Poems are dogs. Language is focused and limited in both. Dogs and poems are only distantly connected to music. The poem and the dog are friendly, we swear, for real, but much closer to the truth is that its instinct. The traits of a dog and a poem tend to be distinct— but we love them simply for what they are. They charm us in a bedroom or a bar, most especially in places where they don’t belong. They will do what you want them to do—for a song. History is poetry, first; finally, castles reduced to stones. Or coins. Dogs and poems are paid in bones.
Ben Mazer is looking forward to the months ahead: his “The Ruined Millionaire: New and Selected Poems” will be available November 1st, and in 2023 Farrar will publish his “Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz.”
Neither Schwartz nor Mazer are overrated—Scarriet can attest both are talented and deliver the goods. But both lack that spark of genius which is necessary to be popular. Schwartz was overtaken by mania—he never allowed himself to be wrong, to suffer in public, poetically—which would have been a beautiful thing to see.
Mazer, unlike Schwartz, did not find himself struggling against an insider literary group who half-accepted him.
On the contrary, Mazer lives in a time when there are no literary groups. In poetry today, no one has ideas.
Nothing exists that says here is what Marjorie Perloff is (“she supports the avant-garde?”). Nothing exists that says here is what William Logan is (“he’s a mean critic?”).
Nothing exists that says here is what Mazer is.
I tried, by writing a book, “Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism,” (2021).
Glyn Maxwell’s 2022 introduction to Mazer’s “New and Selected” makes no attempt, merely mentioning a couple of poets who put Maxwell up years ago when he, Glyn Maxwell, visited America.
No literary movements—the consciousness simply doesn’t exist. Since the Beats. In the wake of the Beats there was the madman Lowell who was not a Beat. And Larkin, more isolated than Lowell and a much better poet—lesson learned.
Mazer is the best living poet. A great poet of no ideas in an era of no ideas. Ashbery is great—only when the clever think they find ideas in him that others do not. Mazer is better than Ashbery because he doesn’t allow this kind of vanity—there really are no ideas. Mazer’s poetry is purer and greater. (Diane Seuss and Sharon Olds are beautiful and profound when they are talking about the details of their lives.)
There is nothing to join or not join. Poetry has no atom—only electrons obeying nothing, except maybe left wing politics.
Left wing politics is great. But it’s not poetry.
There hasn’t been an idea in poetry since Harold Bloom became famous for an idea which said: Rivalry in poetry is all, a pernicious idea which helped ensure no one dared to form or manufacture literary movements, or care about the past—all the writers were alone and precious. Can you imagine Jorie Graham starting a trend based on a spontaneous, all-night bull session? Academia—as it absorbed Modernism (not fit for it, finally) and then French Theory—ended spontaneity and literary movements and gradually became a publishing platform for lonely talents like Graham.
Ben Mazer has put his published poems on Facebook recently. Here’s one I like. As you read it, you’ll see exactly what I mean about the pure poem which doesn’t let you posture vainly over ideas—Mazer’s genius doesn’t allow it. The spell is all.
Epilogue
It is youth that understands old age and your repulsion is but a projection an image of the loathing you obtain. I’ve seen the fall come in and think I shall follow each leaf that winds about the house to where you stutter, the end of the tether where grace walks through the bridal foliage and no one could mistake you for another. After that, they are only leaves to burn. And when the flowers burst upon the rain the roofs shall keep their solemn gentle witness far from the young men who travel far to fill their noses with the autumn air. Daybreak is decent as awakening. And love is gentle, though he is no scholar. What if I filled my notebook with his words sketched suddenly with no least hesitation would she return to him when it came fall or would she sink into a bitter winter not even counting the blossoms that are gone. How many times the autumn rain recurs to wind about the river in the evening or fall like one great ocean in the dawn. No matter, he has had enough of her and leaves his youth in hope of something better. A drop expresses all the flooding water, the wind instills the trees with sentiment, and no one, no one can reverse the patter of the darkness that’s enclosed within. It stares across the city in the dawn and cannot wake these shrouds of memory.
The secret to the poem’s success is its sound. It uses a device few will notice—and which even the poet may not be aware. There is a constant stream of trochaic words beginning with “loathing”—“stutter, tether, bridal, flowers, solemn, gentle, witness, travel, noses, autumn, decent, scholar” (“mistake,” correctly, an exception) until we reach the emotional center of the poem and her “return,” the iamb in the buzzword, trochaic, river—and immediately returning: “bitter, winter…”
Mazer is unconscious, as poets like Tennyson and Dickinson—too busy being poets—were. Mazer once told me a poem he liked of mine reminded him of Robert Lowell’s poetry. I didn’t bother to respond, but it was nothing like Robert Lowell. My poem had an idea.
Either free verse is the rule—and the poet wonders, “wait, so what is poetry?” —or those who like metrical verse make it so complicated, the poet is confused going in that direction, too.
It is bad enough good poetry is really hard to write, but the “wisdom” out there says:
1) poetry must be “difficult.” The end of difficulty is difficulty. A cheery thought.
2) the free verse you write “may not be poetry” and
3) formal poetry has too many impossible, contradictory rules.
Annie Finch, who has written an entire book to explain poetic form, informs us a simple line of trochaic rhythm is actually iambic rhythm—the very opposite of trochaic.
How is this possible?
Trochaic is DAA da and Iambic is da DAA.
The line is Robert Hayden’s and it scans very simply:
SUN-days, TOO, my FATH-er GOT up EAR-ly.
Trochaic.
Ms. Finch decides to call “SUN” a “headless iamb.”
In the expert’s imagination, an invisible syllable hovers in front of this trochaic line, changing the whole sequence to the iambic rhythm.
[hey!] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/ ly.
