover their own equivalents for “rosy-fingered dawn,” “swift-footed Achilles,” and “gray-eyed Athena,” and to repeat and vary them at will. But Virgil also makes us hearers, insofar as anything written in lines rather than prose sentences demands that we attend all the more closely to niceties of sound, rhythm, syntax, to everything we mean by “music.” What we hear in Fagles is strong but not entirely regular verse, with the iambic heft that sounds normative in English: “we all have weathered worse,” “an end to this as well,” “with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs,” “the Cyclops’ boulders too,” “Dismiss your grief and fear,” “so many twists and turns / our course holds firm,” “for better times to come.” Fagles’s lines generally have either five or



 :    () six beats, though he occasionally expands to seven stresses to heighten a rich simile. Often he uses a plain iambic pentameter line, or a variation of one, to signal termination, at the end of either a book or an episode. Here’s the ten-syllable, somewhat irregular end of Book : “Anchors run from prows, the sterns line the shore.” And the perfect end of Book : “her shepherd’s staff of myrtle spiked with steel.” The hendecasyllabic end of Book : “the fame and fates of all his children’s children.” The thirteen-syllable but thoroughly iambic end of Book : “and across his armor pours his life in waves of blood.” A regular iambic pentameter can also mark a pause within the onrush of the narrative, especially in the battle scenes that take up so much of the second half of the poem. Some examples: “speeding them past the churning shoals unharmed” (.); “but Fortune grudged them both safe passage home” (.); “their wailing set the walls on fire with grief ” (., a wonderful turn of phrase). Both together and separately, the iamb and the pentameter provide us hearers with something like a default mode, and a very reassuring one. Equally reassuring is Fagles’s judicious, nimbly handled syntax. Only Milton, or contemporaries mad for hypotactic construction, like Amy Clampitt, Richard Howard, the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur, can perform syntactic acrobatics that would do justice to the Virgilian sentence. Fagles holds his own with his contemporaries. Take, for a modest instance, “forsan et haec.” Virgil begins with “perhaps” and keeps us waiting for the verb until the end of what is for him a short sentence. In his translation—“a joy it will be, one day, perhaps, to remember even this”—Fagles begins with an inversion, perhaps meant to preserve some feeling of pomp and Latinity, but then introduces a series of medical hesitations that allow us to hear the uncertainty and doubts in Aeneas’s voice even before we learn of “the anguish buried in his heart.” Elsewhere, Fagles makes us hear Virgil as a stalwart, plain-speaking Roman whose affirmation of Augustan pieties and propaganda tends to be complicated, or even undercut, by his deeper understanding of what he famously termed “the tears of things.” In Fagles, Aeneas’s response to the depiction of himself and his fallen city on the rising wall of Carthage is another straightforward utterance: “even here, the world is a world of tears / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” As always, it takes the translator more words to render the original: Fagles needs seventeen to translate Virgil’s seven-word epigrammatic formula “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” Latin concision can never be duplicated; a translator must find analogical ways of rendering its effects. Fagles’s Aeneid is a piece of poetry in its own right, with its own music and impelling narrative thrust. If his loosely iambic rhythm draws us in and



  holds our attention over the span of ten thousand lines, he uses other devices as well to ensure our auditory satisfaction and involvement in the action. Consider, for example, alliteration and assonance, which in the absence of rhyme provide musical glue to hold a line, or a longer passage, together. In the funeral games for Anchises, Virgil introduces a giant snake, a benign counterpart to the twin serpents that devoured Laocoön and his sons in Book . The passage glitters, rainbow-like, pleasing out inner eye, and also rings with echoing sounds for our auditory pleasure: a serpent slithered up from the shrine’s depths, drawing its seven huge coils, seven rolling coils calmly enfolding the tomb, gliding through the altars: his back blazed with a maze of sea-blue flecks, his scales with a sheen of gold, shimmering as a rainbow showers iridescent sunlight arcing down the clouds. Aeneas stopped, struck by the sight. The snake slowly sweeping along his length among the bowls and polished goblets tasted the feast, then back he slid below the tomb, harmless, slipping away from altars where he’d fed. (.–) An especially effective alexandrine ends the passage, giving us additional assurance that the ceremonies have proceeded with efficiency and will continue to do so. Such music informs the entire poem, but nowhere is it more welcome than in the second half, the so-called Iliadic Aeneid, filled with warfare, rollcalls of soldiers, and a kind of pageantry that holds little intrinsic interest or significance for a modern audience. Virgil’s contemporaries would have recognized the sheer power of the names of their ancestors, their history, of everything that made Rome great; the catalogue has its own potency and life. For us, whatever power we still find in these passages can be only of an artistic nature. There is, for instance, an auditory thrill in the repeated “an” and “ian” sounds when Virgil lists the “cloud of troops on foot, / shieldbearing battalions” following Turnus: Men in their prime from Argos, ranks of Auruncans, Rutulians, Sicanian veterans on in years, Sacranians in columns, Labicians bearing their painted shields, men who plow your glades, old Tiber, the Numicus’ holy banks, whose plowshare turns the Rutulian slopes and Circe’s high-ridged cape. (.–)



 :    () And here is Fagle’s wonderful rendering of the passage that evokes Vulcan’s workshop, in which blacksmith and Cyclops alike forge Aeneas’s shield. Once again visual and auditory elements combine, this time to force home the sense of constant labor: . . . And some are working the bellows sucking the air in, blasting it out, while others are plunging hissing bronze in the brimming troughs, the ground of the cavern groaning under the anvils’ weight, and the Cyclops raising their arms with their power, arms up, arms down to the drumming, pounding beat as they twist the molten mass in gripping tongs. (.–) Piling present participle upon participle, Fagles guarantees our awareness of the toil involved in producing the shield, on which are depicted scenes from Roman history. These exist in the unknowable future for Aeneas, but as the known past for the poem’s readers. “Hoc opus, hic labor est” (“there the struggle, there the labor lies” in Fagles’s balanced version) says the Cumaean Sibyl to Aeneas before his descent to the Underworld in Book . For the hero, it’s the return from below that is unnaturally difficult; for the translator it’s the trick of remaining faithful to his original without losing his contemporary audience. He has a double obligation and must always look backward and around himself simultaneously. In Virgil time is always of the essence. For the characters, the past destruction of one empire is balanced by the promise of a new one in the future. For us readers, everything is past, like the archaeological layering at Troy uncovered by Schliemann in the nineteenth century. But throughout, both Virgil and Fagles keep us moving rapidly, making us feel that we are hearing rather than reading a fast-paced narrative in which everything is happening right now. If devices such as alliteration and assonance keep us alert to Virgil’s music, Fagles’s energetic absorption of Virgil’s “historical present” verbs (the use of the present tense to render action already achieved) gives his poem a powerful immediacy. Keats does the same to great advantage in “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” to name a more recent example. One also sees the technique used in much contemporary fiction, but all too often, irritatingly enough, for no apparent reason—something on the order of “I am sitting in the car next to my boyfriend and we are driving to the senior prom. I am checking my make-up and smoking a cigarette.” In the hands of a novice, such writing merely pretends to bring us in. It sounds jittery and tends to make its readers—at least those of a certain age—nervous because it prohibits meditation or any kind



  of complex temporality. Virgil uses the present, however, with such smart confidence that even when a passage switches apparently at random between present and prefect tenses we are never discomfited. Here, for example, is Aeneas narrating the fall of Troy to Dido in Carthage. Notice how in the middle he moves from present action to the past perfect tense, and that it doesn’t bother us at all: “into the blaze I dive, into the fray, wherever the din of combat breaks and war cries fill the sky, wherever the battle-fury drives me on and now I’m joined by Rhipeus, Epytus mighty in armor, rearing up in the moonlight— Hypanis comes to my side, and Dymas too, flanked by the young Coroebus, Mygdon’s son. Late in the day he’d chanced to come to Troy incensed with a mad, burning love for Cassandra: son-in-law to our king, he would rescue Troy. Poor man, if only he’d marked his bride’s inspired ravings!” (.–) When Dido, having learned of Aeneas’s imminent departure, flies into desperate rage, we again move seamlessly from past to present tense: . . . but the queen— who can delude a lover?—soon caught wind of a plot afoot, the first to sense the Trojans are on the move . . . She fears everything now, even with all secure. Rumor, vicious as ever, brings her word. . . . (.–) Here and elsewhere, Fagles does not follow verbatim Virgil’s alternations between past and present, but his temporal manipulations always do justice to the spirit of the original. What Pound said of his Cantos (that it is a “poem containing history”) is equally true for all epics, regardless of language or period. It therefore makes sense for the poet or his translator to keep his readers on their feet as he switches between tenses. Virgil’s oft-praised melancholy (he was the man, according to Bruno Snell, who invented the evening), and his attention to the shadows of this world and the shades of the netherworld, derive from his historical sense of the costs of empire, the fragility of the present, the weight of the past, and the uncertainty, however fated, of the future. One



 :    () passage in Book  stands out as an especially poignant example of his weighing of nostalgia against hopefulness. Aeneas encounters Panthus, a priest of Apollo, carrying his gods and his grandchild away from the burning citadel of Troy, and asks what is happening. Panthus replies: “venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus Dardaniae. fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos transtulit ; incensa Danai dominantur in urbe.” I have italicized the verbs, a combination of present and heart-breaking perfect ones. Here is Dryden’s noble summary: “Troy is no more, and Ilium was a Town! The fated Day, th’appointed Hour is come, When wrathful Jove’s irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan State to Grecian hands.” Wordsworth, who did an interesting translation of Books  and  in uncharacteristic rhyming couplets, renders the speech thus: “. . . ’Tis come—the final hour; The inevitable close of Dardan power Hath come:—we have been Trojans, Ilium was And the great name of Troy; now all things pass To Argos;—so wills angry Jupiter.” And Fagles thus: “The last day has come for the Trojan people, no escaping this moment. Troy’s no more. Ilium, gone—our awesome Trojan glory. Brutal Jupiter hands it all over to Greece.” Compared to his predecessors, Fagles sounds matter-of-fact, even prosaic. But this is the point. So does Virgil. “Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium” means simply “we have been Trojans, Ilium has been.” The simple preterite tense, used in the plural and then in the singular, in reference to people and to the state, packs greater punch than any of the English versions. “Transtulit” is perfect tense, “dominantur” present. Thus does Virgil ensure that we, like his characters, are borne off in a frenzy of activity that stretches through several temporal layers. Yesterday’s current events are today’s history. Another way that Fagles keeps the action alive and present is through his dramatic enjambments. Virgil uses long periodic sentences that seldom pause



  at the end of lines. Fagles matches his master in his sense of what onrush means to his characters and readers. Again, from the last night of Troy: “. . . And worse still, the Greeks roaring with anger—we had saved Cassandra— attack us from all sides! Ajax, fiercest of all and Atreus’ two sons and the whole Dolopian army, wild as a rampaging whirlwind, gusts clashing, the West- and the South- and Eastwind riding high on the rushing horses of the Dawn, and the woods howl and Nereus, thrashing his savage trident, churns up the sea exploding in foam from its rocky depths.” (.–) Whether depicting violent carnage, as above, or stately pageantry, as in the scene of Dido and Aeneas riding forth to the hunt (Book ), before the storm that brings their passion to a climax when they take shelter in a convenient cave, both Virgil and Fagles know how to convert movement into energy by careful attention to sound. And also to sight. Pope’s distinction between hearing and reading elides one other vital quality of any epic poem: It must make us see. Virgil’s sense of what are now called “the visuals” is unsurpassed in epic literature. Neither Homer nor Dante nor Milton can give us the sheer stateliness of pageantry, in the epic catalogue or similar roll-calls, or in the depiction of action. Because the Aeneid is a nationalistic epic (the first one, in fact), and because part of its author’s purpose was to praise Augustus for his accomplishments both past and to come, it had to convey the inevitability of Rome’s destiny by making it visible as well as audible. Augustus’s famous, perhaps apocryphal boast, which Virgil did not live to hear, was that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Virgil was, however, keenly aware of the emperor’s building campaign, of Roman feats of civil engineering, and he had a film director’s eye for action and allegorical plumage. When King Evander, the Trojans’ ally in their war with the Latins, asks Aeneas to take his son Pallas into battle, to teach him to “grow hard / to a soldier’s life and the rough work of war,” he reminds us of the didactic angle to Virgil’s patriotism: “Let him get used to watching you in action, / admire you as his model from his youth” (.–). The reader watches the action too, and admires (a word whose root is “to look”) the hero and his various strengths. Through the beauty and music of words, Virgil endows even carnage with its own mellifluousness, especially in the later books, as when Virgil asks Calliope to “help me unroll the massive scroll of war” (.–).



 :    () If the Aeneid were propaganda pure and simple, it would never have maintained its hold on the Western literary imagination for more than two millennia. At one time, part of its appeal derived from the legend of Virgil as pre-Christian magus, an “anima naturaliter Christiana,” who in his fourth eclogue was thought to have predicted the birth of Christ. To the British, the Aeneid, with its imperial vision of Rome, served as a mirror of their own predestined empire and as a means of inculcating generations of schoolboys with Latin notions of duty and piety. But to the mythical “common reader,” the glory of the poem resides in its chronic and inevitable sadness, and in the modern self-consciousness of its hero. Virgil differs from Homer’s stern sense of warfare and tragedy as the essential human condition by giving his hero not only a sense of historical destiny but also a capacity to remain dutiful and duty-bound—“pius,” to use his famous epithet. Aeneas has ferocity when needed and sadness whenever he is left to his own thoughts. Such sadness reflects his self-consciousness (“mens sibi conscia recti,” the mind always alert to what is right), something distinguishing him from his Homeric antecedents, such as Achilles and Odysseus. Self-consciousness, what Socrates called the “examined life,” was not available to Homer. It was Virgil who modernized it and made it a Roman ideal. Marcus Aurelius, still several centuries in the future, would not have been possible without Virgil as a predecessor. And as Virgil is always conscious of his debt to Homer, Aeneas is self-conscious in ways that make him our contemporary. Although the plain fisherman to whom Yeats gave a copy of the poem thought the so-called hero was really a priest, Aeneas has become to modern audiences a test case in the struggle between passion and duty, pleasure and obligation, love and war. “Italiam non sponte sequor,” Aeneas says laconically to Dido as he prepares to leave her (“I set sail for Italy— / all against my will” [.–]). He is weighted down by physical, psychological, and cosmic forces. He lacks free will to define himself for himself. His “pietas,” that classic Roman virtue that weaves its way through Italian history up to Mussolini’s insistence on dedication to the state, partakes of equal portions of familial love and patriotism. And of course the state is the family writ large. The image—beloved of artists and readers alike—of Aeneas carrying his aged father Anchises on his back, holding the hand of his son Ascanius (his wife Creusa following behind, in order to be conveniently disposed of and to allow Aeneas to make a new, dynastic marriage when he alights in Italy), encompasses all the burdens forced upon the unwilling founder of empire. Such burdens are educational, as he reminds Dido in Book : “Schooled in suffering, now I learn to comfort / those who suffer too” (.–). Dido does not learn the lesson as well as she might. No wonder St. Augustine remembers having wasted so many tears over her before he



  found salvation. Whatever her strengths, she is also doubly doomed—as a foreigner and as a woman—and undone by her love for a man. That love is both psychologically realistic in Virgil’s presentation and ordained by the collaborative efforts of Venus and Juno. The queen, committed to empire building, says to her sister that she remains faithful to her dead husband, Sychaeus, but that if anyone could stir erotic passion in her, it would be this gorgeous man recently washed ashore at Carthage. Cupid, the emissary of his mother, works his magic, and the queen is soon won over. She, too, exhibits a modern self-consciousness: “Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae” (“The signs of the old flame, I know them well” [.]). She becomes not an ancient version of a desperate housewife but a tragic figure who gives in completely, as Aeneas does not, to the flames of eros and who thereby neglects her civic responsibility. Once she learns of his decision to leave, she rages, she begs, she asks for a stay in order to come to terms with her loss, she even hints that pregnancy will salve her wounds. All to no avail. Aeneas remains unmoved, unrelenting, and seemingly heartless. It is the poem’s great achievement to allow us to feel ambivalent toward both the hero and Dido, his alter ego. A first-century Roman would naturally see in her, as we do not, the ancestral source of the Punic wars, with Hannibal playing the role of her avenger. But he would also have been moved, like St. Augustine, by the plight of the abandoned lover. At least for a moment, Aeneas becomes something of a stiff: . . . heaven blocks his gentle, human ears. As firm as a sturdy oak grown tough with age when the Northwinds blasting off the Alps compete, fighting left and right, to wrench it from the earth, and the winds scream, the trunk shudders, its leafy crest showers across the ground but clings firm to its rock. ... . . . he takes the full force of love and suffering deep in his great heart. His will stands unmoved. The falling tears are futile. (.–) Virgil’s “placidas auris” (“gentle ears”) indicate Aeneas’s sympathy, held in check by “heaven” and the fates. The hero feels sympathy in his heart, but “mens immota manet” (“His will stands unmoved”)—Virgil’s insistent alliteration calls attention to the immobility of Aeneas’s mind. No cad he, but rather a hero summoned against his will to a higher calling. The conflict between love and duty has echoed down the corridors of cultural history ever since.



 :    () Dido turns out to be as heroic as her abandoning lover, though with different motivation. When she decides to mount her funeral pyre, she proclaims, “I shall die unavenged, but die I will! (.). Fagles’s old-fashioned distinction between “shall” (for futurity) and “will” (for determination) nicely captures the sense of Virgil’s “moriemur inultae, / sed moriamur,” though he does not allow his Dido to speak of herself in the royal “we.” For him, as for the rest of the Aeneid’s modern audience, she remains an archetype of majesty, a pawn in the hands of the meddlesome gods who nevertheless achieves dignity through suicide. “Inultae,” along with “inanis” (“empty” as opposed to “worthless” or “senseless,” as denoted by the English “inane”) and certain other words, ring throughout the poem, with the effect of imparting to it an insistent undertone of futile sadness. Such words are Virgil’s way of reminding us of the uselessness of so much in both human history and the human will. Tears fall useless throughout the poem. Even art often fails in its efforts to memorialize the dead and help the living. Thus, at the start of Book , Aeneas sees near Naples the work of Daedalus, master craftsman, who attempted to carve his son’s tragedy into the walls: And you, too, Icarus, what part you might have played In a work that great, had Daedalus’ grief allowed it. Twice he tried to engrave your fall in gold and Twice his hands, a father’s hands, fell useless. (.–) Much in Virgil’s world, as in ours, turns out to be useless, empty, in vain. The visual splendors of processions, of individual beauty, of nature itself, are severely compromised if not entirely undone by Virgil’s melancholy. Or one might say that the melancholy enhances beauty because of the poet’s sense that, as Stevens put it, “death is the mother of beauty.” As the poet of sadness and the evening Virgil anticipated many modern varieties of nostalgia (literally, “pain of home”) from the Weltzschmerz of Goethe’s young Werther and the mal du siècle of the French Romantics to Freudian mourning and melancholia. More than Homer, who had a starkly absolute, tragic sense of the lives of warriors and their victims, and of the civilians (women and children) whom they took into slavery, Virgil tends to internalize the suffering of both men and women. Such suffering is clear from the opening of his first eclogue, with its references to the displacements and exiles caused by the civil wars of the first century .. It continues in the Georgics. The Aeneid builds upon the earlier works, raising civic disharmony from a pastoral theme to an epic one in the same way that urbanity and empire extend from agriculture and the natural life. “Landscape-lover,



  lord of language” said Tennyson, by which he meant to praise equally Virgil’s combination of local patriotism (his sympathy for shepherds and farmers, the lands they occupied and the trades they plied) and literary savvy. He found in his precursor a Tennyson avant la lettre: “Thou majestic in thy sadness / at the doubtful doom of human kind.” Tennyson’s Virgil is also Fagles’s Virgil, and indeed ours. If both landscape and empire may seem—at the start of our latest century—imperiled by humankind, then Virgil is the poet of today as well as of the nineteenth century. Humanity has run riot over the earth’s landscape: overpopulation, genocide, epidemic diseases, global warming, and internecine warfare all confront us in the news every morning. The cost of maintaining an empire, indeed several of them, mounts constantly. Politics has never seemed more treacherous. A seemingly ornamental passage in the final book epitomizes Virgil’s sympathy for the victims of warfare, and his sensitivity to the inevitable destruction of persons and ways of life under the justification of empirebuilding. Here is one of Turnus’s victims: . . . Turnus kills the brothers fresh from Apollo’s Lycian fields and next Menoetes who, in his youth, detested war but war would be his fate. An Arcadian angler skilled at working the rivers of Lerna stocked with fish, his lodgings poor, a stranger to all the gifts of the great, and his father farmed his crops on rented land. (.–) The death of Menoetes is both a casual aside and the essence of the matter. Virgil’s lines sound not only elegiac but sweet: “Arcada, piscosae cui circum flumina Lernae / ars fuerat pauperque domus nec nota potentum / munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.” “Knowing nothing of the gifts of the powerful” (“munera” may refer to the responsibilities of the great as well as their gifts to poor dependants), Menoetes led a simple life, removed, as Virgil himself was not, from the world of patrons and literary or political ambition. A life of anonymity and quiet in no way spares one from the juggernaut of destruction. Pathos is the inevitable tone here, as it is also in Book , when the young warrior Euryalus dies in battle. Rolfe Humphries gives his death this way: The neck droops over, as a bright-colored flower Droops when the ploughshare bends it, or as poppies Sink under the weight of heavy summer rainfall . . .



 :    () Among contemporary translators, Fagles remains true to Virgil but he also echoes an earlier admirer. Keats (who did a schoolboy translation of the Aeneid, now lost), writes in the “Ode on Melancholy” that the melancholy fit falls sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud that fosters the droop-headed flowers all, and hides the green hill in an April shroud. In Fagles, Euryalus rolls over in death limp as a crimson flower cut off by a passing plow, that droops as it dies or frail as poppies, their necks weary, bending their heads when a sudden shower weighs them down. All flesh is grass. Let me return to Menoetes. Dryden embellishes his death as follows: On Lerna’s lake a silent life he led, And with his nets and angle earned his bread. Nor pompous cares, nor palaces, he knew, But wisely from the infectious world withdrew. Poor was his house: his father’s painful hand Is charged his rent, and plowed another’s land. Fagles requires no such extraneous detail. The facts, plain and simple, though adorned with modest alliteration, suffice to give us a sense of both Virgil’s pathos and his chiseled verse. If one ignores the “and” at the start of line , one has (yet once more) the elegant understatement of perfect iambic pentameter: “his father farmed his crops on rented land.” The default mode works wonders. In his postscript, Fagles says that he has aimed for greater intimacy in his Aeneid than he did in his two Homeric translations, in order to capture Virgil’s “unequalled blend of grandeur and accessibility.” This certainly hits the right note as an estimate of his accomplishment as well as his aim. He has succeeded in producing a modern Virgil, on the one hand conveying the meaning and feeling of the original and on the other “trying to find a cadence for one’s English.” The cadences naturally succeed in moments, like those cited above, that appeal to our contemporary sense of belatedness and of the waning of empires. (I wonder what Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra would sound like if Fagles decided to update it, in the way Robert Lowell revised and modernized Melville and Racine.) Intimacy is one pole of the

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  Virgilian temperament. The other—whether one thinks that Virgil is sincere or merely doing what he thought Augustus wanted of him—is patriotism, grandeur, the public voice, the Big Bow Wow. This voice does not appeal to contemporary tastes quite as much, but Fagles manages to make Virgil’s claims for Roman glory convincing. The command given by Anchises’s ghost to his son in the Underworld may ring hollow to our ears, but the resemblance between the achieved Pax Romana and our nation’s sense of its manifest destiny as policeman to the world is unavoidable. Whatever the differences, nationalistic hubris is at bottom all the same. Fagles’s translation, like Virgil’s original, has not an iota of irony: Others, I have no doubt, will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines, draw from the block of marble features quick with life, plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise. But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war. (.–) Virgil distinguishes the arts of his country from those of Greece and Babylon—from sculptors, orators, prognosticators, and astronomers—but he does so in full assurance that acts of power are no less significant, indeed no less artistic, than sculpting and public speaking. Virgil is, in fact, a master of “public art.” I’m thinking not only of the pedagogic, didactic side of his temperament and his willingness to speak on behalf of Augustus, but also of the way in which he brings his ekphrastic passages into the service of patriotism, and finally of his sense that an individual’s destiny is part of his nation’s. The forging of Aeneas’s shield, of which I have already spoken, is the central scene for the future of the hero and the empire he will never know. It is also the quintessence of Virgil’s distinctive art. Inspired, of course, by the forging of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad (Book ), Virgil’s centerpiece takes up almost three hundred lines. In a poem full of sadness and fervor, nothing matches its sober beauties. Interweaving the themes of heroism, labor, and nationhood, it also radiates the full glory of Virgilian didacticism, for the poet designed it as a reminder to his contemporaries and their offspring of their raison d’être. Right from the start, the sheer physicality, conveyed by presenttense participles, takes us in. The Cyclops band of Vulcanian workers digs into its collective task: “They are forging one tremendous shield, one against

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 :    () all the Latin spears.” When Venus presents the shield to her son, he delights in it, running his eyes across the piece. Art is disposed in the service of duty, and all of Italy, all of Rome, is depicted on Aeneas’s new shield. In the center, at its heart, is the battle of Actium, Augustus on one side and Antony and Cleopatra, his “Egyptian wife” (never mentioned by name), the modern incarnation of Dido, on the other. Everything is present-tense. That’s the nature of art, after all, and also the nature of myth. Caesar triumphs, of course, but Aeneas does not know this. For him, everything is pure futurity, and he is lost in ignorant aesthetic appreciation and wondering doubt without understanding what is meant (for the reader) as an omen. Book  ends on an anticlimax: the hero “takes delight / in the likeness [of the events on the shield], lifting onto his shoulders now / the fame and fates of all his children’s children.” As Yeats understood, having learned his lesson from Virgil, the agents of history seldom know who they are, or what they are doing. Leda did not put on Zeus’s knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop. The Aeneid teaches many lessons—about heroism, love, the tragedy of warfare, our inability to free ourselves from a web of circumstances—but perhaps none more persistently and subtly than that of labor, that crucial Roman virtue celebrated in the Georgics. The gods demand hard work of heroes, who must perform it to merit their status. Right before he goes off to his final battle against Turnus, Aeneas draws Ascanius aside, kissing him and offering a last piece of wisdom: “Learn courage from me, my son, true hardship too. / Learn good luck from others. My hand will shield you / in war today and guide you toward the great rewards” (.–). Here are Roman virtues, born out of the Roman sense of duty and work. Where Homer gives us an archaic world in which happiness is fleeting at best and nothing endures, Virgil works teleologically. The myth of Troy and its fall gives way to the building of the Roman Empire. One word for such a vision is progress. History, like heroism, makes demands.

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L

iterature, too, makes demands, and offers commensurate rewards. By June , with college drawing near, our band of brothers and sisters, having survived the last night of Troy, Scylla and Charybdis, the death of Dido, and a descent to the Underworld, spends its last three weeks reading the opening sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Next to Virgil, Ovid is ease incarnate: his rhythms, vocabulary, and syntax seem less difficult, tortuous, freighted, troubled. A great burden has been lifted from our shoulders, but, having been severely challenged, we also enjoy a feeling of triumph.

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  The pleasures of other Latin authors remain ahead. Many of us continue with Latin for a term or two in college: Catullus, Horace, Tacitus, and the playwrights stand waiting for the happy few. The year has passed. Older, certainly, and perhaps a bit wiser, we are ready to return to the upper world, not, like Aeneas, through the Gate of Ivory, with its false dreams, but rather through the Gate of Horn, with its true ones. —   (“  ”),    “”   ,   , –

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TWO

X

WORDSWORTH’S AENEID 

A

t the height of his creative power, in , Wordsworth wrote to Walter Scott: “Dryden has neither a tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity; where his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects; such as the follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals. That his cannot be the language of imagination must have necessarily followed from this, that there is not a single image from Nature in the whole body of his works; and in his translations from Vergil, whenever Vergil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage.” Wordsworth’s criticism of his neoAugustan predecessors, and his resentment of their translations from the classics (e.g., in a later letter to Scott he remarks that “it will require yet half a century completely to carry off the poison of Pope’s Homer”), offer considerable evidence for what W. J. Bate has termed “the burden of the past,” and Harold Bloom “the anxiety of poetic influence.” Readers have long felt the temperamental affinities of Wordsworth with Virgil, his similar appreciation of a universal sorrow which touches and colors all mortal affairs, and his own “tender heart” and “lofty sense of moral dignity.” But Wordsworth’s admiration for Virgil and his attempt to pay homage to the master in a translation of the Aeneid in – have received little critical attention. The three books of Virgil which Wordsworth completed are proof not only of his grasp and understanding of Latin poetry but also of his difficulty in coming to grips with the precedent of Dryden’s great translation of .

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  The burden of Wordsworth’s criticism of Dryden’s style is repeated in his letters to Lord Lonsdale when he begins his own translation: “Dr. Johnson has justly remarked that Dryden had little talent for the pathetic, and the tenderness of Virgil seems to me to escape him. Virgil’s style is an inimitable mixture of the elaborately ornate and the majestically plain and touching. The former quality is much more difficult to reach than the latter, in which whosoever fails, must fail through want of ability, and not through the imperfections of our language” (Letters: MY II.). This is a complex blend of self-aggrandizement and self-criticism. Wordsworth stresses the relative difficulty of those parts of Virgil which he is himself often unable to match (implicitly praising Dryden’s efforts) but suggests that the problem lies in the differences between the two languages. The pathos and tenderness of the Aeneid, i.e., those qualities which Dryden misses, are the basic Virgilian elements; in their elemental simplicity they test the real talent, as opposed to the cleverness, of any would-be translator. The ambivalence of Wordsworth’s feelings about Dryden is deepened by his choice of the heroic couplet as the poetic unit of his Aeneid. Unable to free himself from the “poison” of that quintessentially eighteenth-century form, Wordsworth tries, in effect, to meet Dryden on his own ground and to defeat him there rather than write the poem in his more usual blank verse: I should have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been persuaded that no ancient author can be with advantage so rendered. Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and feeling, are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound, in our language, to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided three faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes away from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly; attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to be given at all. [Letters: MY II.] The tenuous logic by which he excuses the use of the heroic couplet is, perhaps, Wordsworth’s rationalization for following Dryden’s example. Wordsworth’s characteristic matter-of-factness is at times the strongest facet of his translation, and at others, the weakest. Literalness is as much his aim now as it was twenty-three years before in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject.” How different this is from one of Dryden’s cardinal principles in the dedication of his Aeneid: “I thought fit to steer betwixt the two Extreams, of Paraphrase, and

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’ AENEID () literal Translation: To keep as near my Author as I could, without losing all his Graces, the most Eminent of which, are in the Beauty of his words: And those words, I must add, are always Figurative.” Wordsworth’s literalness often suits the tone of Virgil better than Dryden’s middle course. He recognizes, for instance (Letters: MY –), that his own version of II.– is not nearly so sonorous as the Latin, but nevertheless is superior to his predecessor’s. The meeting with Panthus in the burning streets of Troy is characterized by alliteration and repetition, and by the poignancy of the perfect tense in the famous phrase: “fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens / gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos / transtulit.” Wordsworth includes both the perfect tense and an imitation of Virgil’s repetitions: . . . ’ Tis come—the final hour; The inevitable close of Dardan power Hath come:—we have been Trojans, Ilium was, And the great name of Troy; now all things pass To Argos;—so wills angry Jupiter. (Lines –) Dryden cannot grasp the simple pathos of the opening: Troy is no more, and Ilium was a Town! The fatal Day, th’appointed Hour is come, When wrathful Jove’s irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan State to Grecian hands. (Lines –) Thereafter he is stronger than Wordsworth, by virtue of the rhythmic strength in his presentation of the bombast of battle. Wordsworth’s desire to be literal can often produce circumlocutions, as in his version of “Sinon incendia miscet / insultans,” Which he renders as “Sinon, insulting victor, aggravates / The flames,” where Dryden captures more of the Virgilian spirit in “proud Sinon throws / about the flames.” Dryden omits the one detail which Wordsworth includes: “stat ferri acies mucrone corusco / stricta, parata neci” (“hangs, with quivering point, the blade / Unsheath’d for slaughter”), but inserts the generalizing and more powerful: “Who fights finds Death, and Death finds him who flies.” Wordsworth often seems unwilling to make the necessary leaps of imagination to capture the full feeling of a passage or scene. It has long been recognized that Dryden is most successful in the public passages of the poem, those dealing with Rome’s glories (VI.–), or Priam’s death (II.–), but “his coarse energy and tendency to distort did constant violence to Virgil’s subtle, pathetic, or mystical genius.” Two



  examples of Wordsworth’s particular merits are the Virgilian touchstones of I.– and I.–. Aeneas’ second speech in the poem is meant to carry the full force of his pietas, his willed effort to cheer his men while at the same time suppressing his own inner fears and anxieties: O socii (neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum), o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. . . . revocate animos maestumque timorem mittite; forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas ostendunt; illic fas regna resurgere Troiae. durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis. Dryden’s hero (I.–) is both more laconic and more assertive than Virgil’s; his opening lines plunge right into the stoical advice which he is dispensing: Endure, and conquer; Jove will soon dispose To future Good, our past and present Woes. And Dryden adds the un-Virgilian “What greater Ills hereafter can you bear?” More important, the balanced half lines tend to weaken the sense of sorrow which Virgil builds up deliberately and slowly: Resume your Courage, and dismiss your Care. An Hour will come, with Pleasure to relate Your Sorrows past, as Benefits of Fate . . . Endure the Hardships of your present State, Live, and reserve your selves for better Fate. Wordsworth’s Aeneas (I.–), like Virgil’s, begins with an address, rather than a command, to his comrades: O Friends, not unacquainted with your share Of misery, ere doom’d these ills to bear! O ye, whom worse afflictions could not bend! Jove also hath for these prepared an end. The assertiveness of the last line is prepared for, and there is a greater sense of a changing mood and argument in Aeneas’ speech. In addition, Wordsworth at least tries to capture Aeneas’ uncertainty: Cast off your fears, resume the hearts of men! Hereafter, this our present lot may be A cherish’d object for pleased memory.

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’ AENEID () Dryden significantly ignores the importance of Virgil’s forsan, the one mitigating world in the line. The other touchstone of Virgilian tenderness is I.–. Aeneas, examining the rising walls of Carthage, and finding the battles of Troy painted on Juno’s temple, turns to Achates: Constitit et lacrimans, ‘quis iam locus,’ inquit, ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? en Priamus! Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’ Sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine voltum. Although the litotes of his opening “He stopp’d, and not without a sigh, exclaimed,” is weak, Wordsworth rises to the occasion at the crucial moment: “Tears for the frail estate of human kind / Are shed; and mortal changes touch the mind.” This passage was undoubtedly in his mind when he wrote at the end of Laodamia, almost ten years before: Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, As fondly he believes. Wordsworth’s treatment of “lacrimae rerum” is superior to that of Dryden who, almost as if acknowledging the limits of his ability, omits the whole line, and changes arbitrarily the tenses of his verbs: Ev’n the Mute Walls relate the Warrior’s Fame, And Trojan Griefs the Tyrians Pity claim. He said, his Tears a ready Passage find, Devouring what he saw so well design’d; And with an empty Picture fed his Mind. (Lines –) In addition to his superiority with the elegiac tone, Wordsworth captures certain details in the larger public passages which Dryden, the reputed master of such scenes, carelessly ignores. An arbitrary example of the virtues of each translation is the destruction of Laocoon and his sons by the two mysterious serpents who roll across the waves from Tenedos (II.–). Although Dryden’s version (–) might ultimately be judged superior, several points indicate Wordsworth’s astuteness and taste.



  In Virgil, the passage moves forward in large rhythmic units, broken up by short phrases which refer to the changing responses of the Trojan onlookers (“horresco referens,” “fit sonitus spumante salo,” “diffugimus visu exsangues”). These units become progressively longer, until the climactic lines (II.–) describing the strangulation of Laocoon himself. Certain things in the passage, however, tend to lessen the horrifying effects which the painterly Virgil is constructing. The serpents seem to embrace rather than destroy the two sons (“serpens amplexus uterque”), and to feed on them (“miseros morsu depascitur artus”) in a suggestively pastoral way. The passage ends on a note of tranquility, as the serpents slide under the protecting statue of Minerva: “sub pedibusque deae clipeique sub orbe teguntur.” Moreover, the paragraph is framed artistically by two bulls; it opens with Laocoon slaying a bull at the altar, and, at the end, his cries are like those of a wounded bull (“saucius taurus”). The deliberateness of the balance suggests that Laocoon himself, in the fatal grip of the serpent, is the sacrifice required at this moment. What began as literal detail ends as metaphor, with tenor and vehicle perfectly joined. Dryden certainly captures the vivid visual details of the tableau; in general, the verbs are active and more dramatic than the corresponding ones in Wordsworth. What he misses are precisely those mitigating factors in the scene: the balancing simile (he uses “steer” and “oxe”), and the domestic details. Instead of gently feeding on the two children, as sheep would pasture, Dryden’s snakes “first around the tender Boys . . . wind, / Then with their sharpen’d Fangs their Limbs and Bodies grind.” By ending the passage with a metaphorical ox, he loses “the Beauty of Virgil’s words, “the literal and the figurative. What Dryden lacks, Wordsworth triumphantly provides. The main problem in this version is the diction, Wordsworth’s habitual failing, which is either periphrastic or archaizing, often in an effort to maintain a literal faithfulness to Virgil. Expressions like “engrasps,” “fanging,” “zone,” “distained,” “a several snake,” strike us as self-consciously old-fashioned. “Two Serpents, o’er the tranquil main / Incumbent,” retains Virgil’s incumbunt, but at the price of natural English diction. Wordsworth distances what Virgil makes immediate. On the other hand, he is able to capture something of the rhythmic effect of Virgil’s periodic clauses, where Dryden is again hampered by the regularity of his couplets. The death of Laocoon is handled with appropriate enjambment: . . . but anon Himself they seize; and, coiling round his waist Their scaly backs, they bind him, twice embrac’d



’ AENEID () With monstrous spires, as with a double zone; And, twice around his neck in tangles thrown. High o’er the Father’s head each Serpent lifts its own. (Lines –) The alexandrine is effectively used as the climax of the action. In addition, Wordsworth keeps both of Virgil’s bulls in the scene, and manages to approach partially the delicacy of the original: each snake “feeds on the limbs.” In view of his strengths as a translator, we might wonder, then, why Wordsworth seemed discouraged with his effort, and gave up after completing all but  lines of Book III. For one thing, the work must have been time-consuming, at a period in his life when Wordsworth was spending much of his energy on his growing family (between  and , the translation is Wordsworth’s longest piece, except for his revisions of The Excursion): “Had I taken the liberties of my predecessors, Dryden especially, I could have translated nine books with the labor that three have cost me” (Letters: MY ). Perhaps the dissatisfaction was the inevitable result of comparison with an equally great poet: “When I read Virgil in the original I am moved; but not so much by my own translation; and I cannot but think this owing to a deficit in the diction, which I have endeavored to supply with what success you may easily be enabled to judge” (Letters: My ). In a letter of April , , Coleridge offered faint praise which Wordsworth might easily have mistaken for damning: “Since Milton I know of no other poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single brilliant note, depresses me and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your time on work so much below you, that you cannot stoop and take.” Kevin F. Doherty has speculated that the main reason for not completing the poem was the stumbling block of the heroic couplet. This may be true, although Wordsworth shows a mastery of the form, and a recognition that the use of an enjambment freer than Dryden’s aids considerably the flow and rhythm of Virgil in English: “I have run the couplets freely into each other, much more often than Dryden has done. This variety seems, to me, to be called for, if anything of the movement of the Virgilian versification be transferable to our poetry; and, independent of this consideration, long narratives in couplets with the sense closed at the end of each are to me very wearisome.” All of the above, especially Wordsworth’s dissatisfaction with the diction of his poem, are likely reasons for his giving it up. One other partial



  explanation has not been mentioned: Wordsworth’s possible reluctance to do a version of the Dido tragedy (Book IV), which would require a full treatment of sexual passion and sympathy with a tragic heroine which Wordsworth might not have been able to show at this time. Perhaps publication, in , of the “Vaudracour and Julia” extract from Book IX of The Prelude served to erase all remaining guilt or tension about Wordsworth’s youthful affair with Annette Vallon; yet the elimination of the episode from the final version of the poet’s autobiography suggests an unwillingness to remember or be plagued by the events of the distant past. Of the three versions of Laodamia, his most Virgilian poem, the second () offers the harshest judgment on the heroine’s submission to passion, and suggests that “. . . genuine struggle seems to have receded into the past, and a ‘classical’ faith in reason, order, moderation, becomes at times indistinguishable from copybook morality and conventional pietism.” Wordsworth admits having preferred Ovid to Virgil when a schoolboy, but by , he comes “to admire Virgil’s high moral tone,” to condemn Laodamia to eternal exile, and banish Vaudracour and Julia form the poem on his own life. An examination of certain sections of Wordsworth’s Aeneid indicates his marked aversion to sexual, or suggestively sensual details. In Virgil’s I.–, Juno promises a nymph to Aeolus if he will produce a storm for her. Wordsworth gives us: Twice seven fair Nymphs await on my command, All beautiful;—the fairest of the Band, Deiopeia, such desert to crown, Will I, by stedfast wedlock, make thine own; In everlasting friendship with thee To dwell, and yield a beauteous progeny. (Lines –) Wordsworth captures the seriousness of the promise (“stedfast wedlock” for the Latin conubium, a highly technical term for the marriage ritual). But “such desert to crown” is unnecessary after forma pulcherrima: the subsequent “everlasting friendship” is a curious periphrasis which mitigates conubio iungam stabili; the offer seems to have been desexualized. Pitt, on the other hand, gives more spirit to the proposal: For thy Reward the fairest I’ll resign, And make the charming Deiopeia thine; She, on thy Bed, long Blessings shall confer, And make Thee Father of a Race like Her. (Lines –)



’ AENEID () The appearance of Venus to her son (Aeneid I.ff.) is likewise made less sensuous than the original. In Virgil, the use of unusual end rhyme and liquid sounds helps to increase the delicate beauty of the goddess: “venatrix dederatque comam diffundere ventis, / nuda genu nodoque sinus collecta fluentis” (–). Wordsworth adds an alexandrine and a superfluous clause to increase the liquid sound of the lines, but his efforts result once more in a less erotic description than, for example, Pitt’s: Light o’er her shoulders had she given the bow To hang; her tresses on the wind to flow; —A Huntress with bare knee;—a knot upbound The folds of that loose vest, which else had swept the ground. (Wordsworth, lines –) Bare was her knee; and with an easy Pride Her polish’d Bow hung graceful at her Side. Close, in a Knot, her flowing Robes she drew; Loose to the Winds her wanton Tresses flew. (Pitt, lines –) As Venus makes her famous exit from the scene (Aeneid –), “glowing with her rosy neck,” she reveals her divinity with an accumulation of sensuous details. Wordsworth’s goddess, however, is more ornate and artificial: . . . all bright Appear’d her neck, imbued with roseate light; And from the exalted region of her head Ambrosial hair a sudden fragrance shed, Odours divinely breathing;—her Vest flow’d Down to her feet;—and gait and motion shew’d The unquestionable Goddess. (Lines –) Dryden’s goddess is equally ornate, but substantially more sexual a creature than Wordsworth’s: Thus having said, she turn’d, and made appear Her Neck refulgent, and dishevel’d Hair; Which flowing from her Shoulders, reach’d the Ground, And widely spread Ambrosial Scents around; In length of Train descends her sweeping Gown, And by her graceful Walk, the Queen of Love is known. (Lines –)



  This Venus is both regal and sensuous; “dishevel’d,” which Wordsworth omits, and “sweeping gown,” an improvement on “vest,” as well as the final alexandrine, contribute to a balance between Venus’ womanly and divine powers. The liberty which Dryden takes with the last line indicates, once again, that he has captured Virgil’s spirit, although Wordsworth’s “unquestionable Goddess” might be a more literal translation of vera dea. It is in the treatment of Dido herself that Wordsworth’s reluctance to do justice to Virgil begins, at least unconsciously, to undo him and to point to his future abandonment of the poem. Wordsworth’s lines – of Book I, his version of Virgil’s –, are not only a literal, but a spirited description of the stateliness of Dido’s work, her rising kingdom, and her juridical temper. Similarly, her reply to the temporarily downcast and leaderless Trojans (Virgil, –, Wordsworth, –) is convincing as a presentation of Dido’s dignity, graciousness and hospitality. The trouble starts for Wordsworth when it does for Dido: when Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, begins to infect the queen with the poison of love for Aeneas. Once the dux becomes more of a femina, Wordsworth falters. Dido is “pesti devota futura” (I.), which Wordsworth takes too literally as “to the coming ill devoted.” But “devota” implies both “accursed,” and in another sense, the devotion of a sacrificial victim to a god. “Pestis” is literally a plague or disease, and Wordsworth’s “ruin” is both too bland and too bodiless a translation. The tragic force, with its repeated sibilants, of “inscia Dido, / insidat quantus miserae deus,” is ill served by the wordy “nor weens (O lot unblest!) / How great a God, incumbent o’er her breast / Would fill it with his spirit.” The sharpness of detail in Virgil is constantly blurred by Wordsworth’s euphemisms. Cupid works gradually: “abolere Sychaeum / incipit et vivo temptat praevertere amore / iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda” (emphasis mine). Wordsworth adds unnecessary details, diminishing the effect. His Cupid . . . by degrees Blots out Sichaeus, studious to remove The dead, by influx of a living love, By stealthy entrance of a perilous guest, Troubling a heart that had been long at rest. (Lines –) The special weakness in the last line is the deliberate suggestion of a weaker eruption (“troubling”) than Virgil requires. “Praevertere,” in addition, suggests Dido’s utter helplessness to resist the new passion, which is more than merely “troubling” or “perilous.”



’ AENEID () Finally, at the end of Book I, with Trojans and Tyrians seated together, Dido offers a libation and the poet Iopas sings of creation. As Dido comes to ask Aeneas to recount his adventures of seven years, Virgil inserts a dramatic and psychological gesture which fits symbolically into the context of the drinking and singing contests: “nec non et vario noctem sermone trahebat / infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem” (–). The use of the imperfect, following the normal historical present, attests to the gradual accumulation of pain and excitement to which Cupid has already exposed the queen. Both sexual intensity and the symbolic dimension of the evening’s feast are covered by the single direct object. Wordsworth effects the change from present tense to past (although it would be almost impossible in iambic couplets to approximate the imperfect), and is perhaps true to a literal reading: “But, lengthening out the night with converse new, / Large draughts of love unhappy Dido drew” (–). The couplet is borrowed largely from Dryden: “Th’ unhappy Queen with Talk prolong’d the Night, / And drank large Draughts of Love with vast Delight (–). In this instance, Dryden offers Wordsworth a precedent which he gladly accepts when unwilling to represent Dido’s passion fully. She does not seem like a tragic queen who is about to lose all for love. “Large” with a plural noun diffuses the effect of “longum amorem,” which implies singular intensity and a gradual deepening of the love in time and quality. “Unhappy,” although borrowed from Dryden, owes more to the language of domestic pathos than to that of sexual involvement and frustration; it lacks the tragic tone of “infelix,” which is equivalent to the French “malheureuse.” In this context, “infelix” retains its original meaning of “barren,” or “unfruitful,” especially in the light of the demand for a child which Dido uses in her desperate attempt to keep Aeneas from leaving so soon (IV.–). Wordsworth, however, captures an important small detail in this scene which, again, Dryden misses. Virgil wants us to see some relation between the song of Iopas, “his canit errantem lunam solisque labores, / unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes” (–), a song of creation and labor, and the final demand of Dido on Aeneas: ‘immo age et a prima dic, hospes, origine nobis insidias’ inquit ‘Danaum casusque tuorum erroresque tuos . . .’ (Lines –) Only Wordsworth finds the intended balance between “The labours of the Sun, the lunar wanderings; / Whence human kind, and brute” (–), and Dido’s request: “Retrace the Grecian cunning from its source, / Your



  own grief and your Friends’—your wandering course” (–). The first book ends, appropriately, with the beginning of Dido’s love set against two other versions of toil and wandering; when we return to her at the beginning of Book IV (“At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura”) we are reminded that her love has been growing during the recounting of Aeneas’ wandering. Beginnings and endings are balanced throughout; as with the framing of the Laocoon episode, Wordsworth captures the balance, either out of an innate sympathy with the verse or by virtue of his famous literalness. One might not agree with Mary Moorman’s claim that Wordsworth’s most remarkable poem of this period is “The Virgin” (PW III.), one of the ecclesiastical sonnets. Nevertheless, his image of ideal womanhood, like the earlier Emily Norton of The White Doe of Rylstone, is a sharp contrast to any version of Dido which he might have given us. It is no wonder that a poet who glorifies the . . . Power, in which did blend All that was mixed and reconciled in Thee Of mother’s love with maiden purity, Of high with low, celestial with terrene! would find it difficult to empathize with one of the great classical lovers. The truncated Aeneid that we have, however, contains poetic merit which is often denied Wordsworth at this period in his life. The poet who more than twenty years before turned his back on “what is usually called poetic diction,” here finds himself plagued with a practice at odds with his ideas about the literalness of translation. Wordsworth himself knew this. When part of his poem (I.–) appeared in the Philological Museum (), it was prefaced by the following remarks: “Having been displeased in modern translations with the additions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to keep clear of that fault, by adding nothing; but I became convinced that a spirited translation can scarcely be accomplished in the English language without admitting a principle of compensation” (PW IV.). Ironically, Wordsworth learned for himself what he might have learned from Dryden years before. Admitting his own growing frustration with each book of the Aeneid, Dryden concedes in his dedication that “. . . the way to please the best Judges, is not to Translate a Poet literally; and Virgil least of any other” (PW III.).



THREE

X

SOME LUCRETIAN ELEMENTS IN WORDSWORTH 

W

hat constitute legitimate grounds for comparison? In the manifold answers to this perennial question we can trace both the history of academic literary studies during the past century and the rich tensions among contemporary speculative schools. Comparisons are usually made with reference to tropes or topics: the first a rhetorical and formal, the second a thematic and ideological, way of establishing connections among writers. One sure ground for finding stylistic or substantive relationships is genetic: philology, as the basis of an organic, diachronic historicism, and Quellenforschungen of the old-fashioned “sources and analogues” sort started it all. Recent rhetorical analyses which trace tropes and echoes metaleptically through a single literature or across national and linguistic borders continue the historicist model, as does the eccentric revisionism of Harold Bloom, energetically discovering or imposing configurations among contemporary American poetry, English Romanticism, psychoanalytic theory, and Jewish mysticism. The other habitual basis for comparison, less stylistic than thematic, and synchronic rather than diachronic, isolates periods, enlarges ideas that may have been mere motes in the eye of the Zeitgeist into isms and schools and movements, and produces those topical handles and convenient labels (e.g., “the city in Baudelaire, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky,” “the Romantic Hero,” “post-modernism”) so necessary to literary pedagogy. But grounds keep shifting, and today’s canon may become tomorrow’s cannon fodder. The following essay explores another possibility for “comparing the literatures,” to alter Harry Levin’s phrase; for “sad incompetence of



  human speech” I shall call this way “affinitive” and follow it toward a possible meeting-place between two writers who have usually been thought to have little in common. And where the historical method always proceeds with an aim to discover causality or influence, and the synchronic method seeks to develop similarities, sometimes irrespective of cause, the third kind of comparison hopes to suggest that similarities in temperament and outlook may enable a later writer to be influenced by a distant precursor, rather than, as Bloom would have it, crippled by him. Here are two philosophers’ commentaries on two poets: . . . the greatest thing about this genius is its power of losing itself in its object, its impersonality. We seem to be reading not the poetry of a poet about things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what [he] proves once for all to mankind. . . . he dwells on that mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we set up as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance. . . . For him change is an incident which shoots across a background of endurance. Santayana on Lucretius and Whitehead on Wordsworth: it is an unlikely coupling of two poets whose outlooks and beliefs are often diametrically oppsed. But it is not easy to tell which of the two poets is referred to by either of the estimates above: Santayana unconsciously echoes Wordsworth’s poem “Humanity” (“streams that reflect the poetry of things”) as well as Matthew Arnold’s estimate of the “style-less” Wordsworth, and Whitehead might as well be describing a Lucretian atomic universe. Nor are Santayana and Whitehead unique in encouraging a consideration of a Lucretian Wordsworth and a Romantic, rather than Roman, Lucretius. Other critics, similarly paired, often sound as if they are writing about one poet, not two: [His ethics derives from the idea] that the philosopher must assume the role of the spectator and detach himself from the events of the moment, [and] on the other hand that it is only by a subject, that is, by one who participates in process, that any values at all can be realized. [He employs] a rhetoric of sympathy balanced by a contrary rhetoric of irony; a process securing simultaneous identification and judgment.



     () The largely confected life of Lucretius which William Young Sellar wrote in the late nineteenth century for the eleventh edition of the Encylopedia Britannica makes him sound like an early Wordsworth and shows the natural association of the two writers made by a classicist in the waning days of the Romantic age: . . . the choice of contemplative life was not the result of any indifference to the fate of the world, or of any coldness or even calmness of temperament. In the opening lines of the second and third books we can mark the recoil of a humane and sensitive spirit from the horrors of the reign of terror which he witnessed in his youth, and from the anarchy and confusion which prevailed at Rome during his final years. Passages in his poem attest his familiarity with the pomp and luxury of city life, with the attractions of the public games and with the pageantry of great military spectacles. But . . . he seems to have found a pleasure, more congenial to the modern than to the ancient temperament, in ascending mountains or wondering among their solitudes. Even Bloom, who says that Walter Pater’s “strange achievement is to have assimilated Wordsworth to Lucretius, to have compounded an idealistic naturalism with a corrective materialism,” makes the connection, on Pater’s behalf, between the two earlier poets which, I hope to show, is neither strange nor confected but, rather, implicit in Wordsworth’s own poetry. Indeed, when Bloom remarks, in an obiter dictum, that Wordsworth “handed on to his disciples . . . his Sublime visionary sense, [and] his program for renovation through renewed encounters with visible nature,” he sounds rather like Lucretius on Epicurus: . . . extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens. (. . . He passed far beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit he traversed the immense universe; whence he brings back to us in victory the news of what can be born, and what not, and the way in which the power of each thing is limited, and its boundary-stone deep-set.)



  This is, significantly, a passage which Wordsworth himself evokes in The Excursion, when he describes the “happy man” who . . . explores All natures,—to the end that he may find The law that governs each; and where begins The union, the partition where, that makes Kind and degree among all visible Beings; The constitutions, powers, and faculties, Which they inherit,—cannot step beyond,— And cannot fall beneath; that do assign To every class its station and its office, Through all the mighty commonwealth of things . . . (IV.–) Instead of writing off these seeming confusions to fuzzy critical vocabularies, inexact methods, or sheer coincidence, a genuine comparative study should speculate on the connections between the Roman who was the first great philosophical poet and the Englishman who, according to his friend and most perceptive reader, “possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew,” the one capable of writing “the first genuine philosophic poem.” Such a study would also account for the possible influence of a precursor far removed, by time, language, and often by ideology, on a later poet who absorbs his example and makes use of it selectively. The immediate grounds for comparison are few but solid. In a letter to Walter Savage Landor, Wordsworth admits that “my acquaintance with Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, and Catullus is intimate,” and he mentions De Rerum Natura as a prime example of didactic poetry, “the principal object of which is direct instruction,” in his  preface. R. P. Graves recalls Wordsworth’s fondness for quoting extensively from Lucretius. Christopher Wordsworth and Emerson go even further, the first in his recollection of his uncle’s saying that “the lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe’s long poem,” and the second in his implicit understanding that philosophical differences need never preclude poetic appreciation: “Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet than Virgil; not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power of illustration.” Along with a line from the Georgics, Wordsworth cites Lucretius in the epigraphs to the first edition of his early “Descriptive Sketches”: “Loca pastorum deserta atque otia diva” (V.). In  he writes form Paris to Isabella Fenwick about a miller standing at his windmill and looking “upon the City, with the nonchalance of the Philosopher in Lucretius, who



     () from the eminence of his wisdom regards the world and all its wanderers as something far beneath his anxieties” (LY, Pt. III, ; cf. DRN II.– and The Excursion IX.–). In A Guide through the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth commends a description in Lucretius as evidence that poetry captures more splendidly than nature itself the beauty of vines and olive trees; it is, coincidentally, a passage that may remind us of the opening lines of “Tintern Abbey” once we make the necessary arboreal adjustments: “a grey-green belt of olives might run between the vineyards to mark the boundaries, stretching forth over hills and valleys and plains; just as now you see the whole place mapped out with various charms, laid out and intersected with sweet fruittrees, and fenced around with fruitful shrubs” (DRN V.–). In spite of their differences (Lucretius’s avowed materialism and disbelief in immortality do not square with Wordsworth’s mysticism and religious awe even before his later orthodoxy), we may detect major intellectual and temperamental connections between the two poets, which would account for Lucretius’s poetic usefulness to Wordsworth. Their ethical vocabularies dwell upon pleasure, calm, and freedom, and their minds are strongly antimythological and antisexual. We may hear an echo of the Epicurean credo lathe biosas (“live in obscurity”) in Wordsworth’s claim that The Recluse will have for “its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement” (PW, V, ), and another echo of Lucretian dia voluptas in the “grand elementary principle of pleasure” that informs the preface to Lyrical Ballads (PW, II, ). Both men discover highest good in tranquil retirement and the pleasures of contemplation, to which riches, ignorance, fear and superstition pose the highest threats (I except the salutary fear that ministers, along with beauty, to the young Wordsworth in the first two books of The Prelude). The Lucretian gods, living apart in sedes quietae, embody an ideal which we may approach (e.g., III.: “dignam dis degere vitam”) through understanding and freedom from sensual comforts. Both the autobiographical hero and the other human figures in Wordsworth’s poetry reach, at times, a measured calm through a combination of duty, faith, and understanding. The golden moments, the hoped-for relief from emotional and physical upheaval, the bliss of solitude, and the peace that passes understanding derive as much from Wordsworth’s Epicurean as from his Stoic leanings. But where Lucretius paints an idealized picture of bland gods in a distant heaven, Wordsworth discovers his perfect serenity in the eternity of death. Except for the calm of the disinterested gods and the harmonious tomb, all moments of tranquil respite in Lucretius and Wordsworth are doomed to vanish, either by force of external circumstance, war, and plague, or by the explosion of human weakness and other internal disharmonies: the rhythms



  of De Rerum Natura and The Prelude alternate between moods of hope and despair, and between moments of quiet and turbulence. One sure violation of Epicurean calm is sexuality. By exploiting and exaggerating the common erotic imagery of the Greek epigrammatists, Lucretius presents the wounds, swellings, and lusts of bodily desire as, in turn, natural, habitual, ridiculous, and horrifying (IV.–). Against the certain wastefulness of love, the healthiest stance is avoidance altogether of Venus’s strong knots and removal hors de combat. Although he abjures Lucretius’s graphic renditions of sexuality, Wordsworth sounds the same strong antisexual note. The Prelude celebrates human relationships that are almost bloodlessly rational: to Raisley Calvert Wordsworth offers gratitude, to Coleridge respect, to Dorothy fraternal affection and thanks for seeing him through his crisis of the mid-nineties, and to Mary Hutchinson the merest platitudes of wedded love, for her “benign simplicity of life” (P XII.). Even though he praises human love (XIV.–), when he returns to his true subject Wordsworth summarily dismisses other people from the image of genuine tranquillity. Equating spiritual Love and Imagination, “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, /And Reason in her most exalted mood” (–), Wordsworth affirms the essential isolation of Man. Calm and salvation will come, if at all, from within: . . . Here must thou be, O Man! Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here; Here keepest thou in singleness thy state: No other can divide with thee this work. (XIV.–) Imagination and “intellectual love,” the Wordsworthian equivalents of Lucretius’s ratio and purgatum pectus (DRN V.), alone redeem us from terror and lead to Epicurean ataraxia. The opening lines of Book II in De Rerum Natura, which Wordsworth cites in his  letter, most clearly depict the pleasures of a rational, contemplative life, removed from the futile quest for achievement, power, and wealth. Reason and understanding of natural law lift the shadows through which we pass, struggling, during our lives: “hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest / non radii solis neque lucida tela diei / discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.” Especially in his youth Wordsworth professes a brand of empirical rationalism closely resembling Lucretius’s. In the “Lines Written as a School Exercise at Hawkshead,” a fourteen-year-old schoolboy’s paean to science and education, “pure Religion” initially performs what Venus does at the start of De Rerum Natura: it “rear[s] the peaceful breast / And lull[s] the warring passions into rest” (lines –); thereafter, Wordsworth pays



     () homage to Lucretius and the Virgil of Georgics II in his depiction of the reign of Science: Where, throned in gold, immortal Science reigns; Fair to the view is sacred Truth display’d, In all the majesty of light array’d, To teach, on rapid wings, the curious soul To roam from heaven to heaven, from pole to pole, From thence to search the mystic cause to things, And follow Nature to her secret springs . . . (–) Far from being antiscientific, like Keats for example, Wordsworth expects education and science to “regulate the mind’s disordered frame, / And quench the passions kindling into flame” (–). Sixteen years later, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, he looks forward to the day when Science “shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood,” and “the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.” Even after he has divested himself of his pseudo-Popean couplets and abstractions, in other words, Wordsworth adheres to a faith in the marriage of imagination and science which is implicit in the very personifications he employs. Like Lucretius (see I.–, –; IV.–), with an inherent belief in the primacy of sense experience in knowledge, Wordsworth relies on “the light of sense” for common perception and as the beginning of imaginative salvation. For both poets, freedom is the consequence of man’s isolation and a necessary presupposition for moral responsibility. Like Epicurus, reacting against the determinism of Democritus and other early atomists, Lucretius hypostatizes clinamen (II.–), the small swervings of atoms moving through space, as the physical and metaphorical basis for his proof of selfdetermination. Non-purposive itself, clinamen allows for purposeful human action. Lucretius takes upon himself the task of showing how the mind, like the physical world of which it is a part and the rules of which it obeys, can be subject to external causality but, at the same time, impose its will upon the world. He finds the solution (III.–) in the idea of a compound body (concilium or conciliatus), a union of atoms whose whole surpasses the sum of its parts: “the automatic swerve of the individual atoms then is translated in the complex of the mind into a consciously spontaneous movement, in other words, into a movement of volition.” Wordsworth balances a similar belief in personal and political freedom with an acceptance of physical, social, and intellectual necessity that prevents



  liberty from becoming anarchy. Book I of The Prelude is paradigmatic, with its self-conscious Miltonic echoes, from “The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty” (lines –) to “The road lies plain before me;—’tis a theme / Single and of determined bounds” (– ). He finds true freedom only in the self-limitation that gives direction and self-determination. The strongest statement of this necessity-freedom paradox comes in The Excursion, where the Wanderer, attempting to cure the despondent Solitary, shows how science will watch “the processes of things” to aid “the mind’s excursive power”: . . . conscious that the Will is free, [We] Shall move unswerving, even as if impelled By strict necessity, along the path Of order and of good. (IV.–) Wordsworth here yokes the ethical demands of stoic Christianity to the Epicurean expectation of freedom, in language that sounds Lucretian, especially the scientific “unswerving” and the Latinate “impelled” and “necessity.” Automatic benevolence, the agency of those “little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love,” which “Tintern Abbey” celebrates, results from a “strict necessity” which, in the context of a simile (“even as if ”), seems less than fully real. Total freedom, as he suggests in the “Ode to Duty,” is a burden which the wise man comes gradually to relinquish in favor of a strict obedience that alone will redeem one from “the weight of chance-desires,” and relieve the fatigue brought on by “unchartered freedom.” Like Lucretius, Wordsworth manages a speculative balancing act. In their commitment to man’s release from fear, superstition, and intellectual bondage, Lucretius and Wordsworth share a modern, relativistic temper. Alone among the Latin poets, Lucretius lambastes mythology; alone among the English Romantics. Wordsworth turns away from the use of classical myth, his legacy from Spenser and Milton, nor does he attempt, like Blake, to create his own mythology. But, at the same time, both are willing to invoke the old stories when it suits their purposes to do so. After his gorgeous description of the processions of Cybele, magna mater (II.–), Lucretius takes away with one hand what the other has given: “Quae bene et eximie quamvis disposta ferantur, / longe sunt tamen a vera ratione repulsa.” Thus, in Milton’s words, they relate—erring. In the fables of the underworld (III.–), Lucretius deploys a symbolic use of myth to explain reality. All the punishments we envision in an afterlife, he says, are projections of our earthly fears: Tantalus, Tityos, and Sisyphus are types of men punished for fear, pride, or passion: “Atque ea nimirum quaecumque Acherunte



     () profundo / prodita sunt esse, in vita sunt omnia nobis.” (–). The fictions of Acheron mirror the truths of this life. Similarly, Lucretius is not above using myth as part of the honey with which he coats his bitter philosophic pill (IV.–), as when he stresses the folk etiology of Echo in IV.–; rustics, he says, create local gods for their woods so they will not have to fear a surrounding desert. The motive is understandable, and the poet refrains humanely from condemning it. Phillip Damon says that this picture of a sentient nature “. . . was a thoroughly conscious escape from a correct but slightly chilly conception of the way things are. . . . Instead of harshly contrasting myth with reality, Lucretius comes within a recognizable distance of using myth as a symbol of reality—a symbol of man’s anxious search for the false but comforting stories, traditions and worldviews ‘quae belle tangere possint aures.’ The functional use of myth, which balances the solace of pleasant fictions and their frequent educative value against their falsity (e.g., P V.–), is what Wordsworth, an unlikely relativist, prefers to a downright dismissal or denunciation. Like Milton, at pains to differentiate his true epic subject from pagan stories, Wordsworth still calls up the past as the tradition from which his own clinamen is diverted: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? (The Recluse, “Prospectus,” lines –) It was “true” shepherds, not “such as Spenser fabled” (P VIII.), who first led him to a love of man, and the pastoral otium of his swains was not the “smooth life” with “long springs and tepid winters” but one complicated by storms, snow, and “strict time.” He eliminates pastoral nostalgia and Utopian optimism alike: neither “subterranean fields” nor “some secreted island” will give man happiness, but only “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us” (P XI.–). Neverthless, the Wanderer, in The Excursion, praises even pagan deities as the necessary expression of untutored imaginative impulses. “Apollo” embodies our need for creative harmony, just as Tantalus, according to Lucretius, reflects the need for self-condemnation: . . . if [a lonely herdsman] When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,



  Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. (IV.–) Ambivalent about liberty and mythology, the poets are also uncertain in their sense of their vocations. Daring and fear are partners in the epic quest, and the homage paid by Lucretius to Epicurus, like Wordsworth’s implicit homage to Milton, acknowledges both the master’s unmatchable achievement and an effort to emulate it. Lucretius is our first consciously belated poet, who laments his own weakness in coming after, but turns necessity into a virtue and rejoices in the task of translating the master’s words into a new language. Thrice bemoaning the poverty of Latin (I., –; III.; cf. Wordsworth’s note to “The Thorn,” where he refers to our consciousness “of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language”), he finds his role pleasurable because arduous. He is proud to be the first to describe newly discovered truths in Latin: “et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus / nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces” (V.–). Like Dante following Virgil, Lucretius insists (V.–) that he is walking behind his master “cuius ego ingressus vestigia dum rationes / persequor ac doceo dictis.” But his road is not always marked by the light of Epicurus, and his job is consequently harder. The proem to Book IV (cf. I.–), with its famous comparison of the writer’s task to the physician’s, forcing the medicine down the patient’s throat with the help of honey, boldly asserts Lucretius’s own originality, his quest for new paths, flowers, and a Muses’ crown: Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae. (IV.–) This mingled modesty and pride, the creative uncertainly and ambition which must work themselves out through a complex process of rationalization and sublimation, are precisely what recent criticism has defined as a major force in English Romantic poetry. Wordsworth attempts to outsoar Milton, invoking “a greater Muse” while he “passes,” unalarmed (or so he says), the terror and strength “put forth in personal form” of Milton’s biblical epics (see the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, lines –). In a programmatic statement that recalls Lucretius’s ideas about myth as well as his



     () self-conscious humanism (cf. DRN V.–), Wordsworth boldly plunges into some untrodden region of his mind: . . . Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— My haunt, and the main region of my song. (–) Like Wordsworth himself, we “tread on shadowy ground” if we try to make stylistic comparisons, let alone see connections, between poets separated by culture, language, and two thousand years. We might say, however, that precisely because of the distance between them, Wordsworth absorbed Lucretius’s lessons with none of the anxiety that accompanied his responses to Milton or others closer at hand and speaking the same tongue. And because of those temperamental and intellectual affinities which the two men share, and which permit Wordsworth an admiration of Lucretius’s “power of illustration” if not his entire system, we may discover in their respective poetic languages strong resemblances which are more than coincidental, even if less than inevitable. Both poets risk prosiness (as Coleridge first recognized about Wordsworth), and they can sink to occasional tedium in presenting abstruse arguments. Lucretius’s drift can be, like Wordsworth’s, at times scarcely obvious; at other moments both poets mount to the heights of impassioned speech, unveiling the grandeur of the commonplace and the forcefulness of the philosopher’s abstractions. To start with, we can identify the undeniably political consciousness that informs the greatest moments in De Rerum Natura and The Prelude. In reporting the relations between the atoms, Lucretius uses legal and military metaphors which suggest to Hugh Sykes Davies that he “may have attempted to represent the machinery of the universe—the ‘machina mundi’—by symbols drawn from the legal and political machinery of the Republic.” Davies counts thirty appearances of nexus and its derivatives, used, in Ciceronian Latin, in its legal sense, “denoting the relationship between debtor and creditor, slave and master.” Concilium, ‘deliberative assembly,’ appears twenty times; other frequent words are conventus, congressus, foedus, indicium, imperium, and consociare. Lucretius’s world is congress of things (cf. The Excursion IV., “the mighty commonwealth of things”), sometimes united in useful harmony, sometimes warring factiously. Civil peace and civil strife, physical rest and turmoil, Venus and Mars: these are the contrarieties in Lucretius’s



  universe. The laws of conservation of matter and energy result from a balance between creation and destruction: Nec superare queunt motus itaque exitiales perpetuo neque in aeternum sepelire salutem, nec porro rerum genitales auctificique motus perpetuo possunt servare creata. sic aequo geritur certamine principiorum ex infinito contractum tempore bellum: nunc hic nunc illic superant vitalia rerum et superantur item. (II.–) (And therefore, neither can the motions of destruction rule forever, and forever bury existence, nor further can the motions of existence forever give birth to things and preserve them. Thus, the war waged from infinity on the first-beginnings is carried on in balanced strife: now here, now there the vital forces of things conquer, and in like manner are themselves conquered.) Lucretius’s language invariably humanizes the physical universe. Not only his political metaphors, but even his commonest name for the atoms, semina rerum, betrays an organicist bias. All life is an ecosystem of dependencies; Lucretius applies a single behavioral model to the physical movement of his atoms, the natural world of Venereal reproduction and Martial destruction, and the political world of human peace and chaos: . . . sic rerum summa novatur semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt. augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt. (II.–) (The sum of things is thus ever renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent upon one another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living things are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.) This same organic, political relatedness forms the basis of Wordsworth’s world. M. H. Abrams has observed how frequently Romantic theories of mind depend on political analogies; Wordsworth’s language for the transactions between mind and nature (what Mark Schorer, writing of Blake, refers to as the “politics of vision”), readily invoking words like “sovereignty”



