I happened to meet Michael Casey at the Adastra Press table during this year’s Massachusetts sponsored Salem Poetry Festival, May 6-8.
Shaded by Salem’s Peabody-Essex Museum on a gloriously hot and sunny day, he looked vaguely like an ex-boxer. I shyly gawked at the paperback books and also helped (the ones standing up were knocked over by the wind). I didn’t know who he was, but it turns out he stands precisely in the chronological middle of those awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize (1919 to present; Casey, 1972).
I purchased Casey’s book, Millrat, after I went to get some cash. When I returned, Casey was gone. I quote a couple of poems from Millrat here.
The poet Michael Casey belongs to the Golden age of the Prize, from the end of WW II to Watergate, when Wystan Auden, Dudley Fitts, and Stan Kunitz were the judges, and every other pick they made went on to a modicum of fame.
Robert Hass, in his 80s, picked by Kunitz the next year (73), is the oldest and most famous, now that Rich (50) Merwin, (51) and Ashbery (55) have moved on.
Contrast the Golden Age to the last 50 years—the Yale Younger Prize has not produced one subsequent poet of note. One of them, selected in 1999 by wilderness-loving Merwin (the only winner to become a judge) tragically disappeared in the wilderness in 2009.
Michael Casey, born in the beginning of the Yale Younger Golden Age, and one of its last winners, is a working-class poet from working-class Lowell, Massachusetts.
But don’t be confused. The manufacturing Lowell is not the same family of poets to which Robert Lowell belongs.
The Creative Writing Program Era and the Yale Younger Prize (the oldest annual literary contest in America) overlap.
In 1931, Yale Younger Judge William Alexander Percy—an aristocratic Southerner, and member of John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive Circle—chose Paul Engle—-of Iowa Writers Workshop fame, for the distinguished prize.
Robert Lowell was the first famous poet to teach at the Iowa Workshop under Paul Engle.
Supporting Engle and echoing Pound (who wrote poetry textbooks in middle age) Ransom wrote essays in the 30s asking that “new writing” and “scientific” criticism—credentialed in the universities—replace the old order of professors “watering their gardens” of Keats or Shakespeare or Plato while “amateurs” in newspapers reviewed books by younger poets. Getting new poetry into the universities seemed to be the goal.
The Boston Brahmin Robert Lowell’s successful career chronologically matches the Golden Age of the Yale Younger. Robert Lowell is related to the 19th century poet and abolitionist, James Russel Lowell, not the Lowell of the industrial revolution and Massachusetts town—where Michael Casey was raised.
Ashbery famously won the Yale Younger in 1955, as Auden, the judge, demanded Ashbery’s manuscript be brought to him when it didn’t make it through the first rounds.
Lowell’s “raw and cooked” distinction doesn’t apply to Ashbery’s work, which is neither raw nor cooked; “cooked, but cooked very quickly,” perhaps?
At the Adastra press table, with the kindly editor Gary Metras presiding, I was discussing Yale Younger winners with my new friend, Michael Casey—again, a poet I wasn’t familiar with—and when Ashbery’s name came up, Casey was quickly and quietly dismissive.
I’ve always been smitten by the wide view. As I try to take in the Yale Younger Prize history as a whole, I’m almost tempted to say that Michael Casey is the only Yale Younger winner who wrote the kind of conversational, accessible poetry non-poets can appreciate.
Is it possible? Of all those winners, only one poet represents the “Raw” school of Modern Poetry, the one which is so well known?
And I just happened to run into this poet last week?
How to characterize, in a few words, the Yale Younger “poet” over its roughly 100 year lifespan?
Definitely a show-off. Self-conscious, garrulous, self-assured, semi-Romantic but straining after the anti-lyrical, in a self-consciously modernist, baroque, fussy, studied manner.
Here’s a sample. George Starbuck was a director of the Iowa Workshop in the 60s. This poem is from the book which won the Prize in 1959. Note the appallingly school-boy Romanticism and the location, which happens to be the neighborhood of Robert Lowell (Commonwealth and Marlborough).
“Technologies”
On Commonwealth, on Marlborough, The gull beaks of magnolia were straining upward like the flocks harnessed by kings in storybooks who lusted for the moon.
Six days we mooned into each other’s eyes mythologies of doom and dawn, naked to the Atlantic sun, loving and loving, to and fro, on Commonwealth, on Marlborough, our whole half-hours.
And where our bloods crested we saw the bruised red buds tear loose the white impeded shapes of cries. And when our whitest hopes tore at the wind with wings, it seemed only a loony dream we dreamed.
Such heavy machination of cars and motels confronted love on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.
They do the tricks with rockets now, with methodologies of steel, with industry, or not at all, but so, sweet love, do these white trees that dare play out their lunacies for all they are, for all they know, on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.
The next year Alan Dugan, who settled in Massachusetts, won the prize (same judge, Dudley Fitts, born in Boston, attended Harvard) with a volume simply entitled Poems, which also won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Dugan won the prize in his late 30s. Starbuck had been 28. Dugan crushed it—many would agree his was the best Yale Younger book.
Michael Casey’s publisher bio mentions he read Dugan’s Poems while stationed in Vietnam.
Dugan is not plain-speaking, however. He’s no Michael Casey. Dugan belongs to the Yale Younger School, for better or for worse.
Here’s a poem by Michael Casey, who won no major prizes besides the Yale Younger:
“getting so”
it’s getting so you can’t drive a car on the streets these days without having some asshole run inta ya car denting it all over or like in my case driving along the highway and having a guard rail jump out in front of the car those fuckers are fast
Perhaps the most important thing to ask about a poem (and this truly makes a poem enjoyable and accessible to non-poets) is:
Does it have a beginning, a middle and an end?
The George Starbuck poem does not—its details could unfold in any order.
A popular and famous poem like “The Raven” does—an effect is wrought by an intruder. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Dante wrote a whole book (Vita Nuova) dividing his poems into parts. The trope goes back to Aristotle.
Casey’s poem has a beginning: complaining about other drivers hitting one’s car. A middle: the shift to the poet as the driver And the end: “and having/a guard rail jump out in front of the car/those fuckers are fast”
This singular characteristic of a poem (having a beginning, middle, and end) has nothing to do with form, style, or content—notice it unites two very different poets—the 19th century poet Edgar Allan Poe and the 20th century poet, Michael Casey.
The foreword to Alan Dugan’s Poems Seven, New And Complete Poetry is by Carl Phillips, a Yale Younger judge from 2011 to 2020. Phillips studied with Dugan and his introduction to his mentor’s “Complete Poetry” makes a case for poetry which doesn’t need a beginning, a middle, or an end—because the poet’s brutal, plain, honest, non-transcendent existence is everything. A rather odd piece of writing, Carl Phillips on Alan Dugan. The Eternal Present of the Modern Poem. Here is how it begins:
“The first time I ever heard Dugan read was in 1989, and it was also the first time I’d ever read my poetry in public—at the old Fire House in Wellfleet, where Dugan and all of us in his Castle Hill poetry workshop read together at the end of the summer. Dugan read a poem whose first lines are these: “After your first poetry reading/I shook hands with you/and got a hard-on. Thank you.” Six weeks earlier, I’d have been shocked. But by then, I’d learned already that—as a poet and as a teacher—Dugan was nothing if not direct: exactingly, and often disarmingly so.”
***
“Dugan’s commitment to truth and his refusal to adorn or shroud that truth in distracting ornament have been his most important lessons for me, even as they continue to be a necessary presence in contemporary American poetry.”
***
Of course it’s easy to say one stands for the “truth” against “ornament” (even if somewhat problematic when speaking of art) but I can’t help but observe that it’s precisely when we “adorn or shroud” that we create the conditions for poetry which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. (The “shrouding” of the truth could take place in the beginning, or it could take place at the end.)
Phillips, again:
“So much of poetry handles the world in one of two ways: there’s the flee-in-the-face-of-conundrum approach, known as ‘transcendent;’ and there’s the construct-your-own-alternative-world approach—I believe it too calls itself transcendent. Dugan works differently. As he says in ‘Against a Sickness: To the Female Double Principle God,’ ‘My visions/are not causal but final:/there’s no place to go/but on.’ For Dugan, existential angst is irrelevant—it’s all existence, nothing to hope for beyond, so no reason to rush toward that beyond, and no reason to despair as to what will happen later, because nothing will. His is a queerly, bracingly sobering sense of reality—in the spirit of Lucretius…”
***
“But if Lucretian, then also Whitmanian, a sheer revelry in the high and low, squalor and joy: sure, Dugan frequently starts at and responds to such classical forebears as Virgil, Heraclitus, Tyrtaeus, and Plutarch—but we also come up against Dynaflo, the reduction of Orpheus and Rilke to mere prigs, and the chance to understand the idea of God by becoming God, essentially, via masturbation, about which Dugan says (in ‘For Masturbation’) ‘THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, and if/it is a “terrible disgrace”/it is as I must will.” In the world we’ve come to know as Dugan’s Edge, all is flux, everything comes with its disorienting but finally illuminating flipside; the very wind that sweeps a lover’s hair has known the foul smell of the dead on a distant battlefield; a little girl’s response to being stripped for rape is a simple, comic exclamation of ‘Wow.'”
This is Carl Phillips, future Yale Younger Poet judge, speaking about his mentor Alan Dugan, Yale Younger Winner, in 2001.
Wow, indeed.
I’m sure the reasoning goes something like this: honestly accept the disgraceful and the grotesque—and then the deluded, fake, ‘transcendent’ is not necessary. If you don’t have the courage to embrace the unclean, any attempted ‘transcendence’ in your poetry merely indicates your lack of courage.
I get it. But I’m not ready to embrace this, and never mind on moral grounds, but because it feels simplistic. I sense it leads to poetry which is ‘too knowing’ and has no ‘beginning, middle, and end.’ The Dugan mind says, “I see all the shit. You can’t fool me.” The Dugan mind sees everything at once, the horror and the beauty, and in its genius refuses to discriminate—it finally sees everything as a whole, and this advantage is finally a disadvantage, when it comes to producing an aesthetic product. (If not a disadvantage when it comes to being human—but that’s for another discussion)
Perspective is everything in art, and perspective requires transcendence, if only as a ‘working-through,’ a movement from beginning to middle to end. This is what makes us vulnerable, hopeless, and yet hopeful (and perhaps humorous) human beings.
Look at the nuance in this Michael Casey poem; as simple as this poem is, it is cunningly simple—it has action, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and it nicely and clearly says what it doesn’t say. To me, this poem has ‘real life’ genius, as opposed to the towering, lonely genius of an Alan Dugan:
“resignation”
they don’t like my work here I’m quittin a friend of mine his father owns a gas station I can get a job there pumpin gas while I’m lookin for something better hey Walter catch this I’ll say and throw a hook at him when he throws it back I’ll say don’t you throw nothin at me fuck this place I’m leavin
Just as in the first Casey poem we looked at, where the ‘bad driver’ becomes the poet, the ‘bad work situation’ becomes the poet, who, ironically, will not leave, since Walter is his doppelganger. The poem has created ‘real life’ openings, precisely because of its honest transcendence. The poem has parts, which make sense, parts which have a real sequence, despite the poem’s apparent simplicity.
The George Starbuck poem I quoted is much closer to the Yale Younger Poet poem in its one-hundred year history, an important aspect of American contemporary poetry. Starbuck’s sensitive poem has no real beginning, middle, and end. It is too busy showing off, in a self-consciously modern-yet-romantic manner.
I do think Michael Casey is an exception—and deserves another look.
I’ll close by quoting Alan Dugan’s first poem from his 1960 Yale Younger winning book, startling in how much it encompasses, but notice how its “knowing” is all “one” in the “gravy” of the poet’s (brilliant) mind. It is a remarkable poem. It is hard to escape its sorrow. It represents something stunning in the modern canon. But there’s no Walter. Walter had to be sacrificed on the altar of those nameless “butchers” who “have washed up and left.”
“This Morning Here”
This is this morning: all the evils and glories of last night are gone except for their effects: the great world wars I and II, the great marriage of Edward the VII or VIII to Wallis Warfield Simpson and the rockets numbered like the Popes have incandesced in flight or broken on the moon: now the new day with its famous beauties to be seized at once has started and the clerks have swept the sidewalks to the curb, the glass doors are open, and the first customers walk up and down the supermarket alleys of their eyes to Muzak. Every item has been cut out of its nature, wrapped disguised as something else, and sold clean by fractions. Who can multiply and conquer by the Roman numbers? Lacking the Arab frenzy of the zero, they have obsolesced: the butchers have washed up and left after having killed and dressed the bodies of the lambs all night, and those who never have seen blood awake can drink it browned and call the past an unrepeatable mistake because this circus of their present is all gravy.
This almost needs no comment. The theme and the rhythms are uncanny, beautiful, sublime. I don’t know if it’s a perfect poem, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Shelley presents a singular picture with a rhythm urgent yet calm. This poem roams a bit, but, in its way, perhaps it is perfect. The speaker is implied, is missing, and wants to be known, but we don’t know her. Or maybe we do. It is us, wandering New York, today.
Few dare, and even fewer achieve, these days, a poem as formally powerful as this.
Parody, that is, sublimity seen in glimpses, is fairly common. Maybe 20% of poets can pull it off. But a serious work, profound throughout, like this one, is extremely rare.
The music reminds me of Auden. Not Shelley. Not quite that good. But in the same realm. Do poems get standing ovations?
Poems like this—it found its way to Facebook about 2 days ago and currently has 78 likes—need to be published and collected, reproduced and praised, that a renaissance in poetry (what are we afraid of?) might return.
The poet is Yana Djin.
Morning in New York
If the desert is amnesia, this city is a tomb. The stone, as if in a seizure, erupts from the earth’s womb.
Cinder, rock, scraps of metal strewn along the ridge. The D train with a rattle crosses the Manhattan Bridge.
Blueswoman sings a ballad with a voice rough and hoarse about some Southern harlot and Julliette-the-horse
Take the train to the water. Lose your thoughts, strip your mind. Not a thing you can alter. And the sun is blind.
Coney Island is bare. Bums and seagulls roam. Frozen Wonder Wheel stares like the ruins of Rome.
Buy the bums some booze, Give the seagulls wet bread. And feel love like Lazarus rise from the dead.
The late Harold Bloom, 25 years ago, was asked by David Lehman—who recently ‘liked’ one of my poems on FB—to compile a Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 — 1997 and Bloom complied, but his compilation completely omitted the 1996 Best American Poetry volume by the late lesbian poet, Adrienne Rich. Bloom wrote a scathing introduction saying political correctness was ruining poetry and destroying universities.
Bloom’s 10 year BAP anniversary anthology considered 10 volumes by these 10 guest editors: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Glűck, A. R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate, 1988 to 1997.
There are several stories here.
The headline grabber, obviously: Bloom snubbed every choice by Adrienne Rich (she did find a few good poems: Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada)—Rich, a distinguished poet who was awarded the Yale Younger Poet prize by king-maker W.H. Auden.
Bloom could have included one or two poems and moved on, but the most famous literary critic of his day decided to make a statement. Series editor Lehman suggested what he thought were worthy poems from 1996, but succumbed to Bloom’s editorial fiat. Lehman has turned out to be a wise editor for BAP. He doesn’t encourage controversy, but he doesn’t run from it, either.
Are you sitting down? Here is Bloom, from his introduction:
“That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this introduction, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish that I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint…”
“Sincerity, as the divine Oscar Wilde assured us, is not nearly enough to generate a poem. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.”
“[Literary] Criticism…is dying…replaced…by ‘cultural criticism,’ a would-be social science.”
“When I was a young teacher of poetry at Yale, the English Romantic poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, as well as Blake and Shelley, whose place in the canon I helped restore. On hundreds of campuses now, these poets have to share attention with the ‘women Romantic poets.'”
Bloom doesn’t help himself here. Why can’t women poets (or poets of color, etc) be studied, too? Poems ought to matter as much as poets—there is no such thing as a small group of poets—even if it’s the magnificent Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Blake—who wrote only perfect poems. Women writers sold as well as their male counterparts in the 19th century. If Shelley is being canceled, that’s one thing; to ostentatiously lock the clubhouse door—on some lesser known women poets (some of whom are worth reading)—seems a bit much.
“I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead.”
“Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets…but…the most betrayed…Whitman’s poetry does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more onanistic even than homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic.”
“Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. ‘We live in the mind,’ Stevens said, and our poetry is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson’s dialect of power:”
And here Bloom quotes a passage from Emerson’s “Experience” which takes no prisoners in its radical assertion that within the sanctity of the self, everything is allowed. Emerson: “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated…For there is no crime to the intellect.”
Whoa. Mr. Emerson. Are you really saying this?
But let us be alive to what Emerson (and Bloom, who astutely rode to profit two or three important ideas) is saying here: 1) Human beings are wicked 2) Poetry’s highest calling is to energize itself by both using and getting to the bottom of, human wickedness. Poetry is best when it is an uncompromising vessel for every kind of expression, encouraging a divine individuality of which the “good” and the “fit” and the “beautiful” have no necessary part (though they may). This echoes Plato’s embrace of “madness” as ultimately necessary for creativity (and love).
Poe thought Emerson, and broad, cultural, poetry formulas like this, crazy, recommending instead “method” in the hands of a calm practitioner—think of the “escape from personality” per Eliot. “Beauty” (non-violent madness) was necessary in poetry for Poe—“beauty” wasn’t just one arrow in the quiver; it was the arrow. Emerson, seen through the Poe lens, was hyperbolic and unrealistic, like an ugly guy trying to get laid, enforcing fantastic laws on the universe. One can see here the Poe/Emerson divide which was so important to Bloom (who also apparently thought of himself as an ugly guy trying to get laid). Bloom embraced Emerson-as-Faust—and had zero patience for Poe’s buzzkill.
Bloom couldn’t reconcile.
Back to Bloom’s introduction:
“Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader…”
The “solitary art” for the “solitary reader” recalls what Bloom just said above: his “onanistic” (it means masturbation) description of Whitman.
Bloom prefers the poetry of the private and squishy, objecting to broader political amorousness. The Yale professor is quite certain that concern for the “injured” belongs to him. Is he right?
“The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed.”
Bloom ends his introduction by quoting from “The Poet,” in which Emerson lauds “insanity,” “questionable facts,” “angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and…departure from routine.” According to Emerson, the best is when the poets, “liberating gods,” have it that “dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.”
The radical individualist will have his private, drunken, transcendent dream. This is the essence of Bloom and Emerson (kind of like geniuses on LSD). Here, then, is their democratic, demonic, elitism of lonely difficulty, where the morals of political correctness declaimed by those like Adrienne Rich are cast out as too “sincere” (Wilde).
Bloom is correct. One cannot have the wayward freedom of the private dream and moralizing politics at the same time; they are too antithetical.
But, in the end, there’s nothing really politically intransigent or personally bitter about this quarrel. (As far as I can tell, Rich never responded to Bloom’s attack.) It’s an academic disagreement only, except Bloom’s academy isn’t some 19th century prison: Bloom protests too much; his and Emerson’s pleas for “drunkenness” are more than satisfied in the Humanities, today—which is no longer a Latin-and-Greek, theological, boot camp. Bloom’s political beliefs (leftist, liberal) mirror Rich and the “Resenters”—who, according to Bloom, hate real poetry.
Adrienne Rich, in her introduction, lays out the method for her selections in the very first paragraph:
“This is a gathering of poems that one guest editor, reading through mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry, found especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread.” (Italics mine)
What could be more bland? “mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry…” It sounds quaint. Especially next to this by Bloom, which is how his introduction begins, and which made Rich smile, I’m sure:
“My epigraph [They have the numbers; we, the heights.] is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multi-culturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commisars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic.”
Wow. 25 years ago—this actually rang across the book marts and the halls of academe.
Bloom ends his first paragraph by defining his criterion for the 75 poems he chose (leaving out Rich’s selections):
“These pass my personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and profit.” (Italics mine)
Neither Bloom nor Rich is an Einstein. This is not Baudelaire. Or Edgar Poe. Or T.S. Eliot. This BAP battle has one professor imagining himself as a Spartan commander against another professor who thinks L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poems written by people of color would be an improvement for a Best American Poetry volume. (She writes “Language” with the stars. Do people still do that?)
Here’s Rich, again, from her introduction:
“We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall.”
What say you, commander?
Rich and Bloom are both Emersonian—so no sparks flew, or could fly. Rich’s hip, “living language” pastiche is just Waldo sounding a little more like Paul Simon.
Still, there is a gulf, and here it is:
Bloom wants to preside over the chaotic dream of poetry and be its psychiatrist/critic—the Resenters (they care about freedom, too) don’t want to give Bloom that power; he represents to them exactly what their politics-meddling-with-poetry represents to him; both sides are radicals who differ only where the limited authority should be placed; Bloom wants it placed in him—who will decide which difficult, radical-individual, dream is in fact a good poem; Rich wants authority situated in a set of politically enlightened principles under which poetry can aspire, but not compete.
The final consideration is: how are Bloom’s selections? In his introduction, Bloom names four “major” poets represented in his Best of 1988 to 1997 anthology: Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and May Swenson—who are no longer living, adding Ashbery and Ammons (then living) as worthy to be in their company.
But as Marjorie Perloff (she agreed with Bloom that Rich’s 1996 volume was aesthetically weak) pointed out (I paraphrase her) in her general response to Bloom in the Boston Review:
1) In his introduction, Bloom did not bring himself to mention any other poets in his Best anthology, focusing instead on Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Stevens, Hart Crane, and especially Emerson. (Bloom loves to quote the dead—who invariably make his points far better than he does.)
2) Bloom, like Rich, is mostly a culture critic, and therefore deserves blame for what he laments: the decline of hard-nosed, close-reading, aesthetics.
Two good points from Marjorie Perloff.
Bloom champions Ashbery—which would seem, at first blush, a little strange. Professor Bloom began his career defending Blake and Shelley; the traditional canon suits him, Bloom quotes Tennyson in his Best introduction as an example of beautiful poetry which transcends politics; Emerson, whom he adores, is always making easily understood (if sometimes snide and psychotic) points; and Shakespeare leads the Bloom parade—so what is it which attracts Bloom so much to this grinning, nonsensical, prose poetry, jokester, Ashbery? Isn’t Bloom afraid the Ashbery hipsters are laughing at him, and not with him?
Bloom was wise to include Ashbery in his canon.
First, Ashbery is apolitical. Bloom had to like that.
Second, Bloom’s avant-garde creds rose enormously by embracing the Harvard poet, who was liked by W.H. Auden. With Ashbery on his side, Bloom, from a distance at least, looks less like a dour, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy.
Third, Ashbery is never guilty of the dreaded “sincerity”—in his poems, John Ashbery, the real person, is always hiding. If you hide who you are, well of course you can never be sincere. Ashbery learned this hide-John-Ashbery trick from the beginning and stuck to it—in a steady, unassuming manner, to the end of his career.
Finally, Ashbery’s stream-of-conscious, meandering, prose, poetry, is rhapsodic rather than digressive. Especially in lengthier pieces, the line between rhapsodic (good) and digressive (bad) is very fine, indeed; to pull off the former takes a real, but difficult-to-define, skill.
If this is a legitimate poetic talent—I’ve put my finger on it precisely with these two opposite terms (rhapsodic, digressive) which nevertheless hint at being one—then here is where the whole modern poetry experiment (dubious everywhere else) succeeds: in the strange rhapsody of Ashbery.
We can see this quality clearly in one of Ashbery’s shorter poems, selected by Bloom:
The Problem Of Anxiety
Fifty years have passed since I started living in those dark towns I was telling you about. Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out how to get from the post office to the swings in the park. Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction, and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.
Suppose this poem were about you—would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s, all in some book, it seems. For you I’ve saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches, and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
This might be the best poem in the whole volume, but I also love “litany” by Carolyn Creeden, “Histoire” by Harry Matthews, “Manifest Destiny” by Jorie Graham, “Prophecy” by Donald Hall, “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “Morning, Noon, and Night” by Mark Strand, “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch, and “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” by Galway Kinnell.
There is something to be said for the compilers art, for these extraordinary poems come from poets who also have published (never mind written) poems which are less than good.
The vanity of poets (who think all their poems are good) will get in the way of truly good poems, such that it may be said the honest anthologist is really the one person to whom poetry gives itself.
One “major” poet of Bloom’s, who to this author is overrated, is Ammons—his long poem included, “Garbage,” feels digressive, not rhapsodic. The reason? It’s sincere (Oscar Wilde—and Bloom agreeing with him—get this right).
From “Garbage:”
…(I hope) to live from now on on in elegance and simplicity—
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed)
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, .65$ lb. dry: they have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours—but they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more”…
This is too sincere by half. Ammons is sharing. This is not rhapsodic. It’s digression.