Welcome to verse pedagogy! Learning about the iamb (the most common foot in English poetry) is not enough. The “headless iamb” (an iamb which is not an iamb) must be in the mix, too, for no apparent reason —just to be more “difficult” perhaps. “Difficult” is the great mantra of modern poetry.
And then Ms. Finch tells us with a straight face that:
“the line from Hayden is not only headless, it also has an extra syllable at the end.”
“It also has an extra syllable at the end.”
Well what do you know? It does!
Mr. Hayden, the poet, has counted wrong.
Hayden’s line has an “extra” syllable—because Ms. Finch, who has spent a lifetime studying and celebrating verse (and witchery) declares his perfectly trochaic line is actually an iambic line—with an unaccounted-for syllable at the end waving in the wind.
Annie Finch cannot be wrong. It would embarrass one who has given a lifetime to verse.
Annie Finch is correct to say that a trochee can sometimes stand-in for an iamb. This is common and has nothing to do with her mystical reading of Hayden’s poem. Well, it does, to a degree. A poet establishes an iambic rhythm—da DAA—and for variation’s sake, throws in a trochee—DAA da. But there’s never any confusion between da DAA and DAA da, unless the reader over-thinks the whole matter.
This is what Annie does when she takes a trochaic line in Hayden’s poem—in which she believes an iambic meter is established—and finds a need to declare the trochaic is really iambic.
Poets substitute freely. They don’t need pedants making all sorts of excuses for their substitutions.
If you substitute too much, the established rhythm changes—but this happens when it happens; to impose a reading of an established rhythm is to let ‘what ought to be’ crush ‘what is.’
The line in question, from Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” is the poem’s first line. The poem as a whole is trochaic, with substitutions. There is no need to make the line iambic. There is no need to interfere with Hayden’s intent. This is obvious, because if we use the “extra” syllable at the end of line one to push an iambic rhythm onto line two, we get this atrocity:
[uhh] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/
ly AND/ put HIS/ clothes ON/ in THE/ blue BLACK/ cold.
Line two, in which the extra syllable in line one (created by Annie Finch!) forces its iambic rhythm on line two, demands the reader place emphasis on trivial words: “and,” “on,” and “the” while creating another hanging syllable at the end of the line: “cold.”
Our ears tell us this is completely nuts.
A more subtle error is made by Annie Finch when she turns to Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and her expertise says it is iambic where it is not, simply because the poem’s established rhythm (in this case, unlike Hayden’s poem) is iambic.
The versifying skill of the poet Wordsworth uses the anapest—da da DAA—as a pleasant variation within the general iambic rhythm in his famous “daffodils” poem.
The line:
Flutt’ring and dancing in the breeze.
freaks out the pedant as they notice “flutt’ring” is DAA da (trochaic) and not da DAA (iambic). No one would say Flutt’-RING. Not even a pedant. Something must be done, then, to re-establish the iambic rhythm as quickly as possible, or the pedant will have a heart attack. So we get this piece of doggerel:
FLUTT ‘ring/ and DANC/ ing IN/ the BREEZE.
“Dancing IN the breeze” is clunky because there is a natural anapest right here:
in the BREEZE.
Wordsworth varies from the iambic this way: FLUTT’R ing/ (trochee) and DANC/ (iamb) ing in the BREEZE. (anapest)
The anapest, “ing in the BREEZE” is what Poe calls a “quick” anapest in his article, “Rational of Verse.”
da-da-da DAA. (You can see the relationship to the iamb.)
In the Wordsworth poem are several good examples of this. The “ing in the” part is pronounced with slightly more speed.
The poem is mostly tetrameter (4 beat) but Wordsworth varies it with trimeter (3 beat) lines:
“I WAND/-ered LONE/ ly as a CLOUD.”
“a-LONG/ the MARG/ -in of a BAY.”
These are free-breathing trimeter lines, just as
“FLUTT-‘ring/ and DANC/ -ing in the BREEZE.”
These variations, with their quick anapests, help to give the poem its famous sprightly character. Those fixated on conventional iambic readings will miss this. If you listen to the poem read aloud, you will notice the tendency is not to say “DANC-ing IN the BREEZE.” But the more lightsome and appropriate “DANC-ing in the BREEZE.
I found myself believing everyone loved me; my self-worth being so high, I was like Wordsworth’s cloud glancing at things with joy from the sky. I really thought people were in love with me. This made me shy. I had no ambition; I was sweet as could be, due to the only thing that matters: my own vanity. Those who have no self-worth enter into scams, seductions, and schemes. But there I was, pleasant, polite, and passive, believing my own dreams. I was intoxicated and heroic in my mind, flying over the dwarves who stole moments to gaze at me, even as they lifted heavy boxes on the wharves. I asked you to be mine and you looked at me quizzically as you said: “silly, of course, yes.” That’s all I cared about. The rest of the story is anyone’s guess.
We all have a lens by which we see the world. That lens is ours and others cannot see through it—yet the lens is shaped by the world and belongs to the world; like our beliefs and rhetoric and experience, this lens belongs to us and yet it is not us.
This lens is our mind.
The mind ends up being ourselves to a great extent, because it is how we—and no one else—navigates space in real time. And yet the mind is not finally who we are; it is not the soul.
Importantly, we can forget that we have a soul and live as if this lens is, in fact, our soul.
Our experience is not us. But good and bad experiences have gone into shaping our lens. When does an experience change who we are? It never does. It simply shapes the lens. The lens can fool us into thinking “this is who I am,” ironically enough, at the very moment it is distracting us from the truth of who we are. The experience and the person whom the experience impacts are not the same. As long as we keep this simple fact in mind, no cunning or tragedy finally harms us. “Death, where is thy sting?”
Yet the mind will convince us that it is all, if we are not watchful.
The mind has its demands.