     () and “subservience,” depicts human confrontations with nature or with the depths of the self in a framework of struggle, domination, and freedom. The “renovating virtue” of the “spots of time (P XII.ff.) is their restoration of a proper relationship between mind and nature; they show how “The mind is lord and master—outward sense / The obedient servant of her will.” Going to France with youthful ardor, Wordsworth reminds us that “Nature then was sovereign in my mind, / And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy, / Had given a charter to irregular hopes” (VI.–). The “soulless image” of Mt. Blanc (ff.) “usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be.” After the momentous crossing of the Alps, the imagination is recognized “in such strength / Of usurpation, when the light of sense / Goes out” (–). When the bodily eye . . . The most despotic of our senses, gained / Such strength in me as often held my mind / In absolute dominion,” Nature studiously thwarted this tyranny and “summon[ed] all the senses each / To counteract the other (XII.–; cf. DRN I., “invida praeclusit speciem natura videndi,” our grudging faculty of sight has shut us out from seeing). Natural objects and visible phenomena challenge the imagination’s independence throughout Wordsworth’s greatest poetry; in the ascent of Snowdon which begins Book XIV, the moon becomes a symbol of a “majestic intellect” (line ) threatened by the rebellious fervor of wind and waves; the Atlantic ocean . . . appeared To dwindle, and give up his majesty, Usurped upon far as the sight could reach. Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon, Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay All meek and silent, save that through a rift— Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! Heard over earth and sea, and in that hour, For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens. (–) These lines never resolve the struggle for domination preeminent in Wordsworth’s apocalyptic scenes. Only in special transient moments do we get



  a sense of an achieved balance, as at the end of Book XIII, when the poet gains sight of a “new world,” in which there exists an equilibrium between mind and nature, and in which freedom is tempered by . . . those fixed laws Whence spiritual dignity originates, Which do both give it being and maintain A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees. (XIII.–) Such harmony is the ideal; Wordsworth more often describes a strenuous, internecine relationship like the one in the Snowdon episode which immediately follows, in terms of irresolvable political paradoxes: “mutual domination,” “interchangeable supremacy” (XIV., ), the eternal warfare of the elements within a dynamic cosmos. The usurpation of power, and the civil strife in the natural world that are equivalents to intellectual struggle, are exactly what we find in Lucretius’s description of the civil war among the elements (“pio . . . concita bello”) in V. –. Discounting mythological tales of flood and fire, he offers atomic explanations for the occasional mastery of one element by another. An end may come, he says, . . . vel cum sol et vapor omnis omnibus epotis umoribus exsuperarint: quod facere intendunt, neque adhuc conata patrarunt: tantum suppeditant amnes ultraque minantur omnia diluviare ex alto gurgite ponti, nequiquam, quoniam verrentes aequora venti deminuunt radiisque retexens aetherius sol, et siccare prius confidunt omnia posse quam liquor incepti possit contingere finem. tantum spirantes aequo certamine bellum magnis de rebus cernere certant, cum semel interea fuerit superantior ignis et semel, ut fama est, umor regnarit in arvis. (V.–, my italics) (. . . either when the sun and all heat shall prevail, having drunk up all the water; which they are striving to do, but so far they have been unable to accomplish the attempt; so great a supply do the rivers bring up, and



     () further threaten to deluge the whole from the deep gulf of the sea—all in vain, because the winds sweeping the waters diminish them, as does the ethereal sun unravelling them with his rays, and these are confident that they can dry up all things before the water can reach the end of its task. So fierce is their warlike spirit, in equal contest they strive to win in a mighty cause; although in the meantime fire won the mastery once, and once, the story goes, water ruled over the fields.) The words I have stressed, repeated both within the rest of this passage and throughout the poem generally, have their Wordsworthian equivalents in “upheaval,” “give up,” “usurped,” “encroachment,” “sovereign,” and “supremacy.” Even the rhythm of creation and destruction which gives Lucretius a form for his poem, and which underlies his laws of conservation, has a direct Wordsworthian analogy in the internalized battleground of consciousness. As in the Lucretian cosmos, so in the Wordsworthian mind: nothing is ever lost, only reshelved, or temporarily misfiled but eventually retrievable; all “images and precious thoughts” that are “deposited upon the silent shore / Of memory . . . shall not die, and cannot be destroyed” (The Excursion VII.–). The act of the mind in discovering or recovering itself, its past and present lives, reflects an intellectual ecology and efficiency like that of the atomic universe. The long passages above evince another major resemblance between the poets: they both prove what Donald Davie has suggested about Wordsworth’s diction, that the nouns tend toward generality, the verbs to specificity. The energy in both poets erupts when they depict violent or relentless action; they develop vocabularies that stress change, as Whitehead noticed, shooting “across a background of endurance” (according to Lucretius, II.–, even though the atoms are in constant motion, the world gives the appearance of summa quies). But they are also our greatest generalizing poets. Thus they habitually rely on large conceptual words: Lucretius’s ratio, animus and anima, natura, species, genus, nilum, voluptas, and Wordsworth’s “reason,” “soul,” “imagination,” “nature,” “power,” and “love,” Even their primary concern with “things” is distilled to a level of abstraction. Res and “thing” are rough equivalents in the two languages—bald, prosaic, connoting individuality in the singular and, in the plural, unspecific multeity. Lucretius promises to uncover the origins of the universe, its beginnings in the atoms, and the way nature nourishes matter and then reduces it. One word covers all: . . . rerum primordia pandam, unde omnis natura creet res auctet alatque quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat, quae nos materiem et genitalia corpora rebus



  reddunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum appellare suëmus et haec eadem usurpare corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis. (I.–, my italics) “Things” in Wordsworth are at the heart of important moments, of his recognition of a physical universe with more than physical attributes, and of the unity embracing animate and inanimate alike. Usually things are dead or unhuman, which is why the Intimations Ode can speak of instincts before which “our mortal Nature / Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised.” Hence, also, the speaker’s surprise in “Resolution and Independence” at seeing a “thing endued with sense,” or in “Yew-Trees”: “This solitary Tree! a living thing!” At the other extreme from the “mute insensate things” of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” are the pantheistic revelations made constantly in the poetry, as in The Excursion I. (borrowed almost verbatim from The Borderers, line ), “the moral properties and scope of things.” When we are invited to “come forth into the light of things” (“The Tables Turned”), we sense a vital moral universe; when Lucy Gray is called “the sweetest thing that ever grew,” we realize the inadequacy to reality of our usual categories; when the dreamer in the last of the “Lucy” poems (“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”) announces that “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years,” he implies both his own naïveté and the trans-humanness of the girl. Above all, in “Tintern Abbey,” there is the momentous “we see into the life of things,” which generalizes from the one life within us and abroad, and endows the dead objects of the world or of memory with a pulse of their own. Further on Wordsworth is disturbed by “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things.” Here is another momentary balance: “things” are the percipient beings and the objects of their notice. One world makes the whole world kin. The language of general ideas mixes with the rhetoric of proof in these poets who make arguments, either logically like Lucretius, or analogically, like Wordsworth, reasoning from the example of his own life outward (“What one is, / Why may not millions be?” he asks in The Prelude XIII.–). The prosaic diction of logic is everywhere in Lucretius: he is the classical poet, par excellence, of connectives: igitur, ergo, sic, ita, denique, quippe, haud, hinc, quare, tamen, quapropter, scilicet. The force of his proofs and the confidence with which he asserts them give Lucretius a masterful, authoritative tone. Often thought of as a “hard” poet, Lucretius has a gift for the graceful, simple aphorism which usually crowns an illustration or proof, after which we can do no more than agree: “tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” (I.),



     () and religion has been killed off for good; “corporibus caecis igitur natura gerit res” (I.); “ita res accendent lumina rebus (I.); “nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum” (III.), all single lines which end, matter-offactly, the issues at hand (my italics). The aphorisms work, again and again, like the imperatives which Anne Amory has called “sleeve-plucking words,” to push the argument forward with redounding energy. Lucretius builds toward these simple, memorable, prosaic epigrams, but the main body of his argument is a dense thicket of rhetorical devices; the poetry is rich with repetition, archaisms, and invented compound words. In general, he favors an austere repetition (hence the emphasis on certain conceptual words) rather than the elegant variations used by subsequent Augustan poets. What may seem occasionally prolix and stolid in his style is probably due to his awareness of the difficulty of making an abstruse, unpoetic subject comprehensible to an audience and in a language not particularly hospitable to it. His interest, of necessity, as Wordsworth well knew, was as much in the “power of illustration” as in the system itself. Lucretius wants to keep many possibilities open—hence, in V.–, he admits there may be several causes of the movement of the stars. Calling himself pedetemptim progredientis “one proceeding step by step,” he recognizes the impossibility of figuring out the correct explanation. Another example of the same steady, patient pace is his argument for the mortality of the soul (III.–), which begins with his conclusion, runs with a dazzling display of logical inference through dozens of reasons to make the irrefutable point that both body and soul are mortal, and ends (line ) where it began, with the assertion that “death is nothing to us,” an idea repeated five times in the subsequent  lines. The argument is circular and Lucretius’s arsenal for presenting it immense. In his provocative analysis of Wordsworth’s prepositions, Christopher Ricks has described the stylistic gestures which accompany Wordsworth’s instinctive passion for connection and relationship. Ricks might have gone further: Wordsworth is the English poet of the conjunction, and the adverb of result, as well as of the preposition. Whether used with justly logical force or merely as slap-dash glue for two sentences or arguments, these connectives demand our attention, as Wordsworth hoped they would when he wrote of “Tintern Abbey” that its transitions are equivalent to the turns and counterturns of a great ode (PW, II, ). This is their effect, especially in the capitulating “Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows,” and “Therefore let the moon / Shine on thee in thy solitary walk” (my italics), lines which conclude an argument and announce a new direction in the poet’s thought. Not only do the “thus”es and “therefore”s give what John Jones labels the “logical, knitted quality” of Wordsworth’s verse, but whole phrases are also



  used with conjunctive purpose, whether to support or to demur: “such, perhaps,”; “Nor less, I trust”; “If this / Be but a vain belief ”; “Though changed, no doubt”; “for such loss, I would believe”; “Nor, perchance.” To finish a paragraph, Wordsworth may rely upon a pseudo-logical flourish, for example, “the midnight storm / Grew darker in the presence of my eye. / Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, / And hence my transport” (P II.–). And, trying to be fair to all alternatives, the verse occasionally relinquishes forcefulness to the demands of enumeration and rhetorical complexity: . . . My seventeenth year was come; And, whether from this habit rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess In the great social principle of life Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic natures were transferred My own enjoyments; or the power of truth Coming in revelation, did converse With things that really are . . . (–, my italics) The Wordsworthian statement, like the Lucretian, follows an arc that often begins and always ends in simplicity. A good example is the conclusion of the second verse paragraph of “Tintern Abbey”: . . . Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—That serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (lines –) The monosyllabic, native English words of the last line come at the close of a long breath which begins with a hesitation and a reluctant conditional



     () verb, and works through a series of repetitions designed to build momentum and intellectual clarity in defining the “mood . . . in which” the final mystical revelation is made (compare the impact of The Prelude II., “things that really are,” cited above). Or, we may take the end of the Wanderer’s narrative in The Excursion I, his benediction for Margaret: She sleeps in the clam earth, and peace is here. I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o’er, As once I passed, into my heart conveyed So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could maintian, Nowhere, dominion o’er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith. I turned away, And walked along my road in happiness. (lines –) Once again, the move is circular, from one simple sentence to a bare conclusion, twisting around lines and images full of repetition, redundancy, complex subordination and, unsurprisingly, one strong political image (“maintain . . . dominion”). Repetition, as more than a stylistic tic or an elegant series of grace notes, allies Wordsworth in deep ways with Milton, of course, but with Lucretius as well. Partly this is due to the strong use of key words as rivets or anchors in a world of flux; more interestingly, it attests not to a poverty of language or conception but to an ingrained didacticism that finds in repetition and tautology the deepest truths. Wallace Stevens’s statement in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” that “The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, / But he that of repetition is most master” might well serve as motto for the style and temperament that Wordsworth shares with certain of his forebears. It is not unusual that a poet whose most characteristic experiences and charged moments often take the form of repetition, with or without variation (“Five years have passed . . . and . . . Once again / Do I behold”; “So was it when my life began; / So is it now I am a man; / So be it when I shall grow old”) should adopt a style equivalent to his vision. The harmony of reciprocity,



  another type of political relationship, demands a syntax and a vocabulary of apposite reflexiveness: . . . But he had felt the power Of Nature, and already was prepared, By his intense conceptions, to receive Deeply the lesson deep of love which he, Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught To feel intensely, cannot but receive. (The Excursion I.–, my italics) Teaching is like medicine: repeated doses are often necessary. Tedious and self-satisfied as he sometimes is throughout The Excursion, the Wanderer, whom the lines above describe, is Wordsworth’s spokesman and the major voice in that undramatic poem. His role is an unabashedly didactic one, and at least one principal object of the poem (as in Lucretius’s) is “direct instruction”: how to save yourself from despondency. Both poets have been faulted for preachiness, for tiresome (and, some say, unpoetic) meandering in philosophical domains. But both De Rerum Natura and The Prelude —itself didactic in impulse—are personal addresses as well as, in the one case, a treatise, and, in the other, an epic or autobiography. The passion for getting it right, for explaining a cosmology and an ethics as completely and irrefutably as possible is at the heart of Lucretius’s style. His purpose is not merely to develop his system in verse but to convince and convert Memmius, to whom the poem is addressed, to Epicurean ataraxia and the cult of relaxed friendship uniting men in the Garden. Teaching Memmius how to live, by defining the revelations of godlike Epicurus, will consequently expand the circle of true believers. This is what gives missionary fervor and a human voice to this nominally scientific poem. After Hesiod, Lucretius is our first great poetic teacher. And, in English at least, Wordsworth may be our latest. The “preparatory” autobiographical poem never gave way to the great philosophical opus which Wordsworth anticipated, although it emboldened him for the task. At the end of The Prelude, Wordsworth looks hopefully forward to the fulfillment of his joint task with Coleridge. Should they live, the two of them will deliver their fellows from “ignominy and shame”: Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes



     () A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells . . . ( XIV.–) The mission was never accomplished, as Wordsworth progressively chose for himself the mask of preacher rather than tentative philosophical teacher, pedetemptim progredientis. His “wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing,” however, was achieved in part by the enthusiastic “conversions” of such nineteenth-century followers as Mill and Eliot. It is appropriate, too, that one English classicist should have selected the lines above for translation into Lucretian hexameters (I end where I began this essay: with the instinctive coupling of Wordsworth and Lucretius by various readers): “. . . alii, quod amavimus ante / id discent quoque amare, viamque docebimus ipsi.” Shelley, himself a more thoroughgoing Lucretian, invokes Wordsworth with Lucretian imagery, sensing as it were the allegiances between the two great philosophical poets. For Lucretius, the joy of the philosopher is to gaze from shore upon turbulent waters, to behold “belli certamina magna” from a safe refuge (II.–); the great achievement of Epicurus was to have led us from storm and darkness to calm and light: . . . quique per artem fluctibus e tantis vitam tantisque tenebris in tam tranquillo et tam clara luce locavit. (V.–) As Epicurus was to Lucretius, Shelley intimates, so Wordsworth was to us: Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-like refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude. Whatever their failures, as poets or thinkers, both Lucretius and Wordsworth have given us “an ordered vision of the life of man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute observation.” Wordsworth learned from Lucretius without anxiety, easily appreciating and adopting his characteristic ways of conceiving and depicting reality. Both poets have taught us, in their different ways, our place in a universal commonwealth.



FOUR

X

KEATS’S “COMING MUSKROSE” AND SHAKESPEARE’S “PROFOUND VERDURE” 

W

ithin the mysterious transformations of raw experience and feeling into art, perhaps the most troublesome process—for an audience at least—is one writer’s recollection or absorption of another’s work. How can we know that what we think we “hear” within or beneath a text is there, either intentionally or unwittingly? Literary “echoing,” whether pursued in old-fashioned source studies or in recent analyses of influence, may ring false where we most wish to hear it. On the other hand, the faintest reminiscences, notes of homage to a poet’s precursors, may turn out to play a major part in a poem’s music when we listen to them attentively. Can we derive one poem’s tonic from a key provided by another, or do the “echoes” exist as a counterpoint to the later work’s authentic originality? How comfortably does post hoc square with propter hoc? In the following essay, I shall try to show how a peculiar problem in a specific poem may prepare us for larger connections between that poem and an antecedent work than we might have bargained for. The “Ode to a Nightingale,” as everyone knows, is one of the products of Keats’s most feverishly creative weeks in the spring of his annus mirabilis. But questions of when, exactly, the poem was written, which we cannot know for certain, are compounded by equally knotty ones, which too many readers ignore, gloss over, or misanswer, about time within the poem itself. Some critics unconsciously assume that the poem’s internal time coincides with



“ ”  “ ” () that of its composition, perhaps early May, or they fix that time, via one of the poem’s few exact references, at mid-May. Still others like to think of the ode, because of its proleptic glances toward summer ripeness, as a midsummer piece. It has often been recognized that the florilegium of the fifth stanza, at that mysterious moment of synaesthetic confusion when empirical knowledge and rational discovery give way to intuitive guesswork, moves in a seasonal progression from flowers of the early spring to the fruits of summer: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Certain linguistic and botanical oddities of the stanza demand comment. The most perplexing of these is the last named of the flowers: assuming, for the purpose of convenience, a mid-May date for the poem’s action, what can we make of the conjunction of “coming” and “eldest”? The muskrose is a summer flower, yet to come, not currently in the process of “coming”; Bacon tells us, in “Of Gardens,” that “in May and June come . . . roses of all kinds, except the musk, which comes later. . . . In July come . . . musk-roses.” Consequently, the anticipation within the last line corresponds neatly to that in the last line of the first stanza (“Singest of summer in full-throated ease” []), especially if we assume that the bird’s song somehow reflects the poet’s unconscious, wishful longing for a later time—although some readers have thought that the nightingale, always unaware as the speaker full well knows, must be singing in summer if it is singing of summer. But the “eldest” child of mid-May must surely be the flower born at the start of the month, or even earlier in the spring, something like the hawthorn, or the first-named violet. To say simply that the poem, even at a point where time, like rationality, seems momentarily suspended, evinces Keats’s innate feeling for natural process, will not resolve the other problems within the stanza. To begin with, the syntactic status of violet, hawthorn, eglantine, and rose complements their temporal vagueness, since the punctuation thwarts any attempt to determine whether the flowers are in apposition to the “sweets” of line  or are objects of the seasonable endowment that brings those sweets to all the plants in this bower. Further linguistic details work toward obscuring not



  just one’s time sense but also clear visualization—even within a paradoxically “embalmed” darkness where everything moves and changes. Are the violets quite dead? Do we understand “cover’d” as analogous to the deep location of the nightingale (stanza ) amid the forest’s numberless shadows, to the poet’s present embalmment in darkness, and to the bird’s subsequent burial in the eighth stanza when it disappears into the neighboring valley-glade? Or are the violets, the humble flowers of early spring, merely beginning their etiolation? What leaves cover them? Their own? Those of last year? Those of trees that have already begun to shed, or those of still earlier flowers (the violet, as Wordsworth reminds us, may be hidden even by a mossy stone)? Finally, what exactly does Keats intend by the “seasonable month”? It is difficult to take at face value the citation of this line in the OED as a reference to weather, meaning “suitable to the time of year,” because details of climate or meteorology figure nowhere else in the poem. If we take the adjective to mean “occurring at the right season; opportune,” we are stuck with a typically Keatsian redundancy that teases us again to consider to which month(s) the poet may refer. Although the dictionary lists two other meanings as now obsolete, they at least develop the implications of the word in directions corresponding to the other evidence of the stanza; both “temporary; enduring but for a season” and “mature,” well-seasoned” remind us that the flowers, at the moment of bloom, are fast losing their seasonal sweetness, that like the fruit in “To Autumn” that is filled with ripeness to the core, their rottenness attends upon their very fruition, and that the moment of conception is the beginning of death. And in this case, as in so many others, Keats’s temporal configurations almost deliberately seem to prove that poetic fertility, like natural growth, destroys its own creations. As if understanding this Keatsian dilemma, A. E. Housman later culled his own white hawthorn flowers (often called “May flowers” and gathered traditionally on May Day) with a comparable seasonal paradox: ’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town The golden broom should blow; The hawthorn sprinkled up and down Should charge the land with snow. (A Shropshire Lad, .–) The muskrose blows six times in Keats’s poetry, and all but once it appears in summer. The one exception, in the early epistle “To My Brother George,” associates it specifically with May Day when, with the lily, it bedecks the May Queen as an emblem “true of hapless lovers dying,” in a strange conjunction of erotic tragedy and youthful hope (). But Keats so often connects images of natural process with erotic longing that we must grant this



“ ”  “ ” () muskrose a privileged symbolic status in his garden. And, as Christopher Ricks has suggested, “conception” in Keats usually mingles artistic, natural, and sexual possibilities. In the relations among these possibilities lie Keats’s amplest materials. One year before the great odes, he described the mark of the human spring (in “Four seasons fill the measure of the year”) as “Fancy,” which “Takes in all beauty with an easy span” (–). At the end of , “winged” Fancy betokens the imagination, erotic yearning, and seasonal mutability: Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: .......................... Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the spring Fades as does its blossoming. (“Fancy,” –, –) It is Fancy that leads man to a mistress as “seasonable” as she is—as yet— unseasoned, a mistress to thy mind: Dulcet-eyed as Ceres’ daughter, Ere the God of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide. (–) By , however, Fancy’s Persephone has frowned on the poet, as he turns an embittered eye on the nightingale and what she now represents after the confusions and attendant disappointments of space and time: “Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf ” (–). At the end of the ode, the farewell to the nightingale syntactically precedes, but experientially follows, the recognition that Fancy, that feminine elf, has teased him only halfway. The moment of heightened imaginative activity, in synesthetic turbulence, has defeated expectation and desire; erotic and imaginative deceptions adjust themselves to seasonal process. In Keats’s poetry time is always of the essence. The only instance where its deceits do not portend either tragedy or mere disappointment is at the opening of “To Autumn,” where the bees are characteristically tricked into “thinking” their summer eternal (). Even here, however, human consciousness must not be granted superior wisdom, since the development of the stanza, by denying us a simple independent verb, undermines our expectations; we are unlikely to know, at first reading, that the first eleven lines, with their profusion of timeless infinitives and participles, are grammatically



  and temporally incomplete, finished not by the period of line  but by the question of line  that repairs the fractured apostrophe (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness . . . Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?”). Keatsian trickery, here at its cleverest, is also at its tamest. Elsewhere in his poetry, Keats assures us not only that death is life’s high meed but also that springtime awakening can tempt, endanger, and mystify, most alarming when most longed for. The Edenic opening of “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream,” where synesthetic details echo those of the “Ode to a Nightingale” and where the poet finds himself standing beside a showering noise “by the touch / Of scent, not far from roses” (I.–), prepares him not for bliss but for the evaporation of Flora’s realm and its replacement by something more naked and Grecian. Shortly thereafter, moving toward Moneta’s temple, the poet reminds us of spring’s alluring deceit: When in mid-May the sickening east wind Shifts sudden to the south, the small warm rain Melts out the frozen incense from all flowers, And fills the air with so much pleasant health That even the dying man forgets his shroud.

(I.–) The weakest phrase, because the most general (“pleasant health”), attests to Keats’s lack of interest in this temporary revival, which will, soon enough, make the sick man’s death all the more painful. Even this passage, with its resemblance to the ode, looks back to an earlier poem that itself predicts everything through “To Autumn.” In the  sonnet, “After dark vapours have oppressed our plains,” we witness the Keatsian congruence of human and natural seasons, the budding of leaves leading through autumn harvest to the high-garnered characters eulogizing a poet’s death at the end: After dark vapours have oppressed our plains For a long dreary season, comes a day Born of the gentle south, and clears away From the sick heavens all unseemly stains. The anxious month, relieving from its pains, Takes as a long lost right the feel of May, The eyelids with the passing coolness play, Like rose-leaves with the drip of summer rains. And calmest thoughts come round us—as, of leaves Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—



“ ”  “ ” () Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a sleeping infant’s breath— The gradual sand that through an hour glass runs— A woodland rivulet—a poet’s death. The anxious month barely achieves its own identity, as its name is withheld until the end of the phrase and the season is miraculously reborn; indeed, in the strangely objectless but-reflexive “relieving” we naturally hear “reliving” as spring, phoenixlike, arises out of the despairs of winter. May relieves itself of its pains while retaining its living anxieties as part of its “feel.” Foremost among these, what “forces us in summer skies to mourn: / [and what] spoils the singing of the nightingale” (“Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed,” –) is our foreknowledge of change and death. If natural conception is Keats’s major analogue to poetic imagination, then natural growth always, tragically, predicts human decay and imaginative loss. What may seem like a fanciful divagation from nightingale, musk-rose, and seasonal uncertainty returns me to the problem of poetic inception, by which I mean neither what Helen Vendler has called the “experiential beginnings” of Keats’s odes, nor a more strenuous Bloomian struggle with poetic precursors. Rather, I am interested in what may have inspired Keats’s midnight vision at the heart of his ode, an experience for which there is no autobiographical beginning, at least if we choose to credit Charles Brown’s account of the poem’s morning composition. Many perceptive readers have been confused about the poem’s time without realizing what Keats has done; others who understand what Keats is doing in stanza  seem not to notice a precedent for it; and critics who acknowledge the obvious source for this stanza can still make mistakes about time within the poem, and leave off their examinations of the source as if acknowledgment alone would suffice. The very confusions, as well as incidental details, loud echoes, and thematic parallels, point us toward a source for much in the ode. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the beam in our eye. As long ago as , Edmund Blunden referred to it, but critics have been slow to move beyond or beneath the obvious: “Without going so far as to write of ‘The Plagiarisms of Keats,’ one may indeed affirm that his poetic habit included, as the means sometimes of inspiration and often of embellishment, the expressions that took his fancy as he read.” His “fancy” indeed. Blunden has borrowed Keats’s own winged inspiration; although he sensibly refrains from turning Keats into a Coleridge, a later critic cleverly reminds us that “the surest meeting-place of poet and bird is among the leaves of a volume . . . leaves [like those of Coleridge’s Sybilline Leaves and Leigh Hunt’s Foliage] were in the air.” In the ode, of course, they are also on the ground, fast covering up not only the violets but also Keats’s own path to his source.



  In what ways does A Midsummer Night’s Dream account for the ode’s major strategies as well as its incidental details? Everyone begins with the latter but stops with one quotation, Oberon’s instructions to Puck, as the seeds of Keats’s own flowers: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night . . . (II.i.–) A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the play most underlined by Keats, and although some recent critics have found King Lear and Measure for Measure behind some of the images and references in the ode, it is nevertheless the earlier play that rings loudest within the mature poem. We may return, to begin with, to one of Keats’s earlier muskroses, which appears, somewhat disadvantageously, on June , , in a comparison with other flowers in “To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses”: I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields, A fresh-blown musk-rose; ’twas the first that threw Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew As is the wand that queen Titania wields. (–) In different ways, both the “sweets” and Titania herself look forward to the coming muskrose of . Oberon’s violet, eglantine, and muskrose appear just before Titania’s request (double-marked in Keats’s Shakespeare) for a fairy’s song, followed by her charge to some of her troop to “kill cankers in the musk-rose buds” (II.ii.). This immediately precedes the chorus, also double-marked, that invokes “Philomele, with melody / [to] Sing in our sweet lullaby” (II.ii.–). Might Helena’s lament, “O, wilt thou darkling leave me?” (II.ii.) have rung in Keats’s ear? As the hempen homespuns begin their rehearsal, Peter Quince decides that “this green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring house” (III.i.–, emphasis mine), and it is likely that Keats gathers not only a flower but also the imagined location of his bird in some “plot / Of beechen green” (–) from the remark. Shortly thereafter, Bottom welcomes the news that the moon will shine on the night of the performance: “then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement”



“ ”  “ ” () (III.i.–). This is a source, perhaps, for the casements in the “Ode to Psyche,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the first two of which serve erotic functions, and the last of which is connected to “faery lands”: both possibilities point to Keats’s debt to Shakespeare. These incidental similarities can only suggest, but never fully make good, the fair promise that Keats is paying instinctive homage to his “presider.” They may help, perhaps, to steer readers away from the Keats living under the iron hand of Milton, and toward a poet whose homage to at least one precursor is hardly anxious at all but delicately embellished and lovingly harmonized. It is a testimony of grateful love, not grudging acknowledgment from a resentful heir. We may, however, stand on firmer ground in the attempt to establish A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a major source for the ode, when we consider two major resemblances between play and poem. The first is their equivalent temporal prestidigitations, the second their deep alliances of the imaginative and erotic impulses within a natural framework and a paradoxical sense of dreaming wakefulness. The Furness Variorum edition reminds us of Dr. Johnson’s question about time in the play, which he put squarely with his accustomed, sensible skepticism: “I know not why Shakespeare calls this play ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ when he so carefully informs us that it happened on the night preceding May day.” Furness also repeats Malone’s earlier conjecture that the play was probably first performed at midsummer, and his distinction between diurnal May Day rites and the nocturnal riotings of Midsummer Eve. For Theseus’ marriage and for the four confused lovers who arose early “to observe / The rite of May” (IV.i.–), courting, wooing, and winning clearly belong to the sports of day, whereas the tricks and sleights of the fairies, like those of Keats’s Fancy, operate under cover of darkness. While day and night symbolize different kinds of imaginative and erotic adventure, so do spring and summer. Calendar time gives way to festival time, both diurnally and seasonally, and although C. L. Barber has tried to minimize the temporal problem in the comedy by suggesting that people could go a-Maying in different months ( just as, we might suppose, Keats’s muskrose is always a summer flower except when it blows on May Day), it still makes imaginative sense to honor Shakespeare’s double frame, in order to understand that temporal confusion, like erotic desire, may be either dangerous or salutary. Titania’s condensed reference to the “middle summer’s spring” (II.i.: here is a possible source for Keats’s muskrose, coming yet eldest) occurs in a passage that demonstrates the horrors of unseasonableness, when the times are completely out of joint, disturbed by the “forgeries of jealousy” (II.i.). Planting, plowing, and harvesting are all vain endeavors,



  and the seasons themselves have altered beneath the angry misgovernance of the moon: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. (II.i.–) Oberon’s and Titania’s political-erotic squabbles have compressed all months into an unholy and unseasonable stew. The origin of Shakespeare’s description in Ovid (Metamorphoses, V, –) suggests the significant bond among Keats, Shakespeare, and Ovid as poets of seasonableness: in the Metamorphoses, the seasons run amok as Ceres seeks her missing daughter throughout the world. Of the “middle summer’s spring,” Keats had this to say in the margin of his folio Shakespeare: there is something exquisitely rich and luxurious in Titania’s saying “since the middle summer’s spring” as if Bowers were not exuberant and covert enough for fairy sports until their second sprouting— which is surely the most bounteous overwhelming of all Nature’s goodnesses. She steps forth benignly in the spring and her conduct is so gracious that by degrees all things are becoming happy under her wings and nestle against her bosom: she feels this love and gratitude too much to remain selfsame, and unable to contain herself buds forth the overflowings of her heart about the middle summer. O Shakespeare thy ways are but just searchable! The thing is a piece of profound verdure. This “profound verdure” contains a beneficent goddess who is herself part bird, part lover. The very richness of Titania’s remark and the shared “happiness” engendered by nature’s goodness easily foretell the ecstatic condition of the poet in the ode. Knowing Keats’s ambivalent feelings about the dying Olympian immortals, faint-winged but provocative, whom he celebrated and lamented in the “Ode to Psyche” just before the Nightingale Ode, it makes sense for us to place him in Shakespeare’s tradition of “Englishing” classical mythology. Shakespeare owes a double allegiance—to Greek and Romance figures as



“ ”  “ ” () well as to his native household or village spirits. The nightingale, a dryad, is also, mutatis mutandis, a new Puck, the fanciful local deity leading the unwary poet on a wild bird chase ending, like the lovers’ distractions in the comedy, with an awakening. Traditionally, Robin Goodfellow takes charge of summer torches and bonfires (although Barber does well to notice the absence of bonfires from the play, this may have something to do with the circumstances of performance at an aristocratic wedding). A contemporary ballad foreshadows his metamorphosis into Puck, who leads the four lovers into a frantic arabesque, and later into the nightingale, whose vocal allure loses its midnight spell only when it is buried by the poet’s wakeful mind: Sometime he’d counterfeit a voyce, And travellers call astray. Sometimes a walking fire he’d be And lead them from their way. Puck is both an ignis fatuus and a ventriloquist, but the primary deceptions of the nightingale are auditory: there is no light, either in the dim forest outside Athens (III.ii) or in that to which Keats’s mind transports him. If Barber misjudges the importance of seasonal confusion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he nevertheless understands the seriousness underlying the love-game comedy: “May-game wantonness has a reverence about it because it is a realization of a power of life larger than the individual, crescent both in men and in their green surroundings.” Within the standard Keatsian triad, love-art-nature, the “Ode to a Nightingale” seems noticeably to scant the first element, except peripherally. It does cast sidelong glances at lustrous beauty and new Love in stanza ; it recalls the rapturous embrace of Othello and Desdemona following the storm in Cyprus (“If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy” [II.i.–]), and that tragedy’s Liebestod, in the erotically suicidal suggestions of stanza ; it feminizes the nightingale in stanza  and, by implication, in stanza . The ode nowhere mentions the rape of Philomela, although Keats had made use of it several months earlier in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” but erotic adventure is as much a part of the poem as the nightingale’s own name, never stated except in the title. Absence only increases desire: the bird’s invisibility gives the surest pledge of its tempting inviolability. A virgin dryad, she lures men with her song into the forest recesses and to a temporary death, emblemized by the basic confusion between day and night, or one season and another. Whereas Puck played only the procurer’s role, the nightingale really is the unseen object of desire. Perhaps Keats would have shared Hazlitt’s feelings about the inadequacy of visual representation; thinking (appropriately) of Bottom’s ass’s head, the



  critic remarked that “fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted.” The bird and the fairy crew tempt their audiences with the pleasures and the frustrations that derive from the imagination’s assaults upon such disembodied provocations. Both poem and play, however, require poetic faith as well as rational skepticism for fullest comprehension. Theseus’ gracious response to the Athenians’ dramatic incompetence also must have struck a sympathetic Keats as the proper handling of amateur theatricals and of all other conceptual undertakings: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (V.i.–). More than just an erotic experience, the ode is such an undertaking. It dramatizes a holiday of consciousness; in so doing, it redefines the very move, within a May-Day ritual, from town to country and back. Keats has utterly internalized Shakespeare’s symbolic geography. For seventy lines the nightingale gradually seduces the speaker and finally abandons him, like the knight in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” to the equivalent of a cold hillside. Returning to his “sole self ” in the eighth stanza, he realizes that he has been bewitched, “cheated,” or, to use Peter Quince’s appraisal of Bottom, “translated” (III.i.). The speaker has been made a fool of, although he is not quite a visible ass like the weaver, or even an impetuously foolish lover like one of the Athenians. The following lines from Endymion, obviously a source for the end of the ode, show how A Midsummer Night’s Dream occupied Keats’s thoughts long before May of : [When] thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore The journey homeward to habitual self ! A mad-pursuing of the fog-born elf, Whose flitting lantern, through rude nettle-briar, Cheats us into a swamp, into a fire, Into the bosom of a hated thing. (II.–) The very bell that tolls Keats back to his sole self in the last stanza recalls the bell of midnight that obviates the players’ need for an epilogue after the death of Thisbe and sends court and mechanicals home to bed: “the iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve” (V.i.). Indeed, one of three misspellings in the manuscript of the ode, immediately corrected, is “told” for “toll” in line . The end of the ode appropriately juggles the pattern of the important passages from the comedy that it echoes. Brought back to his senses, the poet is abandoned to either his midnight waking or his Hampstead morning scene while the bird symbolically dies and is buried elsewhere. The lovers and Bottom are, likewise, in act IV, awakened from experiences they can



“ ”  “ ” () neither identify nor understand: “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (IV.i.–; cf. Demetrius, “It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream” [IV.i.–]). They awaken to a new reality; whereas at the play’s end, all the adults are tucked safely away, some into their nuptial beds, the audience, however, awakens from the dream of the spectacle—and these two antithetical processes complement each other. The couples retire, blessed by Oberon and Titania, and the audience is reminded by Puck that they have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend. (V.i.–) Poets, lovers, and audience, in Keats and Shakespeare, “glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,” in Theseus’ well-known phrase (V.i.). The imaginative progress of the ode’s speaker has gone, after all, from his own garden plot to a momentary union with the nightingale and sympathy with the Queen Moon. Although we may never untangle the “coming musk-rose” from its thorny position as mid-May’s eldest child (is it the flower that will be, once it “comes,” the longest lived?), we may rightly conjecture that Keats figuratively heard nightingales and smelled the rose simultaneously; moreover, the flower and the bird are, we might say, copartners with Shakespeare’s fairy crew in the mysteries of Keats’s imagination. As early as , nightingales and muskroses unite among those “soothing,” “gentle” items listed in the opening lines of “Sleep and Poetry” as emblems of distant secrecy: What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men’s knowing? .................................... More secret than a nest of nightingales? (–, ) In this early poetic program, where the poet’s response to the rich realm “of Flora and old Pan” () is to “die a death / Of luxury” (–), Keats first crystallizes his version of the Shakespearian triad of nature, poetry, and eroticism. But the poet, acknowledging his obligation to move on to sterner stuff, although deflected by the “sense of real things” that destroys all visions, ends his insomniac quest both thwarted (he has dreamed, but never slept) and contented: he arises refreshed and glad, and moves on to poetic composition.



  In “Bards of Passion,” written in the months immediately preceding the great odes, nightingale and rose (this time not specifically a muskrose) join once more. Like the “finer tone” in which what we call happiness on earth will be repeated in heaven (Letters, :), the doubled souls of past bards live both on earth as an inspiring challenge to us, and in heaven where the rose gives off a finer perfume and where the nightingale does not tease but instead prefigures those humane goals that Keats articulates most clearly in the second Hyperion: “the nightingale doth sing / Not a senseless tranced thing, / But divine melodious truth” (–). Like the song, the listener is a “senseless tranced thing” in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” where the purity of heavenly music never redeems or releases him from earthly confusions. Oberon, Titania, and muskroses come together in “To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses”; if we could discover the fairies with the nightingale, we would have even stronger evidence for this concatenation of images in Keats’s mind. And in the  “On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies,” part doggerel, part high jocularity, Keats connects them at a galloping pace: This canopy mark: ’tis the work of a fay; Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish, When lovely Titania was far, far away, And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish. There, oft would he bring from his soft sighing lute Wild strains to which, spell-bound, the nightingales listened; The wondering spirits of heaven were mute, And tears ’mong the dewdrops of morning oft glistened. (–) Within four years Keats was to address a different nightingale, one now singing to him mysteriously and seductively. This time, the land of faery enters the ode only tentatively, in stanza , as a reminder of the imaginative unity among disparate audiences of the same song, or, one might speculate, of the same play, a unity hoped for when Keats urged his brother and sisterin-law in America to read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o’clock to bring them closer to him (Letters, :). In the “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats has not only bodied forth an unknown form; he has also reshaped into a new form an older work that was, for a long time, simmering in his “strong imagination.” The suppression of specific quotation and direct allusion has not ruled out frequent echoes, verbal and thematic, that are impressive by virtue of their frequency. The ode



“ ”  “ ” () exists as a continuous sequence of ghostly half-reminders or, we might say, of “negatively capable” echoes. The region of the poem is a rich field for culling flowers from earlier plantings. As Lysander remarks, “Things growing are not ripe until their season” (II.ii.) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the seasonable sweet that has flavored and ripened the later poem.

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FIVE

X

PETER GRIMES The Development of a Hero ()

P

eter Grimes, the eponymous hero of Benjamin Britten’s first fulllength opera, has attracted and bewildered audiences since his appearance in . The continued popularity of Britten’s work, one of the very few postwar operas to have found a permanent place in the repertory, owes as much to the innate dramatic interest of its hero as to its polished musical score. But exactly how audiences have viewed, and partly misunderstood, the figure made on Peter Pears and then reenacted (virtually owned) recently by Jon Vickers, takes us to problems from comparative aesthetics: the recreation of a literary character in another medium; the dilemma of making retrospective connections along a literary lineage; and the relation of words to music. Grimes descends directly from the distinctly less than titular figure in George Crabbe’s  series of verse epistles, The Borough. Although the story of Britten’s inspiration has been frequently told, and the differences between his hero and Crabbe’s explained, I think that certain fogs have clouded the critical field of vision; these must dissipate before we can view our subjects clearly, by themselves, and in respect to one another. And, although it has become conventional to think of one Peter or both as “Byronic” in character, I hope to show that the label “Wordsworthian” might be a more accurate one. The music for the operatic Peter has perhaps caused audiences to overlook both his genuine resemblances to his poetic grandsire and the social commentaries implicit in poem and opera. The bulk of critical opinion has stood on the side of Britten’s Peter as an idealistic, sympathetic, misunderstood visionary



 :      () (calling him “Byronic” seems automatically to ennoble him), as against the bullying, sadistic, and murderous criminal of Crabbe, but it seems to me that neither is the original Peter so black, nor the second so clean, as critical hindsight would conveniently paint them. Crabbe’s Peter may be a little less, and Britten’s a little more culpable, and in the second work a good deal more sympathy than we would perhaps like to confer must be accorded to the community and its sometimes individuated, sometimes choral voices. Both opera and poem derive from a similar creative wellspring: the reluctance of a thoroughly un-Byronic artist to discredit the conventions of a bourgeois society by which he may feel himself threatened or oppressed, but to which he hopelessly wishes to belong. Crabbe and Britten suffer from a fear of flouting society’s convenient demands for conformity, and from a satiric eye that penetrates into the heart of society’s hypocritical follies. Too weak to flee, too timid to fight, too wise to lie, they resort to the best available strategy: they create, they waffle. George Crabbe knew what he was doing, and it frightened him. His epigraph to The Borough, paulo majora canamus, heralds more than a conventional climb up the Virgilian generic ladder; it indicates his intention to move beyond the easy cynicism of The Village () to more complex social and moral issues. His preface mingles modesty and delicate tact with a warning to the squeamish; writing about what he says he knows best, he prepares us for the sea, and the country in the immediate vicinity; the dwellings, and the inhabitants; some incidents and characters, with an exhibition of morals and manners, offensive perhaps to those of extremely delicate feelings, but sometimes, I hope, neither unamiable nor unaffecting. The sloppiness of the last phrase fudges where we might expect rhetorical clarity to guide us through antithetical concerns. “Offensive perhaps . . . but sometimes”—instead of distinguishing clearly between one kind of “exhibition” and another, or between one sensibility and another (i.e., it is not the same offensive exhibition that will also affect some readers touchingly), Crabbe’s sentence unintentionally confuses what he offers us with how we might take it, and with who, precisely, we are. This confusion sets the tone for the tale to follow. “Peter Grimes” tells a story of crime and punishment, but leaves the former uncertain and the latter mysterious. Of Grimes, Crabbe seems simultaneously sure and vague. His preface chisels a character of “a depraved and flinty mind” out of large chunks of abstract nouns, but at the same time he leaves everything to our observation and judgment, as if daring us to gainsay him: The character of Grimes, his obduracy and apparent want of feeling, his gloomy kind of misanthropy, the progress of his madness, and



  the horrors of his imagination, I must leave to the judgment and observation of my readers. The mind here exhibited is one untouched by pity, unstung by remorse, and uncorrected by shame; yet is this hardihood of temper and spirit broken by want, disease, solitude, and disappointment; and he becomes the victim of a distempered and horror-stricken fancy . . . the corrosion of hopeless want, the wasting of unabated disease, and the gloom of unvaried solitude, will have their effect on every nature; and the harder that nature is, the longer time required to work upon it, so much the more strong and indelible is the impression. (xxxiii) When we reach Grimes’s tale at last, Crabbe extends his a priori condemnation. Epigraphs taken from Marmion, Richard III, and Macbeth foretell treacherous villainy and murder, as well as remorse, revenge, and hallucination. The story itself, however, begins primarily as an analysis of genetic mutation, of a bad seed taking root in perfectly healthy soil; Peter’s evil must be innate, since neither his gentle father nor anything in his environment would logically provoke so fractious a disposition and such virulent rage as what he demonstrates from the start. The poem moves swiftly from Peter’s childhood irreligion, rebelliousness, and his father’s curse (“if thou art old . . . And hast a son—thou wilt remember me” [–]) to his mature submission to other vices, drink, gambling, and theft (with a nice rhetorical flourish: “he fish’d by water, and he filch’d by land” []). Mere juvenile delinquency leads to further antisocial behavior, which culminates in a desire for sovereign mastery: “he wish’d for one to trouble and control” (). The possibility of sexual abusiveness as well as economic need determines the particular variety of Peter’s sadism: “He wanted some obedient boy to stand / And bear the blow of his outrageous hand” (–). He becomes, in other words, the vicious father he never had, to the sons he has never sired. Two workhouse apprentices appear, are mistreated, and eventually die, but Crabbe peculiarly refrains from ever incriminating Grimes with more than circumstantial evidence. At key points, the narrative falls back on hearsay and gossip, and however clear seems Peter’s responsibility for his boys’ deaths (at least indirect, in the form of abusive mistreatment), Crabbe tantalizes us, demurely refusing to depict them. Instead of witnessing the murders, we hear only stories. Missing the killings, we have only the corpses; preparation and aftermath have eliminated the important action between them. The Borough, observant but passive, does nothing. No one bothers to intervene for the boys’ protection; if people hear screams, they “calmly” mutter “Grimes is at his exercise” (). The sin of omission in their silent complicity is hardly relieved when their sensitivity to suffering momentarily



 :      () revives in the case of the third workhouse boy whom they take to be some gentleman’s bastard. The foundling motif serves to underscore the populace’s snobbishness, however, not its goodness, and in any case they still fail to interfere. Forbidden a fourth boy, although not proved guilty of the deaths of the earlier three, Peter undergoes a progressive derangement amid the unrelenting gloom of work, solitude, and nature. Deprived, as well as naturally depraved, he becomes, gradually more “dull and hopeless” (), as he hides within a scene encouraging “misery, grief, and fear” (). The landscape is neither a mere expressionistic detail nor the projection of his crumbling senses. Instead, Nature itself encourages his disintegration. Crabbe’s poem studies vocational decline; once Peter’s fishing fails, as he works alone unsuccessfully he is simultaneously cursed in town and shaken by “cold nervous tremblings”: And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart, To think he lived from all mankind apart, Yet, if a man approach’d, in terrors he would start. (–) Crabbe has not painted a conventionally pre-Byronic hero; rather, the vague spirit of remorse, of wishing to fit in where he knows he will never be accepted, turns Peter into a distant cousin of the fin-de-siècle sensitive melancholic best represented by the disappointed, egotistical visionary youth in Wordsworth’s “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” (), whose misanthropy condemns him to isolation, neglect, and finally a withering death eccentric to his community. Peter disintegrates slowly, losing alternately his sense and his power. He floats idly on his boat, plying no trade; then, under the questioning of summer lodgers who have wondered whether he is repenting for some crime unknown to them, he runs off. But he later returns to a parish-bed from which he inspires pity and compassion in the very women who formerly cursed him. Delirious, he still pleads his innocence, although he psychically reenacts his sense of guilt in the last  lines of the poem, dramatically its most powerful and interesting part, which quote the unconscious ravings, part confession, part defense, of “a madman’s tale with gleams of waking sense” (). The indeterminacy of it all rankles. Crabbe seems to want his audience to sympathize at least partly with Peter’s accounts, even though we can recognize a self-serving egotism in his self-projection as the victim of his father’s wily entrapment. Readings of Grimes as feckless, insipid, “a barely human consciousness,” tend to overlook the grandeur of his classic chutzpah: having symbolically killed his father, Grimes in his madness throws himself on



  the mercy of the court as an orphan, plagued and tormented by the old man. The father appeared to him, he says, with a workhouse boy in either hand; the grim specters reduced him to quivering: And there they glided ghastly on the top Of the salt flood, and never touch’d a drop . . . Now, from that day, whenever I began To dip my net, there stood the hard old man— He and those boys: I humbled me and pray’d They would be gone;—they heeded not, but stay’d: Nor could I turn, nor would the boat go by, But gazing on the spirits, there was I: They bade me leap to death, but I was loth to die. (–, –) Unable to work because of his loss of help, Grimes invests the landscape with these specters. Or is it that their objective presence has prevented him from fishing and hereby turned his thoughts to matters of guilt and damnation? The brilliance of the story is that by describing the torture of the father’s provocation, Peter either relives it, or perhaps enacts it for the first time: we cannot tell. His mental ravings leave all unclear the relationship between the past events that they rehearse and the effects of that repetition on his present madness. Either madness has caused the visions, or the guilty memories are themselves the cause of the insanity. One burning hot summer’s day, his story continues, the father scoops up a handful of water, which he throws in Peter’s face: it is hellfire, scalding and blazing. Through the river, father and apprentices force Peter to witness the dismal place of punishment that lies beneath. The sight of unremitting torment tortures him until he can no longer bear it. He dies simply, too weak to endure another visitation from his ghosts: Then dropp’d exhausted and appear’d at rest, Till the strong foe the vital powers possess’d; Then with an inward, broken voice he cried, “Again they come,” and mutter’d as he died. (–) In spite of Crabbe’s orthodoxies, he has deliberately blurred the lines between religious damnation and psychological projection, and Peter’s ultimate fate, whether to burn in the flames of hell or to lie released from mental anguish, is all unknown. The simple pathos of the last four lines above betrays Crabbe’s debt to Lyrical Ballads, but the scene of Grime’s death, with its exposure of a mind hallucinating about the past and consequently



 :      () reviving it points to the more complex artistry and scientific investigations of later realists like Balzac, as Leslie Stephen first suggested. F. L. Lucas has framed a somewhat different division between a romantic and a realistic Crabbe: “If his romanticism calls up the accusing phantoms, it is his minutest realism that paints the setting—the slimy channels in the salt marsh, the blighted tree, the melancholy stakes with their sun-blistered tar, the tepid, muddy waters.” We may take Crabbe as a Pope in worsted, a precursor of Dickens, or as a parson haunted by dreams of insecurity as Patrick Cruttwell does in his seminal attempt to reconcile his surface realism with the deeper currents that flow beneath, even as the flatness of the river’s surface in “Peter Grimes” exposes its own squalid horrors. In any case “Peter Grimes” may well stand as a test of how we read a treatment of an outcast who, in spite of his author’s famous minuteness, defies our knowing him. He is an eccentric figure in more ways than one: out of place in Aldeburgh, he also lacks a psychological centrality with which his creator could have connected him to us. He remains peripheral. That he is “a dull, callous murderer” is everywhere accepted, nowhere provable. Grimes invites not only moral and psychological speculations but also questions about plain act: not only “why did he do these things?” and “how does he suffer?” but also “how can we know that he committed those crimes that seem so patently his?” “Peter Grimes” mysteriously calls into question the “plainness,” “the matters of fact,” which critics persistently label the identifying features of Crabbe’s art. He is a flat writer, they say, at one with the Suffolk landscape of his childhood. For Forster, “nothing is more remarkable, in the best work of Crabbe, than the absence of elevation. . . . Upon [flatness] the most tragic of his poems deploys.” Forster ties these alternatives, flatness and depth, to his evocation of Crabbe’s standard landscape—menacing, monotonous, desolate, endless, gray, spare—which he deftly opposes to Wordsworth’s Lake District heights and his power to elevate childhood experiences to the level of the sublime: “Wordsworth had a power of harmonizing his experiences which was denied to Crabbe. Crabbe remains down among them on the flat, amongst pebbles and weeds and mud and driftwood, and within earshot of a sea which is no divine ocean.” Making the same sort of division he does in Aspects of the Novel between flat and round characters, Forster is here following the lead of Leslie Stephen who also, be way of contrasting Crabbe with the romantics, emphasizes the torpidity of the flatlands compared to the grandeur of mountains and their echoes: “The sea which he loved was by no means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of the beloved Suffolk.”



  Likewise, Hazlitt, the least sympathetic of critics who still find something in Crabbe to admire (“fascinating” is his faint praise), settles squarely upon the monotonous plainness of art as well as of landscape: “If the most feigning poetry is the truest, Mr. Crabbe is of all poets the least poetical. There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe.” That we might naturally tend to hear in this remark a herald of Mill’s famous evaluation of Wordsworth as the poet for unpoetic natures brings me back to a major point of connection between Crabbe and Britten: Peter Grimes, in neither of his incarnations, looks like a Byronic figure. Instead, along with others of his fellow citizens in the borough, he derives from Lyrical Ballads. The unornamented plainness of village life, coupled with ontological problems and epistemological questions, would make Peter very much at home in the  volume: Whatever happened to Lucy Gray? Is the Danish Boy there or not? Can a story be made about Simon Lee’s swelling ankles? What exactly lies beneath the thorn? How much do Johnny Foy and the little girl in “We Are Seven” actually know? Both Peter Grimeses inherited their complexities from these earlier romantic creations. Readers of Crabbe might take a lead from Don Bialostosky’s recent study of Wordsworth’s narrative experiments. The speakers in the most perplexing, and easily mockable, lyrical ballads lead us down certain paths, and then withdraw their guidance, abandoning us there. The narrator of “Simon Lee” tempts us first with tragedy (“But, oh the heavy change”), moves next through bathos (“the more he works, the more / Do his weak ankles swell”), arriving after no story at all at a sense of human weakness that lies too deep for tears (“Alas! the gratitude of men / Hath oftener left me mourning”). The poet of “Lucy Gray” falls back upon the vox populi at the end of his ballad, averring that “some say” they have seen the ghostly girl, but he refuses to commit himself to any single possibility. Of “The Idiot Boy,” Bialostosky writes: “the muses that govern this poem keep matters well away from moral terms that would interfere with the flow of sympathy and from tragic events that might call for judgment” (). These ballads routinely undermine our expectations of fulfillment. Wordsworth is trying to remind us of the impossibility of story-telling, of narrative representation, in a world where observation, judgment, and human acquaintance are all, at heart, equally impossible. Spectral uncertainties, the claptrap normally expected in Gothic mysteries or romance, descend even into the mundane. Both poets invite us to consider the relationships between intention and result, or action and psychological aftermath, which they then deliberately deflect or scant. Under the guise of describing borough life, Crabbe has reaffirmed its strangeness and the foreignness of his main character.



 :      () Although the difference between Peter père and Peter fils have been noticed from the start, if we attend more carefully to what Britten’s words and music suggest about the borough fisherman, we may find him, too, a more perplexing figure than has been allowed. Audiences are as careless in this attention as Peter is with his apprentices. Take, to begin with, Forster. In his attempt to differentiate Britten’s more humane and sympathetic character from his forebear, Forster invents a crime which Grimes has never even committed. Speaking of II.ii, in which Peter’s second apprentice falls to an accidental death, Forster writes: “Peter, enraged, hurries the boy off to their fishing, pushes him out through the cliff door, he slips, falls, and is killed.” Perhaps it happened this way in a performance Forster once saw, but Peter is in fact supposed to do no such thing. The boy falls because of his own haste and fear, while Peter, the stage direction states clearly, stands between the two doors as the apprentice slips down to darkness and death. The approaching posse has terrified both Peter and the boy, and although Peter speeds the boy along, he does not push him. Forster’s extraordinary misreading is understandable, because he wishes to exonerate Peter and he cannot preach forgiveness until he has witnessed a crime. He goes on to say that there is “no crime on Peter’s part except what is caused by the far greater crimes committed against him by society. He is the misunderstood Byronic hero. In a properly constituted society he would be happy, but he is too far ahead of his surroundings” (). This evaluation is patently untrue, but its trivializing nostalgia reveals a great deal about Forster’s ideas of community and belonging, although nothing at all about Peter Grimes, who is as far from being “ahead of his surroundings” as one could conceivably be. Britten’s hero remains chronically, perhaps genetically, neurotic, with little chance for happiness in spite of the sympathetic figures within the community who look out for him. Although isolated differently from Crabbe’s hero, this Grimes lacks the true panache or the genuine criminality of the Byronic hero whom Forster so wants to take him for. He cannot, however, be forgiven, because he has not sinned, nor, because he lacks moral strength, can he be admired. Like his creator, Grimes is a bourgeois manqué: far from flouting society’s conventions, he desperately wants acceptance. The soil roots him to the place of his birth, as he says to Balstrode’s solicitous questions in I.i: “I am native, rooted here . . . by familiar fields, marsh and sand, ordinary streets, prevailing wind.” This reply foretells Britten’s own self-presentation on being honored at Lowestoft in : “I am firmly rooted in this glorious country. And I proved this to myself when I once tried to live somewhere else.” Britten’s sense of rootlessness in America during the first part of World War II, the deep home-sickness provoked by his reading of Forster’s Listener appreciation of Crabbe, of whom he had not previously heard, his subsequent decision to



  make Peter Grimes the subject of his first full-length opera, along with the lucky benefaction from Serge Koussevitzky: all this has been told before, and it helps to explain the efforts of critics to find Peter Grimes a victimized, even sympathetic, figure. Britten has explained, or so he thought, the reasons for a different figure from Crabbe’s: “A central feeling for us was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own situation. As conscientious objectors we were out of it. We couldn’t say we suffered physically, but naturally we experienced tremendous tension. I think it was partly this feeling which led us to make a character of vision and conflict, the tortured idealist he is, rather than the villain he was in Crabbe.” To this we may add Peter Pears’s remark, “There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think.” It is tempting of course to see in Grimes Britten’s own projection of the homosexual as outsider, and to consider the Britten-Pears-Forster collaboration an attempt by three homosexual artists to elicit sympathy for that outsider, but yielding to this temptation overlooks the uncriminal but genuine unattractiveness of the hero. In Hans Keller’s estimation. Peter Grimes is “the story of a man who couldn’t fit in,” which is like Laurence Olivier’s introduction to his filmed Hamlet as the story of a man who couldn’t make up his mind. Keller, like Britten and Pears, smooths over Grimes’s unpleasantness; he does not seem to mind that Britten’s Grimes, although guiltless of murder, has been tamed from Crabbe’s psychopath to a more ordinary garden-variety twentiethcentury neurotic. Philip Brett reads the opera as the mirror of a brave homosexual who can neither fit in nor find a world elsewhere, as Britten chose a course different from that of Auden and Isherwood which earlier in his life tempted him; this interpretation, however, is not entirely convincing because of what we know of Britten’s feelings for Aldeburgh, family, childhood, and the conventional aspects of life which he valued highly and tried to involve himself in during the last thirty years of his life. Grimes is nervous, hostile, and unlucky, and almost nothing about him, except his bourgeois aspirations, redeems him or mollifies his natural hardness. Eric Walter White tries to make him attractive as “a Borough Byron, too proud and self-willed to come to terms with society, and yet sufficiently imaginative to be fully conscious of his loss”; he confers amiability as a result of self-consciousness. In his clearer innocence, Grimes is obviously a step beyond Crabbe’s merely brutal outcast, but he is also less powerful by virtue of his dreams and the less intense tortures of his mad scene. Artistic reinvention has created a character whose knowledge is purchased by loss of power. For White, Grimes, no longer criminal, has turned into “a maladjusted psychopath,” but the sympathetic overtones in the adjective mitigate the horrors implicit in the noun.



 :      () Like Forster, many audiences want their Grimes to be a man more sinned against than sinning, a sympathetic victim of societal oppression. But this is not the figure Britten has given us, and critics too easily have passed over both Grimes’s own responsibility for his situation and the relative agreeableness of individual members of the community. Society in the opera appears cleaner than it does in either Crabbe’s poetry or in some of Britten’s later works. Britten himself encourages a more positive view of the community in one of his recollections: “In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea.” In other words, the Aldeburgh natives, as well as Peter, have a claim to our sympathetic attention. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. The opera comes full circle, ending as it began in I.i, with the music of the sea on the waves, and with an expression of community solidarity in the presence of an ocean that supports as well as threatens daily life. Peter has gone to sea for a final time, has drowned himself in a sacrificial gesture urged upon him by the sympathetic Balstrode, but like the ordinary people in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the villagers are hardly aware of suffering, death, or anything that does not touch their immediate concerns. A boat sinks out at sea, and daily life resumes, as the chorus sings a final hymn to the central element: In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide, flowing it fills the channel broad and wide, then back to sea with strong majestic sweep, it rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep. Normal life with its attendant dangers and charms everywhere reasserts itself throughout the opera. Britten directs almost as much sympathy at individual members of the village that have ignored or tormented Peter as at the neurotic victim of its lynch-mob fury. He goes out of his way to implicate the helpful members of the community, Ellen Orford and Balstrode in particular, in Peter’s situation. And he also, by the opera’s end, has asked us to reconsider the reasonableness of the views of those people who selfrighteously have condemned Grimes. The first scene of Act I requires a partial suspension of audience judgment. The uniformity and solidarity of borough life, defenses against a hostile nature (invoked like a deity on whose mercies the village depends: “O tide that waits for no man, spare our coasts”), serve as backdrop to individual notes of sympathy with the outcast Grimes. Balstrode and Ned Keene give helping hands, bringing in Peter’s boat, acquiring a second apprentice from the workhouse; Ellen promises unembarrassedly to fetch the boy home for Peter. Later (II.i), the contemptible gossip Mrs. Sedley



  urges intervention to protect the apprentice from Peter’s bullying, whereas Balstrode, representing a policy of laissez-faire about which the villagers have earlier sung with pride (I.ii: “We live, and let live, and look! we keep our hands to ourselves”), speaks mistakenly for inaction: “This is not your business.” The audience may sympathize with Balstrode’s attempt to defend Peter, but it is Boles, Sedley, Swallow, and the other forces of interference who alone offer any hope for saving the boy from Peter’s fury. Complacent conventionality has things to recommend it. This is especially true after we have heard Ellen’s resigned acceptance of the boy’s mistreatment earlier in the scene: “A bruise . . . well, it’s begun.” From a practical standpoint, her second aria (“Child, you’re not too young to know where roots of sorrow are”) is monstrous, counseling resignation and final calm, and it turns out to be gruesomely proleptic: “After the storm will come a sleep, like oceans deep.” Although Mrs. Sedley is wrong in her assumption (III.i) that Grimes has murdered the boy (“Murder most foul it is”), Britten symbolically implicates Ellen, whose knitted jersey has given the clue to the boy’s fate. We may hear in her aria (III.i, “Embroidery in childhood”) Britten’s lament for us all, proving the interwoven quality of life and lives within the borough where Peter is not merely a man who does not belong. Her innocent knitting has become the mysterious clue “whose meaning we avoid.” In another significant change from the original poem, Britten deprives us even of a corpse, returning not the boy’s body but only the relic which Mrs. Sedley discovers. Even Peter himself dies offstage. Violence, indeed action of any sort, has been rendered ineffective and undesirable. In the entire opera, Peter once strikes Ellen and manhandles the boy. This is all we see. Ellen’s duet with Balstrode as they await Peter’s return (III.i) depicts most clearly the complexity of feeling and the integration of human fates that Britten has been arguing all along. “What is to be done? What can be done?” Ellen sings. “We have no power to help him now,” but Balstrode replies, “We have the power,” and they agree to abide with him—“We shall be there with him”—even though they acknowledge a solution that lies “beyond life, dissolution.” Their last act of aid, Balstrode’s command to Peter to sink his boat beyond sight of land, reenforces this pattern of support developed throughout the opera, even when it leads to suicide. The “solution” becomes a literal dissolving of the title character. As a more important corollary to my proposition that the voices of the community are not entirely hostile to Peter and that, even where they are gentle, they may be responsible for human life and social abuse, we have the matter of Britten’s recreation of his central character, who is neither villainously black, nor merely victimized by society’s hostile, ignorant



 :      () fear. Peter Grimes is a musical and dramatic treatment of issues of freedom and fatality, and where Crabbe only subtly condemned his villagers for their silence before Grimes’s sadism, Britten everywhere makes mutual responsiblity a major theme. Although he has smoothed over some of Crabbe’s brutalities (the boys die entirely accidentally; Peter is not so much a sadist as a dreamer incapable of regulating the violent aspects of his disposition) and has blurred some of the morality-tale colors, we must also consider the new ways in which Britten has involved his hero in his own doom. Although no murderer, he is far from blameless, and his very acceptance of fault both causes and results from his peripheral status in the community. There is nothing unconventional in the dreams that Grimes discloses to Balstrode as the storm approaches (I.i)—to fish the seas dry, marry Ellen, flaunt his success in the faces of uncongenial neighbors—dreams he realizes are no longer possible in his later monologue (II.ii, “In dreams I’ve built some kindlier home”), and which disintegrate as the inquisitive parade of townsmen approaches his hut. Grimes suffers from a free-floating guilt that increases with village gossip. He is neither good nor understood; he is neither guilty of the crimes of which he stands suspected, nor is he entirely blameless of wrongdoing; neither can he find acceptance within the community nor is he finally destroyed by any force other than his own. Thus, it is too easy to credit the exoneration of Peter Pears (“he offends against the social code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such”) [emphasis mine]. Far from being a catharsis of Britten’s feelings of guilt and persecution, Peter Grimes makes a final judgment of its hero an impossibility, because it prohibits us from knowing him. In spite of Eric Crozier’s theory that Slater and Britten transform Grimes “from a savage fisherman . . . into . . . a bold and aspiring hero at loggerheads with society,” it is clear that his savagery remains, that he is at odds with a society to which he craves admission, and that he is less a scapegoat or tragic hero than an unfortunate neurotic plagued by bad luck. His rough behavior nowhere invites either approval or excuse; his broken dreams make him pitiable; and his music alone invites our sympathy. Patricia Howard sounds the proper mixture of judgment and charity: Its miracle is that a character as unattractive, unapproachable, and undeniably unpleasant as Grimes in the end manages to gain our sympathy. He is not a character with whom we can admit to identifying ourselves; yet his musical character is one to which we listen not with pity, but with delight. A closer look at some key scenes suggests that Britten wants more than our sympathy for Peter; music and words demonstrate his partial



  responsibility for his social and moral predicament. Grimes’s eccentricity, musical as well as social and psychological, is depicted from the beginning, at the inquest in the prologue. He is not so much at odds with his surroundings as he is passively responsive to them. Although he follows Swallow’s lead, singing the same notes, now differently harmonized and marked sostenuto, Grimes appears aloof, dreamy, different from the pompous magistrate whose municipal dignity the music mocks. We hear his maladjustment in the minor th which he uses in his narration, sung con orrore, of the first apprentice’s death. His duet with Ellen, which leads directly into the Dawn Interlude, pits him initially against her (her E major in conflict with his F minor), until they sing together, he temporarily won over to her tonic through the reconciling mediation of A-flat and G-sharp. At once silent and dignified, Peter reveals a capacity to accept suggestion (fulfilled by his suicide at opera’s end) in his following Ellen’s lead. “Peter, come away,” she sings, trying to soothe his protestations about village gossip and his fixation on self-vindication: “We’ll gossip, too, / and talk and rest.” Whereas Ellen sings of hope and sunshine, he obsesses about drowning, the blindness of fate, and the witnessing performed by the dead to torment the living. His reconciliation to Ellen’s key suggests, as does his aria in I.i (“What harbour shelters peace”) that she is the safe port that can only temporarily shelter a man who, by career and choice, belongs as much on the dangerous open sea as in the safety of land. The same ambiguous relationship between Peter and his community is dramatically depicted by his ferocious appearance at the Inn in I.ii. He enters from the storm, wet, dazed, impervious, wondering in a literally monotonous way in his great aria (“Now the Great Bear and the Pleiades”) about the terms of man’s destiny, heaven’s effect on human accomplishment, and the impossibility of making a clean start: “Who can turn skies back and begin again?” Throughout, the strings furnish the melody, to which Peter’s soliloquy is mostly a ground (measure upon measure of E natural, in the opening lines of each stanza, only later descending along a scale). Peter picks up the melody only after it has made its way up through the strings from the basses. As affairs get rowdier, with people tipsy and argumentative, Balstrode keeps the peace by beginning a round (“Old Joe has gone fishing”) in which everyone joins, including, at last, Grimes, whose voice rises above the chorus (direction: “Peter comes into the round, upsetting its course”). He is both part of the community and peripheral to it, singing in descant well above the partsong. Balstrode’s “Come away” urges a cautious course, putting us in mind of Ellen’s earlier admonition in the proplogue, and preparing us for the ultimate command to sail his boat out of sight of land and sink it. These instructions originate, it bears repeating, from supportive friends.



 :      () The climax of the action, from the standpoint of Peter’s self-understanding and his acceptance of his fate, comes in the middle of the opera (II.i), the Sabbath scene, after Ellen has discovered the new apprentice’s bruises. Her song is counterpointed with the choral antiphony of offstage minister and congregation during the Sunday service, and Peter has entered to take the boy home. He is nothing if not unfair and belligerent, to Ellen and the apprentice: “This is whatever day I say it is. . . . He works for me; leave him alone; he’s mine.” Alternately dreaming of his plans to earn a home, respect, “freedom from pain of grinning at gossips’ tales,” and treating Ellen with condescension and then violence, Peter refuses to accept the very help and hope he requires. The rest of the opera depends on the musically and dramatically self-conscious self-damnation that moves Peter from passive recipient of others’ leads to active declaimer. He prevents Ellen from extending the sympathy which he simultaneously solicits: “Take away your hand . . . my only hope depends on you. If you take it away, what’s left?” Work, he claims, will alone set them free, and since he is unwilling to ask for her hand in marriage (as he told Balstrode in I.i) until he has the right to do so by fishing the seas dry, he must now spurn her liberal gesture. “Were we mistaken?” she sings in a major ninth (an interval associated mostly with Peter’s dreaming moments), and it is hard to tell whether he is answering her, or singing independently, as drumbeats predict the grim posse of the next scene. Ellen’s admonition, “Peter, you cannot buy your peace, / You’ll never stop the gossips’ talk / With all the fish from out the sea,” immediately precedes her admission, “We’ve failed.” This, in turn, provokes his major moment. With an agonized cry, he strikes Ellen and, as the chorus indoors ends its worship with a final “Amen,” Peter acknowledges a comparable resignation, with a declamatory “So be it” (on F natural, like the chorus’ amen) and a seven-note declining phrase upon which the rest of the opera will build: “And God have mercy upon me!” Then the chorus picks up the melody, based on his simultaneous selfdamnation and demand for pity. Peter has in some way given up, but at the same time he is now calling the tune, since the community takes its vocal cue from him. He has damned himself musically; no mere victim, Peter has sung himself a figure that will become the sinister choral round, “Grimes is at his exercise” (this phrase is poetically significant as the only line lifted directly from Crabbe’s original poem; it also expands to include everyone, as Auntie, Keene, and Balstrode sing in trio, “Each is at his exercise”) and, more important, the ground bass for the passacaglia in the fourth sea interlude. His response to Ellen, whether we understand it psychologically as threat, challenge, defense, or resignation, is musically conclusive. He has thrown his own die, and has unintentionally inspired the chorus to follow his lead



  in their mocking parody of his plea, and the orchestra as well, which will shortly take the same cue in its insistent ground. In the passacaglia itself, the plucked lower strings sound often like percussion: this deliberate prediction of the posse, which will be led to Peter’s Hut by Mr. Hobson and his drum, clearly suggests that Peter has damned himself, that he is not just a victim as E. M. Forster and Philip Brett would have him. Britten is both more complex (musically and dramatically) and more conservative (morally) than his sympathetic critics would like him to be. The degree of Grimes’s madness and the pattern of his disintegration may be left to the interpretations of individual singers and directors. From the middle of the opera, however, we must no longer think of the hero as either romantic corsair or innocent dreaming scapegoat. He is Byronic only insofar as he has chosen, musically as well as verbally, to control his destiny; and he is a dreamer only in that his bourgeois aspirations return to him, for the final time, in II.ii, immediately before the accidental death of the second boy (the Schlemiel part of Grimes’s lot is nowhere more delicately shown than in his word of warning to John the apprentice as he descends through the back door: even caution seems to work against Peter). His long monologue consists of six tercets that depict the inevitable destruction of unfulfillable fantasies. It begins like something out of Rodgers and Hammerstein: In dreams I’ve built some kindlier home, warm in my heart and in a golden calm, where there’ll be no more fear and no more storm. And she will soon forget her schoolhouse ways, forget the labour of those weary days, wrapp’d round in kindness like a September haze. The learned at their books have no more store Of wisdom than we’d close behind our door, Compar’d with us the rich man would be poor. I’ve seen in stars the life that we might share: fruit in the garden, children by the shore, a whiten’d doorstep, and a woman’s care. But dreaming builds what dreaming can disown. Dead figures stretch themselves to tear it down. I hear those voices that will not be drowned. Calling, there is no stone in earth’s thickness to make a home, that you can build with and remain alone.