Why Bloom could not tell the difference I am not really sure. But since Bloom was not a poet himself, and found no elegance except in quoting others—either the dead, or his colleague W. Jackson Bate, from whom he lifted his anxiety of influence theory—perhaps the Yale professor was finally an emotional, miserable, copying machine?
If we don’t separate out Ammons, we can’t see Ashbery clearly. The rhapsody of Ashbery and the digression of Ammons get confused. Aesthetics is blurry without the surgeon’s knife. Casual readers don’t get together and consult each other. Poems don’t talk. The Critic is necessary.
In a bit of irony, I am going to quote a definition of poetry from the 19th century, which answers to that rhapsody we sometimes get from Ashbery, a definition which Edgar Poe, of all people, said of it that this definition of poetry “embodies the sole true definition of what has been a thousand times erroneously defined.”
Here is the definition. It happens to likewise come from an anthologist in a preface to a poetry anthology:
“He who looks on Lake George, or sees the sun rise on Mackinaw, or listens to the grand music of a storm, is divested, certainly, for a time, of a portion of the alloy of his nature. The elements of power in all sublime sights and heavenly harmonies, should live in the poet’s song, to which they can be transferred only by him who possesses the creative faculty. The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous divine suasion, is the means through which the human character is purified and elevated. The creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, ‘in words that move in metrical array,’ is poetry.”
The author of this poetry definition is a man who called Whitman’s poetry “filth” and betrayed his friend, Edgar Poe.
Rufus Griswold.
If you don’t think the lyric Ashbery poem quoted above is sublime in the way Griswold describes, what do you think the “dark towns” are meant to invoke, or the unseen “you,” and what do you think the “eye” represents? As for “metrical array,” it is there, too: spondees pair up brilliantly with anapests in Ashbery’s sonnet-like work.
Well this is nuts. Bloom and Griswold, (along with Emerson) will long be remembered as deeply hostile to Poe. But here is Bloom, with the help of Griswold (and Poe nodding in agreement) hoisting Ashbery high over Adrienne Rich, guest editor of BAP 1996—who did not include Ashbery, or Ammons in her selections. But what I have outlined is really no crazier than anything poetry has given us since America became a nation (one which Rich did not like), including Spartan commander Bloom (from the “heights”) glowering down at professor Rich, the “people’s” 1996 BAP guest editor.
Are all the poems in the 1996 BAP, Rich, ed. inferior to those in the Best of BAP 1988-1997, Bloom, ed.? It would make things easier for critics if it were true. Suffice it to say there are poems Bloom chose from the first 10 volumes—he tended to choose longer poems (going for “difficulty,” I imagine)—which, like “Garbage” by Ammons, have their moments, but which ultimately strike me as pedantic, digressive and yawn-producing (though perhaps this merely indicates I’m not able to appreciate poetry on the “heights.”)
I think it’s safe to say that poems (which are not book-length epics) should be good to us immediately—we shouldn’t need to read a poem on and on for a “story” to develop.
Aesthetics should hit us in the face, and then, and only then, can the story “develop” in a way that pleases us.
Or, how about this? Arresting start, turn, great end: the sonnet.
There’s not much in the way of sonnet-like poems in these competing BAP volumes—except the Ashbery poem quoted (the “Naw” is the turn) from Bloom’s selection. “Like Most Revelations” by Richard Howard (16 lines) is admirable, but the turns are multiple and a little abstract. Richard Howard might be called Oscar Wilde-lite; he had some of the manner but not all of the wit of the great Wilde; unfortunately for 20th century poetry, there is not so much a difference—as the 20th century (great in the horrors of war, certainly) holds its own, but is mostly the 19th century—watered down.
Wouldn’t that be something if the “champion” in this instance were a traditional form poem—by John Ashbery? (Though the wise money is on Kinnell or Carolyn Creedon—stunning poems, really.)
Adrienne Rich’s 1996 volume avoids what Rich explicitly doesn’t like: “the columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line,” like the poem by W. S. Merwin, “Lament for the Makers” which Richchose. Or Ammons, which she did not. Her selections, compared to Bloom’s, are shorter, edgier, conversational, graffiti-like, shape-y, too consciously attempting not to be digressive, perhaps.
Rich or Bloom? Academic brevity or academic length. It’s basically Emerson, either way.
To judge 100 years of prize-winning poetry is both a challenge and an illumination—the challenge is that in 100 years our idea of poetry has changed.
The landmark year of Modernism, 1922—when The Waste Land and Ulysses were published—saw the first official Pulitzer in Poetry awarded to the Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, a retiring, self-published, versifier who got lucky when a friend showed his book to the president of the United States (Teddy Roosevelt)—Robinson the very opposite of Pound and his manifesto-band of revolutionary opportunists.
Pound and his clique were not just for the “new;” they resented Millay, Frost, Robinson, and poets who rhymed, sold lots of books, and won Pulitzers. Hugh Kenner, author of The Pound Era, had unkind things to say about Millay’s work. It was no secret that American poetry was split in two in the early part of the 20th century—and the two groups did not like each other. Robert Hillyer, a Harvard professor who won the Pulitzer in 1934 and 15 years later objected strenuously to Pound’s Bollingen Prize award, would leave the room if Pound or Eliot came up in conversation.
For years, the Pulitzer poetry award was administered by a committee of three. The chair for years was Wilbur Cross, a literary critic, Yale alum and Connecticut governor in the 1930s. Cross was on the jury until 1947, when Robert Lowell was awarded the prize by Cross, Henry S. Canby, and Louis Untermeyer. The next year Alfred Kreymborg joined the group, and he, Canby, and Untermeyer gave the Pulitzer to Auden.
The Dial magazine Prize (the revived journal lasted only for the decade of the 1920s) was, as any objective person should be able to ascertain, a circle-jerk of poet-comrades awarding each other prizes. Prize winners included Williams, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Marianne Moore—who replaced Scofield Thayer (a wealthy prep-school chum of Eliot’s) as Dial editor in 1926. Cummings eloped with Thayer’s wife at this time, with the latter’s approval, as the nephew of Casey At the Bat author, Ernest Thayer, was later hospitalized for mental instability.
No judging committee is going to be perfect, but the early years of the poetry Pulitzer judging seemed to get it right: don’t let poets award the prize; let a certain objective distance prevail—let judges be those who write opera librettos or teach philosophy, not poets seeking the prize itself. By the 1960s, poets (often winners of the prize) became judges. Poet-judging was already a thing in the 1930s, (there seemed to be a group centered around the long-defunct Saturday Review, a clique-ish center of gravity, if you will) but it was rare.
Po-biz has long since been taken over by the poets. Frost served on the jury once, in the 1930s. Leonard Bacon served on the jury for four years (’36—’39), and then won in 1941. Stephen Vincent Benet served on the jury briefly, and then won. If poets are good, one doesn’t resent this so much. No judging apparatus is air-tight. But it seems a no-brainer: let judges be credentialed in arts and letters, not to a circle of prize-desiring poets.
By the middle of the century, the gap between the two poetry camps (populist and modernist) had almost closed—the skirmish around Pound’s Bollingen Prize in 1949 was the last battle. It is difficult to describe the resulting one camp, except that it was vaguely anti-Romantic. I don’t believe it had anything to do with politics, since Pound was celebrated by Marxists; I think it was just a natural consolidation of friendly power. The cool kids (however that’s defined) prevailed—the outsiders were never quite sure what the favored and consolidating “cool” was, which is why they were outsiders, looking on with a mixture of indignation, admiration, jealousy, and puzzlement.
In the 21st century, the white avant-garde began to be replaced by identity politics, but Romanticism was still a thing of the past. A consolidation was happening within a consolidation. Expressive skill continued to take a back seat to the thing expressed.
The challenge of reconciliation still existed in the 1920s—Edwin Arlington Robinson or T.S. Eliot? Edna Millay or WC Williams? We feel a bit lost in the duality—which side do we like? It’s a challenge.
But as one reads the poets of the 1920s, aware of the split, and thinks about the Pulitzer’s 100 year history, there’s also illumination.
We tend to be binary—we cheer for one side over the other—and in our partisanship we exaggerate differences. As one reads E A Robinson, Edna Millay Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell, the Pulitzer winners of the 20s, poets eventually, and pretty much today, left behind during the Long March of Modernism’s revolution, one cannot help but notice in these populists an obsession with the past, with everything old—and this characterizes the Modernist revolutionaries, as well: for all their “modernism,” Pound and Eliot, too, wore hats and cloaks of the bygone.
As Randall Jarrell said: aren’t we all Romantics, really?
Both camps embraced the past seamlessly in their way: the Modernists attempted to write in a classic manner (stiff, humorless), while the early 20th Century school engaged the old in modes playful, fanciful, passionate—knowingly or unknowingly, it didn’t really matter; they did so energetically. The irony is that Modernist “revolutionaries” were rather staid, by comparison, bogged down by bullet-point, manifesto-ist, decrees.
Just to give a brief example—here’s a passage from Amy Lowell’s prize-winning book, What’s O’clock:
Hot with oranges and purples, In a flowing robe of a marigold colour, He sweeps over September spaces. Scheherezade, do you hear him, And the clang of his scimitar knocking on the gates? The tawny glitter of his turban, Is it not dazzling — With the safron jewel set like a sun-flower in the midst? The brown of his face! Aye, the brown like the heart of a sun-flower.
Whatever can be said of this passage, it is colorful, it has swagger, even as we wonder, wouldn’t “flowing robe of marigold” be better than “flowing robe of a marigold color?”
Mundane things, like syntax and grammar, which the avant-garde dismisses as shallow, inhibiting, or old, will contribute to the quality of poetry forever—whether our meta-theoretical brains like it or not.
(T.S. Eliot, the best of the Modernists, plain knew how to write. He had Harvard. He had grammar—though you don’t necessarily need the Harvard for the grammar. Harvard, most importantly, quickly became the social meeting spot for the anti-Romantic “new,” whether you were Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, or Wallace Stevens.)
Obviously, the following colorful poem is not better than Amy Lowell, but the tone is different—there is nothing “revolutionary” here; the fancy and the expansive have simply been set aside for a boiled-down, self-conscious, lecture:
“So much depends on the red wheel barrow…the white chickens…”
The Modernist poets wanted to ‘get things right’ in a narrower, more serious manner—and this is why they kept manifestos. The Populists (Millay sold 10,000 books for every one by Pound or Williams) were actually more experimental, more imaginative, and took more risks. Which means, yes, some of them did write poems which today make us wince. The Populists were more apt to be zany, to be ridiculous, to be odd, to take a subject and look at it in a bizarre way. They were out to please, without feeling they had to obey some revolutionary decree.
In one of Robert Frost’s four Pulitzer-winning volumes, there is a poem about a girl named “Maple”—those who went to school with the girl insisted it was “Mable.” No, Frost assures us, it was “Maple.” And Frost elaborates in one of his “story” poems.
Maple vs. Mable. This is unusual, bizarre, crazy—crazier than the Modernists, who actually took themselves far more seriously—and took fewer risks and in fact had less fun.
Poetry, the Modernists thought, needed to be serious and tweedy, not a fanciful romp—and this, as it turned out, in a crazy historical twist of fate, worked better in the university—and this is where the revolutionary Modernists finally won—in the ivory tower; they got into textbooks, initially published by the New Critics, anti-Romantics, who brilliantly played the game of Traditionalists who got themselves (the Modernists) in.
The Populists were more apt to write (why not?) like a 17th century bard and occasionally hit one out of the park (think of Millay’s “What Lips These Lips Have Kissed”). Robert Frost, Edna Millay, and Amy Lowell sometimes rhymed and sometimes did not (and come to think of it, T.S. Eliot, the best Modernist, did this as well). Edwin Arlington Robinson made a humorous retort when asked why he didn’t write free verse: “I’m bad enough as it is.” There is something rather puritan, it seems to me, about the narrow ones, frowning in the corner, who never rhyme. You can do all kinds of wonderful things in poetry—and rhyme, as well. But if, on principle, you don’t rhyme—is this really broadening, novel, imaginative, or revolutionary? And how did it become to be thought of as so?
The answer has already been alluded to—rhyme sold books, especially when a writer like Millay (who also had a sexy, rock-star persona) could rhyme almost as skillfully as Shakespeare—could, on occasion at least, pull it off. But the gold mine of getting onto a university syllabus required mining of a special sort:
First, we can’t keep just teaching Shakespeare (and writers like Millay writing sonnets like Shakespeare) forever, can we?
Second, since the establishment pushes for scholarly historical phases of art, it is only natural that we begin to teach those “of their time period,” i.e., the “Modernists.”
Third, is a sexy best-seller by the terribly loose Millay the best thing for serious study in the university? The Populists in the 20s featured lots of rhyming women. The prominent female in the Modernist club was the dour, buttoned-up, anti-Romantic, Miss Marianne Moore. Ironically, free verse was associated with free love. Neither side was necessarily staid. But the Modernists, led by the melancholy T.S. Eliot, seemed more fit for the university.
The generally neo-classical stiffness of the Moderns appealed to educators and deans, at last. The Populists sold books, but when did a “best-seller” ever appeal to a scholarly mind?
I’m going to assign four phases to the poetry Pulitzer history.
The first phase might be called the Wilbur Cross phase, when a Yale scholar and Democrat Governor of Connecticut who gave his name to the Wilbur Cross Parkway led the jury until 1946—when winners were poets like Edna Millay, Amy Lowell, Leonora Speyer (very good, utterly forgotten), George Dillon, Archibald MacLeish, and Audrey Wurdemann (another good poet and now ignored).
The second phase should be called the Alfred Kreymborg phase, a modernist-cooling-into conservatism judge who ruled the jury from 1947 (a young Robert Lowell won) to 1959—when Stanley Kunitz won.
Richard Wilbur (1957) and Kunitz comprised the two-man jury which chose Louis Simpson in 1963 and by now we are in the third phase, which could be called the Stanley Kunitz phase—prize-winning, establishment poets choosing prize-winning, establishment poets. As poetry sold less, it became necessary for poets to breathe “establishment” air. Kreymborg was on the jury one more time—in 1961, when he chose (along with Louis Untermeyer) the now forgotten Phyllis McGinley. The 1967 judges who picked Anne Sexton were Pulitzer prize poets, too: Richard Eberhart, Phyllis McGinley, and Louis Simpson.
The fourth phase begins with Vijay Seshadri winning in 2014—this might be called the Marilyn Chin phase (the latest Jury Chair).
The third phase is a long one, the consolidation of the Modernist hegemony, taking us through Ashbery winning in 1976, Charles Simic in 1990, C.K. Williams in 2000, to Sharon Olds’ win in 2013. We might also call the Kunitz phase the Wright phase: James Wright (1972), Charles Wright (1998), and Franz Wright (2004).
The fourth phase winners are: Seshadri, Greg Pardlo, Peter Balakian, Tyehimba Jess, Frank Bidart, Forrest Gander, Jericho Brown, and Natalie Diaz. Is the fourth phase really just an extension of the third phase? Perhaps.
Vijay Seshadri has a poem which ends with Al Green singing a Bee Gees song. If the music of the Bee Gees or Al Green appeal to you at all, you should find yourself pulled out of the poem (“Bright Copper Kettles”) because let’s face it, prose poets, who work in that familiar prose-poem-template-of-no-particular voice-or-personality—and are neither comics nor composers, and who are not Edna St. Vincent Millay—cannot possibly compete with popular culture (which is probably why, as modern poetry gradually turned into prose, which it mostly is now, poets felt the overwhelming need to professionally bond together in the MFA, award-giving hive, to protect each other from anything which might possibly resemble mass culture—ostentatious rhyme, ostentatious music, ostentatious comedy, sweeping themes, memorable speech.
The monotony of the prose-poem template is perhaps the longest cloud in the history of rapid-fire modernism, and lours over us—despite the wide and varied experience of the poet, or their advanced vocabulary—and it is the very fact of their immense experience and vocabulary which is partly to blame, since a host of sights and sounds observed with loving intelligence is a nullity—when it comes to poetry. The sights and sounds have to be the poem’s. There are limits to what words can describe. If the poet has twelve brothers, if the poet drinks in a bar, if the poet observes the wind’s behavior on a windy day, the translation of these events into words by an observant and intelligent person has absolutely nothing to do with poetry—if that person is not writing as a skilled writer of—poetry. He can reference all the pop songs and dances and memories of dad and world events he wants.
Enough editorializing on truism. The list, please.
(A note: Some won the award more than once, some won for a first book, some for a Collected—all are ranked as poets, but the work that actually won is taken into account, as well.)
The Pulitzer Prize Winning Poets, Ranked, From Best to Worst:
One Robert Hillyer 1934 He vigorously protested Pound’s post-treason Bollingen. Are you shocked he is number one? This owes mostly to the hearsay of poetic reputation. A Harvard prof who wrote like Shelley. Here’s 3 stanzas to give you an idea, from the poem, “Arabesque” published in Poetry magazine, August, 1924:
Rejected by a heliotrope, The drunken butterfly has sworn To hang himself with cobweb rope From the black hawthorn.
The ocean floor is not more still— That moonstone half suffused with green; The sunlight pours forth from hill to hill, Shadow between.
*
Death, not yet. The fountain has not sung enough. One other afternoon, A few more hours. Then, when the sun has set, A few more hours of moon In other gardens, other flowers.
Two Edna Millay 1923 She threw herself into song—and became a rock star. Her sonnets are some of the best of all time. She took song-risks. Failed a lot, but who cares? She doesn’t need to quote the Bee Gees in her poems. She is the Bee Gees.
Three Robert Frost 1924, 1931, 1937, 1943 He was a chatter-box. Sometimes didn’t know when to shut up. He actually did what Wordsworth recommended—blended poetry and speech. As if this means anything. Does it?
Four Edward Arlington Robinson 1922, 1925, 1928 Not since Poe and Longfellow dominated the 1840s were there two poets like Robinson and Millay who owned the 1920s. The public will be pleased by the effusions of whatever strikes its fancy without learned encouragement. The profound which manages to please the public is in danger of being underestimated. Robinson is the real deal. He avoids the fruitless amateur descriptions of trees and such—his poetry speaks.
Five James Tate 1992 Of all the free verse poets, who wrote poems in paragraphs, making no pretense to form whatsoever, he is the one who is probably the most amusing and thoughtful. His Selected Poems won.
Six Howard Nemerov 1978 The oil crisis, disco, the collapse of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But here came Nemerov’s sane, polished, witty, Collected Poems to save us. Humorous/profound in a folksy manner such as we get from this WW II poet makes the rebellious/avant-garde uncomfortable. When you are funny, no one takes your cynicism seriously—and then no one takes you seriously at all. This is what happens to poets, like Nemerov, with range. He also had the audacity to have a good formalist ear. We prefer the tragic poets who have no range at all. In another hundred years, this choice will perhaps make more sense.
Seven Archibald MacLeish 1933, 1953 Won the Pulitzer the second time for his Collected. A poet’s poet. Not as funny as Nemerov—he took himself a bit too seriously, but he was of that time.
Eight Richard Wilbur 1957, 1989 This formalist dynamo did not always match his skills with great subjects—his most famous poem is about laundry (comparing it to angels) but he has a great poem about a fountain. One is always listening for a wrong step—so delicately precise he is—and so you hold your breath when you read him, making your way delicately through the formal delights.
Nine James Merrill 1977 The first part of his Ouija Board epic won the prize—how to tell the elegant Merrill from the scholarly Richard Howard? Merrill is a bit more metrically precise, a bit easier to read. Howard has more philosophical heft.
Ten Leonard Bacon 1941 Writes like Byron. His work is hard to find. Get it. It will be worth something one day.
Just to give you an idea, a few excerpts from his previous work (damn if I can find the book that won):
In short he was the very symbol of The second nature of free verse—free love.
Still polyphonic prose is simply—prose. Free verse is but the shadow of a song, Though sham sham sham and pose repose on pose, Though Greenwich Village pillage still in gutters, Though Arensburg believe what Kreymborg utters.
She beat her bosom, which appeared to be Flat as the level of democracy.
Eleven W.H. Auden 1948 Major formalist poet who was born in England. came to America in 1940 and won the U.S. award with an unrhymed tetrameter narrative poem about barflies in New York called The Age of Anxiety. Not his best but still Auden.
Twelve Donald Justice 1980 Observant, emotionally intelligent, knew how to write the lyric poem.
Thirteen Sylvia Plath 1982 Her life and work are so intertwined, one might say the critic has an impossible task. The New Critics would say, “delete the life!” But as we examine the flaky parts of the poem, all the competing ironies and resonances, we find “the life” in the poem, its energetic source; we cannot delete the poet’s life—its energies, its content, from the poem. Not the famed life, the life.
Fourteen Theodore Roethke 1954 He was very much like a mad, 19th century, English, poet. He ranks high because 19th century England wrote better poetry than 20th century America.
Fifteen Elizabeth Bishop 1956 Her reputation continued to grow as the century progressed and now I imagine it’s as high as it can go. If you got tired of Moore, you could read Bishop (Millay was not modern enough, Parker too dramatic, Teasdale too sad.) I imagine she took a secret delight in being able to write a better “Robert Lowell poem” than her friend Robert Lowell—a poem that was finally updated Wordsworth.
Sixteen John Berryman 1954 Won for Dream Songs—they were certainly uneven and well, crazy. I wonder if we’ll look back some day at 20th century American poetry and see its lunacy? Not as in: good art-crazy, but as in: “oh my God that was crazy.”
Seventeen Leonora Speyer 1927 We choose the best by one thing: their best poems, don’t we? And that makes nearly everyone who is not an epic poet famous (if they are lucky) for a handful of poems, sometimes one. Here’s one of hers I like—though I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic—called “Ascent:”
Mountains take too much time. Start at the top and climb.
Eighteen Stephen Dunn 2001 If you’re going to write free verse and you’re not an Imagist, it doesn’t hurt to be gossipy and poignant—a bartender Socrates.
Nineteen Mark Van Doren. 1940 He wrote lovely, slightly mystical lyrics. Also taught Allen Ginsberg at Columbia.
Twenty Richard Howard 1970 Very much a student of poetry—so absorbed in it, he wrote it almost as if it belonged to a different medium.
Twenty One Wallace Stevens 1955 Overrated, in my opinion. He seems quite consciously to be pulling our leg. I don’t care what Helen Vendler says. Does anyone else think of him as rather a joke? He did have range—though most of what he tried I didn’t like. But he’s still #21. He ought to be happy.
Twenty Two Amy Lowell 1926 Won an Imagist pissing contest with Pound—he was a mere scholar; she was a Sappho. See: “The Letter,” “Venus Transiens,” “The Garden by Moonlight,” “The Taxi,” and her famous “Patterns.” The pity is that she was the one who died early (1925)—rather than him.
Twenty Three William Rose Benet 1942 The Benets (the two brothers who won the prize—Stephen for a Civil War epic, William for an epic on his life of four marriages, including one with the Populist, Anne Sexton-lite poet, Eleanore Wylie). What do you say about the Benets? William’s verse had more energy.
Twenty Four Sharon Olds 2013 finally joined the Pulitzer club with her break-up book, Stag’s Leap—not at all her best work. She made a name for herself by being racy (though she was always more than that) and the Pulitzer for a very long time imagined itself to be rather classy: Robert Penn Warren, not Charles Bukowski. Stripped of her sex-partner, she gained a prize.
Twenty Five Galway Kinnnell 1983 He won for his Selected, before he wrote, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.” More patience, Pulitzer, more patience.
Twenty Six Audrey Wurdermann 1935 Brief bios tell she was the great-great-grandaughter of Shelley. I would love to hear the story—none of Shelley’s known heirs grew to adulthood. She was only 24 when she won for her lyric songs. What do you think of this one:
Persephone
When she first came there, Pluto wept, Streaking cinders down his face, While she competently slept In her alloted place. She catalogued her little hells, Cupboarded the fires, And placed in tabulated wells Old lost desires. She made his Lordship stoop to gather Ashes from the floor; She regulated stormy weather, And polished Hades’ door. The Devil was unhappy in Such cleanliness and space. She said it was a mortal sin, The way he’d kept the place! Now, after several million years, (For time can reconcile), He tip-toes with quite human fears About their domicile.
Twenty Seven Carl Dennis 2002 Nimble rhetorician. His work has a wondering-out loud, Billy Collins feel—but a little more respectable. Don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Twenty Eight Anne Sexton 1967 She won for Live or Die, poems from the early 60s, a housewife Robert Lowell—but with bursts of Dionsyian frenzy. She ought to be ranked higher, but the pain is too great. She out-Plaths Plath. Remember this from her?
from “Consorting With Angels”
I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the pots *
O daughters of Jerusalem, the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful. I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I’m all one skin like a fish. I’m no more a woman than Christ was a man.