The lens is a powerful tool, since it simultaneously takes from the world and knows the world—it is a self-regulating machine which doesn’t need us. Due to its profound ability at circularity (receive, process, act, receive again) the mind has nothing to do with our soul, that eternal part of us which the lens ultimately serves—when it is not too busy immersed in the contingencies of time and space.
I have entitled this essay “the radical mind,” and the above prefatory remarks were necessary, since the radical mind can be defined by the very tendency of mind I mentioned above: not only does the radical mind have no use for the soul; it resents the soul and wishes to torture the soul into submission as part of the processing and functioning loop which aims to make us who we are purely in terms of the mind.
The radical mind seeks to make the mind all.
The sharp intellect of the radical mind knows of the soul but does not believe in it—the soul for the radical mind does exist, but it exists as part of its mind.
The simple, religious, semi-educated, “good soul” is no match in a debate with the radical mind, since the soul—our eternal part—has nothing to do with intellectual argument. Good souls, if they buy the flattery of wishing to be “smarter,” convert to the radical mind. This is the only way conversion occurs, but it’s very common, especially in educational institutions. This is why universities are radical.
Richard Rorty, a dead white male influenced by John Dewey (d. 2007, educated at U. Chicago), an influential modern theorist, when he was a University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia—in 1989, published Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge University Press), a work which illuminates the kindly side of the radical mind in a late-20th century snapshot of Modernism’s march to institutional hegemony.
In 2022, the radical mind, commonly met with in institutional life, is not nearly as friendly as it was in 1989—when it still believed in free speech. The radical mind is not cool anymore.
Comparison is the only way to intellectually understand anything—this is why studying a 1989 work by Richard Rorty might give us hope in how to figure out the unraveling of the radical mind which seems to be happening today.
Comparison is the only way to reason, according to Richard Rorty, a boon in our favor. The radical mind does not believe “intrinsic” truths exist. Never mind religion and God; Rorty wants to ditch metaphysics. What matters to the radical mind is “contingency, irony, and solidarity” (and so the title of his book.)
The Modernist Revolution took several practical steps to get to where it is today.
First, it transformed art—which then transformed education, which finally transformed journalism.
Shapeless art became acceptable in America, pragmatic education grew from that, and then journalism, too found that level.
But does “shapeless art” denote the most profound thing ever? Or something really bad?
Who knows? This uncertainty is precisely what the radical mind feeds on. This ambiguity is what Rorty, still hippie-like, celebrated.
Other pursuits, gas, oil, the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, trading, diplomacy, government policy, politics, sports, all these other things—do they care what I am now discussing? The transformation of the poem itself, the poem as it exists in the classroom, all affecting the journalist outside the classroom—does this really matter? Can what a humanities professor at Virginia says about “irony” in 1989 matter at all?
Richard Rorty anticipates all of this.
Think of the pot-smoking professor played by Donald Sutherland in the movie Animal House (1975).
Richard Rorty is not far off at all.
Rorty’s big word is irony—which is how a professor who wants to be taken seriously says: hey, nothing really matters.
If you were a student and he was your professor, it would make you kind of rejoice—if you were a class clown, if you were ‘too smart for school.’
Rorty: “Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism.”
These nonintellectuals always feel they “must” answer this question which Rorty poses: “When may one favor members of one’s family, or one’s community, over other, randomly chosen, human beings?” Rorty, as the philosopher of contingency, believes we can never answer this question.
Chapter 4, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” comes closest to fleshing out the apolitical Rorty.
“The ironist, by contrast, is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like “just” or “scientific” or “rational” in the final vocabulary of the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice or science or rationality will take one much beyond the language games of one’s time.”
The radical mind takes “language games” very, very seriously. And what is important is the latest language game. Socratic language games are not interesting—(and therefore Socrates is not interesting) because to the “ironist” who is an “historicist,” old slang no longer has meaning.
It doesn’t matter that free Socractic inquiry makes Rorty and the ironist possible. The ironist, aware of the contingent present, re-makes the contingent past. Socrates is junked by the strong poet who has replaced the priest and is about to replace the philosopher. (While the outside world doesn’t quite understand.)
Here’s what Rorty writes next from the perspective of his “ironist”—and think of its implications in the current climate of hyper-sensitive and highly triggering speech:
“The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion for wrongness.”
This is striking.
And Rorty doesn’t realize he’s playing with fire. For he continues this way:
So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by constantly using terms like “Weltanschauung,” “perspective,” “dialectic,” “conceptual framework,” “historical epoch,” “language game,” “rediscription,” “vocabulary,” and “irony.”
Yes—“philosophical terms.”
But what about political ones? Rorty, in his ivory tower, doesn’t think of that.
The “ironist” will not remain philosophical, will they? And doesn’t this become a problem? After all, Rorty is simultaneously getting rid of both religion and metaphysics. But he thinks there’s no danger.
How innocent Socrates exploring the “essence” of something is, compared to “language” turning you into “the wrong kind of human being.”
“Language” is the property of poetry—and so why wouldn’t an otherwise dull humanities professor (who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980), toiling under Ronald Reagan throughout the 1980s, exult in this? Religion, practical work, science, Socrates? These don’t compare to the anxiety, danger and thrill of “She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being.”
Rorty uses the death of the “metaphysician” as the springboard for his “ironist.”
“The metaphysician assumes that our tradition can raise no problems which it cannot solve—that the vocabulary which the ironist fears may be merely “Greek” or “Western” or “bourgeois” is an instrument which will enable us to get at something universal. The metaphysican agrees with the Platonic Theory of Recollection, in the form in which this theory was restated by Kierkegaard, namely, that we have the truth within us, that we have built-in criteria which enable us to recognize the right final vocabulary when we hear it.”
Today the radical mind does not “fear” something “may be merely Greek or Western or bourgeois. The “merely” has been removed. The West itself is feared. There’s a language game for you.