 :      () Next, we hear Hobson’s drum, at a distance; Grimes does not, at least consciously, hear it, but something happens to his memory and his language: Sometimes I see that boy here in this hut, His eyes are on me as they were that evil day, in harbour still and deep. Then the off-stage chorus is heard shouting “Now! Now!”; the dream has been reduced to dust, and Peter’s own rhymes have distintegrated. As the song has switched from A major to A minor (at “but dreaming builds,” when the strings repeat the earlier storm motif ), so Peter’s unconscious understanding, tipped by the provocation of drum and chorus, makes us realize the impossibility of his idle fancies. The memory of the death of the first boy beautifully arouses the freefloating guilt from which Grimes suffers; he is technically innocent, but nevertheless culpable. Having damned himself in the previous scene, Peter here enacts the haunting which his namesake in Crabbe experienced only in his delirious final ravings. Like Crabbe, Britten remains true to the mysteries of origins. Just as the poet could not explain Grimes’s innate brutality, nor ever clarify the genesis of his last hallucinations, the composer never discovers musical terms for the etiology of his hero’s diseases. Music, of course, has no past tense; it can dramatize only present truths or allude, by echoes, to past motifs, but everything exists momentarily. All we can infer from the scene in the hut is the incursion upon dreams by the voices of society, in this case the approaching sound of the drum, which provokes Peter’s memory of the first apprentice, then the surfacing or regret or guilt, and at last the disintegration of his dreams of contentment and picket fences with Ellen. Peter’s disjointed monologue in the final scene (III.ii), containing verbal hints of previous motifs, adds the finishing touches to Britten’s plan for a mixture of pity and harshness in our judgment, and also to his insistence on shared, communal fate and feeling rather than on an individual’s isolation within the restraining walls of his consciousness. As Balstrode says to Ellen at the end of III.i, waiting for Grimes’s return: “We cannot turn our backs. When horror breaks one heart / all hearts are broken.” Not only because his music is so frequently and naturally chordal, but also because Britten relies on old-fashioned, resolving harmonies, and choral configurations, Peter Grimes proves musically the impossibility of an individual’s total separation from a community of which he is a part, however peripheral his position. Just as the sixth orchestral interlude depicts both natural fog and the occlusions within Peter’s gradually decaying mind by alluding briefly to various motifs—money, peace, the Pleiades, storm, fate—so Peter’s monologue in III.ii, contains musical and verbal reminders of his entire life within the opera.



  Bits of resignation (“The first one died just died, / The other slipped and died . . . / and the third will . . .”) interweave themselves with remnants of defiance. Peter taunts and submits simultaneously. The fisherman has become the catch (“Come on! Land me! . . . You’ll know who’s gone fishing when you land the next shoal”). The questions about roots and destination (“What is home? Where’s my home?”) may mirror the feelings of rootlessness that Britten himself had only recently laid to rest, but I prefer to think of them as extending the questioning of origins that the opera continually poses. The scene also duplicates Peter’s movement from responsiveness to aggressiveness, which was most forcefully shown in his exchange with Ellen in II.i. Whereas there the chorus was heard contrapuntally off-stage, and in II.ii, the drumbeats gradually interrupted Peter’s dreaming, here we have a half-echo, half-original response in Peter’s final acceptance of his name and fate. The off-stage call (“Peter Grimes”) provokes more than a simple acknowledgment; Peter’s self-naming (“Grimes, Grimes, Grimes”) also hurls back at the chorus the very gauntlet they have thrown to him. He implicates them, accusing, sharing his name. As the chorus becomes softer, less insistent in its call, and as Ellen addresses him gently, he does not respond; Britten is asking us simultaneously to identify with Peter (we hear the off-stage voices as he does, louder, then softer) and to stand apart from him (we hear Ellen although he does not). With a repetition of his first dreamy aria (“What harbour shelters peace”), Grimes discovers a final resting-place, away, ironically, from both her heart and safe harbor. He hears, as though unconscious, Balstrode’s hypnotizing command and then heeds it. The request for self-destruction has come from without, but it has been little more than an enabling hint. Peter Grimes’s self-propulsion moves him inevitably seaward to his destiny. Standing apart from the community, Peter Grimes everywhere embeds his identity in its life. Benjamin Britten’s own exemplary communal life— creating a festival in which an entire village would participate annually, writing music for groups as well as for individuals, the most important of whom was his own life-long companion and major inspiration (“people are my noterows”; “music should be useful and to the living,” he remarked), becoming a living symbol of the village in which he was resident so long—demonstrates a commitment to the social relationships upon which all identity depends. The life at Aldeburgh comes out of the same instinct that produced the last scene of Peter Grimes. Antiphony is the key. The off-stage chorus beckons, threatens, or just names Peter nine times ( just as the prelude had begun with his invocation by Hobson); his mounting responses not only dramatize his heightened madness, but they also implicate chorus and protagonist in one another’s musical and verbal destinies. In his first response, Peter, thinking of his first apprentice, sings “Water will drink my sorrows dry,” which Colin



 :      () Davis changes significantly, in his recording of the opera, to “Water will drink his sorrows dry.” The choice of identity becomes grayer in the second response, when “Water will drink his sorrows, my sorrows dry.” The third, “Peter Grimes! Here you are! Here I am!” inevitably blurs pronominal distinctions. Unlike the mad scenes of other famous operatic psychotics, such as Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, and Lucia di Lammermoor, Peter Grimes’s f inal moments do not ring in monologue but in conjunction with other voices. And, musically at least, that conjunction is finally harmonious rather than dissonant. In his last response, Peter returns to his opening aria (“What harbour shelters peace?”), sung in harmony with the quiet calls of the chorus which he does not consciously hear, but to which he has delicately tuned himself. The final peace that he reaches enables him to respond automatically to Balstrode’s last command. Leaving somewhat clouded the issue of origins and beginnings, Peter Grimes leaves no doubt about either final ends, however they are accomplished, or mutual responsibility. In society, all individuality, however eccentric, is complicated by relationship. For better, as well as for worse, the community always prevails.



SIX

X

THE RAKE, THE DON, THE FLUTE W. H. Auden as Librettist ()

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onsider first one of W. H. Auden’s paradoxical epigrams: “A tooliteral translation of the text may sometimes prove a falsification.” So success in circuit lies, and the truth must be told slant: “in doing an aria, it is often better, once [the translator] has grasped its emotional mood and general tenor, to put the actual words out of his mind and concentrate upon writing as good an English lyric as possible.” This, in , from the man who four years earlier stood stalwartly against opera in translation, on the grounds that “the new syllables have no apt relation to the pitch and tempo of the notes with which they were associated. . . . In song, poetry is expendable, syllables are not.” But Auden changed his mind, for love and money, and with Chester Kallman as his collaborator, wrote two translations of Mozart operas in the decade following his own strongest achievement as a librettist, his text for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which received its première in Venice in . As exercises in translation, and as reworkings or updatings of Mozartean themes, Auden’s Magic Flute and Don Giovanni give the lie to his pronouncements that “the verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer,” and that “in opera the orchestra is addressed to the singers not to the audience.” They also cast a retrospective look at the basic myths of The Rake’s Progress, which itself glances backward to Mozart as the fount of opera’s, and liberalism’s, golden age. With such circular cross-referencings, The Rake, The Don, and The Flute constitute a chapter in Auden’s poetic history.

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. .    () Auden had a silly side, and when passing off obiter dicta as serious remarks he could trivialize practically anything. Music, especially in his later years, received the ambivalent attention of his perverse intelligence: e.g., he said there are fewer great operas today because we believe less equivocally in the benefits of freedom, but “every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.” Would the Queen of the Night’s F’s in alt make her freer, one wonders, than Norma or Lucia? Nevertheless, Auden devoted himself to libretti, because opera was the one art to which he nostalgically granted the idiosyncratic ability to set forth, in a “secondary world,” a high heroic mode which is absent from our debased modern age. Opera is a filter for the transmission of the past to the present and for a certain style no longer possible. Although many of Auden’s theories seem to ally him to Mozart (who wrote to his father: “in opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music”), more often than not his practice enlists him in the camp of Gluck, who said: “I sought to restrict music to its true function, namely, to serve the poetry by means of the expression—and the situations which make up the plot—without interrupting the action or diminishing its interest by useless or superfluous ornament.” Prima le parole, dopo la musica. It was only after meeting Kallman in New York that Auden became an opera addict, a fact he later acknowledged gratefully, saying that before thirty no rational person is able to deal with opera’s basic foolishness. But for his last thirty years he was a participant and a critic as well as a collector and an enthusiast, and although many of his comments in “Some Reflections on Music and Drama” seem like a betrayal of his librettist’s instincts, it may be argued that Auden was a serious operatic poet. The following essay is concerned with two related aspects of this seriousness: the debt which The Rake owes not only to the inspiration of Hogarth’s prints but also to Auden’s understanding of the Mozart operas he was later to translate; and the force with which, pace Auden’s feelings about the negligibility of poetry, or language at all, to opera’s meaning, his three libretti help to shape those operas whose music they articulate. Auden’s verbal facility found a perfect medium in musical lyric; the gift which so many readers regarded, in his last decades, as the waning betrayal of his genius (a charge beginning in the forties, when reviewers labeled each successive volume a fall from earlier sublimity into wit or glittering inconsequence) was bestowed appropriately upon opera. At the same time that he could rewrite a line for Anne Truelove in The Rake while Stravinsky was sitting at the piano going over the libretto (according to Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet), Auden was

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  a historian in spite of himself who could reshape his own central myths in his opera texts. His genius, like Stravinsky’s, gives a positive answer to the composer’s question about The Rake: “Can a composer re-use the past and at the same time move in a forward direction?” Yes, he can, and so can a poet, especially when collaborating with a composer concerned equally with the story and the music of his opera. Stravinsky says that “The Rake’s Progress is simple to perform musically but difficult to realize on stage. . . . Tom’s machine-baked bread may be hard to swallow, but even it goes down, I think (with a few handfuls of salt), if the stage director has not lost sight of the opera’s ‘moral fable’ proposition by overplaying the realism of ‘The Rakewell Story.’ ” For Auden, as for Stravinsky, a moral fable is possible only at second hand, through stylized imitation. The screen of style protects from harsh realities and admits salutary airs; it is a filter not just for straining away impurities, but for distilling essences. The removal, in space and time, to a conventionalized eighteenth-century England, with its appropriate musical and poetic languages, is a version of the pastoral impulse to take us to a “secondary world” which alone will permit moral fabling but will also prevent it from seeming pretentious or heavy-handed. The screen of a secondary world allows Auden to create a myth around two of his potent poetic themes: the redeeming power of love, and the possibility of human or divine justice through rewards and punishment. The Rake sounds a series of variations on the types of love—from the clement, pastoral innocence of Tom and Anne in the country, before the announcement of his surprising bequest, through Mother Goose’s London brothel, Anne’s heroic search for her lost lover, the vapidity of his marriage to Baba the Turk, and finally to the salvation of Tom’s soul through his recollection of Anne’s love and his hearing the echo of her aria during the graveyard scene. The Rake takes an updated twentieth-century look at conventional moral wisdom: although he saves his soul from the Devil, Tom loses his sanity, the modern price for the destruction of heroic aspiration. Ending his days in the common darkness of Bedlam, thinking of himself and Anne as Adonis and Venus, Rakewell dies, and with him dies the promise of seasonal rebirth except as an elegiac myth or fictive construct. As the ensemble reminds us in its moralizing finale, this is the end of rakishness, and we had better watch our step. We can chart a literary and musical constellation among Auden, Da Ponte, Schikaneder, Mozart, and Stravinsky. The themes of The Rake revise the major ones of Mozart’s operas, and individual numbers in Stravinsky recall Mozartean musical and dramatic situations. Auden sensed the connection between the composers. When he translated The Magic Flute during

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. .    () the Mozart bicentennial year, he gave a nod to his former collaborator in a “metalogue” spoken by the actor who plays Sarastro: Nor, while we praise, the dead, should we forget We have Stravinsky, bless him, with us yet. Basta! Maestro, make your minions play! In all hearts, as in our finale, may Reason and Love be crowned, assume their rightful sway. Nevertheless, this Auden Zauberflöte rings amazing changes on the Schikaneder libretto, and in making his translation, Auden transforms Mozart and violates at least his theoretical feelings about the importance of words in opera libretti. Auden has gone on record for the equation, or more happily the marriage, of opera and myth, so we should not wonder at his fondness for The Magic Flute. His version, however, illuminates his own increasing conservatism— religious, social, artistic—during his last two decades, a nostalgia for the great age of grand opera which coincided with the golden age of liberal humanism, and its millenarian hopes for salvation through myths of progress (the myths, in other words, of Auden’s own formative liberalism in the Thirties). In , Auden said the typical opera addict was a conservative “who does not welcome new opera” because he yearns to hear the out-ofthe-repertory works of Bellini, Verdi, et al., which he fears he never will. The Mozart of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute would certainly have appealed to Auden’s youthful political instincts, but when the time came to articulate those liberal instincts through the medium of opera translation, Auden was probably becoming too conservative to do full justice to his originals. Since the High Style of opera necessarily, according to Auden, resists change, the translator may ignore the importance of the words, and may defend whatever alterations he makes in the text with pleas of fidelity to the opera’s central myth. But in altering the letter, Auden affects the spirit as well: his myth, it turns out, is not identical to Mozart’s. What exactly does Auden do to The Flute, and how does Mozart sound when palyed on the Auden /Kallman instrument? Auden boldly asserted that Schikaneder and Giesecke (if there was a collaboration) did not know what they were doing, and to start with, he rearranges the scenes in Act II to make more cogent emotional sense: Monostatos’ aria, the Queen of the Night’s second aria, and “In Diesen Heil’gen Hallen” now come after Pamina’s lament (“Ach, ich fubl’s” ). All of this is dramatically sound, since the effect of Monostatos and Astrafiammante, as temptations to despair, suicide, or murder, has more power if Pamina imagines that Tamino has deserted her.

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  So far, so good. But then there are Auden’s verbal liberties, which fall into two groups: those taken with the diction and rhythm of arias and sung ensembles, and those involving the spoken dialogue which affect equally the development of characterization and of myth. As a poet, Auden is at times too qualified to write a translation, because his own cleverness—a fondness for obscure or unlikely words, a preference for the polysyllabic to the monosyllabic simplicity of Schikaneder, an occasional flurry of wit—sometimes works against him and perhaps, if our ears can be trusted, against Mozart. Auden always chooses to amplify and vary rather than to repeat; additionally, his reliance on longer words means that faster or comic numbers, which sound a bit Gilbertized or Nashified, fall closer in spirit to the original, whereas the slower, somber pieces are wrenched from their original bases. In “O zitt’re nicht,” the Queen of the Night is relatively straightforward in her effort to convince Tamino of the heinous kidnapping of her daughter: “Ich musste sie mir rauben sehen / ‘Ach belft!’ war alles, was sie sprach: / Allein, vergebens war ihr Flenn / Denn meine Hilfe war zu schwach.” Auden dresses this up with multisyllabic chiasmus: “But vain her pitiful rogation, / My protestation all in vain, / My frantic weeping all in vain.” In her second aria, Astrafiammante (Auden’s Queen) once again speaks more complexly in English than in German. “Der Hölle Rache” is as simple, imagistically, as it is vocally demanding: the Queen tells her daughter that Sarastro has betrayed her, and that Pamina is obliged to avenge her mother. Not only does Auden harden the spirit of this death-defying coloratura— “Avenge me, or accursed die,” she tells her daughter—but he also makes her vocabulary more formidable. “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” becomes “Avenging fury lacerates my spirit,” which is rhythmically fine but verbally arch. Even as she sinks out of sight with Monostatos in the closing moments, Sarastro’s goodness and light having triumphed, the Queen cannot resist, it seems, a learned tone which perhaps reminds us of the universal darkness that buries all at the end of The Dunciad, a condition Auden previously suggested in the Bedlam scene in The Rake’s Progress: “Zerschmettert, zernichtet ist unsere Macht, / Wir alle gestürzet in ewige Nacht” is now “What blinds us with lightning! What binds us with fright! / We sink to the chaos of infinite night.” Although we would hardly expect realistic characterization, let alone verismo passions, in an eighteenth-century opera, Schikaneder’s characters have certain dimensions which Auden, whether consciously or not, has refashioned. For instance, the quest motif has been changed: showing Pamina’s picture to Tamino, the Queen’s ladies serve up love itself, but Tamino now sounds rather like Sidney’s Astrophel: “Where beauty is with virtue shown / More noble than itself alone.” And, surprisingly, for a man who recognizes

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. .    () the spiritual and mythic components of the story, Auden tends to secularize the quest upon which the Queen invites Tamino to embark: “Du bist ja schuldlos, weise, fromm. / Ein Jüngling, so wie du, vermag am besten, / Dies tiefgebeugte Mutterherz zu trösten.” Auden’s Tamino is called “gentle, courteous, true,” rather than “pure, wise, and pious,” which would be more accurate; additionally, the Queen gives a spur to “deeds of love and glory,” a new touch. At the same time, the spoken dialogue with which Tamino introduces himself to Papageno increases the romance motif by adding information nowhere present in the original. Tamino is now a twentieth-century adolescent, discontented and itching to seek adventure: “My feet have wandered with uncertain aim / Driven by longings which I cannot name, / Seeking I know not what.” Charles Osborne has already noted how Auden’s Papageno, enumerating all the birds he catches, is more scholarly than Schikaneder’s, who is distinguished by an undifferentiated naturalism that probably keeps him from knowing one bird from another: they’re all vögel to him. But Auden cannot resist making his Papageno something of an ornithologist, so we have a list which not only embellishes the original (“Der Vogelf änger bin ich ja” ) but also seriously alters the spirit of the character: lark, ruddock, willowwren, jolly nightingale, snipe, partridge, cock and hen, and the melodious mavis, are all prey for Papageno’s traps. His humanity assumes grander dimensions in Auden’s version (indeed, he even calls himself “tall,” an unwarranted danger for the casting director). Schikaneder is straightforward: in the dialogue before “Bei Männern” Pamina tells Papageno that heaven will take care of him. In Auden she is more philosophical: “All will be well: you have love in your heart,” a cue leading into that simple and sublime duet: Bei Männern, welche Liebe f ühlen, Fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht. Die süssen Triebe mitzufühlen, Ist dann der Weiber erste Pflicht. Wir wollen uns der Liebe freun, Wir leben durch die Lieb’ allein. This grows into Auden’s inflated and aristocratic version: When Love in his bosom desire has implanted, The heart of the hero grows gentle and tame; And soon from his passion enkindled, enchanted, The nymph receives the impetuous flame. In all our days we mortals can prove No greater joy than mutual love.

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  The love is grandiose, but also perilously close to some communicable and paralyzing disease which extends its inflammatory blessings from one person to another—something akin to the love which Monostatos feels in his second-act aria: Every animal and human Comes on earth to make a pair; For each man there is a woman, So, should anybody care If I take my little share? It is Auden’s own “intolerable neural itch.” Although he never mentions his own blackness, Auden’s Monostatos reminds us of Caliban and of Auden’s interpretation of The Magic Flute as a gloss on The Tempest. The trials of Tamino and Pamina recall those of Ferdinand. Sarastro, as a Prospero figure, stands at the center of Auden’s opera, figuratively and literally, as he does not in Schikaneder’s. His lengthy and witty metalogue, alluded to already, is Auden’s homage to Mozart and to his golden age shining obliquely into our own. As the spokesman for Auden and for eighteenth-century humanism, Sarastro is a little old, tired, and jaded. For this there is no precedent in the original. Auden changes some of the dialogue, and adds some more, in an attempt to make Sarastro an elder statesman on the verge of retirement. At the beginning of Act II, Auden omits the radiant dialogue between Sarastro and his Priest on the subject of Tamino’s worth: “Er ist ein Prinz” . . . “Er ist ein Mensch” (on the other hand, Auden’s Papageno is a jollier and more congenial figure than Schikaneder’s). Auden’s hieratic figure speaks, again without warrant, with awkward and condescendingly literate diction to Monostatos: . . . With brotherhood, Our Holy Order, we had hoped to win Your mind and soul from what we found them in— A savage state; but you are of the lost: Like the enfeebled asp, undone by frost, Some kindly peasant puts before his fire Only to find that light and warmth inspire A graceless nature to renew its venomed ire. Then, before he sings a very Audenesque “In Diesen Heil’gen Hallen” (“By freeing one another, / We learn ourselves to free, / For man must love his brother / Or cease a man to be”), he sounds the note of a wearied Manicheism, modern and post-Nietzschean:

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. .    () I have grown old in combat, and I fear Passionless. Can Wisdom be too dear? Can she, the Queen of superstitious Night, In her extremities of heart, be right? No, on. We need each other. May we learn Of music how to serve each other’s turn: For music, from the primal darkness sprung, Speaks an undifferentiating tongue, But tamed by harmony, the beast can tame, And every elemental passion name. O light of Wisdom, do not blind our eyes: That Mind may love, and Heart may civilize. As if to strengthen this weariness by repetition, Auden provides a slightly comic version of Sarastro in the second Priest, an old Byronic tippler who has retired from drinking and who no longer needs liquor to enflame him. He is the one who brings Papageno the wine that inspires “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” or Auden’s: “Could I but once discover / Some soft congenial She,” in which that last monosyllabic archaism gives either a lift or a thud to the note, depending on one’s point of view. The wedding of the Appollonian and Dionysian principles was certainly built into the original opera as a brilliant stroke of genius, if not of forethought, by the remarkable change in sympathy demanded of the audience between Acts I and II, and also by the unalterable fact that the instruments of salvation, flute and bells, the musical grace as it were, come from the province of the Queen of the Night. In his tired monologue, Sarastro acknowledges that his victory will be also his defeat, as the younger generation unites both principles in a new synthesis, of harmony rather than warfare. Both he and the Queen will fall, through resignation or defeat, and a millenarian spirit will pervade the new order. Although Schikaneder was by no means a sophisticated poet, he liberated Mozart musically, since no poem constrains the composer to a particular rhythm (as some of the numbers in Figaro do, e.g., “Non so più”). As a result of its libretto—both the myth and the words—The Magic Flute resists pigeonholing, as William Mann has observed. Proverbs, pageantry, farce, animal frolicking: The Flute has them all. Ignored by  as hodgepodge, The Flute has provoked countless recent interpretations (among the more ingenious is Brigid Brophy’s which makes the Queen into a Gravesian White Goddess), but however we hear the opera we owe part of our response to Schikaneder himself.

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  Words, whether translated or added, are important, in spite of Chester Kallman’s statement, anent Anne Truelove: “Anne is a soprano. Period. Words can do nothing but indicate her.” Still, some indications will point in different directions from others, and in Don Giovanni, where we have three sopranos, those indications will tell a lot about the differences among the heroic Anna, the jilted and vengeful Elvira, and the flirtatious, yielding Zerlina. The Auden-Kallman Don Giovanni, done for NBC four years after The Magic Flute, seems in many ways a step backward, a work cruder and broader in its strokes. The peculiarities of the translation are again of two kinds: problems with language, which may owe something to the differences between English and Italian (it is hard to find equivalents for the final weak, unaccented syllables in the original without galloping at a hopelessly Byronic pace); and a refocusing of the text, in this case to a clearer picture of vice and virtue. Auden’s Don Giovanni takes very seriously Da Ponte’s subtitle, “Il Dissoluto Punito.” But at the same time, Don Giovanni is also an opera buffa, and from the start it was famous as comedy. Da Ponte took from Tirso da Molina’s  play the call to repentance and the supernatural warning, and then built up the rest on disguise and revelation, and on the complications attendant upon the hero’s failed seductions. A Berlin reviewer wrote in  that “the piece is about that well-known subject, which only pleases the masses because of Leporello’s burlesque antics and because of the Commendatore on his horse.” As in Die Zauberflöte, Auden and Kallman succeed best with fast, comic numbers, the staccato Gilbertian rhythms of the catalogue aria (“Osservate, leggete con me” becomes a jolly “I maintain it immaculately” ) and “Finch’ han dal vino.” On both the serious and comic lines, Auden’s opera lets out some rope, but it is by this rope that the translators risk hanging themselves. The problems arise first in those intense moments when a character’s passion is threatened or diminished by cuteness in the translation, or when comedy rears itself inopportunely and at odds with what the music is telling us. When Masetto commands Zerlina (in “Ho capito, signor si” ) to “let my Lord make a lady of you,” it comes out like a cross between G&S and a twentieth-century skeptic’s look at old wives’ tales: “When his lordship woos a maiden / She becomes Milady, too, / If the fairy-tales be true.” In the stunning quarter after “La ci darem,” in which Elvira warns Zerlina and Anna of the Don’s roguery (“Non ti fidar, o misera” ), Auden’s Don sounds flip and modern: “She’s mentally afflicted, / And weeps when contradicted: / Stand back or you’ll upset her. / I know these cases better. / Leave her alone with me.” The grand ensemble at the end of Act I originally presented a Don who is anxiously confused and then resolved not to show fear. Auden’s Don is

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. .    () more comically perplexed by these Furies: “What an awful situation! / How I wish I were in bed!” Allowing the translators their rights to decide how and where to reemphasize the seria and the buffa parts of the drama, we may wonder why such skilled poets write both recitatives and arias which seem unintentionally comic or inept. Donna Anna speaks a stilted, foreign English before launching into “Or sai chi l’onore”: “And then my will, in shock reborn, / With terror inhuman, restored my dwindled / forces doubly. “when she reaches the great aria itself, she’s in even more trouble: You know who is guilty, The lecher assassin Who dared my dishonor, And struck down my father! This is no worse than Edward Dent’s: “You now know for certain / The name of the traitor / My honor who assaulted, / My father who murdered.” But it is, alas, no better. “Deh! vieni alla finestra” is, in the original, a conventional seduction piece by which the Don hopes to woo Elvira’s Maid. It plays with standard Renaissance love tropes. But Auden’s version is enormously wordy (indeed, it takes him more lines to do all of his arias; this is perhaps a testimony to Italian concision rather than proof of his loquacity) and somewhat mealy, emphasizing the foolishness of the Don’s pretense or that of the librettists: O star, why keep thy beauty so cruelly hidden? Thy sable realm begem, bright Queen of Love, shine! This dark I bid thee rule, serves thee unbidden; And love that serves by night has made heart thine. With a song like this, and with diction as deliberately stilted or archaic as “Be not of adoration distantly scornful,” it is no wonder the Don Giovanni has so little luck with the ladies. While they stress the buffa parts of the opera, going so far as to make comic what originally was not, Auden and Kallman manage also to expand, through simplification, the moral and psychological dimensions of the original. Among other mistakes, they exclude “Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata” on the grounds that it was a late addition, for the Vienna première, but this takes away from Elvira a great moment to proclaim her mingled love-hate for Giovanni. Right from the opening scene, when the Commendatore is slain, Auden’s diction is either more romantic or more ethical than the original. When there is no clear moral or spiritual dimension present, he creates one. Thus, the Commendatore and Giovanni sing in Italian only of the old man’s imminent death, but in English there is the added note of punishment

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  and immortality: “Ah, I’m wounded! Ah! I’m dying! / God, protect my child from evil! / From this mortal scene of sorrow / My immortal soul must fly.” And: “Ah, he’s fallen! Ah, he’s dying! / Paying dearly for his folly. / On this world of love and beauty / He must close his aged eye.” Little things ring the same change: Leporello tells the Don that he’s leading the life of a scoundrel, “Da briccone,” but Auden’s warns: “You’ll go to Hell, Sir!” Elvira’s original murderousness (“Ah, chi mi dice mai”) becomes a sharing of guilt: “I’ll denounce him / And make him bear the scorn / That I alone have borne.” At the end of the first act, the masked trio enters the Don’s palace, sounding, in the English version, much sterner than in the Italian. Elvira, like a character from morality drama, declares: “In truth resides our power— / The truth, the truth need never wait,” whereas all she claims in Italian is “we’ll expose his wicked crimes.” Anna echoes her: “We want no more than justice . . . / We were, we are . . . his fate!” In the Act II sestet, immediately before “Il mio tesoro,” Anna sings that her tears will allay Ottavio’s pain, but Auden has her sound a guilty note: “Death can please me, / Wipe away the guilty stain, / Dry my tears and ease my pain.” Her sense of sin is heard most forcefully in “Non mi dir,” which has been entirely altered from a plea to Ottavio to tone down his complaints about her cruelty and from a hope that heaven will once again shine on her. Now, the aria is an Audenesque deliberation on Pascal’s “silence eternel de ces espaces infinis,” after her initial request for chastity: “Let yonder moon, chaste eye of Heaven / Cool desire and calm your soul.” The fault, Ottavio, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are sinful: “Cold, we call them, to our sighing; / We, too proud, too evil-minded, / By sin are blinded.” In Da Ponte, a single forse gives the only hope for redemption: perhaps the heavens will pity her some day, she allows. But Auden’s Anna confidently trusts heaven’s guidance, and his Ottavio takes the aria as a covenant of marriage, “a token, a sweet promise,” where in the original he vows only to share her grief. Indeed, throughout, we can see how Auden distilled the bravery of his Anne Truelove from her Italian namesake. The great aria from I, iii of The Rake, in which Anne announces her plans to set out for London and discover her man, is cut from the same cloth as “Non mi dir”: Guide me, O moon, chastely when I depart; And warmly be the same. He watches without grief or shame; It cannot be thou art A colder moon upon a colder heart. Finally, even Auden’s statue is hewn from a more moral stone than Da Ponte’s. The Commendatore arrives for supper and orders the Don to hear

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. .    () him because “my time is short,” to which the Don replies simply: “Speak; I’m listening.” Auden cannot resist a further preacherly exchange. His statue commands: “Mark well my message for short is your time,” to which Giovanni acquiesces: “Speak you message for short is your time.” And at the last, Auden lends a twentieth-century slant to the Don’s non serviam and refusal to repent: “Let dotards talk of kneeling, / God is a fairy tale.” Auden’s epilogue epitomizes his opera’s status as a moral fable. Within this life there is always the possibility of change, especially at the last minute, since sincere repentance freely offered is the ground for salvation. But Elvira seems a little unsure in Auden (her original goes to a convent to finish her life); she is biding her time, plotting the next step: “I will hide me in a cloister, / There to fast and pray and ponder,” The old saw which is the basis for the concluding canon, “This is the end of those who do wrong”—the just desserts motif, in other words—gets a modern liberal handle: “Rakes, betrayers, all take warning, / While there’s time (while there’s time) still your ways to mend, / Your ways to mend, / Mend your ways.” Auden serves up his Anglican faith at the end of a banquet that has been, through all its courses, moral nourishment. Stepping backward again to The Rake’s Progress, we find a libretto poetically superior to either of the two Mozart translations. The practical reasons for this are obvious: the relative values and stresses of syllables in one language are difficult to transfer to another without some betrayal of the original. But we may feel equally that Auden is writing his own moral tale, rather than bending a preexistent one to fit a double Procrustean bed—that of the music and that of his own ideas about the story. Consequently, the elegant verse of The Rake’s Progress can stand by itself less embarrassedly than the translated libretti for Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. But as Kallman remarked, recalling the opera’s composition and première: “it is a tribute to opera in much the same way that Apollon Musagète is a tribute to the dance.” It forces us to consider the nature of imitation, what Stravinsky meant by moving forward by moving backward. We shall not, I hope, be as stodgy as the Italian critics who, after the first performance, gleefully condemned Anne’s first-act aria as “pure pastiche” (as if there could be such a thing), but were at odds with one another on whom precisely Stravinsky was imitating: Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, Weber, and Verdi were all adduced. As I have pointed out before, the libretto to The Rake is a pastiche, complemented by Stravinsky’s neoclassical score, of eighteenth-century diction, literary allusions, and echoes from a range of works, and is therefore a version of pastoral. Distance confers upon the poets the privilege of commenting simultaneously on a stylized eighteenth-century England, the world of Hogarthian fact and fable, and on our modern one by reminding us, through

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  colloquialism, occasional puns or neologisms, that the present and the past both interpenetrate and are separate from one another. Looking back nostalgically, The Rake also settles itself squarely in the modern world. Auden achieves more than he would theoretically allow a poet to do, since although his modesty pretends that the words, irrelevant in themselves, are addressed only to the composer, his instinct has fashioned them rhythmically sound, emotionally potent, and intellectually challenging. They are simple enough to be set and heard, to embody moral truisms, to affirm with aphoristic exactness the story’s themes, but they are also complex enough to be interesting. The variety of poetic forms, the richness of language and rhythm in aria and recitative, the echoes collected from our literary past, all sufficiently disprove, perhaps just once, Gian Carlo Menotti’s generalization: “to read and judge a libretto without its musical setting is unfair both to the librettist and the composer.” Auden’s capturing some older poetic voices doesn’t make him merely a good ventriloquist who reaffirms what he rehashes. The libretto, or many parts of it, can very well stand alone (as he recognized when he published Anne’s lullaby “Gently, little boat” in The Shield of Achilles). The first scene, for example, maintains a consistent pattern of imagery which might pass conscious notice in the opera hall, but which meets the demands that a serious reader might make of an accomplished poet. The language of growth and fertility resounds from the opening duet: Anne: The woods are green and bird and beast at play For all things keep this festival of May; With fragrant odors and with notes of cheer The pious earth observes the solemn year. Rakewell: Now is the season when the Cyprian Queen With genial charm translates our mortal scene. When swains their nymphs in fervent arms enfold And with a kiss restore the Age of Gold. Although music can never express irony (this is why Così Fan Tutte is a failure, according to Hofmannsthal), the counterpointing of words and music can. The duet’s tunefulness complements its Augustan commonplaces and archaisms, but is offset by the skewed rhythm and harmony, Stravinsky’s means of commenting on Mozartean melodies as well as on Auden’s version of a Mozartean moral fable. In fact, he builds a minor doubt into the opening note: Anne begins a half tone off the proper tonic third (C) before settling

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. .    () comfortably into major harmony. The music’s modern idiom combines with the now dated poetic language and knits Auden’s weaving of echo and cliché into a new fabric. At the end of the scene the music gives clues to the dangers in the lovers’ separation and in Tom’s dreams of worldly success. But the words themselves are often at the heart of the performance and its message. Tom’s Drydenic song, “Laughter and light and all charms that endear,” should strike us as disturbing (it encourages Nick Shadow’s final pronouncement: “THE PROGRESS OF A RAKE begins”) precisely because of its diction. Historical distance urges skepticism on our response to pseudo–eighteenth-century language, however accomplished. Dryden will not do today, however clever his adapters may be: indeed, the suitability of score to libretto is proved by how it validates our literary response should we read the naked text. One could extend a commentary on the relationship of the words to their setting to include all matters of orchestration (e.g., the use of winds; the horn obbligato as a hunting motif; the sinister tinklings on the cembalo which accompany Shadow). The best evidence of the librettists’ strength, however, may be seen in the final scene, in Bedlam, which answers with a modern twist the opera’s opening pastoral note. Pastoral now lives in the asylum; the Venus and Adonis myth is the raving of a lunatic. The chorus leavens the Popean picture with modern cliché: Leave all love and hope behind; Out of sight is out of mind In these caverns of the dead . . . Banker, beggar, whore and wit In a common darkness sit. Seasons, fashion, never change; All is stale, yet all is strange; All are foes, and none are friends In a night that never ends. Anne, willing to entertain for a moment Tom’s mythic delusions, sings a duet with him which nervously packs twentieth-century philosophical language into the neoclassical style: Rejoice, beloved: in these fields of Elysium Space cannot alter, nor Time our love abate; Here has no words for absence or estrangement Nor Now a notion of Almost or Too Late. The pastoral language of fertility filled the opening springtime scene, and the elegiac notes in Bedlam, another spring scene, parody that opening

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  by assuring us that the myth of Venus and Adonis, however beautiful, cannot be taken straight. In other words, language, not music, is the vehicle for the plot’s ironic tension between innocent aspiration and depraved pretension. Anne’s lullaby lays to rest Tom and his dreams of rebirth with linguistic harmonies from Blake’s Beulah: Orchards greenly grace That undisturbed place, The weary soul recalling To slumber and dream, While many a stream Falls, falls, falls, Descanting on a childlike theme. A moment later she echoes Shakespeare in the rhythm of Auden’s elegy to Yeats: Every wearied body must Late or soon return to dust, Set the frantic spirit free. In this earthly city we Shall not meet again, love, yet Never think that I forget. With its lovely promise of renewal, elegy is reduced to parody. Like pastoral it cannot exist in our world without some refocusing away from its source. In this regard, the music does less to complicate the words (since the setting of the concluding laments is especially poignant) than the irony of the fable itself does. Deprived of his Venus, Tom, like Adonis, dies; unlike Adonis, he will not be reborn; neither does the final chorus (“Mourn for Adonis, ever young”) grant the kind of consolation that a pastoral elegy normally proffers, since its singers are themselves inmates of Bedlam. To adhere to, or even to glance at, past myths, styles, or languages, requires a seemingly regressive temperament. Nostalgia is a basic form of pastoral, and much pastoral is based on nostalgia for the vanished and irretrievable. But music, especially music wedded to words, offers a chance for something different. This is what keeps The Rake’s Progress from being a mere exercise in imitation: in language and harmony, it meets the challenge of the past, redeems its promise, and looks hopefully forward. As such, it gives new life to Ned Rorem’s provocative adage: “Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.”

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SEVEN

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LANDSCAPE AND KNOWLEDGE The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop ()

T

he most fastidious and unself-assertive of our major poets, Elizabeth Bishop has produced barely two hundred pages of original verse in a career of forty years. The deceptive naturalness and fluent ease of this body of work has led many critics to categorize her as either an epigone of Marianne Moore or another in the line of female imagists. But Bishop’s best poems show her to be an epistemological poet in the tradition of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge. Going beyond the surfaces of the scenes which they lovingly depict, these poems pose essential questions about the relationship between experience and knowledge, between what is empirically ascertainable and what must be deduced or inferred, and between what can be known and what not. Two earlier commentators have pointed Bishop’s readers in the direction I would have them follow more vigorously. Twenty years ago, Howard Nemerov remarked that “such poetry . . . moves away from thought and towards vision”; more recently, Donald Sheehan has compared Bishop to Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth, and Virgil, all of whom possess “that mysterious ability to find just where meaning inheres in the thing seen rather than coheres with the seeing mind.” Starting from these seminal remarks, I want to explore the ways in which Bishop’s poetry passes from statement or elegant description to reenactments of the processes of discovering and learning. Of all Bishop’s important nature poems, “At the Fishhouses” is the one which most nearly resembles a Wordsworthian model; its two most important analogues (one would strain to call them influences) are “Tintern Abbey”

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  and “Resolution and Independence.” The poem sounds as if it might have been written to M. H. Abrams’ formula for the “Romantic nature lyric”: . . . a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation. The flatness of the poem’s opening is deceptive; as David Kalstone has pointed out, the slant rhymes contribute to a feeling of connectedness among the discrete parts of the scene: Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water. In the opening lines of “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth stresses both the connections and the differences among parts of the landscape: the orchard-tufts “are clad in one green hue,” but “lose themselves mid groves and copses.” Hedgerows turn out to be “little lines of sportive wood run wild”; greenness covers all. Likewise, Bishop blurs visual boundaries while connecting the landscape with the quiet, not of the sky, but of “the heavy surface of the sea,” which is “swelling slowly as if considering spilling over.” Throughout, specific details, individuated objects, are combined with a mysterious vagueness: “All is silver,” but the silver of the sea is opaque, whereas that of the benches and lobster pots is translucent. The single fisherman, like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, or the imagined hermit of “Tintern Abbey,” seems barely alive; his existence depends initially

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     () only on functional objects (net and shuttle), which are themselves worn and mellowed. Later, we see him, like the big fish tubs, covered with scales which he has scraped “with that old black knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.” Activity is muted by the timeless decay into which everything has fallen: there are “newly caught codfish,” but also “an ancient wooden capstan, / cracked, with two long bleached handles / and some melancholy stains, like dried blood / where the ironwork has rusted.” At first the narrator seems detached from the cold sea scene: she is unused to the pungent odor of the fish, and refers to herself in the blandest, most impersonal way (“the air makes one’s nose run”). Only when the natural scene is fully established may human activity begin. She offers a cigarette to the fisherman, a gesture which heralds a new intimacy between them; her language suggests an increased closeness with the reader as well, as she reveals more details about herself: “He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population” (emphasis mine). From description the poem has moved toward quasi-narrative; from a broad spectrum of data, connected but discrete, it focuses upon a personal confrontation (like that in “Resolution and Independence” ) and then a revelation to the narrator. Like Wordsworth, Bishop keeps surveying the details which surround her, accounting for them and recalling her former exposure to them; both “Tintern Abbey” and “At the Fishhouses” turn and return upon themselves as they move toward their destined epiphanies. Both are poems of direction, spatial and mental. Christopher Ricks has demonstrated the importance of prepositions in Wordsworth’s poetry; similarly, “At the Fishhouses” emphasizes physical interrelatedness by placing prepositions in stressed positions: The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. Having fixed the singularity of the scene, its discordia concors, and its potential to test both the eye and the fellow feeling of the spectator, Bishop now repeats her perspective on the way up and the way down: Down at the water’s edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet.

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  We follow her eye from the ramp down to the water; the unity of the scene leads directly to a small revelation, accented by monosyllables which repeat earlier details: “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal, / to fish and seals.” And then, as if demonstrating her inability to sustain this new knowledge, the speaker’s memory wanders to a semi-comic adventure with a curious, almost humanized seal to whom she has sung Baptist hymns at this place in the past. The animal, “a believer in total immersion,” achieves what the human speaker cannot—he can dive and reemerge from the sea which, however beautiful, is foreign and deadly to us; its characteristics are enumerated, almost incanted, a second time: “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water.” The repetition suggests the ocean’s hypnotic and frightening attraction for the speaker. She faces a murderous but lovely seascape and is backed by “dignified tall firs” which resemble in color the blue-gray ocean rocks, and virtually trap her into a small margin at the water’s edge. The trees “waiting for Christmas” suggest the inevitability of sacrifice; the sea, the icy freedom of an unbearable element. As the poem rounds to its end, the speaker senses the ocean’s permanence and separateness. Tension is dramatized subtly by a change in pronouns: “If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately.” The general “one” and the personal “I” are replaced by the urgent “you,” colloquial and universal, including listener and speaker. The way up and the way down are one, and the elements of land, air, and water have been connected by the speaker’s discerning vision (cold air, cold water; silver sea, silver benches; blue-gray trees, blue-gray rocks, clear gray water”). Now at last, the opposed elements, fire and water, achieve an identity. Burning both hand and tongue with a “dark gray flame,” the sea is like “a transmutation of fire,” something which, in itself unknowable, can be understood only metaphorically and by our common experience (“it is like what we imagine knowledge to be”). From the flatness of its opening, “At the Fishhouses” has expanded to a vision of the attractiveness and danger of human knowledge: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Ocean and knowledge, permanence and movement, inhuman phenomenon and personified abstraction are one. We return, in some ways, to the opening details: the coldness of the sea recalls the “cold evening”; the water, “flowing

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     () and flown” from the world’s “cold hard mouth” suggests not water so much as air, the element with which the poem began, the most mysterious, least tangible element of all. Like “Tintern Abbey,” “At the Fishhouses” is a meditative poem which moves away from a specific scene into a demonstration of the workings of memory and intellect. Both poems, and “Resolution and Independence” as well, can be said to “manifest a transaction between subject and object in which the thought incorporates and makes explicit what was already implicit in the outer scene.” The same transaction is evident in many of Bishop’s other poems, even those lacking the slimmest thread of narrative or meditative development. In these, meaning accrues beyond their seeming transparency because of the ordering of the images and the progression of the speaker’s tones. In “Florida,” for example, the blandness of travelogue gradually expands into a larger vision, a series of images of the dynamic interaction between life and death, beauty and decay, gentleness and hostility. The opening sentence, really a fragment, apostrophizes a state whose name gives promise of floral loveliness but whose coast is held together only by the tentacles of mangrove roots, and is littered with oysters, skeletons, and curious deathlike hummocks. With its repeated words (“mangrove,” “pelican,” “Indian Princess”) and images of corpses, skeletons, and the clamor of birds or palm trees, the poem becomes a series of mementi mori. It makes vivid the unique beauty of the ecological balance: no nature red in tooth and claw here; rather, the more paradoxical beauty of Keats’s melancholy which covers the green hills with an April shroud and fosters the droop-headed flowers: “the tropical rain comes down / to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells . . . arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico, / the buried Indian Princess’s skirt.” With her famous eye for detail, Bishop perceives not only order in abundant chaos, but also delicate ornamentation amid a truculent semi-tropical jungle. “Florida” moves, by accumulating details, to a deeper understanding of the state with the deceptively prettiest name. As evening approaches, we see buzzards drifting down into the swamp; the “charring is like black velvet” on the dead trees; mosquitoes, like the more predatory of nature’s creatures, “go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.” As the moon rises, the eye now sees the clearest and barest version of the landscape as it begins to parody itself in mere black-and-white: Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed, and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest post-card of itself.

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  The traveler out for souvenirs is bound to be disappointed; the visionary, searching for the veritable Ding-an-Sich, has not the wished-for adventure. Unlike “At the Fishhouses,” however, “Florida” does not end with the finality of understanding, but with the “whimper” of the alligator, emblem of the swamp, and with a return to the voice of the somewhat schoolmarmish narrator, who makes sure that we pick up the details of the travelogue: After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away. The alligator, who has five distinct calls: friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning— whimpers and speaks in the throat of the Indian Princess. On the surface, “The Bight” seems no more than the work of the famous eye: a panoramic description, with different lenses, of a natural setting. But it is also an interior monologue of sorts and, as the epigraph informs us (“On my birthday”), a poem upon a traditional occasion for stocktaking. Meaning hesitatingly grows as details pile up and by the end of the poem we have inferred the speaker’s self-evaluation. She is looking at herself through the veil of the scene before her. Like other poems of this sort, “The Bight” is circular in construction; it begins with the water, the boats beside it, and a working dredge off the dock. It returns at the end to the same “little white boats,” bight, and dredge, but with a new view of them. The progressive accumulation of detail leads to a generalizing vision of scene and, implicitly, of self. Low tide is an occasion for wonderment; the first six lines of the poem reveal vulnerability in a geological formation personified as a skeleton, in desiccated boats and piers, and in a pathetic powerlessness in the water itself: At low tide like this how sheer the water is. White crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches. Absorbing, rather than being absorbed, the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything, the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible. It is a sparse reality; what activity there is is not really purposeful. But the insinuations of decay and ugliness are mitigated by a caricatured South American gaiety: water sounds like marimba music, claves are heard on the “little ochre dredge,” and crazy pelicans dive into the water “unnecessarily hard” only to emerge empty-beaked, and “going off with humorous elbowings.” Like the exposed water, taking all into itself, like the protruding

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     () glaring marl, the sponge boats suggest the weakness and complacency of middle age: “decorated,” “bristling,” but also “frowsy,” and “with the obliging air of retrievers.” We return, at the end, to the first boats: Some of the little white boats are still piled up against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in, and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm, like torn-open, unanswered letters. The bight is littered with old correspondences. The domestic detail is hardly gratuitous; the sense of destructiveness, uselessness, and futility clinches the status of the poem’s observed images as delicate investigations of the self. The last image is triple, referring to the white, wasted boats, to what they suggest about one’s own past which one does not or cannot respond to, and to the larger correspondences in the universe noted by Charles Baudelaire who appeared somewhat offhandedly in line : “One can smell [the water in the bight] turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire / one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.” But Bishop is not Baudelaire, and the correspondences are only hinted at. In her understated way, she has dramatized as if unconsciously the “untidy activity” not merely of a dredge or a single natural scene but of a whole world which includes the speaker and her attempt to perceive or impose beauty around her. Ultimately, her efforts are one with those of the natives and the musicians, forces of cheerfulness in a world essentially alien: Click. Click. Goes the dredge, and brings up a dripping jawful of marl. All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful. The attempt to find comfort and identity in a world where one might not belong is one of Bishop’s central themes. In “The Bight,” “At the Fishhouses,” or the widely anthologized “The Fish,” a dramatic encounter with a scene or an individual leads the perceiving mind to a moral decision (“And I let the fish go”), or to the acceptance of the boundaries of self and world. “Poetry of encounter” has been used to describe Wordsworth’s oeuvre; the phrase is equally appropriate to Bishop’s. The encountered object might be, as in a recent poem, a grand north woods moose, met with late at night as the speaker rides in a bus from Nova Scotia to Boston. It come “out of / the impenetrable wood / and stands there, looms rather, / in the middle of the road,” waking the drowsing passengers. The encounter, however, turns out to be anything but apocalyptic or threatening; the moose, revealed as harmless,

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  female, and “awful plain,” is a stimulus for a shared experience: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel?) this sweet / sensation of joy?” The bus moves on. Separateness is the central fact of experience for both Wordsworth and Bishop. We might have all of us one human heart, but we recognize that unity only in rare moments and sometimes at great cost. At worst, experience is uncertain and the world hostile (as in the chilling “In the Waiting Room” which presents a child’s horrifying vision while she waits for her aunt at a dentist’s office); at best, a delicate “cheerful” victory may be won through imagination, as in “The Bight.” Like Wordsworth, Bishop proves the “pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude” (the phrase is from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads). It is no wonder, then, that she should be drawn to artifice, decor, and to the illusions of art and abstraction. Some of her finest poems are in a fantastic vein: poems of sleeping, dreaming, mythical creatures, fanciful invitations. Still others deliberately confuse or contrast the dynamics of experience with the expected certainties and elegance of created things: she is a poet of nature and pictures of nature, travel and guides to travel. In “Large Bad Picture” we forget that an oil, not an actual landscape, is being described; conversely, “Seascape,” which gives us, we think, the real thing, constantly alludes to something else—a Raphael cartoon, a Gothic manuscript—until reality itself begins to resemble imitation. “The Map,” which opens The Complete Poems, asks us to prefer the imaginative and delicate work of the cartographer to the flatter black-and-white of the historian. Our illusions should at least be colorful. Often the poems which deal with artifacts and stylized scenes proceed according to Abrams’ formula, which I applied to the more overtly naturalistic poems: an introduction to a thing, an investigation of its properties, a meditation in the form of a soliloquy or dialogue with some interlocutor, and a return to the object with deepened understanding. The most representative of these are “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “Over  Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” both poems of travel. Some critics, by no means hostile, have faulted Bishop for the apparent randomness of her details in certain poems: “her poems appear as if they were strung together,” or “reading her poems is like listening to highly imaginative bed-time stories and hearing everything but the plot; it is touching, disquieting, but queerly inconclusive.” The sense of omission and arbitrary ordering is, however, the strategy of a poet who is at the core both skeptical and hopeful. She distrusts reality, wishes to place faith in the redeeming grace and gracefulness of the imagination, but constantly comes up against the realization that artifice and experience are not polar opposites at all but rather twins which, though separate, are often identical.



     () Both “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “Over  Illustrations” deal with aesthetic experiences in the naturalistic mode of the Romantic lyric (similarly, there are deliberate confusions in all the dream poems, like “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “The Weed,” and “The Man-Moth”). They begin with moralized conclusions—“We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel,” “Thus should have been our travels: / serious, engravable”—before attending to the objects at hand. The openings recall the familiar assurance of the first lines in many of Wallace Stevens’s poems: “Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil. / The sovereign ghost”; “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice”; “The eye’s plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience”; “After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things.” The obvious original for poems of this sort is not Wordsworth, who more generally begins with exact detail, but Coleridge: either “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” starting with the resigned conclusion, “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,” or “Frost at Midnight,” which begins with the meteorological generalization: “The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind,” before considering the specifics of scene and memory, and then submitting at the end to “the secret ministry of frost.” “Thus should have been our travels: / serious, engravable.” The moral orotundity of the pronouncement is balanced by the conditional mood and regret for a missed opportunity in the past. The tension between the wisdom of hindsight and the ignorance of actual experience is the main issue in “Over  Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” Beginning and ending with scenes of Christian mystery in a book (a Bible? a guide to the world’s wonders?), the poem treats the nature of knowledge and revelation. For thirty-one lines we see scenes from an imaginary travelogue (Arabs and a holy site) as well as the book’s artistic details (a lunette, an engraved initial letter, “the lines the burin made” which are like “God’s spreading fingerprint”). But there is an unannounced transition, through the sleights of memory, to real travels, recollected details which are presented in a seemingly random order (but which follow an East-West alternating pattern); a final transition then returns us to the book and its own order. The middle section dramatizes not merely the excitement of ordinary travels (the speaker announces at the start that “the Seven Wonders of the World are tired / and a touch familiar”) but their resemblance to the longedfor foreignness of the sights and sites in the Book. There is pastoral loveliness (Newfoundland goats “leaping up the cliffs / among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs”), human and geological death (a dead man and a dead volcano in Mexico), historical decadence (Moroccan mosaics overgrown with beautiful poppies), gossip in England, prostitution in Marrakesh. But



  a climax to ordinary life comes when the traveler least expects it: she comes upon a holy Arab grave, now decayed, no longer holy, nor belonging, really, to the “poor prophet paynim who once lay there.” There is no chance for an epiphany: “In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.” Her recollection of the guide’s ironic attitude returns the speaker to the other travels, with an order to “open the book.” But the moments of ordinary experience, “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’ ” in memory and retelling, though seemingly opposed to the singularity, intensity, and brilliance of the engraved pictures, turn out to be quite similar. At the end of the poem, after one of her dazzling leaps from ordinary experience to vision, Bishop quietly demonstrates the resemblance between aesthetic experience and experience itself: . . . Why couldn’t we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? —the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, —and looked and looked our infant sight away. The poem returns to the wishfulness of its opening, but now the designs of art and the polysyndeton of experience become one as the acts of reading, experiencing, and imaging merge. “The Imaginary Iceberg” presents a comparable magical transition between levels of experience. The title suggests a mental creation, or a delusion, a metaphor for something else: the iceberg itself is everything which humanity and travel are not—static, cold, permanent—but Bishop hopefully personifies it as a sleeping giant with the potential for feeding on the surrounding field of ocean just as she had personified the essentially alien water in “At the Fishhouses.” Now, however, the iceberg is “imaginary,” and hence an occasion for meditation on artifice. In the poem’s second stanza, it merges into a dramatic scene as character, backdrop, and frozen action: This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for. The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles correct elliptics in the sky. This is a scene where he who treads the boards is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain is light enough to rise on finest ropes that airy twists of snow provide.



     () The wits of these white peaks spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares upon a shifting stage and stands and stares. The iceberg has been transformed into spectacle and agonist, pitting itself against the laws of optics, against the sun, against the stage on which it stands, and against the human audience which has turned its back on mundane reality in order to be rewarded by the artless rhetoric (as of Keats’s silent historian) of this strange performance. The stanza moves from the colloquial and witty pun of “give his eyes for” where the sailor, like the travelers in “Over  Illustrations,” is willing to look his infant sight away, to the last line where the immovable and undaunted iceberg “stares” back at the transfixed audience. Our final view of the iceberg is of selfish, self-ornamented glitter. It is both jeweler and jewel (“The iceberg cuts its facets from within”), pure solipsist, without even the saving grace of performing for us as it did in the second stanza. The poem has shown us the iceberg in two personified guises (giant, actor), and now as an inaccessible force, unknowable except by its possible side effects (“it . . . adorns / only itself, perhaps the snows / which so surprise us lying on the seas”). The iceberg stands apart in its own Shelleyan sublimity, withholding its secrets from us. It is a fiction, both imaginary and imaginative; the more acceptable human arena is the warmth of a southern climate where the ship now heads as the traveler bids an unsorrowful farewell to something she realizes she can never know. Like the depths of the soul, to which it is compared, the iceberg is experienced only metaphorically and momentarily, and then ultimately ignored; “Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.” The concluding “behoove” introduces Bishop’s characteristic skepticism. We are left with an uneasy feeling that we shall never know the iceberg itself and had better content ourselves with a personified or imagined equivalent of it. Do we “see” what is true or what is appropriate? Is the iceberg an imaginary illusion or an imagined construct offering glimpses of a deeper truth? Because Bishop never fully abandons her reliance on sensuous experience she can never affirm wholeheartedly a noumenal world. The opening sequence of three poems from Questions of Travel () presents in miniature this Romantic aspect of Bishop’s mind, its hunger for experience and movement, its occasional preference for the static perfections of art, its continual collapsing of usually separate categories into momentary and momentous unions. In “Arrival at Santos,” reality is a dull disappointment, an arrival after a sea journey which, like any other imaginative effort, makes “immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and



  complete comprehension / of both at last and immediately.” The imagination is starved and ravenous (and a trifle comic), but what it finally sees are “selfpitying mountains,” “frivolous greenery,” “uncertain palms.” Once the tourists have dealt with the “necessities” of ports, customs inspectors, and the like, they “leave Santos at once: we are driving to the interior,” to a world, we infer, which will answer their demands, where what is necessary will be replaced by what is beautiful, excessive, and revealing. “Brazil, January , ” is a poem of process, beginning, like “Tintern Abbey,” with a return in time and space; but it also treats the reality of the Brazilian jungle, the “interior” which was the goal at the end of the preceding poem, as an artificial Renaissance tapestry or painting. The workings of the imaginative eye include both natural scene and the “embroidered nature . . . tapestried landscape” of Sir Kenneth Clark’s epigraph. Nature appears to “us” like a painting, as it must have to the original invaders: “every square inch filling in with foliage,” “fresh as if just finished / and taken off the frame.” As perception becomes more precise (we overhear the poet correcting herself: “flowers, too, like giant water lilies / up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves”), it modulates into a vision of artifice. The second stanza presents an allegorical painting, with “big symbolic birds,” and in the foreground, the figures of Sin, “five sooty dragons near some massy rocks,” The tableau includes additional demonic details: first, the rocks “are threatened from underneath by moss / in lovely hell-green flames”; then even that questionable delicacy is replaced by four unmoving male lizards, lecherous, predatory, ready to attack the female whose “wicked tail” is “red as a red-hot wire.” The last detail provides a transition to the third stanza; from one metallic image we move to another which playfully tests the clichés of masculinity and conquest against human insignificance in a foreign jungle: “Just so the Christians, hard as nails / tiny as nails, and glinting, / in creaking armor, came and found it all, / not unfamiliar.” Comically out-of-place, and out-ofdate, the explorers seek some correspondence for the old dreams of wealth and empire, and like all Romantic dreamers and travelers, they fail to capture the essence of the vision which gleams tantalizingly before them. They are exactly like the lizards, predatory and sexually aroused. What joins their landscape with the one seen by the present tourist is the “artificial” guise in which it appears to both. Like Wordsworth’s boy in “Nutting,” the conquerors tear rapaciously into the “hanging fabric” of a landscape which refuses to be destroyed, their dream receding in front of them: each out to catch an Indian for himself— those maddening little women who kept calling,



     () calling to each other (or had the birds waked up!) and retreating, always retreating, behind it. The title poem in Questions of Travel is a philosophical center in Bishop’s work; it poses, methodically, the epistemological questions and alternatives which give most of her other nature poems their form and subject. It is a conversation, addressed to an unspecified companion, which begins with a present scene, expands in ever-widening movements to include “questions” about past experiences, and finally offers tentative justification for travel as an enterprise of the imagination. Throughout, the poem repeats the dissatisfactions of a greedy soul in want of both riches and comforts. The initial details of excess echo the frustrations of the Christian soldiers from the preceding poem. The self is smothered; there is no chance for rest amid “too many waterfalls,” “crowded streams,” “so many clouds.” The density of this world expands in time as well as space: clouds can become waterfalls before our eyes in the torpid humidity of a tropical rain forest. The imagery in this stanza discloses the central problem of the poem: if the clouds remain, smothering mountains and traveller, they will drain themselves into the waterfalls of the jungle. If, on the other hand, they wander on, we are left with skeletal reminders of death and decay: “But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, / the mountains look like hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled.” The possibilities for the clouds are like those for the individual: movement for self-preservation, which reveals the essential otherness or deadness of objects touched and perceived along the way, or a static surrendering of self to the objects at hand. Either a fertilization of the earth by suicidal release, or a preservation of identity through constant movement. The poem dramatizes a preference for the latter. One never fully understands the world, because one has chosen to save the self. The dialectic of choice continues in the second stanza; playing devil’s advocate, the speaker disingenuously and petulantly questions the reasons for activity at once childish, illogical, and perhaps amoral in its excessive aestheticism: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theaters?” Why, she asks, do we demand to experience the unknowable? Is the imagination like cake, or is it not (“Oh must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?”)? The rhetorical questions demand increasingly affirmative answers (which the solid meditation of the third stanza allows.) We “stare at some inexplicable old stonework” not because it is impenetrable but because it promises aesthetic gratification. It is “always delightful”; beauty is a replacement for truth. Dreams are not cake: they can be dreamt and some form of them possessed simultaneously. And there is, of course, always “room for one more folded sunset.”



  The genteel tone with which the third stanza begins (“But surely it would have been a pity”) builds steadily toward fuller affirmations: a pity, “not to have seen,” “not to have heard,” “not to have pondered,” “not to have studied,” not to have had the occasion for revelation. In reviewing, through memory, the past sights and scenes of travel, the poet duplicates an imaginative experience in her own mind, understanding only at the present moment the meaning of a vision in the past. The stanza moves from the comic delicacy and artificiality of “trees . . . like noble pantomimists, robed in pink,” and “disparate wooden clogs,” making music in a filling station, to a fat bird singing in “a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque,” above a “broken gasoline pump.” The peculiarity of the combinations incites the mind to ponder the “slightest connection” between footwear and wooden cages, to study history “in the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.” The final recollection is the most unexpected and the most revealing. Like the first stanza, the last part of the poem begins with a sense of oppressiveness followed by a release. After two hours of unrelenting rain, a golden silence breaks, during which the traveler is able to articulate the dimensions of her problem: “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home! Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one’s room! Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there. . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” Unglossed, unexplained, this notebook entry from the past is as strong an affirmation as Bishop will allow herself. Both the arbitrary assertiveness of “No,” and the ultimate question put an end to all questions by recognizing that the terms of the debate are unequal. There is no home where we can stay; the problem, therefore, is resolved. The traveler, like the cloud, moves on. The knowledge achieved by the speaker is of a curious sort. It is largely retrospective and is based on a present recollection of a past discovery. The paradigm for a poem of this kind is again found in Wordsworth. In “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” the poet reaches the fullest, empathetic identification with the flowers only in the final stanza, when his heart fills with joy and dances with the daffodills through the reimagings of memory. On a larger scale, the same phenomenon is dramatized throughout The Prelude, most vividly in the crossing of the Alps in Book VI where only after



     () fourteen years can the poet recognize the glory and accept the workings of the imagination. In both Wordsworth and Bishop, accurate natural description and the colloquial rhythms of ordinary experience are superseded by extraordinary moments of consciousness. Both poets seem, however, curiously impersonal, even in their moments of grandest revelation. Wordsworth’s famous matterof-factness rarely allows us, in the short poems at least, more than a glimpse into a unique inner world of feeling or turmoil; instead, we see deeply into the heart of feeling itself, but a feeling so depersonalized as to be universal. Likewise, Bishop shares a moment of vision with us, but never exposes the frayed nerve endings of some vulnerable ego, nor ever breaks through the decorum which her own proper but simple speech demands. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth admits that he has “at all times endeavoured to look steadily at [his] subject”; Bishop, too, in fixing her attention on the objects of encounter, never violates her own reticence. By looking steadily at their subjects, whether artifacts, landscapes, individuals, or memory itself, all the great Romantic nature poets affirm our shared humanity at special moments. In the new, uncollected “Poem,” Bishop develops a magical sense of oneness with a dead great-uncle, a painter whose “little painting” is paradoxically “about the size of an old-style dollar bill,” but “has never earned any money in its life.” The nakedness of the title and the financial language of the first stanza are, in retrospect, ironic: like the painting it deals with, the poem proves the value of art as an agency of human communion. The second stanza begins with an aesthetic identification: “It must be Nova Scotia,” and the details of the painting merge, as in “Large Bad Picture,” and “Seascape,” with the real, remembered landscape. As if entering, through memory, the world of the painting, the speaker lets slip a detail which does not rightly belong in the work itself: “the air is fresh and cold.” Some things confuse her: “A speck-like bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” Subsequently, recognition becomes more impassioned, as individual names are recalled, along with the obvious fact that “those particular geese and cows / are naturally before my time.” It is the confrontation with the object, then the scene it depicts, her memory of the same scene, “changed no doubt” (Wordsworth’s phrase) from what it was before and after, which lead to the final encounter with Uncle George himself: Our visions—coincided—“visions” is too serious a word—our looks, two looks: art “copying from life” and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed



  they’ve turned into each other. Which is which! Life and the memory of it so cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail —the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese. As in Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” the landscape is the medium of communication between a present speaker and an absent individual. Confined to his garden, Coleridge paints for us a scene which he can see only imaginatively and which leads him to a union with Charles Lamb, his surrogate in the midst of natural beauty: “. . . A delight / Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad / As I myself were there.” This recognition allows him, only then, to content himself with the beauties of his confining bower, to reach the moral truism of his meditation, that “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure,” and finally to bless the last rook (“a dim speck,” like Bishop’s bird) from the woods, seen by both himself and the now invisible Charles. For all the Romantics, from Coleridge and Wordsworth to Bishop herself, landscape, painted, remembered, or perceived, is a major means of human relationship and connection. It is “the little that we get for free,” and what we do with it determines whether it is enough.