Twenty Nine Richard Eberhart 1966 The groundhog poem. He lived to be very, very, old.
Thirty Robert Penn Warren 1958, 1979 A prize machine, he belonged to the Fugitives, the Southern Agrarians, and co-wrote Understanding Poetry, the New Critics textbook, a tome of many editions mid-century which made it official: WC Williams yea, Poe nay.
Thirty One John Ashbery 1976 Anyone can rhyme, and now, thanks to Ashbery, anyone can write poetry.
Thirty Two Anthony Hecht 1968 “The Dover Bitch” wins the Pulitzer Prize!
Thirty Three Stanley Kunitz 1959 His poems stake out a sentimental pitch and then retreat, ashamed for doing so. I love him and can’t stand him.
Thirty Four Robert Lowell 1947, 1974 There’s something show-offy about him. Always seemed too prog-rock, not rock enough for my taste. I’ll admit I thought the Lowell name opened doors, and found it strange that he left Harvard for New Critic-dom in Tennessee. A Fugitive poet was the family psychiatrist. The first Big Star Writing Program prof (Iowa, Boston U.), his early promise, the idea of his greatness, didn’t come to fruition.
Thirty Five W.S. Merwin 1971, 2009 Has that lack of punctuation poignancy which floats off to somewhere else, allowing nothing very important to be finally said, and if this is what poetry finally is, damn he’s good.
Thirty Six Robert Hass 2008 He perfected that middle period free verse ability to ironically lecture while invoking the sensual.
Thirty Seven Natasha Tretheway 2007 Her poetry snaps and zings as good poetry should. She’s underrated. Her lyricism has force.
Thirty Eight Louis Simpson 1964 O the contemplative wisdom in the darkness! His work seems a little plainer and duller now than I remembered it. Some poetry has a way of impressing us more in our youth when professors-as-human hold more sway.
Thirty Nine Louise Gluck 1993 I must admit she completely bored me at first. She seemed emotionally distant in her poems and I read her that way, and so I fell asleep to what she was doing.
Forty Gwendolyn Brooks 1950 “We die soon.”
Forty One Carl Sandburg 1951 He really did write a lot of bad poems. Maybe folk-singers do that.
Forty Two George Dillon 1932 One of Millay’s boyfriends. Poetry magazine editor—while serving in WW II. Here’s his “Beauty Intolerable:”
Finding her body woven As if of flame and snow, I thought: however often My pulses cease to go, Whipped by whatever pain Age or disease appoint, I shall not be again So jarred in every joint, So mute, amazed and taut, And winded of my breath,
Beauty being at my throat More savagely than death.
Forty Three Stephen Vincent Benet 1929, 1944 The Civil War epic! He received his second award posthumously. He was also a well-known fiction writer.
Forty Four Phyllis McGinley 1961 A formalist housewife poet. Made the cover of Time in 1965.
Forty Five Natalie Diaz 2021 The latest winner. She played professional basketball before earning her MFA. “It Was the Animals” is a brilliant poem.
Forty Six Peter Viereck 1949 He dared to invoke old, swooning themes in rhyme. My God, it was 1949! I guess the free verse revolution hadn’t happened yet. His poem, “Again, Again!” sounds like a pop song. Here’s how it begins and ends:
Who here’s afraid to gawk at lilacs? Who won’t stand up and praise the moon? Who doubts that skies still ache for skylarks And waves are lace upon the dune?
*
I’ll see. I’ll say. I’ll find the word. All earth must lilt, then, willy-nilly And vibrate one rich triple-chord Of August, wine, and waterlily.
Billy Collins sounds bad ass compared to this. I still like it, though. I’m not afraid to praise the moon. It’s difficult to understand that when poetry rejects—in principle—whatever Viereck is doing here: 1649, 1949, 2021, it doesn’t matter, options don’t increase; they diminish.
Forty Seven Alan Dugan 1962 Who are these poets who feel so damn sorry for themselves, writing spare little poems in diners and used clothing shops? Hey don’t knock it. Sylvia Plath was dying and he was winning a Pulitzer prize.
Forty Eight Charles Wright 1998 Almost won in 1982 but was beaten by Plath’s posthumous Collected. His winning volume has that resigned, bird-watching, lawn-sprinkler, reality which is perfectly good even as it bores us to tears. “If there’s nothing going on,/there’s no reason to make it up.” Yeah, I guess.
Forty Nine Kay Ryan 2011 Brevity is the soul of wit, not poetry. She has an Emily Dickinson quality, but much drier. The idea of her greatness, but in fact, not. Occasionally good.
Fifty Paul Muldoon 2003 Seamus Heaney-lite, or maybe closer to Ted Hughes-lite. Whimsical, with an edge.
Fifty One Tyehimba Jess 2017 Born in Detroit, a Slam poet who received his MFA at NYU. “a woman birthed him/back whole again.” He knows how to end poems. Many good poets don’t know how to do that.
Fifty Two W.D. Snodgrass 1960 Confessional Poetry. What was “confessional,” anyway? What did it confess? Snodgrass went through a divorce as he earned his MFA at Iowa.
Fifty Three Yusef Komunyakaa 1994 One of America’s great tragic poets.
Fifty Four Rita Dove 1987 Her winning book is about her maternal grandparents. She responded with great dignity when her anthology of 20th century poetry was attacked from respectable academic and avant-garde quarters for filling it with certain types of poets. Her poetry celebrates affection.
Fifty Five Marianne Moore 1952 She was not only didactic at times, but she explicitly warned us away from beauty in the old high sense. Sorry, no.
Fifty Six James Schuyler 1981 You cannot totally hate poetry when at least a friendly, observant, personality shows through.
Fifty Seven Gregory Pardlo 2015 You can say a lot of things in prose poetry. I love this: “She makes a jewelry of herself and garlands/the ground with shadows.”
Fifty Eight Philip Levine 1995 Won for his book The Simple Truth. Run-on prose lines; breathless sameness to his poetry. A Hemingway plain-speaking tone imprisoned in pseudo-lyric form.
Fifty Nine Jericho Brown 2020 Influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes.. He’s director of the Creative Writing program at Emory.
Sixty Philip Schultz 2008 Shared his win with Hass. Confessional—the Stanley Kunitz school.
Sixty One Jorie Graham 1996 She won for later work that was pedantic—poison to her mystical flair. Early Graham was better.
Sixty Two Marya Zaturenska 1938 Her verses are below the quality of what I expect to see from that time; somewhat heavy-handed, but they certainly have their moments.
Sixty Three Mary Oliver. 1984 The first member of the ‘Feel-Good School.’ It certainly has worth (and may even win the day for some) even if hers is the shadow of poetry, the shadow of what might be called nature poetry (which is impossible anyway—“I think I will never see…”).
Sixty Four Robert Coffin 1936 Has some OK ballads. He was the poetry editor of Yankee magazine.
Sixty Five Conrad Aiken 1930 A friend of Eliot’s, he and John Gould Fletcher (in 1939) were the first of the “hostile camp” Modernists to slip in and win a Pulitzer—Aiken’s lyrics were not terribly good but had an Eastern feel. Everyone in America—Populist or Modernist—loved Eastern art and poetry: from the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War to Pearl Harbor.
Sixty Six Vijay Seshadri 2014 And why not put Al Green singing a Bee Gees song in your poem?
Sixty Seven Peter Balakian 2016 I don’t know. His poetry has that scholarly, thoughtful sheen.
Sixty Eight George Oppen 1969 Fashionably minimalist.
Sixty Nine Tracy K. Smith. 2012 She was young when she won the award. I saw her read around that time, and she seemed apologetic around her fellow readers. She’s a much better poet now.
Seventy Mona Van Duyn 1991 Witty, formalist, didactic. A pleasant poet from Iowa who could rise to a mighty rhetoric from which one felt she pretty quickly needed to get down.
Seventy One Charles Simic 1990 Like so many free verse poets, whatever at-the-time-magic hovered around their utterances previously, is now fled. I found The World Doesn’t End haunting when it came out. It didn’t bother to do anything except describe (briefly and plainly) what was odd and the reader would fill in the rest. Was it this novelty itself which charmed? It haunts no more.
Seventy Two William Carlos Williams 1963 He won at the end of his life for a book of poems on Bruegel. I guess if you want you can try to use words to compete with…Bruegel. Well, advertisers can make us taste beer, can’t they?
Seventy Three Rae Armantrout 2010 By the time she won, Ron Silliman’s avant-garde was getting desperate. It would try anything. Do you want to hear a few jokes?
Seventy Four Ted Kooser 2004 He nearly destroyed the Poetry Pulitzer’s reputation by winning. It was between the old avant-garde running out of steam and the complete triumph of Identity Politics. Remember that window? Kooser slipped in.
Seventy Five William Meredith 1988 Nice. And the dull, which tends to rust the nice, has done so.
Seventy Six Frank Bidart 2019 Highly interesting, but I had to rank him here because he borrows explicitly to such an extent. “Ellen West” enthralls me.
Seventy Seven James Wright. 1972 Just awfully sentimental. He was writing during a time when the sentimental had almost been demolished by High Modernism’s brutalist take-over—and I suppose there was a backlash.
Seventy Eight Caroline Kizer 1985 She has a Marianne Moore vibe.
Seventy Nine C.K Williams 2000 Long lines of exuberant tastelessness.
Eighty Gary Snyder 1975 In his poems we glimpse the real good life.
Eighty One Forrest Gander 2018 A highly self-conscious effort at stylishness is what jumps out at me from this winning book. Self-conscious stylishness (or at least what feels self-conscious) is what bothers me about Robert Lowell (he won during a hybrid era when warring Imagism and Romanticism had died in the 1920s, socialist ballads had died after the Hitler/Stalin pact, and post-WW II, ‘good and the stylish, vaguely blending old and new’ was what everyone was expecting) but Robert Lowell could at least versify somewhat.
Eighty Two Franz Wright 2004 An honest and tempestuous man, his poetic legacy now seems largely one of self-pity—with the occasional lyric of shining light.
Eighty Three Claudia Emerson 2006 Prosaic—as if the poem doesn’t know what she’s talking about—though we do.
Eighty Four Lisel Mueller 1997 Free verse without personality is like reading a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Some nice thoughts, but presented in such a way that the air doesn’t move. The sailboat doesn’t go.
Eighty Five Maxine Kumin 1973 She operates poetry’s ranger station.
Eighty Six Karl Shapiro 1945 Childish, description, poetry. Poetry which feels like an exercise. “The Fly,” for instance, is pure horror, and I don’t mean in a good way.
Eighty Seven Henry S. Taylor 1986 Perfected the Modernist, Iowa Workshop, mundane life-plain voice template.
Eighty Eight John Gould Fletcher 1939 He was the one, more than anyone else, who belonged, hesitantly, not intentionally, armed with money, to all the groupings of High Modernism—Amy Lowell’s, Pound’s, the Fugitives, disappointing them all, apparently, by not being loyal enough, or by not spending his money enough. He reminds me of that hapless friend of Iago’s who was advised, “sell all your lands!” He wrote perhaps the worst poem of all time in which he grieves for a “black rock,” sticking out of the ocean, over and over again, in the same way, over multiple stanzas.
Eighty Nine Mark Strand 1998 He represents the nadir of establishment 20th century American free verse. Once a highly acclaimed poet of zen-like poems of profound emptiness which now seem merely empty—the title poem of his winning book, “Blizzard of One,” is really about a single snow flake that floats into a man’s home and sits on his chair and “That’s all/There was to it.”
Here’s an earlier poem by Mark Strand from the late 70s. This was once considered good. I think I probably liked it at one time. Now it just seems embarrassing.
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams.
I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
So there we have it—the best and the worst of the first hundred years of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Through WW II, nearly half the prizes (10) were given to Frost, EA Robinson, and the Benet brothers.
There has been only one repeat winner since 1989 (W.S. Merwin in 2009).
Depending on your taste, you may want to flip this ranking on its head.
The trouble with Criticism is that its whole business is to insert itself between a poem and its reader—a superfluous act; if the poem is good it doesn’t need the extra words of Criticism. The smell of a bad poem arises with the smell of Criticism. No wonder a thousand poets exist for every critic—and even then a critic is 9 times out of 10 a poet whose criticism is morale boosting notes to himself—a pure sideline activity.
When anyone discusses poetry, the same few critics are mentioned over and over—an indication of how unpopular critics are; in the whole history of Letters, five or six critics receive all the press:
Plato—because he had the audacity to ban the poets (too crazy, too emotional) from his Republic.
Aristotle—The Greek alternative to Plato. “Tragedy is good because it purges emotions.”
Samuel Johnson—Did us all a favor by faulting the “metaphysical poets,” saying of them “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”
Wordsworth—Also did us peasants a favor by defining poetry as plain talk.
Poe—More fodder for the simple folk: “A long poem does not exist” and “the best subject for a poem is the death of a beautiful woman.”
T.S. Eliot—Returned poetry to the professors. Told us “poetry must be difficult” in an essay praising the metaphysical poets.
Despite the fact I have said Criticism is rare, that critics are usually poets first, and that people generally dislike or fear criticism, I will defend Criticism in this essay—only because I believe critically I have something to say.
This is all that matters.
Having something to say. Critically, that is.
Auden mocked poets who earnestly felt they “had something to say.”
Well. Of course.
Poets do need ideas, though. In poetry, it is not the idea, but how the idea gets put into the poem.
Somewhere along the way, based on wise remarks by those like Auden, and due to the hard, gem-like resistance of Modernism generally, ideas—as things to be stated, worked-up, and enjoyed—got tossed aside.
Never mind poems—Criticism is nothing but ideas.
Most young writers today who try their hand at “criticism” have no overriding ideas; they choose topics to write on—a poet’s lifestyle or some neat time period.
As I think Plato and Aristotle demonstrated, literary criticism belongs properly to philosophy—even if it’s “amateur” philosophy.
Criticism should remain above poetry and not play second fiddle to it—even if it plays its fiddle in a “professional” manner, like Helen Vendler or Marjorie Perloff, or God forbid, Harold Bloom (who carried on as if he were a pure Critic, but was not; his colleague at Yale, W. Jackson Bate, was far closer to true Criticism).
Critics need to debate other critics. Criticism needs to be a field on its own. It should not be a press agent for poetry. Just like an honest reviewer, critics should never befriend poets.
Enjoying a poem has nothing to do with Criticism. Enjoying a poem is an unconscious activity. Criticism is a conscious activity. And this is okay. We need to become accustomed to the fact that Criticism is its own art. This is difficult in our present day because we haven’t had Criticism practiced like an art form since Plato. So you see the task before us.
There have always been two sides to Criticism and we must decide, before we go any further, which side we are on.
The good side seeks to narrow and the bad side seeks to expand, poetry.
The realist, who wishes to expand poetry’s role, is naive.
We don’t usually associate realism with naivete, but let’s jump into today’s debate by yoking some heterogeneous ideas violently together.
John Crowe Ransom was a realist from Tennessee and Harold Rosenberg an idealist from New York.
Rosenberg is best known as an art critic, but he published a volume of his own poetry and Rosenberg’s philosophical approach (as opposed to a literary criticism approach) happens to put him in a place I can use to great advantage.
Let’s quote Ransom first, from the Preface to his distinguished, prize-winning, collection of essays, The World’s Body:
“First we should see what poetry properly is not, though it is what poetry has often declared to be.”
***
“The poetry I am disparaging is a heart’s-desire poetry. If another identification is needed, it is the poetry written by romantics, in a common sense of that term. It denies the real world by idealizing it: the act of a sick mind.”
This is quite an ideal kind of realism which I have found—Ransom was highly respected in his day, and New Criticism was very influential; it was the school of T.S. Eliot: “difficult,” savvy, worldly, smart.
As opposed to poetry which “denies the real world,” Ransom states in his preface he is for the poetry that “only wants to realize the world, to see it better.”
“The kind of poetry which interests us is not the act of a child, or of that eternal youth which is in some women, but the act of an adult mind; and I will add, the act of a fallen mind, since ours too are fallen.”
Ransom’s language is really loose here—the rather modest expression: “only wants to realize the world, to see it better” could be construed as “idealization.” After all, to merely “see” the world carries with it an immense task (think of how much there is to “see”) but to “realize it,” to merely “see it better” implies narrowing (ideal) not expansion (real). Idealism (which selectively narrows its focus) can be a very realistic approach.
Any “realist” who opposes “idealism” (as Ransom is doing here) finally doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Later in this essay I am going to argue for an idealism free of all worldly elements involved in one’s response to art—sufficient to say that Ransom’s possible wavering between idealism and realism in terms of the world will finally make no difference in my equation. Anyway, “to realize the world, to see it better” is what the scientist barely succeeds at; surely Ransom cannot seriously believe this is a goal of art?
Well I warned you that you would need to pick a side.
A modest narrowing is our only choice when it comes to poetry.
The issue is simple—too simple for “fallen” Ransom to grasp, apparently.
Ransom argues (badly, vaguely, but nonetheless strenuously) for the opposite, for expansion, not narrowing—as he explicitly equates “idealizing” with “sickness.”
Ransom needs to believe the idealist is a sentimentalist. He doesn’t come out and say the sentimentalist is naturally an idealist—this would be to give sentimentalism a chance against being brutalized—which is not at all where Ransom, if one knows him, is coming from. We must therefore question Ransom this way: If one (realistically, practically) chooses what to focus on, why shouldn’t the selection be governed by happiness (the “heart”)? Should we select what we don’t want? (We understand Ransom does not necessarily mean “happiness” when he refers to what he calls “heart’s-desire” sentimentalism, but this is a quibble—to be sentimental is to either be happy or suffer because one wants to be happy.)
Ransom concedes elsewhere in no uncertain terms that for him, art is not science—art, for Ransom, fulfills a complimentary but completely different function. Strange, then, that he should juxtapose the hard, unforgiving laws of science with art which in his view has no child-like happiness or charm, but caters rather to an “adult” and “fallen” mind.
Harold Rosenberg will now set himself down on our side—in this instance, in the moment of my essay, a Wolfgang Mozart to Ransom’s Antonio Salieri.
Ransom is being a child when he rejects the child.
But let’s be clear.
In other places in his writing, generally, Ransom says absolutely brilliant things.
But we get to wisdom truly only thru someone’s ignorance. I saw a cooking show yesterday in which the chef praised the shaved broccoli stalk as the best part of the plant. Critics cannot be timid; they must prepare and ravish other critics. Just as a poet seizes on whatever inspiration happens to come along, critics should not let the hidden, tender parts of other critics go to waste—go for it!
To critics: when you find error in the reasoning of another, don’t be shy—this is how the meal is made.
There is profit, no doubt, in critics trailing after, and cleaning up after, poets; Ransom came into his own by love-hating Milton—his smashing first essay in The World’s Body—but if there is to be a revival of Criticism—which poetry needs almost more than a revival of Romanticism and the Child—critics ought to stir each other up—especially the few who exist, and especially those just coming onto the scene (we hope there are some rowdy ones)—if only to make the public aware that Criticism is not dead, that it’s able to hurt, and draw blood, and have real feelings.
Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism is perhaps a good start. The author of this essay is the author of this just-released book.
Of course my point is not all of Harold Rosenberg is superior to all of John Ransom—those incapable of Criticism might fret over what they imagine in horror is my unforgivable sin—as I impugn an idea or two of Mr. Ransom’s.
The following quotes are from Rosenberg’s essay, “Literary Form and Social Hallucination.” Rosenberg put in this essay his whole critical being, leaving nothing essential out. Writers do have highs and lows. Judge for yourself, but you ought to see immediately how Rosenberg brilliantly advances my argument—it is his argument, really; Rosenberg is in service to me, as much as I am deeply and forever in service to him:
“If, to the Greek, art subordinates the facts to the emotions, to the modern writer it subordinates both facts and emotions to art’s own ends.”
I don’t know any statement which sums up Ancient v. Modern quite so well—and John Crowe Ransom would concur. I don’t know of anyone who would not.
Rosenberg continues:
“…T.S. Eliot gives reasons why literature does not, and ought not, go to the limit in ‘tracing a certain fact.'”
Rosenberg had just quoted Dostoevsky: “The apparent impotence of art made me wonder about its usefulness. Indeed, trace a certain fact in actual life—one which at first glance is not even very vivid—and if only you are able and endowed with vision, you will perceive in it a depth such as you will not find in Shakespeare.” (italics mine)
With that Dostoevsky quotation in mind per Eliot, let’s return to Rosenberg:
“In a good poem, he [Eliot] says, there must be a ‘precise fitness of form and matter…which also means a balance between them.’ Like Dostoevsky, Eliot refers to Shakespeare, but he points out that in a Shakespearean song, ‘the form, the pattern movement, has a solemnity of its own, however light and gay the human emotion concerned, and a gaiety of its own, however serious or tragic the emotion.’ The form, in short, carries its own independent feelings, which play against the feeling aroused by the subject; and the artist, according to Eliot, is most interested in the ‘fitness’ of these contrasting feelings to each other, so that a ‘balance’ may be reached.”
Eliot (and again, Ransom would fully agree, having himself emerged fully formed from the head of Eliot) is stating the great “reactionary” truth of art, which is that the art-form must be taken into account when it comes to art, no matter what the art is “talking about.” Accounting for “form” is necessary, Eliot says, in a “good poem.” And Rosenberg, like an excited child, runs with this idea as an idea, to wherever it might lead:
“If this is the case,” Rosenberg continues, “the form of a literary work acts directly contrary to Dostoevsky’s desire to get to the bottom of a particular state of affairs.”
Doesn’t “desire to get to the bottom of a particular state of affairs” sound similar to what Ransom professed poetry singularly ought to do? In Ransom’s own non-idealizing words: “to realize the world, to see it better.” Rosenberg begins with Eliot (and Ransom attached to him at the hip) but where Rosenberg ends up may not be fit for Ransom’s eyes:
“Indeed,” Rosenberg goes on, “the very function of form would be to cut across the reaction aroused by the subject and suspend the mind in a riptide of feelings belonging to art itself.”
But wait, it gets better. In the next paragraph Rosenberg hits a home run:
“In emphasizing balance Eliot is consistent with the attitude of literature toward truth throughout most of its history. For it is clear that writers have not, traditionally, regarded themselves as crusaders against mystification. Their way has been rather to appropriate illusions inherited in the patterns of story-telling and in the usages of words and to contribute to deepening these illusions. It is not by chance that the meaning of ‘form’ and the meaning of ‘hallucination’ overlap in their connotations of an appearance or ‘show’ without substance. There is a natural alliance between art and deception; and one needs no prompting from modern radicalism to see this alliance as the ideal extension of the relation of the arts to their historic patrons: courts, priesthoods, and in more recent times, capitalists and bureaucrats.”
The reference to “form” as an “appearance” in a “hallucination” is one of the greatest moments, for me, in the history of Letters. Eliot’s delicate “balance” between “form” and “matter” in art is in danger of being swept entirely away into pure suspension of disbelief and illusion. But Rosenberg, the lynx-eyed social critic, grounds it in society: “the ideal extension of the relation of the arts to their historic patrons: courts, priesthoods, and in more recent times, capitalist and bureaucrats.” Again, this is not foreign to Ransom, who brings acute social observances into his literary ideas, but what is being smashed here is Ransom’s naive aesthetic desire to “realize the world, to see it better.”
Rosenberg attaches a footnote after “bureaucrats,” which demands quoting: “Writing about the traditional attitude toward the nude, Paul Valery observed: ‘Everyone had a muddled conviction that neither the State, nor the Law, nor Education, nor Religion, nor anything else that was serious, could function if the truth were entirely visible.’ [Valery’s italics]”
But Rosenberg still isn’t done, bringing in Keats, a modern critic known to Ransom, and then Plato:
“The celebrated phrase about poetry inducing a ‘suspension of disbelief’ need only be given its socio-political dimension and it becomes a formula for the service rendered by art to holders of social power. If it weren’t for art, men’s disbelief would not be suspended. Would not curiosity press them then to chase after the hidden truth? Form, beauty, calls off the hunt by justifying, through the multiple feelings it arouses, the not-quite-real as humanly sufficient.
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity
Wasn’t it in I.A. Richards’ discussion of Keats’ drugged lines about beauty being truth, truth beauty, in which the poet so perfectly draws the curtain of ecstasy over his vision of painful fact, that ‘suspension of disbelief’ first entered the contemporary vocabulary of literary criticism?”
“Plato’s Republic, which was organized ‘transparently,’ and hence had no disbeliefs to suspend, banished the poet.”
***
“In the past, governments took for granted the cultural Chinese walls which the arts built around them; today, the cost of reinforcing these walls against the siege of rival concepts is included in every defense budget.”