“Whereas the metaphysician sees the modern Europeans are particularly good at discovering how things really are, the ironist sees them as particularly rapid in changing their self-image, in re-creating themselves.”
This is true. Cynical recreating has actually run amok. And it’s not just something the metaphysicians are doing.
“A more up-to-date word for what I have been calling “dialectic” would be “literary criticism.” In Hegel’s time it was still possible to think of plays, poems, and novels as making vivid something already known, of literature as ancillary to cognition, beauty to truth. The older Hegel thought of “philosophy” as a discipline which, because cognitive in a way that art was not, took precedence over art. Indeed, he thought that this discipline, now that it had attained maturity in the form of his own Absolute Idealism, could and would make art as obsolete as it made religion. But, ironically and dialectically enough, what Hegel actually did, by founding an ironist tradition within philosophy, was help de-cognitivize, de-metaphysize philosophy. He helped turn it into a literary genre.”
I quote the Hegel passage to demonstrate the way Rorty uses metaphysics to enhance his argument even while he is busily destroying metaphysics. Burning the ground on which you stand—the ultimate ironist position. But again, we can see why this mode of discourse is attractive to a humanities professor. Philosophy becomes literature! Or, as he puts it, in slightly more combative terms in the spirit of Harold Bloom:
“Influential critics, the sort of critics who propose new canons—people like Arnold, Pater, Leavis, Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom—are not in the business of explaining the real meaning of books, nor of evaluating something called their “literary merit.” Rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies.”
“Literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicans.”
Rorty recognizes that:
“Literary criticism has been stretched further and further in the course of our century…to theology, philosophy, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos.”
And:
“Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism….the rise of literary criticism to preeminence within the high culture of the democracies…has paralleled the rise in proportion of ironists to metaphysicians among intellectuals. This has widened the gap between the intellectuals and the public. For metaphysics is woven into the public rhetoric of modern liberal societies.”
Rorty knows there’s a problem with burning the ground you are standing on. But he’s not really concerned because as an “ironist”—who knows the two main strands of the Radical Mind, Nietzsche (self-creation) and Marx (solidarity) will never meet (as Rorty says in his Introduction)—he thrives in that split between private and public (which old religion and metaphysics vainly sought to bring together):
“Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seems to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics.”
Rorty is finally happy to be bourgeois when it comes to politics—and leave the radical and scary notions to bounce around in the classroom:
“We ironists who are also liberals think that such freedoms require no consensus on any topic more basic than their own desirability. From our angle, all that matters for liberal politics is the widely shared conviction that, as I said in Chapter 3, we shall call the “true” and the “good” whatever is the outcome of free discussion…”
“The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society described in the previous chapter consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.” This conviction would not be based on a view about universally shared human ends, human rights, the nature of rationality, the Good for Man, nor anything else.”
Rorty’s goal is rather rarefied, then. Let “bourgeois freedoms” continue to structure society and remain the “social glue,” while intellectuals privately re-make themselves in non-traditional ways. Everything is good. A wealthy society with hippie pot-smoking professors and bloviating, right-wing Harold Bloom professors.
Rorty begins chapter one by saying:
“About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight.”
The French revolution, in many ways, was a radical horror show of murder.
But to an “ironist” professor in front of a blackboard, the French revolution can seem rather quaint.
Today, both conservatives and liberals fear democracy is under attack, that “bourgeois freedoms” are on the way out, that America has lost its way, that even guillotines are being prepared.
Rorty presents the French revolution as a kind of abstract good. Were he alive today, would he not note the irony that he presents radical irony as an abstract good—but apart from politics?
Maybe it’s OK when the “ironist” intellectual has no public views. But what if society is run by people who have no public views? Rorty doesn’t let himself wonder about this.
Is this the problem? The radical mind is razor-sharp in the classroom—but naive in the real world?
Should classroom instruction look over its shoulder, occasionally, at the real world?
Should professors wonder what will happen when their ideas escape the lab?
Should poets write poems that people actually like to read?
Rorty begins chapter 2 by quoting the end of a Philip Larkin poem:
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that man dying.
Rorty quotes a lot of Harold Bloom and William James in analyzing this poem, claiming that what distresses Larkin is the fear that he won’t be happy—even as one of Bloom’s “strong poets,” In this context, Rorty writes, “Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is really only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives.”
According to Rorty: “The strong poet’s fear of death as the fear of incompletion is a function of the fact that no project of redescribing the world and the past, no project of self-creation through imposition of one’s own idiosyncratic metaphoric, can avoid being marginal and parasitic.”
Larkin must accept the fact that no one’s life will be complete when they die—that everything is contingent. Rorty credits Bloom as “de-divinizing the poem,” just as Nietzsche did the same for “truth,”and Freud, for “conscience.” Larkin must depend on the “good will” of future readers.
Larkin’s poem—is Rorty aware of this?—is made more remarkable precisely because the poem (an excerpt, no less) has no use for Rorty’s learned and philosophical rhetoric—as interesting as it is on its own.
Rorty’s discourse, however, needs Larkin’s poem. (I don’t know about “strong poets,” but this might be a litmus test for a “strong poem.”)
Is Larkin afraid that, even while he demonstrates he is a strong poet in his poem, he still fails?
How wrong The New Yorker and the Moderns were, trying to say what poetry was. The symbol and the image and a bit less rhyme, estrangement and the street lamp, a guy talking to himself on 33rd and Third. What an insult to imagination—and death, which closed imagination down. Diane Seuss sold her copy of “Modern Poetry” and went to Rome. —“Keats’s death room. His deathbed, a facsimile. Everything he touched was burned”— (Because they had to kill the germs) and she discovered poetry kissing his death mask and thinking of her fetal blood lost in the sewers; everything in the past stinking, only poetry able to remember the body, just before it crumbled in ember, Romanticism the greatest throwing off of all— worse than your ailments, your modernism, your modern thrall.