EIGHT

X

“IN THE MASH OF THE UPPER AND NETHER” Ben Belitt’s Places ()

C

oming upon the work of any poet for the first time is like entering a foreign country: we must gradually acquire a sense of topography, customs, and, above all, language. Usually there are guides or signposts or cognates to ensure our not getting lost. A. R. Ammons greets us, in his land of inlets, swerves, and radiances, with some poems “small and easy,” and others, more capacious but equally hospitable. Robert Lowell often sticks to a recognizably public scenario so that history itself is our entry. Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich expose the daily events of the exemplary self, and we learn the terrain from the natives. But some borders are harder to get across than others, some languages more difficult, some landscapes more exotic or forbidding. Ben Belitt’s reputation has always been as a consciously hard poet: hard, first of all, in his concentration on rocks and stones, deserts and frozen scenes, jagged points, dense spaces, and light that illuminates and blinds at once. But he is hard, as well, in his “fascination” with “what’s difficult”—W. B. Yeats’s phrase borrowed by Howard Nemerov for his review of Belitt’s The Enemy Joy. What strikes the reader first on reading Belitt is the unspoken “modern” cast of his verse, a modernity now old-fashioned in comparison to the openness of Ammons, the colloquial diction of Nemerov, the vatic posturings of Allen Ginsberg, the austere minimalism of W. S. Merwin. Belitt belongs to a tradition whose major spokesmen, with the exception of Allen Tate, are



  gone: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and especially Hart Crane. As Robert Boyers observes, it is a tradition “in which the eccentric particular flourishes. . . . What we value . . . is the pleasure of making our way through the obliquities of syntax and imagery and diction.” Belitt’s language spotlights words like “obliquities,” as well as “equilibrist,” “antipodal,” “bicarbonation,” “crepitations,” “sensorium,” and “opalesence” and favors the polysyllabic and the abstract. He is one poet who has kept alive T. S. Eliot’s prophecy of : “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” To describe Belitt thus is to place him outside the predominant tendencies of English and American poetry and within a major Continental and South American one. It is no wonder, then, that much of his work has been the translation of the highly imagistic poetry of Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. As heir to the European symbolist tradition, Neruda is a master of ambiguous syntax which alone could prove treacherous to a would-be translator. He is master, too, of images with shifting connotations, moving “toward an impure poetry,” which focuses, he says, on “the world of objects at rest. . . . From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all harassed lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.” From “the confused impurity of the human condition,” Neruda and Belitt can fashion “a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon’s claw.” The Parnassian elegance and the rich “impure” density of Belitt’s own poetry are exemplified in his translations from Neruda. He gives us “fisherfolk” for pescadores, for example—other translators are content with “fishermen”—and “habitudes” instead of “customs” for costumbres. Although not quite periphrastic, Belitt’s diction prefers the uncommon, the graceful, the subtly various to the plain. For Neruda’s lines (in “Algunas Bestias”): “el guanaco fino como el oxigeno / en las anchas alturas pardas,” James Wright offers: the guanaco, thin as oxygen / in the wide peaks of cloud,” and Anthony Kerrigan, “the guanaco, rarefied as oxygen, / up among the cloudplains.” Belitt outdoes them both: “the guanaco, oxygen-fine / in the high places swarthy with distances.” A whole stanza evinces the same preferences. From the seventh poem in Alturas de Macchu Picchu (I quote from Neruda’s masterpiece because its landscape is one that Belitt remembers and evokes in his own poetry): Pero una permanencia de piedra y de palabra: la ciudad como un vaso se levantó en las manos



 ’  () de todos, vivos, muertos, callados, sostenidos de tanta muerte, un muro, de tanta vida un golpe de pétalos de piedra: la rosa permanente, la morada: este arrecife andino de colonias glaciales. Here is the translation of Nathaniel Tarn: And yet a permanence of stone and language upheld the city raised like a chalice in all those hands: live, dead and stilled, aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life, struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home. this reef on Andes, its glacial territories. And here is Belitt’s: We come upon permanence: the rock that abides and the word: the city upraised like a cup in our fingers, all hands together, the quick and the dead and the quietened: death’s plenitude holding us here, a bastion, the fullness of life like a blow falling, petals of flint and the perduring rose, abodes for the sojourner, a glacier for multitudes, breakwater in Andes. Belitt’s style is marked by the use of biblical cadences (“the rock that abides,” “the quick and the dead”), unlikely or unexpected English words (“quietened,” “perduring”), a chiseled formality appropriate to the ritualistic quest of Neruda’s poem, and a rhythmic preference for a basically anapestic line. This language is apposite to Belitt’s sense of place. Fully half of his poems depict a landscape or action within an external scene. But the peculiarities— indirectness, formality, elegance—of Belitt’s style as a translator have their respective analogues in his style as a landscaper. It is a useful simplification to propose two basic choices for poets who evoke or portray “nature”: they may present it as a setting for action and human contemplation, or as an end and subject in itself. Nature with man, or nature without man. The first is the major Western tradition, from Theocritan pastoral and its singing contests, laments and love struggles, to the Romantic lyric in which a dialogue between the poet and the data of the world affirms both the resilience of his mind and the tenacious hold of external things upon it. The second mode is a modern approximation of classical ekphrasis (the way of symbolists and imagists), and it leads to the “set-piece,” a precise description of a natural or artificial scene: A tapestry can be like a landscape for Elizabeth Bishop or



  Richard Wilbur, just as landscape may impress them with its prepared and artificial order. To paraphrase Williams, no ideas but in scenes. Belitt’s place-poems don’t quite belong in either group. He is not an epistemological poet in the school of the English Romantics, nor is he minutely descriptive. His predominant vein is neither narrative (there are few people in these poems), or meditative (little developed abstract thought), or simply lyric (the centrality of emotion). In his Midway interview he has said “without place, nothing,” and one of his admirers, picking up on this, asserts that “the newer poems are everywhere marked by the tangible presence of the spirit of place.” Neverthelss, the queerness of diction and syntax, and the frequent lack of clear transitions prevent the clear visualization of scenes or the identification of genii loci. Belitt defines his places by objects and by the connections, perceived by the astute poet, between objects. Translucence and opaqueness vie with one another in illuminating and shading the lands; his eccentric genii give partial glimpses of scenes like fast-moving photographic stills. There is a basic foreignness in his landscapes, even in the Vermont sequences which stress numbing and paralyzing stasis, the dark as well as the searing light of icy winters. Like Stevens, Belitt is most at home in lush tropics (Mexico for him, rather than Cuba) and in New England chills. But in all the landscapes, north or south, especially in the earlier poems, we get the feeling, to alter a mot of Gertrude Stein’s, that there is no “here” here. Belitt habitually distances the scenes, as in the opening line of “Papermill Graveyard”: “In that country of thresholds we move like vandals.” Or in the whole series of “Departures” from Wilderness Stair. In “Trade Wind: Key West,” Estéban looks from a window into the sea: Beyond, A splint of mummying tinder; scarabs, fans, Rocking the palmglare, leaf under leaf, like rain — — And there! there! That diminishing gust! In “Tourist and Turtle” we see “a green sojourn,” a delicate mixture of underwater flora and fauna, but at a distance, “there where the ebb gives phosphor, and begins / its tender overturn.” Even in the culminating poem, “Cricket Hill: Vermont,” when the traveler has been brought home at last “to country shingle under a panic cloud,” Belitt stresses separation: “There, the unsmiling providence of the year / Gathered the extravagant blazons of its loss.” The scenes are “there” and “that”; rarely “this” and “here.” One could easily find reasons for the remoteness of these places (as a child, the poet spent several years in an orphanage, and his poems are haunted by orphanings, deaths, relentless abandonings, a quest for roots). Still, at the



 ’  () heart of these “Departures” is the epigraph from St. Augustine affixed to “Cricket Hill: Vermont”: “Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place. The poet does not inspire a feeling that he belongs to a landscape; he is the antithesis of the Horatian figure who has held such appeal for Western literature of retirement. When W. H. Auden addresses “The Horatians,” we can see how Belitt does not fit in: “all of you share / a love for some particular / place and stretch of country.” In another poem, Belitt remarked, “one place becomes every place or no place.” “Siesta: Mexico / Vermont” begins with our eyes sinking into sleep, “like the pan of a scale,” as we are delivered “blindfold” from the surrounding Mexican landscape—from “predilections of ochre and pomegranate, / the cactus’s belly-hairs, the jeweler’s wedge / that widens the magnolia’s claw.” Then, having been transported “to our upper and nether senses,” . . . we hear the turning millstones at the center, the infinitesimal pumice in the flaw, curving the lenses, matching the incandescence of the edges, circling the precision of a moment like a bareback rider’s hoop burning with spikes and gasses: while the antipodal man turns heavily in mid-air, locking his foot-soles above and below, enters the horizon’s double ring, the tropic and the polar fires — an icicle in Vermont rayed like Guadalupe’s mantle, the frost on the machete’s edge — head downward and head upward, king of the playing cards, who sleeps in the slalom’s angle with the Mexican. The antipodal landscapes are not so important as the sleight of vision which makes one little room an everywhere. The way up and the way down are joined at the pair of “flying foot-soles,” just as the two figures, a New England skier and a Mexican bowed beneath his sombrero, are one. The transmutations and glittering facets of the fancying mind are at the center of Belitt’s fascination with nature. Nothing abides. “Departures” opens up a world of changes. “Vermont Quarry” announces that “Time was the emery’s”: geological erosion is a motif, as are the shifts of sea weather (“Trade Wind”), the impermanence



  of sand paintings, the lightening leap of the “Celebrated Jumping Frog,” the “uncommon sun” which “opens a collar of horn / and forces the thornpoint’s ascension” and blindingly but momentarily suspends separateness: The cactus’s paddle Unharmed in the holocaust, bone-white on tin: The wilderness mercy reversed in a brazen arena Scored with the cactus’s fibre; The fronds of unfailing maguey That take the mirage of the world and burnish all distance to one: This way, the sun-burst of thorn, that way, the thorn-burst of sun. (“Cactus Gardens: Oaxaca”) Even when not dazzled by brilliances of the sun (which often recall, in these poems, Dante as well as the more immediate ancestor Paul Valéry and his “maint diamant l’imperceptible écume”), these landscapes offer neither comfort nor permanence. In “Cricket Hill: Vermont,” the speaker, dry and unfeeling, comes to a valley where autumnal rain brings danger as well as grace: There, the unsmiling providence of the year Gathered the extravagant blazons of its loss: The apple’s defection, genius of vinegar, Struck on the whirling fly; the spine and the stalk, Axe-helve and trident, spoilure and overplus — And rose in the horn and richened its husk: and broke! And moved, in the cricket’s interval of pause, Bearing the blazing rondures of a season Toward those enormous countries of the center . . . This is a strange updating of “To Autumn.” It is ambivalent in tone (“unsmiling providence” must recall Pope’s “laughing Ceres,” and the latinate “extravagant” and “genius,” the richness of neoclassical diction) and in syntax (“providence” must be the subject of the simple verbs “rose,” “broke,” “moved”). The mountains welcome and embrace an “intruder” who finds there only momentary consolation and inspiration. The moment of arrival—a literal consummation, devoutly to be wished—is both a burial within the enormous countries of the center, and a sexual climax ending all in a universal embrace: And, in the wish’s kingdom of completion, Departure’s placename beckoned toward no-place



 ’  () And the expressive passion smiled upon its source: The nude head yielded, ringed in its clear halation; Prism and lash moved down; the kiss Fell and grew great, struck, and was universe. Frustration attends the anxious topographer of this land and the grammarian of its language. The Horatian middle style seems as foreign as a Tivoli farm. The same stylistic habits, however, are evident in far different poems, for opposed to the rootless searchings in this series are the static panoramas, like “Battle-Piece” in The Enemy Joy, which borrows and combines details from Uccello’s panels for the Battle of San Romano, or “Court of the Lions: Alhambra,” with the still “apparatus of the maze,” the elegance of Arabic verses engraved as design in the Moorish masonry. These objects become as congenial as places to a poet who, like Neruda, prefers nouns to verbs (and even in the dynamic or evanescent moments in “Departures” the verbs do less work than the concrete objects of description): The Hieratic lions of Alhambra Circle the court, like a map-maker’s rose, In a poodle-dog’s tonsure, ferocious, solicitous, Their muzzles, bared for the water-spout, Four times scored with a grimace, Their manes on their powerless shoulders, like a fleece, Taking the basin’s weight on their trumpery toes, Among cameras, talismans, Baedekers, legendary gesso. (“Court of the Lions: Alhambra”) Formal artifacts, substantial and nominative, give one kind of stasis in Belitt’s poetry: the ice of Vermont, another. The sequence of four poems, “The Cold,” from a longer series (“The Great Cold” in Nowhere but Light), begins with a place and a meteorological fact and continues in a timeless dream world as the poet fantasizes and extemporizes variations on the themes of chill, paralysis, and physical relinquishment. An ice-bound landscape parodies a tropical one, as the freeze becomes a frieze: the freeze at the heart of the world unfolding the bone of the fiddlehead icicle, cornucopias of maidenhair, asterisks of lichen and frost. The next two poems change the setting, to fifth-century Athens and the speaker’s own childhood, but they retain the same imagery—a frozen calligraphy, the unfolding of writing, growing, extending. All places are the



  same. The last poem admits that “the fiction of human direction . . . fails in a blind circumspection,” and the previous variations, diminutions, and still-lives open to a larger, all-inclusive geological frame. The imagery of deployment (fern and icicle), and of carbon and diamond, mercury rising and falling, combines as animation resumes, and the great Beast of Time is released: a presence that grapples a continent, the glacier that walks the moraine, the whole heft of mica and gravel, alluvial conch and detritus tilts halfway toward Asia, turns on its axle of coal, dragging its fish-bones and flint-heads, iron and bronze in the ferns. slips toward the pole on a pendulum’s back-swing. A heart-beat is heard in the rock: and the cold, the great cold, the geysers of oracular cold issue forth to the Pythoness. And a ratchet resumes in the clock. North or South, frozen or tropical, even in the poems of action (e.g., “On Quaking Bog” and “Block Island Crossing” in Nowhere but Light), the lands are composed primarily of “objects at rest.” ( In his introduction to his Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda, Belitt writes: “I have mounted my language on rhythms which enlist the resources of poetry in English as much as they do the poetry of Pablo Neruda: I have worked at objects.”) The major exception is “The Gorge,” a five-part sequence from Nowhere but Light. By developing a pattern for the landscape which is both literal and symbolic, and by articulating the changing responses of a thoughtful, humane persona, “The Gorge” radiantly combines both kinds of landscape poetry. The poem is a literal act of passage in the progress of the narrator from distanced spectator to passive and unwilling victim as he is ignominiously, but comically, carried out by Gayosso’s Ambulance Service from Cuernavaca to Mexico City. It is also a figurative ritual, since the sequence depends on Dante’s Commedia for imagery and focus. At all points, however, the Dantesque pattern emerges from the physically real landscape. The poems are both off-handedly “symbolic” (“Doré knew this overhang.” the poet writes, looking into the gorge) and faithful to the unique richness of the place. In the impurity of Cuernavaca, he finds an amplitude of imagery for a world; without losing sight of the given, he creates a modern “comedy” and works his way to a kind of salvation through an affirmation of the gorge’s many voices.



 ’  () Overlooking the gorge, the speaker’s eye descends “in the kingdoms of ordure,” “a naval of rubble,” to the Gehenna in the pit below: All that remains of the starved and appetitive life, acid and gall, moves down under feces and bandages, newsprint, a tin-can necropolis, cat-gas in the verminous cane, toward a darkness’s center where the rat mills its plenitude. With its allusions to both Dante and Eliot, Belitt’s garbage-heap is only part of the picture. Still distanced, the speaker turns to the opposite side, following “the gardens aloft over gardens”; although stationary himself, he sees [the] equilibrists toil on the slopes toward a purity, soiling the sheaths of a toe-hold, out of eye-shot. The first two poems follow the same pattern: a view down, and then one over, to the depths and to the heights, both remote. The jacaranda “is there and it thrives,” he exclaims in “The Gorge” (#). In “A View from the Gorge” (#), after making the model for Doré’s engraving into “a pin-ball commedia . . . The odds / are already well-known: electric displays for the winners, / and the damned circling down toward the hammers,” he is held by “the purgatorial moment, seen small on the opposite side,” where “quicklime has dazzled the glass of the greenhouses.” Redemption, of land and soul, is now the exclusive province of the gardeners, cutting and arranging, themselves toiling on the precarious slopes. They are poised, and hover like dragonflies or seeds, and, appropriate to the Dantesque topography, they are “penitential, half mantis, half angel, on a causeway of manna and boulders.” Downward he sees “the generations of Rahab, the fires and basalt of Dante, the bones / of the beast of the Apocalypse,” but across the gardeners are balanced, covering the slopes with the fruit of their daily labors, working happily like Dante’s burning and rejoicing Purgatorial penitents, “because sun shines exceedingly there / and the spirit is willing.” It is part of the charm of this sequence that it does not push its Dantesque parallel any further than the slopes of Purgatory. Belitt is both too secular, delighting in the Hopkinsesque dappledness of the things of this world, and too modest to see into divine and total Paradisal light. In the center of the sequence, symbolizing grace and awkwardness, both affirmative and silent, is the loco-bird, a Mexican grackle of sorts, beaded and enamelled, crow-black and floridly designed, “the bird of the abjectly ridiculous,”



  whose very presence transforms the poem from commedia to comedy and undoes the speaker’s “need / for the marvellous, [his] awe / at the slant and equivocal.” The bird is the most active creature in this landscape, perhaps in all of Belitt’s landscapes—he flies, tilts, and takes in as a prize what he sees: “two quicksilver drops on the cusp of a fern, and a turd.” “Unawed by obliquity,” he shakes his beads in the tree, and then takes off, defying gravity, metaphysics and solemnity: . . . all’s one to him: a descent in a maelstrom or a herringbone climb up a Matterhorn — the loco-bird swivels his rudders, steadies his keel, and skates off, chaplinesque, on a rink, in the steerage, a spa, an alarm-clock, a lady’s emporium, a steam-bath with the peerage: he knows how it feels to look into the billy and badge of the actual and veer out of range on his wheels without ruffling his daily sensorium. Such dizzying and fanciful motion is unusual in Belitts’s poetry, especially in comparison with the subdued elegance of the purgatorial gardners in Parts  and  and the florists of Part  (“Flower Market”). The loco-bird is unique and complex. Like his movements, “chaplinesque” in their peculiar grace, his song—such as it is—a “gratified scream,” is both abrasive and comic: . . . a sound like a child’s smutty fingertip rubbing the damp of a shaving-glass; or a glass-cutter’s wheel over glass; whistles and burps; an acetylene blast; and the banging of safe-cracker’s tools in an empty museum. Belitt refrains from attaching too much symbolic weight to his bird; such value would destroy its flightly delicacy, and neither the structure of the poem nor the landscape within could support such magnified affirmation at this point. The voice of the gorge, into which all things fall and echo, repeats “The devil walks to and fro in the world, the devil . . .” but to this, the poet ends by reminding us, “the bird in the tulipan tree has no answers.” Answers are articulable only by humans, and since the poet is in some way working towards a salvation for himself, the symbolic purport of sounds and images must finally be translated into human equivalents. The fourth poem, “Flower Market,” prepares us for the speaker’s entry into the action as more than mere spectator of distant vistas or audience for audacious theatrics. Now he is a painter of an ominous Earthly Paradise



 ’  () where the wreaths of multicolored, deliciously named flowers form a “funeral wheel,” “a bandage of lilies,” a perishing forest of stems,” which ultimately slope, “bleeding all color” into the omnivorous cut in the gorge. The poem ends with nightfall, the promise of floral sweetness having been tainted by disease and damage: . . . Water-boys wilt in the stalls. The shutter slams down for the shopkeeper’s lock. And night festers. We are ready for disaster, spiritual or physical, personal or astronomical. Appropriately, then, the last poem, “‘Gayosso’s Ambulance Service: Emergency,” details a movement downward to darkness, the speaker laid out on a stretcher, transported “feet last” from Cuernavaca to Mexico City under a nocturnal sky: “The gorges turned backwards, / the city sloped under my shoulders in a rocket-burst / starring the Valley of Mexico.” Swathed in an “onion of blankets,” the speaker fixes on “the idea of non-being,” the desolation of hospital sterility, and his own end. But with the same sort of surprise offered by the loco-bird as a visionary of quicksilver and turds, and precisely because of the serio-comic tone in which the bird responds, or not, to the world, Belitt makes his poem into both a dark night of the soul and a reminiscence of silent film comedies. At the moment of greatest danger, when the speaker exclaims “Urgent!” to himself, a stiller voice replies “Urgent?” and the mind flies to an inner landscape where Harold Lloyd, “the tortoise-shelled / stranger brilliant with nausea, caught / on the clock-face . . . knows better.” All personal danger is like the mock-danger of film comedies or melodramas (“one slips / toward the tooth of the buzz-saw”); by comparing his situation with these more hysterical and dangerous, though confected, ones, the speaker successfully calms himself, as “the scene recomposes itself.” The recomposed scene is the physical landscape, the gorge, retrieved by the speaker’s eye as he comes out of his momentary dream; it is also a setting for a recomposed self which now puts things in their proper perspective, visually and emotionally. Both the exaggerated urgency of his own dilemma and the extreme theatrical danger of the comedian have been replaced by an expansiveness of understanding. The generalizing “one endures the precarious” leads to the realization that “emergency” and danger are constant and therefore not extraordinary, just as the sound of Gayosso’s “emergency” siren is always to be heard, and always to be destroyed, “like a carpenter’s bubble.” Picking up the earlier image of the foot-sure gardeners on the mountains, the speaker is temporarily startled: “the equilibrist falters, / shocked by his personal hazard.” At least now he is a participant, not an aesthete. hors de combat.



  But this is not full knowledge, and the poem rounds to its end by returning to the impurity of the gorge, now viewed as the rich ambivalence of the world itself. We leave behind the possibility for redemption in Paradise, as Belitt concludes by affirming this world as (in Wordsworth’s line) “the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all”: But another sound lives in the Gorge — an equivocal thrashing of bamboo and manure and papyrus, neither pure nor impure: the spirit that works in the middle stark under the sun-stone, in the mash of the upper and nether. And heard as the Gorge-Dweller hears it, the serpent’s tail beating the shell, that unriddles its birth in the wet and the dark And says: it is well. It is well. From “equilibrist” to “equivocal,” from “Urgent!” “Urgent?” to “it is well. It is well, “The Gorge” reveals at last what many of Belitt’s earlier poems hinted at: that the spirit of place, as it appears to him, exists “in the mash of the upper and nether,” between the purifying slopes and the offal of the ravine. Ten years ago, Belitt looked back on two of his early poems from The Five-Fold Mesh and saw two movements: “the startling increase in specificity and power which flows from the total commitment to ‘place’—specificity of rhythm, form, language, and self-knowledge, as well as particulars of the American scene; and the other, the deepening of the imaginative occasion by a contradictory shift from the theme of place to the theme of displacement.” In poems like “Departures,” with their refusal to accommodate us to a scene, or “The Cold,” which have placement but no specific scene at all, he wavered between the two possibilities. In “The Gorge,” there is adherence to place without the stasis of artifact; the sequence embodies one of Belitt’s hopes for American poetry: “It is this engagement of curiosity with the actual—to the point at which, in Hopkins’ words, ‘whatever you look hard at, seems to look back at you’—that I find crucial to the poetry of place and the criteria of ‘American’ song.” Looking hard at the actual and recognizing the dynamic potential on an impure world, moving from displacement toward stationing, Belitt never allows himself to be seduced into total contentment or his scenes to become excessively comforting. While the gorge becomes an image of a world, it never loses its uniqueness. In accepting it, the poet accepts, as well, Stevens’ claim that “it is only enough to live incessantly in change.”



NINE

X

“ALL THE WORLD’S PLENTY, ALL THE BRAZEN PARTICULARS”  On Ben Belitt “Not feelings, but things I had felt.” —,  DER NEUEN GEDICHTE

L

et me come at my subject from afar, “indirectly,” to use Eliot’s famous word. We cannot confront Ben Belitt head-on, precisely because he occupies an opaque space in the now receding vistas of modernism. Let me apply Rilke’s summary of his New Poems to Belitt’s new collection. It works. Frank Kermode pointed out thirty years ago that the “modern” poets used the “image” as a hinge between the things of the sensible world and those invisible to mortal sight. Modernism shunned, or at least distrusted, the Romantic reliance on human feeling that provided Wordsworth and all subsequent autobiographical poets with a basis for self-exploration, whether in life or in writing. “No ideas but in things,” proclaimed Williams; “direct treatment of the thing,” urged Pound. All vision was mediated. Poets were to stop feeling feelings, perhaps, in exchange for feeling things. And, in so doing, they were enjoined to make their poetry, like their feelings, hard. Eliot talked about “dislocat[ing]” language into meaning; later on, R. P. Blackmur set as the highest good “language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.” Feeling things appealed naturally to poets like Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Rilke, for whom divinity exists immanently within a physical world.



  (A democrat like Whitman uses things as part of a political program of annunciation.) By centering meaning on an icon, by infusing a “thing” with symbolic spirit, the moderns objectified their own feelings, holding them, and their readers as well, at arm’s length. Younger poets, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, have drawn their readers in, often with nothing in the way of an intervening filter for the sake of politeness; contemporary egos display their wounds and neuroses with proud openness. By comparison, the case of Ben Belitt, a “neglected master” according to his sometime colleague Howard Nemerov, comes down finally to what has happened to Kermode’s “romantic image” in American poetry during the past half-century. Belitt is a throwback to the sterner paradigms of high modernism; along with Theodore Weiss he is among the last members of the generation that came of age during the reign of Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane, and his insistence on “hardness” during a career that has lasted for fifty years owes a great deal to those earlier masters. “Hardness” has always meant for Belitt the linguistic difficulties and dislocations of modernism, which has come in for some harsh criticism lately, from critics on the right as well as the left; his hardness also derives from a reticent temperament, easily mistakable for coldness or stoicism, that everywhere informs his poetry. He has inherited the verbal playfulness of Auden, going in for archaism and such difficult specks of fluff as “farthingale” and “deckle” (from “March Willows,” a new poem). But he has always preferred a polysyllabic diction: Scanning the pages of this new edition we come upon words that are arcane but precise: “acidulous” (how many poets would use this more than once in one hundred pages?), “haruspices,” “terebinth,” “liana,” “meniscus,” “cacique,” “scoriae,” “maguey,” and those key terms that resound like leitmotifs, “equivocal” and “equilibrist,” the second virtually a counter to the first. In an age of dour feelings as well as diction, Belitt may seem like a throwback to early Stevens, fanciful and arch, as if romping through an urban carnival: Summer deploys upon the brims of hats— Turns upon twill; affirms with colored drinks A mimic solstice poised in flying inks In Babylons of ribbons and cravats. (from “Battery Park: High Noon”) The difficulties of this stanza differ from those of other poets. Pound and Eliot demand of their readers considerable learning; John Ashbery, to cite the contemporary poet most prominent for opacities, mixes levels of diction with a cavalier disregard for pronouns, syntax, and other forms of connection. But Belitt, as demonstrated above, is most like Stevens in trying “to make



“  ’ ,    ” () the visible a little hard to see.” The scene, all sunlight and shadows, suggests ticker-tape and streamers (“ribbons”) as well as costumes, airplane advertisements (“flying inks”) as well as clouds. Like the titular carpenter in the new poem “Annunciation to Joseph,” Belitt could say of himself, “I am moved by no journeyman thing,” preferring the ornate, the recondite, and the artificial to the plain, the commonplace, and the natural. The opening stanza of one of the dozen new poems in the collection shows that Belitt has not changed his poetic habits in the fifty years since “Battery Park: High Noon”: The rock, in the salt meander, the bison-back nuzzling the sea-holly in a drench of coppery bubbles, chain mail, saliva, repeating a sponge’s disguises, speaks for the animal mystery. (from “This Rock”) “The rock . . . speaks for the animal mystery”: Already two other mysteries have been hinted at, one syntactic, the other perceptual. The subject and verb are divided by three and one-half lines that metaphorically demonstrate the truth of the central proposition that things often turn out to be different from how they first appear. As so often happens in Belitt’s poems, this one explores the mysterious fact that things may resemble, or actually change into, one another, that the material and spiritual worlds comfortably cohabit one space. The rock itself seems to become an animal substance, at first buffalo-like (“bison-back”), then semi-human in its “chain mail” and “saliva,” and placed in a world where even the vegetation may imitate animal life (“repeating a sponge’s disguises”). Metamorphosis takes place before our eyes, as the poet strings together a series of unlikely transformations that enliven a stolid rock. Two significant earlier poems, “Xerox” and “The Orange Tree,” handle the matter of what Belitt calls “the world’s doubleness” (“Block Island”) slightly differently. In “Xerox,” a “singular,” “seminal,” or “original” man lies down on the glass of the machine in order to reproduce himself, all the while asking the questions that a person without siblings or children, or an artist after Walter Benjamin, might ask of himself, his life, and his work: “What must it be, to be many?” Mechanical reproduction is a modern equivalent of parthenogenesis, as the man on the glass learns when he reproduces himself, or is reproduced by the copier: And all that was lonely, essential, unique as a fingerprint, is doubled. Substance and essence,



  the mirror and the figure that printed the mirror, the deluge that blackened creation and the hovering pigeon with the leaf ’s taste in its beak are joined. The invisible sleeper is troubled: What does it mean to be legion? he cries in the hell of copied. To such questions the Adamic solitary offers the consolation of answers that themselves ask us to consider the parallel states of Shakespearian figures and Dantean ones: Forgive our duplicity. We are human and heterogeneous. Give us our imitations! Heart copies heart with a valentine’s arrows and laces. The Athenian dream and the adulterers paired in the storm tell us the mirrors are misted. The whole of our art is to double our witness, and wait. And the original man on the plate stands and steps down, unassisted. There is no joy in such parenting. The original figure remains “unassisted” and presumably unpartnered by any of his new progeny. And, as often in a Belitt poem, the ending undoes our earlier expectations. The voice that speaks the italicized apology above is itself a double one, neither wholly that of the original man nor that of his children. Even the doubled “and” s (“and wait. And the original man”) enact, sonically, the confusions that exist between the original and his company. Indeed, the antecedent lines have already abetted this issue: . . . The agonist prints its convulsion. Like turns to like, while the seminal man on the glass stares at his semblance and calls from the pit of the ink: This seminal man has now rendered himself into his own progeny: Identity, having once been doubled, can no longer be singular. “Turns” means, of course, both “turns into” and “turns to confront,” while the “seminal man” is equally at home now on the glass, where he began, and in the pit of the ink, where he has ended up. To any reader familiar with Belitt’s life, “Xerox” must also be read in parts as its author’s autobiography. He is a poet who has made a career out of solitude. As early as The Five-Fold Mesh () he was obsessed with the end of childhood, which in his case coincided with the death of his father and with what he referred to, in a  interview, as “a very important and extensive, perhaps traumatic, period of [his] childhood in an orphanage



“  ’ ,    ” () in Upper Manhattan, [where] possessions were absolutely minimal, with a minimal place for them: rather like a solider in a barracks living out of a footlocker.” Aloneness and materialism are solid companions. An original loss and the fear of further loss combine to give Belitt’s work the stubborn American reliance on things that Pound, Williams, & Company advised. Such amassings derive from deprivation: In a youthful poem, he remarks that “the quieter god comes early to the childhood / That is unhappy,” and in “The Lightning-Rod Man,” a later one, he spells out a fear that he constantly repeats: A thunderstorm has short-circuited the electricity, and a lightning bolt has ripped through the house: And worked in that room: a methodical killer smelling of flint and burnt almond, cotton-gloved like a safe-cracker, cutting wires, picking tumblers, moving over my letters, the things I had hoarded or loved: Old pesos. Indian pennies. Loose change in a jar from Gibraltar. Postcards from Pompeii in unplaceable reds; a cosmetic of garlands and winged amorini in blood-rust and ashes, to prefigure the strange and erotic where the bolt worked before. Still tracking copper, it rode in the wiring like punk, exploded in plaster and rubble, blackened a voice in the radio tube on its way to a fortunate answer, and spelled out in Nineveh: trouble! Belitt’s poetry focuses on things, not people, and specifically on the accumulations (those hoardings of love) that seem to offer protection against the kind of abandonment that tormented the child who, like Keats, has been subsequently pressing his face against the sweetshop window. Possessions may offer a cold comfort, because they are obviously mutable, but Belitt lists them obsessively, as if chanting an ancient charm for their protection as well as his own. In “The Orphaning,” he cries out “Father! / and forg[a]ve him his dying, who knew not what he did,” but his forgiveness seems to have encouraged him to take on the things of this world rather than its sins. The fact of deprivation and the fear of its repetition make Belitt’s poetry into a ritual of restitution. Listing is an act of reparation. In his poems, as in his house, we find the compensatory gestures of a man who can never forget his earlier life in the barracks. Belitt’s inventive wit and elusive conjectures seldom allow his readers to feel happy about their place in the world. Even that other, and more hopeful, poem of the world’s doubleness, “The Orange Tree,” itself a response to Yeats’s and Rilke’s great tree-poems, contains its own mitigating gestures. It



  opens with four stanzas of proliferating richness, deferring its main predicate even more desperately than “This Rock” does: To be intact and unseen, like the orange’s scent in the orange tree: a pod of aroma on the orange’s ogive of green or a phosphorous voice in the storm of the forge and the hammer: to climb up a ladder of leaven and salt, and work in the lump of the mass, upward and down in the volatile oils of a wilderness heaven: to sleep, like the karat, in the void of the jeweler’s glass, yet strike with the weight of the diamond— perhaps that is to live in the spirit! Belitt allows himself only the skeptic’s partial assurance that perhaps the life of the spirit combines the joint conditions of being, climbing, and sleeping. After the strenuous oppositions in the first fifteen lines—between potentiality and actuality, intactness and invisibility, ascent and descent, wilderness and heaven, tranquility and striking, void and weight—Belitt’s affirmation sounds a troubled, agnostic note. The stanzas work themselves up through infinitives and aggresively rich imagery (“ogive,” “phosphorous,” “karat,” “diamond”) only to subside into mere possibility. The expansive build-up of a sentence from phrases divided by colons seems to compensate for a spiritual dearth, just as the rhythm develops a nervous rubato. If one considers how much more certain a comparable statement might be, in both diction and rhythm, one is struck by the tentativeness of Belitt’s reduced faith: Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. I quote the famous lines from Book  of The Prelude to show that something has happened between Wordsworth’s capacious confidence of  and



“  ’ ,    ” () Belitt’s more subdued, theoretical questioning of the very possibilities of spiritual harmony. Partly, of course, naked faith has been undermined by the failure of religion and perhaps of all unmediated vision in the twentieth century. Likewise, no poet burdened with the techniques of the symbolists (like García Lorca and Neruda, whom Belitt has translated, as well as Rilke and Valéry, whom he has absorbed) would allow himself the orotund grandeur of Wordsworth’s abstractions without a point of reference within the visible world. Such is the inevitable outcome of the merging of American materialism with the orthodoxies of modernism. Belitt has both an imagist’s concern for the abundant things of the world and a symbolist’s awareness of invisibility and spiritual presence. His double response is often uneasy. A Rilkean remark at the beginning of the second part of “Double Poem of the World’s Burning” sums up Belitt’s instinct: “The invisible life that sleeps in the grossness of things / and feeds on the bulk of the world.” Such a life both inhabits the common material world and also destroys it from within. The menacing “feeds” does double duty. Belitt continues to observe the orange tree, attending to its organic growth. He has structured his poem as a presentation of “openings,” but now he reduces them through acts of division, paring, and elimination: So the orange tree waits on its stump as the wood of its armature multiplies: first, the branch, then the twig in the thicket of leafage, then the sunburst of white in the leaves, the odor’s epiphany. All burns with a mineral heat, all hones an invisible edge of the noonday, while the orange’s scent speaks from the tree in the tree to declare what the holocaust meant: to be minimal, minimal: to diminish excess; to pare it as a child pares an orange, moving the knife through the peel in a spiral’s unbroken descent, till only the orange’s sweat, a bead of acidulous essence, divides the rind from the steel: perhaps that is to live in the spirit. The poem builds and gives, and then diminishes and takes away. It suggests the pithy paradox that spirit and flesh coincide but also reduce to nothingness. Paring down is equivalent to reaching an essence, but at the end there is no orange left: Dissection, as Wordsworth long ago observed, is murderous. Belitt the sensualist is everywhere at war with Belitt the stoic; the mitigations of perhaps attend even his most glorious confidences.



  The possibilities of a life “in the spirit” are doubly compromised: first by the differences between the two halves of the poem, and next by the very lack of certainty that always seems to inhibit him from reaching spiritual conclusions. The final line above repeats the poem’s central hypothesis, and it also breaks the frame of the poem’s four-line stanzas. This is a characteristic maneuver of Belitt’s and it is related to both the shape of his poems and his habits of perceiving the world. Typically, a Belitt poem moves from an explosive listing of things to lucid statement. In “The Orange Tree,” multiplication precedes disappearance; the visible is proffered and then replaced by the invisible; and, more important, lengthy sentences give way to short, naked utterances. We can trace the same path, from fullness to emptiness, from complexity to simplicity, from observation to action, in almost all the dozen new poems in possessions, which end with straightforward sentences that are often isolated spatially from what precedes them and that uniformly come as a sign of well-earned closure. Here, for example, is the end of a superb new poem, “Brutto Tempo: Bellagio,” about a day in the Italian Alps: . . . But here in the pit, nothing prodigious acknowledges the workings of providence. There is only Gina, come down from the Villa, her outrageous umbrella striped like a medicine ball for the balancing act of a poodle, to toil in the clottings of fog and the world’s suppuration, bearing her paint box, a scrap of stretched canvas, an improbable easel—a vulnerable mote in the wind and the void. Her brush’s point churns in a plasm of oil, ascending, descending, preparing a lane to the passes till the wet of the canvas is covered and the color is total. Peak after peak reassembles. Her alpenstock strikes for the palette’s horizon and holds firm on the glazes and she waves back to us from the summit. This poem is like the second take of a scene that Belitt looked at first in Mexico (“The Gorge”) where he also stood across from a mountain, looking up to the summit and down into the pit, and detected a Dantean accumulation



“  ’ ,    ” () of garbage and purgation. Here at Lake Como the mist has occluded both vision and Vision, however, and “the volatile life / of the imminent—selfloss and self-manifestation— / wrestle like opposite presences.” As in “The Orange Tree,” Belitt is uncertain whether invisibility means deprivation or the realms of the spirit, so he turns, in the lines above, to a real, but distant, human figure, whom he locates as a model (even though drawn with a small dose of affectionate humor) for the artist’s enterprise of struggle and ascent. Belitt’s rhythms uphold the human drama he has staged for us. He has always been drawn obsessively to triplets—dactyls or anapests depending on how you place them in a line—and phrase after phrase, even line after line, come at us in a compulsively triple rhythm. (Compare his translations from Spanish poetry with those of other Americans to see how this preference both derives from his originals and reappears in his versions of them.) A single line, even with a central caesura, may sound perfectly dactyllic—“Lórca, Nerúda, Siquéiros; Mótherwell cútting acídulous prísms”—and then continue in the same fashion: “in métals and piércing the wálls with a pópe’s fenestrátions” (“Possessions”). Similarly, in the ending of “Brutto Tempo: Bellagio” we hear a resolute alternation of anapests (“in the pít”) and dactyls (“nóthing prodígious acknówledges,” “wórkings of próvidence”), even strings of dactyls: “[her out]rágeous umbrélla / / stríped like a médicine báll / for the bálancing ácts of a póodle.” We become so accustomed to triplets, even including the internal pauses, hesitations, and reversals, that the end of the poem reaches closure with an appropriate shock: We see Gina as both painter and climber, becoming part of the picture she is in the act of composing. The spondaic “hólds fírm” momentarily halts our progress, which then proceeds through the more normative sound of “on the glázes,” before melting into the relative anarchy of the last line: The opening monosyllables are somewhat harder to hear than what follows them. Is “back to us” a dactyl? or do we want to stress the separation between her and us (“back to us”)? in which case the poem subsides into its wonted pattern. The interruption jars the meter, legitimately I’d say, since the poem ends with a greeting from a separate sphere by a woman who has herself been somehow absorbed into art and distance. The single last line testifies to the hard-won simplicity of human greeting only after struggle, and it reminds us, too, that Belitt usually holds the promise of such communion at arm’s length. Greetings and endings somehow stand apart from the main body—of life, of poetry—as if Belitt again cannot permit himself more than a hint of affirmation. Belitt has worked this way from virtually the start of his long career. “There is nowhere but light” stands single at the end of the earlier poem



  “Memorial Hospital: Outpatient” () and then reappears as the title of his  volume. Epigrammatic wit becomes stronger by virtue of succeeding Belitt’s itemized lists; statement comes as a hard-won climax (as well as something of an asymmetrical afterthought, as above) and, once earned, it is not easy to let go of. Four of the six sections of Belitt’s greatest long work, “Block Island: After The Tempest,” a dizzying series of correspondences between Shakespeare’s imagined world and its symbolic equivalents on an Atlantic island, end this way. So does “The Guanajuato Mummies,” which moves from the chilling indoor scene in which the famous mummies are displayed to a richly observed Mexican marketplace outdoors, and which ends after all the enumerations and tropes of plenitude, with simple sentences, simple action, and simple diction: We come out into sunlight, at last. We see cut watermelons, papaya, pyramidal oranges, gelatinous diamonds where the pineapple sweetens its center in the hive’s core. We are wracked with the pangs of our fasting. We are alive. The children approach us with sugary ribbons: “A mummy, señor? ” And they offer us candy. Mocking, solicitous, the children insist. The children wait to be paid. We bite through the skulls in the cellophane wrappers. We burn in the sunlight, afraid. This human encounter repeats and defuses the whole experience of seeing the garish mummies. All places rich, redolent, and inexhaustible appeal to the sensualist in Belitt, who has fashioned a poetic language and syntax worthy of them. But the orphan in him remains skeptical, and therefore follows the sensualist’s gluttony with two corrective steps backward, as if expiating the imagination’s Mardi Gras with an Ash Wednesday of plain speaking. He continually retreats from his own riotous, kaleidoscopic productions, shamed by his self-indulgence. At the age of seventy-six, Belitt has finally given free rein to an understandable bitterness at the world’s neglect. He has had his devoted partisans— Calvin Bedient, Hugh Kenner, Harold Bloom, in addition to Nemerov—but they have been few. One new poem, “Graffiti,” represents the imagined revenge of an orphan, or of anyone who has smarted beneath indifference. (Not for nothing did Belitt identify, in The Double Witness, his last volume, with Keats and Machado, the first an orphan never fully recognized during



“  ’ ,    ” () life, the second an exile.) In a subterranean scene he performs an act of creation and destruction with childish stealth and criminal bravado: Spraygun in hand, in the tomb-robber’s darkness, I dreamed of my doubled initials: a jungle liana of loops in a gangster’s cartouche, a beanstalk of curlicues, calligrams, cave scribbles branching flintily out to the roof like smoke from a pistol. I tasted the charge of the rails to the roots of my nostrils, and the tunnels erupted in a hashish explosion. There were the platforms and carriages, the time-lapse ascents on the pods for a giant, branching over and under: the reds and the greens of a tapeworm cartography stinting the windows with a knifegrinder’s emery hiss, the guillotines venting their closures and human discharges, the placenames, the stations . . . So I struck with the felt of my marker. I struck. I struck at the windows. I struck under the bulbs through the flying chromes and aluminum with the mark of my lifetime’s rejections till all turned to neon. “B over B” or simply “I”—he writes and reads his initials, inscriptions of identity and revenge, while in a state of imagined persecution. His anger explodes in the repeated “struck”s that suggest either a child’s petulant defiance or an adult’s phallic lashing out against hostile authority, or both. The garish nightmare ends with his escape from the police and the subway officials (the critics?), and with his triumphant recreation of a wholeness in which he may place himself at last and find the solace of belonging: That way, the signs could be carved into the domes of the blinded macadam, the caravans, seared with my brand, drink deep at the railyards in the iron savannahs, the Alexandrian libraries re-arise from the flames and the whole of the canon be one. I read this ending as Belitt’s fiery equivalent to the end of “Kubla Khan,” another poem that half-hopefully restores the peripheral and neglected poet to a central position. As usual, the baroque syntax and the computation of lists give way to a quiet conclusion, but now the orphan is demanding more



  forcefully than ever before the satisfactions of full recognition. The claim to greatness is more powerful for coming late. In the great tile poem of this volume Belitt has balanced his somewhat lurid thoughts of restitution with his spiritual questioning of material things and their symbolic worth. Pairing an imagined awakening of the dead King Tutankhamen in a tomb violated by grave robbers (another underground scene!) with an enumeration, perhaps his last one, of his own possessions in his Bennington house, he asks (and forces us to ask) what meaning or comfort “possessions” can finally offer us. “All that pharaonic junk” in the boy-king’s rumpus room turns out to have been more perishable than the god himself, who wakes with a querulous wonderment that asks human as well as divine questions: “If nothing has followed us there, if nothing has stirred in the desert but some nondescript intruder, if an Englishman from Cairo with a writ for our arrest lays violent hands on a pharoah’s portion, after the long hiatus— if nothing is ever reborn, what have we ever possessed?” What seemed to the young boy “the inviolable iconography of transcendence” is distinctly violable and, therefore, perhaps unreadable as well as final. Possessions and their possessors alike may become “dispossessed.” Safety abides nowhere. A typical string of subordinate clauses (“if . . . if . . . if ”) ends now with a touching question that invites us to infer two equally terrifying answers: “nothing” and “only that which we can name.” Belitt once quoted approvingly the dictum of Antonio Machado, “the stubborn heterogeneity of things [is] the special province of poetry,” and “Possessions,” like all of Belitt’s major poems, presents both the intractability and the ephemerality of the material world. He has borrowed the title of his entire volume from the title of a poem by Hart Crane. Now, Belitt takes a survey of a frozen Vermont landscape, and he sees in the surrounding ice “a midrash of hieroglyphs.” Like many Jewish poets who are aware of their status as am hasefer (the people of the book), Belitt has always construed nature as a written text—the word hieroglyph first appeared in his early poem “Charwoman:  Vesey Street”—and attempted to read internal scenes as well. But at this point he casts a cold eye on his domestic interior. Hierophant and interpreter of transcendent signifiers (or so he hopes), Belitt is also sufficiently agnostic neither to affirm nor to disbelieve. This last catalogue poem has neither the bitterness of some of his earlier ones (in the sequence “The Orphaning” he addresses his blind and dying mother and refers to “all that forces your spirit / to sweat in the flint and the trash of the earth like a slave”)



“  ’ ,    ” () nor the aesthetic affirmation that he permits himself in “Court of the Lions: Alhambra,” which traces a scene that goes from ornate exterior settings to “the labyrinth’s center [where the lions] honor a myth of the instinct’s simplicity.” Now, instead, he “dream[s] semiotic/pageants,” looking around at the accumulations of a lifetime, which he alternatively calls “trash.” An updating of King Tut with his own appropriate rubbish, Belitt examines his objets, pictures, and souvenirs, all of which he realizes are elegiac efforts to preserve the past and to ensure a perhaps specious immortality: a collector’s vagaries metamorphosed into possessions I would heap at the door if I could, to interpret my lost predilections and repeat my identity. The signature elements—metamorphosis and repetition—appear again, but only wistfully, as the poem takes a brutally honest final turn, acknowledging the futility of such dreams of preservation: The Creek jostles its darkness under the ice. Below is a roaring, a grating of angles and edges, a slobber, a drowning. The boiler-room readies its column of blood in the shaken thermometer and sets forth on the torrent. What have we ever possessed? I wait for the tomb-robbers. Now, toward the end, counting up is the same as counting down. Once lost, predilections can never return, nor can identity be repeated. The parthenogenesis of the “seminal” man in “Xerox” has no human equivalent in this valedictory poem. Repeating his rhetorical question—“What have we ever possessed?’—Belitt reminds us that our momentary stays against obliteration are as doomed as we are. In his long career Belitt has never neglected to confront the world’s body, appropriating its elements to his own purposes. Though he may legitimately question all acts of possession and the possibilities of ownership, this new collection should encourage his readers to acknowledge with gratitude the bequests he has made to them. With age he seems to have exchanged his earlier belief in Wallace Steven’s judgment that the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world for the stoical, diminished acceptances in Stevens’s own late poems. The sensualist of the imagination is waiting for the tombrobbers and their knock on the door, but fortunately we now possess the things he has felt and those he has inventoried.



TEN

X

THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER I, OR THE PERILS OF VAUDEVILLE IN A POSTMODERN AGE On Irving Feldman ()

I

f Jackie Mason could write poetry he would probably sound like Irving Feldman. Or maybe if Irving Feldman could do stand-up he’d sound like Jackie Mason. With the exception of Albert Goldbarth, no other American poet, certainly none who has retired from a distinguished academic career lauded and (as he puts it in one poem) Maclaureled, shoots past us so many riffs—energetic torrents mixing the sublime, the pathetic, and the almosttasteless—as Feldman does. His vaudeville routines seem to belong to another century, as though Browning’s dramatic monologues had been renovated for the fin of the siècle just past, and yet their author came to poetic maturity in the summer of High Modernism, right after World War II. (He was born in , of the same generation as Ammons, Ashbery, Bly, Creeley, Ginsberg, Justice, Merrill, O’Hara, Rich, and Snyder, though he sounds like none of them.) He is the poet as comedian, a multifaceted performer extraordinaire. But he wasn’t always this way, and the development in Feldman’s poetry over more than four decades roughly parallels the changes of fashion in American poetry. Here’s Feldman in : “Call!” “Call!” “Call!” “Call!” “Call!” “Call!” Thought I was bluffing. Wanted to see me.



      -  () I’m loaded, guys, I am fuller than full. So, see ’em, read ’em, feed ’em, eat ’em—and weep! Then, our heart-and-soul-satisfying smart sharp snap-and-slap-the-cards-on-the-table shtick; up on two feet, I cracked the buggy whip my wrist; and the five-of-a-kind of the hand I held high, one by one, Take that, whump! and Take that, whamp! and Take this whomp! I smacked down—notice served to all the stiffs and to the Big Stiffer by the woodcutter and master of the deck, owner of the ax, last man alive and standing! (“Joker,” Beautiful False Things) Talk about energy, gamesmanship, testosterone—the whole shebang of masculine self-assertiveness. The wildness makes him sound like some cranky old codger on speed. But here is Feldman almost forty years ago: Like weary goddesses sick of other worlds— Those little islands, their drugged white beaches Where the surf ’s unending colonies arrive, And, helpless, the sacrifice lies on altars Of their indifference, gasping in the sun, Offering millenniums of his wound— They, as from the prows of ships stepping, Come to where the patient worries The sheet’s spreading day, his body Stilled in drowsy rituals of disaster. And the marble paradigms, their patient, Uncaring hands, drop from the salt-parched Light, gathering your infinite gift, Its burden. (“The Nurses,” The Pripet Marshes) Whatever else this may be, it is an exercise in stiltedness, from the stiff, slightly-off iambic metric to the tortuous simile that interrupts between the first line and the seventh. The diction seems to come from a translation of Hart Crane from English to Greek and back to English (“Offering millenniums of his wound”), and the whole, heavy piece is redolent of what we might call postness—post-Eliot, post-Yeats, post-Tate, post-Lowell. Young Feldman was in thrall to the masters of the first half of the century, and his earliest poems, which often responded to the Holocaust and the aftermath of World War II, did so in accents not entirely his own.



  Feldman has not just become looser, jazzier, and more dizzying over the years, he has shifted his entire aesthetic. Where in The Pripet Marshes he issued the Zen-like pronouncement that “The poem is in the center, but / In the center of the poem is emptiness” (“Nightwords”), now he has come around to the view that “the language isn’t saved by style / but by a tale worth telling” (“Fragment,” The Life and Letters). In an age of poetic navel-gazing, he looks—mostly but not exclusively—outward, to a world of event and personality; his poems tell stories and feature memorably oddball characters. And yet, for all this surface brio, underneath Feldman is fascinated with certain abstruse paradoxes and conundrums, particularly ones involving, in some way, the authentic versus the ersatz, or original versus copy. This is evident, for example, in his most moving piece, the title sequence in All of Us Here (), which consists of a series of first-person responses to an exhibit of plaster cast sculptures by the late George Segal, works at once life-like and cadaverous. “About these figures we don’t ask, ‘Who are they?’ / We ask, ‘Who, who is it they remind us of ?’ ” thinks one of the museum- or gallerygoers. Does art imitate life, or is it the other way around? Such speculations are, of course, symptomatic of so-called postmodernism, from which Feldman often likes to distance himself even though he exemplifies—almost by default—some of its orthodoxies. He looks around him (“Adventures in the Post-Modern Era,” The Life and Letters) and takes swipes at those critics and poets for whom there is no passion, just parody, belatedness, and repetition. He ferociously attacks literary modishness, tongue-in-cheek pomposity, meta-thises and thats, and the cant of intellectual self-aggrandizement. He sees and hears through all pronouncements, positions, and theoretical statements, especially from writers whose only theme is “Omnipotence in the realm of words,” which turn out in the end to be only “crushed butt words, empty can words.” But lately he has managed to put a fresh spin on these matters by approaching them through outlandish dramatis personae. Who shows up in these two latest volumes? No one you’d like to meet on the street or at a bar, but (from another way of looking at it) Everyone, that’s who. Louche characters with delectable bounce; sinister doormen; transsexual and transvestite prostitutes; a lecherous older poet, part Socrates, part satyr; an overworked, kvetching Muse consumed with Cleopatra-ish “immortal longings.” Like Eliot, or Richard Howard, Feldman enjoys doing the police in as many voices as he can invent. And those many voices constitute an experiment in authenticity and its opposites. It’s often hard to tell who or what is real in his poems. Especially in the earlier of these two books, Feldman takes as a subject, as well as the title of a single poem, “[In] Theme Park America,” where everything is an imitation of something else.



      -  () Typical of Feldman’s recent characters is Larry Dawn, hero of “Funny Bones, Or Larry Dawn’s  Nights in Condolandia” (Beautiful False Things), a third-rate, down-on-his-luck, Borscht-Belt stand-up comic, a has-been or never-was (“Frankie: big; Jerry: big ; Larry? Gimme a break!”), who has been reduced to entertaining—if we can call it that—the living dead in Miami Beach, recycling jokes for an audience about to shuffle off this mortal coil. Like his creator, Larry shows us what repetition (in his case, the same old tired routine) can and cannot do: And Lazarus? Does it say he was born again again? For him one born-again was enough. Then what about Larry on the condo circuit, descending nightly through humongous human humus —to stand naked before the gums of Death, joking? Mornings it’s harder to lift the earth overhead. And what pushes up is each time less, and heavier —the early worm gets the silica special. Gravesite gravel filling his heart, from a mile away you can hear, you’d swear, old Larry rattling and raling like a maraca while he rumba-shlumps around in Flo-ri-da. But night after night something in him is kissing off the same old joke with a first kiss. Sylvia Plath, move over. With its heartless mockery of the old, the infirm, and the talentless, the poem is a grand guignol performed wit a Yiddish accent. Another study in sadism is “Oedipus Host” (Beautiful False Things), in which the Theban king is cast as the host of a TV talk show that is equal parts loony bin, funhouse, tag-team wrestling match, and revival meeting. Oedipus, in whom blindness and lameness vie for control, no longer wears his mask from Greek drama. Instead we have the hero himself: Whoever did his makeover’s some kind of brain. That mask he wore is gone; this face is mask enough. How could paint improve the hollows of those cheeks, the dark sumps pooled inside the sockets’ crusty holes, those hoary locks the gore has plastered into place? They say his wardrobe stocks a dozen changes —it takes that long to launder out, and in, the dust. Or, rather, we have not Oedipus-an-Sich (in Feldman’s world there can be no such thing) but an improved version with a new mask, outfitted by a really clever couturier. An added twist is that the poem’s narrator is not only watching



  the show but taping it for future replays; it’s as if Feldman has crossed the Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape with the Wordsworth of the “spots of time,” those moments deposited in the mind’s memory bank “for future restoration.” Who comes to visit such a debonair host? The usual suspects—“Job and Lear drop by”—as well as Don Quixote, Julius Caesar, ordinary survivors of tragedy, sinners and freaks, “and some real trash who piss on your sympathy.” Feldman takes seriously one of those truths we solemnly tell our students about Great Literature and its Purposes: that what Aristotle in the Poetics called anagnorisis, recognition, comes as an unmasking and revelation at the end of tragedy, after which we—characters and audience alike—experience the catharsis of fear and pity. In other words, we are all of us in it together: Now it happens to you. You’re here, and you’re there, too. Because anyone’s story could be everyone’s story. Something tremendous is going on tonight. Everybody’s coming out to everybody. Even coming out to us, to me, out here. Can anyone not feel what I feel in my heart so strong the wave of it rolls back to them? Audience participation indeed: Coming out has seldom had such apocalyptic yet ordinary effects. At poem’s end, Laius and Jocasta make a surprise appearance. “The mom is old enough to be his mom,” and everyone is gasping because “Something major’s going down.” But poor Oedipus, still in the dark, mistakes good old Mom and Dad for the messenger he fervently awaits: Then sweet-tongued Ismene’s laughing, oh god, can’t hold back her laughter—so bubbly-happy with something she knows that I’m laughing, too. “Surprise, Papa! Guess who’s here to see you!” Black pit of his mouth opens. He’s speaking. “Apollo, golden Phoebus, great lord of sun and death, is that you in your bright chariot?” Does this ending qualify as poetic justice or some new and delicious irony? Sometimes it’s hard to gauge the emotional tonality of Feldman’s poems. Although one of his strengths is knowing how to end a poem with a wallop, closure itself—that sound of a lid clicking shut that Yeats liked—will fail to satisfy us unless we can tell where we have been taken by the poem’s roller-coaster wit. “Interrupted Prayers” (The Life and Letters) also concerns a talk show, only this time one on radio. A three-way relationship develops: The poem’s



      -  () narrator listens to a conversation between Larry the host and Don the caller, and gets vicarious thrills from both. The “billion bucks” of Don’s cheery voice “i.v. directly into the bankrupt heart,” and the narrator, yearning for even a little hopefulness, hunkers down: I dial Don down to whisper, curl closer, plug myself into the keyhole of sound. Feed me! Be me! Such identification extends all the way up the existential ladder: Don brings the listener a “gift . . . to Being’s bright mountain!” But as the interchange between host and guest turns nasty, the listener uncorks his own cascade of metaphoric bravado: They’re playing our song again on the suicide trivia hotline. Once there were worlds, and now there’s entertainment. So let’s just relax and enjoy the void-noises of the whirling debris of shattered places drifting apart in the wide ocean of air, calling out, trying to get connected. And Larry? Lord of soul dumps, Larry trolls the airwaves for trash fish, for flounderers. He tingles when the stricken vibes imply a flat one’s on the line. With his gleaming hook, he’ll play him good, he’ll pluck him out, he’ll toss him flopping onto the heap beneath his hams of the used up, the washed up, the obsolete. The poem ends with a typically expansive gesture that combines the Lazarus gambit from “Funny Bones” with the Krapp’s Last Tape one from “Oedipus Host.” Here the listener replays the talk-show interchange. The poem has wound down only to begin again: “Hello, Larry?” It’s  a.m., and, risen from static and silence, good old Don is back, cold Lazarus recycled word for word by courtesy of tape—still trying to reach the Thaumaturge, still getting through to Pluto instead . . . “Go ahead, Cleveland, you’re on the air! ”



  “Beautiful False Things” similarly plays fast and loose with the themes of imitation and reproduction. Yusuf Krip, “much be-lau-reled” Albanian (!) poet, thinks he hears over the airwaves one sleepless night an “unearthly” voice, which turns out to be that of Dante, reading Robert Pinsky’s Inferno. Dante, in Paradise, talking American! Like the narrator in “Interrupted Prayers,” Krip reaches out—or his ears do—in need of consolation and connection, and discovers in Dante-and-Pinsky his own Virgil. Surely this cannot be, but “Krip pursued the fantasy” of hearing “a testimonial to the translation / from the author of the original.” Ironic? Impossible? Dante “trotted out from deep retirement in death / to perform the poet he no longer is?” Krip continues: Better, then, to peddle secondhand poems in postmodern America than reign supreme in irrelevance on Parnassus? What in the world can Dante be doing in this pathetic self-impersonation? Has he, like Milton’s Satan, succumbed in his pride to the folly of rationalizing rapture? Is there no kitschy rhetoric to which a poet will not stoop, no trick he will not try, in order to stay alive or to be reborn? Embarrassed for Dante, Krip turns the radio off, but not before “repeating” Dante’s words along with him. So who is speaking? The voice is Krip’s as well as Dante’s: “That accent’s blundering teratogen / was his Albanian, not Dante’s Florentine. / And that performance of author ecstasy, / that ‘heartfelt inauthenticity’ were his.” An echoing hallucination of sorts ensues; what Krip heard was perhaps Pinsky’s translation of Krip, or maybe the translation of “that Feldman kid— his latest Englisher.” So nothing is left, or else too much is. Self and otherness, performance and impersonation blur until at last everything seems either indistinguishable or multiplied and “annulled in other otherness.” It’s Feldman’s odd version of James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation,” and his homage to at least the title of the Weill-Nash musical Lost in the Stars. Krip dreams that he’s an Odysseus stuck with a crew of barbarians—in the original sense of nonspeakers of Greek (or in this case Albanian)—whose foul speech has annoyed him. By plugging their ears, he also ties their “tongues.” Consequently, when the Sirens sing, “music came, imbuing the dark / with his native speech, his mother tongue. / Everything he heard he understood.” Superb material, this, but since the song is in Albanian—hardly a lingua franca—it will require translation. Pinsky, Feldman, or some new tertium quid with the portmanteau name “Feldminsky” will, naturally, have the last world: And drifting, in the embrace, on the bosom, of Mother Sleep, Krip, drowsy, murmuring



      -  () in the world’s ear, You’ll never know, but, people, believe me, it’s better . . . the original. This is every poet’s wish and nightmare, hope and fear. Believing that there exists some lost original (Feldman’s  collection is entitled Lost Originals), the poet dreams of a homecoming, the linguistic equivalent of an Odyssean nostos. But he must finally acknowledge that an original can only be approximated, never reproduced, because all utterance needs broadcasting, and its transmission ensures its dissipation. Feldman’s obsession with original-and-copy is further exercised in “The Life and Letters,” in which a prodigal son, an indolent failure, writes trite, lying letters to his family, inventing a life for himself. But “his words returned” because his mother “copied over like a holy Scripture” his “snarled, uncontrollable scrawl” and made it “round and plain and easy to read.” Art begins to improve upon, to supplement, to embellish life and its first accounts. Indeed, the life is virtually nonexistent without the compensatory and improving medium of the letters that actively produce—not merely reproduce—it. The mother’s “necklaces of script” do little, at first, to placate or delight the son, who falls progressively into anomie, despair, and selfconsumption until, in the poem’s last section, he discovers in an old pair of pants a letter from his mother, which he, in a final compensatory act, proceeds to copy for himself: He wrote the date. He wrote, “Dear Son.” He wrote, “We’re glad the children all are well again and getting A’s.” He wrote, “We’re also happy that you like your job . . .” He, too, was happy. He, too, was glad. He wrote. All repetition, reflection, and echo constitute both failure and triumph. We can take this idea one step further: Literary troping, the mere attempt to reproduce an event, image, phenomenon, or feeling, moves away from an originary point and toward diminishment or weakening. But it also spirals upward to a final phase of success, however illusory or undeserved that might be. “He wrote . . . He was happy”: What artist could ask for anything more? “Kiss and Tell” (The Life and Letters) treads similar ground. It recounts the worst nightmare of any man of letters, critic, or editor (here Alfred Tell) who is in a position to receive the lifework of any failed, disconsolate, older writer (here Kenneth Irving Kiss) clamoring pathetically for recognition. This cautionary tale begins sarcastically and unfeelingly, as Alfred Tell, who is himself hungry for reception and acknowledgment, discovers amid the junk mail a thick sheaf containing pages



  of shriveled, discolored onion skin, on which, battered through an old typewriter ribbon’s ragged palimpsest, a ghostly scurf of words had spread —rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint: yes, more hopeless poems of Kenneth Irving Kiss! After first receiving only a few of Kiss’s “epidermal sloughings,” Fell then gets all of Kiss dumped on him (“art may be long but the vita is longer”). His reaction is not entirely lacking in sympathy: Exasperated, guilty, feeling doomed myself, I was like the surgeon who opens and gazes into the morbid heart of humorlessness; he notes the lack of tone, the arrhythmia, the total absence of proprioception; everywhere he probes there are the tell-tale, grim metastases of mediocrity, of obsession; praying, cursing, he capitulates —to the inoperable, to mortality. I gentled it back into its envelope, and resubmitted it to the raw dark maw I’d plucked it from: my desk’s final landfill of verbivorous, logophagous literature. De te fabula narratur: The haughty Tell recognizes a not unkindred spirit; in burying Kiss, he is returning part of himself to the compost heap of literary detritus. The compost heap is linguistic in more ways than one. Feldman cannot resist the rich redundancy of “verbivorous” and “logophagous,” synonyms that attest to his exuberance and to his characters’ repetitive resemblance. This brings us to the question of whether, beneath the giddiness, outrage, and verve, there is in Feldman’s work such a thing as what Keats memorably called the “true voice of feeling.” Feldman often seems to belong to the camp of Horace, whose credo was a cool nil admirari. Nothing astonishes, and his typical response—to name the cliché that provides occasion, title, and refrain to one fine poem—is “No Big Deal.” Feldman has seen it all; he takes long views; he chuckles. Or else he resorts to Swiftian savagery, bathing his poems in an acid wash. Yet for all his sarcasm and apparent detachment, not to mention his weakness for certain postmodern attitudes, Feldman is finally a humanist poet: Scratch a modern cynic and find a Romantic. Feldman’s affection for his fellow creatures is evident, for example, in “The Handball Players at Brighton Beach” (Leaping Clear []), a wonderful earlier poem in which he waxes ecstatic about old men



      -  () who yawp, who quarrel, who shove, who shout themselves hoarse, don’t get out of the way, grab for odds, hustle a handicap, all crust, all bluster, all con and gusto, all on show, tumultuous, blaring, grunting as they lunge. And it surfaces more recently in “Warm Enough,” which rehearses a mockcourtly ritual between an elevator operator named Eddie and his passenger. “Warm enough for you today?” asks Eddie, and the two men proceed to lob sacred gossamer banalities back and forth until, by poem’s end, the phatic cliché has been transformed into a genuinely meaningful question: “ ‘You tell me, Eddie. / Is it warm enough for me today?’ ” Like certain greater poems by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats that end with questions more than rhetorical, the poem trails off in a conclusion at once satisfying and open-ended. Not surprisingly, it is Feldman’s sense that what most connects us to other people is art itself, the ennobling (as well as pathetic and comic) effects of which he proclaims to a degree reminiscent of James Merrill. In “Movietime,” for instance, we find Feldman and his friend (or wife or lover) watching a flick that involves a pair of excited lovers and an obese detective. Afterward, the two reflect “how happy we are with all these tiny textures of being / and time the fat guy has generously treated us to— / so many moments to talk over and appreciate.” The satisfaction of movie-going (or radio-listening or gallery-hopping) is almost sexual, and, like sex, usually better when shared. Like the lovers on screen, the departing moviegoers turn and ask each other, “ ‘Was it good for you?’ ‘Mmmm. And you? Was it good for you?’ ” (“Movietime,” Beautiful False Things). Running counter to this vein of sanguine, lighthearted sentiment, an undertone of elegy pervades these two volumes. “Variations on a Theme by May Swenson” (The Life and Letters), dedicated to Swenson’s memory, retells the story of her father’s death, centering on the cryptic five-word injunction he uttered at the end: “Feel me to do good.” By attempting to tease out possible meanings from this riddling phrase, Feldman dramatizes our perfectly natural need to elicit wisdom from terminal situations. We’ll never know whether these five words represent some deep truth or merely the mutterings of a man losing scrutability along with consciousness. In his elegy for Paul Goodman, “Lives of the Poets” (Beautiful False Things), Feldman dwells on doubling one more time, now to heartbreaking



  effect. The poem ends with a mirrored image that exquisitely recalls us to our common destiny: And so here one is between two cortèges, Paul’s past and the present writer’s assembling (slowly, gentlemen!) somewhere up ahead. Well, Paul had his decade or so in the sun, his nearly fifteen years of fame —which at this distance seem foreshortened to Andy’s famous “fifteen min.” The times took his hand and walked with him a while, a mile. And then walked on. His coronary when it came along was wholehearted, unrefusable. This is Feldman at his delicate best. The lines are both casual (“Well . . .”) and formal, with the impersonal “one” and “the present writer” displacing “I” because, it would seem, “I,” like “you” and “he” and “she,” must one day be extinguished. The final personification is like something from an updated Greek Anthology: Time accompanies the man and then passes him by. Most moving of all is the concluding touch. The pun in “wholehearted” is no mere display of wit but an intimation of the blessedness of sudden death. That “wholehearted” is also a word we often use to describe enthusiasm and applause, that it suggests the language of aesthetic appreciation, is fitting, because to Feldman death, almost as much as life, is an entertainment from which we cannot afford to turn away. For all his connections to some of the styles and truisms of postmodern thought, Feldman remains solidly rooted in many traditions of the nineteenth century: not just in his revival of dramatic monologues, narrative poems (unlike the so-called “new” narrative poets, Feldman is no mere reactionary), and vaudeville routines, but also in his commitment to our common humanity. With his rum characters, his exuberantly reflective multiple selves, his poetic renderings of philosophical puzzles, and his reckless verbal cascades, Feldman is a poet both antic and stately. Weirdness, vitriol, and zaniness are one part of these poems. The other is solid good sense with an undertone of genuinely elegiac tenderness.