And then another brilliant footnote follows:
“Note to ideology-enders: In the war of ideologies, history grows more and more talkative, i.e., rhetorical, which means that image assaults image, until all have lost their sacredness and none inspires a defense to the death. Thus ideological conflict, which promotes rather than suspends disbelief, is the only kind of conflict among great powers in which hope can exist for a nonviolent resolution.”
“Considering the function of the arts in transferring into familiar experiences the hallucinations bred in the centers of authority, one might decide that the arts are by nature reactionary. Such a conclusion would be neither far-fetched nor particularly novel—I suspect that most liberals feel this, though they shrink from admitting it to themselves.”
Liberals realizing that art is reactionary in 1960? Is this like liberals facing their white privilege in 2021? Not only is Rosenberg’s essay brilliant on several levels (I wish I had time to quote more of it)—it’s prophetic, as well.
But let’s not get side-tracked, although this is perhaps what Rosenberg wants, and this is the danger I face in quoting this marvelous essay at length.
Now at last I can quote Rosenberg a couple of pages later in the essay speaking directly to Ransom’s all-too-common Modernist complaint against poetry of the “heart,” the “child,”—of and for “romantics:”
“The sigh of Keats and the logic of Eliot represent art’s willing acceptance of the merger of substance into form—and the fabled lightheartedness of the artist, his childlike spirit, his ‘innocence,’ have to do with this professional yielding to the falsification, play-acting, and charmed distortion inherent in his medium. The abnormal thing is not the pressure upon art to falsify, but that art should have come to resist that pressure.”
John Crowe Ransom represents the thrust in our time to “resist that pressure” to romantically “falsify,” though he is fully aware of it and even somewhat sympathetic to it. From The World’s Body:
“The whole poem is properly an illusion, but a deliberate and honest one, to which we consent, and through which we follow the poet because it enables him to do things not possible if he were presenting actuality. At some moments we may grow excited and tempted to forget that it is illusion, as the untrained spectator may forget and hiss the villain at the theatre. But we are quickly reminded of our proper attitude. If the author tends to forget, all the more if he pretends to forget, we would recall him to the situation too. Such license we do not accord to poets and dramatists, but only to novelists, whose art is young. And even these, or the best of these, seem now determined, for the sake of artistic integrity, to surrender it.”
We can see from this passage that Ransom understands the importance of art’s deception—but by God he will not be deceived for very long! Ransom goes so far as to be pleased that the “novelists” will “surrender” their art “for the sake of artistic integrity.” Surrender your art for art, Ransom says—but can he really be saying this? Yes, he is saying this. And now comes the following two questions: Why is he saying this? And what is wrong with him?
Rosenberg will help us out; let’s re-quote him: ” In the war of ideologies, history grows more more and more talkative, i.e., rhetorical, which means that image assaults image, until all have lost their sacredness…”
Ransom, who took great delight, with many of his contemporaries, to label Romanticism as the act of a “sick mind,” to hiss at villains from the past, to beat the drum as mustaches were put on the Mona Lisa—was a high-ranking general in the Modernist ideological war in which “image assaults image, until all have lost their sacredness…” Ransom was at the front of the mob which threw splinters of the red wheel barrow at The Raven.
The stripping-away-the-veil-from-art so that all sacredness is lost is just what certain intellectuals love to do. They may justify their acts with “theory” and impressive intellectualism, but they are finally like Ransom’s “untrained spectator” hissing at “the villain at the theatre.”
Their “theatre” is whatever they want it to be. In art theories (think of Wilde) which have the art hide the artist, we are reminded of the New Critical impulse to look “only at the work.” The New Critics never really believed this, and first asserted it in order to seem “pure;” they spent the second half of their careers back-peddling, as they raised the “impure” flag—what I said to gain attention I now renounce as a full human being: thus end all art movements.
In the essay by Ransom just quoted from, “A Poem Nearly Anonymous,” Ransom is most interested in Milton, the “man,” lurking behind the acknowledged masterpiece of “Lycidas.” As Ransom remarks in the penultimate sentence of his essay: “We are disturbingly conscious of a man behind the artist.”
As I said earlier, Ransom falls on the side of expanding poetry, which is wrong (oh we must think of this and think of this and think of this) and despite New Criticism earning its reputation of narrowing (focus on the work only) this is more its exception than its rule—as Eliot questioned what the Metaphysical Poets really were, we must do the same with The New Critics.
What this critic believes is this: there is no “man” behind the poem.
There is no John Milton who John Ransom needs to be “disturbingly conscious of.”
Save your energy, John.
There is a wonderful South Park episode called Sarcastaball, in which the sarcasm a father uses to defend the rough-and-tumble aspects of football is taken literally, leading to a whole new professional sport. The father becomes addicted to sarcasm—he is sarcastic in the doctor’s office—the audience of this South Park episode are not sure whether or not the doctor is being sarcastic as he shows the father brain scans of severe brain damage—but is it from a concussion, or the father’s disease of sarcasm?
Criticism which demands to be taken seriously, but is so absorbed in balancing form and matter (but willing also to choose one for the sake of an art movement so that finally either one will do,) drags us into the mind-fuck world of “Sarcastaball.”
The truth is: form in art is all that matters.
Art is “suspension of disbelief.”
And art is “reactionary,” and we will all just have to deal with it.
Politically, Ransom and his colleagues were reactionary. And this is why in their Criticism, they tried to go the other way. The New Critics’ “balancing” act within literature sprawled over into politics—politics/social commentary (Plato, Marx, the State) has traditionally been the escape-hatch, the fourth wall, for any critic who is not certain of his or her aesthetic designs. If they were more certain of purely motivated art, the critic might become an apolitical creative genius, instead.
Criticism—which wrestles with things other than pure form—is finally seen in the public square as rather a mess. Its politics hides behind its criticism (New Criticism) or its criticism hides behind its politics (Marxism). Our best living Critic happens to be a reviewer—William Logan—and in the eyes of Letters, he is considered a conservative, by default, since he dares to actually criticize what he reviews. No one knows if he is actually reactionary—they assume he is, since he is a Critic, and has no choice but to be less than polite. As an honest Reviewer he has no where to hide. Actually, William Logan is not reactionary. (Like many people, he likes old stuff.) There’s no other reviewer like him, because no one wants to be thought of as reactionary in the world of Letters—and utterly transparent reviewing pegs one as so. Why this phenomenon exists would make for a very interesting essay, indeed. Harold Rosenberg might be able to help, but he’s been dead for over 40 years.
Logan does puncture “Romanticism” in a manner similar to Ransom—and until recently, “conservatives” tended to clobber Romanticism—we will quote Harold Rosenberg in a few minutes on this very point. Romanticism, however, no longer represents progress—perhaps T.S. Eliot and Harold Rosenberg assumed it did; surely William Logan does not object to Romanticism for this reason!
I champion Romanticism—but for aesthetic reasons only. (I do sometimes think in political terms—and do not believe High Modernism is progressive in the least, but as a true Critic, I should suppress these feelings.)
The ideal art form, of course, is music. And in music, form is all. There is no “man” behind Mozart’s music. There is no way one would be construed as “reactionary” in discussing Mozart’s instrumental music honestly, in a detailed and critical manner.
There isn’t even “feelings” as we commonly think of that word, in Mozart’s music. To hear “feelings” in Mozart’s music is to falsify, in a non-artistic sense, the art.
Sarcasm cannot exist in Mozart’s music—it can only exist in speaking of Mozart’s music. Mozart’s music is a very heaven because everything is completely understood immediately there.
If we hear a passage in a Mozart concerto which sounds “sad” to us, there is no way to prove that any of this “sadness” (which is merely due to a certain arrangement of notes) can be traced back to Mozart the “man” (or the “composer,” what difference does it make?)—so we really would be completely deluded to believe it is “sad.”
When you hear a critic going on about the “mature” Mozart wrestling with “tragedy” in his “life” through his “music,” this is only the critical impulse puffed by its own importance. For truly, even if Mozart (who can do it) expresses melancholy in a concerto, the point of the concerto is for the whole to be resolved by the whole—so that a bit of “sadness” qua “sadness” is meaningless—in terms of any understanding we have of the “sad.” Even if a violinist who understands the music better than we do weeps as she plays the music, we cannot, from this, assume the music Mozart has written is intrinsically “sad.”
The overwhelming genius of Mozart might make us sad or frustrated, but this, again, is of no consequence. That we “feel emotional” listening to Mozart’s music is eminently possible—but we can’t trace this back specifically to the music, nor (and this is more far-fetched) to the “man” behind the music.
Rosenberg at one point said that pure formalism is the art which really annoyed the Soviet Union. Why should the Soviets have cared about painting of drips and shapes? They did, Rosenberg insisted.
If you don’t like Mozart, you might want to re-think.
I will end this essay by leaving art and returning to the real world. Art is indeed wonderful because it has nothing to do with the real world.
Harold Rosenberg’s introduction to his book of essays, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture & Politics, published in 1973, contains some remarks worth noting, as well.
“The cultural revolution of the past hundred years has petered out. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Today’s authentic vanguardism is being sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, by state arts councils, by museums, by industrial and banking associations.”
***
“Exhibitions of art and publications of literature are quite pleased to be absorbed into the teaching and entertainment industries. Professional art lovers are less interested in their responses to works of art than in knowing what to tell people about them—to take an early example, Leo Stein lecturing on Matisse the moment he began to acquire works by him.”
***
“An assistant professor of English, writing in the Times Book Review on a work by the Marquis de Sade, finds the Marquis’ tortures of servant girls to be tame, and is prepared to fit him into middle-class reading lists. Is this professor radical or conservative?”
***
“That there is no radical presence in society seems to give the conservative an edge in the argument. He can revile the mistakes and foolishness (Romanticism) of those who still hope for more humane social arrangements and for forms more responsive to actualities, high and low. But though the radical consciousness is stymied, the events of the epoch are radical. The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice. The cultural conservative wins the argument, but, like the political conservative, he repeatedly finds himself betrayed. Hence he is in a constant state of paranoia. The most he can hope for is that nothing will happen—that Nixon will not go to China—and that fewer knives will flash in the dark.”
Again, Rosenberg is prophetic about our day: the “conservative” hopes “Nixon will not go to China” (!)
Or: “prophecy” merely means nothing has changed very much?
Ben Mazer sent me Rosenberg’s essays recently—utterly by accident—and isn’t that how life usually changes one?
In Ben Mazer I, too, find that mysterious phenomenon—as a voter, Mazer, shuffling along with the mass of humanity, is a liberal, a Democrat, a leftist all the way, but in the completely unspoken presence of his uncanny work, I find him to be something else.
Hans Holbein Printers 5-1
Marcel Duchamp Printers 6-2
Mark Twain Buyers 11-6
Paul Engle Buyers 10-7
Margaret Atwood Dreamers 9-6
John Crowe Ransom Crash 7-5
Relief
Pablo Picasso Crash 9-3
Jean Cocteau Universe 3-0
Czeslaw Milosz Universe 5-2
John Cage Printers 5-2
HOME RUNS
Elizabeth Bishop Buyers 22
Sharon Olds Dreamers 19
Aristophanes Printers 19
John Updike Printers 19
Dylan Thomas Buyers 18
Edna Millay Dreamers 17
Juvenal Universe 15
Bob Dylan Universe 14
Robert Lowell Buyers 14
Louis MacNeice Dreamers 14
Stephen Spender Crash 14
Paul Celan Universe 11
Garcia Lorca Printers 10
The closest race in the league is the dogfight in the Modern Division between Rockefeller’s Buyers (who once led by a wide margin) and Spielberg’s Universe—a game apart, and the Printers are only 2 games away from the Universe. Robert Lowell has been hot at the plate for the Buyers, Bob Dylan for the Universe. Pitching-wise, Mark Twain has been hot again for the Buyers (and leads the division in wins), and Raymond Carver (replacing Randall Jarrell in the rotation) has been hot for the Universe (4-2). MLK Jr is 3-2 in his 8 starts since joining the Universe, and Spielberg has added Jean Cocteau (3-0) to the bullpen, a move he feels will put the Universe over the top. But Andy Warhol’s Printers made moves, too. Hans Holbein the Younger joined the rotation, and is 5-1. Paul Klee is a new lefty starter (3-3). Toulouse Lautrec (3-2) filled in admirably for the injured Duchamp (a toilet fell on his toe). Aristophanes and John Updike have both slammed 19 homers for manager Brian Epstein and his Printers. John Ashbery, who has seven homers from the lead off spot, and is one of the best fielding third basemen in the league, predicted the Printers would win it all. “Why shouldn’t I say that?” he asked. The Crash and the Dreamers, tied for last, are not that far out (seven games) and so every team is truly in the hunt in this division. John Crowe Ransom of the Crash did not win his first game until the end of May, and now at 7-5 he’s among the pitching leaders. John Dewey is 3-0 in July, Wittgenstein and Pater are 2-1 in July. Has the moment arrived for the Crash? Picasso has won 9 games for the Crash in relief. Franz Werfel has replaced the injured John Gould Fletcher in left, and has already begun hitting homers. Stephen Spender leads the Crash in that category. Stevie Smith, playing for the hurt Louis MacNeice, clubbed four homers for the Dreamers, and the home run power of Edna Millay (17) and Sharon Olds (19) has been on display all year for Pamela Harriman’s club. MacNeice himself has 14. The Dreamers have been doing everything they can to fix their bullpen (Germaine Greer has been a huge disappointment) but relief pitching is a tricky affair. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have joined the team, but all sorts of off-the-field issues have resulted in not much action—a blown save by Kahlo. Jean Paul Sartre, however, has gone right to work—he’s 2-3 in relief in some very close games. As for the starting rotation, William Godwin pitched well but went 1-4 filling in for Simone de Beauvoir (2-7), losing to Ransom 4-3 on her first start back. Mary Wollstonecraft has joined the Dreamers and is 3-1 in 8 starts. Anais Nin is 8-8. Margaret Atwood has regained her early season form, and is 9-6. Don’t count out the Dreamers!
PEOPLES DIVISION
KOLKATA COBRAS S. RAY 47 33 –
SANTA BARBARA LAWS DICK WOLF 41 39 (6)
BEIJING WAVES MAO 39 41 (8)
TOKYO MIST KUROSAWA 36 44 (11)
LA GAMERS MERV GRIFFIN 35 45 (12)
Confucius Waves 7-2
Mark Van Doren Laws 4-1
Menander Gamers 6-3
HOME RUNS
John Donne Laws 18 Vikram Seth Cobras 18
Li Po Waves 17
Jadoo Akhtar Cobras 16
John Lennon Mist 15
Billy Collins Gamers 15
Hilda Doolittle Mist 15
George Harrison Cobras 14
Eugene Ionesco Gamers 14
Thomas Hardy Laws 14
Karl Marx Waves 13
Tu Fu Waves 13
Sadakitchi Hartmann Mist 11
The Kolkata Cobras have 3 good hitters and 3 good pitchers, and a six game lead in the Peoples Division. Vikram Seth is tied with the division lead in homers with 18, Jadoo Akhtar has 16 round-trippers, and George Harrison, 14 (though Harrison strikes out way too much). We could also mention Allen Ginsberg of the Cobras, batting .301 with 7 homers. The three big starters for the Cobras are Rumi, Tagore, and Gandhi. Kabir Das has improved in the bullpen; the Cobras have been healthy, and don’t plan on any big moves. The Laws, in second place, are also healthy; they added Ferdinand Saussure to their relief corps, but otherwise are staying with the team they’ve had since the beginning, and has arrived at the all star break 2 games over .500: Martial, Donne, and Thomas Hardy with 40 homers in the middle of the lineup, Aristotle, their ace who was hot, but lost 4 straight as they hoped to close in on the Cobras, Bacon, 10-4 since going 0-5 to start the season, Horace 4-2 in the last 5 weeks, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, pitching well, but not getting run support lately, as is the case with Aristotle. Donne is the only one hot at the plate right now. The Waves are 8 back, and slipping a bit lately, as Lao Tzu has been their only consistent pitcher; Confucius made a big splash in the beginning of the year, winning all sorts of late inning games—he’s just 1-0 in the last 5 weeks; Voltaire and Rousseau continue to disappoint. Tu Fu and Karl Marx have cooled off at the plate somewhat. Brecht and Neruda are not hitting. “The whole team has dropped off,” Jack Dorsey, the Waves manager said, “and it’s time we get back in this. We have an amazing team.” The Tokyo Mist got a boost when Yukio Mishima (9-6) replaced Heraclitus, and Yone Naguchi has quietly compiled an 8-5 record, but the two top starters for the Mist, Basho and Issa, have been a study in frustration. Issa gets no run support; Basho’s ERA is too high. Haruki Murakami (2-1) may be the bullpen ace they need, but it’s too early to tell. The Mist would love to have some of relief pitcher Kobe Abe’s (2-7) losses back. The Mist are not really hitting right now. John Lennon and Hilda Doolittle lead the team with 15 homers apiece—but most of those were hit in May. The Mist are a game out of last place—occupied by the LA Gamers. Billy Collins is probably the hottest hitter for the Gamers right now, which isn’t saying much; he has 15 dingers (We can imagine Collins writing a poem on the word ‘dinger’) and Ionesco is right behind him on the team with 14. Collins, the left fielder, and Joe Green, the third baseman, came within an inch of a nasty collision chasing a pop foul down the left field line last week. “We almost lost 20 homers,” manager Bob Hope said. And maybe 20 errors. Collins has been a circus in the field. If a last place team is going to make a run, it will be the Gamers. Merv Griffin’s club has added the following to their pitching staff—Democritus (5-5) is now starting for E.E. Cummings. Charlie Chaplin (2-1) is now starting for Garrison Keillor (1-2), who replaced James Tate (5-5). Woody Allen (2-2) has replaced Antoine de Saint Exupery (0-1), who replaced Derrida (1-6). Muhammad Ali (2-1) and MC Escher, a lefty relief specialist, have joined the Gamers bullpen, which has been mostly patrolled by Menander (3-2) and Morgenstern (2-2). Charles Bernstein is 0-4. Clive James joined recently, and is 1-1. Gamers fever is still high!
SOCIETY DIVISION
BOSTON SECRETS BEN FRANKLIN 51 29 —
NEW YORK WAR JP MORGAN 42 38 (9)
WESTPORT ACTORS WEINSTEIN 40 40 (11)
FAIRFIELD ANIMALS PT BARNUM 38 42 (13)
VIRGINIA STRANGERS DAVID LYNCH 31 49 (20)
WINS
Alexander Pushkin Secrets 10-1
Amy Lowell Animals 11-2
Plato Secrets 13-5
Walter Scott War 11-5
George Byron Actors 7-4
Moliere Secrets 8-5
Chaucer Actors 8-5
Erich Remarque War 10-7
Alexander Pope Strangers 8-7
Gaius Petronius Actors 8-7
Relief
Thomas Jefferson Secrets 4-1
HP Lovecraft Strangers 4-2
Sade Actors 6-4
Home Runs
Emily Dickinson Secrets 19
Thomas Nashe Actors 18
Theodore Roethke Strangers 18
Stephen Crane War 16
Hafiz Actors 14
Arthur Rimbaud Strangers 14
Robert Frost Secrets 14
Harry Crosby War 13
Francois Rabelais Strangers 11
Wallace Stevens Animals 11
Woody Guthrie Secrets 11
Seamus Heaney Animals 10
Amiri Baraka Actors 10
Ben Franklin’s Secrets own the best record in the league (51-29) and have the biggest division lead (9 games). Pushkin and Plato have nearly half the Secrets wins, while Moliere, their fourth starter, has a nifty 8-5 mark, as Poe, their ace continues to struggle (6-7)—but most of it is due to low run support. Poe threw his first shutout right before the all star break. The Secrets’ Emily Dickinson leads the Society Division with 19 homers; Frost has 14, Woody Guthrie 11, and Kanye West leads the team in homers over the last couple of weeks; he now has 7, as does Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Secrets lead off hitter (.299, 9 stolen bases, 6 triples). With a solid, Founding Father, bullpen, the Secrets have no real weaknesses, and Boston has got to feel happy about the way things are going—although manager George Washington never looks happy. The second place War are 4 games over .500, have been getting good starts from Walter Scott and Erich Remarque, and manager Machiavelli is hoping Shakespeare (7-7) will come back stronger after his rehab (newly signed Julius Caesar is 2-2 with a shutout in his absence). The War’s Stephen Crane leads JP Morgan’s club with 16 homers, and Harry Crosby has been a surprise with 13. Jack London is new in the Wars bullpen, which has been shaky. The two Connecticut teams, Harvey Weinstein’s Actors (Byron and Chaucer their best pitchers, Nashe and Hafiz their best hitters) and PT Barnum’s Animals (Amy Lowell 11-2 the only star so far; they’ve added AA Milne in the bullpen) have some catching up to do, eleven and thirteen games back, respectively. Norman Mailer (3-3) is a new pitcher for the Actors. Finally, the Strangers. They are 20 games out. David Lynch and manager Bram Stoker made a big move and got Franz Kafka. He’s 0-2 in relief and 0-6 as a starter. Salvador Dali is new, and he’s 1-2, stepping in for Becket (3-8). The Strangers ace, Alexander Pope, is either brilliant or so-so; he has 4 shutouts, but he’s 8-7. Theodore Roethke has cracked 18 homers for the Strangers (Rimbaud has 14, Rabelais has 11) but the team strikes out too much and hits into too many double plays. Twenty games out in this division may be too big a climb for David Lynch’s Strangers. Manager Bram Stoker merely stared at us coldly when we mentioned this.
GLORIOUS DIVISION
FLORENCE BANNERS DE MEDICI 46 34 —
DUBLIN LAUREATES NAHUM TATE 44 36 (2)
LONDON CARRIAGES QUEEN VICTORIA 43 37 (3)
BERLIN PISTOLS EVA BRAUN 34 46 (12)
DEVON SUN JOHN RUSSELL 34 46 (12)
WINS
Jonathan Swift Laureates 12-1
John Ruskin Sun 6-1
Andrew Marvell Carriages 12-3
Virgil Banners 10-4
Percy Shelley Banners 11-5
William James Pistols 9-5
Leonardo da Vinci Banners 8-4
Virginia Woolf Carriages 9-8
Relief
Livy Laureates 9-3
Bertrand Russell Sun 6-3
Richard Wagner Pistols 5-3
HOME RUNS
William Yeats Pistols 25
Friedrich Schiller Banners 18
Charles Dickens Laureates 18
Henry Longfellow Carriages 17
William Wordsworth Sun 17
Aphra Behn Laureates 17
James Joyce Pistols 15
Ted Hughes Pistols 14
Alexandre Dumas Laureates 13
Robert Browning Carriages 13
Arthur Tennyson Carriages 11
DG Rossetti Banners 11
HG Wells Sun 10
Matthew Arnold Sun 10
GB Shaw Carriages 10
Right now the Glorious Division is a 3 team race—the Banners, led by the bat of Friedrich Schiller (Keats is finally starting to hit a little) and a great starting rotation, led by Virgil and Shelley, are in first. But right behind the Banners are the Laureates, who now have Pascal (3-1) and Robert Louis Stevenson (4-1) in their starting rotation to go with Jonathan Swift (12-1), and they’ve picked up JD Salinger and Hans Christian Anderson in relief, just in case they need them. Charles Dickens, Aphra Behn, and Alexandre Dumas are smashing homers for Nahum Tate’s Dublin club, who were playing quite well even before they made these changes. Watch out for the Laureates. Some see them as a populist joke. Especially since they’ve added Pascal, and with the way Swift is pitching, they are not. The Carriages are in third, and in the thick of it, too. Paul McCartney has smashed 9 homers from the lead off spot (and is batting .340), George Bernard Shaw has clubbed 10 off the bench, and then you have Tennyson, Browning, and Longfellow belting out 41 between them in the middle of the order. Andrew Marvell (12-3) is London’s towering ace, but after that, including the bullpen, the pitching is thin. To remedy a weak bullpen, they just added Descartes. In limited use, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Lamb haven’t been too bad in relief. Virginia Woolf (9-8) has tossed a lot of innings as their no. 2 starter. If the Carriages keep hitting (and they do win on the road) they can take this thing. The Devon Sun and Berlin Pistols, tied for last at 34 and 46, and 12 games out of first, have pretty good bullpens (Bertrand Russell anchors the Sun pen, Richard Wagner, the Pistol’s) they can hit the ball out of the park (Yeats, Joyce, and Ted Hughes for the Pistols, Wordsworth, HG Wells and Matthew Arnold for the Sun) but starting pitching is their doom. The Pistols’ T.S Eliot lost his first five starts and has battled back to 9-9. The Pistols’ Ezra Pound began the year at 1-3, including losses of 27-3, 24-7, and 22-14. Pound was replaced by Hemingway (0-2) and then Horace Greeley (3-6). Maybe they will try Pound, again. The moody William James is the Pistols best starter. He’s 9-5. After Santayana won 3 in a row in May, he can’t win. The Sun’s woes are similar. Emerson is 6-10. John Stuart Mill (4-6)—spelled by Ruskin, the Sun’s best pitcher so far—Aldous Huxley (6-8), and Thomas Carlyle (5-10) have been no better than Emerson. Ruskin, who helps Thoreau and Russell in the bullpen, has 4 shutouts (his phenomenal run when he briefly replaced Mill); the rest of the staff has one (Emerson). Maybe it’s time to put Ruskin back in the starting rotation. “I will pitch where the manager [Winston Churchill] wants me to pitch,” said Ruskin. Churchill, and the Sun’s owner, John Russell, likes Emerson, Mill, Huxley, and Carlyle. So we’ll see.