I was able to read the following poem online (FB) this week, by the recently famous poet, Diane Seuss.
Romantic Poet
You would not have loved him, my friend the scholar decried. He brushed his teeth, if at all, with salt. He lied, and rarely washed his hair. Wiped his ass with leaves or with his hand. The top of his head would have barely reached your tits. His pits reeked, as did his deathbed.
But the nightingale, I said.
Diane Seuss, Poetry (October 2022)
Life is a smelly mess and beautiful poems can be written by smelly people.
“Life is a smelly mess” is a given.
“Beautiful” poems are not.
This is why I prefer optimists, the religious, patriots, and Romantics to pessimists, atheists, radicals and Modernists.
Life sucks, there is no sign of God—this is a given.
Poe was correct. Beauty is the province of the poem—whatever conspires against beauty is a given (of course life is an ugly mess).
I like Seuss’s poem: it confronts the fact that Keats was a horror—yet the “nightingale.”
After heavy-handed, hammer-blow, iambic/trochaic verse, the single dactylic expression of the poem—LA-la-la—is “nightingale.”
Sound is sense.
Diane Seuss, unlike many moderns, has an ear.
One can almost guess the origin of the poem: Diane Seuss stumbled on a Scarriet essay praising the Romantic poets (a theme of which Scarriet never tires) and she laughed to herself, “The 19th Romantic poets? Think of how they lived! And wasn’t Keats five feet tall? The Romantics, in person, probably had no romantic charm at all. Ha ha ha!”
And so the germ of the poem was born.
Seuss put her thoughts in the words of “a scholar,” which helped the poem, since it is mostly through “scholars” that we appreciate the “Romantic poets.” Hers is the voice in the poem defending the Romantic poet—which makes sense, because she, after all, is a poet, herself, and a modern one—which again, works, because her poem feels modern, but nonetheless uses Romantic devices (rhythm and rhyme.)
Bravo.
Did Romanticism just fade way, or was Modernism an “Anti-Romanticism” movement?
Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; I am weary to bear them; yea, when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers I will not hear; your hands are full of blood! Isaiah 1:13
I found the old book
in the surplus store
nestled among things
no one wanted anymore.
The poet will not be me.
A beautiful old book will write the poetry.
I will not fail to write you by every caravan that leaves.
We entered the gateway of which Samson carried away the gates.
Clouds of incense floated above the multitude.
The east blushed with a roseate purple, and the morning star was melting into its depths.
The stillness of the hundred streets within the walls of Jerusalem.
I was awe-silent.
Jerusalem, started, as one man, from its slumbers.
The murmur of voices was like the continuous roll of the surge
upon the beach, and the walls of the lofty Temple, like the cliff,
echoed it back.
I stood rather as a spectator than a sharer.
How can the blood of a heifer, of a lamb, or of a goat,
take away sins?
Just as the sun dips beyond the hill of Gibeah,
overhanging the valley of Aijalon, there is heard a prolonged note
of a trumpet blown from one of the western watch-towers of Zion.
The dark cloud of sacrifice ascends in solemn grandeur,
and sometimes heavier than the evening air, falls like a descending curtain
around the Mount, till the whole is veiled from sight.
The question is a simple one—but it gets complex when we try to answer it.
If there is one thing which happened, beyond all else, to poetry, during the so-called revolution of Modernism in the early 20th century, it was this:
Poetry got less sentimental.
The Imagist movement (one of the little ‘movements’ inside the larger Modernist craze) said:
Just the Thing. No sweaty-palmed commentary, please.
This was very easy to understand, as easy to understand as the way poetry was introduced to me as a school boy. My class learned about (and simultaneously) learned to write—haiku. Creative Writing replaced English.
OK, fine. We’ll add an appreciation of haiku to our appreciation of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Poe, Tennyson, Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Wait a minute. No. The Modernists and the Imagists were fine. All those others had to go.
And this is how Modernism was like the French revolution. New was all. The guillotine was required.
What had to go?
Pure poetry.
The sneering sarcasm of Byron’s longer poems fit with the Modernist ideal.
But Byron—all of him—had to go, because Byron was born in the 18th century. Byron couldn’t be seen writing impure poetry because he wasn’t new. Byron was a Romantic—he was at the center of what had to be swept aside. It would take too much explaining to say, “we want to keep this part of Byron…” so the Modernist revolution just got rid of him.
The “old” poetry, according to the influential poet and critic from Tennessee, John Crowe Ransom, was a “compound” poetry—it consisted of two elements: morality—hidden by sweetness.
Modernism, however, had advanced beyond crude “compound” poetry and given us poetry which was pure—in the way ‘pure’ science and ‘pure’ poetry no longer have anything to do with each other—modern scientists don’t write treatises in verse.
The old “compound poetry” is sentimental poetry—it has a moral floating in it.
Modernism, almost everyone agrees, has advanced beyond this—morality nor sweetness, nor their too-obvious combination—none of this, belongs to Modernism—which separates out poetry from all the other pursuits: science, religion, advertising, law, history, architecture, painting. The example Ransom gives is Wallace Stevens. Poetry for the sake of poetry.
Of course this is crazy. Didn’t Stevens mix philosophy with his poetry? Doesn’t advertising use poetry? Wasn’t it Poe who argued for this kind of pure poetry (when at the same time Poe advanced scientific thinking as much as any writer)?
But let’s follow Ransom in his argument—he was, after all, perhaps Modernism’s greatest spokesman.