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ELEVEN

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REPETITION AND SINGULARITY  On Louise Glück, The Seven Ages, and Jorie Graham, Never

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ooks by poets whose work we are already familiar with pose different challenges from first books—either work by new poets or work that is new to us as readers—because nothing takes the measure of an artist’s progress so well as an examination of her development over the course of a career. If an author has not “found her voice” (curious phrase) at the start, we criticize her for sounding derivative or imitative of someone else. Once she has found or invented the mysterious knot of individual identity and cemented a singular persona, a technique, above all a unique style, we might then—paradoxically—criticize her for a staid, unvarying sameness. Auden was the best example of this—his late poems were mocked for both triviality of subject and self-repetition in method. Greedy readers require, legitimately, sameness and difference all at once. New volumes by two of the most distinctive poets of their generation suggest the way that “plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.” There is no mistaking a poem by Jorie Graham for one by anyone else; and even the more austere, less flamboyant Louise Glück, once one understands her style and obsessions, seems always, inevitably herself. Each is sui generis. How to remain true to the self but also to keep it fluid, changing, and responsive is any artist’s greatest challenge. Although readers will differ in their evaluation of individual volumes (some find Glück’s Vita Nova less appealing than The Wild Iris; some think that Graham’s metaphysical speculations and syntactic

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  fractures go madly awry in Swarm), it is clear that both poets would agree with Keats that they “would sooner fail than not be among the greatest”; that constant experimentation (“that which is creative must create itself,” Keats continues) is the only way to forge a poetic identity. And as Yeats succinctly said: “It is myself that I remake.” These references to earlier poets are not gratuitous. Graham has always inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics. Her new book takes an epigraph from one of Keats’s letters (“How can I believe in that? Surely it cannot be?”), in which eager wonder competes with incredulity as he views the scenery of the Lake District for the first time. Glück—especially in her new volume—is revisiting Wordsworthian scenes of childhood, developing her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what her Romantic precursor called “spots of time,” “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” and even “visionary dreariness.” If her previous work responded to Plato, Greek myth and epic, to Dante, and to Milton and his God, her latest one suggests that she has been taking a fresh look at poets historically nearer. This is not to say that her autobiographical maneuvers are something novel; in all of her books, especially Ararat (), her familial life—as daughter, sister, wife, and mother—has been central. Sometimes overtly, sometimes through parable, dream, and fable, Glück has made her poetry out of lived experience. But now, in The Seven Ages, Wordsworthian repetition and a return to the past engage her more fully than ever before. Glück has always shared the desire articulated by Adrienne Rich, “to do something very common, in my own way,” i.e., to remain faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience. In “Memoir” she says it simply: “[M]y story, in any case, wasn’t unique / though, like everyone else, I had a story, / a point of view” (). Her double goal affects her subjects (the everyday interwoven with the mythic) and the size of her poems (an economy that inspires depth). Her “point of view” generates an exquisite sense of poetic form. Witness “The Muse of Happiness,” a subject so atypical of this usually saturnine or skeptical poet that she handles it entirely in sentence fragments except in its exact middle, from which shapely integrated sentences arise. Finally Glück’s language leans toward the commonplace and away from the mandarin. She always prefers “the simplest vocabulary” as she acknowledges in her autobiographical apologia “Education of the Poet.” But the whittling of her austere economies does not invariably result in utter transparency. Because of both repetition and omission, her work contains its own conundrums, the most important of which touch on the very nature of identity. Lyric address is crucial to all lyric utterance. Who is speaking? And to whom? In many of Glück’s poems we may find ourselves surprised to be addressed, or else discomfited to break in on a conversation in medias



   () res. The much anthologized “Mock Orange” (The Triumph of Achilles) begins with the confidential but angry charge: “It is not the moon, I tell you.” And it requires another sixteen lines for readers to realize that she is addressing women in general but no one in particular. In the same book, “Horse” is spoken by a man to his young bride, but readers often automatically, but wrongly, assume that the speaker is a version of the poet herself. Earlier, in “The Pond” (The House on Marshland ), the speaker addresses an unspecified “you,” a potential lover of whom we learn nothing else. One could go through all of her volumes and discover the same phenomena. In all of them, even when she addresses or even mentions people who we infer are genuine in her life—the mother, the father, the sister who lived, the sister who died, the husband (in a marriage now dissolved) named John, the son named Noah—Glück heightens the simplest acts of naming and address through her chastened tones, some chilling, some angelic, some merely propositional. In “Moonbeam” (The Seven Ages) she addresses a “you [who is] like me, whether or not you admit it” (). That is all we know of the addressee. Glück has always responded, she has admitted, to “poetry that requests or craves a listener . . . I need to feel addressed: the complement, I suppose, of speaking in order to be heeded.” As a child she took to Keats and Blake, feeling that they were talking directly to her. As an adult, reading Stevens flummoxed her; she felt “superfluous, part of some marginal throng.” But often her poems make us wonder: who is the “you” to whom she speaks? In the new book sometimes it is the proverbial reader: “I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm / to caution you, to prepare you. // Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly, subtly, not to say with connivance” (“The Sensual World,” ). Sometimes she seems to be talking to herself: “You were // a beast at the edge of its cave, only / waking and sleeping” (“Decade,” ). At least once it might not even be a person but an inanimate titular figure, her version of Wordsworth’s single tree in the Intimations Ode: And it was always this we discussed or alluded to when we were moved to speak. The weather. The quince tree. You, in your innocence, what do you know of this world? (“Quince Tree,” ) Although the adolescent Glück reveled in Keats’s poetry, as an adult (she once said in an interview), the only poem of his to which she returns with excitement is the mysterious late fragment, “This Living Hand,” in which the dramatic situation of the speaker and, even more, the identity of the addressee are thoroughly ambiguous. Glück is also a master of dialogue, but the practical problem of quotation marks complicates issues of identity. Only one poem in the volume (“The

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  Traveler”) uses them. Otherwise, dialogue is signaled by italics or by nothing at all. We cannot tell for sure who is speaking to whom. Midway through “Stars” the “unsatisfying morning” addresses the waking poet. The last fourteen lines look like this: I will never be banished. I am the light, your personal anguish and humiliation. Do you dare send me away as though you were waiting for something better? There is no better. Only (for a short space) the night sky like a quarantine that sets you apart from your task. Only (softly, fiercely) the stars shining. Here, in the room, the bedroom. Saying, I was brave, I resisted, I set myself on fire. (–) “I” is the morning light; “you” is the recalcitrant poet. But who is the “I” in the final, italicized remarks? The stars of the night sky that penetrate the poet’s darkness and become her symbols? Perhaps “There is no better” begins a response by the poet herself in which she separates the night sky from the daylight. In this case, both the tonality and the effect of the poem’s conclusion have altered radically. Identity is shared, just as life’s roles and human articulations melt into one another. A covert continuity in human speech (or human and superhuman speech, as above) matches other temporal or generational continuities. In “Mother and Child,” the mother addresses her offspring, but the absence of quotation marks forces us to understand that the child literally repeats the parent and her words. He also, of course, repeats the genetic material of both his parents and his grandparents. The poem’s ending can legitimately and eerily be heard as coming from one or both of the pair: This is why you were born: to silence me. Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece. I improvised; I never remembered. Now it’s your turn to be driven; you’re the one who demands to know:

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   () Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us; it is your turn to address it, to go back asking what am I for? What am I for? () Verbal repetition and acts of real or remembered return provide the keys to so many of these poems that we feel Glück has provided for the forward movement of her art by moving backward in her life. Two related thematic elements match the importance of ambiguous address in these poems: the generality of myth and the specificity of remembrance. Glück here almost forgoes her previous reliance on myth and parable in favor of more ordinary acts of memory. Child, daughter, sister, schoolgirl, adult, wife, divorcée (but only once in this volume, mother) are her looser and nonsequential versions of Shakespeare’s Jaques’s “seven ages,” the parts each person enacts in the play of life. The world of dream and fable still makes an appearance, however, surrounding (for the most part quite literally) the book’s central section, which contains Glück’s more realistic personal reminiscences. The volume opens and closes with dreams. The first, the title poem, concerns creation and a descent into life. The book’s last and shortest poem, “Fable,” deals with life or death (or eternal life), a descent into nirvana, a home whose light provides no peace. The world the speaker enters seems like the heaven found unacceptable to the youth and “pale virgin” in Blake’s “Ah, Sunflower,” who arrive at the “sweet golden clime” only to find it wanting. Glück’s book is filled with both premonitions (in dreams) and retrospection. Everything seems to happen at least twice. The title poem begins “In my first dream the world appeared / the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet / In my second I descended” (). And “In my first dream the world appeared” recurs toward the end of the poem, as well. Like Graham, Glück has the habit of giving several poems in one volume the same title. (There are three “Fable” poems here.) In addition, all of the titles are simple nouns or noun phrases; the effect is one of naming discrete items, incidents, chapters, even still lifes. The secular, Wordsworthian poems at the book’s core are its strongest. In the language of simple fact they relate the wish to return, repeat, proliferate, to renew the self in the face of the knowledge of time’s inevitable passing and depredations. And they relate as well the poet’s resistance to and acceptance of this knowledge. The book is full of efforts to stop time. “the attempts of the mind / to prevent change” (“Birthday,” ); “when I didn’t move I was perfect” (“Summer at the Beach,” ); “I never changed” (“The Empty Glass,” ). Here is the beautiful first part of the ten-section “Ripe Peach”: There was a time only certainty gave me

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  any joy. Imagine— certainty, a dead thing. () The future is always “lethal, unstable” (“The Empty Glass,” ), and the present is often unbearable. Is it any wonder that Glück sounds like Wordsworth here (“There was a time . . .” begins the Intimations Ode) and elsewhere (“my heart would leap up exultant and collapse / in desolate anguish” she writes in “Birthday”)? Glück revisits scenes of childhood sometimes dispassionately, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes regretfully. Unlike some of her earlier, cryptic narratives, most of these are crystalline. “Study of My Sister” responds to Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers” and “We Are Seven,” those “lyrical ballads” dramatizing the inevitable impasse in conversations between adults and children. Her parents ask her younger sister, who has been playing with blocks: “What did you build ? / and then, because she seems / so blank, so confused, / they repeat the question” (). “Blank” and “confused” are strong Wordsworthian words. Here is the beginning of “Quince Tree,” with its acknowledgement of change: We had, in the end, only the weather for a subject. Luckily, we lived in a world with seasons— we felt, still, access to variety: darkness, euphoria, various kinds of waiting. I suppose, in the true sense, our exchanges couldn’t be called conversation, being dominated by accord, by repetition. () Variety and repetition go hand in hand. And there is, additionally, the very language of Wordsworthian abstraction, finely chiseled to work against the specificity, weight, and meaning of the quince tree itself. “Grandeur and splendor” () (what Wordsworth called “the glory and the freshness of a dream”) inform the mundane details of the world of the backyard, the weather, the conversation. In spite of all the motifs of mirroring and other repetitions in this volume, Glück seldom resorts to the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, preferring the parallel trope of anaphora. So when she employs chiasmus in “Time” (), a crucial Romantic poem, we sit up and take notice. Once again the poem begins with a myth of abundance and a fall into nothingness: “There was too much, always, then too little.” Memory itself works through chiastic mirroring and repetition: “Things became dreams; dreams became things.” The nominal subject here is childhood sickness, and reading in bed, followed by health and growing up: “The perceived became the remembered, / the remembered, the perceived.” Such rhetorical crossings are matched by

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   () a linear crossing-over: “And time went on, even when there was almost nothing left.” Everything in this volume is informed by its author’s awareness of having gone beyond life’s halfway point. She refers to her ability to think back fifty years. She returns to her childhood home (“Unpainted Door,” ), and finds it both the same and not the same: The house was the same, but the door was different. Not red anymore—unpainted wood. The trees were the same: the oak, the copper beech. But the people—all the inhabitants of the past— were gone: lost, dead, moved away. The children from across the street old men and women. What she calls the “bewildering accuracy of imagination and dream” works backward and forward. Her whole childhood was a “long wish to be elsewhere.” Re-arriving at the origin she says simply: “This is the house; this must be / the childhood I had in mind.” What a delicious unpacking of a cliché: “had in mind” refers to both the childhood she intended at the time and the childhood she has borne with her after a half century. The mind has remained a constant after childhood has passed. Such constancy distinguishes one of the volume’s most moving poems, “Mitosis,” a psychological myth of the division between two antagonists which we like to think were at one point identical: the mind (always lingering, wanting more, finally wanting to go back, to try for a second chance) and the body, “implacably moving ahead, as it had to, to stay alive.” In childhood the mind wants infinity; in middle age it wants a new beginning: It wished simply to repeat the whole passage, like the exultant conductor, who feels only that the violins might have been a little softer, more plangent. () The body has no “dream except the dream of the future.” The poem ends with the kind of sensuous delight that Glück, in other moods, tends to suspect. While hardly rising to exultant heights, and remaining true to her congenital sadness, she reaches a point of what we might label satisfaction as mind and body come to rejoin one another, at least figuratively: Limitless world! The vistas clear, the clouds risen. The water azure, the sea plants bending and sighing among the coral reefs, the sullen mermaids all suddenly angels, or like angels. And music rising over the open sea—

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  Exactly like the dream of the mind. The same sea, the same shimmering fields. The plate of fruit, the identical violin (in the past and the future) but softer now, finally sufficiently sad. () Sameness and identity exist primarily as rhetorical figures rather than as actual phenomena; unity is a poetic construct. The last three poems (before the final epitaphic “Fable”) offer a trio of Glückian songs, an epitome of her miniaturizing art. The largely unpunctuated “Aubade” () is an experiment in repetition: “There was one summer / that returned many times over / there was one flower unfurling / taking many forms . . . ,” it begins. One summer, one flower, one love, one garden, all repeated: Glück ends her incantation with one summer “returning over and over / there was one dawn / I grew old watching[.]” The ardors of observation connect her with Stevens, master of repetition (who said that we move from “that ever-early candor to its late plural”), and Wordsworth, who spoke of the single tree, flower, and field in the Intimations Ode, and who found a sufficient challenge in life’s single, unidirectional path. Like the overwhelming majority of poems in the book, “Aubade” is in the past tense (the few in the present refer to the past), as is the subsequent “Screened Porch,” whose title refers not just to a piece of domestic architecture but to the separation of the nuclear family from a natural world that ignores the “great drama of human life.” Nature’s beauty once provided a solacing arrangement onto which we could project our need for something eternal: Immunity to time, to change. Sensation of perfect safety, the sense of being protected from what we loved— And our intense need was absorbed by the night and returned as sustenance. () In “Screened Porch” Glück achieves the rare perfection that unites details from a single life with generalizations about our shared humanity. There is no “I” in the poem, only a collective “we” that refers to the poet and her family and to the rest of us as well. “Summer Night,” the book’s penultimate poem, however, begins entirely in the first-personal singular, as the poet hears her own heart beating. Its sound reminds her of those pluralities left undone—letters unsent, journeys unmade, “[a]nd the life, in a sense, never completely lived.” At the center of the poem Glück makes an equation between her life and her work:

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   () And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious. Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life? Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie. () Glück has never repeated herself in her art although—especially here— repetition is one of her thematic constants. At the end of this poem she moves beautifully beyond the self. Now she hears in her heartbeat not her own past but a common, general one, and she allies herself with precursor poets. Committing herself to life’s inexhaustible ordinariness, she simultaneously achieves a consoling music in “Summer Night” like that of Mahler in his Rückert songs, or Strauss in the “Four Last Songs”: Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention. Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death? () “Death is the mother of beauty”: in his famous repeated line from “Sunday Morning” Stevens showed himself, like Keats, sensitive to the facts of mortality. Both poets understood as well the relations among inertia, reverie, and pattern. Like them, Glück has committed herself to the poetry of earth, and has found in Wordsworthian “spots of time,” those scenes of power in childhood, evidence of the mind’s resistance to both the body’s will and nature’s beckoning seductions. “Summer Night” is especially appealing when set beside the moments and gestures of bitter irony, self-loathing, and skepticism that have always accompanied Glück’s responses to the physical world. This book does not omit such gestures. Witness “Ancient Text,” which begins as if it were a homage to Henry Vaughan (“Happy that first white age when we / Lived by the earth’s mere charity!” or “Happy those early days, when I / Shined in my angel infancy”), but then continues in a distinctly sardonic, Glückian tone: How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer heard by the angels. I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much mud in the face. ()

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  “Summer Night” responds to such assertions with something—can we even use the word?—like happiness, or quiet acceptance. Glück said in “Education of the Poet” that “the fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness,” but she now seems to find it less terrifying than before. Although she makes us aware of Pascal’s “silence éternel de ces espaces infinis” and of the terrors of the every day, and although she never raises her voice, Glück has now added something to her understanding of life’s disappointments and pleasures: we might call it mature wisdom. Helplessness has turned into an accommodation with the self and the world.

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he differences between Graham’s temper and art and Glück’s are many and transparent. Glück’s colossal but low-grade sadness makes ecstasy impossible, although in The Seven Ages she seems surprised to have achieved ordinary human happiness. Graham’s breathless, energetic onrush always verges on sexual or religious rapture. The hallmarks of Glück’s poetry are her moderate, often dispassionate tones and a preference for short lyric utterances with simple syntax and diction. Graham’s expansive, swirling, explosive articulations sometimes (as in her recent work) seem not even to be sentences. Glück maintains roots in self and relatives that branch out in chaste poems of observation or reminiscence or in lyrics with incantatory anaphora; she looks primarily inward, or outward as far as the immediate family. Graham, on the other hand, tries to imagine what an idea might be, as it is felt on the pulse; she makes us aware of the very processes of thinking, of the act of consciousness. She moves both deep inside the mind and out into the cosmos. And whereas Glück has always maintained an anecdotal basis for many of her short poems, Graham has begun to move away from intertwined, multifaceted narratives that gave substance to such poems as “What the End Is For,” “Fission,” “From the New World,” “The Phase after History,” and “Manifest Destiny.” (Two of the new poems, “The Taken-Down God,” and “High Tide,” retain the older narrative structure.) Because her major subject is our perceptual negotiations with the world, she must create or discover adequate aesthetic form for philosophical problems: how the world appears, how we register its appearance, and how it inhabits and expands our minds. The poems exist along a spectrum from the difficult but comprehensible to the difficult and impenetrable. Each reader, I suppose, will weigh in with different preferences and degrees of understanding. Graham’s “repetitions” differ from Glück’s but they offer readers—of this poet who has always been obsessed with entrances and the relation of in and out—a way in. First of all, she favors long, convoluted, deeply subordinated sentences,

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   () often lacking distinct, parsible grammatical coordinates. Within any single poem, she repeats phrases, words, and motifs in a quasi-musical way. Second, there is the (annoying) habit of proliferating parentheses and brackets [it’s often impossible to understand why she uses one marker instead of the other at any given moment], which suggest uncertainty, simultaneity, hallucination, or the equivalence of a painterly montage instead of a straight sequence. Third, Graham’s—not entirely new—favorite parts of speech are gerunds and present participles, so that action seems never to begin or finish but always to be progressing and repeating itself. In The Errancy () a poem titled “The Turning,” in which an act of description becomes a kind of narrative, ends with the question: “Whose turn is it now?” And we see here how Graham is playing not only with two senses of the word “turn” but also with the differences between the gerund and the simple noun. In the new book she poses a simple question: “Where does this going / go?” (“Philosopher’s Stone,” ). The gerunds go wild in Never, much of which has seaside settings. In her renderings of the “roiling” (a much-used word), cresting, and withdrawing waves, and the lucent speckling of light upon water, Graham has found a style apposite to her subject. In the same way that John Ashbery is our best poet of weather, Graham may be the best poet of water. The opulent activity mimicked and produced within her poems comes often at the price of clarity. (Adam Kirsch has already written, sympathetically but quizzically, about whether these things are “poems” instead of something else.) Twenty years ago she entertained many of the same thematic preoccupations, but her sentences and her lines were shorter. Later, beginning with The End of Beauty, her third book, expansion, proliferation, and fracture took over. In most of the new poems, Graham usually starts with simplicity of articulation and notice, and then lets spin her metaphysical energies as she hurls her mind into the visible and its borders with the invisible. More than half of the twenty-seven poems in Never have straightforward beginnings, whether simple sentences or mere phrases. Like Charles Wright, Graham has borrowed—from Pound? from Gary Snyder?—the habit of moving from phrases to clauses and of sometimes constructing lengthy phrases with no simple predicate. Here are some random openings: “I am beneath the tree. To the right the river is melting the young sun” (“Afterwards,” ); “It’s like this. There are quantities” (“Philosopher’s Stone,” ); “How old are you?” (Evolution,” ); “Those neck-pointing out full bodylength and calling / outwards over the breaking waves” (“Gulls,” ); “Cluster of bird-chatter a knot at the center of a supreme / unfolding” (“The Time Being,” ); “All day there had been clouds and the expectation / of sun” (“Surf,” ). The last citation makes a deceptive nod in the direction of Elizabeth Bishop, whose steady eye Graham professes to emulate, but whose modest



  style she seldom replicates. Like Bishop, Graham includes acts of selfcorrection in the very patterns of her observation. Graham moves from the seen to the unseen, gazing steadily like Bishop but then whipping off in a melodramatic frenzy of metaphysical speculation. Where Bishop is fastidious, Graham is fastidious and rhapsodic. The two poets ask the same questions in different dialects: How is the natural world scripted? How can we reproduce it in our language? How might such language model itself on natural ebb and flow, waxing and waning? In our secular, post-Romantic age these constitute theological dilemmas and statements not of belief but of approach. Four of her new poems are titled “Prayer” (as in previous volumes Graham offers multiple takes on a single subject); others have religious titles (“Via Negativa,” “Covenant”) or subject matter (“The Taken-Down God”). More than a century after the death of God there is no one to answer her questions, many of which seem like poems directed outward into the void or into the inner depths. Like Bishop (in her early “Over  Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”) Graham confronts the potential for religious experience only to “look and look [her] infant sight away.” In a videotape made in  for the Lannan Foundation, Graham replied to an interviewer’s question about her difficulty that she does not find her own poetry opaque: “I think I make it as clear as it can be.” Her answer may be any author’s response—Ashbery and Frost said the same thing—or it may be slightly disingenuous, since she is well aware of her reputation as an often inscrutable poet. Whatever she says, her poems offer us the best evidence of their maker’s methods. (Cf. D. H. Lawrence: Never trust the teller, trust the tale.) The shortest and seemingly simplest poem in the book (first published in the New Yorker) may make us ask: Why can’t they all be this clear? In a note, Graham informs us that the last line is based on something by Zbigniew Herbert; that she “take[s her] poem to be in conversation with such notion of the gods—and of how history transforms them”; that the poem wonders what the “ ‘suitable’ distance between subject and object, gods and humans, humans and nature, might indeed be.” Like much of her work, “Prayer (‘From Behind Trees’)” is an object lesson in what we might call “betweenness.” It is also only deceptively easy: The branchful of dried leaves blown about at the center of the road, turning on itself is it a path: snake: gray-brown updrafting: drama: whole affair played out between the wind’s quiver, wind’s dusty haste, an almost impeccable procedure, bit of scenery from which all fear



   () is deleted. So it is right here, where I am peering, where I am supposed to discern, how the new gods walk behind the old gods at the suitable distance. () “Prayer” prays for nothing, addresses no one other than the reader, and achieves its ends by relatively (for Graham) simple means. The poem employs no brackets, no parentheses. It gives instead a series of alternatives divided by colons, as the poet lists possible answers to a question (in a run-on sentence) provoked by a natural phenomenon. This is as condensed a poem as Graham has ever written, but it does no more than “wonder” (her word) about the “suitable distance.” It is a miniaturized, imagist metamorphosis: not a genuine Ovidian tale, with mythic etiology, only the observation of change and a speculation about the possibility of the invisible emanating from the visible. Probably no living American poet has as much hunger for speculation and for metaphysical questing as Graham. Her work is a welcome alternative to the intellectual, linguistic, and emotional impoverishment of so much contemporary poetry. In her avidity she resembles Stevens; in her looking at the world she resembles Bishop, the late Amy Clampitt, and (one of Clampitt’s and Bishop’s favorite poets) Hopkins. But whereas patience is the virtue most associated with looking at the world, Graham’s rare talent has resulted in impatient observing. Instead of the calm attention of Hopkins, Ruskin, and Darwin, the greatest of the Victorian lookers-at-the-surround, Graham offers swirling junkets of action, a mind and a world in perpetual motion. “I am a frequency, current flies through” announces the first line of “Ebbtide” (); the speaker characterizes herself—in terms of both electricity and water—as a force of repetition and uniqueness. Graham’s most Stevensian poem, “Hunger,” is virtually a homage to “Credences of Summer” from which it takes a line as epigraph. Set at day’s apogee, it contains short sections that have time signatures (:, :, :, :, and so on) as noon comes and goes. At the end the poet makes a kind of note to herself: “The god: repetition without variant,” and then immediately offers a self-correcting alternative: “its spouse: inevitable necessary variant.” In other words, the poem also uses Stevens’s theme-andvariations format, and his idea of poems as “notes” (for Graham, not “notes towards a supreme fiction” but toward an understanding of process and object). Like Stevens, Graham seeks but never finds a naked truth, what he labels the “rock.” She requires and also resists what he calls the evasions of “as,” because all language is metaphorical, figurative, approximate. In the last lines of “Hunger” she asks for “A truth not a symbol. Grip it in scrutiny” ().

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  Again, the very fact that she echoes Stevens means that poetic articulation may be secondary, indeed evasive: . . . It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object. Deep in the woods They sang of summer in the common fields. They sang desiring an object that was near, In face of which desire no longer moved, Nor made of itself that which it could not find . . . Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed The object, grips it in savage scrutiny . . . (“Credences of Summer,” VII, my emphasis) Like Stevens, Graham wishes to “trace the gold sun about the whitened sky / Without evasion by a single metaphor” (“Credences,” II), and like him she realizes and dramatizes the impossibility of her wish. Both poets occasionally sound notes of desperation. In “Relay Station,” her volume’s concluding poem, she claims—against her better judgment—“a thing and its description can be one: can be the time it takes to say the thing” (). No, it cannot. Even at noon, the time of “Hunger,” when there are no shadows, reality itself comes only in parts, never in naked essences. Stevens and Graham both “seek // The poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word, / Straight to the transfixing object . . . We seek / Nothing beyond reality” (Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” IX). This is a sophisticated person’s nostalgic wish for presence and reality, for an unmediated vision. “You do understand, don’t you, by looking?” she inquires over again as a refrain in “Le Manteau de Pascal” (The Errancy), Whose many other compelling repetitions act as a fugal stretto as well as a psychological gesture. Graham’s compulsive looking is allied to her double sense that, on the one hand, she may be saved by looking or at lease learn something by it, but that, on the other, looking—like language—is mediated by human consciousness and can never be other than partial. In choosing sea, and light and air as objects of her efforts, Graham ensures a plenitude of matter; Thomas Wyatt’s line “Since in net I seek to hold the wind,” the epigraph to The Errancy, might be her calling card. Where Bishop took “The Monument” (of wood) and a cabin on stilts (“The End of March”) as objects for her descriptive energies and symbols of material reality, Graham makes her poetic and epistemological task more difficult by looking at what she cannot grasp.



   () At the same time, the sheer materiality of the world inspires the lush, almost tangible, densely syntactic thickets of Graham’s poetry. “The Visible World” (Materialism) begins matter-of-factly, “I dig my hands into the absolute,” as she goes literally beneath the surface of things. Action—physical or mental—predominates so that all the poems seem to be present tense (even when they are not), whereas Glück, like Wordsworth, seems always to be living in the past. The first “Prayer” of Never reproduces an act of watching with an (uncharacteristic) long first sentence, followed by a sequence of shorter, simpler ones. This is the opening: Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (Turning, reinfolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing motion that forces change— this is freedom. () The description renders action variously: the first simple verb (“watch”) is succeeded by one implied infinitive (“swirl”) and one actual one (“to create current”) and then the onrush of participles and gerunds (“making,” “Turning,” “re-infolding,” “entering and exiting,” “making”) embedded in which come the redundancies of sonic repetition (“minuscule muscle,” “unison in unison”) and the entire line of densely repeated rhyming sounds: “dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where . . . [.]” Only Hopkins— certainly not Bishop—can so sumptuously match the voraciousness of the eye fixed on the visible world to the musical thickness of sound itself (“I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom-of-daylight’s dauphin”). The poem follows up the density of description with the simplicity of application: “Nobody gets / what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing / is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.” “Infinity threads itself ” through time, through space, through light and water, through the material world, and we are both free and acted upon by the force of circumstance. The seeing poet catches the visible with her eye, at the same time acknowledging a resemblance between herself and the thousands of

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  swirling minnows below her, caught in a current both of, and not of, their own making. No other contemporary poet weaves so richly synesthetic a fabric, or vibrates so excitedly between the seen and the heard. In “Where: The Person,” seeing and hearing intertwine with touch as they do in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Here, Graham witnesses “the hammer in the sun behind the fence” and, almost simultaneously, the way the “[w]ind silks the fronds” (). In “In/ Silence” she identifies “[t]he song that falls upon the listener’s eye” (). Like Whitman, Stevens, and Bishop, Graham loves to situate herself on a shoreline and to use the available sensory data as a goad to, and a reflection of, her metaphysical aspirations. These are also vocational ones. Like these poets in the Romantic tradition who see evidence of natural writing in the world, and who listen attentively to the sounds of birds and wind, Graham challenges and measures herself with respect to her witnessing. Thus, in “Dusk Shore Prayer,” she pays homage to the Bishop of “The Map” and “The End of March” by examining a shoreline and seeing evidence of writing in and along it. The poem begins: “The creeping revelation of shoreline. / The under-shadowed paisleys scripting wave-edge down- / slope / on the barest inclination . . .” (). She wants to catch and take hold of what she knows she cannot just as she realizes the impossibility of her analogous wish: “to believe this truly, / not in metaphor.” Graham sees the imperial sun go down. With it, “the human will comes to the end” (). The motif of natural writing, whether a Christian liber naturae, the traditional evidence of God’s presence, or a reflection of the poet as a surrogate god, requires careful looking and reading, and Graham has always attempted to find, to save, and to render herself through such looking. But listening is more problematic still, if only because sound is temporal and more difficult to catch than light, harder to grasp than wind. In “The Complex Mechanism of the Break” (another poem whose very title signals the relationship of a natural phenomenon to an artistic one, in this case the breaks of waves and lines), Graham beings with the visible, trying to describe the effect of waves waxing and waning. Both the waves and the “real rows of low-flying pelicans” () move and dissolve, two natural elements mirroring one another. In trying to see and to record the waves, Graham involves herself in acts of self-correction. Her stringing together of parenthetical phrases, both simultaneous and sequential in their effect, mimics the motion of the waves and also stands in for her greedy imaginative desire to rearrange linear time in order to make everything visible at once. She says straightforwardly: “The mind doesn’t / want it to break—unease where the heart pushes out—the mind / wants only to keep it coming, yes, sun making the not-yet-breaking crest / so gold where the / pelicans turn as they glide— flapping then gliding—as long as possible without too much dropping” ().

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   () As usual her breathless, onrushing excitement sounds a sexual note. It is as though Molly Bloom had become an intellectual. Graham has always looked hard at the world; now in mid-poem, she turns her attention from the visible to the audible. She listens hard. She asks her reader (or herself ?) to “close your eyes” and then corrects herself, acknowledging the inevitable overlapping of the senses: “although it’s only when you open them you hear the seven / kinds of / sound.” (As with Empson’s seven types of ambiguity, what is important is not so much the distinct kinds as the human effort to distinguish them. One is surprised not that it is done well but that it is done at all.) She has attended to “force” and now she measures it sonically, listening to “hiss-flattenings,” “the pebbled wordlike pulling down and rolling up,” through the “crash” of one wave hitting another, subsiding into the “lowering and sudden softening of all betweens,” and then hearing “the first crash” yet once more. The conclusion of the poem—fifteen lines—begins and ends with parentheses; everything she hears, including a “momentary lull,” is bracketed to give a sense of “betweenness.” Like the ocean, the music of Graham’s poetry ignores normal signatures of key and tempo; her most radical experiments may be those in which she both signals and eschews closure. Grammatically and syntactically she goes beyond the late A. R. Ammons, who also looked closely at his surround and who meticulously accumulated his observations in a series of phrases or clauses separated by his beloved colons. Graham’s earlier sensitivity to the visual world—whether painted or natural—is complemented and superseded by her musical sensitivity in poems like this. Her philosophical themes (shared in part with Ammons) are cause and effect, origin and destination, and the way things work temporally. But by looking at waves and water she reproduces her obsession with middles, “betweens.” Her hurly-burly, synesthetic response to the world allows her to combine the philosopher’s wonder with the painter’s eye. In a poem titled “High Tide,” Graham admits that once, after high tide, she “found a beachlong / scripting / of debris” (). Like Bishop’s kite string in “The End of March,” what Graham discovers inevitably reminds her, and her readers, of all efforts to penetrate the visible through to its origins and its meanings, to connect effect with cause. At the same time (if I may resort to her distinction between nouns and gerunds) she is trying to distinguish between deeds and doings. The genitive phrase, a “scripting of debris,” refers ambiguously to the debris as written evidence (a script written in debris) and as the direct object of the action of “scripting.” No action seems completed in Graham’s poetry; cessation or fulfillment would be equivalent to death. (Interestingly, Glück ends her beautiful poem “Celestial Music” in Ararat with the line: “The love of form is a love of endings.”) In his great autobiographical poem “Nutting”



  Wordsworth recounts a moment when, at the age of ten, he wandered into a hazel grove and ripped it apart in an act of rapacious, assertive masculinity. But before doing so he lolls about, taking his ease; he hears what he calls “the murmur and the murmuring sound” of nearby waters. I take this as a distinction between an abstraction and a present-tense activity, or between the Platonic idea of a thing and that same thing in a self-performance. The same distinction—between a thing in its “doneness” and in its “doing”—is very much at the heart of Graham’s recent poetry. In “Exit Wound” she refers to “the blue between the branches / pulling upwards and away so that branches / become / branching” (). Much of the book generates questions about completion, about whether a thing is ever done. I take it as significant that in her earlier “The Phase after History” (Region of Unlikeness) Graham embedded quotations from, and allusions to, Macbeth, the play that asks the very Grahamian question about whether a thing is done “when ’tis done.” Such queries are practical as well as philosophical and psychological. In Never Graham questions the efficacy of all action, and the ways in which we resist and also accept changes from within and from without. In her previous book, The Errancy, Graham included a group of poems spoken by a series of “guardian angels,” whom she identified as witnesses, unable to effect change. In Never it is the poet herself who wrestles not only with acts of perception but also with activities of control and the determination of destiny. The first poem (“Prayer”) ends with her uncertainties about her power: “I could not choose words. I am free to go. / I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. / It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never” (). The biographical background of these short declarations is probably the series of recent changes in Graham’s life—a divorce, a physical move from the Middle West to the East Coast—but their function in the poem is to alert us, in a series of assertive renunciations, to affirmations still to come. “[N]ever anything but expectant”: the waves and the tide in the book’s final poem (“Relay Station,” ) are also a stand-in for the poet’s own state of mind. In “Exit Wound” she distances herself from herself, referring (like Stevens) to “she,” never to “I.” As she examines herself, she wonders about one of her habitual questions: “the problem as always was the problem of how / something could come out of nothing.” At the end, recalling a previous condition she “felt as if she could / reconcile / this present to that one, and that the / thinking / wanted that so. And that it strived” (). I take this realization as the poet’s determination to continue her movement, however ragged or rugged it might be, toward some degree of illumination. Never is a very strong book. It asks questions; it assays answers; it affirms and then withdraws its affirmations. The mind of the poet and the activities of her poetic “thinking” resemble the waves she confronts and describes. Like the waves, they are endless.



TWELVE

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POETRY IN REVIEW On the Collected Poems of Donald Justice ()

I

wonder whether Donald Justice, before his death two months ago, was able to look at his Collected Poems and to cast himself back in time by a half century and into the place of his septuagenarian precursor who saw his own collected works and decided that “he was glad he had written his poems. / They were of a remembered time / Or of something seen that he liked.” The Ariel of Wallace Stevens’s “The Planet on the Table” can say somewhat cavalierly, or with faux naïveté, that “it was not important that they survive.” Rather, he commits himself to a doctrine of authenticity, to the true voice of feeling and of witness: “What mattered was that they should bear / Some lineament or character . . . Of the planet of which they were part.” When considering their legacy and its possible permanence in the face of human mortality, artists exhibit a range of responses, from the assertive to the nonchalant. On one hand, we have Horace and Shakespeare, building their monuments that time will not efface. On the other, George Balanchine, who went even further than Stevens and told his choreographic heirs that he didn’t care whether his ballets survived because he knew they would inevitably change over time and that dance notation could never preserve in amber the essence of his work. But whereas dance lives only in the moment of its happening, words remain imprinted on the page and in the mind of the reading survivor. What does or should a poet expect and demand of the “secondary world” (W. H. Auden’s phrase), the planet on the table that he has amassed during a lifetime of word-crafting? Any Collected Poems encourages us to take the measure of its author; this particular planet



  on the reviewer’s table establishes once more Justice as a major modest poet, a man who never published a bad poem. In this regard he is different from Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and John Ashbery, whose works—greater in length and in range—are often vitiated by poetic missteps, self-indulgence, or tonal excesses. Justice has stuck to his last in both subjects (childhood and nostalgia predominantly) and tones (melancholy, quiet contemplation, and authorial reticence). In addition, his insistent revision and his stylistic variety mark him as a craftsman as careful as Elizabeth Bishop and as experimental (compare Stevens again: “All poetry is experimental poetry”), as fluid and open to new gestures as Lowell and Ashbery. Quiet thoughtfulness does not preclude evolutionary transformation. My association of Stevens and Justice is not merely fanciful. Justice always claimed Stevens, along with Charles Baudelaire, as one of his major influences. “The Planet on the Table” is, one might say, an exercise in proleptic nostalgia—the poet confronts the future but simultaneously knows that his readers will absorb his stoic grace as they look backward—and as such it suits the moods and subjects Donald Justice made his own over almost a half century. Although there have been others of his generation with similar concerns ( James Merrill on childhood; Merrill and Richard Howard on art, artists, and the entire realm of the aesthetic), and although Charles Wright vies with him as a master of melancholy, Justice spoke more fluently on behalf of nostalgia as a primary human emotion than any other poet of his generation. Tracing how that nostalgia works and has changed over time is one means of calculating the changes in Justice’s art. By comparison to despair, angst, rage, and libidinal surgings, nostalgia suffers form negligence or condescension among postmodern intellectuals, who tend to prefer raw openness, existential fear, or self-laceration in their art. In her suggestive study On Longing, poet-critic Susan Stewart calls it a disease. She allies it with still life, the much-maligned form that traditionally occupies the lowest rung on the ladder of painting’s genres and that, “by concealing history and temporality, . . . engages in an illusion of timelessness.” Like illusion and still life, nostalgia seems a matter of bad faith because it allows, indeed encourages, us to evade or ignore reality. For Stewart, such forgetfulness and evasion are apparently themselves to be avoided. But just as still life as a genre for literary contemplation has undergone transformations at the hands of such stern modernist masters as Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. G. Sebald, so also nostalgia must undergo an upward revision. More than mere escapism, it, too, engages and connects us to reality rather than distances us from it. Justice, both an anatomist and a practitioner of nostalgia, deserves sympathy, respect, and attention. It is time to render both him and his subject greater justice.

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () What’s wrong with nostalgia, anyway? It does not invariably mean regret for a better time. For someone like Justice, who lived through the Depression, the equation of melancholy, rather than simple dreamy longing, and “homesickness” (the literal sense of nostalgia) seems both natural and defensible. He was not always happy in an Edenic childhood; rather, both past and present seem imbued with inexplicable low-grade depression. I am reminded of a question posed to the late novelist Laurie Colwin, who was accused of being too New Yorker-ish, of writing interior-decorated fiction about well-educated, well-bred, good-looking people with a sufficiency of income and an abundance of taste and talent. Why did she write only about “rich” people? She replied to the interviewer that, having once been poor herself, she didn’t find the condition very interesting; that she would rather write about a cast of characters somewhat higher on the income scale. Who could deny her that? Why would anyone object to Justice’s combination of longing for, and anxiety about, a past whose factuality he could neither deny nor wish away? In many cases ( Justice’s is one) an artist’s subjects seem less chosen than given; they constitute a kind of genetic material or poker hand that he has been dealt and must, in turn, do something with. All of Justice’s reviewers and readers bring up the melancholy, nostalgia, and sadness in his poems. Few of them record how melancholy masks terror in his work. In  Jerome McGann compared him to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for “his poems about poetry and a life in art.” Reading the Selected Poems () and thinking of its homogeneity of tone and subject matter, Vernon Young called him “more hedgehog than fox.” Edward Hirsch in a review of The Sunset Maker () labeled him “the resident genius of nostalgia.” Joel Connaroe came closer to the full truth, observing in  that the poet brings his “controlled, urbane intensity to his Chekhovian descriptions of loss and of the unlived life, of the solitary, empty, ‘sad’ world of those who receive no mail, have no urgent hungers—who, in short, lead their lives but do not own them.” This strikes me as accurate, except that there’s a difference between examining the lives of others and reflecting on oneself. Justice always did both. In his  essay “Benign Obscurity” he writes eloquently about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Turannos,” that Jamesian masterpiece of unexplained domestic tragedy. And there are moments in his poetry when a move outward—to story-telling, to observation of others—allows him his own Robinsonsian or Chekhovian moments. By and large, however, the terrors of Justice are entirely internal ones. There’s an instructive comparison with the young Robert Lowell (“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”), who looks at his family and says “unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina / in the Golden House of Nero.” Justice for the most part does

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  without heroic, mythic aspiration or pretense; the ordinary insecurities of childhood suffice for him. The insecurities are chronic and therefore lend themselves to repeated iteration. Repetition signals obsession or at least concern, and it clearly inspires this poet’s technique. Consider the effect of repetition in (to take two examples from many) “Nostalgia of the Lakefronts” ( published in the s) and “Sadness” (in the s). Both are ( largely) constructed in sixline stanzas and both feature a device that Justice alone among contemporary poets has obsessively liked: repeating instead of rhyming words. ( It’s for this reason that he also likes the sestina, the villanelle, and the curtailed villanelle.) The first poem includes two longer middle stanzas (the third and fourth, of six, have seven lines apiece); the variation both breaks the sameness and adds a certain symmetry to the whole. Here are the first two: Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters. A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes; Another, by the lake, the times of cruises. Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises, Is fading to a landscape deep with distance — And always the sad piano in the distance, Faintly, in the distance, a ghostly tinkling (O indecipherable blurred harmonies) Or some far horn repeating over water Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies. At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world. And this is the world we run to from the world. Unlike William Wordsworth, who also grew up “fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” Justice tends not to single out spots of time but to merge his memories into gestures and pictures that typify a chronic condition. Such typifying can easily seduce us into thinking that the pictures are mere washes of color, aquarelles or miniatures. “Blurred harmonies,” “dark sweet afternoons of storm and rain” (stanza ), and a local lake “famed among painters for its blues” (stanza ) cannot entirely erase the thudding horror of words that rhyme only with themselves. “Distance,” “distance,” “distance”: it’s a tocsin of alienation. It is as though the principle of all verbal repetition—whether of sounds, as in rhymes, or of whole words—must counter the effects of historical and personal change. Justice tries to fix the past by limiting the number of words at his disposal. Time makes its erasures. After the middle stanzas, enriched with their added lines, the final (again, six-line) stanzas return us

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () to a stylistic diminution as proof of time’s inexorable destructiveness, against which Justice offers us, not the self-confident pronouncements of Horace or Shakespeare on his immortality, but a muted, saddened, sotto voce despair. After the war (after childhood), when the grand hotels have been shuttered, when “we come back . . . as parents,” when there are no “lanterns now strung between pines— / Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines,” the poet has only memories, some modest pictures, and Proustian associations: And after a time the lakefront disappears Into the stubborn verses of its exiles Or a few gifted sketches of old piers. It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart; Then we remember, whether we would or no. — Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know. The homonymic repetitions register subtle tonal shifts. Because things have vanished, the clean balance of “harmonies” with “harmonies” or “world” with “world” must also go. So we are left with “disappears” and a muted but hopeful reappearing “piers.” The poem ends with its only second-person pronoun, which brings us into the poet’s confidence, and makes a small community (as in Stevens: “Where being there together is enough”). We have the satisfactions of nostalgia, but they are braced against the threat of undoing: “know” goes with “no,” and recollection is an involuntary process. It is as though Justice wants to combat, or at least resist, the inevitable. This is hardly a disease or the “illusion of timelessness.” Justice heard the winged chariot more emphatically than most of his contemporaries. The later “Sadness” sounds a similar tone but with some variations. It starts by trying to identify what was never spoken, only intimated: Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents, Why were you so sad on porches, whispering? What great melancholies were loosed among our swings! As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering And marks each small change in the atmosphere, So was it then to overhear and to fear. What distinguishes Justice’s melancholy from that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Charles Wright—to pick two examples from the past and the present—is that for all of his interest in both music and painting, he tends to eschew Tennyson’s mellifluousness (“The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmur of innumerable bees”) and Wright’s gorgeous pictures. He substitutes an almost discursive language, as in the fourth stanza, in which the very

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  verb “describes” and some concluding abstractions move us away from the physical world to its effects on the psyche: Burchfield describes the pinched white souls of violets Frothing the mouth of a derelict old mine Just as evil August night comes down, All umber, but for one smudge of dusky carmine. It is the sky of a peculiar sadness — The other side perhaps of some rare gladness. The strongest, because the most clearly antithetical rhymed couplet in the poem comes in the pairing of “sadness” and “gladness” (with the echo of Wordsworth’s “We poets in our youth begin in gladness, / but thereof come in the end despondency and madness”). Auden’s definition of poetry as the “clear definition of mixed feelings” comes to mind. Justice concludes the poem on another Romantic note: “Sadness has its own beauty, of course,” begins the seventh stanza. He is thinking of John Keats’s Melancholy, who “dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die.” The colloquialism “of course” is no flat filler. Like the modified and repeated end words, it deliberately keeps tragedy and despair at arm’s length. The river darkens at dusk, and “we stand looking out at it through rain.” The conclusion humanizes life itself, echoes the tears at the end of the Intimations Ode, and, most touchingly, modestly joins endings and beginnings, factuality and figuration: It is as if life itself were somehow bruised And tender at this hour; and a few tears commence. Not that they are but that they feel immense. Like Bishop at the end of “One Art,” trying to pretend that she feels no pain at her loss, Justice keeps passion under the control of art, without whose asbestos gloves he would be left with an unstoppable outpouring. Not, for him, a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But this self-restraint makes us well aware of the turbulence within. One of the compelling aspects of Justice’s poetry is its reticence, clearly on display in these poems of sadness. He was not one of the “foudroyant” masters whom Auden (in “The Horatians”) dismisses in favor of the more modest tones of Horace and his companionable followers. Although we come to know details of the poet’s life—the Florida childhood, the music lessons, the friends who died early and late—Justice was perhaps the least open of contemporary poets. By this I do not merely mean that the spared us much of his inner life or that he evaded the “confessional” mode once made popular by poets like Lowell, who disavowed the very term. I mean that the

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () first-person pronoun seems less prevalent in Justice’s work than in anyone’s since Stevens’s. Just as Stevens projects himself into the “he” of the Snow Man, the Canon Aspirin, Crispin the Comedian, Professor Eucalyptus, or of any third-person subject in his verse, so Justice, too, could register fluctuations of feeling and personal observation without necessarily calling our attention to his own self. It is as though Justice throughout his work wished to harness the concerns of the British Romantics to the restraint of (at least one side of ) Stevens, but with the discursive ease and clarity of Bishop or his own student and somewhat younger contemporary Mark Strand. Compare, for example, Justice’s “Fragment: to a Mirror” to James Merrill’s early “Mirror.” Neither gives what we might initially expect: an occasion for self-examination and scrutiny that leads to understanding. With its obliquely rhymed couplets (a stressed penultimate syllable in an oddnumbered line rhymes with the last syllable of its partner in the following, even one: “arrangement” and “change,” “superficial” and “fish”), its arch diction characteristic of the youthful aesthete, its tired speaker (the mirror itself ), Merrill’s poem concerns the nature of looking. The mirror records the glances of family members, who are regarding and measuring themselves, and it then adresses the window—that complementary framer of a scene— on the opposite wall. Looking out, looking across, looking in; Narcissus and the whole principle of self-knowledge are not far from the poet’s mind, nor is Echo, present in the rhymes, and in the mirror’s last acknowledgment: “to a faceless will, / Echo of mine, I am amenable.” For his part, Justice addresses a mirror but (and here is his distinctiveness) does not involve the self: even more than Merrill’s, his poem is typically not an exercise in human self-knowledge or reflection. A series of questions, the poem demands what exists “Beyond that bland façade of yours” and what before it, as well. The final question figures a world with no people, no questioners, therefore no function for the mirror and no human self-knowledge: Is this the promised absence I foresee In you, when no breath anymore shall stir The milky surface of the sleeping pond, And you shall have back your rest at last, Your half of nothingness? Justice never wrote about Edward Hopper, but he should have. Hopper’s pictures of existential loneliness either with or without human beings give us an appropriate analogy to poems in which people, even when they are together, are invariably alone. Justice’s stylistic reticence derives from his unflinching sense of not belonging. The warm and fuzzy feelings we normally associate with nostalgia have been largely replaced by the chiseled

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  coldness that accompanies an acceptance of alienation and that (in Justice’s mid-career) found a stylistic equivalent in experimental free verse and a surrealism that connected him for a while with Mark Strand and painters like Giorgio De Chirico. The icy ars poetica “Poem” ignores both speaker and reader: “This poem is not addressed to you. / You may come into it briefly, / But no one will find you here, no one. / You will have changed before the poem will.” This is as close as Justice comes to Horace’s “monumentum aere perennius,” but it offers little consolation. He has taken the New Critical ideal of a poem as an autotelic phenomenon and pushed it to its horrifyingly logical conclusion. And he turns his back on the kind of consolations Wallace Stevens might have offered; his poem “comes without guitar, / Neither in rags nor any purple fashion. / And there is nothing in it to comfort you.” Exeunt both Hoon and the Man on the Dump. Exeunt, in fact, all human beings, as well as their wonted emotional satisfactions: “Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.” Stripped-down, bare, prosaic and uncaring, the poem of “Poem” will certainly not help us either to enjoy life or to endure it. Justice’s readjustment to his sense of identity coincided, as it always does in poets of the greatest scrupulousness, with the constant revision of his work. (“You didn’t write; you re-wrote,” says the ghost of Randall Jarrell to Robert Lowell in one of Lowell’s sonnets.) From the same time as “Poem,” “Self-Portrait as Still Life” has undergone a transformation of its own as the poet wavered between versions: from an initial appearance, to a revision in the New and Selected Poems (), to a final return here to the original version. Far from representing what Stewart calls “an illusion of timelessness,” Justice’s tinkering with his poem proves that self-portraiture and even painted still lifes undergo constant change; poem and painting are both, in Paul Valéry’s famous pronouncement, never completed, merely abandoned. In addition to changes in the incidental details of the picture in the poem, the most important fluctuation is the degree of Justice’s self-involvement. In both versions (of six unrhymed quatrains) he makes his brief appearance only in the second half. Here are lines – of the  version: And where am I? I don’t Come into the picture. Poets, O fellow exiles, Lisping your pure Spanish, It’s your scene now, and welcome. You take up the guitar. You cut up the melon.

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () Myself, I’m not about to Disturb the composition. But the poet obviously had second thoughts about his modest evasions, his refusal to disturb or even to enter his picture, his insistence on rendering a self-portrait through gestures of absence. The original version, which now reappears in the Collected Poems, involved its creator to an even smaller degree. Here are lines –: [ . . . ] On the wall, A guitar, in shadow, Remembering hands . . . I don’t come in to the picture. Poets, O fellow exiles, It’s your scene now, and welcome. As an exile himself, Justice now prefers even less of himself. From three “I”s he moves back to a single one. It’s as if he realizes that even a modest increase in the number of his self-denials puts too much of himself into his poem. Can there ever have been a less revealing self-portrait? Hopkins observed that “the just man justices”; in this poem Justice “justices” or absolves himself by means of his exit strategies. The clearest proof of such absolution is the unique appearance of the poet’s name in his “Variations on a Text by Vallejo”: “Donald Justice is dead.” This is Justice’s version of Elizabeth Bishop’s “You are an I; you are an Elizabeth” in “In the Waiting Room”: a single act of self-naming in a writer’s oeuvre, in her case associated with a moment of hallucinating and loss of consciousness, in his with death itself. Inveterate fussing, sometimes at the level of single words, minor substitutions, or even changes of punctuation, occurred throughout Justice’s career. “The Poet at Seven,” a sonnet from his award-winning first book, The Summer Anniversaries (), contains the line “And summer evenings he would whirl around,” which he later changed to “he would spin around,” to change, I suppose, the alliteration. Subtle details like this abound, but the change of even a single world might produce major effects. For example, another poem, originally called “Sonnet,” deals with Adam and Eve. After its first appearance, Justice retitled it “The Wall,” not only for greater specificity but also for greater menace, the menace of omission. This miniaturized account of life in the Garden until the moment of exile ends: They had been told and told about the wall. They saw it now; the gate was standing open. As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

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  What is everywhere present but never mentioned in the poem is its real subject, present as an unspoken rhyme on the title: the Fall. One can go on. Start at the very beginning with “The Anniversaries,” the first poem in The Summer Anniversaries. In four twelve-line stanzas it traces the poet’s life from his birth, at which “Great Leo roared,” to his thirtieth birthday, when he “saw / The trees flare briefly like / The candles upon a cake / As the sun went down the sky.” Subsequently, through the  Selected Poems, a revised poem called “The Summer Anniversaries” eliminated the original first stanza, began with the poet at ten, and inserted a new stanza about the twenty-one-year-old poet, now on the Lower East Side listening to a melancholy tugboat’s blast, which “reminded me I was lost.” Flash forward to : the original poem has been restored, the revised one eliminated. Usually Justice preferred the latest versions of his poems; in this case he returned to the earliest one. Why? Surely a Variorum edition will be needed—as it will be for Lowell—so that future readers can make their own assessments. Until then we won’t be able to figure out whether Justice’s tamperings constitute improvements, uncertainties and doubts, nostalgia for first thoughts, or simply second (and third) thoughts. We might also ask ourselves why the poet could not simply combine the two versions, making a five-stanza poem that marks different points along the path of his first thirty years. This volume omits the first version, a narrative, of “Incident in a Rose Garden” from Night Light (), preferring a second version, in dialogue form, even though each of Justice’s previous collections included both poems. A “Collected” Poems is never the same as a “Complete” one (which is generally posthumous), but I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s ironic decision to title her volume of  The Complete Poems, meaning of course “complete up until this point.” In Justice’s case, the current collection will stand until someone does for him what Frank Bidart did, albeit incompletely, for Lowell. Whether we take Justice’s revisions as compulsive impatience, nervous discontent, or neurotic hesitation, these small gestures point to the craftsman’s tinkerings as evidence of a high degree of self-consciousness. A selfabnegating poet can still assert himself through means other than overt proclamations. “Learn to be anonymous,” he advises in “For a Freshman Reader.” Less trumpeting and self-promoting than Robert Lowell, Justice always took surprising turns in his negotiations with poetic form and language. Like Lowell he began as a “formal” poet, preferring the tried and true rhythms and genres of English verse. Although Lowell manipulated or wrenched the sonnet in the hundreds of pages of Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, his poetry from Life Studies onward became increasingly relaxed. Justice experimented with free verse (as with surrealism) in his middle volumes but has come back in the poems of the past fifteen

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () years to many of his earlier, traditional choices. A poet’s style rather than his subject matter might offer us the surest guide to his self-transforming. Because Justice’s subjects stayed the same, the formal variety of his presentations becomes that much more powerful a means of appreciating him. I have already glanced at Justice’s rhymes, especially the repeated words, and the homonyms or “rime riche,” that he used throughout his career. As a principle of sound, repetition becomes a cause of effects, a constituent of meaning. Even with a preponderance of laconic diction (as in the characteristic epitaphic early poem “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”) and straightforward syntax, a Justice poem like the early, arch “Southern Gothic” can create an effect of thickness—appropriate to the landscape—through repetition of key words even when they are not placed in end positions. The last eight lines read: Great oaks, more monumentally great oaks now Than ever when the living rose was new, Cast shade that is the more completely shade Upon a house of broken windows merely And empty nests up under broken eaves. No damask any more prevents the moon, But it unravels, peeling from a wall, Red roses within roses within roses. It sounds as if the Robert Frost of “Directive” and the Stevens of “The Plain Sense of Things” had moved for a moment to the Deep South. Later on, Justice looked back at his “Early Poems” with self-correcting, self-satirizing awareness: “How fashionably sad those early poems are! / . . . / The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!” But it’s not always lush sadness. Justice renders his grim sense of human decline and deprivation with half rhymes to characterize the half-knowledge of “Men at Forty” (whose very title he famously borrowed from the very un-laconic “Comedian as the Letter C”). The beginning and end of the poem: Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to. ..................................... Something is filling them, something . . . That is like the twilight sound Of the crickets, immense, Filling the woods at the foot of the slope Behind their mortgaged houses.

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  “Forty” and “softly” begin the soft music that becomes the “twilight sound” of progressively threatening crickets. A mixed, simultaneous diminuendo and sforzando accompanies further half-rhymes (“woods” and “foot”) as music itself develops a symbolic power to complement the clear suggestion of “slippery” in “slope” and the jarring final adjective, which puts us in mind of the “death” that belongs linguistically to any “mortgage.” Thus, Justice in midlife, chaste, sad, anonymous, fond of free verse or syllabics in his schemes and of synecdoche in his tropes. The man who earlier addressed a mirror still has no reflection, as in “The Missing Person” (“He sees what is missing. / It is himself ”) or begins his shut-down as in “The Man Closing Up” (“Like a deserted beach, / The man closing up”). Simple declaration accompanies the use of parts for wholes: “No longer do the hands know / The happiness of pockets” (“Hands”). The “twilight sound” has an internal component: “Now comes the evening of the mind. / Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood” (“The Evening of the Mind”). And in a minor mode: If we recall your voices As softer now, it’s only That they must have drifted back A long way to have reached us Here, and upon such a wind As crosses the high passes. [“For the Suicides of ”] And in Hopperesque reflections: Lights are burning In quiet rooms Where lives go on Resembling ours. [“Bus Stop”] The reflections, revenants, and other reminders of a common mortality deliver their sense of acceptance all the more powerfully for being written in the present tense, and seldom in the first-person singular. The poems of the last decade—both those included in the  New and Selected and the ten new ones at the end of this collection—advance and repeat Justice’s ability to find new bottles for old wine, new music for his old congenial themes. “Vague Memory from Childhood” moves nostalgia to the edge of apocalypse, enclosing its imagery of sound and sight within quatrains that themselves offer verbal containment. Here is the first stanza:

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  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () It was the end of day — Vast far clouds In the zenith darkening At the end of day. The voices of the poet’s aunts mingle with the sound of “bird-speech” as evening gradually comes upon the child who, playing alone outdoors, notices a light indoors “printing a frail gold geometry / On the dust.” The last of five stanzas: Shadows came engulfing The great charmed sycamore. It was the end of day. Shadows came engulfing. The syntax is completely paratactic throughout; there is not a single dependent clause. The middle stanza is enjambed into the fourth; otherwise, each stanzaic room is self-contained by both its final period and the word that recurs at the end of its first and fourth lines (or, rather, variations on the phrase that boxes in the entire stanza). The last stanza is the only one with three sentences, which signal a deliberate slow-down. Darkness, endings, and the final ominous italicized repetition are heightened by the most specific extension and deepening of the “vague” threat present since the beginning: the initial verb (“came engulfing”) is transitive, affecting a single object (“the great charmed sycamore”). Now, the shadows come engulfing . . . what? Nothing specific and therefore everything in the world. Justice applies utter clarity of method to the articulation of a vague, intransitive horror. Consequently, we respond to the poem with a shiver of dread and a smile of aesthetic satisfaction. Repetition, repetition, repetition: the new poems are filled with it. “At the Young Composers’ Concert” makes rhyme the connecting link between, rather than within, its couplets, in order to produce a chain of sameness and difference. Thus: The melancholy of these young composers Impresses me. There will be time for joy. Meanwhile, one can’t help noticing the boy Who bends down to his violin as if To comfort it in its too early grief. It is his composition, confused and sad, Made out of feelings he has not yet had [ . . . ]

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  “Couplets Concerning Time” Offers epigrammatic examples of time’s passing, starting with a (single) first-person confession: Have I not waited with a numbed impatience In polite pale rooms with polite anonymous patients? Applying Yeats’s “polite meaningless words” (“Easter, ”) to (presumably) the poet himself in a hospital waiting room, Justice moves to scenes of greater impersonality, concluding his quintet of couplets with a bleak meteorological vignette: The clouds, the vast white Saturday afternoon, And the high mournful whistle crying, Nooon, Nooon. Surely Justice intends “Nooon” not merely as an onomatopoeic transcription of a train whistle but also as a reminder of Stevens (“The Course of a Particular”), who gives us “the absence of fantasia” when at last the cry of the leaves “concerns no one at all.” The poem has moved from “I” to no one. Exeunt omnes, yet once more. But not quite. The volume’s last poem—placed there deliberately, I am sure—is a three-stanza meditation (“There is a gold light in certain old paintings” ) on the depiction of suffering or simple unhappiness through the mediums of pictures, music, and drama. Each stanza stands separate by virtue of its subject and by its vigorously emphatic repeated words. The gold light of old paintings “is like happines, when we are happy,” asserts the first stanza, even in scenes of the Crucifixion, when the soldiers “Share in its charity equally with the cross.” In stanza , Orpheus, having turned to see Eurydice, sings a song asking for the prolonging of his sorrow, “If that is all there is to prolong.” And, at the end, we have Justice’s non-Christian version of Sonia’s heartbreaking final speech in Uncle Vanya: The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good. And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed. The couplet moves away from the simple sentences and end-stopped lines that precede it. It also picks up a more lilting rhythm. Line , in my ear, gets four stresses as opposed to the five in the others. Speed enters at the very end. The couplet reminds us assertively of the goodness of our work and of our existence. Like God examining his creation at the beginning of Genesis, I hope that Donald Justice was able to take a retrospective glance and find



  COLLECTED POEMS OF DONALD JUSTICE () his own work “strong and clean and good.” The last line of Justice’s last poem requires us to realize both that suffering does exist and cannot be wished away, and that some kind of recompense for it will be allotted. The recompense comes metaphorically (“as though”) and through the witnessing of art. Donald Justice made himself into an impressive witness.



THIRTEEN

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RITA DOVE, DANCING 

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lmost three centuries ago, in his youthful “Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope perceptively observed: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.” He here supplements the traditional comparisons—which he certainly also knew well—between the sister arts of poetry and painting, and between poetry and music, and he then goes on to praise the “nameless Grace . . . beyond the reach of art” that constitutes the highest achievement in all aesthetic activity. The best practitioners make the difficult look easy, the deviant look normal. Everyone learns to walk and talk; dancers walk, and poets talk, better than the rest of us. So how come there aren’t more dancing poets? The title of Rita Dove’s new volume promises a little more than the contents deliver, but one should be grateful for what lies within. Her earlier Grace Notes () showed Dove’s interest in those delicacies of thought, feeling, and expression that decoration adds to artistic enterprises. American Smooth continues its author’s commitment to integrating the ornamental, the nominally “superfluous,” into the weight of serious subject matter. As a kind of epigraph, she quotes two definitions from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (of “American” and “smooth”), before producing her own titular definition: “American Smooth” is “a form of ballroom dancing derived from the traditional Standard dances (e.g., Waltz, Fox Trot, Tango), in which the partners are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and individual expression.”



 ,  () Dove is taking (understandable) liberties here, but that’s what a creative artist does. As anyone knows who has been put through his or her paces in ballroom instruction, there’s only minimal room for improvisation in the waltz and fox-trot, but as with sonnet writing, strict limits sometimes make for innovative, liberating gestures. Dove’s take on dancing has consequences for, and parallels in, her poetry. Plenty of poets have been Sunday painters or even serious ones. Many poets have had experience with music, as composers, librettists, or talented amateur performers. And there have been still more poets who have enjoyed looking at pictures and listening to music. But dance is of the body, and it’s hard to think of many poets comfortable enough in their own bodies to sway them to music or even to watch others in action. A dancing poet is rarer these days than a dancing bear. Poets, like Pope above, have traditionally found dance useful as a metaphor if not a practice. Shakespeare’s Florizel (in The Winter’s Tale) courts Perdita in rhythms that approximate his subject: “When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that, move still, still, so, / And own no other particular.” And T. S. Eliot, whom it is difficult to imagine cutting a rug, alludes to dance throughout Four Quartets as a symbol of grace, harmony, and integrity, reminding us (in “The Dry Salvages”) of the oneness born of participation in a nonsemantic art: “you are the music / While the music lasts.” More recently, in first-person reminiscences, we have the late Donald Justice’s poignant “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” a recollection of the “little lost Bohemias of the suburbs” and those “brave ladies” who taught him the foxtrot in the makeshift dance studio of their living room. And then, of course, every poetry teacher’s favorite dance poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” which uses an iambic trimeter line to hammer out Theodore Roethke’s memory of his father’s drunken lurchings. At last, in twirls Rita Dove, who actually dances as well as thinks about dancing. Any reader of this volume who happens also to be a dancer (as I am) will suffer some disappointment at not finding more dancing in the poems. The volume seems to be a loose collection, a miscellany in five parts. Only nine poems concern dancing, although music figures in many others. One entire section, called “Not Welcome Here,” deals, through the first-person recollections of men in action, with the th Regiment of African American soldiers (specifically the musicians in the regiment) who fought in World War I. Another, “Twelve Chairs,” is a series of inscriptions carved on the backs of chairs in the federal courthouse in Sacramento. Most of the other poems are first-person lyrics, although real and literary characters (Hattie McDaniel and Salome) also appear. It is the reader’s job to find a thread that weaves the whole into something greater than a random assemblage. And,

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  it turns out, one exists: the book’s leitmotif is the way all identity ( personal, cultural, historical) depends on the relationship between received forms and personal improvisation, between command, expectation, and historical pressure (in the case of the black soldiers) and response, performance, and outcome. And, as a corollary, the way any artist (a poet, a dancer, even a soldier) must train himself or herself to make the difficult look easy. Perhaps Horace was right when he said that poets are born, not made, and perhaps there are born dancers. Most of us, however, train ourselves and get put through our paces—in the schoolroom at our desks, or on the dance floor—in order to accomplish insouciant feats without sweating. The nonchalance of Byron (“I am like a Tiger: if I miss the first spring, I go growling back to my Jungle again, but if I do hit, it is crushing”) and Nijinsky (“I merely leap and pause”) is what everyone aspires to but few, if any, ever achieve. In Dove’s case, it was a specific hardship that led to her current dancing obsession and to the subsequent use of dance in her writing. In  her house was struck by lightning and entire collections of art, manuscripts, files, and photos were lost. A while later, some neighbors insisted on taking the poet and her husband, Fred Viebahn, out dancing. They got hooked. American Smooth records the results of countless hours—and money—spent and lessons taken. “Fox Trot Fridays” was the first poem to come from the experience. Is it coincidental that the fox-trot is the first, the basic dance that a person, or a couple, must learn before moving to more complicated patterns? Or that it is the quintessential smooth American dance? Probably not. In seventeen lines (eight couplets and a single concluding line—a technique Dove has always liked and perhaps inherited from Robert Penn Warren, who used it extensively) and only two sentences, the lyric starts in gratitude (“Thank the stars there’s a day /each week to tuck in // the grief, lift your pearls, and / stride brush stride // quick-quick with a / heel-ball-toe.”). The fox-trot—“smooth” and “easy”—joins the couple “rib to rib,” as though Adam and Eve have been reunited under the mellow tones of Nat King Cole and are returned to Eden, “with no heartbreak in sight—” just the sweep of Paradise and the space of a song to count all the wonders in it. This first dance poem in the book led me to ask two questions—one specific, the other general—about writing about dance and about assembling a volume of poems. The first was about rhythm: How does a poet replicate the distinctive measure of a specific dance? Roethke famously used iambic trimeter, faithful to the “threeness” of the waltz, even though a dactylic foot, with its



 ,  () heavier first beat and two lighter subsequent ones, would more appropriately mimic the rise and fall of the waltz than an iambic line. Dove nowhere replicates an actual dance rhythm, but she often comes close. Here she tries for an analogy to the fox-trot’s “slow-slow-quick-quick” or “slow-quick-quickslow” timing in short lines that open and sweep along with the breeziness of ordinary speech, in the preponderance of monosyllabic words (the first of only five two-syllable words doesn’t appear until line , and “Paradise,” the poem’s longest word, comes appropriately, near the end), and in the delicate assonantal rhymes (“stride,” “stride,” “smile,” “time,” “sight,” “Paradise”) that keep things moving. Other poems follow similar analogical patterns. In “Bolero,” for example, Dove uses a three-line stanza in which the first, long line precedes two shorter ones, in the same way that the first long, dramatic sweep of this slow, sexy dance readies a dancing couple for the two collecting steps that follow. “Rhumba,” one of the book’s longest poems, doesn’t so much mimic the rhythm of the slow-quick-quick-slow, basic Latin dance as remind us visually of a pair of dancers. The poem combines two separate voices, two typefaces; we must read, hear, and see it in the same way we would register a couple on the dance floor as a whole greater than the sum of the two respective parts. The poem begins this way: Wait. Here comes At his touch the music: ( just under the tricep) lean back, look at me— lock your knees, the straighter your legs look, straight up the easier to fall, into him, his hand stroking to descend your cheek. . . . lightly. And so on, through to the end. The first speaker (flush left) is the woman speaking to herself in the second person; the second speaker (flush right: even the typography separates and joins) is the man, and the poem ends with her feeling the audience’s gratitude and his feeling or taking total possession of her: stay on your toes now lean into me,



  define the length of him . . . that’s right . . . the audience forget them the audience your body shuddering all mine into applause now We realize—if we haven’t yet registered the fact—the poem’s multiple identities. We have here two monologues that may be thought of as simultaneous or as provocation-and-response, an antiphonal back-and-forth. And we also have the merging of the two voices, just like the merging of two bodies moving as one, in those lines that ask to be heard either as separate or overlapping: “the audience shuddering . . . your body shuddering,” “shuddering into applause,” “into applause now.” As separate, or overlapping, or both: the wonderful thing about this double-column writing is that it shows how Dove has refused a too easy rhythmic accompaniment or setting for her dance poems. Instead, she has substituted something at once easier to see and harder to hear, which forces the reader to perform his job with a graceful, daring combination of effort and attentiveness, of actively leading and passively submitting to another’s lead. The reader must turn himself into both halves of the dancing couple. “Fox Trot Fridays” provoked a different question as well, one that applies to virtually all volumes of poetry published in the United States within the past fifty years: to what extent can or should we attempt to consider a book as a self-contained work with its own internal logic, themes, and music, and to what extent as a group of discrete poems brought under cover by a combination of convenience and necessity? A poet has a certain number of poems, written over a period of five or six years; a publisher requests a book, and the poet willingly complies. Does a reader derive more satisfaction from a whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts, however lovely the single lyrics may be? Louise Glück has set the standard for books that cohere. The Wild Iris, especially, however it developed over time in the poet’s head, impresses us in part by the ongoing nature of the monologues, the addresses, and the growing conversation between the poet-gardener, the individual flowers in her yard, and the God who supervises and looks down upon all of His creations. Dove’s own Pulitzer-winning Thomas and Beulah told a family story in two parts and had a purposeful design. Does American Smooth?



 ,  () Not overtly. Just as Dove’s individual dance poems tacitly make us listen for a verbal music appropriate to the music of the ballroom, so all of the poems require us to make sense of their relation to one another. Dancing is only one of her subjects. “Twelve Chairs” are the epigrammatic responses— some of them unpunctuated, some of them gnomic—of people required to sit in judgment. The World War I section works from history books and the diaries of a veteran named Orval Peyton, whom Dove met in . What, if anything, brings them together? “Fox Trot Fridays” begins at the end of the workweek (“My Papa’s Waltz” is also, almost certainly, a Friday night poem, unless Roethke’s father had a six-day workweek) and ends with a return to Paradise. The dancing couple in “Rhumba,” like any male /female partnership, could be troped as a version— however fallen—of Adam and Eve. Paradise turns out to one of the several motifs linking individual poems throughout the book. Grace Notes took the embellishments suggested in the title and asked us to consider them as more than random, irrational, insignificant frills and garnishes. Instead, they became instruments of grace, redeeming their makers and users in the same way that art reaches for the grace beyond it. So it came clear to me only after reading “Fox Trot Fridays” why the book begins with two seemingly unrelated poems, “All Souls” and “‘I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land.’” The first recounts the Fall, without ever naming our first parents, and the changes that attended their leaving our earliest and only ideal home. With excellence and concord behind them, they hunkered down to business, filling the world with sighs— these anonymous, pompous creatures, heads tilted as if straining to make out the words to a song played long ago, in a foreign land. What does the female partner in a dancing couple do if not tilt her head and try to reachieve the actual and symbolic harmonies lost long ago? Dancing is a momentary attempt to regain Eden, Eve and Adam rejoining at the hip close to the rib he once lost. The second poem goes back in the story by a page or two: now we have Eve still in the Garden, apart from Adam and discovering the tree and its “speechless bounty.” Just noticing the temptation is equivalent to succumbing to “the red heft of [the fruit] / warming her outstretched palm.” The trope is here paradoxically inverted: an invitation to the dance, a hand extended to lead a partner out onto the floor, consolingly repeats that earlier, more catastrophic invitation to step down and into the world. (And consider how Milton famously made use of hands, united,

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  dropped, and reunited at his epic’s end, in Paradise Lost.) The temporary delight of the dance momentarily allows us to regain the blissful seat we left behind. Some invitations are issued out of malice, others out of the promise of redemption. Dancing uplifts the soul as well as the body. American Smooth begins with the Fall. It ends with something like a rising. In other words, the volume mimics in more ways than one the rise and fall of all smooth dances. The title poem recounts Dove’s delighted recognition that for a moment in some fox-trot or waltz she and her partner had “achieved flight, / that swift and serene / magnificence, / before the earth / remembered who we were / and brought us down.” In addition, the entire last section of random lyrics (entitled “Evening Primrose”) is held together by a common strand, namely, the idea of surprise. Or of not belonging and then finding a place. Or of things lost and returned, of destruction and re-creation. “Reverie in Open Air” begins, “I acknowledge my status as a stranger”; “Sic Itur Ad Astra” (the title is Virgil’s “this way to the stars”) deals with a dream of rising to the stars in sleep; a child speaker in one poem eagerly awaits growing up, and an adult, in another, wants to rest in her mother’s lap as she did when she was a child. “Desk Dreams” revisits various places in Dove’s past, each with its own writing desk, the last of which was the one in Charlottesville that now stands like “honey in the ashes.” The penultimate poem argues “Against Flight,” but the last one, “Looking Up from the Page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil,” signals a release, an acceptance, a confirmation of the ordinary life from which the speaker chooses not to shuffle off. Unsure whether what she sees from her window is “daybreak / or the end,” the poet comes to her senses by asking, and then implicitly answering, the questions that have occupied her attention throughout the volume: “What good is the brain without traveling shoes? / We put our thoughts out there on the cosmos express / and they hurtle on, tired and frightened, / bundled up in their worrisome / shawls and gloves.” Like Elizabeth Bishop, in the great title poem of Questions of Travel, inquiring whether we should have stayed at home, “wherever that may be,” Dove wonders about those twinned impulses: motion and stasis. She also seems to be taking a last look at the earlier poems in this volume. We hear a reminder of the military band of her African American World War I troop when she feels she is ignoring “the body’s marching orders”; all kinds of movement (dancing as well as walking) are implicit in the “traveling shoes” above. The Eden of the book’s first poems is replaced at the end by the dawn of a new day, with avian musicians: “The blaze freshens, / five or six miniature birds / strike up the band.” Dove introduces art into her last poem only to naturalize it. As she awakes to an ordinary daybreak, she returns from the theater



 ,  () of the mind—and from all artistic efforts that stretch us towards grace—to a simple, quiet life: . . . no more strobe and pink gels from the heavenly paint shop: just house lights, play’s over, time to gather your things and go home. Going “home” means returning to the life of a professor-poet in a rebuilt house, of hearing birds instead of human musicians “strike up the band,” and it also means accepting both the allure and the inevitable disappointments of all heavenly aspirations.