EMPEROR DIVISION
Rome Ceilings Pope Julius II 44 36 —
Paris Goths Charles X 41 39 (3)
Corsica Codes Napoleon Bonaparte 41 39 (3)
Madrid Crusaders Philip II 40 40 (4)
Rimini Broadcasters Fellini 38 42 (6)
WINS
Francisco Goya Goths 7-2
Ludovico Ariosto Ceilings 9-4
George Orwell Broadcasters 7-3
Homer Codes 10-5
GWF Hegel Codes 9-5
George Friderik Handel Crusaders 8-4
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand Goths 10-6
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Broadcasters 6-4
John Milton Ceilings 8-7
Oscar Wilde Goths 7-6
Wolfgang Goethe Goths 7-6
Relief
Maurice Ravel Broadcasters 4-0
JS Bach Ceilings 9-5
HOME RUNS
WH Auden Codes 20
Anne Bradstreet Crusaders 19
Sophocles Goths 19
Heinrich Heine Goths 18
Victor Hugo Codes 18
Aeschylus Crusaders 16
Euripides Ceilings 14
Mary Angela Douglas Crusaders 13
Rainer Maria Rilke Broadcasters 12
Robert Burns Broadcasters 12
Jean Rancine Codes 12
Edmund Spenser Ceilings 11
Torquato Tasso Goths 10
Anne Sexton Broadcasters 10
The Ceilings still lead the Emperor Division, with a 3 game lead over the recently surging Goths—tied for last not long ago. The Ceilings once invincible starting pitching has faltered, and they look human and beatable. Milton went 7 straight trips to the mound without a win; Dryden got hurt and has only won once since early June; Augustine is win-less in his last nine starts; Ariosto, however, continues to pitch well, Bach is still a miracle in the bullpen, and Euripides and Blake are hitting and scoring runs. Goya came out of the pen where he was 3-0 and has won 4 as a starter for the Goths, replacing Baudelaire (2-9) in the rotation. Thomas de Quincey is a recent bullpen acquisition. Tasso, playing for the hurt Ronsard, has 10 homers, adding to the melancholy duo of Sophocles (19) and Heine (18) for the Goths. W.H. Auden has smashed a division-leading 20 for Napoleon’s Codes, 41-39—like the Goths, and Homer (10-5) and Hegel (9-5) have emerged as their lethal starting duo. In a tight division race, Madrid’s Crusaders (4 games out) and the Remini Broadcasters (6 games behind) are in striking distance. The Crusaders, a .500 team for a while now, are being lifted by music: Handel (8-4) leads the team in wins; Mozart (3-2) and Beethoven (4-1) who joined the team in June, hope to eventually push them over the top. Joan of Arc is the new lefty in the bullpen. The Crusaders have plenty of pop with Anne Bradstreet (19 homers), Aeschylus (16 homers) and Mary Angela Douglas (13 homers)—the contemporary poet who won a starting job off the bench—replacing an injured Saint Ephrem at shortstop—when she starting hitting homers. The Broadcasters are Fellini’s team, and this currently last-place team is difficult to define: Rilke and Burns lead them in homers, Mick Jagger leads them in stolen bases, Jim Morrison leads them in doubles, Anne Sexton leads them in batting average, George Orwell, who is both starter and reliever, leads them in wins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is their best starting pitcher right now, and Maurice Ravel is slowly becoming a star in the bullpen. “The musicians are beginning to change Scarriet Poetry Baseball,” Ravel said. “A memorable phrase of music is just a good as an epigram.”
Oscar Wilde: 4-0 with a shutout in last 4 starts to help the surging Goths.
The Rome Ceilings are still in first. But barely. After dominating the Emperor Division in the first two months of the season, their starters have forgotten how to win.
The Ceilings have lost 12 of their last 16.
Giacomo Leopardi had the kind of day which gives even greatness pause; it was when the Rimini Broadcasters flew into Rome to face the Ceilings—a 31-17 club beginning an 8 game home stand. The visiting Leopardi tossed a one-hitter and hit a home run, and out-dueled John Milton, 1-0.
Apparently, this brilliant performance by Leopardi knocked the Ceilings into a spin.
Since then, Milton has not won, John Dryden has not won and missed a start (Octavio Paz lost in his place), Ludovico Ariosto (who earlier won 6 straight) has not won, and Saint Augustine has not won.
The Ceilings have never been lower.
General manager Pope Julius II waved his hand when asked what was wrong.
“Nothing.”
Manager Richelieu practically spat his response.
“We’re good.”
Meanwhile, the Paris Goths exploded, going 12-4, as the Ceilings went 4-12, and we now have a race in the Emperor Division.
The Ceilings were hoping to break things wide open—as they appeared almost invincible in the early part of the season. But all it takes is a stumble (you start to lose those 3-2 contests instead of winning them) and another team gets hot.
The Goths of Charles X have made their run at home, in Paris, a beautiful park near the Seine, including a series against the Broadcasters in which Leopardi pitched well again, blanking the Goths for 8 2/3 innings—but Johann Wolfgang von Goethe answered with 9 shutout innings of his own, and Sophocles’ walk-off grand slam off George Orwell, the Broadcasters’ new hope, in the bottom of the ninth gave the Goths a 4-0 victory. Arthur Schopenhauer, the Goths manager, chortled afterward, “Sophocles is the ultimate goth—even more than Goethe!”
George Orwell, burned by Sophocles, has returned to the bullpen for the eccentric and highly individual Broadcasters with starter Samuel Taylor Coleridge now healthy—and who appears to be throwing the ball harder than ever; a good sign. And Jacques Lacan, replacing a struggling Ben Jonson in the rotation, has given the Broadcasters a lift (3-0, 2.80 ERA)—who have gained on the Ceilings, too, though their record is still under .500. A long, thrilling, grinding, road trip for the Broadcasters included two back-to-back, come-from-behind, wins in Rome for this slowly reviving team owned by Federico Fellini: Jim Morrison, Anne Sexton, and Charles Bukowski, got key hits, as Orwell beat J.S. Bach twice in nail-biting relief appearances, once in extra innings—to the horror of the Ceilings fans in Rome.
The Corsica Codes of Napoleon (Codes ace Homer going 3-0) the Madrid Crusaders, and the Broadcasters all gained on the Ceilings while playing .500 ball during the Ceilings current slump, but Philip of Spain’s Crusaders have to be the happiest—they gained in the standings playing a long road trip, and best of all, signed both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludvig van Beethoven to their starting pitching rotation. Mozart is 2-1 and Beethoven is 2-0 in their first 4 starts. The Crusaders, playing on the road, lost Beethoven’s first 2 games, 9-5 and 4-2, despite Crusader home runs by Mary Angela Douglas and Joyce Kilmer, as Ludwig was throwing too hard and not hitting the corners. Mozart has not been dominating; composers always need to adjust in a poetry league. But the addition of Mozart and Beethoven changes things: the Emperor Division is really up for grabs.
And now a special treat. Scarriet Poetry Baseball caught up with Oscar Wilde and W.H. Auden in a hotel cafe, following Wilde’s 3-2 complete-game victory in Paris over the Codes, despite a two-run homer by Auden. At this writing, Auden has 20 home runs for Napoleon’s team, the most home runs in the Emperor Division, and is close to leading the entire league. Wilde has 6 wins for the Paris Goths, pitching beside Goethe, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire.
Scarriet: Gentlemen…
Wilde: You flatter.
Scarriet: W.H. Auden…
Auden: Now you flatter! Who’s he?
Wilde: (to Auden) You almost spoiled my win, silly.
Auden: My home run?
Wilde: Yes, what were you trying to do? (laughing)
Auden: I was distracted.
Wilde: By my pitch? (laughing)
Auden: No, by an idea for a home run. (laughing)
Wilde: You devil! Where do you get these ideas? Not from me, I hope! (smiling)
Wilde and Auden pause, both looking at the interviewer.
Scarriet: (mind going blank) It’s a lovely day.
Wilde: To be outside.
Auden: It’s always better to be somewhere else.
Wilde: Precisely. Let’s go inside.
Auden: Is it too noisy here? I thought we were inside?
Wilde: (looking around at the space) It’s difficult to tell. Are we?
Auden: We’re partially indoors. This large awning, and this carpet.
Wilde: A big cafe. So fancy, it’s hard to tell where we are. Who picked this place?
Auden: At least we’re not directly on the street.
Wilde: But we can see the street…
Auden: Thank God we can smoke here…
Wilde: I don’t know. What year is it?
Auden: It always feels like a year between cigarettes for me…
Wilde: You measure time that way? By coughing?
Auden: Yes, it’s my clock. Sixty coughs per hour.
Wilde: But you have the breath of ten men.
Auden: My lungs are my best feature. I have handsome lungs.
Wilde: I can hear them. They’re lovely.
Auden: A bit high-pitched.
Wilde: Low tones can hardly be heard. I like a good, stabbing, high-pitched, voice!
Auden: (laughing, coughing) You’re making fun of me!
Wilde: Don’t lower your voice now! Don’t be suave, Wystan! Be yourself. Scream.
Auden: (pealing, high-pitched laughter, interrupted by low, growling coughing)
Wilde: People are looking now! See what you’ve done, Wystan!
Auden: (still choking) Me??
Scarriet: Can I ask—
Wilde: About the United States?
Auden: (cough, cough) What about Ireland?
Wilde: Do you know what the United States was? Ireland’s revenge against England.
Auden: And now? What about now, in 2020?
Wilde: China is England’s revenge—against the United States.
Auden: People have soured on Christianity. The pendulum is swinging towards a different kind of control.
Wilde: Oh life is pleasant now. Let’s talk about baseball. This gentleman wants to know—
Scarriet: I would rather you two just talk. I’ll stay out the way…
Wilde: This is the worst interview ever! (smiling) Let us two gasbags go on? Is that a good idea?
Auden: Perhaps we could set a few things straight. History gets everything wrong.
Wilde: (sighing) Wystan! Do you have to bring history in? I’m still trying to figure out my mistakes…
Auden: They weren’t your mistakes. They were history’s mistakes.
Wilde: Yes, that’s what history is. But no, they were mine. They were my mistakes. (pause)
Scarriet: Can I borrow a cigarette…
Auden: Oh, certainly, dear!
Wilde: Our interviewer is so charming!
Auden: And he lets us say whatever we want! (laughing)
Paul McCartney, lead-off hitter for the London Carriages, has 6 home runs.
EMPEROR DIVISION
The Rome Ceilings have outscored their opponents 84-49 at home—holding them to 2 runs per game, as their spacious outfield, (as big as the Colosseum) and fleet center fielder Edmund Spenser, gobbles up would-be home runs; Milton, Dryden, Ariosto (7-2) and Augustine, with Bach in the bullpen, is all pitching coach Marco Polo, and manager Cardinal Richelieu need. If the Corsica Codes are going to catch the Ceilings, they’re going to have to pitch better, and play better on the road. In his last 5 starts, no. 3 starter Hesiod is 0-5. Victor Hugo (2B) and W.H. Auden (SS) are hitting a ton, but Napoleon’s infield (Callimachus 1b, Derek Walcott 3b) leads the league in errors. The Madrid Crusaders have to be happy that Mary Angela Douglas played so well filling in for Saint Ephrem at shortstop—Douglas, Aeschylus, and Bradstreet were a murderer’s row from late May to early June. St. John of the Cross and Handel have pitched really well recently. But the big news: Cervantes, the Crusaders manager, has met with Mozart and Beethoven—if either one of these join the Crusaders pitching staff, all bets are off. The Paris Goths (22-26) are out of contention because of one starter—Baudelaire is on a 9 game losing streak; the ‘cursed’ pitcher has had poor run support (10 runs in his last 7 starts). The Goths’ position players have been dogged by injuries; Tasso and Holderlin, tied with the 3rd most homers on the club, began the year on the bench. Manager Schopenhauer might put Baudelaire in the bullpen for a spell and use newly acquired Goya as a starter. The Rimini Broadcasters, at 22-26, in last place with the Goths, need to decide what to do with George Orwell, who pitched well for the damaged Samuel Coleridge—who is now healthy. The Broadcasters need pitching help (Ben Jonson, their no. 2 starter, has been lackluster) and are close to signing Lacan, Gurdjieff, Frida Kahlo, or Salvador Dali. Nero, the Broadcasters manager, has spoken to all of them.
Standings
Ceilings Pope Julius II, 31-17 “They also serve who only stand and wait”
Codes Napoleon Bonaparte 25-23 “Let the more loving one be me”
Crusaders Phillip II of Spain 24-24 “If in my thought I have magnified the Father above the Son let Him have no mercy on me”
Broadcasters Federico Fellini 22-26 “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name”
Goths Charles X 22-26 “Every great enterprise takes its first step in faith”
The first place London Carriages swept the Laureates in Dublin—as Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Bronte combined to throw a 4-0, 11 inning shut out, and William Hazlitt beat Samuel Johnson in a 2-1 pitching duel. When the Laureates tried to repay the favor, and beat the Carriages 3 out of 4 in London; Virginia Woolf avoided the sweep, out-pitching Thomas Peacock 2-1. The Carriages (27-21) swept the Florence Banners (25-23) when they first visited London, Andrew Marvell beating Dante 5-0. The second time the Carriages hosted the Banners, they lost 3 out of 4 to de Medici’s club, as Virginia Woolf prevailed over Shelley, 3-2. That’s the difference between the first three teams. The Devon Sun would be in last place, except John Ruskin won 5 straight replacing the injured J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell is 5-1 in relief, and William Wordsworth hit some clutch homers. The Sun are tied with the Pistols, who they beat 23-18 and 27-3 in Berlin; however, the Pistols have beat the Sun 6 out of 8 since then. T.S. Eliot finally began winning (5 straight, 2 shutouts) a cursed Pound was sent to the bullpen, and the Pistols enjoyed a power surge from Ted Hughes, John Quinn, and Alistair Crowley.
Standings
Carriages Queen Victoria 27-21
Laureates Nahum Tate 25-23
Banners de Medici 25-23
Pistols Eva Braun 22-26
The Sun PM John Russell 22-26
WINS
Andrew Marvell, Carriages 7-2 Percy Shelley, Banners 7-4
Jonathan Swift, Laureates 6-1
William James, Pistols 6-2
John Ruskin, Sun 5-1
Leonardo da Vinci, Banners 5-2
Virgil, Banners 5-4
Virginia Woolf, Carriages 5-6
T.S. Eliot, Pistols 5-7
Santayana, Pistols 4-4
Samuel Johnson, Laureates 4-4
Dante, Banners 4-5
Emerson, Sun 4-6
Relief
Bertrand Russell, Sun 5-1 Livy, Laureates 5-1
SOCIETY DIVISION
The Boston Secrets have 10 wins in relief, while starters Plato and Pushkin have excelled; starters Poe and Moliere have been disappointing, and the Secrets haven’t exactly knocked the cover off the ball, but defense, and coming out on top in close contests, find Ben Franklin’s team solidly in first. No other team in the Society Division is playing over .500—the Connecticut Actors (24-24) are relying on Byron (6-0 in his last 8 starts) Chaucer (3 shutouts), and Thomas Nashe (12 home runs) and not much else. The Manhattan War need Shakespeare to pitch better, but he has won 5 games, and has been out-dueled a couple of times; he’ll be fine. Stephen Crane is the only one really hitting for the War. Philip Sidney (4 home runs) has been playing hurt (foot). The Fairfield (Connecticut) Animals are tied with the War, and scoring runs is even more of a problem for them—Wallace Stevens, their clean-up hitter, has only 5 home runs. Seamus Heaney, their leader, has 8. P.T. Barnum’s club is scoring enough for Amy Lowell—she has one of the best records in the league. Herman Melville has been a study in futility, however. He’s 1-9. The Virginia Strangers are losing close games; Lovecraft is not scaring anyone in relief; Camus is 2-8; Pope, their ace, is 5-4. Rimbaud, Rabelais, and Roethke are providing pop. Manager Bram Stoker is talking to Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard about helping the Strangers bullpen.
Standings
The Secrets Ben Franklin 29-19
The Actors Harvey Weinstein 24-24
The War J.P. Morgan 23-25
The Animals P.T. Barnum 23-25
The Strangers David Lynch 21-27
WINS
Plato, Secrets 8-3
Amy Lowell, Animals 7-1
Walter Scott, War 6-2
Byron, Actors 6-3
Remarque, War 6-4
Verne, Animals 6-5
The Kolkata Cobras were not happy when Tulsidas agreed to play right field with Lorenzo de Medici’s Ceilings, but the Cobras have done just fine without him, depending heavily on the 20th century and English. Ramavtar Sarma and Acharya Shivapujan Sahay were just added to the bullpen, to help Kabir Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Krishnamurti, Faiz A. Faiz, and Raja Rao, as manager Rupi Kaur and pitching coach V.S. Naipal struggle to find the right combination there. Herman Hesse is 3-5 as the fourth starter, but Rumi, Tagore, and Gandhi are a combined 21-7. Javed Akhtar, Vikram Seth, George Harrison, and Anand Thakore have combined for 145 RBIs, while Samar Sen and Allen Ginsberg have scored 55 times at the top of the order. The Beijing Waves, in second place, are 17-7 at home, with Lao Tzu as a starter and Confucius in relief, their top hurlers. Khomeini in the bullpen, and Voltaire and Rousseau as starters, have been big disappointments. Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Engles, and Lu Xun are in the mix in relief. Jack Dorsey, the Waves manager, is at his wit’s end trying to find pitching for Chairman Mao’s team. Li Po, Tu Fu, and Karl Marx are hitting well in the middle of the order, but they need more from Brecht, Li He, and Neruda. The Santa Barbara Laws are playing much better away from home than the Waves, and are tied with them for second place, as John Donne and Thomas Hardy lead the Laws in homers. The good news for the 25-23 Laws is the recent performance of 3 of their starters—Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Oliver Wendell Holmes are all 4-1 in their last 6 starts. Quintilian has been added to help Mark Van Doren in relief. The Tokyo Mist and the LA Gamers are the current bottom feeders in the Peoples Division. Yukio Mishima (6-4, 2.10 ERA) has been a pleasant surprise for the Mist, filling in for the injured Heraclitus as the no. 3 starter, and has certainly earned a spot on the team. Basho and Issa as starters, Kobe Abe and D.T. Suzuki in relief, have not been good. John Lennon, Hilda Doolittle, and Yoko Ono are not hitting in Tokyo, as the Mist have a terrible home record. The Mist are 4-12 against the Waves, but are playing .500 against everyone else. The Gamers are 1-7 against the Cobras. James Tate has started to win, but Derrida is 0-4 in his last 4 starts, and Democritus replaced the injured E.E. Cummings only to go 1-4. Lewis Carroll, the Gamers ace, has contributed to the slide, not able to win in his last 4 starts. Ionesco leads the Gamers with 11 homers. Manager Bob Hope is talking to both Woody Allen and Muhammad Ali about joining the bullpen. Merv Griffin is also trying to woo W.H. Auden away from Napoleon’s Codes in the Emperor Division. Auden, critically esteemed, yet a champion of Light Verse, would be an ideal fit for the Gamers. But Auden is leading his division in homers and seems to love playing in Corsica, so that move is doubtful.
Standings
The Cobras, Satyajit Ray 29-19
The Waves, Chairman Mao 25-23
The Laws, Dick Wolf 25-23
The Mist, Kurosawa 20-28
The Gamers, Merv Griffin 19-29
WINS
J. Rumi, Cobras 7-1 R. Tagore, Cobras 7-3 M. Gandhi, Cobras 7-3
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, Laws 5-2
Yone Noguchi, Mist 5-3
Lewis Carroll, Gamers 5-5
James Tate, Gamers 5-5
Francis Bacon, Laws 5-6
Relief wins
Confucius, Waves 6-2
MODERN DIVISION
The Chicago Buyers have the best record in the whole league, even as Freud has stopped winning and their bullpen has not been effective. But Freud started out 5-0, and now the other 3 starters have taken over: in their last 6 starts, Whitman is 3-1, Twain is 4-1, and Paul Engle is 4-1. Elizabeth Bishop has more home runs than anybody (20), plus Dylan Thomas has 14, and Robert Lowell has 10. The Arden Dreamers have cooled after a hot start and now they’re in second place—under .500 and 9 games behind the Buyers. Margaret Atwood and Anais Nin have each won 5 for the Dreamers, but Germaine Greer is 2-6 in relief. Manager Averell Harriman would love Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to join their bullpen. Talks are underway. Run-scoring is not a problem for the Dreamers. Sharon Olds, Edna Millay, and Louis MacNeice have knocked in 129 runs between them. Bob Dylan (.311 batting average, 9 home runs) finally got hot for the Phoenix Universe, but manager Billy Beane knows they have to make a move, as they are 10 games out of first and not one of their pitchers has been outstanding. Steven Spielberg’s Universe is talking to everyone, including Jack London, Octavio Paz, and MLK Jr. The Manhattan Printers have been playing much better lately. John Updike is their home run leader with 14, and Duchamp and Marjorie Perloff have been on fire—Duchamp is 4-1 and Perloff is 5-0 in their last 7 starts; Stephanie Burt, and Mark Rothko, however, have been dismal; Burt is 0-4 in his last 6 trips to the hill, Rothko has not won in his last 5 outings. That leaves us with the Philadelphia Crash, 13 games out of first. The only bright spot is Pablo Picasso in relief (7-2). Allen Tate leads them with 8 homers. Walter Pater hasn’t won in 6 starts, John Dewey is 0-1 in his last 4, and their ace, John Crowe Ransom, has yet to notch a win. Manager Giorgio de Chirico and Henri Matisse are doing what they can to keep Ransom’s confidence up. The Crash lost Ransom’s first four starts by one run, and he was tossed for throwing at hitters in one of those close games. Pitchers Clement Greenberg and Roger Fry are said to be close to signing for the last-place Crash.