Ransom, who was as savvy as his more European counterpart, Eliot, dumped Byron explicitly, in his 1938 essay on modern poets, “Poets Without Laurels:”
“…modern poets are quite capable of writing the old compound poetry, but they cannot bring themselves to do it; or rather, when they have composed it in unguarded moments, as modern poets still sometimes do, they are under the necessity of destroying it immediately.”
[they are under the necessity of destroying it immediately!!]
Ransom continues, “There is no baffling degree of virtuosity in the old lines,
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin, his control Stops with the shore.
The modern poet can accomplish just as elegant a rumination as this; but thinks it would commit him to an anachronism, for this is the style of an older period.”
I wonder if Ransom was aware that Ezra Pound used “thee” in his poems?
But “thee and thou” are natural anachronisms—they have nothing to do with this “compound” theory of Ransom’s—which bar the modern bard from Byron forever.
Why was Byron out?
Is it the fact that Byron is speaking directly to the ocean? Is the address too oratorical? Is Byron not allowed to do that? But perhaps Byron is saying it in a whisper, to himself—he’s not really addressing the dark blue Ocean; he’s uttering a simple observation under his breath, making an observation to himself. What is wrong with that? The idea that the ocean is less marred by humans than the land: is this idea not itself allowed? (Poe, who sometimes admired Byron and sometimes did not, would agree—poets should not lecture too much.) Ransom, however, doesn’t say; he only really wants to tell us that Byron is archaic.
Surely Ransom is not saying we can’t still be influenced and inspired by Byron? He doesn’t dare say as much. It’s not really clear what Ransom is saying—except to put signs up around the Romantics which say “Keep Out.”
Byron is roughly 100 years younger than Ransom.
A 30 year old poet—today—is 100 years younger than Pound, Eliot, Williams, Frost—and Ransom.
Let’s let Ransom finish his thought on why “we” can’t write like Byron anymore:
“In that period, though it was a comparatively late one, and though this poet thought he was in advance of it, the prophets of society were still numbering and tuning their valuable reflections before they saw fit to release them; and morality, philosophy, religion, science, and art could still meet comfortably in one joint expression, though perhaps not with the same distinction they might have gained if they had had their pure and several expressions. A passage of Byron’s if sprung upon an unsuspecting modern would be felt immediately as “dating;” it would be felt as something that did very well for those dark ages before the modern mind achieved its own disintegration and perfected its faculties serially.”
Ransom refuses to discuss the Byron passage itself—as he and his New Critics insisted over and over again we ought to do. He merely continues to hammer home in a vague manner (“the prophets of society were still numbering and tuning their valuable reflections before they saw fit to release them…” ??) that Byron is lost to us, and he belongs, with all his irreverent swagger and wit, to “those dark ages.”
Writing in another essay, “Criticism, Inc.,” Ransom said reading Chaucer is 95% “linguistics and history” and 5% “aesthetic and critical.” Are we to assume that a “thee” in Byron—or Pound—blocks all aesthetic pleasure? Are “aesthetic” and “critical” joined in a kind of “pure” and valid appreciation of poetry? So many questions.
Robert Penn Warren, too, was one of the High Priests of Modernism. He co-wrote a school textbook, (with a fellow New Critic,) Understanding Poetry, which successfully went through 4 editions from the 1930s to the 1970s. (Scarriet has written a great deal on this subject.) RP Warren writes the following in his 1942 essay, “Pure and Impure Poetry:”
“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not.”
Like Ransom, Warren (his colleague) wrestles with the idea of “poetic purity.” They are very much in the wake of Poe, in this regard (who they practiced, as good moderns, not to like): Before we write poetry, what is it?
Ransom’s point made in the 30s was that modern poetry was “pure” in terms of division-of-labor—poetry no longer supported science, philosophy and religion—poetry was “modern,” meaning it was specialized. The Modernist poet is resigned to “purity,” or, we might put it this way: to ‘think small.’
Robert Penn Warren comes at the problem with very different terminology—modern poetry is “impure,” and this is what marks it as modern. But just as Ransom rejects all of Byron with one “blue Ocean” quote, Warren demolishes Shelley by comparing a short lyric, Shelley’s beautiful “The Indian Serenade,” to the more wide-ranging garden scene in a play by Shakespeare—his Romeo and Juliet.
The reasoning is somewhat different, but the result is the same: Romantics Poets, go home!
Let’s give Warren a chance to make his case, because like Eliot and Warren (and unlike Pound, who was more or less a crank) Warren is wrong-headed, (like all the Modernists) and yet persistent and even brilliant:
“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not want to be too pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then to conclude that, because neutral or recalcitrant elements appear in poems, even in poems called great, these elements are simply an index to human frailty, that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems which would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary. They are not even as pure as they might be in this imperfect world. They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, cliches, sterile technical terms, head work and argument, self-contradictions, clevernesses, irony, realism—all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection.”
This soaring passage, a paean to cacophony and dross, by a prominent New Critic, co-author of the college textbook, Understanding Poetry, which every student was exposed to from the late 1930s across the 20th century, destroys, once and for all, any notion that the “conservative” New Critics opposed the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology (1960).
This duality is a myth. The New Critics, despite their tweedy exterior, fell into ecstasy in the woods all the time when no one was looking.
Pound, Williams, Olson, and the entire nexus of post-modern poetry was the Frankenstein monster of Dr. Frankenstein—a Fugitive and New Critic who attended Vanderbilt. There was no opposition. The only opposition is between Poe/19th century and Pound/20th century. There is no other.
Either elements of a poem effectively work toward the end of that poem—or they do not. Poe or Pound. You must choose. ( The 20th century may slide “backwards” occasionally).