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FOURTEEN

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THE NINETIES REVISITED 

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ere is a literary parlor game for the fin de siècle. What do the following poets have in common: Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Lisel Mueller, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Mona Van Duyn, and Charles Wright? And what do the following have in common: A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Amy Clampitt, Alfred Corn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Susan Howe, Donald Justice, Heather McHugh, James Merrill, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott? The answer? Those in the first group won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry during the last decade of our century; those in the second did not. Literary prizes often indicate little aside from the vagaries of taste, the winds of change and fashion, and the perennial influence of politics, cronyism, and back-scratching, as well as the frequent rising to the top of every committee member’s second choice. We may recall the bitter words Robert Lowell puts into the mouth of Hart Crane: “When the Pulitzers showered on some dope / or screw who flushed out dry mouths out with soap . . .” (Lowell, Life Studies, ). But can we ascertain from this list of ten something about the state of poetry in this country at century’s and millennium’s end? Whether or not these volumes are the “best” of their years, are they at least representative? And, if so, of what? Can we detect in these two handfuls of books any millennial intimations? Does “endedness” or the demarcation of an era make an unconscious

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   () if not an inevitable appearance in the works of poets who have other overt concerns and themes? And if fins de siècle are typically marked by fatigue, etiolation, and hope of renewal, what do we learn from American poetry in the decade before the much ballyhooed YK, whose excitement and bruited, would-be disasters came and went with little noise and less effect? Even when we are skeptical, as Frank Kermode long ago observed, “we are most of us given to some form of ‘centurial mysticism,’ and even to more extravagant apocalyptic practices. . . . the image of the end can never be permanently falsified” (). Arguing through the evidence of the Pulitzers is like doing film studies by watching only Academy Award winners. Omissions are always important; art advances independently, regardless of popular acclaim; tastes change. Will this decade’s poets have meaning one hundred, or even twenty-five, years from now? Decades ago, R. P. Blackmur proclaimed the only basis for poetic eternity: “The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom: language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality” (). Nonetheless, zeitgeist diagnoses remain tempting, even fashionable, and not only in the medium of cultural studies. If these volumes were to be placed in a time capsule, and then opened two centuries from now, what would a literary anthropologist conclude about the time of their making? The sense of an ending, if not of the ending, has already prompted retrospectives and theoretical positions from poets and critics. In the middle of the last decade, Elaine Scarry assembled a collection devoted to poetry at centuries’ ends. Her introduction, “Counting at Dusk (Why Poetry Matters When the Century Ends),” constitutes an extended meditation on numbers—the pleasures that mathematicians and others take in them—and an assessment of the relationships between aesthetic gratification, counting, and poetic “numbers.” Scarry’s argument for an enlarged aestheticism at century’s end depends on a strong degree of coincidence as well as special pleading. While lassitude, malaise, and enervation are often associated with the fin de siècle, she balances calendrical and mathematical endings with a “picture of the human will based on the poetic legacy of the final decades” to limn an opposing condition, which “inspires inaugurating linguistic acts. . . . The end of the century . . . seems instead to prompt the desire to reconstitute the world linguistically” (–). Surely this is a truth available only in retrospect and through careful selection: had Scarry dealt with second-rate poets instead of Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, she might have shown us a more random panorama. The spirited hopefulness of, for example, the preface to Lyrical Ballads is visible

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  across the Atlantic in Emerson and Whitman in a century’s midst rather than its beginning or conclusion. The past and the future can never exist apart from out presence between them. Poet Robert Shaw offers a different backward glance. For him, “the last decade has been a much less perilous time for poets than the fin-de-siècle preceding it” (). Measuring his contemporaries against the generation of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, Shaw finds that risktaking in poetry, as in life, has lost much of its tragic glamour: “The drink of the s was absinthe; that of midcentury was gin; that of the s appears to be Cranapple Juice” (). He has updated a classic myth: the giant race was borne away by the flood of its own making, leaving in its wake a landscape at once drier and less fertile and, paradoxically, more comforting. Our self-destructive forebears bequeathed to us the inhibiting model of their artistic bravura and the negative example of their psychological bravado. Shaw finds a lack of self-confidence in his cautious, well-fed contemporaries—owing both to their new commitment to cardiovascular health and other forms of sobriety and to oedipal fears of the covering cherubs of yesteryear. His conclusion is not entirely unrealistic: “Reading our poems fifty or a hundred years from now, posterity will have to decide if this reflexive caution among poets of my generation was a tragic state of affairs, a forfeit of grand opportunities. . . . If we choose to cultivate a poetry that is small in its aim and in its scope, we shall have only ourselves to blame for the results” (). This assessment cannot account for the metaphysical extravagance of Jorie Graham, who along with Louise Glück and James Tate certainly belongs to Shaw’s generation. For one poetic myth Shaw merely substitutes another. Where Lowell elegized Berryman by recalling the generic life shared by their generation of “les maudits” (Lowell, Day by Day, ), Shaw discovers poets of taste and solidity, averse to risk. To such an appraisal, the Pulitzer winners of the past decade offer a sobering corrective. For one thing, the list attests to the diversity of the art and its practitioners. More so than the lists of National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award winners, this one has a strong gender and racial mix. It also bears traces of the internationalism encompassed by American literature, or literature written in English by nonnative speakers such as Lisel Mueller and Charles Simic. We notice more significant forms of variety as well. Charles Wright is lushly Romantic. Mark Strand and Mona Van Duyn still resort (although not exclusively) to formal patterns of rhyme and meter. Tate carries the banner of one kind of surrealism, Simic of another (indeed, his volume of prose poems is dedicated to Tate). Glück has written a book with an organizing principle, a durchkomponiert sequence. Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine,

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   () and Mueller—and the others to varying degrees—reminisce and revisit scenes of family, childhood, and personal history in general. Since all of the poets have attained “senior” status (Graham turns fifty in ), there is the inevitable, occasionally gloomy, obsession with personal rather than historical endings. Mortality, loss, and decay figure heavily in the books; death hangs over the poets’ heads. Finally, one can read and assess the poets along a scale moving from relative simplicity (or transparency) to difficulty (or opacity). Poetic means and ends, styles and subjects, rhythm and diction, syntax and troping vary widely within these books. Of the ten, four (those by Graham, Komunyakaa, Mueller, and Tate) contain “selected” poems. Of these, Graham’s and Tate’s do not contain “new” work, but Graham has selections from her two volumes of the s, Region of Unlikeness and Materialism, and for that reason (among others) I include her in the following pages, whereas I exclude Tate from further consideration.

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staple of contemporary poetry is the autobiographical reminiscence, which attests to Wordsworth’s long and various legacy and to the transformations of nostalgia during the past two centuries. Komunyakaa, Levine, Mueller, Simic and Van Duyn all mine this vein, attempting, like Wordsworth, to give “Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining, / Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past / For future restoration” (The Prelude,  version, :–). A return to sources—childhood and family, rites of passage, initiations, revelatory or inspirational moments—brings sustenance and the ability to get on with life. One version of the fin de siècle involves erosion, evasion, desiccation, and anomie and a concomitant commitment to poetry of “seriousness and flamboyance, hyperbole and arbitrariness” (Vendler, ). But the central tonalities in these five books are conversational, and often flat; the poets seem to think that a move beyond the koine might undermine the sobriety of the speaking voice and the sincerity of memory. In order to attest to seriousness, they forswear flamboyance and hyperbole. (And Simic, in this volume at least, forswears even verse, using the magical realism of prose anecdotes, vignettes, and mood pieces to reconstruct a historical or mythical past and to reinvent a self.) In his selection of twelve new poems, Komunyakaa (like Charles Wright, another southerner) shows a preference for noun-heavy, adjective-laden descriptive verse, but without Wright’s deep melancholia or his religious questionings. With no capacity for abstraction (unlike Wright and Graham), Komunyakaa revels in sensuous recollections and makes his poetic

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  stock-in-trade out of description and narrative. Thus the first poem sets the scene. It marks a return to home base: Horse-headed clouds, flags & pennants tied to black Smokestacks in swamp mist. From the quick green calm Some nocturnal bird calls Ship ahoy, ship ahoy! I press against the taxicab Window. I’m back here, interfaced With a dead phosphorescence; The whole town smells Like the world’s oldest anger. (“Fog Galleon,” ) The method is characteristic not only of Komunyakaa but also of many of his contemporaries. It is his version of “Tintern Abbey,” saying, “Here I am again and this is what I notice; here’s what has changed and what has not.” He proceeds from a sentence fragment to a full sentence, from a visual image to an aural one, from the observed external world to a stationing of the self. The unexpected “interfaced” introduces the language of contemporary technology into a polluted landscape, and a further simile extends the picture from the present on the Gulf Coast to a different place and time in order to universalize a personal experience: Scabrous residue hunkers down under Sulfur & dioxide, waiting For sunrise, like cargo On a phantom ship outside Gaul. Neutral language; the habitual, annoying ampersand; and an informal but steady beat (the lines have an unstrict but discernible rhythm of mostly three stresses) prepare us for Komunyakaa’s complicated feelings, in subsequent poems, for his native landscape and the people from whom he fled but to whom he returns Antaeus-like. These are family poems, and like Wordsworth’s they contain lessons: “My first lesson: / Beauty can bite” (“Praising Dark Places,” ). Home is inescapable. Because Komunyakaa has no interest in meditation, he relies on narrative to dramatize the lessons he has learned. A ten-part sequence entitled “A Good Memory” is typical of much of his (and his contemporaries’) reappraisals of the past. Like Levine, Komunyakaa expects personal experience to suffice and ordinary language to give ballast to memory. There is no

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   () hankering after heightened speech, rich musicality, or sinuous syntax. Each numbered and titled section represents a single moment, item, or vignette; the individual parts (among them, “Wild Fruit,” “Meat,” “Breaking Ground,” “Shotguns”) capture still vivid spots of time. Sensuousness is both a subject and a poetic technique: Figs. Plums. Stolen Red apples were sour When weighed against your body In the kitchen doorway Where late July Shone through your flowered dress Worn thin by a hundred washings. Like colors & strength Boiled out of cloth, Some deep & tall scent Made the daylilies cower. (“Cousins,” ) How does meaning develop in poetry? One way, abjured by Komunyakaa and other contemporary poets, is through such conscious linguistic manipulation that the reader feels that English is now something strange and foreign. A poet can use words in strikingly original ways or discover old or unusual words that send a reader to a dictionary. Such was Auden’s legacy, which most of today’s poets have ignored in favor of “les mots de la tribu,” purified (they would like to think) by the double cauldrons of sincerity (“this is what happened to me—I present it to you clearly”) and democracy (“what happened to me is probably like something that happened to you”) But as John Hollander has suggested, a poet is someone with an interest in language both diachronic and synchronic, who attends to the resonances of words at a specific time and to the development of words through time itself. Suggestiveness and etymology become cousins in the poetic arsenal (Hollander, ). Komunyakaa and Philip Levine both spurn, by and large, the arcane, the archaic, the elevated—in diction as in syntax—in order to remain faithful to the honesty of experience and recollection. Komunyakaa has a series of fourteen free-verse sonnets (“Songs for My Father”) that depicts the difficult but affectionate, physically and psychologically turbulent oedipal relationship. The last lines of the final, deathbed poem show the linguistic richness often missing in this poetry: “You were skinny, bony, but strong enough to try / Swaggering through that celestial door” (). The two trisyllabic words represent the father’s heightened power, now sadly diminished. For a rare moment, linguistic effect conveys the force and form of feeling.

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  The last poem in Levine’s book (“My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis Could Break His Heart”), like Komunyakaa’s, is a son’s testament to his father. In a book of family-and work-centered poems, in which machismo and swagger go hand in hand with heterosexual tenderness and elegiac reminiscence, this one represents the perfection of Levine’s method. Figuration, syntax, and even musicality play less prominent parts than the (at least apparently) open directness of address and plain speech. Elsewhere in the book Levine has asked us to “bless the imagination. It gives / us the myths we live by” and “the visionary power of the human” (). In “My Father with Cigarette,” Levine proceeds from the assumption that accurate memory, judicious detail, and language that resists the highfalutin and the abstract will nevertheless raise what might be otherwise constructed as a prose vignette to the level of poetic utterance. The formula, stated overtly here, but implicit everywhere in Levine’s autobiographical works, is simple—a series of variations on this poem’s opening “I remember” (). Levine spins free-ranging improvisations in long, fanciful sentences. His poems constitute experiments in working-class embroidery. Each contains an unanticipated surprise, for us or for the characters: Levine has a storyteller’s instinct and knows how to pace a plot, to withhold a punch line or an epiphany, to embellish, augment, or undermine his opening premises. With its modest accumulations of details, and virtually unnoticeable variations on a theme, the poem about his father sounds delicate changes of tone; it builds subtly to a climax that takes in father and son, world history, and the genial refractions through which life and art merge. The poem circles away from seemingly incidental details and returns to them in the manner of a Romantic nature lyric. It veers between present and past tenses; bringing his father into focus causes the son, sixty years later, to return to an originary place and to stand there in memory as though “then” were really “now.” The construction of a Levine poem is, typically, fugal. Motifs recur with variation; repetition becomes a structural and an emotional principle. Single images, people, phrases, and things develop iconic status: for example, the picture of the father with his match; the room; an unplayed piano; the motif of money; the sense of a drama being played in present tense; a picture of Hindenburg in military regalia; and the dating of the memory (in the poem’s long antepenultimate sentence) to the “year Hitler came / to power,” when Levine’s grandmother learned English by reading Dickens. The poem ends: Everything tells you this is a preface to something important, the Second World War, the news that leaked back from Poland that the villages were gone. The truth is—

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   () if there is a truth—I remember the room, I remember the flame, the blue smoke, how bright and slippery were the secret coins, how David Copperfield doubted his own name, how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking, how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano. () Like other forms of repetition, anaphora has its own rhythm; Levine has learned from Whitman the special wonders of list-building. Keatsian truth and beauty “are one though never meant to be” (): Levine seems never to have surmounted his working-class anxieties about form, elegance, and beauty itself. His “simple” truth is simple in the way of Shaker furniture: honed, refined, burnished until it gleams. In the title poem he reverts to a defense from nature, not nurture: Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. () This American myth of innocence, nakedness, and simplicity is highly artificial. Levine would agree with Yeats that there’s more enterprise in going naked, but nakedness is not possible unless one is also, or has been, clothed, just as the truth is never simple. Life’s details do not stand alone; instead, they are gathered through repetition, in shadows of picture frames that themselves contain other representations. For Levine, “truth” is an aesthetic construct and a supplement. Plainness, like utilitarianism, comes with its own beauties. For this reason, work, poverty, even truth, those staples of Levine’s “subject matter,” never produce unhappiness. Lisel Mueller (like Simic) represents the new international American language of the second half of the twentieth century. Like Levine, she favors metonymy, the trope of substitution, as a poetic strategy. Metonymy seems a natural ally to a poet who has suffered displacement and resettling, and who tries to domesticate things by naming them: What happened is we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face,

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  the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue. (“Things,” ) The poem dramatizes the relationship between the settled life and poetic acts of replacement. Loneliness, the immigrant’s condition, provokes poetic reclaimings through the trope of catachresis. “Things” is not only an ars poetica but also an introduction to acts of reestablishing an ego and its place in the world. Everything extends from the self. In order to relocate it, to make it comfortable, “we gave the country a heart, / . . . so we could pass into safety.” Mueller dwells on loss, in her case the homeland itself, symbolized by her mother’s piano (“Place and Time,” ), instantly retrievable through poetic recall. The fragile beauties of nature and domestic life survive as permanent artifacts of consciousness. Like Levine, Mueller has a moralizing, fabular impulse; she wishes to make sense of ordinary things and to preserve them by simple acts of explanation, in one case a fairy tale. (Her use of magic is like Charles Simic’s surrealism, another perhaps inevitable mode for displaced persons who have borne witness to world calamities.) The longest of the new poems in this volume, “Captivity,” refigures the Patty Hearst-Symbionese Liberation Army episode primarily as a domestic event: “Eight weeks in that closet: / a child’s worst nightmare, / being locked up in the dark” (). Hearst becomes a child again, a surrogate (another metonymy) for the German refugee who sought new life in America. The poem is really about the audience for the new and our individual and collective need to have fairy tales with clear moral meanings and easy answers: “We could not cope with the huge / complexities of the heart, / that melting pot of selves” (). At last, Patty disappears (like Mona Van Duyn’s Leda) “into the dappled / indistinct tapestry / of the common crowd,” “passing into the ever-after / of the free, anonymous life” (). Domestication represents one way in which contemporary female poets tame and revise older myths of violence, or history itself. Mueller has in no way transformed the language of poetry (it would be a rare—indeed unique—poet who could do so in her second tongue); she offers, instead, a clarification of ordinary life, even at its most bizarre. Charles Simic, younger but equally displaced, goes one step further in The World Doesn’t End, his volume of prose poems. Although his title implies a rebuttal of apocalyptic fin de siècle lassitude, Simic’s pared-down surrealism—a mixture of vignettes, domestic description, and dreams—suggests a failure of direct engagement with the world, and a retreat into a parallel universe that bears some tangential resemblance to our own.

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   () The award of a prize to a book of prose poetry validates a form that— however established it has become in the past century—still seems like the neglected stepchild in the House of Poetry. Simic relies on simple declarative sentences for the most bizarre reportage. Growing up in Belgrade during World War II, he writes English in the way of an immigrant or a sedulous schoolboy—with an eye to correctness. The diction is limited (unlike, say, that of copious Whitmanian wordmongers such as Amy Clampitt and Jorie Graham). The prose is proper, although the images are fantastic. The individual pieces, never more than a page long and usually shorter, foreground structure, not significance; they seem allegorical or symbolic, and they invite deeper probings, but they resist or defy interpretation. The book constructs a life story, but of whom we cannot know. The person who speaks most of the pieces bears a resemblance to someone named Charles Simic, who once answered a question about the autobiographical basis of his poems by temporizing: They sound more autobiographical. They’re certainly based on things I did, but I’m far more interested in the fiction. The “I” is many fictions. The object is always “truth,” but not the literal one. . . . I’m more interested in history than in autobiography. (“Metaphysician,” ) Ventriloquism, lyric projection, and the creation of a persona have been staples of lyric poetry since the Renaissance, and Simic neatly fuses the “sincerity” of a Romantic poet with the masks that Pound, Eliot & Co. urged poets to wear at the beginning of the high modern period. “Je est un autre” as well as the “I” of Simic himself. Autobiography always reveals something, however covertly, but the artful literalism of Simic’s prose (or, in his other volumes, of the poems) always thwarts a reader’s desire to find meanings in his parables and allegories. Simic’s parallel universes explain his fondness for Giorgio De Chirico and for Joseph Cornell, to whom he wrote a book-length homage, DimeStore Alchemy (). Like Cornell’s boxes, Simic’s verbal objets trouvés are assembled both simply and weirdly. I have suggested the appeal of metonymy (or synecdoche) to poets like Mueller and Simic, who did not have English as a first language. Both of them qualify as “domestic” poets, fascinated by objects, although the scenes in Simic’s book would hardly match anyone’s ideas of ordinary life. He often articulates details in phrases instead of sentences, but even when he writes full, but grammatically simple, declarative sentences, he withholds meaning. People and parts are anonymous and replaceable. The weather takes on metonymic properties: “Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years” (World, ), or “A century of gathering

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  clouds. Ghost ships arriving and leaving” (). The gods have lost their luster: Hermes “showed up” in the fourth year of the war but “was not much to look at” (). The “last Napoleonic soldier,” who has been retreating from Moscow for two hundred years, crosses paths with the Russians and the Germans, going in opposite directions, and mordantly observes: “I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long” (). Wonder and ignorance go together. “Once I knew, then I forgot,” a speaker observes in a little vignette about falling asleep and waking to find “that a grove of trees had grown up around me.” This Rip van Winkle redivivus learns, however, nothing: I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! () These intimations of delicacy, menace, irony, and wackiness become a miniaturized version of the promises as well as the horrors of the twentieth century. They also adumbrate Simic’s aesthetic premises: The ideal spectator who lives only for art, hands folded behind his back. A blank canvas appropriately entitled “Blank” before him. It’s exactly  .. in the provincial museum. One can hear the rumbling stomach of the uniformed guard, who has the face of someone drowned by moonlight. () The noncommittal spectator poses before a Magritte-like picture that is called what it is—the nothing that is there—directly across from his phantom double, a presumably bored guard bathed in white light reflected from a secondary source. With its alchemy, dreams, transformations, little rival universes made from words, Simic’s surrealism abjures thought in favor of sensation, contemplation in favor of aphorism, wholes in favor of parts. No wonder that the last poem, one of the few with a title, moves seamlessly in an unpunctuated flow: My Secret Identity IS The room is empty, And the window is open ()

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   () Once revealed, a secret is no longer a secret. What remains? A revelation should constitute something substantial, but Simic’s volume ends with a disappearance. Such ironic troping on self-presentation is the poetic equivalent of a Houdini escape. We never really saw Charles Simic anyway; whoever he was, he is now gone. But since “the world doesn’t end,” perhaps he will return. Despite his quirky, mercurial presentation of self and world, I have placed Simic with more conventionally autobiographical writers like Komunyakaa, Levine, and Mueller because he shares with them a commitment to the dominant, postwar “middle” style. In Mona Van Duyn we have a slightly different example of autobiographical verse, if only because she makes her middle-class, suburban observations in a lyric vein that in addition to its casual ease and Horatian wisdom aspires to the level of music. Thirty years ago, Van Duyn occupied a central place in a momentarily famous skirmish. To See, to Take won the National Book Award, much to the consternation of Allen Ginsberg, who then went public with his grievances against his fellow committee members and locked horns in print with Richard Howard in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. It is a classic confrontation between paleface and red man, the cooked and the raw, the fancy and the plain, art and genius, excellence and ecstasy, intelligence and prophecy, the legacies of Stevens and Williams, the avatars of form against those of inspiration. Van Duyn was seventy when she won the Pulitzer, and her largely retrospective volume (containing elegies, reassessments, considerations of the banking of love’s flames, and other, more general diminishments) exemplifies the negative as well as the positive connotations of everything we associate with “traditional” verse. Van Duyn does not merely talk; she often sings, and consequently she bridges a gap that Wyatt Prunty has identified as a characteristic measure of postwar American poetry. Unlike Levine, who develops rhythm out of syntax and sentence variations, Van Duyn has an ear for formal rhythms that allies her, in this group of poets, only with Mark Strand. She writes in couplets, in villanelles, but she favors the casual lines that sound mostly like rational speech with rare rises in emotional or sonic pitch to aria: Peter, Tom, David, Jim and Howard are gone. Down hallways, in long-kept rooms, four others are in danger. In Love’s old boardinghouse the shades of five rooms are drawn. At table their places are set, their tea-time kettle is on, no space has been aired and emptied for the needy stranger, though Peter, Tom, David, Jim and Howard are gone. (“Condemned Site,” Near Changes, ) This villanelle opens with a toneless roll call of names and continues in lines of varying lengths, with phrases alternating between triple beats and

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  something like two-syllable “feet.” Gentle, uninsistent music sounds the note of the seemingly random but inexorable force that takes us all away. “The Block” deals with the life cycle through the trope of real estate and the rise, fall, and inevitable resurrection of a suburban neighborhood as young people buy property, move in, raise families, lose children, grow old, ship out, and are gradually replaced by the next generation. The five verse paragraphs are composed of informal lines of mostly six stresses—the kind of rambling rhythm that sounds like “talk”—and use literary figurations in ways that delight but never startle: The end came before we knew it. All in one year my husband retired and half of the houses emptied. Cancer ate four, heart attacks toppled some others, a nursinghome closed over one, the rest caned off to apartments with elevators. For Sale signs loomed like paper tombstones on the weedy lawns. The gentle years turned vicious all of a sudden. () Nothing here strains credulity or comprehension. The strong but predictable verbs that depict decay and death (“ate,” “toppled,” “closed over,” “caned”) and the telling simile (“like paper tombstones”) offer just enough menace to sadden but not to shock. We never feel, reading Van Duyn, as though the top of our head has been blown off. (This is a more neutral rephrasing of Allen Ginsberg’s sweeping criticism of genteel poetry.) Her subjects include “found” newspaper reports, Ferris wheels, car washes, backyard birds; nests, and hair dyes. Her angst and pleasures are those of sybaritically enlightened middle America (aware of food additives, blood pressure, and cardiovascular exercise), which she treats with delight tempered by gentle skepticism. The precursors of this kind of poetry are Auden and Randall Jarrell, filtered through the postwar suburbanism of Howard Moss and Howard Nemerov. What Van Duyn gratefully calls “the sweet quotidian” of supermarkets (“Glad Heart at the Supermarket,” ), with their combination of sameness and novelty, might offend flamboyant or politically minded poets, but she remains true to her Matisse-like sense of bourgeois pleasures. What one finally misses in poetry like this is what J. Hillis Miller has famously referred to as “the linguistic moment . . . the moment in a work of literature when its own medium is put in question” (). Such a position is a more stringent version of Wallace Stevens’s claim that “poetry must resist the intelligence, almost successfully” (). It is only partly synonymous with “difficulty” in poetry, which comes, of course, in many forms. John Ashbery and Amy Clampitt demand attention to syntax. The scrupulous musical effects

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   () of Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice frustrate our attempts to describe them. Neither Van Duyn’s suburban reflections nor Levine’s autobiographical reconstructions require second readings. Like Komunyakaa’s and Mueller’s their poetry, however accomplished, offers little resistance. The last four poets in this series seem to move us beyond such charms by virtue of quirkiness, musical deftness, formal inventiveness, and the ambitions of intellect. Mark Strand and Charles Wright work in the nostalgic mode, but with striking differences. Both have looked carefully at painting; both use deft musical phrasing to produce harmonies and rhythms that generate schadenfreude. They are sensuous, refined poets, but Strand lacks Wright’s insistent capacity for abstract speculations, his fear of mortality, and his Tennysonian melancholia.They share a comparable fin-de-siècle aestheticism and fatigue. Strand’s has a whirling, giddy quality: the longest poem in Blizzard of One, “The Delirium Waltz” (a combination of prose sections and pantoum quatrains), circles endlessly as it plays itself out at century’s end. For from being moved to tiredness, Charles Wright seems to have been sitting for years in the same place—his own backyard—contemplating his position in the universe, the joys offered by landscape, and the deep sadness underlying his own vision. Strand is like a tired athlete, moving with grace and occasional bursts of speed as the sands of time make their inexorable flow through the hourglass; Wright just watches the hands of a clock as he surveys his surround. In both poets, time tends toward lateness: like Virgil and Tennyson, they are poets of shadows and of evening. The three parts of Strand’s ironically titled “The Next Time” (there will be no next time) rehearse belatedness with a sense of surprise and resignation. Like Ashbery, Strand is one of the heirs of Stevens’s discursive maneuvers and wistful Romantic longing in the face of stronger knowledge: Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either. Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems, And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled, Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake, And so many people we loved have gone, And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this Is the way it was meant to happen . . . () Such troping of endings mingles acceptance, resignation, regret, and sheer wonder. “How did we manage to come this far?” he always seems to ask. The

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  natural world holds inevitable temptations, but Strand, like Ashbery, often shrugs them off, knowing too much to accede to the lure of landscape. In the third poem he realizes the short-sightedness of believing that “the intended story” would have been “like a day in the west when everything // Is tirelessly present.” Instead, he looks grimly forward (but significantly in the past tense—even the future has a past of its own!) to the time when the leaf that was going to fall will have fallen: For soon the leaves, Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet, Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be This late in the day for us but desire to make amends And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears? () Alliteration and assonance, and the bracing of monosyllables against the rare trisyllabic word, maintain a fluent music in Stand’s musings. For two decades, he has been a poet of belatendess (see his  volume The Late Hour). It is always too late in the day; the likelihood of starting again seems slight. His uncertainty—suggestions and then rebuttals of the possibilities of rebirth—is carried by the vague apposition in the last line. How are we meant to take “the sun’s compassion”? Is it equivalent, or opposed, to “what else” there might be late in the day? Its evasive grammatical position at the end of a question undermines the likelihood of any genuine compassion from it or any other natural item. After such agnosticism, what strategy? Epicureanism, and aestheticism, above all. “Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life,” another three-part poem, revises Stevens’s admonition that a “Supreme Fiction” must give, inter alia, pleasure: “We drank Mersault, ate lobster Bombay with mango / Chutney” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” part ). Late in the century, the fancy fare has become less exotic: And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . why live For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life. ()

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   () Much political poetry was written in the past decade, but Stand casts his lot with a different crew. Although neither suburban like Van Duyn nor overtly autobiographical like Levine, he has made a strategic retreat as a means of protecting himself from the shrillness of those “advocates of awfulness and sorrow.” He prefers the aesthete’s enlightened hedonism and the drained, muted sadness he expresses in two villanelles about De Chirico paintings, whose two repeated lines are a leitmotif throughout his work: This melancholy moment will remain, And always the tower, the boat, the distant train. () Boredom sets in first, and then despair. Something about the silence of the square. () It is no wonder that De Chirico, a painter with little interest in human beings, should provoke these meditations, or that two of Strand’s other favorite painters, William Bailey and Edward Hopper, are famous for nature morte or scenes of anomie, with or with out people. The bittersweet tonality that fills this book, like its predecessor, Dark Harbor (), has comforts of its own, Even the title conveys a sense of menace miniaturized: both fears and hopes have been scaled down, Sadness insulates, saturating the self in wistfulness. Winter can keep us warm. Strand wants his readers to take solace from his nostalgia. As he announces in the prose introduction to “The Delirium Waltz”: “Anxiety has its inflections— wasteful, sad, tragic at times—but here it had none. In its harmless hovering it was merely fantastic, so we kept dancing” (). We can relish anxiety without threat, simply by giving ourselves to the music’s mellow rapture. Strand articulates the feeling of dissolution as the airs and harmonies of evening, belatedness, and darkness descend upon him. Transformations of harm into pleasure characterize many of these poems, starting with “Untitled,” about early love and early verse, both long gone but still recalled with pleasure in “lavender light under the shade of the pines”: The dust of a passion, the dark crumble of images Down the page are all that remain. And she was beautiful, And the poem, you thought at the time, was equally so. The lavender turns to ash. The clouds disappear. Where Is she now? And where is that boy who stood for hours Outside her house, learning too late that something is always About to happen just at the moment it serves no purpose at all? ()



  Stephen Dedalus might have been proud of such crepuscular delicacy. Strand always prefers to take cover in the shade. Like Ashbery, he wavers between expectation and disappointment, hope and regret, giddiness and sadness, but the latter always gains his truer assent. And the musical sameness of his poems—whether rhymed or not—as well as the lush imagery contained within syntactically smooth sentences, produces an unwavering surface that would never make us mistake his poems for prose chopped arbitrarily into lines. People, like snowflakes, moments, perceptions, feelings, and even colors come mysteriously into these poems, linger for awhile, then disappear. Strand does no do portraiture, as Komunyakaa, Levine, and Van Duyn do. His signature salute is a kind of farewell, in the opening poem (quoted above), or in the last one, “The View.” Again, the third-person figure is presumably a self-representation who’s “always been drawn to the weather of leavetaking, / Arranging itself so that grief—even the most intimate— / Might be read from a distance.” In a chaste seaside setting, a man having a solitary drink in the waning light sits and reflects (in both senses of the word): Slowly the sky becomes darker, The wind relents, the view sublimes. The violet sweep of it Seems, in this effortless nightfall, more than a reason For being there, for seeing it, seems itself a kind Of happiness, as if that plain fact were enough and would last. () This is late Wallace Stevens made even “later.” A poet reduced by age but sublimed by contentment, Strand reflects on those significantly Stevensian notions of plainness and sufficiency. Strand and Wright are our preeminent poets of tristesse, but Strand manifests restraint and propriety in tone, rhythm, and the brevity of his lyrics, whereas Wright, in his long diary poems, surveys the universe, like A. R. Ammons, from an armchair in or near the backyard. His lament, seldom querulous, has two tones: sad and sadder. “Melancholia’s got me,” he announces early on in Black Zodiac (). In neither despair nor elation, Wright receives pleasure only from his aesthetic responses to landscape and painting, and occasionally from memories. People seldom appear in these poems, and only in the past tense. Companionship seems to be neither a subject nor a source of solace for a man who basks in his own isolation. Time and space are perennial topics. Wright has the gift and curse of a native landscape from which he has been separated only during his early military service in Italy and his years in California. The South has been a home in actuality and retrospect, and the poems have become, over the past twenty years, one long poem.

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   () It is a poem of the present; even when Wright remembers the past, one has the sense that reliving feelings and sights brings them to the fore for repeated examination: “What I remember redeems me, / strips me and brings me to rest, / An end to what has begun, / A beginning to what is about to be ended” (). This is Eliot’s Four Quartets with the Christianity left out. Wright’s religion is all natural. Obsessed by endings (“Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death” [], he is concerned with the beyond but is rooted to earth: “I’ll take as icon and testament / The daytime metaphysics of the natural world / Sun on tie post, rock on rock”(). Linda Gregerson aphoristically summarizes Wright’s procedure: “It is the business of his poems to conceive transcendence by means that forestall it” (). Among the Pulitzer winners, Wright joins Glück and Graham as the only ones whom we might label spiritual poets. Although he long ago abandoned the Episcopalianism of his childhood, he retains a hankering for religion’s solace; he has substituted questioning, observation, and aesthetic gratification for orthodox spirituality. “Christmas East of the Blue Ridge” develops a poetics of loss and diminishment even in the face of the celebration of Christ’s birth: So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains Stuck to the landscape, December dark Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon, Little tongues of the rain holding forth under the eaves, Such wash, such watery words . . . So autumn comes to this end, And winter’s vocabulary, downsized and distanced, Drop by drop Captures the conversation with its monosyllabic gutturals And tin music, gravelly consonants, scratched vowels. () The first two stanzas of this five-stanza lyric are a good summary of Wright’s habits, style, and obsessions since the publication of The Southern Cross two decades ago. The jagged five-line units, emblems of continuity over and above fragmentation, suggest separate vignettes even as they blend together. Landscape is invariably personified—space and time have become full partners in the human soul’s mysteries—and Wright (like Jorie Graham and, from an earlier generation, Howard Nemerov) sees evidence everywhere of language,

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  a secular version of God’s liber naturae. The delicate Shakespearean echo in the opening line (“yellow leaves, or none, or few”) prepares us for multiple expressions of lateness: in the poet’s life, in the year (and, from the standpoint of the era, of the century), in the Christian age, and in the annals of literature. Because the absence of humanity from his poetry compels Wright to populate his world with personified abstractions, elision and replacement become his favored tropes. As Shakespeare’s leaves have been reduced to stains, so the only language Wright hears is natural music. Wright works both by accumulation—of description observation, and commentary—and by reduction, through echo, tropes of diminishment, and overt statements of loss: “There is no essence unless / nothing has been left out” (). What Gregerson called forestalling or deferral defines Wright’s elongations and also touches upon the crucial absences in his poems. Something is always missing, and in this particular poem (“Sitting at Dusk in the Back Yard after the Mondrian Retrospective”) what is left out, as in a Mondrian painting, is more important than the form that contains and organizes the available materials. “The gods and their names have disappeared. / Only the clouds remain” (). In other words, the death of God has been both a catastrophe and a boon to the imagination. Wright updates what Stevens did in “Sunday Morning” and elsewhere to the great nineteenth-century theme of religious doubt. He reiterates the sad opportunities available to him as a priest of secular metaphysics. Although he tries to heed a lesson he learns from a swallow—“omit, omit ” ()—Wright meditates so compulsively that his poems threaten to overwhelm the reader with the riches, rather than the poverty, of the natural world and of the poet’s capacity to replicate them. The harmonious tension between a poetics of accumulation and one of reduction is seen most clearly in “Disjecta Membra,” the book’s last poem, which gulps after form and formlessness, like Stevens’s dazzling northern lights, which serpentlike shed and reconstitute themselves (“The Auroras of Autumn”). Nature does not mirror God’s presence; it reflects us. In Wright’s landscape all is contingency; all is interconnected: Back yard, dry flower half-border, unpeopled landscape Stripped of embellishment and anecdotal concern: A mirror of personality, unworldly and self-effacing, The onlooker sees himself in, a monk among the oak trees . . . How silly, the way we place ourselves—the struck postures, The soothing words, the sleights-of-hand 

   () to hoodwink the Paraclete— For our regard; how always the objects we draw out To show ourselves to effect (The chiaroscuro of character we yearn for) Find us a shade untrue and a shade untied. Bad looking glass, bad things, () Although the last line may ring false or comic in our ear (as if Wright were saying “bad dog, bad dog”), the stanza dramatizes his move toward revelation. His usual procedure is to start with phrases instead of clauses (a habit inherited from Pound), and then to insert himself within the surround, as he does in line . The willed projection of self into landscape and the equally willed desire to see the self reflected in the physical world are doomed to failure. We can never hoodwink the Paraclete; our words seldom soothe anyone other than ourselves, and then only briefly. Our reflections are inadequate because every effort to “draw” ourselves into or out of objects results in self-effacement as well as self-portraiture. Wright’s self-reflections have the unique result in contemporary poetry of creating a speaker whose isolation does not glorify his own ego. He has managed to replace narcissism with self-revision, the characteristic flaws of which he well knows: “Whatever it was I had to say, / I’ve said two times, and then a third” (). To the swelter and humidity of Wright’s accumulated descriptions, the richness of his melancholia, and the rhetoric of religious or metaphysical longing that works it way into his poetry, there is no stronger, chaster antidote than the austere passions of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, the only Pulitzer winner with the intensity of a deliberately thought-through volume. The organization of Strand’s book and the buildup in Wright’s leave us with the sense that the authors have assembled miscellanies. But Glück’s, probably the most powerful single volume of lyric poetry in the past quarter century, has the additional virtues of serious religious questing and utterly simple economy of means. If we could mix the rhythms of the Old Testament, expressions of John Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy,” the intimacies of George Herbert or Emily Dickinson addressing God, and the philosophical meditativeness of Four Quartets, we would arrive at something like a blueprint for The Wild Iris. Of the poets who have won the Pulitzer, Glück (along with Jorie Graham) bids fair to leave the strongest effect on the next generation, owing to her intention, scope, and complex experiments with problems of poetic “voice” in a volume of many speakers, all of whom bear the imprint of their author yet remain distinct from one another. She resorts to lyric, instead of capacious meditations (as Wright does) or dramatic, multipart, sometimes hallucinated and rapturous longer poems (as Graham does). 

  Lyric voices interweave. God shares space with a human speaker and a bounty of floral ones, which represent both the poet’s handiwork (as human beings are God’s) and her challengers. She is poised between her creations or her arrangements and the divinity whose creation she is. The poet becomes both subject and object, in a cosmic backyard drama. Glück’s diction is always the plain language of serious conversation; unlike Graham, over whom Rilke and Heidegger hover like covering cherubs, Glück has no truck with metaphysical abstraction. Her sober diction, like her garden, is rooted in the world of immediacy. Stately, sometimes biblical cadences work alongside orthodox anaphora and parataxis: Your voice is gone now; I hardly hear you. Your starry voice all shadow now and the earth dark again with your great changes of heart. And by day the grass going brown in places under the broad shadows of the maple trees. Now, everywhere I am talked to by silence so it is clear I have no access to you; I do not exist for you, you have drawn a line through my name. () The synesthesia of the opening lines beautifully captures a sense of abandonment in the evening and in autumn (a foretaste of endings yet to come); the idiomatic “access” reminds us that we are in our own century. Like the speaker, the flowers can also sound biblical. Glück effectively uses enjambment, that contemporary cliché, to heighten the slow intensity of speech. Here, for example, is “The Gold Lily”: As I perceive I am dying now and know I will not speak again, will not survive the earth, be summoned out of it again, not a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt catching my ribs, I call you, father and master: all around, my companions are failing, thinking you do not see. ()



   () With a metaleptic echo (Cavalcanti and Ash Wednesday: “Because I do not hope to turn again . . .”), the lyric lily refuses to mourn. The flowers are never gendered, but they always seem female, like the lily of the valley in Blake’s Book of Thel (“And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales”). Like the human speaker, the flowers address God, but they also address her. The titular flower, whose poem introduces the volume, remembers death and rebirth, surviving the winter and coming to consciousness in the spring, and extends solace and warning together: You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice; from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater. () It is in her treatment of God that Glück confronts most dexterously the problems of voice and the rhythms appropriate to the dialogue between creator and creation throughout a season of birth, growth, and decay. She shares the dilemma faced by orthodox poets like Milton, as well as extravagant and theologically heterodox ones like James Merrill, of finding an appropriate voice for him. Her human speaker may be, by turns, beholden, querulous, compliant, perverse, stoic, and wondering; her deity expresses pity, condescension, vexation, and sternness as he listens and responds to the words of the human and floral speakers. “I have shown you what you want: / not belief, but capitulation / to authority, which depends on violence” (). Thus the voice of patriarchy. Or the alternate voice of God the maker, loving but far from omniscient: When I made you, I loved you. Now I pity you. I gave you all you needed: bed of earth, blanket of blue air— As I get further away from you I see you more clearly. ()



  Or God the Paraclete, whose cold comfort may do little to assuage our fears. “I cannot succeed / with all of you,” he says, and then places responsibility on our will: Never forget you are my children. You are not suffering because you touched each other but because you were born, because you required life separate from me. () With the exception of Merrill in his epic trilogy, no contemporary poet has so successfully characterized God, and not even Merrill makes God speak in such a human voice and in the medium of lyric. These quiet poems project authority and inspire acceptance not in spite of but because of their audacious economies. Blakean vision? A heaven in a wild flower? Certainly. Such economies do not suit the voraciousness of Jorie Graham’s intellect. Glück’s daring consists of redefining the speakers, but not the speech, of lyric, by relying on simple syntax, rhythm, and diction. Graham’s goes the other way. Her philosophical questing breaks down syntax, line, sentences, and patterns of thought; like the Language poets, she resists paraphrase, but unlike them she is—however unconventionally—autobiographical, lyrical, and descriptive, sometimes by turns, sometimes virtually simultaneously. And if, according to Howard Nemerov’s famous formulation, “poetry is a way of getting something right in language” (), for Graham it appears that the quest frequently fails, and that “something” in language is always inadequate, even wrong. If her poems seem to resist the intelligence completely it is only because we have not taken the measure of her technique; we have not learned how to read her. Whereas Glück has inherited certain of Eliot’s syntactic and rhythmic habits, Graham alone among our contemporaries has inherited his ambitions, often synonymous with occlusion and difficulty. In an interview, she identified her involvement in our historical moment: “I feel like I’m writing as part of a group of poets—historically—who are potentially looking at the end of the medium itself as a vital part of their culture—unless they do something to help it reconnect itself to mystery and power” (“Interview,” ). So we end with endings and beginnings. Graham makes the acknowledgment that poetry is failing and that its rebirth requires nothing less than a return to ancient sources. Scarry would associate this claim with the end of the century; to me, it seems perennial. Power depends upon mystery. Graham scants clarity, whether in the Horatian mildness of Nemerov and others who came of age during World War II, or in the now normative language



   () of much workshop verse, or even in the refined austerity of Louise Glück, replacing it with gaps, blanks, lacunae, dismembered sentences, occasionally hallucinated fragments. We are back at the originary moment of contemporary poetry—the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the rival dispensations of organic wholeness and what Thomas McFarland refers to as the “modalities of fragmentation.” Blackmur’s evaluative dictum is still trenchantly accurate. Any strong poet inherits a vocabulary and a thematics from a tradition; she refashions, reformulates them and makes them new. Thus the available stock of reality is both a constant and an increasing entity. Charles Wright’s lush revisions of Romantic tropes, Mark Strand’s musical renewals of Stevens and his syntax, and Louise Glück’s surprising appropriation of old-fashioned devices are all ways of inserting a new poet’s voice into the ongoing conversation. Graham outdoes her contemporaries in her experiments with diction, lineation, and syntax; in her vigilant attentiveness she establishes radical new connections among the material, inner, and spiritual realms that appear congruent at some times and disjunctive at others. There are no better examples of Graham’s relationship to harmony and disjunction, or clarity and opacity, than the two handfuls of poems from her  volume Materialism, a volume at once metaphysical and scrupulously observant. The Errancy and Swarm, Graham’s subsequent volumes, go in different directions entirely, but here, what she calls “the evidence of the visual henceforth” () dominates her formal and speculative maneuvers. Graham typically begins poems with the material world, with simple fact or recollection. Thus, “Watching the river, each handful of it closing over the next, / brown and swollen” (“Notes on the Reality of the Self,” ); “On my way to bringing you the leotard / you forgot to include in your overnight bag, / the snow started coming down harder” (“The Dream of the Unified Field,” ); “I dig my hands into the absolute” (“The Visible World,” ). And then reticulation and ramification take over. Graham’s poems branch easily, luminously. She is a poet of directions, who makes prepositions and adverbs of place into nouns (“The angels in ranks, the about ”; “Tap tap the underneath,” ). A second poem titled “Notes on the Reality of the Self ” () begins easily and compactly enough: In my bushes facing the bandpractice field, in the last light, surrounded by drumbeats, drumrolls, there is a wind that tips the reddish leaves exactly all one way, seizing them up from underneath, making them barbarous in unison. There follow three long sentences, the last of which sputters to a conclusion, interrupted by parenthetical remarks and dashes, the hallmarks of Graham’s



  recent style. What might have become her version of The Music Man devolves into something more speculative, as Rilke joins Meredith Willson on the Iowa playing fields. The wind takes over. Participles and gerunds, which Graham uses more ferociously than most poets, create a wash of movement and sound: the coupling and uncoupling limbs—the racks of limbs—the luminosities of branchings— offspring and more offspring—roil—(except when a sudden stillness reveals an appall of pure form, pure light— every rim clear, every leaf serrated, tongued—stripped of the gauzy quicknesses which seemed its flesh)—but then the instabilities regroup, and the upper limbs of the tall oaks begin to whine again with wide slappings which seep ever-downward to my bushes . . . Such syntactic volume and heavy verbal impasto sweep ever onward, as the poet and the scene she witnesses—vision is now accompanied by music— whirl toward some virtually unspeakable conclusion. Process is everything, result nothing. The bushes respond not at all to the band music: not a molecule of sound from the tactics of this glistening beast, forelimbs of silver (trombones, french horns) (anointed by the day itself ) expanding, retracting, bits of red from the surrounding foliage deep in all the fulgid instruments—orient—ablaze where the sound is released— trumpeting, unfolding— screeching, rolling, patterning, measuring— scintillant beast the bushes do not know exists as the wind beats them, beats in them, beats round them, them in a wind that does not really even now exist, in which these knobby reddish limbs that do not sway by so much as an inch its arctic course themselves now sway— ()



   () The breathless outpouring of the poem’s ending sounds like a combination of Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins set to Wagner’s “Liebestod.” No contemporary poet is as alive to the dangerous energies of the external world as Graham, or as eager to trace its spiritual outline. Where Glück takes as her great tool the trope of voice, Graham unleashes torrents of syntax; where Wright looks for the shadows cast by the invisible over the visible world, Graham everywhere scoops up large bucketfuls of physicalmetaphysical overlappings, concentrating on what she calls, in the book’s last poem (“The Surface”), a river’s chill enlightenments, tight-knotted quickenings and loosenings—whispered messages dissolving the messengers— the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings, glassy forgettings under the river of my attention— () The British poet Charles Tomlinson, who works within a far different tradition, although equally attentive to the demands of eye and ear, once noticed that “[t]he time is in love with endings” (). Graham’s disruptions and eruptions often sound an apocalyptic note appropriate to millennial ends, but they suggest even more a deferral and extension of her passion and observation. Her heightened language of ecstasy—unlike that of Shelley in Epipsychidion—heaves into the future on the crest of an ongoing wave that never seems to break. For Graham, the present seems to be the only moment we can know. For the roiling onslaught of time itself she has devised a language “twisted and posed” (in Blackmur’s terms) apposite to her subject, which also adds to an available stock of reality for her readers and, perhaps more important, for her successors in a new century.

WORKS CITED Blackmur, R. P. Form and Value in Modern Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: DoubledayAnchor, . Glück, Louise. The Wild Iris. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, . Graham, Jorie. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, –. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, .



  Graham, Jorie. “An Interview with Jorie Graham.” Conducted by Thomas Gardner. Regions of Unlikeness. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, , –. Gregerson, Linda. “Short Reviews,” Poetry ( December ): –. Hollander, John. The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, . Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, . Komunyakaa, Yusef. Neon Vernacular. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, . Levine, Philip. The Simple Truth. New York: Knopf, . Lowell, Robert. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, . ———. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, . McFarland, Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. New York: Seabury, , –. Mueller, Lisel. Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Nemerov, Howard. “Poetry and Meaning,” in New and Selected Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, , –. Prunty, Wyatt. “Fallen from the Symboled World”: Precedents for the New Formalism. New York: Oxford University Press, . Scarry, Elaine, ed. Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in , , , , . Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins University Press, . Shaw, Robert. “Tragic Generations,” Poetry ( Jan. ): –. Simic, Charles. “The Metaphysician in the Dark: An Interview.” With Bruce Weigl. . Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Bruce Weigl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, , –. ———. The World Doesn’t End. San Diego: Harcourt, . Stevens, Wallace. Adagia. Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, , –. ———. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, . Strand, Mark. Blizzard of One. New York: Knopf, . Tate, James. Selected Poems. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, . Tomlinson, Charles. Collected Poems. New York: Oxford University Press, . Van Duyn, Mona. Near Changes. New York: Knopf, . ———. To See, To Take. New York: Atheneum, . Vendler, Helen. “Fin-de-Siècle Lyric: W. B. Yeats and Jorie Graham,” Scarry –. Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, –. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, . Wright, Charles. Black Zodiac. New York: Farrar, .



FIF TEEN

X

JORIE GRAHAM TALKING 

I

n “Posterity,” the last of the twenty-five poems in Overload, her new book, Jorie Graham says, twice, “I have talked too much” (–). I am sure that even some of her sympathetic readers have been thinking the same thing, impatiently, for much of the past decade, perhaps longer. Has redundancy set in? Not only does Graham repeat herself here but she also continues her habit of repeating titles. Six are called “Praying,” about which more later. Three at the center are called “Spoken from the Hedgerows.” Her love of words—lots of them—bespeaks a swirling spirit, sometimes out of control. It was not always thus. Nor did she used to worry about repetition. The poet whose first two volumes, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion, consisted of short lyrics, in short lines and short stanzas, has moved for the past two decades into larger, more free-ranging, indeed chaotic forms. Expansion has replaced concision; metaphysical speculation has gone wild, as have Graham’s sentences, some of which are not really sentences, replete with their frustrating parentheses, brackets, and lacunae. Breaking out, breaking away, she has seemed simultaneously and paradoxically airy in her bodiless abstractions and heavy in the sheer weight of her utterances. She has been talking a lot. The question of whether the talk makes sense, or sounds instead like pretentious palaver; whether the talk rises to the level of music, and whether what she has been writing can be legitimately called “poems” has been on the minds of her friends as well as her foes for a long time. When the late Howard Nemerov wittily observed (in “Strange Metamorphosis of Poets”) that “From epigram to epic is the course / For riders of



  the American winged horse” and that most poets “start out Emily and wind up Walt,” he was thinking of his male contemporaries. Graham may be the only female poet—aside from the late Amy Clampitt—to have assumed the mantle of Whitmanian largeness after having made a more modest start. Her skeptical readers, like Whitman’s, would accuse the poet of mere bloviation. The writers of the volume’s dust jacket copy play right into the hands of Graham’s doubters. They (or the poet herself ) tell us that “the work meditates on our new world, ghosted by, and threatened by, competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, ‘free.’ ” Well, yes, I suppose it does, but whether it does so convincingly, whether it has found the proper poetic form for the articulating of Graham’s philosophical, social, and political questions, remains open. The comparison to Whitman remains instructive. Whitman’s genius allowed him to produce a new kind of poem with a new subject, to forge a heterogeneous style out of the heterogeneity of the United States themselves. Whitman’s line, his robustness, and his addresses to his readers all bespeak a radical confidence. Likewise, his language encompasses a range unduplicated by any poet since, except John Ashbery. Graham has something of Whitman’s braggadocio but lacks his vigorous buoyancy, optimism, his humor (no other contemporary poet aside from Adrienne Rich has so little lightness), and even his delicacy. She does not loaf and invite her soul, although she thinks a lot about “soul” and other spiritual matters. Unlike Whitman’s, Graham’s spontaneity often seems forced. For all her sensuousness, Graham is a remarkably alienated poet. Pleasure does not fit into her scheme of things, at least as she places herself in the universe of the twenty-first century. The world’s riches and beauties give her apparently little consolation, although she registers them capaciously. Once again, it’s Whitman without joy. For a person so alert to the senses she seems remarkably puritanical, resistant to ordinary happiness. Like Whitman, however, Jorie Graham has been able to put her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, and regardless of whether her vision and her announcements will last longer than their historical moment, no other poet has tried to come to grips with the larger world so much as she has. By “larger” I mean both public (political) and philosophical (metaphysical). More than any of her volumes from Materialism through Never, burdened with somewhat recondite references to the turmoil in her life (divorce, relocation, remarriage, more relocation), Overlord takes on the problem of public themes—history, ecology, and economics—in tones of anxiety, fear, contemplation, remembrance, and prayer. Especially prayer. All of a sudden Graham has got, if not that old-time religion, then at least the urge to speak to some higher force. ( It does not answer.) Four poems form her previous volume,



   () Never (), have “prayer” in their title. Aubades and annunciations appear in other volumes. The subjects at the heart of Overlord, which is in many ways her most focused of the past decade, and the one with the clearest sense of organization, are twinned. First of all, the poet’s thoughts about the war that took place sixty years ago on the beaches at Normandy, where she now spends part of her time and, as a response to /, her thoughts on the growth of anti-Americanism, global warming, and political upheavals. Second, a series of addresses to a deus absconditus who shows no signs of returning, or even of hearing her. Although these poems will not appeal to all tastes, some of them contain sections of urgency as well as topical relevance. Graham’s honest religious questioning comes as a welcome alternative to the increasing religious certainty now prevalent in much American life. Better, one thinks, an excessive, verbose indecision than a narrow, straightened, exclusive fidelity, or a self-righteous, smug sense of one’s own salvation and the damnation of all unbelievers. I take it as a deliberate reimagining on her part that Graham now calls her poems “Praying” instead of (as earlier) “Prayer”; by relying on the gerund she calls attention to the effort of making an address rather than the accomplishment of it. In contrast to “praying,” “prayer” retains an almost material solidity. As always in her poems, Graham prefers processes to things. The volume opens with a Proustian lyric (“Other”), which prepares the way for the following speculative poems. This recollection from early childhood (the poet, sick at home and absent from school) focuses on the child’s first awareness of presence, in time and space, of what “now” means, and of how one can be “absent” and not absent at the same time. It is a picture of the little Jorie Graham in the first flowering of her abstract speculations: “We can be in and out of here, now, / at once, and not die” (). And from this conjecture the rest of the volume extends. Graham has deliberately mingled two halves of her poetic temperament—the modestly autobiographical, and the heroically ambitious: Proust (or Wordsworth) and Whitman. One poem especially stands out as an example of the modest and the ambitious together, or of old Graham and new. “Impressionism” (–), in seven numbered sections, begins with clear, careful attention to an external scene. (The fact that Graham can write plainly when she wants to makes one wonder what makes her not want to, much of the time, preferring instead her looping, loping, fragmented utterances). The poet is watching a “silent little girl” near St. Laurent sur Mer whose “frock” (the very word is sufficiently archaic to put us in mind of a Renoir painting) “is jagged in its / private wind / of starch and straightenings and cleanliness.” In her “incandescent pinafore” the girl leans over a bridge railing and fishes for crabs.



  Immediately the poet thinks of direction, of the bottom of things, and by the midpoint she is off, à la mode de Graham, thinking in images and abstractions, of trees with swollen fruit retreating to barrenness, and of questions about surfaces, depths, materiality, and its opposite. Here is Section , the poem’s exact middle: As if a tree could siphon all its swollen fruit back in, down into its limbs, dry up the tiny opening where manifestation slipped out— taking it all back in—until it disappears—until that’s it: the empty tree with all inside it still— versus this branching-out before me of difference, all brilliantly lit, outreaching, variegating, feeding a massive hunger. The heron is full of hunger. The miles of one-thought-driven grasses full of hunger. Although not in this register. This sounds like no one else but Graham, in both of her modes, the observant and the speculative, or what I previously termed the modest and the ambitious. It begins with a deliberate anti-Keatsian strategy. Where he looked at the stubble fields (in “To Autumn”) and performed an act of imaginative reparation, thinking back to spring and summer, Graham observes fullness and imagines emptiness. She, too, is going backward in time, but from actual ripeness to empty possibility. From life she travels back to the womb, from outside to inside. In one long non-sentence (followed by three short lines—one sentence and two fragments), she thinks of visible life as “manifestation” and “difference” feeding a hunger that belongs equally to the tree and to herself. Hunger (as she explains in the next section) moves through “the through” covered by the “shine” of manifestation. Once again, movement, direction, and process take precedence over stasis and permanence; or, rather, by making a noun out of a preposition (“through”) she gives action its own place. Like Wordsworth talking to any of the children or old people he encounters in his country walks, Graham engages the child in conversation and registers at the end an almost Darwinian picture of nature’s hunters and prey. A “bleached-out jumbo turkey-leg” on the girl’s string pulls up eleven crabs, “all feeding / wildly” and then crushed with the child’s hammer on the dock, one by one, and “picked up claw-end by many / hands that seem to suddenly



   () materialize / out of the nowhere to which I am / now sent.” The poem ends with the poet herself, somewhat ominously: There’s no way back believe me. I’m writing you from there. Trolling for poetic material, out picking up impressions, Graham goes for a walk and comes upon what starts out as a fête champêtre and ends as a vision of nature red in tooth and claw. All lines—of fishing pole or poem— move in one direction only, a stark termination. We might take the Darwinian scheme of “Impressionism” as a microcosm for the entire volume, in which Graham mingles personal details (in her praying to an overlord) with historical ones. Operation Overlord was the code name for the Allied invasion of Europe that began at Normandy on D-Day. At the eerie dead center of the book, the trio of poems entitled “Spoken from the Hedgerows” borrows from letters and other written sources the voices of American soldiers, who speak to us not only from the hedgerows but also from beyond the grave. Their laconic, matter-of-fact account of the events before, during, and after D-Day plays off against the lacy spiderwebs of Graham’s own propria persona speculations. Leonidas and his Spartan soldiers have come alive once more. Is Graham great? Does she contain, Whitman-like, multitudes? As she did in earlier volumes (notably Materialism), the poet incorporates the words of others within her own. Quotation becomes part of a poet’s arsenal, and the fact that in some cases she dispenses altogether with quotation marks makes the voices of several soldiers blend together in a chorus and yet remain separate at the same time. The words of the noble dead belong as well to Jorie Graham, their poetic incorporator. She has become them through an act of absorption. And like Whitman himself, Graham calls into question the entire issue of poetic address: who is speaking, and to whom, throughout these pages? In “Dawn Day One” she remembers having looked at herself in a mirror (Latin: speculum, as she well knows) and spins a riff on self-and-other, the “you” and the “not you” whom “you” (or “one,” or she herself ) might see. As markers of identity, pronouns identify and also deceive. The poem ends with a Grahamian speculation on the nature of identity that sounds as well the erotic note of Whitman talking to his readers through the ages: Here. You are at the beginning of something. At the exact beginning. Ok. This is awakening number two in here, in this poem. Then there are these: me: you: you there. I’m actually staring up at you, you know, right here, right from the pool of this page.



  Don’t worry where else I am, I am here. Don’t worry if I’m still alive, you are. (–) “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you”: thus Whitman at the famous end of “Song of Myself.” The erotic, the political, the epistemological all come together in both poets, as does the possibility of multiple identities. In “Praying ( Attempt of June  ’)” Graham mixes her own awaking with scenes from D-Day, once more addressing God, or a lover, or some combination, and says—in a figure of speech that verges on the literal—“I am beside myself, I am beside these words.” Some strange meiosis sets in as the poet recalls counting the stars in childhood and losing her place and beginning again. The poem ends with an enumeration, a Whitmanian list, which returns the poet to origins, the place of starting out, with a combined sense of accumulation and loss: . . . oh lord it is a small thing, no?, to have to begin the count again—the stars, the butterflies, the flies, the scars, the dead, the rooms, the sand, the words, the wounded, the roads, the missing limbs the whose of the missing limbs, the missing, the starlings, the prayers, the individual secrets, the bullets, the days, from the beginning again, the days. Start counting. Too much blood. Under the bridge. Start. Start putting things back. To still us. Start. () The hallucinated commands seem directed equally outward and inward, to God and to the self. She is beside herself, and she is beside her words, but of course she is also their source. They emanate from within her. But who is she, and how does she wish us to think of her? Whitman distinguishes the “Me myself ” from everything around him, however important lovers and other people may be. Standing “apart from the pulling and hauling” is “what I am,” but at the same time he asks “Who need be afraid of the merge?” He asserts himself in part through acts of withdrawal, in part through acts of absorption. And his most important, primeval question is also Graham’s: “To be in any form, what is that?” Like Whitman, Graham asserts her “self ” at the same time that she reduces it: “I cannot make out what borders are” she announces in “Praying (Attempt of June  ’)” (). This is what a pop psychologist today would call “boundary issues.” For a poet so attuned to the world’s body, its lush physicality, Graham also



   () seems paradoxically unsure of her own corporeal status. One sometimes has the feeling that, like the young Wordsworth on his way home from school, Graham must grab onto a wall or a tree to recall herself from the “abyss of idealism.” Her Romantic precursor, describing the motivation behind the Intimations Ode, famously wrote: “I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, that I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature.” Both Wordsworth and Graham deal constantly with physical reality and they both question its permanence, its reliability, and their own ambiguous place within it. At the beginning of the following poem, “Upon Emergence,” she asks a question with a complicated sense of her own identity: “Have I that to which to devote my / self?” (). Not only does she wonder about an appropriate object for her questions, her addresses, her devotional aspirations, but she also thinks of her “self ” as something separate from herself. The line break tells all. Her “self ” is different from “herself.” She has a proud humility, saying that she “can make / myself very small” (), emphasizing both her power and her pettiness. She tries for Zen-like emptiness and erasure but ego keeps getting in the way, via her volubility. In a poem about illness (“Physician”) she separates her body from her self: “My person is sick. It trembles” (). But like Whitman and Allen Ginsberg (in his jovial, mock-paranoid “America”) she also identifies with her nation: “My person, ah, America, sinks into its bed.” Is the country in apposition to her self? (Her body is like Donne’s newfound land, her own America.) Or is it the object of her address? The line can be read in two distinct but complementary ways. She thinks of her body as different from herself. Like Rimbaud, she might say “je est un autre,” having externalized her body-in-pain from the Real Me: “How do I tell my person it is not my body that is ill. / Not my body, not me, that is right. To be sure, there is / terminal illness, but this is not personal, there is no longer / personal illness” (). By interiorizing and exteriorizing illness at the same time, the poet both bears and rejects the possibilities of termination. Or, rather, she accepts her mortal self and simultaneously transcends it. Similarly, in the following poem (“Disenchantment”), she continues her effort to identify a self. The poem begins: I shift my self. It’s me I shout to the tree out the window don’t you know it’s me, a me—I really don’t care what we call it, this personhood—a hood isn’t a bad thing, a place to live, a self-blinding. () So the self-as-hood merely covers, indeed suppresses, the real “me.” Whatever we call it, individual identity hides as much as it reveals. Graham

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  contains multitudes, many possible me’s. She manages to live within them just as smoothly, casually, as they exist within her. “Hood”: both a piece of protective clothing and, colloquially, a neighborhood in which to live with other people. This review began with the opening sentence from “Posterity.” Like many of Graham’s poems this one surrounds an anecdotal base, in this case the handing over of the poet’s dinner, a store-prepared chicken in foil, to a homeless beggar. A specific experience involving another person often sets the poet and her poem going. The whole poem recalls in principle the best of some of Graham’s earlier work, like “What the End Is For” and “Imperialism” (The End of Beauty), “Fission” and “The Phase after History” (Region of Unlikeness), and “The Dream of the Unified Field” (Materialism). All of these mingle narrative, lyric, and conjecture, and it is in this kind of mixing that Graham is most memorable, authentic, and original. But mere speculation, or thinking, like mere “talk,” is not enough to make a poem. A poet must work her language into shapely utterance, her talk into music. She must do more than mix the separate ingredients. Without music, we have prose musings. The poet must also refine thought into artifact; otherwise it remains fluffy abstractions. Graham has achieved such refinement somewhere in most of her volumes. (Swarm continues to baffle or elude me, however.) “Posterity” combines the best as well as some of the most annoying of Graham’s poetic habits. Its “idea” (as Wallace Stevens might have it), that is its concept, its form and shape, is serious, weighty, important. Its particulars (“the poem of the words” in Stevens’s formulation) veer between the elegantly simple, the banal, and the pretentious. Where is the real Jorie Graham? The poem opens with something like a confession of—if not exactly sins—weaknesses, flaws, and a meditation on the historical, mythical, properties of the Holy Grail, that instrument of salvation. Then the introduction of the street person encountered in Harvard Square follows, and the gift of the store-bought chicken, which I take as the poem’s experiential beginning. The poem ends with the poet’s reflections on the efficacy of her poetry, and really of anything that smacks of too much talking. Sometimes the language seems merely banal: “It was in a paper bag with aluminum / lining. Even so it was extremely hot.” Sometimes the strained simplicity of her diction courts pretension: “I gave it him in both hands.” This is British rather than American usage. We might remember that Coleridge criticized Wordsworth for bombastic diction, images too great for the thoughts they carry, and also for metaphysical heaviness. Is Graham’s chicken the grail of the twenty-first century? Like the Leech-Gatherer, or the Discharged Soldier in The Prelude, or the old men in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” Graham’s Harvard Square beggar is meant to be both a

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   () representative (of the poor we shall have always with us) and a corrective to the poet’s own condescending act of presumptive charity. “Posterity” comes last in this book at least in part because it deals with the noble idea of bequests, charitable and otherwise. It gives an adequate sense of closure. It also, however, contains gestures and moments that seem at once too ordinary (as above) and too grandiose. The homeless man apparently never gets to eat the chicken; he doesn’t even speak. The poet walks on, frustrated if not actually defeated in her charitable aims. She turns her attention upon herself, on the nature of “the subject” (both personhood and poetic tropes). And she acknowledges that the whole event was all an occasion for poetry: “Forgive me I am perhaps not speaking to you individually.” The individual has become a trope; the poet has used the beggar, absorbing him to her own need to offer charity. He becomes the reason for a poem, and Graham feels inspired and also chastened: To praise to recall to memorialize to summon to mind the thing itself—forgive me—the given thing—that you might have persuaded yourself is invisible, unknowable, creature of context—it is there, it is there, it needs to be there. I awaken again. The man, last night, his hands no longer operational. () When she finds herself exasperated by the noncompatibility of ways and means, morality and aesthetics, giving and acknowledgment, Graham summons a desperate tone right out of Wallace Stevens: “it is there, it is there, it is there” certainly sounds a lot like “It is possible, possible, possible. It must / Be possible” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”). Perhaps there is no Thing-inItself (Kant’s “Ding-an-Sich”); there is merely what one confronts, what one is given, provisionally or by accident. Poetry’s traditional justification—to praise, to recall, to memorialize—is invoked only, it seems, to be shunted away. The beggar, his hands “no longer operational,” stands for everything weak, impoverished, unfunctional, and also ungrateful. The poet awakens the next day if not sadder but wiser then at least modestly chastised as well as “operational,” and she wonders, in two senses of that word: I wake up operational over what country now. The rain has ceased, I stare at the gleaming garden. ()

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  In a book that has explored public themes, Graham asks about (one sense of wondering) “what country” she now occupies, or rather what kind of polis makes possible the kind of encounter she had the day before. But she looks inward as well as outward: in her private life, in her own person, she marvels (the other sense of wondering), speaking with utter clarity and simplicity of the new day and the natural beauty to which she awakens. Has she decided, Candide-like, to cultivate her own garden? Adrienne Rich, another poet given to public themes, has seemed in her poetry of the past ten years to have made a comparable retreat from the public to the private life. The poet-critic James Longenbach has already described “Jorie Graham’s Big Hunger,” and Graham herself uses hunger as a motif for both her characters and herself throughout many of her books. The big question is what Graham will need next. What will she be hungry for? Where will her hunger lead her? Into larger swirls of metaphysical and political anxiety, or to the smaller pleasures of the self and its privileged enclosed domain, signaled by a gleaming garden, about to continue growing?

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SIXTEEN

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POETRY IN REVIEW On A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery ()

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bout what is it that they are never supposed to be wrong, the old masters? Not just, pace W. H. Auden, suffering, but also the full gamut of human experience: sorrow, wonder, and even, occasionally, joy. And by “old” masters we might think not merely of those long gone but also, and more close by, of those senior poets who have earned the right to be labeled sages. Their wisdom keeps us coming back to them and also encourages us to consult them for their guidance in regard to what Socrates thought the only philosophical question: How do we approach death? What can the “golden codgers” (Yeats’s phrase) teach us? Something must have been in the air, the water, or the Zeitgeist in the several years before the Great Depression. Between  and  the following poets were born: Carolyn Kizer, Donald Justice, Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, W. D. Snodgrass, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, Philip Levine, Irving Feldman, John Hollander, Richard Howard, and Adrienne Rich. O’Hara and Sexton died relatively young. We might observe of the others, both those who have died recently and those who remain, that they give the lie to the cliché that poets in their youth burn with glory and gladness, and then lead a dull, posthumous life in the manner of William Wordsworth. And not just they but other significant postwar poets (Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, Anthony Hecht) wrote some of their best work in their last years. All of these “old masters” lend support to T. S. Eliot’s claim (“East Coker”) that “old men ought to be

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  explorers.” But Eliot also admonished: “Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, / Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession.” He wanted, or so he claimed, only “humility.” Somewhere between fear, humility, folly, and wisdom, the late A. R. Ammons and the still with us (and with it) John Ashbery have staked their latest claims on our attention in their most recent books, Ammons’s a posthumous collection composed during a six-week period in late  and fussed with until his death in , and Ashbery’s the current production in a voluminous late flowering that keeps on coming. Death hangs over both books, as does a combination of refusal to go gentle and a resigned acceptance of inevitability. Black humor, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and wonder fill both of them. When Ashbery says, as a jacket blurb for Ammons’s book, that “nothing will alter the certainties of old age, but his clear-sighted acceptance and celebration of it seem distantly related to joy,” he must be looking at his contemporary with his own combination of envy and gratitude. “Distantly” tells us more about Ashbery than Ammons, who is often giddy with pleasure, relishing life’s ordinary events. Both poets have mastered the American dialect, especially its slang, and neither shies away from plain goofiness, nor does Ammons shy away from bad puns. In Ammons we find joy as well as plenty of other emotions; in Ashbery we find the desire to find a joy that has evaded him, a partial elegy for missed opportunities, but also an eerie, stubborn willingness “to accept [what Jack Gilbert calls] our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” Neither book is uniformly wonderful. Both have their longueurs but also contain sublime evidence of their authors’ insistent charms. Of the two books, Bosh and Flapdoodle is the more predictable, and not only because its author was living with a clear sense of his mortality while writing it. Ammons has in these poems—had, I must say, now that he is gone—two registers, the ironic and the stoic. As in all of his books, he also has two subjects: the large and the small, the universe and the self, peripheries and centers. On the other hand, these poems come in only one size, neither the book-length form that Ammons favored in Tape for the Turn of the Year, Sphere: The Form of Motion, and Garbage, nor the “really short”—as he called them—miniatures that he also favored, but one- and two-page lyrics (only a handful are longer), all in couplets except “Thoughts” (in tercets), a meditation on ars longa, vita brevis that takes as its example A. E. Housman, whom Ammons addresses as though he were talking to or about Walt Whitman and his “real me”: in fact, tho, A.E., you’re not in your grave, not the real you: whatever of the real you is left is here with us: you’re here with

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 . .     () us, in a sense: the grave holds nothing, or what soon will be: but no one, now, dead or alive can hold you in his arms and dry your eyes This clear-eyed recognition of the dust to which we shall return, the failure of anything but art to give some solace, and the reinvigoration of the cliché about art’s endurance do not really concern Housman but Ammons himself. It is Archie he mourns for, or refuses to. In “In View of the Fact” he states clearly: “The people of my time are passing away.” He is part of a generation, any generation, all of which have one thing in common. First weddings come, then babies, and now funerals: “we never // thought we would live forever (although we did) / and now it looks like we won’t.” There’s a delicious ambiguity within the parenthesis: although the phrase means primarily that we thought at some level that we actually would live forever, even in the face of greater knowledge, it also means that we actually did have a healthy, long lifespan. Ammons keeps mourning in check, but he never suppresses it altogether. His Wordsworthian simplicity of means reminds us that “tears to human suffering are due” (Wordsworth’s acknowledgment in “Laodamia”) and that memory can give relief rather than regret: until we die we will remember every single thing, recall every word, love every loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to others to love, love that can grow brighter and deeper till the very end, gaining strength and getting more precious all the way. In other words, it’s not just Horace’s “monumentum aere perennius” but also a relishing of ordinary human emotion that gives pleasure. Ammons’s awkward syntax works to his advantage here, as the verb “to love” strangely becomes a noun (“love that can grow brighter”), as if to demonstrate how the doing of something gets transformed into a fact, as a process becomes an event, a solid thing. Ammons never lost his fondness for the down-to-earth, and the downand-dirty. If sentiment fills the lines above, he was also always capable of thinking of the body at its most elementary level. A brief inventory would include the following phrases, images, topics, and titles: “Give a shit”; “get the fuck out”; an interest in one’s bowels (how many poets get them into their poems?); his wonder and dismay at a now nonfunctional organ (“It used to flick up so often, I called it / flicker: but now, drooping, it nods awake // or, losing it, slips back asleep”); “ ”; the desire to examine one’s own

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  shit and snot (“was it just a clear // gelatinous blob or crusty skin shield or a // butterball of gooey glop”); an ecological poem called “Vomit,” one called “Shit Face,” and another called “Spit.” In an earlier work he wondered why medieval poets never tell us about how and where knights in armor were able to move their bowels. He takes these things very seriously, however lightly he seems to treat them. Throughout his poetic career, Ammons was, like Whitman, a poet of the body as well as of the soul, and a poet sensitive to their overlappings and intersections. He allows that “we are such dust as housemites / husband on,” at the end of “Dumb Clucks,” a poem that begins on Ammons’s beloved peripheries: “the aboriginal // emptiness, source of all beginnings, where / spirit at last totally prevails, up there.” “Universe” and “wisp” he calls the two poles of our attention, or sweetness and pain, but Ammons is always too mercurial or volatile to remain attached to any one thing for too long. “The / day-to-day plunged into eternity: the look / back then from eternity to the day-to-day” he puts it in “Informing Dynamics.” In “Quibbling the Colossal,” a poem about poetry addressed to Harold Bloom, one of his earliest promoters, Ammons shimmies his way between an old man whose feet swell when he’s sitting still too long at his typewriter, and the sky, the land of spectral energies: in other words, between the self and the cosmos. And he maneuvers slyly between chattiness and cliché on one hand and afflatus on the other, although we may be surprised by the ease of his transitions: the disjunctiveness of my recent verse cracks up the dark cloud and covering shield of influence and lets fresh light in, more than what little was left, a sliver along the farthest horizon: room to breathe and stretch and not give a shit, room to turn my armies of words around in or camp out and hide. He looks for and then finds the silver lining in the clouds, where resides the Bloomian motif of the “Evening Land.” To the appeal of elegy itself, Ammons counters with Thoreauvian optimism: “the greatest dawn ever is / rosy in the skies.” The poem ends (as do several throughout the volume) with a capitalized summary: “  .” Ammons always bounces back. He gives Bloom the best riposte he can, his version of the finger: the rosy-fingered bloom of sunrise.