Standings
The Buyers John D. Rockefeller 32-16
The Dreamers Pamela Harriman 23-25
The Universe Steven Spielberg 22-26
The Printers Andy Warhol 21-27
The Crash A.C. Barnes 19-29
Edna Millay, Dreamers 13
Aristophanes, Printers 13
Louis MacNeice, Dreamers 13
Aphra Behn, Laureates 13
Aeschylus Crusaders 13
Sophocles Goths 13
Anne Bradstreet Crusaders 13 Stephen Crane, War 13 (Society Div)
Victor Hugo Codes 12
Friedrich Schiller, Banners 12
Thomas Nashe, Actors 12 Vikram Seth, Cobras 12 (Peoples Div) Javed Akhtar, Cobras 12 (Peoples Div)
Heinrich Heine Goths 11
Arthur Rimbaud, Strangers 11
Ionesco, Gamers 11
Li Po, Waves 11
Lord Tennyson, Carriages 10
Ted Hughes, Pistols 10
Emily Dickinson, Secrets 10
George Harrison, Cobras 10
John Donne, Laws 10
Robert Lowell, Buyers 10
Edmund Spenser Ceilings 9
Rilke Broadcasters 9
Robert Burns Broadcasters 9
Robert Browning, Carriages 9
William Wordsworth, Sun 9
Alexandre Dumas, Laureates 9
Thomas Hardy, Laws 9
Karl Marx, Waves 9
Bob Dylan, Universe 9
Juvenal, Universe 9
Tu Fu, Waves 8
John Lennon, Mist 8
Seamus Heaney, Animals 8
Mary Angela Douglas Crusaders 8
Jean Racine Codes 8
Allen Tate, Crash 8
Stephen Spender, Crash 8
Muriel Rukeyser, Dreamers 8
Matthew Arnold Sun 8
Henry Longfellow Carriages 8
GB Shaw Carriages 8
Anne Sexton Broadcasters 7
Robert Frost, Secrets 7
Francois Rabelais, Strangers 7
Theodore Roethke, Strangers 7
Billy Collins, Gamers 7
Thomas Hood, Gamers 7
Anand Thakore, Cobras 7
Hilda Doolitte, Mist 7
Martial, Laws 7
Paul Celan, Universe 7
Kenneth Koch, Printers 7
John Quinn Pistols 7
HG Wells Sun 7
Basil Bunting Sun 7
Woody Guthrie, Secrets 6
Harry Crosby, War 6
Hafiz, Actors 6
Euripides Ceilings 6
Kenneth Rexroth, Buyers 6
Anthony Hecht, Universe 6
Hart Crane, Printers 6
Wole Soyinka Codes 6
JK Rowling Laureates 6
Sara Teasdale Laureates 6
Paul McCartney Carriages 6
Haruki Murakami Mist 6
Sadakichi Hartman Mist 6
Joe Green Gamers 5
Tasso Goths 5
John Paul II Crusaders 5
Holderlin Goths 5
Wallace Stevens Animals 5
Phillis Wheatley Crusaders 5
Jim Morrison Broadcasters 5
Knut Hamsun Strangers 5
Amiri Baraka Actors 5
Gwendolyn Brooks Actors 5
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Animals 5
Boris Pasternak Laureates 5
Christina Rossetti Banners 5
Ben Mazer Banners 5
Alistair Crowley Pistols 5
Sir John Davies Sun 5
Yoko Ono Mist 5
Donald Davidson Crash 5
Federico Garcia Lorca Printers 5
Robert Penn Warren Buyers 5
John Gould Fletcher Crash 5
Stevie Smith Dreamers 5
Richard Lovelace Dreamers 5
Jack Gilbert Dreamers 5
Maya Angelou Universe 4
Edgar Lee Masters Buyers 4
Duke Ellington Buyers 4
John Crowe Ransom Crash 4
Andre Breton Printers 4
John Ashbery Printers 4
Kalidasa Cobras 4
Donald Hall Laws 4
Ghalib Laureates 4
DG Rossetti Banners 4
Dante Banners 4
Geoffrey Hill Carriages 4
Phillip Sidney War 4
Shakespeare War 4
Derek Walcott Codes 4
William Blake Ceilings 4
Thomas Chatterton Goths 4
de Stael Goths 4
John Milton Ceilings 4
Michelangelo Ceilings 4
Oliver Goldsmith, Laureates 3
John Townsend Trowbridge Laureates 3
Glyn Maxwell, Banners 3
Ford Maddox Ford, Pistols 3
D.H. Lawrence, Pistols 3
Olga Rudge Pistols 3
Filippo Marinetti Pistols 3
Alfred Orage Pistols 3
Margaret Fuller Sun 3
Rudyard Kipling Sun 3
Horace Walpole Sun 3
Carol Ann Duffy Carriages 3
Elizabeth Barrett Carriages 3
Carl Sandburg Secrets 3
Nathaniel Hawthorne Secrets 3
Paul Simon Secrets 3
Robert Graves War 3
Marianne Moore Animals 3
Ovid Animals 3
Jack Spicer Animals 3
Reinhold Neibuhr Crusaders 3
Robert Herrick Goths 3
Callimachus Codes 3
Jules Laforgue Codes 3
Mick Jagger Broadcasters 3
Francois Villon Codes 3
Gottfried Burger Laws 3
Reed Whitmore Laws 3
Jane Kenyon Laws 3
Antonio Machado Laws 3
Ernest Thayer Gamers 3
Noel Coward Gamers 3
Bertolt Brecht Waves 3
Gary Snyder Mist 3
Natsume Soseki Mist 3
Izumi Shikabu Mist 3
Li He Waves 3
Allen Ginsberg Cobras 3
Walt Whitman Buyers 3
Carolyn Forche Dreamers 3
Lou Reed Printers 3
Archilochus Crash 3
WC Williams Crash 3
Chuck Berry Universe 3
Delmore Schwartz Universe 3
Joyce Kilmer Crusaders 2
Saint Ephrem Crusaders 2
James Russell Lowell Ceilings 2
Mina Loy Codes 2
John Clare Codes 2
Vladimir Nabokov Broadcasters 2
Giacomo Leopardi Broadcasters 2
Gregory Corso Broadcasters 2
Edgar Poe Secrets 2
Cole Porter Secrets 2
Wilfred Owen War 2
Apollinaire War 2
Alan Seeger War 2
T.E. Hulme War 2
James Dickey War 2
Robinson Jeffers Animals 2
Mary Shelley Strangers 2
Marilyn Hacker Actors 2
David Bowie Actors 2
Lucille Clifton Actors 2
Rod McKuen Laureates 2
Van Morrison Laureates 2
Thomas Wyatt Banners 2
Stefan George Banners 2
Thomas Moore Banners 2
Guido Cavalcanti Banners 2
John Keats Banners 2
T.S. Eliot Pistols 2
Gertrude Stein Pistols 2
Carl Jung Pistols 2
Dorothy Shakespeare Pistols 2
Ralph Waldo Emerson Sun 2
Marilyn Chin Sun 2
Joy Harjo Sun 2
Joseph Addison Sun 2
Richard Steele Sun 2
Philip Larkin Carriages 2
Sylvia Plath Carriages 2
Simone de Beauvoir Dreamers 2
Jorie Graham Buyers 2
Marcel Duchamp Printers 2
Larry Levis Universe 2
Christopher Isherwood Printers 2
Stanley Kunitz Crash 2
Franz Werfel Crash 2
Galway Kinnell Universe 2
James Baldwin Printers 2
Francisco Goya might be what the Goths are looking for.
The Rome Ceilings of Pope Julius II are doing it with pitching.
Bach, the great Lutheran composer who spent his last years perfecting his Catholic Mass, has been a godsend for The Ceilings in relief: 30 innings, 12 hits, 34 strikeouts, 2 walks, and 2 runs allowed, with a 5-2 record.
John Milton, the famous Puritan poet (his brother was a Catholic) agreed to play for Julius II (“We’re all Christians,” he said as he signed) is 6-4 with a 1.80 ERA. Ariosto, the great Italian renaissance poet, has also been amazing for the Ceilings, with a 7-2 record and a 2.20 ERA. The Ceilings have allowed just 137 runs in 48 games, the best in the entire league.
Only Lorenzo de Medici’s Banners in the Glorious League is close (139) in allowing the fewest runs. The Banners, with a starting four of Dante, Shelley, Virgil, and da Vinci, have a modest 25-23 record (John Keats, batting third, only has 2 home runs, and they don’t have much of a bullpen.) The Ceilings send Milton, Dryden, Ariosto and Augustine (Jonathan Swift went to the Laureates at the beginning of May) to the hill as starters, and Bach has made a huge difference in relief. Bach’s success meant Augustine could move from the bullpen to the starting rotation.
Edmund Spenser (9) and Euripides (6) are the leading home run hitters for the Ceilings, atop the Emperor division with a 31-17 record.
Only Rockefeller’s The Buyers, in the Modern division, have a better record, at 32-16.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s Codes are in second place, led by Homer and Hegel’s pitching (both 5-3 as starters), and the hitting of W.H. Auden and Victor Hugo. Auden leads the Emperor division with 15 homers. People are still wondering why the suave modern poet, W.H. Auden, wanted to sign on with Napoleon. Auden, with a conservative and eccentric streak, still won’t say. But his bat is speaking loud and clear. “I do hope our pitching improves,” Auden said. “Our boys certainly know how to pitch.”
The Crusaders signed Handel to be “their Bach in relief” but decided to move the composer into the starting rotation and use Bishop George Berkeley as their heavy lifter in relief. This has worked wonders for Philip of Spain’s club, which has played better than .500 ball since the first month of the season, and find themselves just a game out of second place. Handel is 6-2 and Berkeley has won some extremely close games. St. John of the Cross won three straight starts recently and Thomas Aquinas has been steady, though not brilliant. The Crusaders have some pop in their bats—Anne Bradstreet and Aeschylus have 13 homers each, and Mary Angela Douglas, filling in the for the injured St. Ephrem, has added 8.
The Broadcasters and Goths, the two “strange” teams in the division, are tied for last. They’ve been inconsistent, but certainly have the stuff to win. Jim Morrison of the Broadcasters missed 20 games, and the reason was anyone’s guess, but when he returned, he homered in 4 consecutive games. None of the Broadcasters’ starters (Leopardi, Ben Jonson, Nabokov) have been horrible, but they’ve been hot and cold, including George Orwell, who has replaced the injured Samuel Coleridge as the no. 4 starter. The signing of Maurice Ravel in relief could be one answer for the Broadcasters; Valery as a reliever hasn’t been that good. And Alfred Hitchcock and Walter Benjamin haven’t really impressed so far, either. Rilke, Bobby Burns, and Ann Sexton have hit well for the Broadcasters and Mick Jagger has 3 homers and 17 stolen bases from the lead off spot.
The Goths know that Goethe (3-4) can do better; Chateaubriand, their no. 2 starter has been great. Wilde and Baudelaire, starters 3 and 4, have been disappointing. “The very nature of winning and losing streaks are flimsy,” Wilde quipped. “Time and work will be kind to our team.” A.W. Schlegel (3-3) and Theo Gautier (1-3) have worked a lot of innings in relief, without much to show for it—newly signed Goya has already made a difference, however. If Goethe pitches like people expect, and Sophocles and Heine continue to hit balls out of the park, look for the Goths to move up.
But who can catch the Ceilings, with their pitching staff of Milton, Dryden, Ariosto, Augustine, and Bach?
Emperor Division Standings
Ceilings Pope Julius II, 31-17
Codes Napoleon Bonaparte 25-23
Crusaders Phillip II of Spain 24-24
Broadcasters Federico Fellini 22-26
Goths Charles X 22-26
Fellini’s Broadcasters play in Rimini, Italy. Nero is their manager. They’re currently 6-10.
Dublin Laureates Get John Townsend Trowbridge
The prolific author John Townsend Trowbridge, born in 1827, has just signed with the Laureates in the Glorious League. Friends with Whitman and Twain, Townsend spent the last half of his life in Arlington, Massachusetts. He traveled to the South right after the Civil War to interview ordinary folk for his book, The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities.Guy Vernon is his remarkable verse novel which has gained recent attention. Manager Ronald Reagan was very happy the Laureates were able to secure Townsend, tweeting, “The man who wrote the sweet versed Guy Vernon is ours! He will make an immediate impact on our ball club!”
Napoleon Glad Homer’s Injury Is Not Serious; Auden Continues To Answer Questions
The Corsica Codes, run by Napoleon Bonaparte, favored by many to win the Emperor Division, are currently tied for first place with the Ceilings of Pope Julius II. Napoleon got a bit of a scare though, when his “Ancient Ace,” Homer, complained of shoulder stiffness after pitching the Codes to a 2-1 ‘no decision’ win. Manager Alexander the Great rested Homer for his next start; critic and poet William Logan went to the hill in his place, allowing 2 runs and 6 hits over seven, in a game won by the Codes 3-2, Immanuel “Manny” Kant picking up his third win out of the bullpen. Doctors have cleared Homer to keep pitching.
In another Codes piece of news, W.H. Auden has banged out 5 home runs to tie for the Emperor Division lead with Aeschylus (Madrid Crusaders) and Heine (Paris Goths) and is obviously enjoying playing for Napoleon’s stern and serious ball club. Look at the Codes pitching staff: Homer, Cicero, Hegel, Hesiod, and Kant. Can the genial and low-key Auden (ss) get along with Callimachus (1b), Racine (cf), Villon (rf), Tati-Loutard (c), and Victor Hugo (2b)? The manager Alexander the Great? The owner, Napoleon? Auden’s countrymen, and many Americans, wonder what he’s doing on Napoleon’s club. “I like being on a great team, an historic team. I’m being paid well,” Auden said in a recent interview. Auden’s friends in England and the United States shake their heads when they hear talk like this. Some are absolutely incensed: “Paid well?” “I love all kinds of literature,” Auden tweeted yesterday, “always have.” He’s playing well, and so far, it doesn’t seem like he’s been affected by the criticism. Alexander, the manager, made a simple observation: “Napoleon wants good players. Auden will help us win a title.”
The Codes started off on fire, winning five of their first 6. They’ve cooled a bit recently, and were embarrassed at Madrid, in the Crusaders‘ home park, losing 19-0. Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, John Paul II, and Mary Angela Douglas homered for Philip of Spain’s team.
Graves Sent To War, Pessoa To Replace for Strangers
Robert Graves, the starting second baseman for David Lynch’s Strangers, has been traded to J.P. Morgan’s War—for Ben Lerner, Franz Wright, and WS Merwin. Fernando Pessoa will replace Graves in the Strangers starting lineup. “We thought Graves was strange, but he wasn’t strange enough. I don’t think he quite fit in,” said Bram Stoker, the Strangers manager. “We wish him well.” Laura Riding remains on the Strangers, playing shortstop. Both the Strangers and the War play in the Secret Society Division.
Crusaders Sign Handel
The Crusaders of Madrid got a big boost when they signed George Frederick Handel to bolster their pitching staff. JR Tolkien moves to the bullpen. Christopher Columbus, pitching coach for the Crusaders was ecstatic: “This is wonderful. Handel has a fastball around 100 and one of the best curve balls in this league.”
~~~~~~~~
Emperor League Standings and Leaders
Ceilings 11-5 —–Runs 53, Allowed 37
Codes 11-5 ——Runs 67, Allowed 75
Goths 9-7 ——Runs 82, Allowed 80
Crusaders 6-10 —–Runs 89, Allowed 99
Broadcasters 6-10 —–Runs 58, Allowed 71
~~~
The Ceilings play in Rome. Owner Pope Julius II. Manager, Cardinal Richelieu. Oliver Cromwell, first base coach. Pope Urban VIII, third base coach. Marco Polo, pitching coach.
The Codes play in Corsica. Owner Napoleon Bonaparte. Manager, Alexander the Great. Johann Fichte, first base coach. Napoleon III, third base coach. Julius Caesar, pitching coach.
The Goths play in Paris. Owner Charles X. Manager, Arthur Schopenhauer. Alexander Humboldt, first base coach. Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenbach, third base coach. Charles de Gaulle, pitching coach.
The Crusaders play in Madrid. Owner Philip II. Manager, Cervantes. Francisco Goya, first base coach. SalvadorDali, third base coach. ChristopherColumbus, pitching coach.
The Broadcasters play in Rimini, Italy. Owner Federico Fellini. Manager, Nero. Claudius, first base coach. Augustus, third base coach. Seneca, pitching coach.
~~~
The Broadcasters are the “strange and modern” team in this division. Their starting lineup includes Anne Sexton, Bukowski and Jim Morrison. Mick Jagger. Rilke. Sappho. Celebrities are hanging out in Rimini. Rumor has it Augustus has already complained about this over Nero’s head to Fellini. Although they’ve lost 7 of their last 10, to fall 5 games off the lead in the Emperor Division, the Broadcasters shouldn’t lose hope. They’ve lost a bunch of games by one run, and their pitching has been decent. Nabokov (2-1) tossed a 1 hit shutout. Leopardi, Ben Jonson, and Coleridge have all thrown good games; Valery has been solid out of the pen.
The Ceilings are really the team to watch, with a 2.40 team ERA. J.S.Bach has won three games in relief. JohnMilton, their ace, has been almost unhittable, and in their latest starts, Ariosto and Swift have thrown shutouts. John Dryden has been almost as consistent as Milton. The run production hasn’t been great, but Edmund “Eddy” Spenser has provided pop from the cleanup spot, and when WilliamBlake and Petrarch at the top of the lineup start getting on base, watch out.
The Codes are getting solid pitching, hitting from Auden, and not much else. They need Victor Hugo to hit, and more consistency throughout their lineup, but they are getting the job done.
The Goths have to be happy with their pitching—Goethe, Chateubriand, Wilde, Baudelaire, AW Schlegel, and the hitting of Sophocles and Heinrich Heine. Their bench is deep. Ronsard had to miss some games at first; Tasso filled in admirably. They are poised to rock this division.
The Crusaders started out slowly, but their ace Thomas Aquinas has won his last two starts and they are now playing .500 ball. Adding Handel to their starting staff is huge. Aeschylus and Anne Bradstreet in the middle of the lineup are killing the ball.
Streaks
last 10, ceilings 7-3
last 10 codes 6-4
last 10 goths 6-4
last 10 crusaders 5-5
last 10 broadcasters 3-7
Milton, Ceilings 2-1, 1.15 ERA
Swift, Ceilings 2-1, 1.40 ERA
Nabokov, Broadcasters 2-1, 3.37 ERA
Aquinas, Crusaders 2-2, 3.45 ERA
Hegel, Codes 2-0, 3.67 ERA
Hesiod, Codes 2-1, 3.75 ERA
Baudelaire, Goths 2-2, 4.05 ERA
Cicero, Codes 2-1, 4.70 ERA
WINS-Relief
Kant, Codes 3-0, 3.99 ERA
Bach, Ceilings 2-2, 4.12 ERA
AW Schlegel, Goths 2-2 4.21 ERA
Napoleon convinced Homer the fate of Greece lies with central Europe; the torrential rains in Corsica which delayed both opening game ceremonies and the game itself didn’t seem to bother Napoleon one bit. He smiled the whole time, and even toasted several dignitaries, and the fans, at one point, to tremendous cheers, with champagne from South Africa (watered down).
Homer scattered seven hits in a lengthy and soggy, complete game, 5-3 win over the visiting Rimini Broadcasters in an epic contest marred by heavy Mediterranean rains, as Napoleon’s Codes prevailed over a persistent Federico Felini team in the first game of the season.
The first pitch of the year delivered by Homer was a strike. Knee high, on the outside part of the plate, where Homer pretty much stayed all day (and into the night—this was a long game.)
The Broadcasters took an early 1-0 lead against Homer and the Codes in the second as Robert Burns walked (Corsica fans thought ball four was strike three) and scampered home on a Jim Morrison double.
The Codes stormed back in the bottom of the fourth, taking the lead for good. The Broadcaster starter, the noble Leopardi, seemed bothered by the muddy mound, and fell at one point delivering a pitch. Homer himself began the scoring with an infield single. After Callimachus fanned, Derek Walcott drew a walk and Jean Racine drove in two with a slicing triple that took a funny hop off the wall past Anne Sexton in right. Racine then scored on a Victor Hugo sacrifice fly.
Wole Soyinka and WH Auden both hit solo homers in the seventh, chasing Leopardi. Auden, the English poet, was asked after the game, once again, why he was playing for Napoleon’s team. “Because it’s a good team,” Auden said, “and I love the limestone cliffs of Corsica overlooking this ballpark.” Soyinka, sitting nearby, with a big laugh, called out, “limestone cliffs, baby!”
Not too far away, in Paris, the other Emperor Division contest saw the home Goths trounce the visiting Crusaders 9-5, as Johann W. Goethe earned the opening day win and also knocked in three runs. Thomas Aquinas never looked comfortable on the mound for Philip II’s Madrid team, as he couldn’t find the plate in the first. Somber and humble afterwards in the clubhouse, Aquinas said simply, “God was not with us this day.” Smiling through tears, he added, “He’s not always with us for every little thing we want. I need to pitch better….”
In one other game to report, in the Glorious Division, London was happy as Queen Victoria’sCarriages hosted an opening day win against the Berlin Pistols and starting pitcher T.S. Eliot.
Andrew Marvell, with ninth inning help from Jeremy Bentham, stopped the Pistols, 2-0, besting Eliot in a pitching duel which saw Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning slam solo homers to provide the scoring for the home team. Eliot struck out 15 hitters, including Henry Longfellow four times, but Marvell never allowed a Pistol past second base as his big curve was accurate and a wonder to watch.
Pistols starting pitcher Ezra Pound, hanging out in the bullpen with Hemingway, Heidegger, Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, John Quinn, and Olga Rudge, got into a shouting match with some London fans in the seventh inning, and then after the game complained bitterly that the Pistols “gave Tom no run support after he pitched such a great game; I think I might have to put myself in the lineup; when you can’t hit the ball hard, you have to manufacture runs! Maybe I’m crazy, but I think we should win every game!” William Yeats, hitting in the cleanup spot for the Pistols (0-3 with a walk and a strikeout) grumbled as he left, “It’s still early. We have a lot of games to play. This is a terribly good team.”
Reporting from Corsica, Paris, and London, this is Scarriet Poetry Baseball news.
George Byron in a pensive mood, before taking part in the opening day Scarriet baseball ceremonies.
Happy Easter!
Scarriet has expanded and restructured its baseball league!!
Gone the 2 leagues of 20 teams led by 20 American poets—Eliot, Pound, Frost, Poe, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Dickinson, Millay, Jorie Graham, Ginsberg, Ransom, Cummings, Whittier, Whitman, Bryant, Longfellow, James Lowell, Ashbery, and Emerson.
Now poets like Emerson, Eliot and Poe can be player/managers—to contribute to their teams both at the plate and in the field.
The field is more international—Scarriet Poetry Baseball is now 25 historical teams from all over the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The gods and muses must be pleased with our ten years of Poetry March Madness and our first Poetry Baseball season, where poetry is worshiped through time and space in a manner which no one has ever seen.
Fortunately one of the Muses has always been here to help us, Marla Muse.
Marla Muse: They are indeed pleased, Tom!
You have spoken to the other muses who live in other realms, in those shadowy timeless realms where time is one and poetry lights up suns distantly—
Marla Muse: Yes, and they approve! The stars in the heavens love you more than you know… I would rather die than see poetry die.
This baseball season is different. Mysterious and wealthy owners throughout time and space are bidding, some in secret, for players to fill their rosters.
In the Great Emperor League, we have the Broadcasters. Their motto is “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” and they feature Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Gregory Corso, Anne Sexton, Bobby Burns, Omar Khayyam, Rilke, Coleridge, Leopardi, Anacreon, Sappho, and Ingrid Jonker. They are rumored to be owned and funded by a business group led by Federico Fellini, and their ballpark is in Rimini, Italy.
These ballclubs are timeless, in every sense of the word (these teams compete, with actual statistics, where chance unfolds out of space, out of time) but real money, blood money, purchases these players. We know JP Morgan, for instance, wanted Shakespeare and bid heavily to get him.
The Pistols, who play in Berlin, are said to be associated with Eva Braun, but this cannot be confirmed; one older muse claims to have overheard Eva say, “I take care of this. Adolf is too busy talking to bankers and architects. He doesn’t have time for poetry.” But honestly we cannot say who owns the Pistols.
Nahum Tate, owner of the Laureates, for those who do not know, re-wrote a popular King Lear with a happy ending (after Shakespeare’s death when, for a long period, the Bard was out of fashion,) and was chosen as Poet Laureate of England in 1692.
Dick Wolf produces Law & Order on television, and appears to have a controlling interest in the Laws, playing out of Santa Barbara. He’s got Aristotle, Lord Bacon, and Horace.
John Rockefeller opened his purse to get Walt Whitman, and he thinks that will be enough to win a championship. We don’t know. We do know baseball is all about pitching. All you need is a few good arms which dominate, defense behind them, and some clubhouse chemistry, and not too many injuries. It’s a crap shoot, in many ways, and this is why Rockefeller grumbled he wasn’t going to waste money on superstars who hit home runs and have a high batting average. He’s probably right. A team that wins 2-1 is better than a team that wins 7-4, by pure mathematics, even though the former score wins by 1 and the latter by 3 runs. It’s the ratio that counts. 2-1 = 2. 7-4 = 1.7 This simple reason is why defense wins in every sport. Rockefeller is using this formula, and the oil baron was also advised that you can’t buy a pennant—throwing money at sluggers doesn’t do any good; it’s 90% pitching and luck. Just put a a poet with critical depth on the hill and three good versifiers in the infield and sit back.
Some of the rosters might have some question marks, but that’s what happens in a free market. It’s an historical fact that Longfellow did meet Queen Victoria in person. But no one expected him to play for her!
And W.H. Auden just “wanted to play for Napoleon, I don’t why.”
Marla Muse: I can’t wait for the season to begin! Spring is in the air! Around Rome, and in those still fairer isles… Let’s forget about plagues and the starvation for awhile. Songs are going to sing.
Here then, are the Teams, their Mottoes, and the preliminary rosters—they are always changing (there’s a big minor leagues!)