But let Professor Warren talk. (I am not sure how many times he says “nature conspires,” but it is somewhat bizarre.) In a moment of exciting critical acumen, Warren highlights Juliet rejecting Romeo’s moon metaphor (representing the old poetry) amidst “recalcitrant elements” (characters) who pull against Romeo in Shakespeare’s play. However, these competing “elements” in Romeo and Juliet certainly do not represent a “cacophony.” Further, Warren, it seems to me, unfairly raises the bar for Shelley’s lyric—so that a brief poem by Shelley is forced to compete with Shakespeare’s play. Professor Warren resumes where we left off:
“Sometimes a poet will reflect on this state of affairs, and grieve. He will decide that he, at least, will try to make one poem as pure as possible. So he writes:
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
We know the famous garden. We know how all nature conspires here to express the purity of the moment: how the milk-white peacock glimmers like a ghost…
And we know another poet and another garden. Or perhaps it is the same garden, after all:
I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low And the stars are shining bright. I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Hath led me — who knows how? To thy chamber window, Sweet!
We remember how, again, all nature conspires, how the wandering airs “faint,” how the Champak’s odors “pine,” how the nightingale’s complaint “dies upon her heart,” as the lover will die upon the beloved’s heart. Nature here strains out of nature, it wants to be called by another name, it wants to spiritualize itself by calling itself another name. How does the lover get to the chamber window? He refuses to say how, in his semi-somnambulistic daze, he got there. He blames, he says, a “spirit in my feet,” and hastens to disavow any knowledge of how this spirit operates. In any case, he arrives at the chamber window.”
I find it interesting to note how Warren, the New Critic, is going against the New Critic’s creed here: he is attempting to paraphrase Shelley’s half-quoted poem, (never paraphrase! the New critics say) and by doing so (it seems intentional) Warren here becomes the grumpy, old-fashioned, condescending critic all young poets fear.
Shelley “refuses to say…” (!!) Shelley “blames…a ‘spirit in my feet,’ and hastens to disavow any knowledge of how this spirit operates.” (!!) Maybe that’s the point? The “spirit” doesn’t “operate.” It is the soul and body (“spirit in my feet”) blending. Warren displays a great deal of impatience. Warren, in a semi-exasperated state, now breaks into a condescending grin, as he continues, but now he will introduce Shakespeare:
“In any case, he arrives at the chamber window. Subsequent events and the lover’s reaction to them are somewhat hazy. We only know that the lover, who faints and fails at the opening of the last stanza, and who asks to be lifted from the grass by a more enterprising beloved, is in a condition of delectable passivity, in which distinctions blur out in the “purity” of the moment.
Let us turn to another garden. The place: Verona; the time: a summer night, with full moon. The lover speaks:
“But soft! what light thru yonder window breaks? It is the east…
But we know the rest, and know that this garden, in which nature for the moment conspires again with the lover, is the most famous of them all, for the scene is justly admired for the purity of its effect, for giving us the very essence of young, untarnished love. Nature conspires beneficently here, but we may chance to remember that beyond the garden wall strolls Mercutio, who can celebrate Queen Mab, but who is always aware that nature has other names as well as the names the pure poets and pure lovers put upon her. And we remember that Mercutio outside the wall, has just said:
…’twould anger him To raise a spirit in his mistress’s circle Of some strange nature, letting it there stand Till she had laid it and conjured it down.
Mercutio has made a joke, a bawdy joke. This is bad enough, but worse, he has made his joke witty and, worst of all, intellectually complicated in its form. Realism, wit, intellectual complication—these are enemies of the garden purity.”
Warren is protesting too much. Intellectually complicated? Realism? It’s just a bawdy joke. Or—and we can see this even as an amateur—it can be read without the bawdiness. Shakespeare, the genius, surely knows this. It is the kind of wordplay which some find overbearing in Shakespeare. To call it “intellectually complicated in its form” is high-sounding and empty; it doesn’t really identify what Mercutio’s speech actually is, or what it’s doing in terms of poetry. It’s almost as if Warren is yelling, “Mercutio has a big dong!” No, professor Warren, “intellectually complicated in its form” doesn’t, by necessity, mean bawdy punning. Warren continues:
“But the poet has not only let us see Mercutio outside the garden wall. Within the garden itself, when the lover invokes nature, when he spiritualizes and innocently trusts her, he says
Lady by yonder blessed moon I swear,
The lady herself replies,
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, That monthly changes in her circled orb.
The lady distrusts “pure” poems, nature spiritualized into forgetfulness. She has, as it were, a rigorous taste in metaphor, too. She brings a logical criticism to bear on the metaphor which is too easy; the metaphor must prove itself to her, must be willing to subject itself to scrutiny beyond the moment’s enthusiasm. She injects the impurity of an intellectual style into the lover’s pure poem.”
There’s a couple of problems with this. Shakespeare’s play is being witty, not the characters themselves. Romeo has used a metaphor in a vow and Juliet is merely chiding him by drawing one of her own. This has nothing to do with the triumph of the “impurity of an intellectual style” over “purity.” Elements either harmonize, or they don’t. Shakespeare makes them harmonize in his play. Shelley makes them harmonize in his lyric. Warren is splendid at recording and organizing observations—but what exactly his ideas are, and where they are going, is sometimes hard to tell. But, in this case, it is palpably easy. Warren is trying to set up some kind of out-of-context contest between Mercutio and Shelley—to make the Romantics seems shallow and humorless, to make the Romantics seem, in a word, sentimental. Warren continues:
“And we must not forget the voice of the nurse, who calls from within, a voice which, we discover, is the voice of expediency, of half-measures, of the view that circumstances alter cases—the voice of prose and imperfection.
It is time to ask ourselves if the celebrated poetry of this scene, which as poetry is pure, exists despite the impurities of the total composition, if the effect would be more purely poetic were the nurse and Mercutio absent and the lady a more sympathetic critic of pure poems. I do not think so. The effect might even be more vulnerable poetically if the impurities were purged away. Mercutio, the lady, and the nurse are critics of the lover, who believes in pure poems, but perhaps they are necessary. Perhaps the lover can only be accepted in their context. The poet seems to say, “I know the worst that can be said on this subject, and I am giving fair warning. Read at your own risk.” So the poetry arises from a recalcitrant and contradictory context.