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 . .     () Ashbery’s besetting flaw is opacity (about which more later); his corresponding virtue is surprise. With Ammons the flaw is garrulousness, or annoying self-attentiveness, and the representative virtue is ease. There is no more companionable guide in late-twentieth-century American poetry except for the more formally confined Howard Nemerov. Along with Nemerov, Ammons’s only competitors for the title of Best Observer are Charles Wright (imbued with melancholy) and Amy Clampitt ( given to the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings). Ammons is given to delight and chuckling, even when acknowledging fatigue. Thus, in “Called into Play,” he deals with the artist’s perennial problem of locating material: “Fall fell: so that’s it for the leaf poetry.” He knows he isn’t “going to // find something to write about I haven’t already / written away.” He wonders: “is // something going on: something besides this / diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact.” Even at his most banal, he can sound funny and touching, although a little of this goes a long way. Or, when annoyingly self-attentive he touches on the issue of finding an answerable style (“one of my meanest problems”), a perennial matter for such self-conscious artists. In the book’s final poem, “Way Down upon the Woodsy Roads,” as elsewhere, he comes down in favor of “discinct” (his coinage) rather than succinct poems and, in spite of his brevity, against compression. He wants to “rattle [his] old prattle,” and prattle he certainly does. A happy man ends his last volume with images of home and wandering to the “periphery of chance and surprise.” Because Ammons was ill during the composition of these poems, he filled them with intimations of mortality, and two kinds of backward glances. The first (as in the lovely “Hooliganism,” a reverie over old real and imagined flames) looks to his past. The second—less expected in a poet not normally allusive—looks to earlier poets, especially Shakespeare, to whom he alludes several times, often unobtrusively: “we are such dust as housemites / husband on” (“Dumb Clucks”); “that is the question” (“Body Marks”); “a place dreams // and dreamers are made on” (“Lineage”); “neither a sayer nor a doer // be: be a beer” (“Dishes and Dashes”); “nothing // is got for nothing” (“Tree-Limbs Down”; here Lear and Ralph Waldo Emerson join voices); “oh, how // flat it is” (“Sucking Flies”). Sometimes the quotations, like Ammons’s fervor for alliteration, sound facile. In too many of these poems Ammons settles for mere cuteness. At his best, however, both alliteration and allusion allow the poet to build to the musical crest of his own wave, as in the lines that follow the echo of Hamlet in “Sucking Flies”: is it wise to fiddle with fragilities, little dreams and hopes and foolish beliefs:

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  there is a smallness runs under things like a crumbly soil that takes in what remains and gives back the beauties of the field: our bodies share these worm-shaken roads: but our spirit, it is from before and knows no changes through all the lineations of consequence. . . . This is Ammons at his best, delicate and nondoctrinally religious. The spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins hovers over the lines (“there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”), as does an almost Old Testament grandeur that replaces the lilies of the field with the more generic, Romantic, and American “beauties of the field,” and “through all the days of our life” with the scientifically alert abstraction of the final line (“through all the lineations of consequence”) that trails off into wonder or daydreaming. Although Hopkins, Shakespeare, and even Samuel Johnson make random appearances in this book, Ammons remains truest to his native Emersonian spirituality. In one of the long (that is, three-page) poems (“Now Then”) he returns to the theme of praise and a reaching for the sublime that were his staples in his great work of almost a half century ago, the poems or individual lines most of us remember when we say “Ammons”: “Mechanism” (“Honor a going thing”); “Guide” (“to be glad and sad at once is also unity / and death”); “Terrain” (“The soul is region without definite boundaries”); “Cut the Grass” (“less than total is a bucketful of radiant toys”), “The City Limits” (“When you consider the radiance”). No one can sound both selfdeprecating and magisterial at once as well as he does. “Now Then” begins with an ordinary domestic situation (the effect of wind blowing through an open window on a bathroom door) and an ordinary idea (“major effects / can come of slender spacings”), and then off it goes. As so often in the past, Ammons divides his attention between the very large (in this case, gorillas) and the very small (here, yellowjackets), and contemplates the nature and the divinity of each species (shades of Hopkins, once again). He asserts that nothing is so true as what breaks into being this minute from colossal petrifications of past time and huge issuances into time-to-be: Such breaking into being signals both creation and destruction, but Archie in his backyard is unafraid. If the world explodes, “nothing will be lost, every / little tiny atom will be spinning for // the lord” (echoes of James Merrill, “Lost in Translation”). He fills his final book with elegies and turns from

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 . .     () elegy, always coming down on the side of Emersonian compensation and American optimism: have no fear: weep but move on: if the god is not in residence, he is in motion, and it is hard to tell which is which: coco rico, the rooster crows: it is day again. The sun is always about to come out, again. Ammons is the latest, perhaps the last, true avatar of Henry David Thoreau. No such constant, confident optimism infuses Where Shall I Wander. If Ammons often sounds like the man next door, Ashbery sounds like someone who lives next door to Edward Gorey. His tones and situations—laconic, innocent, and reportorial but at the same time arch, sinister, menacing— evoke the creepy characters and settings in Gorey’s sinuously drawn cartoon stories, in part because both artists can use neutrality in dangerous ways. Like an illustrated Gorey narrative, an Ashbery poem can convert matterof-factness into the essence of terror. At age seventy-eight, Ashbery has earned a right to sound autumnal, nostalgic, even fearful, but the wonderful thing about his latest book is that he maintains the same balance between giddiness and fear, satisfaction and anxiety, acceptance and doubt, that has marked his greatest previous work. From the beginning of the book, warnings and danger, grief and a sense of loss, intrude. “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse” and “O Fortuna,” the resonant opening poems, recall and foretell disaster: “We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine,” begins the first of these. And although it starts in the past, it ends with the future: “Only beware the bears and wolves that frequent [a chilly spring] / and the shadow that comes when you expect dawn.” The second, which begins with faux bonhomie (“Good luck! Best wishes! The best of luck!”), subsides into a sense of disappointment and a clarification of the difference between tragedy and the facts of ordinary life: It wasn’t until a real emergency arose, that someone had the sense to recognize for what it was. All hell didn’t break loose, it was like a rising psalm materializing like snow on an unseen mountain. All that was underfoot was good, but lost. Some kind of displacement exists here, like the shadow of the unseen presence in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” The disillusions in Ashbery’s poems are gradual and yet irrevocable. Nothing works

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  of a sudden; what Wordsworth would call a “gentle shock of mild surprise” underlies all the revelations, positive and negative, that inform the poems. In “Days of Reckoning” we find a more docile version of some putative Last Judgment, with a small cast of characters who would feel at home in a Gorey story. Alienation comes as an unwarranted disclosure: “Then they brought up // the whole other issue of belonging. / Seems we weren’t welcome despite / having occupied Hollyhock House / for generations upon generations.” What might have been endless—world without end—turns out to provide no defense against terminations. The menace of death looms large everywhere, in both the immediate past and the impending future. Ammons seems always to occupy a position in the present tense. Ashbery, regardless of the tense of his utterance, is looking back over his shoulder or forward to a new terminus heaving into view. He is too nervous to sit still, actually or metaphorically, for long. He himself, however, often does not know the meaning of the events he narrates, the scenes he describes. In the weird “Coma Berenices,” a five-page prose poem, he imitates the voice of a diary writer or someone sending out a Christmas letter to everyone on her list. The poem ends: All in all this has been an active and satisfying year, and I’m looking forward to the next one. Where it will take me I do not know. I just hang on and try to enjoy the ride. Snow brings winter memories. There is a warning somewhere in this but I do not know if it will be transmitted. Like Ammons, Ashbery has mastered banality, but unlike his contemporary, he knows how to invest it with menace. As I mentioned above, Ashbery veers between opacity and surprise. His unpredictability keeps him alive and us interested. Just when you think you may be on the verge of understanding, just when he may “deviate into sense,” he catches you up and takes you elsewhere, with a different lingo, a change in syntax, or a refusal to signify. Part of the perennial frustrations as well as the satisfaction in reading Ashbery comes from each reader’s effort to disentangle the underbrush, to distinguish the more approachable from the less approachable terrain. If Ammons represents one kind of poet (perhaps this kind’s last important avatar), who subscribes to a Romantic sense of organic unity in a poem, Ashbery seems to have moved to another paradigm: we often understand him in parts, not in wholes. Charles Wright once said that the parts are always greater than the



 . .     () whole; Ashbery’s poems sometimes but not always cohere. And coherence, or the lack thereof, is often a matter of tone, which changes swiftly, like imagery and syntax, within a stanza, even a line. Part of the fun of reading through a volume of Ashbery poems involves making preliminary determinations: Which poems come clear as wholes, which in parts, which not (on first reading) at all? No one insinuates as well as Ashbery does. Sometimes the lines of a poem sound like captions for cartoons that we don’t have: “The horse chestnut shelters the house of princes. / The laurel nudges the catalpa. / Mussolini offers a diamond to Corot. / The proud, the famous, the magnificent / exude gentleness and megalomania.” Thus, the opening of “Well-Lit Places,” which continues in the same vein but in expanding lines and with verbs in the future tense, all implying ministories, all begging for illustration. The perfectly banal becomes, in Ashbery’s hands, the perfectly sinister. Take, for instance, “Interesting People of Newfoundland,” which has the same dramatic and emotional heft, and the same easy accessibility as “The Instruction Manual” from Some Trees, Ashbery’s first book of a half century ago. Like “Coma Berenices,” it never rises beyond a reportorial tone that captures a nostalgia that you just know cannot be sincere although you can’t put your finger on the cause of your own doubt. Is it the mingling of cliché with danger (“Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon / when he wasn’t completely drunk, which was most of the time”)? Is it the adherence to an obligatory linguistic political correctness (“Then it was time to return home, which was OK with everybody, / each of them having discovered he or she could use a little shuteye”)? Or, perhaps, the rhetorical doublings that don’t really cohere (“we loved each other and had interesting times / picking each other’s brain and drying nets on the wooden docks”)? As so often happens, the clincher comes at the end: It was too much of a good thing but at least it’s over now. They are making a pageant out of it, one of them told me. It’s coming to a theater near you. How much of a good thing is too much? Will it be better and improved, or reduced and somehow less intense once it gets repeated as art? Is this the return of the repressed? Emotion recollected in tranquility? Or the farce that every tragedy gets repeated as? See, also, “Novelty Love Trot,” which sounds like answers to a celebrity journalist’s insipid questions: “I enjoy biographies and bibliographies, / and cultural studies,” but ends with a naked statement of separation: “You are stuffing squash blossoms / with porcini mushrooms. I am somewhere else, alone as usual. // I must get back to my elegy.”



  Other poems also end with a combination of regret, nostalgia, pleasure, and fear. Elegy abounds. For example: In summer it was straw hats and licorice, which, fading, leave a taste for other novelties and sundries. It is never too late for stealth, mourning itself, or the other irregular phantoms. (“Wastrel”) Or, with a fear of termination and arrival (stand-ins for death itself ): Better the long way home, than home; better an unlit fire than the frozen mantelpiece. Better toys than a blanket of stars waiting for you upstairs. “Bankruptcy, ma’am: I’m better at it than most. It definitely needs more salt.” (“Dryness of Mouth”) Or resignation and acceptance of impotence in the face of necessity: we never meant it to, this stream that outpours now haplessly into the vestibule that awaits. We have shapes but no power. (“Annuals and Perennials”) Ashbery sustains entire poems, as well as parts of them, with an increasing sense of having surrendered to inevitability, but he never (herein lies part of his appealing originality) gives in entirely, nor does he ever lose his sense of humor. “More Feedback,” for example, begins with a nod to Shelley and Yeats—“The passionate are immobilized”—and proceeds through a series of images, gestures, and examples of stasis, uncertainty, confusion, contradiction, ostracism, and general impasse. It ends: There’s no turning back the man says, the one waiting to take tickets at the top of the gangplank. Still, in the past, we could always wait a little. Indeed, we are waiting now, That’s what happens. This sounds like something from Samuel Beckett—I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll just stand here and wait—but imbued with a mordant sense that the march from the gangplank is nothing more than a circus game. Whether this is meant to confound or comfort one can only guess.



 . .     () In spite or because of his awareness of time’s passing, of the fact that “there’s no turning back,” Ashbery insistently turns nostalgic, especially at the end of this book. A sense of weariness, of having lived through it all, complements an equal sense of gratitude for still being around. Many of these poems are of the evening. Whether addressed to a single person (David Kermani, his longtime companion, to whom the book is dedicated) or several, an “interior paramour” or some other fiction, these poems—and the moments of direct address in pieces of others—represent Ashbery’s equivalent of Wallace Steven’s touchingly intimate line: “where being there together is enough.” The book’s title poem, in prose, is also its last, and it ends: “Together we / were a couple forever.” This sweet acknowledgment follows poems that also mingle tenderness and love with a sense of belatedness. “The Bled Weasel” ends “That was in the time when it was just as well / to be”; “A Below-Par Star” addresses someone or something that’s a combination of a real person, a movie star, and a heavenly body: “They said you’d be here sooner. It’s still early, but I can wait / no longer. It’s bed and the movies for me.” In “Composition” he also sounds like an early-to-bed kind of guy, but not because he relishes the domestic pleasures: next month is “a pure but troubled time,” which is why the speaker doesn’t “go out much, though / staying at home never seemed much of an option.” Indeed, he says, “speaking of nutty concepts, surely ‘home’ / is way up there on the list.” The Proustian “Tension in the Rocks” reviews the past through landscape: “You can see how the past has come to pass / in the ferns and sweepings of ore and text / that shadowed such narratives as had been scratched.” The poems meditate on, or at least take glancing nods at, missed occasions, unfulfilled affairs, fleeting passions. Time is both friend and foe, as Ashbery acknowledges at the end of “Composition” in a wry turn of phrase that expresses his perennial preference for time to place. Having turned away from the nutty concept of home, he says: I feel more certain about “now” and “then,” because they are close to me, like lovers, though apparently not in love with me, as I am with them. I like to call to them, and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream. A man in love with Time, invoking the past and the present as a means, presumably, of both accepting and deflecting the inevitable future, Ashbery responds to the call of the beyond, dreaming and also “composing” himself. Two beautiful poems at book’s end suggest the motifs of contentment and acceptance that move Ashbery beyond elegy and simple regret. “Like



  Most Seas” starts with a paragraph in present tense and moves to a second one in the past. Both deal with changes in the landscape and the weather, persistent Ashberyan themes. The second ends with the possible threat of a tidal wave or hurricane followed by a determination to stay put: No one thought about leaving, or rather it was moving that no one thought about. We were each happy in the cell of our self-determination, attentively falling out of love with the atrium of tomorrow, its muscle, its bravado. “Now” and “then” merge here because the poem treats a moment in the past (“then”) when no thought was given to anything other than the present (“now”). It’s as if all adheres, or rather adhered, in present time, but that time has ended. Even more sympathetic is “The Love Interest,” the tenderest of Ashbery’s love poems. It mingles time and space, a sense of something “coming from forever” that then arrives “parallel / to the day’s walking.” The speaker and his lover are satisfied, although he admits that they “keep coming back / for more—that’s part of the ‘human’ aspect / of the parade.” But he recognizes that darkness lies ahead: And there are darker regions penciled in, that we should explore some time. For now it’s enough that this day is over. It brought us its load of freshness, dropped it off And left. As for us, we’re still here, aren’t we? Such a quietly striking ending attests to Ashbery’s way of turning a phrase. It’s Wallace Stevens-meets-Stephen Sondheim: “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” and Yvonne De Carlo in Follies singing “I’m Still Here.” So, thank goodness, is John Ashbery.

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SEVENTEEN

X

“NAKED WITHOUT MY LINEENDS” Robert Lowell in His Letters ()

I

n the name of full disclosure, I must begin this review by admitting to be a not entirely disinterested party. Having recently completed an edition of a poet’s letters myself, and having seen my volume (Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt) paired by various reviewers with Saskia Hamilton’s impeccable selection of Lowell’s correspondence, I approached my task with a combination of curiosity and critical wonder; I came away from it with a combination of gratitude (for Hamilton’s dedication, precision, care, and stalwartness) and sadness (for the self-portrait of Lowell that emerges here). Lowell and Clampitt were almost exact contemporaries, she born in , he in , although he died in  before her first poems were published. They belonged, in other words, both to the same generation and to different ones. In  Irvin Ehrenpreis said that the postwar years constituted “the age of Lowell”; Clampitt’s “age,” if there is to be one, has yet to come. Clampitt lived a completely private life until she burst onto the literary scene in her late fifties; she said in a  letter that she regarded herself “in spite of everything, as one of the fortunate people who happen to be around.” Robert Lowell was heralded, when a young man, as the savior of post–World War II American poetry: in , at thirty, he won the Pulitzer for Lord Weary’s Castle. More important, he had demons. Clampitt found her genre, if not quite her vocation, late in life and stuck with it: there are few changes, especially with regard to diction and syntax, between her first and last books. Lowell was constantly reinventing himself. It’s this reinvention, in part, that justifies giving him a central place in the



  history of mid-century American poetry. The poets’ letters, like their poems, lives, and temperaments, are completely dissimilar. The letters tell a different story from that of the poetry. It’s not just the subjects, or the recipients, of the missives that distinguish the two volumes, but also, and more interestingly, their styles. As a reader, I was impressed by Clampitt’s prose; as an editor I was thwarted by the legacy of her belatedness. The first letter I uncovered was one from  (she was thirty at the time) to an English woman who became a friend the previous year when Clampitt made her first trip to England. It is polite, reportorial and, like all of the others, written with lucidity and correctness. Clampitt’s poetry is—mostly—swirling and baroque, exploding with passion, observation, and enthusiasm. Her letters, on the other hand, are by turns meditative, narrative, and self-defining. She was able to think in prose, and in part because she was living an anonymous, quiet, normal life she was also able to write long journal letters (mostly, in the early years, to her family) like Keats’s to his brother and sister-in-law in America. Even during the years of fame there were relatively few letters to literary people. What would she gain by writing to them? The whirlwind of travel, awards, and readings shortened the length of individual letters but never interfered with Clampitt’s keen-sighted ability to look at her subjects with humor and sanity. She was a natural letter writer. In other words, she was a literary person even before she alit, quite late, on poetry, her true genre, and discovered, as they say, her “voice” as well as her public. How different was Robert Lowell. Because he came from a prominent family, because he had connections as well as an enormous ego, because he hit the literary scene as a teenager and never left it, we have lots of letters from him. (Hamilton observes that his two children have kept private their letters from him. I suspect that other letters to his first and third wives, Jean Stafford and Caroline Blackwood, have either disappeared or also been withheld.) The first, written when Lowell was nineteen, is addressed to Ezra Pound and sets the tone for the rest of the correspondence as well as Lowell’s entire creative life: “You will probably think that I am very impudent and presumptuous.” Yes, indeed. “Proud, somewhat sullen and violent” (): the selfportrait in “ Revere Street” (Life Studies) is both twenty years in the future and also embryonically available right here. Lowell wanted to put himself to school at Pound’s Ezuversity in Rapallo. He was always looking for father figures, and his oedipal conflicts, both with his own father and his poetic mentors, are writ large throughout both the poetry and the letters; he comes to the master with his wonted combination of energy (which has yet to turn fully manic), pride, ambition, and submission: “I will bring the steel and fire, I am not theatric, and my life is sober not sensational. . . . I would like to bring back momentum and movement in poetry on a grand scale. . . . I shan’t



     () bring any strings of principles, but will throw myself into the fight and stay there” (, ). He is theatrical and sober at once: machismo is one of his middle names, but terror, unfortunately, is the other. From the start he knows himself. He puts himself very much in the Flaubert-Eliot line, which demands that an artist live like a bourgeois in order to write like a radical, when he says to Merrill Moore: “I have become more and more aware of the need for an at least surface conformity, dressing inconspicuously and neatly, living by a stable economy, flaunting convention by penetration rather than by eccentricity” (). He was, after all, a Boston Lowell. All of the letters to his elders (starting with Pound and including Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Frost, Santayana, and Tate) are polite, often deferential, as are the letters to his contemporaries, even when he disagrees with them. Writing to Allen Ginsberg, and discussing critically but fairly all of Ginsberg’s enthusiasms for those poets Lowell deems unimportant, he says: “I think letters ought to be written the way you think poetry ought be. So let this be breezy, brief, incomplete, but spontaneous and not dishonestly holding back” (). What registers almost immediately is Lowell’s discomfort with the medium of letter writing. He was not a natural at this game. Too much force, not enough leisure: his disposition and lifestyle are the exact opposites of Clampitt’s, and somehow he could never feel comfortable in prose. Hamilton observes in her introduction that “it’s as if, writing prose, he is a racehorse in a stall tensed for release onto the track of a poem” (viii). Letter writers need to be tortoises, not thoroughbreds. And, unlike me, Hamilton must have had an editor’s nightmare. Clampitt’s letters, even those that were written in her awful spidery hand, were “letter-” as well as pitch-perfect; she did not make errors in spelling or grammar. Every paragraph has order, definition, and shape. Lowell’s letters, on the other hand, were messy in their appearance, ungrammatical, reading often like first drafts for something else. Hamilton observes their “odd, intricate, sinewy sentences that seem to run several syntaxes together” (viii), all of which give us a different kind of access to his inner life and his creative thinking than do his poems. In a letter to his school friend Blair Clark, written during a manic episode, he attaches a P.S.: “If this letter sounds rapid it’s because I can type faster than I can think” (). To John Berryman, in , pre-Life Studies: “I’ve just started messing around with my autobiographical monster. Prose is hell. I want to change every two words but while I toy with revisions, the subject stinks like a dead whale and lies in the mud of the mind’s bottom” (). At the same time, he calls writing prose “a hell of a job, it starts naked[,] ends as fake velvet” (). And in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, one year before his death, he writes: “Without verse, without philosophy, I found it hard, I was naked without



  my line-ends” (). In other words, Lowell thought best, or most naturally, in verse. I am reminded of James Merrill’s remark at the start of The Book of Ephraim, when he is considering writing his story in prose: “Since it had never truly fit, why wear / The shoe of prose? In verse the feet went bare.” Naked, clothed, whichever: Lowell’s letters are not “fake velvet” at all. He wears the shoe of prose, and if it sometimes chafes and blisters, most often being shod allows him to tread on the ground and to keep in touch, Antaeus-like, with reality, even at those times when mania or depression distorts that reality. He might feel naked, but a reader senses a different kind of craftsmanship at work here. The letters are revelatory and heartbreaking at once. One thing that does not change between Lowell’s prose and his poems is his wondrous eye for detail, a gift for metaphor, and a sardonic wit that he applies to characters and social situations. Like his delicious prose in “ Revere Street” and like some of the poems, Lowell’s letters reveal a temperament that would not be out of place in the world of neo-Augustan satire. He might have equaled Jarrell or Mary McCarthy as a mordant observer of social mores in general, and the academic life in particular. Here are some examples of aperçus. Writing to Bishop from Europe about a visit from his mother: “She is a very competent, stubborn, uncurious, unBohemian woman with a genius for squeezing luxury out of rocks. That is, she has a long memory for pre-war and pre-first-world-war service; and thinks nothing of calling the American ambassador if there’s no toilet-paper on the train, etc.” (). On Randall Jarrell: “He is like a knotted, brown old gladiator, and will be still more so when his Mercedes racer arrives” (). On Elizabeth Hardwick’s pregnancy: “We lie about on sofas all day eating cornflakes, no-calorie ginger-ale and yoghurt. Elizabeth never moves except to turn the page of an English newspaper or buy a dress. . . . We hear of women (Eleanor Clark) who ski all through pregnancy, give birth in bomb shelters without doctors, etc. But we don’t approve, and are timid, delicate and antebellum” (). On Adrienne Rich getting ready for her third child: “reading Simone de Beauvoir and bursting with Benzedrine and emancipation” (). To Bishop on a  birthday party for Jackie Kennedy in Maine: “a slightly tawdry untimely Marie Antoinette feeling of a festival when the age for being whole-hearted about such things has passed, the flash of the jet-set, a little lurid and in bad taste in a world of poverty and blood” (). The bulk of the volume reveals the heart of the man and the two things that occupied all of his energies and imaginings: his sense of self and his work, separate but interchangeable. One disadvantage of reading letters is that one does not have the other side of the correspondence, and especially with regard to Lowell’s wives and other lovers, we cannot get the whole story. It is good to know that a volume will soon appear of the Bishop-Lowell



     () correspondence. Although both halves have been published individually, we shall be better able to take the measure of this extraordinary relationship by following the back-and-forth-ing of their ideas. Whereas Clampitt is inquisitive and alert in her pursuit of aesthetic truth, with a Quaker tendency to investigate patiently, Lowell always seems to know his own mind; his commitment to art and his sense of self-worth never wavers. Nevertheless, there is often a kind of vacillation, a more modest version of the manicdepressive swings, which makes him all the more human in a reader’s eyes. He writes to Bishop: “Maybe it’s just my nature, but one seems to see-saw from a sort of rosy blandness to a blank, bare cracking feeling. It’s like swimming across a pond littered with pieces of wood; one wonders if one has the energy to push through it all, then one floats gaily and the curry [current?] draws one forward” (). The formality of “one” betrays modest sobriety, and the steadiness of his articulation balances his confession of a see-sawing “rosy blandness.” Lowell’s tone is always at least assured, even when he frets; more often it is assertive, with an undertone of competitiveness. Only with Bishop (as above) does he sometimes sound like a child sent down to the principal’s office. Or: “You always make me feel that I have a rather obvious breezy, impersonal liking for the great and obvious—in contrast with your adult personal feeling for the odd and genuine” (). It’s an important distinction— the “breezy” against the “adult” and the “great” against the “genuine”—and it shows Lowell’s understanding of the differences between his taste and personality, and Bishop’s at once more modest, and yet more authentic selfhood. Art and life go hand-in-hand, as the following, perhaps deliberately, mixed metaphor attests: “I guess I don’t really like solitude. The fun is hammering bits of it out of a crowded life. For one’s self, I think one should keep [the] door open for strict, disorderly and free meters” (). With barely a transition he moves form life to work, eliding whatever separates them. In addition, the strange mingling of strictness and freedom has ramifications for Lowell’s publicly tempestuous life and his hammered-out verse. In a letter to the critic Cleanth Brooks he sounds a Frostian note: “I see poetry as a mixture of deep-seeing and a game or craft” (). And no one played that game for mortal stakes more passionately than Lowell. An interesting redaction of this volume might be a selection of the letters to other poets in which Lowell discusses poetry in general and the nuts and bolts of his own work in particular. Such a grouping would constitute as much of an ars poetica as all of Lowell’s other prose writing on the subject. Few writers have ever had such a keenly accurate self-understanding when it comes to what they are up to. In this regard, of course, the pathos of Lowell’s own manic-depressive cycles, his inability to know what was happening at



  the height of his mania, and his subsequent apologies and shame, represent the man who suffered rather than the man who composed. He strove, in Yeats’s famous distinction, for perfection of the work, not of the life. Combat was never far from his mind—in ordinary as well as lucid moments—and for Lowell, labor was a way of exorcising his inner demons and struggling with his living contemporaries. Elizabeth Hardwick notes his discipline and heroic work ethic as well as his gift for friendship; many loved him, and almost no one ever repudiated him. He writes to both Theodore Roethke and Jerome Mazzaro about rivalry in poetry, “the competition, the boxing match” (). He is obsessed with writing; he asks his old friend Peter Taylor whether he has ever tried to stop (Clampitt made a similar attempt, well before she achieved her fame, and found that stopping was impossible.) “It’s harder than alcohol” (), he ruefully acknowledges. The ascent to Parnassus, as Milton well knew, is all labor and little pleasure: “I think the ambition of art . . . gives a mixture of glory and exhaustion. I think in the end, there is no end, the thread frays rather than is cut, or if it is cut suddenly, it usually hurtingly frays before being cut” (). This remark to his editor and friend Frank Bidart came one year before Lowell’s death. On the personal front, the news is not happy. We have laid before us here the evidence of Lowell’s marriages, his breakups and breakdowns, his crazed and inappropriate momentary attachments to various women. To Lady Caroline Blackwood, his third wife, whom he left finally to return to New York and Elizabeth Hardwick, his second, he writes: “Neither of us have made it any better for the other. It hasn’t been a quarrel, but two eruptions, two earthquakes crashing” (). Most of all we have first the happiness, then the fraying (to appropriate his word above about art), the sad battles and the reconnectings with Hardwick, the entire fracas provoked by his decision to use her letters to him in parts of The Dolphin, an episode from literary history which does not put Lowell in the best light. There are some things, as Elizabeth Bishop reminded him, more important than art itself. But not for Lowell. Whether tailoring his verse as a means of presenting and clothing himself, or going naked without line-ends, as he does in the private communiqués collected here, Lowell was in every fiber and vein of his being a man of the book. He was omnivorous in his reading, catholic, as well as for those few moments in the mid-forties, Catholic. Who would have thought he would say: “I have been reading masses of Pope and Faulkner—a wonderful pair to have together” ()? Or, while complaining about his students’ unwillingness to read “old” poets: “I’m on a Wordsworth and Blake jag. I’d like to do poems that would hit all in one flash, though loaded with subtleties of art and passion underneath. Or great clumsy structures like Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer, that somehow lift the great sail and catch



     () the wind” (). Or saying to Hardwick how thrilled he is to learn that she and their daughter Harriet are reading poetry together: “To me poetry means poetry written before ” (). If, on the one hand, the Letters gives us a portrait of a discrete individual, on the other hand it serves as a reminder of an entire generation of poets who flourished after World War II in the wake of the modernist giants before the flood. In both his poems and his letters Lowell describes his sense of the generic life he shared with Berryman, Taylor, Jarrell, Roethke, and others. He means both the marriages, divorces, affairs, alcohol, pills—all the messiness of “life”—and also, more important, what now seems like a terribly old-fashioned dedication to art, to craft, and to a tradition that goes back to Homer. Lowell was a summa cum laude graduate of Kenyon College, and his degree was in classics. There was no such thing as a creative writing program for him to enroll in. Instead, he famously pitched his tent on Allen Tate’s front lawn in the summer of , in order to learn from him. The true heroism that emerges from this volume is that of a man with an all-consuming commitment to a life in and through his art, creating the former by means of the latter.



EIGHTEEN

X

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ROBERT LOWELL 

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he publication of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems in  initiated a welcome renewal of interest in the writer who, a half century before, had been heralded as the golden boy, perhaps even the savior, of postwar American poetry. Reviews and features—like that by Charles McGrath in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, not normally a venue for literary coverage—devoted what seemed like disproportionate energy and space to reviving Lowell the man. Attention was paid to his aristocratic lineage; his rebellions against proper Brahmin Boston and other representatives of authority that included two president (Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson); his discovery of ersatz father figures in Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, with whom he studied and for whom he performed brilliantly at Kenyon after he dropped out of Harvard; his marriages, divorces, and affairs; and, most prominently, his manicdepressive cycles, hospitalizations, and pharmacological treatments. This was the man who made a household world of “confessional” poetry (not his term, and one most poets and critics alike have come to disavow) as the supposedly uptight, straight-laced fifties gave way to the rebellious, let-itall-hang-out sixties. In the “Epilogue” to his last book, Day by Day, Lowell asks: “why not say what happened?” (). What “happened” is never as important as what the artist makes of it; a good poem is not a confession. Bidart thoughtfully and permanently disposes of the term in an elegant afterword, reminding us that Lowell’s candor, like that of all great artists, “is an illusion created by art” (). Helen Vendler did the same some years



     () ago when commenting on the opening line of “Bright Day in Boston,” a late poem: “Joy of standing up my dentist” (). Lowell sheepishly confessed to her that he had always wanted to do this, but in real life could not. Collected Poems gives us a life created, not reflected or reported. It is life as perfection and retribution. Somehow, however, reading several of the reviews of this book, one had the feeling that the poetry had been scanted or was merely the backdrop or excuse for what Joyce Carol Oates once dismissed as prurient pathography. The man in all of his larger-than-life power and in his tired pathos seems to have preempted the work. I kept looking for People magazine to grant Lowell his page of celebrity. Whatever its focus, however, the coverage performs at least two important functions: it reminds us that most artists, certainly most writers, undergo a diminishment of renown and respect immediately after their deaths (Elizabeth Bishop being the rule-proving exception: her works have sold considerably more in the quarter century since her death than they ever did in her lifetime); and it prompts a general reassessment of Robert Lowell the poet, whose life, like that of any writer, was the necessary but far from sufficient cause of his work. Looking back, what do we see? Robert Trail Spence Lowell IV was a poet whose best critics and general readers will always be those who share his imaginative intuition that the most fascinating as well as the most important people in history have been its warriors, princes, statesmen, and other persons of public power. His interest in the civic realm, the relations between private lives and historical events, and his own role as observer of and sometime participant on the public stage make for a poetry that may not suit contemporary audiences. Can we, post-Watergate, post-Iran-gate, post-Hill vs. Thomas, post-Monica, think of politics and politicians as anything other than mendacious, conniving, meretricious, and sleazy? As readers, how can we assimilate a poetry that takes politics so seriously? Other than a major dose of Schadenfreude or masochism, what could impel a sensitive intellectual to continue to pay attention to the buffoons, criminals, hypocrites, actors, and temporizers who constitute, with their self-serving rhetoric and pious platitudes, their quickchanging beliefs or noncommitments, the bulk of our public officials? And more specifically, how does lyric poetry, traditionally and theoretically the genre of the private, inward life, accommodate itself to subjects and characters who might be better served by the mimetic, representational mediums of fiction and drama? If there remains any validity to the claim made by Irvin Ehrenpreis in  (London and Boyers, –) that the immediate postwar years constituted “the age of Lowell” (as opposed to, say, “the age of Bishop” or of someone else, or of no one in particular) it comes in the way that Lowell



  perfected—or possibly violently assembled—a language and a style capable of representing or enacting the intersections and overlapping of the private life and the public arena, of defining the “self ” by virtue of its relations with others, whether family members and friends or historical figures living or long dead. And more particularly in the way that the fertilizing inspiration as well as the Bloomian “anxiety” of influence could require of a maker of poems, and his readers, a full commitment to the intellectual traditions of Western literature. In spite of his clear and multiple attachments to literary guides and masters ranging from Tate and Ransom to Hopkins and Hardy, and in spite of his appropriation of Marvell’s octosyllabic line and his “imitations” of non-English poets, Lowell most clearly resembles Milton in his unswerving ambition. (Among his contemporaries, only James Merrill would qualify as an equally, but far different, epic poet.) Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of Milton’s sonnets as an example of his misguided energies (he was “a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock; but he could not carve heads upon cherrystones”), might be taken as an appropriate commentary on Lowell’s insistence on forging History from the two versions of Notebook and ending up with a “sonnet sequence” as oppressive as Wordsworth’s illconceived Ecclesiastical Sonnets and much less varied in music and tone than John Berryman’s sonnet-like Dream Songs. Through a fortuitous combination of deliberate stylistic choices and unconscious gestures, Lowell’s entire work, starting with Lord Weary’s Castle, the volume that threw its not-yet-thirty-year-old author into the spotlight and won for him the  Pulitzer Prize, consists of short poems all of which might become big ones. The Collected Poems opens us to the full figure of Lowell as an epic poet whose major subject, it turns out, is history itself. (The book’s publication elicited barbs from James Fenton in The New York Review of Books last year, especially with regard to editorial principles and annotations. Of the latter, I shall remark only that every reader will find some helpful and others superfluous, and every reader will also require information as yet unprovided. A future Lowell industry will involve deeper scholarship.) Whereas Pound called the epic “a poem containing history,” Lowell’s oeuvre, even before the overwrought and often indigestible History, is a series of experiments that, considered together, embrace and envelop the course of Western civilization. At its center is its maker, the man who could not resist taking himself as the mirror of an age. His “temperament” (a word adapted to criticism by the late David Kalstone) was composed of equal parts of classical learning, literary ambition, and historical insight.

X 

     ()

M

y own experience of reading Lowell’s poetry was not atypical. Coming to it fresh from our training in the New Critical classrooms of the mid-sixties, my contemporaries and I were intoxicated by the sheer power of its literariness, by which I mean both the bookishness that demanded annotation from others or library research from ourselves, and the knottiness of sound, syntax, grammar, and thought that forced us to read the work through the same lenses we had used on Donne and Eliot. A “plain style,” whatever subtle beauty it might strive for or achieve, was for novices, lightweights, philistines. Difficulty was for grown-ups, for those who aspired to the condition of heroic reading. I could not resist the gorgeous, mouth-filling sonority of the opening of Lord Weary’s “Salem”: In Salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips To the canvas flapping on the seaward panes Until the knitting sailor stabs at ships Nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain’s Asylum. () That someone had written a technically perfect sonnet in his midtwenties (the poem appeared in a slightly different form in Lowell’s first volume, Land of Unlikeness, in ) made us realize that the tradition that Eliot had insisted upon still reached into our lifetime. The fact that I could not quite unravel or crack the actual meaning of the sentence above merely added to the excitement of its power. Our native tongue could possess all the glamour of a foreign language. A life devoted to literature—whether as maker or consumer—demanded heroic askesis equal to the task of deciphering what Lowell later referred to as his “craggy, dark, apocalyptic poetry” (Collected Prose, ). Such heroism required, above all, a commitment to the meanings and sounds of English, and a willingness to inundate the ear and the mind with an enriching linguistic flood. To come upon, as a nineteen-year-old college junior, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” was to discover that Milton, Thoreau, Hopkins, Eliot, Hart Crane, and Tate still breathed life into the language of contemporary poetry. Although Yeats had claimed that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry, it appeared that in Lowell, rhetoric and poetry occupied one space. They were two words for the same process and phenomenon. Ehrenpreis thought that Lowell had “a habit of substituting rhetoric, in the form of self-conscious sublimity, for poetry” (London and Boyers, ), although he hesitated to say whether what was impressive as aspiration was equally so as achievement. “Rhetoric” in fact was the word used over and over by Lowell’s champions and best readers as well as his detractors. From the forties through the sixties,



  the literary world was still so much in thrall to the principles of French symbolism—to Verlaine’s demand that we wring rhetoric by its neck—that it felt uneasy, squeamish, or uncertain when confronted by someone perfectly contented to use a big voice in orotund measures. In , John Bayley, on “The Quaker Graveyard,” suggested that “the early poetry is a signal instance of what T.S. Eliot called ‘a poetry that is purely verbal, in that the poem will give us more of the same thing, an accumulation rather than a real development of thought or feeling.’ It creates no world into which we can move, explore, discover” (London and Boyers, ). Surely this is not entirely right. “The Quaker Graveyard” demands that we follow a complicated series of artistic and emotional maneuvers, from the gnarled opening that ventriloquizes Thoreau (“A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket” []); through the various homages to “Lycidas”; to the often unclear mingling of details from the life and death of Warren Winslow with those of nineteenth-century sailors; the combined Melvillian and Christian figure of “IS, the whited monster” () which practically screams “Symbol! Symbol!” at us; the thundering tones of Jonathan Edwards, who appears elsewhere in Lowell’s early work; the meditative Eliotic harmonies of Part VI, “Our Lady of Walsingham”; and the final return to the “brackish winds” of Nantucket and the primal moment of creation . . . When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime And breathed into his face the breath of life, And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill. The Lord survives the rainbow of his will. () The lines are a challenging combination of Genesis and Darwin (God did not create man from “the sea’s slime” but from red clay), of murderousness and sanctity, of destruction and the promise embodied in the figure of a rainbow. The poem has developed, painfully and perhaps arthritically; it does not merely accumulate. Even more than unpacking and rearranging “symbols” and figures of speech for intellectual coherence, it is the reader’s job to make sense of a syntactically simple unit like the last line, which might be taken as mere redundancy (God survives everything); as the kind of paradox prized by the New Critics (the rainbow represents God’s promise of second chances, but the only living creatures who have survived have been Noah and his shipmates); and as a musical experiment performed by a man besotted, as early Lowell clearly was, with the sound of his own voice in particular and of the English language in general. The clotted “blue-lung’d combers lumbered” is particularly fine, especially before the ease of articulation permitted by the last line, and the rhyming of “kill” and “will” in the final couplet makes for thematic irony as well as harmonious music.



     () Not Bayley but, as usual, Randall Jarrell, described the effect of this early poetry with absolute precision: . . . a good deal of what is excessive in the extraordinary rhetorical machine of a poem like “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” which first traps and then wrings to pieces the helpless reader—who rather enjoys it—is gone from some of his later poems, or else dramatically justified and no longer excessive. [“The Quaker Graveyard” is] a baroque work, like Paradise Lost, but all the extase of baroque has disappeared—the coiling violence of its rhetoric, the harsh and stubborn intensity that accompanies all its verbs and verbals, the clustering stresses learned from accentual verse, come from a man contracting every muscle, grinding his teeth together till his shut eyes ache. (Axelrod, ) We more than “enjoyed” the struggle, the excesses, the “violence” and the teeth grinding: we shared in, and were uplifted by them. Lowell’s musclebound verse moved away from “the real language of men” that had been the goal of one strand of poetry since Wordsworth formulated his democratic ideal in . A reader’s struggle is invariably a repetition of a writer’s, although in a finer or attenuated tone, and by this I do not mean the mental and emotional struggles of Robert Lowell the man, but the artistic chiseling, wrenching, and twisting of Robert Lowell the verbal sculptor. This is what Jarrell meant when he called Lowell “a thoroughly professional poet” (Axelrod, ) at a time well before our contemporary institutionalization of MFAs, creative writing “workshops,” and the proliferation of prizes and publications that have made a different kind of credentials necessary for self-proclaimed “professional” poets. Before it became a university cottage industry, poetry required only arduous intellectual perseverance.

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is struggle could not continue in quite the same way, of course, and as the cataclysmic forties gave way to the “tranquillized Fifties” (), and then to the impatient and rebellious sixties, Lowell found different ways to match his style and literary temperament to the times. Again, we measure than man through his involvement in history. And his involvement in history always necessitated new poetic measures. The tortured stanzas, convoluted syntax, opaque symbols, rigid meter, and stubborn intellectualism subsided, under the influence of life changes (loss of religious faith, divorce, remarriage, manic-depressive episodes, new drugs), into looser and freer lines and music, while the same sensibility or “temperament” remained in evidence.



  The surest test of a major artist is whether he can both change and at the same time remain recognizably the same or true to himself. In this regard Lowell maintains preeminence. Unlike Bishop, for example, whose late work is hard to distinguish in tone and method from her earlier work (because she was always so careful an artist that she often held onto poems for years before finishing or publishing them), Lowell was able to free himself from the shackles of Catholicism and baroque stanzas and yet retain the toughness of mind, the accuracy of perception, the interest in particularity of detail and articulation that remained one component of his permanent armor. He famously attributed the loosening of style that became the hallmark of Life Studies () in part to his hearing Allen Ginsberg read Howl in San Francisco. As an artist, in other words, Lowell could benefit from the examples of his contemporaries—even, or especially, when they were seemingly different from him—as readily as he profited from his precursors. The best artist learns from, and absorbs, everything. Witness Picasso and Stravinsky in other arenas. Sitting down with anyone’s collected work is not an easy task. Lowell’s is more daunting, virtually unapproachable, than most. One thing that recommends such an activity (other than the obligation of having accepted a professional review assignment) is the way it enables a reader to see the forest as well as the trees. We can perceive the continuity of, as well as the changes in, Lowell’s poetry. From the start, Lowell’s voice is always (as the young critic Nick Halpern has recently written) “pitched for the end of history” (). We can take “end” to mean not just termination (i.e., Lowell’s apocalyptic tones) but also purpose. And since history includes politics, according to Halpern “political speech was for Lowell the most trustworthy, the most reliable way of speaking in prophetic and everyday voices at once” (). So even when the subjects and styles of Lord Weary’s Castle yielded to the family romance and Oedipal outrages of Life Studies, Lowell was still practicing historical researches. In some ways, the investigation of domestic life challenged him even more than his forays into the American past. The family, far from being a refuge, was always a complication fraught with political struggle. The terrific pressure that organized the formal structures of poems in Lord Weary’s Castle did not disappear; it merely went temporarily underground in order to transform itself in the latter volume within the individual lyrics that build to a sustained, wonderfully articulated, autobiographical narrative. In a letter to William Carlos Williams, Lowell said that he took Williams and Bishop as models because they both keep their eyes (in a Wordsworthian manner) on their object, and they “giver rhetoric a nap” (Axelrod, ). Admiring their absorption in their subjects, Lowell now tries his own hand at the sturdy realism of Tolstoy and Chekhov, attending to characters within social,



     () familial, and historical contexts. In his reminiscence of the writing of “Skunk Hour” Lowell admits that his “own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor. . . . What influenced me more than San Francisco and reading aloud was that for some time I had been writing prose. I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert” (Collected Prose, ). I shall return later to “the many poetic styles in English” in a consideration of Lowell’s contemporaneous (and controversial) translations in Imitations; at this point it is important to consider the “prosing” of Life Studies and the ways Lowell’s apparent artlessness enlivened his art. Although Lowell called his own oeuvre “a small-scale Prelude” () it does not record “the growth of a poet’s mind”, nor does it provide a lesson and an example. Wordsworth’s didactic self-absorption is not his model. He could never ask, even rhetorically, Wordsworth’s question: “What one man is why may not thousands be?” Rather, “my journey is always stumbling on the unforeseen and even unforeseeable” (). Wordsworth (and Whitman and later avatars) aside, prose has always been the normal mode of autobiography. What strikes a reader first about Life Studies is both the surprising appearance of the chiseled, perfectly articulated prose of “ Revere Street” at its center (surely one of the most moving and polytonal memoirs of the past half century), and also the ways in which this piece maintains a hold on the poems that surround it. Like Merrill, who always claimed that writing prose was unnatural and that “in verse the feet went bare,” but whose prose is braced by the same control of tone and lucidity of observation as his poetry, Lowell writes sentences that anyone might envy. The memoir opens on a single picture, now lost, of his distant cousin Major Mordecai Myers, a German Jew with qualities associated with other kinds of foreignness as well: Mediterranean, Moorish, Spanish. And then he warms to his subject—a childhood house in which objects function as strongly as people—and his method, the uses to which portraiture may be put. It is especially appropriate that the entire memoir records Lowell’s sense of being, like his ancestor, alienated, out of place, often alone (as an only child, among other reasons). The solidity of things held in memory works (paradoxically, as a good New Critic might demand) to balance the child’s sense of smallness and worthlessness. The memoir includes both Wordsworthian “spots of time” and Lowell’s material equivalents of them, objects that, although lost, still retain the vibrancy of life: Major Mordecai Myer’s [sic] portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories I often come upon it in the setting of our



  Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befoggings of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and meaning—because finished, they are endurable and perfect. () The entire effort of Life Studies is contained within these five sentences. Objects, like people, exist within the mind’s repository, even after they have vanished. The “motherly care,” like Lowell’s own mother, whom he resented in youth, has been internalized as a principle of order. Death confers perfection, the vernissage that gives a “finish” in several senses. Memory revives the past, offering what Wordsworth would call “restoration.” (As an example of Lowell’s long-standing attachment to the permanence of “things,” consider the image of a bureau in “Off Central Park” from Day by Day: “the drawers have the solidity of Spanish kings, / observers of successive peaks of decadence, / set on racks in identical bass-viol coffins” []). Throughout the memoir, Lowell’s eye for the precise detail never fails him, nor does his choice of the mot juste (he calls the house a setting for “arthritic spiritual pains” []; to “be a boy at Brimmer was to be small, denied, and weak” []), or his ear for rhythm (“the blank befoggings of forgetfulness” is perfect iambic pentameter). And his sense of quite ordinary characters seems artlessly to raise parents and child to a heightened, mythic level. The ineffective, mumbling, weak father, a fish out of water after leaving the navy, can never quite make a go of it in civilian life but retains a patience compounded of the stoic and the pathetic: “Like a chauffeur, he watched his car, a Hudson, with an informed vigilance, always giving its engine hairtrigger little tinkerings of adjustment or friendship, always fearful lest the black body, unbeautiful as his boiled shirts, should lose its outline and gloss. He drove with flawless, almost instrumental, monotony” (–). Lowell has absorbed metonymy, the basic trope of realistic fiction—his inheritance from the French and Russian masters he was trying to emulate—and so deftly intertwines car and driver that the reader easily forgets which stands for, or represents, which. Charlotte Winslow Lowell, the snobbish mother with her fatuous compensatory dreams of Wagnerian heroes and Napoleonic grandeur (from whom Lowell surely derived his lifelong Nietzschean interest in supermen and heroics), speaks which a cozy epigrammatic shrillness that terrifies and excites her son: “We are barely perched on the outer rim of decency”; “A man must make up his own mind”; “I usually manage to make myself pretty comfortable”; “I have always believed carving to be the



     () gentlemanly art”; “A really great person . . . known how to be courteous to his superiors” ( passim). The combination of acid social satire and psychological accuracy makes for a memoir both humorous and dangerous, and it also prepares us for the “life studies” that follow. Although James Longenbach has recently tried to undermine the now popular truism that many contemporary poets achieve a “breakthrough” with a third or fourth volume, it is clear that Life Studies stands well apart from its predecessors, Lord Weary’s Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs. If Lowell’s true subject throughout all of his poetry is history, then here at last personal and family history come alive with the vibrancy of color, detail, and anecdote that give weight and meaning to wonderful particularities. We can look back at the finger-wagging, skeptical response to the volume by Joseph Bennett in The Hudson Review () and only wonder at a critic’s myopia: “Lazy and anecdotal, it is more suited as an appendix to some snobbish society magazine, to Town and Country or Harper’s Bazaar, rather than as a purposeful work.” And of the prose memoir: “a mixture of Cleveland Amory and John Marquand” (London and Boyers, –). In fact, Lowell’s admiring, envying assessment of Bishop—“unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect” ()—can be applied to his own achievement in the finely spun but seemingly untailored style of these poems. The language in Life Studies is everywhere precise and meticulous, and even its rhythms, famously loosened from the tightly bound pentameter lines of Lowell’s early poetry, still retain a formidable mixture of elasticity and tautness. Thus, the opening of the elegy to Ford Madox Ford: The lobbed ball plops, then dribbles to the cup. . . . (a birdie Fordie!) But it nearly killed the ministers. Lloyd George was holding up the flag. He gabbled, “Hop-toad, hop-toad, hop-toad! Hueffer has used a niblick on the green; It’s filthy art, Sir, filthy art!” () The first line proves Lowell’s mastery of monosyllables—something he learned from Hopkins, shared with Frost, and passed on to Seamus Heaney— as the first four words convey an image through sounds that mimic awkwardness, after which the line, like the ball, then glides smoothly along as it subsides into regular iambs. Or consider the opening of “To Delmore Schwartz,” which seems to have absorbed some of the music of “Prufrock,” that earlier poem in which unexpected and sudden rhythmic changes interrupt regularity: We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit! Even when we had disconnected it,



  the antiquated refrigerator gurgled mustard gas through your mustard-yellow house, and spoiled our long maneuvered visit from T. S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware. . . . () What starts in rhymed pentameter couplets immediately breaks down as readily as the furnace and refrigerator, and the haphazard repetition of another “it” sound (“visit”) readies us for the irregularly rhymed remainder of the poem and the drunken semi-joyful moment shared by the two poets. The final six lines repeat a similar tactic: The Charles River was turning silver. In the ebblight of morning, we stuck the duck -’s webfoot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we’d killed. () The finely broken but enjambed phrases (“ebb-//light” and “duck//-s’ web-//foot”) signify diminishment and slowdown, and the hard monosyllabic tongue-tightening in the rhymed “ebb,” “stuck,” “duck,” “web” brings the music to an adagio pace before the loosening release of the upwardly accented “a candle, in a quart of gin we’d killed.” Everyone has long agreed that the anatomies of failure and the elegiac tones that pervade the volume reach their finest moments in the eponymous fourth section of Life Studies. More than four decades after their publication these poems retain their patina of freshness and energy, even wit and passion, despite the pervasive haunting that makes Lowell and his family into figures who belong partly to the world of classical myth and history, partly to the world of James and Wharton. Any of the individual figures, as well as the relations among them, could be enlarged into material for prose fiction or Chekhovian drama. Finally, it is not the British Wordsworth but the American E. A. Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters, and even Frost, who stand behind the character portrayals here. The sense of a shared family identity—partly genetic, partly situational—reminds us that what D. H. Lawrence one called “the old stable ego” is gone for good, that all identity is shared. One of Lowell’s distinctive achievements was his embedding of the single self (the traditional subject of lyric, as I mentioned at the start of this essay) into a web of social and familial relationships. The other putative “confessional” poets did the same thing, but none with Lowell’s fine journalist’s attention to social detail and his poet’s ear for the right musical



     () phrasing. Not only Lowell but the Lowells—past and present—make history come alive, and give life as well to the poet who had been relatively absent as a character from his first two volumes. I am reminded of a remark by the America biologist Lewis Thomas: “The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.” Identity, in other words, is neither unitary, nor irreducible, nor unchanging, nor independent. It exists, as we all do, as a reflected and a reflecting object, and beneath masks, and within communities. People are points of reference as well as objects of interest in their own right. In thirty pages Lowell revives the past, tracing his own history from the age of five (in , the year of the first poem in the sequence, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”) through the deaths of grandparents and parents, largely skipping over his adolescence, education, and first marriage. He ends with his incarceration as a “fire-breathing Catholic C.O.” (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”), and as another “manic” sort of person at McLean’s sanitarium (“Waking in the Blue”), with himself as father and husband, but sufficiently self-aware to assume (in “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’ ”), a wife’s persona (although as Lowell pointed out, the wife was based on Delmore Schwartz’s, not Elizabeth Hardwick). And he rounds off the sequence with the contemporaneous “Skunk Hour,” which now occupies a quasi-canonical status in anthologies and college poetry courses. In all of these poems, the external as well as the internal circumstances of human identity are depicted with a combination of sympathy, understanding, outrage, and good humor. “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” a prose piece written probably in , recalls Lowell’s incarceration at the Payne-Whitney Clinic three years earlier and contains information that he would later fold into the poems of Life Studies. A comparison shows how the poet’s art transformed recollected minutiae into poetry that is more than just “free” or loose-lined verse. For example, in “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” Lowell thinks back to his first brush with death, when his uncle, sick with Hodgkin’s disease, packed up for a last trip to Europe with his wife (leaving their three daughters at home), before dying the following winter. In the prose piece, Lowell mentions the family farm, Char-de-sa, named for the three Winslow children: “No one, except a silly gun-shy setter, had ever died there. I sat on the tiles, all of three and half ” (Collected Prose, ). Accuracy of recollection is not the major issue, but in the poem Lowell corrects himself: “I was five and a half.” More interestingly, he revises or reimagines the family dog, at least as much for sound as for accuracy: “No one had even died there in my lifetime . . . / Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling



  toads. / I sat mixing black earth and lime” (). Whether real or invented, “Cinder” appropriately prepares us for “earth and lime” and even more for the death of Uncle Devereux in the poem’s last lines: My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile . . . Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color. () Most moving, the specific detail of death by paralysis fits in with a range of the other paralyses that beset all the human characters in the sequence. The gentle musicality (the half rhymes that join “Scottie” and “puppy,” and “Scottie” and “gobbled,” the alliteration of “puppy paralyzed”) attests to the poet’s revisionary ear. Frank Bidart’s introduction (with its subtitle from Randall Jarrell, whose ghost appears to Lowell after death and tells him: “You didn’t write, you rewrote” []) informs us that Lowell was an inveterate reviser, and that his revisions were one cause of the quarter century delay between his death and the production of this volume. Still, an even more compendious variorum will be needed at some point, containing the now omitted volumes of Notebook, the earlier versions of poems that appeared later in History, and offering an extensive scholarly apparatus detailing as precisely as possible the nature of Lowell’s writing processes. Something like those editions of The Prelude, with the  version on the left, and the  one on the right, would allow students and even interested general readers to “compare and contrast” (as we used to be asked to do in school) several takes on a single subject. Meanwhile, the proof of Lowell’s achievement will be found within the poems themselves and the relations among them, and between the various single volumes as well. The figure of the stubbornly rebellious boy, alternately truculent and cowering, appears in “Life Studies” as in “ Revere Street.” So does the “gentle, faithful, and dim” father (as Lowell refers to him in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” [Collected Prose, ]). Charlotte Lowell has been significantly replaced or preempted by the Winslow family—her brother and her father (who is the real father figure for young Cal)—and makes her only major appearances in one stanza in “Commander Lowell” and later as a corpse in “Sailing Home from Rapallo.” Her absence here, given her domineering presence in the prose memoir, indicates that Lowell is working (as I have mentioned previously) through metonymy, figuring things and people through stand-ins and replacements. For all of her



     () strong will, Charlotte Lowell requires personal attachments in her life, as we learn at the end of “For Sale,” the short poem describing what happens to the Beverly Farms house after her husband’s death. The poem has three five-line sentences, of which these are the last two: Empty, open, intimate, its town-house furniture had an on tiptoe air of waiting for the mover on the heels of the undertaker. Ready, afraid of living alone till eighty, Mother mooned in a window, as if she had stayed on a train one stop past her destination. () Both house and widow are in states of anticipation. The house and furniture have been humanized; the mother, having lost her original energetic fire, is now less than human. Reading the lines, we might naturally take “Ready, afraid” to continue to refer to inanimate objects; instead, Lowell tricks us by both changing the subject of his last sentence (although beginning both sentences with a set of adjectives) and thereby connecting it to the previous one. After almost half a century the brilliance of Life Studies still gleams in the details. I can vividly recall the pleasure I derived from the opening of “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” when the surly fiveyear-old Bobby refuses to go with his parents, preferring the company of his Winslow grandfather: “I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!” That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. . . . Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound. . . . Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather’s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. ()



  Wherein lay the appeal? “Water” and “watery” make an appealingly dreamy pair; “watery martini pipe dreams” gently connects two different images; the list of place names is arranged solely, but thrillingly, to achieve the rhythmic precision of a football cheer; adjectives are chosen for differing effects (“Diamond-pointed” for visual precision, “athirst” for human aspiration, and “Norman” for social exoticism). Above all, one registers the music (as well as the continued human application) of the last four lines, with their military imagery and plosive alliteration (“poplars,” “paraded,” “pine,” “paths,” “pioneering”) that overhaul human beings and their natural surroundings into partners in a common destiny. For a man famous for nearsightedness, Lowell either saw everything or compensated for myopia with aggressively imaginative perceptions. The sheer visual qualities of this poem and the others in the sequence; the constant but delicate insistence on animal imagery and similes; the use of appropriately ironic details; the off-handed rhyming and other sonic details, make other poets’ work pallid by comparison. There is grandeur even (or especially) in images of failure, e.g., the depiction of Great Aunt Sarah, “thundering on the keyboard of her dummy piano,” now “risen like the phoenix” as potential prey for tone-deaf Grandmother, who is herself “quick as a cricket” and greedily looking for a bridge partner: Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. () “Tilted . . . and jilted”: the movement from this literal nose-turning to Aunt Sarah’s failure of will on the day of her Symphony Hall recital makes for a mock-heroism that even Pope would envy. Personal and social disintegration have seldom seemed so automatic, so inevitable. Details such as this stand both in contrast to, and in support of, other semi-uplifting ones. The young Lowell, in formal short pants, fashions himself on the “Olympian / poise of my models” (already he has been trained as a classicist of sorts) “in the imperishable autumn / display windows” of a local boys’ store (). “Imperishable autumn” suggests his inheritance from the ironic stances of his teacher Allen Tate: I think of the wonderful paradox at the opening of “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in which dead leaves are called nature’s “casual sacrament / To the seasonal eternity of death.” At the same time, he is also “a stuffed toucan / with a bibulous, multicolored beak,” showing the gene pool in action—i.e., “bibulous” evokes his parents’ watery



     () martini pipe dreams, and the exotic bird, his grandfather’s manly, sensuous, and comfortable hunting-lodge surroundings. And all this even before the eponymous character makes his appearance in the poem’s last quarter. By the time he arrives at a picture of his uncle, Lowell has already set the scene—with other family members, décor, details of social class and history, and with himself—so it is appropriate that the depiction of Devereux closing his camp for the winter and escaping to Europe with his wife should come from the viewpoint of a child at once weak and strong, terrified and omniscient, modern and ancient: I cowered in terror. I wasn’t a child at all— unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero. . . . () His previous “Olympian / poise” has been replaced by a different classical image, and the change in gender also reminds us of the feminization Lowell felt as a boy at the Brimmer School (“ Revere Street”). His poem ends with a characterization of Devereux that both animates and deadens him. Line by line, through a rhetoric of anaphora (“He,” “His,” “His,” “His,” “He,” and so on), Devereux comes to life but only as a figure in a wax museum. He is already, partially, dead: He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle. He was animated, hierarchical, like a gingersnap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease. () Many of these details appear in the prose memoir, but Lowell has also made significant changes. Formerly it was Lowell himself who resembled Bayard. “Hierarchical,” with its overtones of social class, was previously “hieratic.” (“Solid cream” was there at the start.) The most brilliant image, the brittle “gingersnap man,” which recalls Lowell’s own “Olympian poise,” was added for the poem. Lowell the inveterate reviser literally resaw and reimagined as he edited and hammered his prose into verse.

X 

 

I

have concentrated on this poem not only because it introduces the most famous single section of Lowell’s complete works but also because it represents what Lowell did impressively and characteristically. The individual details that mount and mount, and that echo others ( just as members of a single family repeat and echo one another genetically and behaviorally) are hallmarks of the best parts of Life Studies, For the Union Dead (especially its great title poem), and Near the Ocean, regardless of other stylistic differences among the poems. As with any great artist, a change of style or method entails a change of vision (although which comes first is often a knotty problem to disentangle). But in some ways Lowell did not remain faithful to his achievements of the late fifties. Reading through the Collected Poems one comes upon two stumbling blocks, each of which constitutes a seeming interruption of forward movement. Lowell’s controversial  volume of “translations” (Imitations) is contemporaneous with his best poems, but it provoked great critical hostility as did, though for different reasons, the hundreds of pages of unrhymed “sonnets” that constitute the three volumes of History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin in the seventies. What interests me is the effect of reading these four volumes in the context of the whole oeuvre, and tracing within them the changes in Lowell’s imagination and the mustering of his various energies. Objections to the accuracy of the translations came from many fronts. Marjorie Perloff devotes several pages in her  The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell to an analysis of his version of Rimbaud’s “Mémoire,” concluding that he “destroys a carefully conceived imagistic design without replacing it with anything else” (). Ben Belitt, writing sympathetically of Lowell’s versions of Montale, laments incidental collapses and “fumbled opportunities,” but finds felicities as well as errors. He also remarks in an obiter dictum that translation “may serve the translator as a form of surrogate identity, as well as a labor of love” (London and Boyers, ), an assessment to which I shall return. Stephen Yenser, in what is still the best critical work about Lowell, attends less to translation per se than to the structure of the volume, calling the book an “autobiography of the spirit” (Yenser, ). Like Belitt, in other words, he realizes that Lowell is up to something in this book other than performing acts of homage and revision. The most hostile of all commentators, John Simon, carefully weaves a path through Lowell’s distortions, egregious mistakes, the violence he performs against his originals, and his troubling alternation between the overabstract and the overspecific. But what Simon says as criticism may be as helpfully true as it is (or at least seems to be) ungenerous: “I cannot escape the feeling that Lowell translates when he is unable to write anything of his own, not so much out of love for



     () the poem translated as out of love for the sound of his own poetic voice” (London and Boyers, –). The effect of reading the more than one hundred pages of Imitations in the midst of this almost one thousand-page volume is a liberating one, for reasons I have specified above. Lowell is remaking his identity, writing a chapter of his literary (if not his spiritual) autobiography, specifically by testing the sound of his poetic voice. Whatever his intentions, experiments with, or adaptations of syntax strike me as the most important result of Lowell’s translations. Stepping back to examine his earlier books, we notice that the sentences in Lord Weary’s Castle are long, sinuous, baroque, and hypotactic. By the time of History, the single line has come to predominate as a unit of sense and of meaning. In between, as at the end of “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” iteration through anaphora and amplification begins to develop the force of a hallucinated attachment to the subject. In Imitations Lowell convincingly oscillates between direct treatments and simple articulations on the one hand, and more elaborate weavings on the other. Translation allows him the power to be himself and not himself at the same time, to transform, or in some cases to confirm, his previous poetic practices. His versions (or willful transmutations) of foreign poems enable us to see his own freshness. Let me consider merely two examples. “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” Rilke’s stately, mysterious depiction of Orpheus’s failure to keep his eyes in front of him, would appeal naturally to Lowell’s feeling for metamorphosis and classical mythology, and his instinctual erotic imaginings. But where Rilke roots his picture in the natural world, with its connections to the human drama being played out, Lowell from the start politicizes the adventure. Even the punctuation in the German title—with periods as indications of firm separation—has been changed to suggest process and relationality. Rilke begins with a deliberate pun on “veins” (“Adern”), a word that suggests both blood and silver ore: Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk. Wie stille Silbererze gingen sie als Adern durch sein Dunkel. Zwischen Wurzeln entsprang das Blut, das fortgeht zu den Menschen, und schwer wie Porphyr sah es aus im Dunkel. Sonst war nichts Rotes. It was the souls’ strange mine. Like silent silver ore they wandered through its dark like veins. Between roots



  the blood welled up that issues forth to man, and it looked hard as porphyry in the dark. Nothing else was red. (trans. Edward Snow, ) Lowell’s less reliable version forgoes the easy pun (he has moved beyond the wordplay favored by his New Critical models in the forties) and takes substantial liberties with his original: That’s the strange regalia of souls. Vibrant as platinum filaments they went, like arteries through their darkness. From the holes of powder beetles, from the otter’s bed, from the oak king judging by the royal oak— blood like our own life-blood, sprang. Otherwise nothing was red. The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot. () We have moved out of the world of myth and into that of politics and judgment: “regalia,” “oak king,” and the entirely uncalled-for appearance of Caesar, as well as the eerie zoology of beetles and otters (a manifestation of Lowell’s perpetual interest in the animal kingdom) suggest willfulness. An equally important example of Lowell’s autonomy is his handling of syntactic and phrasal transformation. The single word vibrant constituting its own line reminds us of the games in “To Delmore Schwartz,” and the single-line stanza of Caesar’s foot is another sign that Lowell is eager, even anxious, to break the stanzas that had bound him in his poems of the forties and fifties. A final single detail confirms our sense of Lowell’s engagement in an imagined realm slightly different from that of Rilke’s Orpheus. The last stanza, after Orpheus has turned around, and Eurydice become root (“Wurzel”), depicts Hermes following her back to the underworld, retracing her earlier steps, this time “ohne Ungeduld,” without impatience. Lowell’s scene is not so much sad as charged with danger, and poised on the brink of something explosive. Orpheus . . . stood and stared at the one level, inevitable road, as the reproachful god of messengers looking round, pushed off again. His caduceus was like a shotgun on his shoulder. ()



     () Rilke’s god has a mournful (“trauervollem”) look, but Lowell’s is reproachful. There is no mention of the caduceus, let alone a gun, in the original. Lowell simply cannot evade his New England Calvinist background, or his own childhood attachment to instruments of power, to military detail. It is as though Hermes the messenger god has become one of the toy soldiers, or one of the “two hundred French generals” whom the young Lowell, “bristling and manic,” knew by name (“Commander Lowell” []). In other words, Lowell is liberated in some ways via another poet, but in others he takes the liberty of “Lowellizing” him, in the same way that Pope “Englished” The Iliad (“A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you mustn’t call it Homer”). Rilke’s transcendental Germanic mysticism provided one set of challenges to Lowell, whose responses may strike us as quirky and inappropriate. His translations of Eugenio Montale offer a different example of provocation and response. Lowell was clearly inspired by Montale’s terse, often gnomic lines, redolent of the hard, dusty Ligurian landscape from which he sprang. To someone who previously thought in terms of the stanza, or in richly subordinated sentences, Montale offered a model of a poet who tought in phrases and images, as Lowell would increasingly come to do. These particulars accumulate and extend, whether in a single sentence (one of Montale’s most famous lyrics, “L’anguilla” [“The Eel”], follows the geographical route of the fish from Baltic to Mediterranean in an accretion of participles) or in stanzas of limpid, vibrant imagery and direct address. Lowell is incapable of a simple maneuver; he heightens or brightens his original. Consider “The Magnolia’s Shadow,” a farewell to a lover. Montale begins delicately: L’ombra della magnolia giapponese si sfoltisce or che i bocci paonazzi sono caduti. Vibra intermittente in vetta una cicala. The shadow of the Japanese magnolia is thinning now that its royal-blue buds have fallen. At the top a lone cicada chirrs off and on. (trans. Jonathan Galassi, –) Lowell raises the stakes, adds a couple of animal images, and nervously exaggerates the air of autumnal abandonment and neglect: The shadow of the dwarf magnolia is a scarecrow now that the turkey-wattle blossoms are blown. Like something wired, the cicada vibrates at timed intervals. ()



  Even the cicada seems more like a menacing piece of mechanical equipment than a part of nature (the “timed intervals” of the cicada sound planned, as opposed to the more natural “vibra intermittente,” which captures the buzz of a single, haphazard insect). And consider still more animals, in Lowell’s version of “Se t’hanno assomigliato” (“If they have compared you . . .”), which enhances and deepens Montale’s elevating passion and the dangerous charm of his beloved. Montale says she has been compared to a fox because of her darting movements, or the gleaming wave (“onda luminosa”) of her almond eyes, or “for the sharpness of your quick amazement” (my translation), per lo strazio di piume lacerate che può dare la tua mano d’infante in una stretta; se t’hanno assomigliato a un carnivoro biondo, al genio perfido delle fratte (e perché non all’immondo pesce che dà la scossa, alla torpedine?) . . . for the havoc of shredded feathers your baby’s hand can wreak with a tug; if they’ve compared you to a blond carnivore, the faithless genius of the thicket (and why not to the foul fish that shocks, the stingray?) (Galassi, –) As usual, Lowell inflates erotic danger: . . . for the craft of your alert panic, for the annihilation of disheveled feathers in your child’s hand’s python’s hug; if they have likened you to the blond lioness, to the avaricious demon of the undergrowth (and why not to the filthy fish that electrocutes, the torpedo fish?) . . . () Lowell takes something originally hard and chisels it to make it harder. As he makes the Ligurian landscape brighter, so he makes the end of a love affair seem like something out of Wuthering Heights, all gnashing animal passion. Why not substitute “lioness” for “carnivore”? Why not turn human beings into their cousins a bit lower on the food chain?