~~~~~~
THE GREAT EMPEROR LEAGUE
Federico Fellini, Rimini The Broadcasters [Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name]
-Mick Jagger, Sappho, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Paul Valery, Anne Sexton, Omar Khayyam, Robert Burns, Ben Jonson, Coleridge, Jim Morrison, Edmund Waller, Nabokov, Rilke, Giacomo Leopardi, Anacreon, Ingrid Jonker, Swinburne
Napoleon, Corsica The Codes [Let the more loving one be me]
-W.H. Auden, Homer, Hesiod, Racine, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Mina Loy, William Logan, Irving Layton, Villon, Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard, Wole Soyinka, Jules Laforgue, Derek Walcott, Callimachus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius
King Philip II, Madrid The Crusaders [If in my thought I have magnified the Father above the Son, let Him have no mercy on me]
-Saint Ephrem, G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien, Thomas Aquinas, Hilaire Beloc, John Paul II, Saint Theresa of Lisieux, Joyce Kilmer, Saint John of the Cross, Mary Angela Douglas, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Countee Cullen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aeschulus
Charles X, Paris The Goths [Every great enterprise takes its first step in faith]
-A.W. Schlegel, Baudelaire, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Sophocles, George Herbert, Heinrich Heine, Robert Herrick, Clement Marot, Ronsard, Saint-Beuve, Catulus, Thomas Gray, John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Theophile Gautier
Pope Julius II, Rome The Ceilings [They also serve who only stand and wait]
-Milton, Michelangelo, William Blake, Robert Lowell, Petrarch, G.E. Lessing, John Dryden, Klopstock, GE Horne, Ferdowsi, Ariosto, Luis de Camoens, Swift, Tulsidas, Edmund Spenser, Kwesi Brew, Pindar, Euripides
~~~~~
THE GLORIOUS LEAGUE
Eva Braun, Berlin The Pistols [A life subdued to its instrument]
-Ted Hughes, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, DH Lawrence, Alistair Crowley, George Santayana, F.T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Richard Wagner, Jung
Queen Victoria, London The Carriages [Theirs but to do and die]
-Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Longfellow, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Hazlitt, Paul McCartney, Geoffrey Hill, Henry James, Andrew Marvel, John Suckling, Virginia Woolf, Theocritus
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence The Banners [The One remains, the many change and pass]
-Percy Shelley, Dante, William Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, DG Rossetti, John Keats, Marlowe, Guido Cavalcanti, Glyn Maxwell, Ben Mazer, Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Moore, Philodemus, Virgil, Stefan George, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci
P.M. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Devon The Sun [A good indignation brings out all one’s powers]
-Emerson, Horace Walpole, Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Sir John Davies, Margaret Fuller, Robert Southey, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo, Basil Bunting, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Nahum Tate, Dublin The Laureates [Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands]
-Ghalib, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Sara Teasdale, Pasternak, Louis Simpson, Dana Gioia, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Aphra Behn, Rod McKuen, JK Rowling
~~~~~
THE SECRET SOCIETY LEAGUE
Harvey Weinstein, Westport CT The Actors [I am no hackney for your rod]
-John Skelton, Langston Hughes, Henry Ward Beecher, Chaucer, Amiri Baraka, Lord Byron, Hafiz, Thomas Nashe, Marilyn Hacker, Petronius, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jim Carroll, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Jimmy Page, Andre Gide
David Lynch, Alexandria VA The Strangers [So still is day, it seems like night profound]
-Jones Very, Alexander Pope, William Burroughs, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Weldon Kees, Berryman, Mary Shelley, Rabelais, Charles Simic, Eric Satie, Labid, Roethke, Camille Paglia, HP Lovecraft, Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett
P.T. Barnum, Fairfield CT The Animals [Majesty and love are incompatible]
-Ovid, Gerald Stern, Robinson Jeffers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Jack Spicer, Kay Ryan, Leslie Scalapino, Mary Oliver, W S Merwin, Melville, Camille Saint Saens, Edward Lear, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gerard de Nerval, Robert Bly
J.P. Morgan, Madison Avenue The War [The fire-eyed maid of smoky war all hot and bleeding will we offer them]
-Shakespeare, Louis Untermeyer, Apollinaire, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, Rupert Brooke, Sir Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, James Dickey, Harry Crosby, Keith Douglas, Wilfred Owen, Howard Nemerov, Stephen Crane, Erich Remarque, Alan Seeger
Ben Franklin Philadelphia The Secrets [We come in the age’s most uncertain hour and sing an American tune]
-Paul Simon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Key, Cole Porter, Plato, Hawthorne, Pushkin, Walter Raleigh, Moliere, William Cullen Bryant, Amy Lowell, Emma Lazarus, Carl Sandburg, Pete Seeger, Natasha Trethewey, Amelia Welby, Woody Guthrie, JD Salinger, John Prine, Kanye West, Stephen Cole, Bob Tonucci
~~~~~
THE PEOPLE’S LEAGUE
Sajyajit Ray, Calcutta The Cobras [Is it true that your love traveled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?]
-Tagore, Allen Ginsberg, Jeet Thayil, Rupi Kaur, Anand Thakore, Dhoomil, G.M. Muktibodh, Rumi, A.K. Ramanujan, Samar Sen, Daipayan Nair, R. Meenakshi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Hermann Hesse, Persius, George Harrison, Adil Jussawalla, Tishani Doshi, Sushmita Gupta, Vikram Seth
Kurosawa, Tokyo The Mist [In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto]
-Basho, Hilda Doolittle, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, D.T. Suzuki, Yone Noguchi, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Kobayashi Issa, Lady Izumi Shikibu, Cid Corman, Sadakichi Hartmann, Heraclitus, Richard Brautigan
Chairman Mao, Beijing The Waves [Death gives separation repose. Without death, grief only sharpens]
-Tu Fu, Lucretius, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Rousseau, Guy Burgess, Amiri Baraka, Brecht, Neruda, Li Po, Li He, Bai Juyi, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Ho Chi-Fang, Yen Chen, Billie Holiday, Khomieni, Lu Ji , Wang Wei, Lao Tzu, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Wendell Berry
Dick Wolf, Santa Barbara The Laws [In poetry everything is clear and definite]
-Ajip Rosidi, Aristotle, John Donne, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Donald Justice, Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Campion, Frederick Seidel, Antonio Machado, Mark Van Doren, David Lehman, Lord Bacon, Martial, ML Rosenthal, Horace, Gottfried Burger, Yvor Winters
Merv Griffin, Los Angeles The Gamers [He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife]
-Lewis Carroll, James Tate, E.E. Cummings, Tony Hoagland, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Eugene Field, W.S. Gilbert, Thomas Hood, Noel Coward, X.J. Kennedy, John Betjeman, Wendy Cope, Tristan Tzara, Heather McHugh, Charles Bernstein, Jack Spicer, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Green, Menander, Morgenstern
~~~~~
THE MODERN LEAGUE
Pamela Harriman, Arden NY The Dreamers [not the earth, the sea, none of it was enough for her, without me]
-Sharon Olds, Edna Millay, George Dillon, Floyd Dell, Dorothy Parker, Stanley Burnshaw, Richard Lovelace, Stevie Smith, Louis MacNeice, Louise Bogan, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Marge Piercy, Carolyn Forche, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Valentine, May Swenson, Propertius, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir
Andy Warhol, East 47th St The Printers [the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag, that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.]
-John Updike, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, James Merrill, Hart Crane, Lorca, Thom Gunn, Stephen Burt, Frank Bidart, Mark Rothko, Marjorie Perloff, John Quinn, Duchamp, Aristophanes, Christopher Isherwood, Andre Breton, Lou Reed, John Cage
John D. Rockefeller, Chicago The Buyers [Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?]
-Walt Whitman, Alcaeus, Edgar Lee Masters, Kenneth Rexroth, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler, Jorie Graham, Franz Wright, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Paul Engle, William Alexander Percy, Richard Hugo, Carl Philips, Harriet Monroe, Duke Ellington, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Sigmund Freud
A. C. Barnes, Philadelphia The Crash [But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us]
-Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, John Crowe Ransom, John Dewey, Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, Walter Pater, Wittgenstein, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Archilochus, Anne Waldman, Stanley Kunitz, Jackson Pollock, WC Williams, Luigi Russolo, Stephen Spender, Richard Howard
Steven Spielberg, Phoenix AZ The Universe [I know why the caged bird sings]
-Maya Angelou, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bob Dylan, Margaret Atwood, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Claudia Rankine, Harold Bloom, Alice Walker, James Wright, Juvenal, Chuck Berry, Stephen King
Alan Seeger—yes, he is related to the folk singer Pete Seeger—certainly has a sublime entry:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
World War One was such a horrible meat grinder, it’s a miracle any beautiful poetry on that war was possible, but poets will find a way. The theme is similar to ‘all quiet on the western front.’ I will die when it’s “quiet.” I will die when it’s “Spring.”
The Moderns often point to the Great War as the end of “pretty, Victorian poetry;” it’s not that poems like Seeger’s on WW I were not beautiful, were not popular, were not moving—it’s just that the horror of war “outside” the text began to condemn it (pretty poetry) as naive. The air-tight jar of art-for-art’s sake was broken by an event too vast and grisly for that jar to survive.
The problem is, however, that when you try and ‘fit’ poetry to the gruesome stupidity of life, it’s no longer poetry. So now, you’ve not only done a stupid thing by having World War One, you’ve gone and ruined poetry, too.
And this is not to say that all poetry should be flowery and Victorian and how dare you introduce more realistic views—no. The point is, poetry should never be defined by “what are we going to do about World War One?” In any way, ever. Because—the dyer’s hand. If you write poetry about iconic stupidity, it will be stupid. After you go to the ironic well of ‘I will die when it’s quiet/spring’ one too many times, you may have to start writing ‘his face was blown off’ while trying to be poetic, and that will take too much effort, or make one indulge too much in brutality for its own sake. And if you wish to address the stupidity of World War One in a truly serious or scientific way, you probably won’t be using poems.
Seeger’s opponent is Richard Eberhart and his poem, “The Groundhog:”
In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots’ might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left; and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
It is the scene-shifting of this poem which is so moving. Poems exist in time, if we let them. There are poems which exist in a picture. But some poems exist only as they unfold. Poets often miss this principle: a poem is a continual arriving and leaving, and the rare, poignant ones ride the temporal itself. One could state the theme of decay in a much shorter poem, but a short poem would not get the decay in life and memory as Eberhart here so beautifully unwinds it.
Alan Seeger, brave man! Fare thee well!
Eberhart advances.
~~~~~~~~
The arena can hardly contain the crowd for this one: T.S. Eliot versus Dylan Thomas!
The sly, slim, astute Eliot, unruffled as a cat on a stuffed chair. The bubbling, passionate, beer-soaked Thomas.
Already a few brawls outside the stadium.
The languorous sounds of “Prufrock” as it reaches its mesmerizing end:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The crowd is lulled into an ecstatic trance, but Dylan Thomas is about to change all that…
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
One of the great drawbacks of homosexuality is that so many great poems are now ruined, because the word “gay” is used in the old sense.
Some scholars believe T.S. Eliot was gay.
Still other scholars think we’re all gay. Let’s just defer to them right now, shall we?
Marla Muse: Tom! What are you babbling about?
Nothing, Marla, just having fun. But I think I’ve come down with a cold.
Marla Muse: You might want to take care of that cold. I hear people who are 99 years old and have diabetes and asthma are dying in Italy.
Good God, Marla, now what are you babbling about?
“Parody! Parody!” In the vestibules the Dylan Thomas fans are making a fuss that “Prufrock” is nothing but a school boy parody.
Maybe we should leave, Marla. It seems to be getting out of control down there.
Marla: Rage, indeed. Perhaps we should leave. Was that a beer bottle which just flew by?
Marla, follow me.
~~~~~~~~
The final First Round Scarriet March Madness Sublime contest in the Modern Bracket is two 20th century poets: W.H. Auden and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Marla Muse: Both great poets. And both used rhyme. You know, as time rides farther and farther away from the 20th century, and we look back, it will begin to appear, as we read the poems most memorable, that free verse was no factor in modern poetry at all!
History is funny, isn’t it?
Marla Muse: Not only history, but time!
Istimeitselfthe funny part? Perhaps it is…
Marla Muse: After many a summer dies the swan.
Tennyson.
Marla Muse: No, that’s mine. The muses own all of it.
Of course.
Here is the first half of Auden’s energetic march, “As I Walked Out One Evening:”
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
.
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
.
But all the clocks in the city
Begin to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.
.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
.
‘O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A land to the land of the dead.
“And the seven songs go squawking/like geese about the sky.” I could recite that line forever!
Look at the Auden fans! Doing a “plunge them in up to the wrist” dance! What a cavorting mob!
Marla Muse: There’s quite a gathering of Edna fans, too. Millay is heavenly.
Here she comes now with one of her best known sonnets.
Her fans are strewing petals everywhere about her!
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
.
.
The Milly fans are singing, over various strumming chords, “no more,” over and over again, hypnotically, in a simple major key, as they wind about, in a great procession, out of the arena towards the river.
.
The Auden followers are bellowing Auden’s ballad in E minor. A few things are being broken.
.
And so ends the First Round play in the Modern Bracket.
.
Lights, lights, everywhere, as night falls, and music echoes behind the trees.
We’ve already seen the magnificent Classical and the Romantic Brackets, but some say this is the most profound sixteen they’ve ever seen!
Despite the corona virus emergency, Scarriet Sublime March Madness will continue as planned, with full audiences in the stands!
Check these out!
Can writing get more sublime than this?
But let’s say a few words before these masterpieces (excerpts, mostly) are perused, and bets are placed.
It seems we need to recognize two types of literary “sublime.”
The first is when profound ideas enforce themselves into our intellect, so that we began to think of the world in a new way.
The second is purely beautiful, when our brains fall asleep, and we experience the sublime with either our emotions, or with the silent, inarticulate parts of our souls.
We might assume only when the sublime is both types of the sublime at once, then, and only then, can we be absolutely blown away. But if the intellect is ambushed, or the emotions are vanquished, either type of the sublime conquers us absolutely nonetheless.
The modern bracket is less intellectual than the classical and the romantic brackets. By the year 1900, all the thinking was done, and philosophy gave way to pure awe, and pure feeling. This is what the fans are buzzing about, as they gather now, in the twilight, outside the temples and the stadiums, as a sea breeze hits the land, blowing in from the underside of the dying sun, throwing its light into the waves.
1) Joseph Conrad (children of the sea)
The sunshine of heaven fell like a gift of grace on the mud of the earth, on the remembering and mute stones, on greed, selfishness; on the anxious faces of forgetful men. And to the right of the dark group the stained front of the Mint, cleansed by the flood of light, stood out for a moment dazzling and white like a marble palace in a fairy tale. The crew of the Narcissus drifted out of sight.
I never saw them again. The sea took some, the steamers took others, the graveyards of the earth will account for the rest. Singleton has no doubt taken with him the long record of his faithful work into the peaceful depths of an hospitable sea. And Donkin, who never did a decent day’s work in his life, no doubt earns his living by discoursing with filthy eloquence upon the right of labour to live. So be it! Let the earth and the sea each have its own.
A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone for ever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.
2) Erich Remarque (all quiet on the western front)
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
3) D.H. Lawrence (ship of death)
I
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
.
II
.
Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
.
The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.
.
And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can’t you smell it?
.
And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.
.
IX
.
And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.
.
Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion.
.
Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.
.
Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.
.
A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.
.
X
.
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again
filling the heart with peace.
.
Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.
.
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
.
4) Virginia Woolf (a room of one’s own)
It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.
No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged.
The blame for all this rests no more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are responsible. All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, when the writer used both sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare, then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was Keats and Coleridge. Shelley was perhaps sexless. Milton and Ben Johnson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.
The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river. And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman who came together across the street, and the current swept them away, as I heard far off the roar of London’s traffic, into that tremendous stream.
5) F. Scott Fitzgerald (great gatsby)
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
6) Alan Seeger (i have a rendezvous with death)
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
7) T.S. Eliot (love song of j. alfred prufrock)
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
.
8) W.H. Auden (as i walked out one evening)
.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
.
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
.
But all the clocks in the city
Begin to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.
.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
.
‘O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A land to the land of the dead.
.
9) Edna St Vincent Millay (what lips my lips have kissed)
.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
.
10) Dylan Thomas (do not go gentle)
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
11) Richard Eberhart (the groundhog)
In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots’ might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left; and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
.
12) Stephen Spender (the truly great)
.
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
.
13) Edmund Wilson (memoirs of hecate country)
.
“Come outside a minute,” I said, when everybody was clapping and cheering. “I want to tell you something.” She went with me in silence—I was satisfied and proud, and I also felt really excited. There would be people in the courtyard, I knew, so I took her to the terrace at the side of the house. I kissed her, holding her tight against me, one arm about her naked shoulders, the other under her soft bare armpit just where the breast begins; and she seemed to me voracious and hot as I had never known her before. I said nothing, for the kiss said all. But we couldn’t go on, so at last i stopped and looked away to distract myself. There above us in the sky where it was always summer hung the dust of the richly-sprinkled stars that gave the illusion out here of being both closer-to and more tinselly than they ever did in the East—the stars of the blissful Pacific that had the look of festive decorations for people to be gay or to make love by, yet with which I had never been able to feel myself in any vital relation as I did with the remote ones at home. I spoke of this and when I looked back at her face, I saw that she was smiling and gazing up with her lips parted in such a way as to show great long bare-gummed teeth that stuck out and yet curved back like tushes and that seemed almost too large to be contained in her mouth. She looked like a dog panting when you take it out for a drive, and for a moment I was sharply repelled; but then, saying, ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she closed her lips, and the teeth disappeared. I saw only her wide wet mouth, and I pounded kisses against it with summoned determined passion, tasting her perfume and her flesh. It was precisely those long teeth, I thought, that gave her large mouth its peculiar attractiveness: it might have been unpleasant, but wasn’t.
.
14) James Thurber (memorial)
Like the great Gammeyer of Tarkington’s Gentle Julia, the poodle I knew seemed sometimes about to bridge the mysterious and conceivably narrow gap that separates instinct from reason. She could take part in your gaiety and your sorrow; she trembled to your uncertainties and lifted her head at your assurances. There were times when she seemed to come close to a pitying comprehension of the whole troubled scene and what lies ticking behind it. If poodles, who walk so easily upon their hind legs, ever do learn the little tricks of speech and reason, I should not be surprised if they made a better job of it than Man, who would seem to be slowly slipping back to all fours, in spite of Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford and Robert Frost.
The poodle kept her sight, her hearing, and her figure up to her quiet and dignified end. She knew that the Hand was upon her and she accepted it with a grave and unapprehensive resignation. This, her dark intelligent eyes seemed to be trying to tell me, is simply the closing of full circle, this is the flower that grows out of Beginning; this—not to make it too hard for you, friend—is as natural as eating the raspberries and raising the puppies and riding into the rain.
15) Hart Crane (the bridge)
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
.
And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced
As though the sun took step of thee yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
.
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn …
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,
.
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
16) Philip Roth (goodbye, columbus)
We had to take about two too many steps to keep the approach from being awkward, but we pursued the impulse and kissed. I felt her hand on the back of my neck and so I tugged her towards me, too violently perhaps, and slid my own hands across the side of her body and around to her back. I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back, it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy 180 feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.
Selected Poems by Ben Mazer Paperback, 248 pages Madhat Press Preface by Philip Nikolayev
T.S. Eliot was born in 1888. As Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems, with its T.S. Eliot heft, lands on America’s doorstep (as writing workshop and slam poet hives hum in every college town) this is the question a few may be asking: is Mazer a genius, or a copyist?
When we write in the ascendant style of an age, we position ourselves for greatness (think Beethoven atop Mozart), or neglect—a copyist the world doesn’t need.
W.H. Auden—younger, English-born, sassier than the somber American, T.S. Eliot—whom Eliot published, and who, after traveling to Berlin and China with Isherwood, subsequently moved to America and awarded John Ashbery his Yale Younger—is Auden Mazer’s fountainhead?
Are the following quotes from Auden or Mazer?
1.Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day/Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,/He got down to work
2. The flier, at the Wicklow manor,/Stayed throughout the spring and summer,/Mending autos in the drive
3. In a strange country, there is only one/Who knows his true name and could turn him in./But she, whose father too was charged with murder
4. Look, stranger, on this island now/The leaping light for your delight discovers
5. And move in memory as now these clouds do,/That pass the harbor mirror/And all the summer through the water saunter.
The insouciance of rhymes flung against the language of hard-boiled detective fiction. It’s Modernism longing to be Romantic, but finding it quite impossible.
1, 4, and 5 are Auden; 2 and 3, Mazer.
Shelley in army uniform, cynically resigned to domesticated Empire life—which pays better than it ought.
Ben Mazer is for, by, and about poetry which sings out the following historical paradox:
Shelley, the Romantic, is quick—look at him riding winds and swift ocean currents.
The Modern, with her machines and her anxiety, hasn’t got time for Romanticism singing Shelley, and, yet, the modern boredom and leisure which the modern affects, allows for poetry which goes deeper into the Shelley of Shelley than Shelley ever did.
If you give Mazer a few minutes (since a long poem doesn’t exist) he will pour more Shelley on you than you’ve ever known before.
The Mazer quoted above, in the comparison with Auden, is early Mazer. The later Mazer is less like Auden and more like Eliot. But these comparisons are not entirely fair. Mazer is Mazer.
Here’s an excerpt from Mazer’s “The Double:”
I remember chiefly the warp of the curb, and time going by. As time goes by. I remember red gray green blue brown brick
before rain or during rain. One doesn’t see who is going by.
One doesn’t think to see who is going by.
One sees who is going by all right, but one doesn’t see who is going by.
The bright lights attract customers to the bookstore.
Seeing, chalk it up to that. The bitter looks of the booksellers,
as you leave the shop without paying. Rickety steps that will soon
be history. A ripped up paperback book with some intelligent inscriptions
in very dried out blue gray ink. Lots of dumpsters. And seagulls.
Or are they pigeons. They seem related, as the air is to the sea.
When it gets darker, or foggier, it is a really big soup
of souls, works of art, time tables, the hour before dinner,
theatrical enterprise, memories of things never happened, warnings
spoken in a voice familiar, a keen and quickened sense
of possibility glimpsed through windows.
Handbills, whatever to mark the passing time. And sleep.
I know it is good when the good of it is not noticed.
It is something you try and tell someone privately in a room
where the light is broken in October. Your sense of time
is the source of your charm with strangers,
who would accept you anyways.
Mazer’s accumulation of details—this is the first 22 lines of “The Double” (Poems (2010) in Selected pg. 9)—unlike the poetry of Ashbery, which explodes in non sequitur—narrows down to philosophy. With each additional observation, Mazer’s centripetal process pins down meaning; notice how the passage we have quoted is not just creating categories, but reflects on category itself: “They seem related, as the air is to the sea.” See (“seeing, chalk it up to that”) the subtle manner in which observations are linked throughout the passage: the ambiguity of the poet’s seeing-but-not-seeing-who-is-going-by is repeated in the “booksellers,” who by their very nature see-but-don’t-see visitors to the bookstore, since they want visitors (our poet) to buy books from their store—a store which has “rickety” steps, indicating not many people are buying books, and the store itself will become “history”—the bookstore itself will become a book. The poet embraces the trope of attracting customers (readers) himself—the poet comments on what makes poetry good (“I know it is good when the good of it is not noticed”) defines imagination (“memories of things never happened”) and the actual surroundings of the poet’s rambles (“lights, fog, handbills, dumpsters, gulls, bookstores, the hour before dinner) cunningly mingle with the walking-and-seeing poet’s thoughts on poetry: “try and tell someone privately…” “your sense of time” (poetry, a temporal art) “is the source of your charm with strangers”—and with “strangers” we are back to the booksellers—and the customers who don’t buy (“strangers” to each other) and readers of poems—the more successful, the more “charm” the poet has, the more readers (“strangers”) the poet will have.
The hidden meaning of “The Double” is the lonely enterprise of the seeing-but-not-seeing poet who strives to be successful—the background of urban poverty and charm denoting the modern is just one of its layers. There is a density of significance impossible to define, but Mazer’s poetry has it. “The Double,” “Death and Minstrelsy,” and “The Long Wharf,” three longish poems which greet us in the beginning of Mazer’s Selected, should be taught in every writing class—these three poems alone ensure Mazer’s immortality.
We also think “Divine Rights,” Cirque D’ Etoiles,” “Deep Sleep Without Reservations,” “Monsieur Barbary Brecht,” “The King,” (excerpted in Selected) and “After Dinner Sleep” fall into the “immortal” category, though there are shorter pieces (mostly sonnet-length) in the book of great charm, and even sublimity.
In Auden’s “The Partition,” quoted above, Auden was writing about the immensely real: the British Empire dividing up its conquests.
Mazer writes of the real, but almost religiously avoids current events.
Mazer writes of what is close—he is Romantic in nature.
The British Empire splitting apart requires the poets of that Empire to say something, to mourn, to capture.