Let us return to one of the other gardens, in which there is no Mercutio or nurse, and in which the lady is more sympathetic. Let us mar its purity by installing Mercutio in the shrubbery, from which the poet was so careful to banish him. You can hear his comment when the lover says:
And a spirit in my feet Hath led me—who knows how? To thy chamber window, Sweet!
And we can guess what the wicked tongue would have to say in response to the last stanza.
It may be that the poet should have made his peace with Mercutio, and have appealed to his better nature. For Mercutio seems to be glad to cooperate with a poet. But he must be invited; otherwise, he is apt to show a streak of merry vindictiveness about the finished product. Poems are vulnerable enough at best. Bright reason mocks them like bright sun from a wintry sky. They are easily left naked to laughter when leaves fall in the garden and the cold winds come. Therefore, they need all the friends they can get, and Mercutio, who is an ally of reason and who himself is given to mocking laughter, is a good friend for a poem to have.”
Shakespeare is a great playwright—no one would argue with this. But will installing Mercutio in the shrubbery of Shelley’s poem improve Shelley’s poem? Is mocking laughter always closer to reason than sorrow? Do cold winds always produce laughter?
Warren has placed shame in the garden. He gives to Romanticism, in the form of a beautiful and magnificent lyric by Shelley, a designation, a false designation, and then, at some length, devalues that designation. Ransom did the same thing.
Poetry is only as good as our thoughts about it (Warren is right about one thing: poetry is “vulnerable”) What we think about something—for a minute—becomes the way we think about it for a hundred years.
What always matters is what the poem is doing and how the parts harmonize to do it. Poetry is not necessarily improved by adding the “merry vindictiveness” of “intellectually complicated form” as personified by a Mercutio hiding in the shrubbery. The critic should know that it all depends.
Mercutio will ruin a poem, even a poem by Robert Penn Warren (the only writer to win Pulitzers for poetry and fiction) and countless others. Are you Shakespeare? Are you writing a play? OK, maybe bring Mercutio in. As a supporting actor.
But don’t write cultural bromide as an advertised New Critic and pretend it is literary criticism as you claim the “intellectual” high ground with the installation of Mercutio into a Shelley poem.
Harmony is the soul of art. One either understands this or fails.
Romanticism—and Victorian poetry in its wake, was cast aside by Modernism in precisely the emotional and intellectual manner exhibited in the Robert Penn Warren essay just quoted. These were the men (Warren, Ransom, Allen Tate, WC Williams, Pound, together with the next generation led by Robert Lowell) who won the prizes, wrote the school textbooks, published the essays, commandeered the “school government ship” which invaded both city and suburb, where Edwin Arlington Robinson conversation languished quaintly in handsome and dead-quiet libraries. Ashbery studied Warren at Harvard. Ginsberg studied Warren at Columbia.
Mercutio, for a few exciting moments in the mid-20th century, did become Poetry.
But Modernism itself only seemed to triumph. It didn’t really. Byron was read less. But “old” Shakespeare proved popular—even ubiquitous—in college stage productions. Ransom, Warren, or Eliot and the next generation, John Berryman, for instance, would, as old men, read their poems on campus to medium sized audiences—and it was difficult to tell whether the undergraduates in the back were laughing at them or not.
Mercutio is a funny drink. It disables as much as it amuses.
And did modern poetry, in the end, become less sentimental than Shelley? Did modern poetry finally triumph, intellectually, because it wanted less to do with Shelley and Byron?
Not really. Not at all. Shelley seems art, not sentiment, when compared to many modern poems.
But let’s admit it. Shelley is sentimental, as Warren went out of his way, splendidly, to prove.
Byron encouraged the “blue ocean” to “roll,” and, according to the insouciant, modern, manner and common sense of John Ransom (b 1888), modern poetry should have nothing too much resembling the hyper-sentimentality of Byron.
But isn’t all poetry, finally, sentimental?
At least in the sense that poetry is “vulnerable,” as Robert Penn Warren so aptly described it? Therefore, as Warren put it, poetry needs the “wicked” Mercutio as a friend. It needs to listen to the old nurse and her wisdom, and listen to the beloved—whose scrutiny questions the metaphor of its vow. Yes, no doubt.
But unpack as many elements as you wish, it must all finally be rolled back into the dramatic product, or poem, and live or die as that singular and artificial thing—Shelley, Shakespeare or Ashbery—before a sentimental audience, living in a form which is finally a sentimental, vulnerable thing—because it was written by a human being, and not by a machine.
James Wright studied with John Ransom at Kenyon (where no doubt Byron was beaten out of him). Wright won the Pulitzer, as did his son, Franz. This is considered his most beloved poem. People were swooning and cooing over it on FB (“this is my favorite poem of all time!”) just the other day. It was published in 1961.
The Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
This is “pony love” as perhaps never experienced before—or since. And what can happen “just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” but that someone—who compares lonely and loving ponies to “wet swans”—will “suddenly” feel, were they to step out of their “body,” that they would “break into blossom?” You may like this. And it is perfectly fine if you do. Ransom, who taught Wright at Kenyon on the GI Bill, surely felt sincerely proud for his ex-student. James Wright must have felt deeply happy and proud that he wrote and published this poem.
You may consider yourself an arbiter of taste yourself.
But if you like this poem, and feel that, in its way, it is a perfection of the modern style, kindly do not call the Romantics—Shelley, Byron, Poe—or even those women Victorian poets who are forgotten, “sentimental” again.
Scarriet 