     () Not all of the poems in Imitations make such spectacular leaps into perilous seas, of course; the translations of Pasternak especially seem to elicit gentler articulations from Lowell, and a syntax that carries over into the sparer, shorter-lined poems that open For the Union Dead (), his next volume. It required the cauldron of translation for Lowell to produce the more straightforward, dry, and colloquial “Water,” “The Old Flame,” “Middle Age,” “Fall ,” “Alfred Corning Clark,” and “Myopia: A Night” as well as the easier stanzaic arrangements of “Tenth Muse,” “Soft Wood,” and “Buenos Aires.” Lowell never lacked for clarity, but it seems that following the footsteps of others enabled him simultaneously to absorb and distill their lessons in “For the Union Dead,” composed while he was also working on the translations. He might have absorbed or taken crisp imagery and easy quatrains from multiple sources. Still, the most significant effect of his experiences as a translator, I think, was Lowell’s ability to distance himself from, and to take an objective view at, items in a surround. His attention to verbal objects in a foreign poem allowed him to increase his attention to himself in a great historical poem (“Form the Union Dead”) that dramatizes, as well as proposes, an archaeology of history and selfhood, a layering of details through time, and multiple viewpoints on politics, society, and human growth. In middle age Lowell began finding himself through others. Whereas in his first two books he looked primarily outward, and in Life Studies inward, now he moves inward and outward simultaneously. Subsequently, in Near the Ocean (), he came as close as he ever would to easy accessibility, reaching out to his audience as a result of having listened and responded to other poets in Imitations.

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ut then came Notebook (in two forms, both of which are excluded from this edition, for reasons of cost and weight), and its recasting as History. This, plus For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, will ( I predict) be judged most harshly by posterity for poetic, not for personal, reasons. The latter came thirty years ago in force from a chorus of outraged readers, most notably Adrienne Rich, who objected to the “bullshit eloquence,” the “aggrandized and merciless masculinity” and the “vindictive and mean-spirited” inclusion of private letters from Elizabeth Hardwick (Axelrod, ). Donald Hall, whom Lowell cites without naming in “Last Night” (History), referred in a review to “the seedy grandiloquence of Notebook ” (). Elizabeth Bishop also expressed reservations, privately wondering how much art is really worth. For at least one kind of artist—Faulkner is in the same family— everything is grist for the mill, and if a poet will not spare himself, why should he spare others? Diane Wakoski took a slightly longer view (which



  passing time, I suspect, will warrant), saying that these very personal poems constituted “a mythology with characters named Elizabeth and Harriet and Caroline in it” (Axelrod, ). Although poems are written, and read, individually, the force of History is a collective, convulsive, totalizing one that tends to obliterate the individual lyrics and, in fact, to overwhelm the reader. At least that seems the book’s intent; its reality is somewhat different. Calvin Bedient was right to suggest that both single poems and the volume as a whole marked an improvement over Notebook, but still constitute “the reworking of ‘rubble.’ Blocks are shifted or recut, but usually the poem is still random, not even a ruin” (Axelrod, ). Not only has Lowell (in Bedient’s words) “razed” and “destructured” the sonnet, but also, in spite of the epic heft or pretension of the whole, what the reader is left with is parts instead of wholes. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”? Perhaps. Many of the poems sound like private negotiations with history’s details, which require more annotation than the editors have provided. Lowell often seems to be writing in code, having moved beyond the clarity of his best poems from the sixties. What troubles most is the way Lowell’s experiments with sonnet form remake many poems into mere accumulations of single images, or single lines. Lowell had moved, during his career, through different kinds of stanzas, but here he seldom pays attention to the sonnet’s / or /// structure, with a volta after line  and /or a capitulating Shakespearean couplet. Seldom have I ever wished for more enjambment. It is as though Lowell has absorbed the model of Walt Whitman, an unlikely precursor—except with regard to ambition and ego—who often thinks and composes in terms of long individual lines, any one of which might grow into a poem, or story, of its own. Consider “Blizzard in Cambridge,” not one of the best poems in the volume (Helen Vendler has rightly singled out the two poems about the  March on the Pentagon as examples of Lowell at the top of his game), and not one of the more recondite ones, but typical of Lowell’s accumulative methods: Risen from the blindness of teaching to bright snow, everything mechanical stopped dead, taxis no-fares . . . the wheels grow hot from driving— ice-eyelashes, in my spring coat; the subway too jammed and late to stop for passengers; snow-trekking the mile from subway end to airport . . . to all-flights-canceled, fighting queues congealed to telephones out of order, stamping buses, rich, stranded New Yorkers staring with the wild, mild eyes of steers at the foreign subway—then the train home,



     () Jolting with stately grumbling: an hour in Providence, in New Haven . . . the Bible. In darkness seeing white arsenic numbers on the tail of a downed plane, the smokestacks of abandoned fieldguns burning skyward. () This is nervous, provisional poetry, and not merely because it rapidly jots down impressions of a man anxious to get home. You hear the occasional iambic pentameter line (, ) and other feints toward regularity (the second half of  and most of ), but the entire poem consists of random rhythms and single details telegraphically alerting us to the passage of time. Because both of the two “sentences” (one long, one short) lack a main verb the poem registers as an extended fragment, in which ellipses and other pauses (as well as the ongoing push of participles and noun phrases) suggest that the chain of items and images might be extended still further and has ceased only because of the sonnet’s procrustean demands. Still, much of Lowell’s characteristic brilliance shines through, phrase by phrase: one kind of “blindness” preparing the foggy teacher and his reader for another kind of physical occlusion and for “darkness” at the end; the insistent internal rhyme of “blindness,” “bright,” “driving,” “ice-eyelashes,” “mile,” “fights,” “fighting,” “wild, mild eyes,” “Bible,” ending in “white”; New Yorkers transformed to wondering beasts; modest self-irony and satire in “the blindness of teaching” and “jolting with stately grumbling”; the apocalyptic insinuations of the final two lines. Many of the poems in History are redeemed by individual images (e.g., George Eliot with “the profile of a white rhinoceros” []); or single stately, iambic lines (“the sickroom’s crimeless mortuary calm” [“Mother and Father ,” ]); or places where you know that Lowell is thinking of himself via his nominal subject (of the deists’ “Watchmaker God” he says: “He loved to tinker; / but having perfected what He had to do, / stood off shrouded in his loneliness” []). But hundreds of pages of such poems can tire the reader, and the flashes of imposed imagistic and epigrammatic brightness can lose their radiance. Over all, the reader has the feeling that Lowell has not so much revised the sonnet as appropriated it, wrung it out, and hung it up to dry. Reading The Dream Songs is a more various experience, if only because of Berryman / Henry’s antic energy and gleeful wit. ( In Day by Day Lowell writes an elegy for Berryman in which he acknowledges: “I discovered how we differ—humor ” []). Randomness cannot provide a basis for any personal narrative beyond diary jottings, let alone for a rendering of history itself. This is why, for all his tinkering with the poems in History, and for the frank confessions and self-analyses (in the subsequent two books) that accompany his more objective historical reflections, Lowell tires himself out after three hundred pages of sonnets.



  The second half of his last, eponymous poem in The Dolphin pays homage to Lady Caroline Blackwood, his third wife, and makes its own honest, not quite abject, confession of injuries and crimes for which he can ask neither forgiveness nor compassion. The first half develops an image of a composite poet (Lowell and Jean Racine) as a “man of craft” guided by a muse, or dolphin, who saves him from capture in a “hangman’s-knot of sinking lines.” Coming out of this delicate metaphor, the second part strikes us as all the more poignant: I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself— to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting— my eyes have seen what my hand did. () For once Lowell has neatly divided two parts of his artistic temperament— call them here the complex and the straightforward, or the historical and the personal—into two parts of the poem. The “wandering” of the first half gives way to the frank openness of the second. Bidart’s note is especially illuminating. He tells us that Lowell was thinking, in the last line (which he substituted for a more imagistic one: “Why should shark be eaten when the bait swims free?”), of a remark made by Hemminge and Condell, Shakespeare’s printers: “His eyes saw what his hand did.” But it turns out that “Lowell’s memory had invented the line” (). Hemminge and Condell had made a more commonplace observation about Shakespeare’s reluctance to revise: “His mind and hand went together.” Lowell’s mistake allows us to take the measure of his achievement. The simple diction, the rhetorical parallelism (“not avoiding . . . not avoiding”), the single concentrated image of the penultimate line—all lead to a confession that refers equally to events in life and to events in the retelling of life. If there is an eerie, slightly Old Testament quality to the revelation at the end, it comes appropriately with an extension or breaking of form. Line  of the sonnet, perfect tetrameter monosyllables, exudes relief and ease of articulation.

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ase and relief are the hallmarks of Lowell’s last book, whose publication preceded his death by less than a year. In the same way that Life Studies marked a change in technique from its two predecessors, Day



     () by Day announces its author’s liberation from the self-imposed shackles and what he called “the cramping and military beat” () of the sonnet, even his own irregular ones. Never has free verse, with its lines irregularly enjambed and its stanzas of random lengths, seemed so welcome. It signals more than the exhaustion of a poet who, like his version of Odysseus, has “grown bleak-boned with survival” (). And although he claimed that the volume lacks “public events,” Lowell could never avoid historical reference, and this largely personal diary gains added power by the delicacy of its enfolding of the private and the public in one last integrating gesture. It starts with Odysseus (“Ulysses and Circe”), an appropriate symbol of return, and throughout it makes darting mention of contemporary writers, Freud, Lincoln, Longfellow, Whitman and Hart Crane, Hitler and Munich, the abortion debate, Napoleon and William the Conqueror, the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, Cicero, and Vermeer. (It also contains one political allegory, “Ants,” whose title figures “invented the state before and after / Plato’s grim arithmetic,” and “crowned slavery with socialism” []). Lowell could never steer entirely clear of referentiality: it was his means of connecting himself to the external world and it was also the proof of his intensely acquisitive and absorbent intellect. But especially after History, which has, in Keats’s words, “a palpable design upon us,” the last poems seem lifted up rather than weighted down by their allusions. The most touching of them forego allusions entirely or else use them gently. Like Life Studies the bulk of the book focuses on Lowell, his family past and present, his marriages, his last hospital stays. They are poems about a tired man but they are not always tired poems. Aspiration more or less gives way to acceptance: Darling, terror in happiness may not cure the hungry future, the time when any illness is chronic, and the years of discretion are spent on complaint— until the wristwatch is taken from the wrist. (“The Withdrawal,” ) Touches of the old mania are projected outward, as when Lowell characterizes the returning Ulysses as a version of his manic self: . . . he circles as a shark circles visibly behind the window— flesh-proud, sore-eyed, scar-proud, a vocational killer in the machismo of senility,



  foretasting the apogee of mayhem— breaking water to destroy his wake. He is oversize. (“Ulysses and Circe,” ) “Risk was his métier”: the poet appropriately insists upon the past tense for his stand-in. Elsewhere he gives us pictures of senescent sexuality with a full understanding of its pathos, as in a portrait of Baron Philippe de Rothschild at table with a young girl who “cannot cure his hallucination / he can bribe or stare / any woman he wants into orgasm . . . // He fills her ear / with his old sexual gramophone. // Like belief, / he makes nothing happen” (“Ear of Corn,” –). Like belief ? Also like poetry in Auden’s elegy for Yeats. In “Death of a Critic,” Lowell, now realizing that he has become one of the “dull, disagreeable, and dying . . . old men” whom he used to scorn, recalls his “maiden reviews.” Like him they are now old and falling apart: “their stiff pages / chip like dry leaves / flying the tree that fed them” (–). It is so hard to tell exactly who is speaking this poem—an old critic, an old Lowell, or a combination—that I am tempted to think that Lowell changed his focus while writing it (manuscript evidence might be helpful here), finding himself in another person while losing control of his direction. Metaphor and metonymy work together: the characters are old, and the gestures and things that resemble and stand in for them—pages, poems, leaves of grass—are also old. Lowell has in fact returned to the originary elegiac trope of Western literature: Homer’s “as the leaves to the trees so are the generations of men.” Addressing his son Sheridan (as interested in toy soldiers as young Cal was in his own youth), he looks at a landscape: “Placed chestnut trees flower mid-cowfield, / even in harvest time, they swear, / ‘We always had leaves and ever shall’ ” (). Lowell is alert to the commonness of our destiny. We are all stand-ins for one another. In a touching elegy about (the unnamed) Auden, he announces their connections over and beneath their differences: “He was not my double, and haunts me” (). He tells the dead Berryman “really we had the same life, / the generic one / our generation offered” (). And in “Lives” he states simply: “My unhealthy generation— / their lives never stopped stopping” (). The new poems addressed to his parents at last forgive them; he realizes that he has become them. For a moment he even becomes his grandfather, in “Phillips House Revisited” (whose title echoes Yeats’s “The Muncipal Gallery Revisited”), when he returns to the scene of the old man’s death forty years before and recalls how “twice he was slipped / champagne and oysters / by a wild henna-dyed niece by marriage.” And he then confesses semi-ruefully: “I too am passed my half-bottle . . . / no oyster” (). One especially touching



     () detail seems to have been borrowed from his student Sylvia Plath’s most mordant and anthologized poem, “Daddy”: I’ve come a third time to live in your dour, luxurious Boston; I almost lifted the telephone to dial you, forgetting you have no dial. (“To Mother,” ) “The black telephone’s off at the root,” Plath announced more than a decade before. The old oppressors are unavailable, except within oneself. Lowell has outlived both his parents and those surrogate children, his students. The entire volume sparkles with incandescent individual details, as beautiful and poignant as the leaves above, or as brisk as the combination of “dour” and “luxurious.” Such details stand out as one part of Lowell’s new experimental poetics in this volume. Truth is an aesthetic effect created by form and tested by a reader’s responsiveness, and Day by Day marks both a change of pace and an epitome for its author. It has the appearance of spontaneity and questioning, but it also reminds us of where Lowell has come from, of what he has done with the same characters and themes and situations in the past. We have had clarity of image and piercing vision from him since Life Studies (whether used for irony or moral outrage or sympathy). Here he enfolds, or juxtaposes, such details into or against epigrammatic simplicity and oblique or unclear leaps in syntax, rhetoric, verb tenses, and associative connections. It is a poetics of acceptance and forgiveness, and also of questioning. (Compare the confident pronouncements in Lord Weary to the wonderment in Day by Day; count the question marks per page in each volume.) Precisely because Lowell revisits the terrain he has examined in his earlier work, we get the sense of history repeating itself—not first as tragedy and then as farce—but often in a diminished key. In “Grass Fires,” he announces that “we cannot recast the faulty drama” but segues, still in the present tense (an example of the obliquity I mention above), to a recollection of his setting a grassfire at his grandfather’s house that threatened the “inextinguishable roots” of a giant shade tree. Fire engines “were deployed with stage bravado,” he recalls, before he ends by juxtaposing post heroism with present smallness: yet it was I put out the fire, who slapped it to death with my scarred leather jacket. I snuffed out the inextinguishable root, I— really I can do little,



  as little now as then, about the infernal fires— I cannot blow out a match. (–) The naked ego—“I” occupying a line of its own—is powerless in the face of his religious destiny (surely one meaning of “infernal”) and his genetic one: “infernal” half-rhymes with “internal,” and “inextinguishable root” tacitly acknowledges an acceptance of the Winslow and Lowell family mantles, roots that cannot be “snuffed out.” (To “snuff out a root” sounds like a sloppy mixed metaphor but as an interesting figure of speech it neatly combines two different images of destruction.) A caustic wit often accompanies the pathos, as in the balanced rhetoric of a concluding quatrain: We feel the machine slipping from our hands, as if someone else were steering; if we see a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of the oncoming train. (“Since ,” ) Not just the image but also the rhythm of this pleases: I hear it as alternating four and three stresses, like an unrhymed ballad quatrain. Elsewhere Lowell can become even more condensed and witty: “If you keep cutting your losses, / you’ll have no loss to cut” (“In the Ward,” ). And gnomic: “Why does a man love a woman / more than women?” (“We Took Our Paradise,” ). And haiku-like: “This August is like a woman / who gets men without moving” (“Lives,” ). And fabular: “A man without a wife / is like a turtle without a shell” (Shadow,” ). Many of the poems have the quality of late-Matisse cutouts, or Picasso’s last childlike, exuberant distillations. The master knows how to do things with less effort now than at the start. The difference between Lowell and the older painters lies in his fatigue as opposed to their registry of joy. But like the painters he has not lost his eye: the sometimes flickering, sometimes extended descriptions of the external world prove that his sensitivity to life has increased as his own energies have waned. Consider “Milgate,” about Caroline Blackwood’s country house in Kent, in which aphoristic aperçus (“Age goes less noticed in humbler life”) are interwoven with ravishing descriptions of landscape in a mellow, almost Yeatsian nostalgia: Yearly, connubial swallows nest in the sky-flung gutter and stop its mouth. It is a natural life. Nettles subdue the fugitive violet’s bed,



     () a border of thistles hedges the drive; children dart like minnows. They dangle over the warm, reedy troutbrook. It’s a crime to get too little from too much. () Whereas Lowell thought in stanzas (in the early poetry), or in lines (in the sonnets), here he refreshingly thinks in sentences, some of which are simple and some more complicated. The easy enjambment of free verse draws us from line to line. Where do the swallows nest? In the gutter. Where do the children dangle? Over the brook. What’s a crime? To get too little from too much. Suspense coincides with acceptance as the poem details natural bounty and human frailty. At the end of his life, in response to a symposium sponsored by the quarterly Salmagundi, Lowell wrote a brief piece, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me” (published in ). Among several significant remarks, one stands out. Thinking of the “Contradictory, muddled, and troubled” state of contemporary art (e.g., of his own), he regards the “secular purgatory” of the current scene, one for which “there is no earthly paradise on the horizon.” He tacitly concedes that life is not a dress rehearsal. (“We are poor passing facts,” he says in the “Epilogue” to Day by Day [].) He then makes a list: “War, nuclear bombs, civil gangsterism, race, woman—the last has always, been the writer’s most unavoidable, though not only subject, one we are too seriously engaged in to be fair, or . . . salvationists” (). Awkward in syntax and parallelism, this sounds like a retrospective summary of Lowell’s career. If there is any simple, satisfying answer to the question that I posed at the start of this essay—How might lyric poetry accommodate itself to subjects drawn from public life?—it might come in this old, apparently random list, which moves from the awful and the apocalyptic, through the secular and societal, to the personal and erotic. Lowell grants his own involvement in his subjects (“the writer” and “we” are both clear stand-ins for “I”), especially the last one. He knows that objective judgment and redemption are equally impossible. Everything has a provisional rather than a providential cast. Like history, poetry happens (“our insoluble lives sometimes come clearer in writing,” he says in the following sentence) and then moves on, offering momentary illumination at best. During his career Lowell looked within and without, devising multiple designs for his articulations. His style, like his subjects, never stopped changing. Collected Poems expands and contracts like the human heart, alternating between closed and open forms, or tight and expansive ones. The poet’s history and his participation in history receive equivalent attention, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.



  But even this large book, like the supposedly closed rooms of the sonnet, has an open door through which writer and reader must finally make their exit. WORKS CITED Axelrod, Steven Gould. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, . Fenton, James. “The Return of Robert Lowell.” New York Review of Books, Aug. , , –. Halpern, Nick. Everyday and Prophetic. The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments. New York: Oxford University Press, . London, Michael, and Robert Boyers. Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time. New York: D. Lewis, . Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, . Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux . Montale, Eugenio. Collected Poems, –, trans. Jonathan Galassi, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux . Perloff, Marjorie G. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, . Rilke, Rainer Maria. New Poems, trans. Edward Snow. San Francisco: North Point Press, . Vendler, Helen. “The Hurt Soul” (rev. of Lowell, Collected Poems), New Republic, July , and Aug. , , –. Yenser, Stephen. Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Berkeley: University of California Press, .



NOTES

X

  . Ernest De Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years (–), nd ed., rev. Chester Shaver (Oxford, ), . . Ernest De Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years (Oxford, ), I, n. Future references will be to this edition and will be cited in the text. . Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., ), –, notes that: “While Tennyson is commonly accepted as the most Virgilian of nineteenth−century English poets, it is a less familiar fact that his nearest rival is the supposedly unbookish Wordsworth,” but mentions Wordsworth’s Aeneid only briefly (n). Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years (Oxford, ), –, mentions the translation only to date it. For a more specialized study of certain aspects of the Latin background of Wordsworth’s thought, see Jane Worthington, Wordsworth’s Reading of Roman Prose ( New Haven, ). The one writer who has commented judiciously on Virgil and Wordsworth is Kevin F. Doherty, S. J., “On Wordsworth’s Aeneid,” The Classical World,  (), –, to which I am indebted. One should consult as well his “The Vergilian Wordsworth,” CJ  (), –, for a general discussion of the Virgilian elements in “Laodamia.” . Cf., also, Bush’s comment about Dryden: “Dryden seems to be most adequate when Virgil is on his middle level, in narrative of action and in many passages of elevated rhetoric,” . The letters to Lord Lonsdale, as they



   –

. . . . .

.

. .

appear in the De Selincourt edition, are misdated, as the editor later recognized. For proper dating, see Moorman, n, or Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, eds., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, nd ed. (Oxford, ), IV, –. James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, ), III, . Future references will be to this edition and will be cited in the test. All quotations are from Loeb Classical Library Aeneid, rev. ed., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., ). All quotations are from De Selincourt and Darbishire, Poetical Works, IV. E. M. Tillyard, The English Epic and its Background (New York, ), . One could also cite Creusa’s speech at the end of Book II, or Andromache’s in Book III, for the sense of exile and sadness, and a willing submission to necessity. Christopher Pitt, The Aeneid of Virgil (London, ), is cited by Wordsworth as an influence on his translation (he copies Pitt’s opening couplet, among others), but Pitt, like Dryden, omits the lacrimae rerum ( I.–). E. L. Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, ), V, –. Ernest De Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years (Oxford, ), I, . Doherty, “On Wordsworth’s Aeneid,” , estimates the enjambment in Wordsworth to be /; in Dryden, /; and in Pope, negligible. In Pitt’s translation, it is approximately /. Moreover, Wordsworth seems generally more concise than Dryden, as the following chart makes clear: Virgil Book I Book II Book III

 ll.  ll.  ll.

Wordsworth    ( ll. missing)

Dryden   

. Wordsworth certainly might have been embarrassed by the tale for poetic reasons; the end, especially, shows the worst excesses of sentimental narrative. But what remains in the  Prelude is fragmented, teasing, and ultimately incomprehensible. . Bush, . . Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth ( London, ), III, . . For various classical influences on Laodamia, see, especially, Doherty, “The Vergilian Wordsworth.” . Pitt’s version is more vivid than Wordsworth’s, and his last line is particularly good: She said, and turning round, her Neck she show’d, That with celestial Charms divinely glow’d. Her waving Locks immortal Odours shed,



   – And breath’d ambrosial Scents around her Head. Her sweeping Robe trail’d pompous as she trod, And her majestic Port confess’d the God. ( Lines –) . Moorman, .

  . Although he might reject the title, Bloom is probably the most important “comparatist” in America. See, especially, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry ( New York, ), A Map of Misreading ( New York, ), and Kabbalah and Criticism ( New York,). Two exemplary works of comparative “tropic” analysis are Thomas M. Greene, The Descent From Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity, ( New Haven, ) and John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After ( Berkeley, ). . Harry Levin, Grounds for Comparison (Cambridge, Mass., ), . . George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge, Mass., ), ; Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World ( New York, ), , . . It is common to think of Wordsworth as a Stoic, not an Epicurean. See Jane Worthington Smyser, Wordsworth’s Reading of Roman Prose ( New Haven, ), esp. Chap. iii, “Wordsworth and Roman Stoicism.” . Phillip De Lacy, “Process and Value: An Epicurean Dilemma,” TAPA  (), ; G. M. Harvey, “The Design of Wordsworth’s Sonnets,” Ariel  (), . . Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination ( New York, ),  and . . De Rerum Natura I.–. All references are to the edition of Cyril Bailey (Oxford, ), hereafter cited in the text as DRN. I have modified Bailey’s translations or else paraphrased them in my argument. . All quotations from Wordsworth are from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, nd ed.,  vols., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, –), hereafter cited in the text as PW; and The Prelude, nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, ), cited in the text as P. I have used the  version of The Prelude. A similar image of a philosopher’s journey through the infinite universe occurs, mutatis mutandis, in the famous description of the statue of Newton as “The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (P III.– ). A comparison is usually made between these lines and those of James Thomson’s “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton”: “The noiseless tide of time, all bearing down / To vast eternity’s unbounded sea, / Where the green islands of the happy shine, / He stemmed alone.” I wonder, however, to what extent Wordsworth was familiar with the distinctly



   –

.

. .

.

.



Lucretian ring of Gray’s homage to Milton in “The Progress of Poesy”: “. . . he rode sublime / Upon the seraph−wings of extasy, / The secrets of th’abyss to spy. / He pass’d the flaming bounds of place and time.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk ( July , ), in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., ), ; and Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, ), II, . See, also, Coleridge’s letter to Wordsworth after the publication of The Excursion ( May , ), in which he claims that “whatever in Lucretius is Poetry is not philosophical, whatever is philosophical is not Poetry: and in the very Pride of confident Hope I looked forward to the Recluse, as the first and only true Phil. Poem in existence. Of course, I expected the Colors, Music, imaginative Life, and Passion of Poetry; but the matter and arrangement of Philosophy—not doubting from the advantages of the Subject that the Totality of a System was not only capable of being harmonized with, but even calculated to aid, the unity ( Beginning, Middle, and End) of a Poem,” in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, IV (Oxford, ), . Coleridge was disappointed in his hope. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, ), Pt. I, , hereafter cited in the text as LY. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart ( London, ), III,  and ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Engilsh Traits ( Boston, ), . Critics of both poets routinely hear “two voices” or see “two roads” in each. See, e.g., William S. Anderson, “Discontinuity in Lucretian Symbolism,” TAPA  (), –; Charles Rowan Beye, “Lucretius and Progress,” CJ  (), –; and Elizabeth M. McLeod, “Lucretius’ Carmen Dignum,” CJ  (), –. For the “rhythm” and “voices” in Wordsworth, see esp. David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality ( Middletown, Conn., ), ; Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude (Princeton, N.J., ), esp. –; and Newton Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought ( Bloomington, Ind., ), . Sexual passion frequently brings tragedy in Wordsworth’s poems: e.g., Ruth, Martha Ray, Laodamia, Vaudracour, hapless Ellen in The Excursion VII. Even Wordsworth’s refusal to continue his  translation of the Aeneid owes something to his inability to sympathize with Dido’s passion; see Willard Spiegelman, “Wordsworth’s Aeneid,” CL  (), –. The image of an “asexual” Wordsworth has been current since Shelley’s “Peter Bell the Third”; Coleridge, for whatever reasons (personal jealously, his painful alienation from Wordsworth), wrote to Henry Crabb Robinson in  that “Wordsworth is by nature incapable of being in Love, tho’ no man more tenderly attached” ( Letters, III, ). The least hostile modern critics to consider the absence of sexual passion in Wordsworth are F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry ( London, ),–, and Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self ( New York, ),

   –

. .

.

. .

. .

.

. .

. . .

: Wordsworth’s genius depends “upon the suppression not only of the sexual emotions but also of the qualities that are associated with sexuality: high heartedness, wit, creative innovation, will.” The recent discovery and publication of a series of love letters between William and Mary Wordsworth proves that, in his life if not in his poetry, such tender feeling and self−assertiveness played a positive part; see The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, N.Y., ). II.–; also, I.–, III.–, VI.–. Wordsworth’s epistemology is deeply connected to his feeling for retirement. See Grosart, III, , where he talks of the dangers of comfort and worldliness to scientists: “If Bacon had dwelt only in the court of Nature and cared less for that of James the First, he would have been a greater man, and a happier one too.” For Wordsworth’s scientific education, see Ben Ross Schneider Jr., Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education (Cambridge, ), –. The importance of clinamen in recent literary theory, especially the work of Harold Bloom, need not be discussed here. For the Epicurean relation of atomic swerve to human free will, see Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford, ), –. Bailey, . For Lucretius’s proof of free will, see DRN IV.–: he cannot accept a universe based exclusively on nonhuman causality. Lucretius, too, alternates between moods of expansiveness and limitation; in VI.–, e.g., he praises Epicurus for pointing us to the straight and narrow path: “viam monstravit, tramite parvo / qua possemus ad id recto contendere cursu.” Phillip Damon,“Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse,”University of California Publications in Classical Philology,  (–), –. With its satyrs, nymphs, echo and Pan, The Excursion IV.– corresponds neatly to Lucretius, IV.–, on echoes, and shows that perhaps Wordsworth had it in mind. For another Lucretian sentiment, referring in part to Tantalus, see the Solitary’s remark about ancient myth in VI.: “Fictions in form, but in their substance truths.” The notion of “unanxious” influence has been proposed by James Rieger, “Wordsworth Unalarm’d,” in Joseph Wittreich, ed., Milton and the Line of Vision ( Madison, Wis., ), –. Hugh Sykes Davies, “Notes on Lucretius,” The Criterion,  (–), –. See David West, The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Edinburgh, ), : “Lucretius was an inveterate anthropomorphizer, writing about the phenomena of nature in living human terms.” Natural Supernaturalism ( New York, ), –. This is the general thesis of Richard Minadeo, The Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura ( Detroit, Mich., ). Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry ( London, ), –.



   – . The best discussion of “things” in Wordsworth is E. D. Hirsch Jr., Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism ( New Haven, ), –. . Anne Amory, “Obscura de re lucida carmina: Science and Poetry in De Rerum Natura,” Yale Classical Studies  (), . . For important analyses of Lucretius’s style, see W. S. Maguiness, “The Language of Lucretius,” in D. R. Dudley, ed., Lucretius ( London and New York, ), –; E. J. Kenney, Lucretius (Oxford, ), –; on repetition, Bailey (ed.), –; on the difficulty of writing in verse of prosaic matters, see Beye, . . David West, “Lucretius’ Methods of Argument,” ClassQ, NS  (), –. . Christopher Ricks, “The Twentieth−Century Wordsworth,” in Twentieth−Century Literature in Retrospect, ed. Reuben A. Brower, Harvard English Studies  (Cambridge, Mass., ), –. . John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London, ), ; see also Michael G. Cooke, Acts of Inclusion ( New Haven, ), –, on “The Mode of Argument in Wordsworth’s Poetry.” Cooke follows what he labels “the logical undervoice.” . Cf. Josephine Miles, “the normal structure of statement for Wordsworth [is] the interconnection of particular declarative statement and of phrasal and clausal series with a framing general declaration or exclamation” (Eras and Modes in English Poetry [Berkeley, ], ). . On repetition and tautology as significant forms of expression, see Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter−Spirit ( New Haven, ), –. . The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford, ), Pt. I, . . E. E. Sikes, Lucretius, Poet and Philosopher (Cambridge, ), . Sikes translates excerpts from Wordsworth and Arnold. . Paul Turner, “Shelley and Lucretius,” RES, NS  (), –. . T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood ( London, ), . Eliot is writing of Lucretius, but his judgment applies to Wordsworth as well.

  . Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence ( New York: Oxford University Press, ), begins his major theoretical investigations with a denial: “The profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source−study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images” (). For Bloom, in all his work of the past decade, influence means misprision, struggle, and misrepresentation. Such, I hope to show, is not always the case. For another recent discussion of literary “echoing,” see John Hollander, The Figure of



   –

.

.

. .

. .

. .

Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After ( Berkeley: University of California Press, ), which helpfully distinguishes among quotation, allusion, and echo. Miriam Allott, ed., The Poems of John Keats ( London: Longman, ), –, summarizes the major ideas concerning the poem’s composition, including Charles Brown’s letter, now thought to be a mistaken reminiscence, about Keats’s easy morning’s work. Additionally, Robert Gittings, in John Keats: The Living Year (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, ), says Keats began to draft the ode on April , and cites his May  remark, in a journal letter to the George Keatses, that “the violets are not withered before the peeping of the first rose” (). See also M. R. Ridley, Keats’ Craftsmanship (Oxford: Clarendon, ), –. (–). All Quotations from Keats’s poetry are taken from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, ); those from the letters are taken from The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins,  vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). The Essays of Francis Bacon, ed. Mary Augusta Scott ( New York: Scribners, ), –. A. E. Housman, Complete Poems ( New York: Holt, ), . The hawthorn, too, bears symbolic weight: “Hawthorn was supernaturally powerful at all times and against a wide range of evil, not merely against the malice of fairy and witch,” and it can never be safely disturbed: see Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora ( London: Hart−Davis, MacGibbon, ), –. Christopher Ricks (Keats and Embarrassment [Oxford: Clarendon, ], –) has the fullest treatment of “conception” in Keats. Annabel M. Patterson, in “‘How to load and bend’: Syntax and Interpretation in Keats’s To Autumn,” PMLA  (): –, refers to this fact, but does not consider its thematic importance in the poem. Helen Vendler, “The Experiential Beginnings of Keats’s Odes,” SiR  (): –. E.g., Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode ( New Haven: Yale University Press, ), : “The nightingale is a prophet by example, bearing witness to summer in ‘mid−May,’ as does the poet”; Miriam Allott, John Keats ( London: Longman, ), –: “the celebrated stanza imagining the woods in an early summer night transmutes with familiar Keatsian alchemy passages about summer sweetness”; see also Eamon Grennan (“Keats’s Contemptus Mundi: A Shakespearian Influence on the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’” MLQ  []: –) who understands the temporal confusions in the stanza but not their source; and Joseph Candido (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: A Further Instance of Keats’s Indebtedness,” AN&Q  []: –) who sees the source but not the richness of meaning.



   – . Edmund Blunden, “Keats and His Predecessors: A Note on the Ode to a Nightingale,” The London Mercury  (), . . Fry, The Poet’s Calling, . . All references are to the Penguin edition, ed. Madeleine Doran ( Baltimore, ). . See Grennan; also, Barry Gradman, “Measure for Measure and Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ Ode,” ELN  (): –; and Gradman, “King Lear and the Image of Ruth in Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ Ode,” K−SJ  (): –. R. S. White, in “Shakespearean Music in Keats’s ‘Ode to a ‘Nightingale,’ ”English  (): –, compiles a list of echoes in the poem from eleven of Shakespeare’s plays but stops short of analyzing their significance. . White makes this suggestion, and lists as well the two other Shakespearian uses of “darkling” (King Lear I.iv.; Antony and Cleopatra IV.xv.–) as possible influences on Keats. The erotic significance of the lines in Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, especially, corresponds nicely to the ode’s speaker’s invocation of both nightingale and death. John Hollander () puts Keats’s line within the tradition of poets and birds (Paradise Lost III.–; Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”) but, in dealing exclusively with the motif of the song—sung or heard—in darkness, ignores that of the abandoned and longing lover. . The notion of unanxious influence has been proposed by James Rieger, “Wordsworth Unalarm’d,” in Joseph Wittreich, ed., Milton and the Line of Vision ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. Depending, however, on the degree of disappointment one hears in the speaker’s confusion at the end of the poem, one might well consider the transformations of Shakespeare in the ode as evidence of literary anxiety. . Horace Howard Furness, ed., A Midsommer Nights Dreame ( Philadelphia: Lippincott, ), v; evidently, Shakespeare’s playful handling of daily, as well as seasonal, time, results in Furness’ worried attempt “to discover any semblance of probability in the structure of a drama where to four days there is only one night” (xxviii). . C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . The famous Peter Brook production of the play demonstrated how close dreaming is to nightmare, how dangerous, in fact, are the games of midsummer. . Caroline Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . One should notice, in addition, Werner W. Beyer’s Keats and the Daemon King (New York: Oxford University Press, ),  and passim, for Keats’s knowledge of the Oberon and Titania figures in Wieland’s Oberon. . Quoted in David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. . Barber, . . William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy Plays, in Complete Works, ed. e P. P. Howe ( London: J. M. Dent, ), :–.



   – . Although Gradman, “King Lear and the Image of Ruth,” takes “emperor and clown” as a reference to Lear, the phrase could just as easily have occurred to Keats in regard to Theseus, Bottom, and the fairies at the end of A midsummer Night’s Dream.

  . See Hans Keller, “Peter Grimes,” in Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller, eds. Benjamin Britten ( New York: Philosophical Library, ); and Michael Kennedy, Britten ( London: Dent, ). . E. M. Forster, “George Crabbe and Peter Grimes,” in Two Cheers for Democracy ( London: Edward Arnold, ) , calls Britten’s Peter “the misunderstood Byronic hero”; Eric Walker White, Benjamin Britten: His Life and Operas ( Berkeley: U of California P, ) , calls him “a Borough Byron, too proud and self−willed to come to terms with society, and yet sufficiently imaginative to be fully conscious of his loss”; Philip Brett, ed. Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ) , extends the usual distinction “between the poet’s harsh ‘eighteenth−century’ realism and the composer’s Byronic figure. Crabbe’s Peter is an embodiment of the dark side of an uncaring and morally enfeebled society, whereas Britten’s is the victim of that society and a symbol of its oppression.” . George Crabbe, Works ( London: John Murray, ) II: xvii. References to Crabbe are taken from this edition. . Peter New, George Crabbe’s Poetry ( New York: St. Martin’s, ) . . Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (New York: Knickerbocker, ) II: . . In George Crabbe, An Anthology ( New York: Farrar; Octagon, ) xxx. . Patrick Cruttwell, “The Last Anglican,” Hudson Review  (): –. . New . . Forster  and . . Stephen . . In Arthur Pollard, ed. Crabbe: The Critical Heritage ( London: Routledge, ) –. . Don Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ). . Forster . . Peter Grimes ( London: Boosey & Hawkes, ; rev. ). There are four versions of the text, with minimal differences among them. I have quoted from the standard source. It is important to recognize that Montagu Slater, Britten’s librettist, has said that the idea for the character as well as the story came from Britten himself (in White ). . Quoted by White . . See Kennedy passim; White –; Arthur Oldham, “Peter Grimes,” in Mitchell and Keller –.



   – . Quoted in M. Schafer, British Composers in Interview ( London: Faber, ) . . In Mitchell and Keller . . This is the thrust of the provocative analysis of Philip Brett, “Britten and Grimes,” originally printed in Musical Times ,  ( December ): –. . In Mitchell and Keller . . See, especially, Kennedy, and Alan Kendall, Benjamin Britten ( London: Macmillan, ) passim, for Britten’s place in his community. . White . . White . . In Mitchell and Keller . . In David Herbert, ed. The Operas of Benjamin Britten ( New York: Columbia UP, ), “Staging First Productions,” . . Patricia Howard, The Operas of Benjamin Britten ( New York: Praeger, ), . Philip Brett significantly edits this evaluation when he refers to “Patricia Howard’s prim little sentence, ‘his is not a character with whom we can admit to identifying ourselves’” (). . These musical conciliations are discussed by Kennedy, . Additional excellent technical analysis may be found in Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).

  . Throughout this essay, I use “Auden” as shorthand for the poetic achievement, in the libretti, of Auden and Kallman. Alan Ansen has done a breakdown of the work on The Rake; nothing similar has been done for the Mozart operas. . See my article, “The Rake’s Progress: An Operatic Version of Pastoral,” Southwest Review  (): –.

  . Howard Nemerov, “The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop,” Poetry  ( December ): ; Donald Sheehan, “The Silver Sensibility: Five Recent Books of American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature  (): . . M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Romantic Nature Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom ( New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. One should consult as well Earl Wasserman, “The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge,” in Studies in Romanticism  (), –, for the single most cogent description of Romantic epistemological schemes in Wordsworth and Coleridge; and Donald Wesling, “The Inevitable Ear: Freedom and



   –

.

. .

. .

. . . .

.

.

.

.

. .

Necessity in Lyric Form, Wordsworth and After,” ELH  (); –, esp. : “Romantic and post−Imagist poets . . . required a causality which would prefigure in all its transitions the effect which was the poem. The need to convert a series of perceptions into a continuous poem, and to interrelate part and whole, description and discourse, obliged them entirely to rethink the question of poetic structure.” David Kalstone, “Conjuring with Nature: Some Twentieth Century Readings of Pastoral,” Harvard English Studies , ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . All references are to The Complete Poems ( New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ). Christopher Ricks, “The Twentieth Century Wordsworth,” Harvard English Studies , ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. Abrams, “Structure and Style,” . See David Kalstone, “All Eye” (review of The Complete Poems), Partisan Review  (): : “There are in her poems no final visions—only the saving, continuing precise pursuits of the travelling eye.” See the recent book by Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ). “The Moose,” The New Yorker,  July , . “In the Waiting Room,” The New Yorker, July , , . Jan B. Gordon, “Days and Distances: The Cartographic Imagination of Elizabeth Bishop,” Salmagundi, – (): ; Anthony Alvarez, “Imagism and Poetesses,” Kenyon Review  (): . All quotations are from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, ). The poems cited are “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “Of Modern Poetry,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Plain Sense of Things.” See Frederick A. Pottle, “The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth,” Yale Review  (): –, esp. : “Looking steadily at a subject, then, for Wordsworth means grasping objects firmly and accurately in the mode of common perception and then looking at them imaginatively.” Cf. “The Imaginary Iceberg,” “At the Fishhouses,” and especially “Cape Breton,” in all of which only what is on the surface or the perimeter can be known or experienced. The interior is generally, for Bishop, a heart of darkness. In “Crusoe in England,” The New Yorker, Nov. , , , Bishop playfully refers to the Daffodills poem; Crusoe, having returned to his homeland, discusses all that he had forgotten on his island: “ . . . I tried /reciting to my iris−beds, / ‘They flash upon that inward eye, / which is the bliss . . .’The bliss of what / One of the first things I did /when I got back home was look it up.” See Geoff rey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry – ( New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. “Poem,” The New Yorker, Nov. , , .



   –   . Howard Nemerov, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” in Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics ( New Brunswick, ), –. . Robert Boyers, “To Confront Nullity: The Poetry of Ben Belitt,” The Sewanee Review  (): –. . “Toward an Impure Poetry,” in Ben Belitt, ed. and trans., Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda ( New York, ), . . Belitt has said that “the formalization of poetry in English is supposedly hostile to certain practices—the anapest for instance—which come very naturally to the Romance language poet,” in Joan Hutton, “An Interview with Ben Belitt” Midway  no.  ( Winter ): . . In a letter to the author, Belitt remarked: “Nothing is really ‘descriptive’; everything is a ‘doubling’” in his poetry. . Joan Hutton Landis, “A ‘Wild Severity’: Towards a Reading of Ben Belitt,” in Robert Boyers, ed., Contemporary Poetry in America ( New York, ), . . All quotations from Belitt’s poetry are taken from either Nowhere, but Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) or The Enemy Joy (Chicago: University of Chicago press, ) which includes most of the earlier poems from Wilderness Stair ( New York: Grove, ) and The Five−Fold Mesh ( New York: Knopf, ). . Belitt’s sensibility is Heraclitean. In “Winter Pond: Lake Paran,” part of “The Great Cold” in Nowhere but Light, the speaker confronts a frozen lake of “midsummer dazzle” which momentarily gives the illusion of a “Heraclitean swimmer” who might “dissolve into light.” The compulsive “doublings” in Belitt’s poetry, a subject by themselves, are most brilliantly displayed in the recent “Xerox” (The New Yorker, March , , ), and the as yet unpublished “Block Island” sequence which develops elaborate parallels between views of the island and the various characters and themes from The Tempest. . Hutton, “An Interview with Ben Belitt,” . . The ferry in “Block Island Crossing” (in Nowhere but Light) lacks the loco−bird’s elegance, but has the same dogged and tentative tenaciousness in reaching its object: Somehow, in the drenched displacement, a boat no bigger than a haddock asserts its ungainly will to cross, with its gimrack universe intact, endures its self−effacement and its loss and heaves a hawser to the opposite landing. . Ben Belitt, “In Search of the American Scene,” in Howard Nemerov, ed., Poets on Poetry ( New York, ), . . Ibid., .



   –   . Louise Glück, “Education of the Poet,” Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry ( New York: Ecco, , ). . Glück, “Invitation and Exclusion,” . . Glück, “Education,” .

  . The following were winners of the National Book Award: Philip Levine, What Work Is; Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems; A. R. Ammons, Garbage; James Tate, Worshipful Company of Fletchers; Stanley Kunitz, Passing Through; Hayden Carruth, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey; William Meredith, Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems; Gerald Stern, This Time; and Ai, Vice: New and Selected Poems. And for the National Book Critics Circle Award: Rodney Jones, Transparent Gestures; Amy Gerstler, Bitter Angel; Albert Goldbarth, Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology; Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems, –; Mark Doty, My Alexandria; Mark Rudman, Rider; William Matthews, Time and Money; Robert Hass, Sun Under Wood; Charles Wright, Black Zodiac; and Marie Ponsot, The Bird Catcher. One notices that Wright was the only double prizewinner (for the same volume), and that Levine and Tate won other prizes during the same decade. . See Mona Van Duyn, “Leda,” in To See, to Take: “She married a smaller man with a beaky nose, / and melted away into the storm of everyday life” (). . See The New York Times Book Review, Apr. , ,  +. . For a discussion of the different styles of singing and saying, see Wyatt Prunty’s “Fallen from the Symboled World”: Precedents for the New Formalism –. Prunty makes a useful but too easy dichotomy: “Two types of contemporary poetry stand as opposites—plain−spoken poems that are reticent about their intensity and lyrical poems that are both compulsive and musical” (). His ground does not accommodate new musical structures or tonalities. . Robert von Hallberg discusses the “suburban” nature of much postwar American poetry (–).

  . James Longenbach, “Jorie Graham’s Big Hunger” in Thomas Gardner, ed., Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. This valuable new volume contains both previously published reviews and essays and also new ones, which treat the whole of Graham’s career thus far.



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INDEX

X

Abrams, M. H., ,  Achilles,  Adam, , ,  address naming and,  –  poetic,  Aeneas, , , , , , , , , ,  final piece of wisdom from,  forging of shield,  pietas and,  speech of encouragement,  The Aeneid (Virgil), , , , , ,  civic disharmony in,  lessons taught in,  music’s role in,  Wordsworth, William, and, – African Americans, soldiers, ,  “After Dark Vapours” (Keats),  “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me” (Lowell,),  “Afterwards” (Graham),  “Against Flight” (Dove),  alexandrines, , 

alliteration,  All Of Us Here (Feldman),  “All Souls” (Dove),  Alturas de Macchu Picchu (Neruda), – American Smooth (Dove), , , ,  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,  Ammons, A. R., , , , , , – banality and,  as down-to-earth,  poet of the body and,  Amory, Anne,  “Ancient Text” (Glück), –  Anchises, , ,  “The Anniversaries” ( Justice),  “Annunciation to Joseph” (Belitt),  Antoinette, Marie,  Ararat (Glück), ,  Aristotle,  Arnold, Matthew, ,  “Arrival at Santos” (Bishop), 



 Ashbery, John, , , , , , , , , , , – banality and,  opacity, surprise and,  – Aspects of the Novel (Forster),  assonance,  “At the Young Composers’ Concert” ( Justice),  “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop), – , , , – “Aubade” (Glück),  Auden, W. H., , , , , , ,  as librettist,  – love for opera and, –  translations of Mozart’s operas by,  –  Augustine. See St. Augustine Augustus, ,  Aurelius, Marcus,  Bacon, Francis,  Bailey, William,  Balanchine, George,  Balzac, Honoré de,  Barber, C. L.,  “Bards of Passion” (Keats),  Bate, W. J., ,  “Battery Park: High Noon” (Belitt), – “Battle-Piece” (Belitt),  Baudelaire, Charles, , ,  Bayley, John,  “Beautiful False Things” (Feldman),  Beautiful False Things (Feldman),  and passim. de Beauvoir, Simone,  Beckett, Samuel,  Bedient, Calvin,  Belitt, Ben,  accumulation of things and,  biblical cadences and,  hardness and, –, , 



language of,  nature and, – poem form of,  poetry of, – “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Keats),  Bellini, Vincenzo,  “Benign Obscurity” ( Justice),  Benjamin, Walter, ,  Bennett, Joseph,  Bentley, Richard,  Berryman, John, , ,  Bialostosky, Don,  biblical cadences,  Bidart, Frank, , ,  “The Bight” (Bishop), ,  Bintner, Marie, , , ,  “Birthday” (Glück),  Bishop, Elizabeth, , , , , , , , , ,  blurring of visual boundaries and,  landscape, knowledge and poetry of, – nature and, –, , – repetition and,  separateness and,  surveying of details and,  Blackmur, R. P., ,  Blackwood, Caroline, , ,  Black Zodiac (Wright), – Blake, William, , ,  “Blizzard in Cambridge” (Lowell), – Blizzard of One (Strand), – “The Block” (Van Duyn),  “Block Island: After The Tempest ” (Belitt),  “Block Island Crossing” (Belitt),  Bloom, Harold, , , , ,  on comparative literature, – Bloom, Molly,  Blunden, Edmund,  Bly, Robert, , 

 “Bolero” (Dove),  The Borough (Crabbe), ,  Bosh and Flapdoodle (Ammons), – Bottom, ,  Boyers, Robert,  “Brazil, January , ” (Bishop), – Brett, Philip, ,  “Bright Day in Boston” (Lowell),  Britten, Benjamin, , , , , , ,  Brooks, Cleanth,  Brown, Charles,  “Brutto Tempo: Bellagio” (Belitt),  bulls, in the Aeneid,  – “the burden of the past,”  “Bus Stop” ( Justice),  Byron, George Gordon (Lord),  Caesar, ,  Calvert, Raisley,  The Cantos (Pound),  “Captivity” (Mueller),  Cassandra, ,  Catullus, , , ,  “Celebrated Jumping Frog” (Belitt),  “Celestial Music” (Glück),  Ceres, ,  “Charwoman:  Vesey Street” (Belitt, ) Chaucer, Geoff rey,  Chekhov, Anton, ,  “Christmas East of the Blue Ridge” (Wright),  Churchill, Winston,  Cicero, ,  Clampitt, Amy, , , , , , , , ,  Clark, Blair,  Clark, Kenneth (Sir),  “The Cold” (Belitt), ,  Cole, Nat King, 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, , , , , , , , , , ,  Collected Poems ( Justice), ,  Collected Poems (Lowell), ,  Colwin, Laurie,  “Coma Berenices” (Ashbery),  comparative literature, – The Complete Poems (Bishop), ,  “The Complex Mechanism of the Break” (Graham), – conceptual words,  “Condemned Site” (Van Duyn),  Conington, John,  Connaroe, Joel,  Corn, Alfred,  Cornell, Joseph,  “Counting at Dusk (Why Poetry Matters When the Century Ends),”  “Couplets Concerning Time” ( Justice),  “Court of the Lions: Alhambra” (Belitt), ,  “Covenant” (Graham),  Crabbe, George, , , , , , ,  Crane, Hart, , , , , , ,  “Credences of Summer” (Stevens),  – Creeley, Robert, , ,  “Cricket Hill: Vermont” (Belitt), , ,  Crozier, Eric,  Cruttwell, Patrick,  Cyclops, , , ,  forging of shields, – dactyls,  Daedalus,  Damon, Phillip,  “Dance Lessons of the Thirties” ( Justice), 



 dance, poetry and,  –  DanteAlighieri, ,, , , , , ,  Da Ponte, Lorenzo, ,  Dark Harbor (Strand),  Darwin, Charles,  Davie, Donald,  Davies, Hugh Sykes,  “Dawn Day One” (Graham),  – Day by Day (Lowell), , , – “The Death of a Critic” (Lowell),  De Carlo, Yvonne,  De Chirico, Giorgio, , ,  Democritus,  Dent, Edward,  “Departures” (Belitt), , ,  De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), , ,  “Descriptive Sketches” (Wordsworth),  “Desk Dreams” (Dove),  details, surveying of,  deus absconditus,  Dickens, Charles, ,  Dickinson, Emily,  Dido, , , , , , , ,  death of,  tragedy of,  Ding-an-Sich,  “Directive” (Frost),  discordia concors,  “Disenchantment” (Graham), – “Disjecta Membra” (Wright), – Doherty, Kevin F.,  The Dolphin (Lowell),  Don Giovanni (Auden), ,  Don Giovanni (Mozart),  Donne, John,  “Double Poem of the World’s Burning” (Rilke), 



Douglas, Gavin,  Dove, Rita dance and poetry of,  –  replicating dance measures and, –  rhythm and, –  “The Dream of the Unified Field” (Graham),  Dryden, John, , , , ,  goddess descriptions, – Wordsworth, William, and criticism of, – “Dusk Shore Prayer” (Graham),  echoing, literature and, – Wordsworth, William, and,  Eclogues (Virgil),  Ecclesiastical Sonnets (Wordsworth),  “Education of the Poet” (Glück), ,  “The Eel” (Montale and Lowell), – Ehrenpreis, Irvin, , ,  Eliot, George,  Eliot, T. S., , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ,  Encyclopedia Britannica,  Endymion (Keats),  The Enemy Joy (Belitt),  Ennius,  Epicurus, , , , ,  epithets,  The Errancy (Graham),  “Essay on Criticism” (Pope),  Euryalus, ,  Eurydice, ,  “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats), , ,  “The Evening of the Mind” ( Justice),  “Evolution” (Graham), 

 The Excursion (Wordsworth), , , ,  “Exit Wound” (Graham),  “Fable” (Glück),  Fagles, Robert, , , , , , , , ,  “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream” (Keats),  “Fancy” (Keats),  Faulkner, William,  Feldman, Irving,  characters of,  original-and-copy and, – poetry of, – Fenwick, Isabella,  Figaro (Mozart),  figures of speech,  “The Fish” (Bishop),  Fitzgerald, Robert,  The Five-Fold Mesh (Belitt), ,  “Florida” (Bishop),  – “Flower Market” (Belitt),  flowers, language of, –,  “Fog Galleon” (Komunyakaa),  “For a Freshman Reader” ( Justice),  For Lizzie and Harriet (Lowell),  formulas,  “For Sale” (Lowell),  Forster, E. M., , , ,  “For the Suicides of ” ( Justice),  For the Union Dead (Lowell), ,  Four Quartets (Eliot), ,  “Fox Trot Fridays” (Dove), , ,  “Fragment: to a Mirror” ( Justice),  Freud, Sigmund, , ,  “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge),  Frost, Robert, , , , ,  “Funny Bones, Or Larry Dawn’s  Nights in Condolandia” (Feldman),  – Furness, Horace Howard, 

“‘Gayosso’s Ambulance Service: Emergency” (Belitt),  Georgics (Virgil), , ,  Giesecke, Carl Ludwig,  Ginsberg, Allen, , , , ,  Gluck, Christoph Willibald, ,  Glück, Louise, , , , , ,  echoes of Wordsworth, William, in,  memory and, ,  naming and addressing,  –  repetition and, –  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ,  Goldbarth, Albert,  “golden codgers,”  “The Gold Lily” (Glück),  “A Good Memory” (Komunyakaa),  Goodman, Paul,  Gorey, Edward, ,  “The Gorge” (Belitt), , ,  Grace Notes (Dove), ,  “Graffiti” (Belitt),  Graham, Jorie, , , , , ,  joylessness and,  poetic address and,  praying and,  repeating titles and,  talking too much and, – as Whitmanesque,  – “Grass Fires” (Lowell), – Graves, R. P.,  the Great Depression, ,  “The Guanajuato Mummies” (Belitt),  A Guide through the District of the Lakes (Wordsworth),  “Gulls” (Graham),  Gunn, Thom,  Hamilton, Saskia,  Hamlet (Shakespeare), 



 Hammerstein, Oscar,  “The Handball Players at Brighton Beach” (Feldman), – Handel, George Frideric,  “Hands” ( Justice),  Hardwick, Elizabeth, ,  Hass, Robert,  Hazlitt, William, ,  Heaney, Seamus,  Hearst, Patty,  Hecht, Anthony,  Herbert, George,  Herbert, Zbigniew,  heroes, , . See also Aeneas Byronic,  development of, – hard work demanded of,  heroic couplet, ,  Hesiod,  hexameters,  “High Tide” (Graham),  Hirsch, Edward,  History (Lowell), ,  Hitler, Adolf,  Hofmannsthall, Hugo von,  Hollander, John, , ,  Holocaust,  Homer, , , , , , , , , ,  Hopkins, Gerard Manley, , , , ,  Hopper, Edward, ,  Horace, , , , , , ,  “Horse” (Glück),  Housman, A. E., , ,  Howard, Patricia,  Howard, Richard, , , , ,  Howe, Susan,  The Hudson Review,  “Humanity” (Wordsworth),  Humphries, Rolfe, ,  “Hunger” (Graham),  – Hutchinson, Mary, 



Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion (Graham),  “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (Shelley),  iambic pentameter,  “The Idiot Boy” (Wordsworth),  “I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land” (Dove),  The Iliad (Homer), ,  The Iliad of Homer (Pope),  “The Imaginary Iceberg” (Bishop), , ,  Imitations (Lowell),  – “Impressionism” (Graham), – “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop),  “Incident in a Rose Garden” ( Justice),  The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud),  “Interrupted Prayers” (Feldman),  “In Theme Park America” (Feldman),  Isherwood, Christopher,  James, Henry,  Jarrell, Randall, , , , ,  Johnson, Samuel,  “Joker” (Feldman), – Jones, John,  Julius Caesar,  Justice, Donald, , , , ,  collected poetry of, – nostalgia and melancholy in, – poetic consistency of,  repetition and,  reticence and,  – self involvement and, – thickness effect and,  time and,  Kallman, Chester, , , , ,  Kalstone, David, 

 Keats, John, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Shakespeare’s “profound verdure” and “coming muskrose” of, – time in poetry of, –  Keller, Hans,  Kennedy, Jackie,  Kenner, Hugh,  Kermode, Frank, , ,  Kerrigan, Anthony,  Kinnell, Galway,  King Lear (Shakespeare),  “Kiss and Tell” (Feldman), – Kizer, Carolyn,  Komunyakaa, Yusef, , , , , ,  Koussevitzky, Serge,  Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett),  “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge),  Landor, Walter Savage,  language Belitt and,  flowers and, –,  general ideas, “things” and, – public /private arena and,  Laocoön, ,  Laodamia (Wordsworth), ,  “Large Bad Picture” (Bishop), ,  lathe biosas (live in obscurity),  Latin, Virgil and,  Lawrence, D. H.,  Levine, Philip, , , , ,  Levin, Harry,  Life Studies (Lowell), , , – , , , , ,  –,  “The Life and Letters” (Feldman),  “The Lightning-Rod Man” (Belitt),  Lincoln, Abraham,  “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” (Wordsworth), 

“Lines Written as a School Exercise at Hawkshead” (Wordsworth),  Listener (Forster),  literature comparisons in, – echoing in, – “Lives of the Poets” (Feldman),  Lloyd, Harold,  Longenbach, James, ,  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,  Lonsdale (Lord),  “Looking Up from the Page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil” (Dove),  Lórca, Garcia,  Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), , , , ,  Lost in the Stars,  “Lost in Translation” (Merrill),  Lowell, Charlotte Winslow, ,  Lowell, Robert, , , , , , , , ,  achievement of, – change in writing technique, – generic sense of life in,  language of public /private arena and,  letters, – as major artist,  manic-depressive mood swing and, – as “savior of post-World War II American poetry,”  unchanging elements of prose and poems,  varied stanzas and,  Lucas, F. L.,  Lucia di Lammermoor,  Lucretius, ,  conceptual words of,  on Epicurus, , , 



 Lucretius (continued ) language of general ideas and “things” in, – physical world, mind and,  repetition and,  Wordsworth, William, and elements of, – Lucy Gray (Wordsworth), ,  Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), , , , , ,  Macbeth (Shakespeare), ,  Machado, Antonio,  The Magic Flute (Auden), ,  The Magic Flute (Mozart),  Mahler, Gustav,  Mandelbaum, Allen,  manic depressive, – Mann, William,  “The Man Closing Up” ( Justice),  “The Map” (Bishop),  “March Willows” (Belitt),  Marmion (Scott),  Mason, Jackie,  Masters, Edgar Lee,  Materialism (Graham), , ,  Mazzaro, Jerome,  McCarthy, Mary,  McCrorie, Edward,  McFarland, Thomas,  McGann, Jerome,  McGrath, Charles,  McHugh, Heather,  Measure for Measure (Shakespeare),  Melville, Herman,  Memmius,  “Memoir” (Glück),  “Memorial Hospital: Outpatient” (Belitt),  memory, ,  “Men at Forty” ( Justice), – Menoetes, ,  Menotti, Gian Carlo, 



Merrill, James, , , , , , , , , ,  Merwin, W. S., ,  Metamorphoses (Ovid),  A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), , , , , ,  “Milgate” (Lowell), – Miller, J. Hillis,  Mills, John Stuart,  The Mills of the Kavanaughs (Lowell),  Milton, John, , , , , , , , , , ,  “Mirror” (Merrill),  “The Missing Person” ( Justice),  “Mitosis” (Glück), –  “Mock Orange” (Glück),  “Moonbeam” (Glück),  Moore, Marianne, ,  Moore, Merrill,  Moorman, Mary,  Moss, Howard,  “Mother and Child” (Glück),  –  “Movietime” (Feldman),  Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, , , , , , ,  Mueller, Lisel, , , ,  “The Muse of Happiness” (Glück),  music, , , – muskrose. See flowers Mussolini, Benito, ,  My Early Life (Churchill),  “My Father With Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart” (Levine), –  “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” (Lowell), –  “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke),  “My Secret Identity IS” (Simic),  Nabokov, Vladimir,  naming, addressing and,  – 

 nature, , , , , – romantic lyrics and,  Wordsworth, William, and,  – nature morte,  Near Changes (Van Duyn),  Near the Ocean (Lowell),  “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” (Lowell), –  Nemerov, Howard, , , , , , , ,  Neruda, Pablo,  ambiguous syntax and,  Never (Graham), , ,  New and Selected Poems ( Justice), ,  New Latin Dictionary,  The New York Times Book Review,  New Yorker,  New York Times Sunday Magazine,  “The Next Time” (Strand),  nightingales, –  Night Light ( Justice),  “Nightwords” (Feldman),  Nijinsky, Vaslav,  the Nineties poetry and revisiting, – YK and,  “ Revere Street” (Lowell), – ,  Norton, Emily The White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth),  “Nostalgia of the Lakefronts” ( Justice), – Notebook (Lowell), ,  “Notes on the Reality of the Self ” (Graham),  “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens),  “Not Welcome Here” (Dove),  Nowhere but Light (Belitt),  “The Nurses” (Feldman),  “Nutting” (Wordsworth), , 

Oates, Joyce Carol,  Oberon, , , ,  “Ode on Melancholy” (Keats),  “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), , , ,  “Ode to Duty” (Wordsworth),  “Ode to Psyche” (Keats), ,  Odyssey,  “Oedipus Host” (Feldman),  “Of Gardens” (Bacon),  “Off Central Park” (Lowell),  O’Hara, Frank, ,  Olivier, Laurence,  “One Art” (Bishop),  [shouldn’t this come, alphabetically AFTER something that begins with On?] “On Quaking Bog” (Belitt),  “On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies” (Keats),  “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” ( Justice),  Operation Overlord,  “The Orange Tree” (Belitt), ,  “The Orphaning” (Belitt), ,  “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” (Lowell and Rilke), – Osborne, Charles,  “Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life” (Strand), – “Over  Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (Bishop), , ,  Overlord (Graham), – Ovid, , ,  “Papermill Graveyard” (Belitt),  “Paradise” (Dove),  Pater, Walter,  pathos,  patriotism, local,  Pears, Peter,  People,  Perloff, Marjorie, 



 Peter Grimes bad seed taking root in healthy soil,  development of a hero, – dulling of, – madness of,  music in, – Peter Grimes (Britten), , , ,  Peyton, Orval,  Philological Museum,  “Philosopher’s Stone” (Graham),  pietas,  Pinsky, Robert, ,  “The Plain Sense of Things” (Stevens),  “The Planet on the Table” (Stevens),  Plath, Sylvia, , , ,  Plato,  Pliny,  “Poem” (Bishop),  – “Poem” ( Justice),  “The Poet at Seven” ( Justice),  Poetics (Aristotle),  poetry address and,  Belitt and, – body,  dance and,  –  Feldman’s, – Justice’s, – landscape, knowledge and, – Lowell, Robert, and,  review, – revisiting the Nineties, – sadness and,  “speaking voice” in,  time in, –  “The Pond” (Glück),  Pope, Alexander, , , , , , , ,  “Posterity” (Graham), , – Pound, Ezra, , , , , , , 



“Praising Dark Places” (Komunyakaa),  “Prayer” (Graham), – , ,  “Praying” (Graham), ,  – Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth),  The Prelude (Wordsworth), , , , ,  prosody,  Proust, Marcel,  Prunty, Wyatt,  Puck, , ,  “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (Lowell), – “Questions of Travel” (Bishop), – Questions of Travel (Bishop), , ,  The Rake’s Progress (Auden), , ,  Ransom, John Crowe,  The Recluse (Wordsworth),  Region of Unlikeness (Graham),  repetition, , , – ,  singularity and, – “Relay Station” (Graham),  “Resolution and Independence” (Wordsworth),  “Reverie in Open Air” (Dove),  “Rhumba” (Dove), – Rich, Adrienne, , , , , , , ,  Richard III (Shakespeare),  Ricks, Christopher, , ,  Rilke, Rainer Maria, , , , ,  Rimbaud, Arthur, ,  “Ripe Peach” (Glück), –  Robinson, Edwin Arlington, ,  Rodgers, Richard,  Roethke, Theodore, , , , ,  “romantic nature lyric,” 

 Rorem, Ned,  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel,  Rossini, Gioachino,  de Rothschild, Philippe (Baron),  Ruskin, John,  “Sadness” ( Justice), ,  “Salem” (Lowell),  Salmagundi,  Santayana, George, ,  Scarry, Elaine,  Schadenfreude,  Schikaneder, Emanuel, , ,  Schliemann, Heinrich,  Scott, Walter,  “Screened Porch” (Glück),  “Seascape” (Bishop),  Sebald, W. G.,  “secondary world,”  self-involvement, – “Self-Portrait as Still Life” ( Justice),  Sellar, William Young,  “The Sensual World” (Glück),  serpents. See snakes “The Seven Ages” (poem, Glück),  The Seven Ages (volume, Glück),  and passim Sexton, Anne,  Shakespeare, William, , , , , , , , , , , ,  “coming muskrose” of Keats and “profound verdure” of, – Shaw, Robert,  Sheehan, Donald,  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, , , ,  A Shropshire Lad (Housman),  “Siesta: Mexico / Vermont” (Belitt),  Simic, Charles, , , , , ,  similes,  Simon, John, 

“Simon Lee” (Wordsworth),  “Since ” (Lowell),  singularity, – Sisyphus,  “Sitting at Dusk in the Back Yard After the Mondrian Retrospective” (Wright),  “Skunk Hour” (Lowell),  “Sleep and Poetry” (Keats),  snakes, , ,  Snodgrass, W. D.,  Snyder, Gary, , ,  Socrates, , ,  “Some Reflections on Music and Drama” (Auden),  Sondheim, Stephen,  “Songs for My Father” (Komunyakaa),  “Sonnet” ( Justice), . See also “The Wall” “Southern Gothic” ( Justice),  “speaking voice,” in poetry,  Spenser, Edmund, ,  “Spoken from the Hedgerows” (Graham),  spondees,  Stafford, Jean,  stanzas, varied,  “Stars” (Glück),  St. Augustine, , ,  Stein, Gertrude,  Stephen, Leslie,  Stevens, Wallace, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Stewart, Susan,  Strand, Mark, , , , , , ,  Stravinsky, Igor, , , , ,  “Surf ” (Graham),  “Summer Night” (Glück), ,  The Summer Anniversaries ( Justice), – Swarm (Graham), 



 Swift, Jonathan,  syntax, ambiguous,  Tacitus,  “The Taken-Down God” (Graham),  Tantalus,  Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ammons),  Tarn, Nathaniel,  Tate, Allen, , , , , , ,  Tate, James, ,  Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), , , ,  “There is a gold light in certain old paintings” ( Justice), – thickness effect,  “Things” (Mueller),  “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison” (Coleridge), ,  “This Living Hand” (Keats),  “This Rock” (Belitt), ,  Thomas and Beulah (Dove),  Thomas, Levi,  Thoreau, Henry David, ,  “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” (Wordsworth),  th Regiment of African American soldiers,  time, , – ,  “Time” (Glück),  “The Time Being” (Graham),  “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), , , , , ,  Titania, , , , ,  “To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses” (Keats), ,  “To Autumn” (Keats), , ,  “To Delmore Schwartz” (Lowell), –  Tolstoy, Leo,  Tomlinson, Charles,  “To Mother” (Lowell), 



“To My Brother George” (Keats),  To See, To Take (Van Duyn),  “Tourist and Turtle” (Belitt),  “Trade Wind: Key West” (Belitt),  Trojan horse,  Trojans, , ,  Troy, , , , , , ,  Truelove, Anne,  Turnus, ,  Tutankhamen,  “Twelve Chairs” (Dove), ,  “Ulysses” (Tennyson),  “Ulysses and Circe” (Lowell),  – Uncle Vanya (Chekhov),  the Underworld, ,  descent into,  “Unpainted Door” (Glück),  “Untitled” Strand, – “Upon Emergence” (Graham),  “Vague Memory from Childhood” ( Justice), – Valéry, Paul, ,  Vallon, Annette,  Van Duyn, Mona, , , , ,  Vaughan, Henry,  Vendler, Helen, ,  Venus, ,  description comparisons of, – Verdi, Giuseppe, ,  Vermeer,  “Vermont Quarry” (Belitt),  Vesuvius,  “Via Negativa” (Graham),  Vickers, Jon,  Viebahn, Fred,  “The View” (Strand),  Virgil, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  alliteration and,  assonance and,  emptiness of worldly things and, 

 Latin and,  local patriotism and,  as master of public art,  nostalgia and,  “placidas auris,”  poet of sadness and evening,  time and,  use of past and present,  virtues, Roman,  “The Visible World” (Graham), , visual boundaries, blurring,  Vita Nova (Glück)  Wakoski, Diane,  Walcott, Derek,  “The Wall” ( Justice),  “Warm Enough” (Feldman),  Warren, Robert Penn,  Weber, Carl Maria von,  Weiss, Theodore,  Weltzschmerz,  Wharton, Edith,  “Where: the Person” (Graham),  Where Shall I Wander (Ashbery), – The White Doe of Rylstone (Wordsworth),  Whitman, Walt, , , , , , , , , , – Wilbur, Richard, , ,  Wilderness Stair (Belitt),  The Wild Iris (Glück), , , –

Williams, William Carlos, ,  William the Conqueror,  “The Withdrawal” (Lowell),  The World Doesn’t End (Simic),  words, conceptual,  Wordsworth, Christopher,  Wordsworth, Dorothy,  Wordsworth, William, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  The Aeneid of, – conceptual words of,  criticism of Dryden by, – goddess descriptions, – language of general ideas and “things” in, – Lucretian elements in, – nature and,  – repetition and,  separateness and,  World War I, , ,  World War II, , , ,  Wright, Charles, , , , , , , ,  Wright, James, ,  Wuthering Heights (Brontë),  Wyatt, Thomas,  “Xerox” (Belitt), ,  Yeats, William Butler, , , , , , , ,  Yenser, Stephen,  Young, Vernon, 

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