The American Empire holding itself, remarkably, together, is impossible to speak, except in amateurish and splenetic bouts of boring and dubious prophecy. The best American poets are not historians. They enjoy being in the middle of a dream.
In the wider historical scope, it could just be this.
Mazer is properly, we think, poetry, not history.
Poetry, in a certain historic time and place, which tries to be history, fails.
Poetry of any sensuality, which doesn’t try to be history, tends to be Keatsian. We don’t read the poetry of Keats to find out about English history.
Mazer, the neo-Romantic, might be called the Wordsworth of brick, but he is really closer to the sublime Keats than the more mundane and pedantic (though still good) Wordsworth. A Romantic urbanity thrills, and when a natural scene is glimpsed, it is all the more beautiful. To this extent, Mazer is Wordsworth.
Still more powerfully, Mazer carves out, half-self-consciously (there’s genius in that “half”) the leisure to travel wholly in Keatsian revery—into and around reality (we use “reality” in the plainest and most mundane way possible)—which makes Ashbery look like a mere manipulator of words, by comparison.
Ashbery’s prose-poetry might be said to resemble the Stars Wars trinity of prequel movies: Ashbery’s pyrotechnical ur-poetry attempts to modernize the nostalgic; Ashbery is a kind of hyper-contemporary of quotation and copying, done very well, but missing what makes the franchise (Poetry) great.
Every major contemporary critic, from Harold Bloom to Helen Vendler, acknowledges Ashbery—now the mourned, late Ashbery—as the contemporary master. But no one would say Ashbery is the future of poetry, or a reenactment of what makes the “old” poetry “great.” Ashbery took the franchise, Poetry, and inserted himself in front of it as a language machine which artificially generates poetry with a small “p.” The Ashbery “river” is like poetic consciousness, but without the Poem. Ashbery is (or attempted to be) the equipment of poetry without Poetry, without the poetry itself, without the ‘iconic poem.’
Ashbery also has a Jar Jar Binks quality, a silliness which condemns him before a certain more serious crowd.
William Logan, known for his critical rigor (and rancor?), isn’t fond of Ashbery. Logan, much younger, will outlive Bloom, Vendler, and Perloff, and so we’ll see.
Mazer may be the last Modern—his Modernism resembling Luke Skywalker’s lonely predicament in the currently much discussed, and much maligned, Last Jedi.
The High Modernism of T.S. Eliot is new, yet old, situated, in terms of politics and taste, somewhere between Dante and the new diversity.
Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi—and we might as well say it: Mazer is the last Modern.
Mazer gets his “Force” from the Tradition (in our crude analogy, the “Force” from the original Star Wars films)—Mazer’s work belongs to High Modernism, but if his poetry is “heroic,” (and we believe it is) the poetry is both nostalgic (timeless, longing) but also unique—when we read Mazer’s poetry, we care about the person in the poetry, and this is what gives the “great” poem an added, human, interest. The reader identifies with the poet on his quest, but also with the poem-significance of the quest, in terms of the bigger picture—Tradition, Poetry. The great poem will use both elements in its appeal—1. this is a good poem 2. my heart is moved to pity and understanding by this poet who lives in this poem.
Mazer writes poems first, and secondly, poetry. Mazer’s poems will ensure his immortality—or not.
Ashbery wrote poetry first, and secondly, poems. Ashbery’s immortality depends on his poetry—as time rolls on and does its usual up-rooting and destroying.
A poem is probably a better shelter, but who knows how the future moves?
A review of a poet’s Selected Poems—retrospective by its very nature—would not be complete without some discussion of the arc of the poet’s career.
Critics love to talk of an artist’s phases, but most of this talk is speculation and half-truth; it is the fate of a poet to be a poet—never to be a poet in this or that phase. Tennyson wrote about Crimea because Crimea happened—not because Tennyson was in a phase.
The quality which makes any artist significant is
1. recognized by the connoisseur immediately
2. transcends phases.
A long poem does not exist. In the same way, a book of poems does not exist. Mazer’s Selected is hefty, but even if it were not, any poet’s Selected is for reading, at one’s leisure, a marvelous poem, or a series of marvelous poems. Eventually, the whole book may be digested and understood, and even memorized, but a Selected is not intended to be read straight through in one sitting.
The arc of any great poet’s career is: over a certain amount of time, they wrote poems.
And that’s it.
If a poem is successful, it escapes the circumstances of its writing.
We can say Dante was “exiled,” and this fact contributes to our understanding of the Divine Comedy. Well, yes and no.
A biographical fact is good. The imagination of the poet rarely finds it useful, however.
But what happened to Mazer? Don’t we care? And shouldn’t his Selected Poems reflect this?
If you want to know, read the poems.
Keats, the most iconic Romantic, once complained of Wordsworth writing about Dover. “Dover?” Keats groused, who would write on Dover? The Moderns, of course, would laugh at this—why shouldn’t the poet write on anything he wants? But Keats—no matter how much his advice may fly in the face of “freedom” and “common sense,” is correct.
No poet should write on Dover. The poet uses his imagination to describe his own imagination. Otherwise, the poet should be a photographer, a political writer, or a travel writer.
Mazer did write on New York. “Entering the City of New York” Selected, pg 84
It begins:
Entering the city of New York
is something like approaching Ancient Rome,
to see the living people crawling forth,
each pipe and wire, window, brick, and home.
The times are sagging, and it is unreal
to know one’s slice of mortal transient time.
We angle forward, stunned by what we feel,
like insects, incognizant of every crime.
We are so duped, who make up civilization
in images of emotions that we feel,
to know the ague of the mortal steel,
each one perched balanced at his separate station.
The graves are many, and their fields decay,
where nothing can be meant to stand forever.
No doubt in due course God will have his way,
and slowly, slowly, all our bonds dissever.
Mazer is obeying Keats’ edict, and not writing on New York City; these opening lines are certainly redolent of some very large city which a humble, rural, meditative stranger enters, but more importantly, an almost 18th century sublimity is expressed—the subject is not New York City, but the soul.
Mazer should be read for poetry, which vibrates to the times, to the reality—which surrounds all of us; and as we read, Mazer’s poetry frees itself of that reality, and then returns to it. It’s the new return in the poetry which matters, not exactly what he is writing about.
Even as the exact, in the winding, mossy ways of the poetry, is paramount.
If this advice sounds like a truism, it is, but it is a truism which is fading away, as Keats is fading away. Mazer is Modernism returning (impossible!) to Romanticism, and not in a bookish sense, or a scholarly sense, but in exactly the way we have described it—it is poetry returning to poetry.
A minor drawback: Mazer reads his poetry aloud in a manner which does not do justice to its greatness; admirably, he speaks plainly, letting the poetry speak; at times, however, monotone eclipses music. The verse of Mazer’s Selected Poems Tour comes out of his body, which can barely know his mind, the latter being so vast as to have no affinity with mere lisp and gesture. (In person, Mazer tends to be very intense, and very quiet, rather than ebullient, but this makes his occasional joking and excitable nature all the more charming.)
In person, Mazer is a wit, one who does not waste words.
At one of his readings, there was a long question for Mazer, involving the structure of his poetry.
Mazer paused, and then said, “It all rhymes.”
The drama of the poems is missing in Mazer’s recitation, perhaps, because the drama is delicately locked within, guarded by the brain of the poet, which, when it comes to speaking its treasure, fails to properly spill outward the swells and currents of its majesty—in the ephemeral instruments devoted to breath.
We saw an anecdote, once, of Rupert Brooke reading his poetry so softly that he could only be heard in the front row. Mazer can be heard—he is certainly competent when he reads. Mazer is a talented musician, and his devotion to poetry (to the delight of poets everywhere) overtook his earlier interest in music.
Who are the great living poets today?
The audacity to seriously ask this question precludes, perhaps, an answer.
Should we say it?
At the top, or near, of the greatest living poets, is, without a doubt, Mazer.
Here’s another classic poetry battle between the 19th and 20th centuries in the Poetry Bracket, Round One:
W.H. Auden, the well-connected, gay, British poet, became American in 1940.
T.S. Eliot, who helped Auden first get published in 1930, went from American to British in 1927.
Auden traveled to Iceland, Germany, and China (with Christopher Isherwood, who ended up, like Aldous Huxley, in California); Auden rather famously called the 1930s that “low, dishonest decade.”
Auden also wrote a well-known elegy on Yeats—who died at the end of that decade.
Auden knew Stephen Spender—who secretly got CIA funding for his literary magazine, Encounter.
Auden taught at Michigan, gave John Ashbery the Yale Younger Prize, and spent most of his life as an American in New York City; he was a chain-smoker, and it was said of the Jungian W.H. Auden that he “smelled like shit.” Actual shit.
Auden wrote rollicking poetry ballads, similar to Kipling (whom Eliot loved) and Auden converted to Christianity (he knew C.S. Lewis at Oxford) around the time he crossed over to America; Auden also edited an anthology of Light Verse, wrote somewhat admiringly on Poe, and had a few interesting, but ultimately misguided things to say about Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
He’ll be remembered for a few poems.
Auden’s entry is from a later poem of his:
“Let the more loving one be me.”
This sums up his personality: a witty, somewhat cynical, romantic, puppy dog.
Auden’s line sounds very 20th century, in its hippie pleading in the face of that era’s spectacular wreckage of hatred and violence.
Amelia Welby is a 19th century poet, another one of those women poets championed by Poe—whom the 20th century, fueled by the insanity of Ezra Pound, forgot. The moderns were even contemptuous of Edna Millay; 20th century women poets like Dorothy Parker, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Eleanor Wyley were overshadowed by the brittle Marianne Moore—because Moore, not the others, belonged to the 1920s Dial clique of Pound, Williams, and Eliot.
Welby’s line has music, not morals:
“And birds and streams with liquid lull Have made the stillness beautiful”
But Welby’s beauty is moral. A idea which, unfortunately, completely disappeared in 20th poetry.
Twilight At Sea
The twilight hours, like birds, flew by,
As lightly and as free,
Ten thousand stars were in the sky,
Ten thousand on the sea;
For every wave, with dimpled face,
That leaped upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there.
Welby (1819-1852)
Most moderns read a poem like this and sneer at its pretty sentimentality.
But it’s not sentimental at all. There’s no expression of morality in Welby’s poem. It’s sensual only.
“Let the more loving one be me” is sentimental, and a little egotistical, too.
It’s the august beauty of “Twilight At Sea” which scares moderns away—because words that bend to beauty seem to them to give up way too much. They want words to do more. Which they can, in prose. But, the moderns want poems, too, to sound like prose; the moderns don’t want the meal (prose) and desert (poetry) to be separate. Ever. Table manners in the 20th century suffered a blow.
The “lull” in Welby’s line is not the noun, meaning a break in activity, but the verb, which means soothe with sound.
Sound echoes sense in the Welby. The “stillness” is the unified dignity of the line, describing natural beauty—whose natural beauty invades itself in the line’s insouciant “lull.”
Auden’s line is a good one, too. Psychologically, people tend to believe that in every love relationship, imbalance or inequality inevitably appears, grows, and ruptures the bliss—and Auden insists on being the lover, “the more loving one,” even if the beloved, like a silent star, is indifferent to human love.
1. Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. (Marlowe)
2. Every Night and every Morn Some to Misery are born. Every Morn and every Night Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night. (Blake)
3. Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. (Dowson)
4. April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (Eliot)
5. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones and trees. (Wordsworth)
6. If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. (Emerson)
7. The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. (Arnold)
8. When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Though you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. (Teasdale)
9. The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. (Dickinson)
10. We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile. (Dunbar)
11. This is the waking landscape Dream after dream walking away through it Invisible invisible invisible (Merwin)
12. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw, And I said I do, I do. (Plath)
13. It is easy to be young. (Everybody is, at first.) It is not easy to be old. It takes time. Youth is given; age is achieved. (May Swenson)
14. There is no disorder but the heart’s. But if love goes leaking outward, if shrubs take up its monstrous stalking, all greenery is spurred, the snapping lips are overgrown, and over oaks red hearts hang like the sun. (Mona Von Duyn)
15. Long life our two resemblances devise, And for a thousand years when we have gone Posterity will find my woe, your beauty Matched, and know my loving you was wise. (Michelangelo)
16. Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. (Auden)
BRACKET TWO
1. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. (Shakespeare)
2. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. (Coleridge)
3. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. (Barrett)
4. Say to the Court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; Say to the Church, it shows What’s good, and doth no good: If Church and Court reply, Then give them both the lie. (Raleigh)
5. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicaean barks of yore, That gently o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. (Poe)
6. Some for the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum! (Omar Khayyam)
7. Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. (Marvell)
8. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (Gray)
9. O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O, sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, Blow bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. (Tennyson)
10. I have a rendezvous with Death, At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air. (Seeger)
11. I have put my days and dreams out of mind, Days that are over, dreams that are done. Though we seek life through, we shall surely find There is none of them clear to us now, not one. (Swinburne)
12. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. (Whitman)
13. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. (Keats)
14. Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. (Frost)
15. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. (Stevens)
16. I was, being human, born alone; I am, being a woman, hard beset; I live by squeezing from a stone The little nourishment I get. (Wylie)
BRACKET THREE
1. The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way. (Milton)
2. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a roving By the light of the moon. (Byron)
3. 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. (Shelley)
4. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. (Owen)
5. We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses. What more is there to do, except to stay? And that we cannot do. And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara. (Ashbery)
6. Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives. (Sassoon)
7. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose. (Parker)
8. The shopgirls leave their work quietly. Machines are still, tables and chairs darken. The silent rounds of mice and roaches begin. (Reznikoff)
9. It’s not my business to describe anything. The only report is the discharge of words called to account for their slurs. A seance of sorts—or transport into that nether that refuses measure. (Bernstein)
10. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed. (Rich)
11. When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives (Larkin)
12. I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. (Millay)
13. Those four black girls blown up in that Alabama church remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks in a net, under water in Charlestown harbor so redcoats wouldn’t find them. Can’t find what you can’t see can you? (Harper)
14. It’s good to be neuter. I want to have meaningless legs. There are things unbearable. One can evade them a long time. Then you die. (Carson).
15. On my way to bringing you the leotard you forgot to include in your overnight bag, the snow started coming down harder. I watched each gathering of leafy flakes melt round my footfall. I looked up into it—late afternoon but bright. Nothing true or false in itself. (Graham)
16. The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee. Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. (Lockwood)
BRACKET FOUR
1. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. (Homer)
2. And following its path, we took no care To rest, but climbed, he first, then I—so far, through a round aperture I saw appear Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears, Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars. (Dante)
3. With usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour with usura the line grows thick with usura is no clear demarcation and no man can find site for his dwelling. Stonecutter is kept from his stone weaver is kept from his loom WITH USURA (Pound)
4. I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin. Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea. (Chin)
5. Dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. (Sexton)
6. I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew, The jealousy, the shyness—though in vain—Made up a love so tender and so true As God may grant you to be loved again. (Pushkin)
7. We cannot know his legendary head And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze is turned down low, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. (Rilke)
8. So much depends on the red wheel barrow glazed with rain water besides the white chickens. (Williams)
9. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. (Ginsberg)
10. The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. (Carroll)
11. What dire offense from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things; Slight is the subject, but not so the praise, If she inspire, and he approve my lays. (Pope)
12. Harpo was also, know this, Paul Revere. And Frankenstein, and Dracula, and Jane. Or would you say that I have gone insane? What would you do, then, to even the score? (Mazer)
13. Come, read to me a poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day. (Longfellow)
14. So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus, not to hold him back but to impress this peace on his memory: from this point on, the silence through which you move is my voice pursuing you. (Gluck)
15. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so: From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow. (Donne)
16. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. (Bishop)
17. Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty which all our power will never establish, It is so frail. (Ransom)
Monday morning is public. Friday night is private.
The public is what finds us out and makes us do things. In private, we do whatever we want.
We are forced to act a certain way in public. In private we can be ourselves.
Here is what is so dreary and ugly about poetry: poetry is all about making something public.
Why in the world would we want to do this? Why would we want to take Friday night and move it over to Monday morning?
Poetry makes the private public—but for what reason? To spend all that time and effort getting published? What kind of fool would do this?
The public is the necessary place where work gets done. To “make a living,” we go to the public, but we go to the public wearily, warily, unhappily.
Even those who win the public’s affection “just want to be alone.” Fall into the clutches of the public, lose your privacy, and watch what happens. You go insane, is what happens. The public is where we go to die.
Those who “want to be liked” take the first foolhardy steps towards their doom. Because “being liked” is usually achieved in the public eye.
Even famous poets rejoice in privacy. As W.H. Auden put it in his well-known introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
All of us like to discover the secrets of our neighbors, particularly the ugly ones. What today passes for scholarly research is an activity no different from that of reading somebody’s private correspondence when he is out of the room. Most genuine artists would prefer that no biography be written. Shakespeare is in the singularly fortunate position of being, to all intents and purposes, anonymous.
Even the joy of knowing “ugly secrets” is a private affair.
And yet it’s the public judgment which deems them “ugly.” Privacy enjoys things in a completely judgment-free zone.
The trick is to protect the private space with a good public wall, or fence.
Auden’s poetry did not reveal his private feelings at all. The poet, Auden, because he was a good poet, was simply making a public display to keep the public happy and out of his life.
Without further ado, let us ask: Does the public give us any joy at all?
If so much happens in public, if so much matters in public, can we really say it is a miserable, unhappy realm?
How can the infinitely important and consequential (public actions and responses) cause so much unhappiness?
Let us try and find some things which are public and also good.
First, we should ask the obvious: is one possible without the other?
We mentioned Auden, celebrating the private, yet known as a public figure by his public poetry.
Do we all need a public edifice in order to enjoy our private space?
And what is it, exactly that we do, and who exactly are we, in that private place behind our public wall?
We are not just saying you can’t have Friday night without Monday morning—that’s pretty obvious; we are asking more than that: we are asking: what is this privacy that we seek, exactly? And is this privacy something we seek, or something we are?
Can we have a private bedroom without first having a public house on a public street in a public city? Can we build a place to hide (a house) without work done in public to earn that house? Okay, more obvious stuff: we all have to pay the (public) piper; get dirty to enjoy our cleanliness. An interesting reversal of metaphor here? For isn’t private dirty and public clean?
But this apparent metaphoric reversal points to the very thing we are trying to do: fight through the obvious truth, the platitude, the truism, of the private space hiding behind the public wall, to ask: what exactly are these things? Public? Private?
So far we established without much effort, that private is good, public, bad; the private pleasurable, the public, odious, the private, true and genuine, the public, false and tedious.
But let us ask a few more questions and see if this is the actual state of things.
Is the beauty of the sky public or private? Public, certainly; we would not enjoy the beauty of a sunset if the sunset existed privately. The sky, then, is public. Yet all all of us experience the sky in whatever way we choose. We all experience the sky—this very public thing—privately.
Now this is interesting. For all of us to experience the sky privately it is necessary for the sky to be public.
Now what if we were to insist that all private experiences belong to this category: the public experienced privately?
What if we made this radical assertion: What we think is private is really public.
The private is merely a piece of the public—the public is the actual; the private is nothing more than a piece broken off?
The public is the whole thing (the whole sky, the whole universe) or, in terms of time, the eternal—what lasts is the only thing that is true, according to The Big Boys: Socrates, Shakespeare, etc. And thus the private, which we just got done lauding, is only a crumb, a morsel of what is true.
For a small (mortal) mouth, a morsel is perfectly suitable, but here’s the startling truth which is now insinuating itself into this essay: the private is nothing in itself—it is only the public cut down to a practical size.
We flee to our room to dwell in a private place, but we seek that privacy in vain. We cannot escape the eye of God—and another name for God is—the public.
The room we seek is our tomb, the privacy we seek, nothing.
We run to the public restroom for a little privacy; but how much more privacy if we were home in our own bathroom! If we had a thousand bathrooms, would we have more privacy? No! We just need one! Privacy cannot be quantified— it is like the point in geometry. A thousand bathrooms is a public fact, not a private one. (There is no private fact. Privacy is an infinite number of ideal, immaterial points, geometrically speaking.)
Privacy cannot be physically measured—meanwhile ‘the public’ is measurement itself—since privacy has no material existence; privacy is the One Person in the One Private Place—an Ideal, an impossibility, a part torn off from the One Public in vain, for Reality in its true state will not be torn off or broken.
We would have more privacy in our bathroom at home than in a public one; but perhaps not—what if our husband were home and knocked on the bathroom door, and wanted to come in? Or what if we had no husband and lived alone? Alone is the ultimate private existence, and yet the one state we all fear the most: for to be truly alone is to be buried alive; privacy in its true state is death.
The idea of the private is just that: an idea, and has no real existence: every thought coursing through that head of yours belongs to the public; your body is public, your whole existence is public in a manner you can barely comprehend, and so far as you don’t comprehend, you are absolutely ignorant—and this ignorance is nothing more than your pitiful (because nonexistent) privacy.
You have remained too long in the darkness.
Party like it’s Monday morning.
You have nothing to hide, because the hidden is nothing.
Collecting is where material pride, wisdom and love uneasily sit, an endless pursuit which moves product, an endless boon to any enterprise. To collect is to amass, to buy, to own, to bring into one’s circle the niceties of some industry for one’s own comfort and inspection. The collectable items should be unique, if not numerous, and if not unique, at least very rare. Collecting is to break off pieces of some whole, but the item, when found, bought, discovered, possessed, is a shining whole to the collector, and compared to it, the universe is a sad jumble—such is the profundity of collecting.
Poetry anthologies spread wealth; poetry is centrifugal; it scatters itself outward freely. Except where it overlaps with the ‘rare book collector,’ poetry, despite its fecundity, is not collectable; collecting is centripetal; it waits in vaults and rooms crowded with unique paintings, coins, and cars. To know coins, one must darken them in one’s palm; to know poetry, one merely glimpses what every other person glimpses.
The following list is not a rare book list; increasingly, great old poetry, important translated poetry, and all sorts of rare poetry, simply lives on the internet.
This, in many ways, is a perfectly centrifugal list, readily available to whatever soul—no matter how mysterious, no matter how centripetal, no matter how hidden, no matter how curious—happens to want it.
Poetry is against collecting. Poetry doesn’t hoard; you can be deeply poetic for free.
These are books you could own, or read, or memorize, or teach, or learn, and probably already have.
Good translations are necessary, but impossible. Old poems are necessary, but impossible. Good, new poetry is necessary, but impossible.
The list below is mundane, but necessary. This—mostly from the top of the list—is what you read if you want to know poetry.
It is everywhere, but it still must hit you.
1. SHAKESPEARE SONNETS, AUDEN INTRODUCTION Modern poetry begins here. A definite sequence: 1-14 children as immortality, 15-28 poems as immortality, etc.
2.POE: POETRY, TALES, AND SELECTED ESSAYS(LIBRARY OF AMERICA) Iconic poems, tales of poetic quality, even criticism of poetic quality
3.VIKING BOOK OF POETRY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD, RICHARD ALDINGTON H.D.’s husband, got Eliot out of the bank, solid anthology by this Brit wounded in WW I who knew all the Modernists and hated most of them (375 poets)
4.PLATO: THE COLLECTED DIALOGUES, BOLLINGEN SERIES, EDITH HAMILTON, EDPoetry being born
5. THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE, COMPLETE WORKSWith Shakespeare the best is just to read, and forget all the notes
6.THE DIVINE COMEDY, DANTE, JOHN D. SINCLAIR, TRANSLATOR (OXFORD U. PRESS) Verse translation hopeless; take the prose Sinclair with Italian on the facing page
7. THE ILIAD OF HOMER TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER POPE(PENGUIN) The king of men his reverent priest defied/And for the king’s offense the people died
8. THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY ALEXANDER POPE(MACMILLAN, 1911) The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d/Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound
9.EDNA MILLAY COLLECTED, NORMA MILLAY (HARPER) Tragically undervalued as Modernism came into vogue, Millay’s Collected is a must
10. PHILIP LARKIN THE COMPLETE POEMS, ARCHIE BURNETT recently published master of the short lyric
11. LYRICAL BALLADS, WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGEA shame Coleridge didn’t contribute more
12. WASTELAND AND OTHER POEMS, T.S. ELIOTThe one Modernist who could really write poetry (and prose).
13. LEAVES OF GRASS, WHITMAN(1855 EDITION) The first edition, before it got too long-winded
14. THE COMPLETE POEMS OF JOHN MILTON WRITTEN IN ENGLISH (HARVARD CLASSICS) You can’t go wrong with melodious Milton
15. UNDERSTANDING POETRY, BROOKS AND WARREN Textbooks are propaganda—this most used anthology in the 20th c. attacked Poe and elevated Pound/Williams
16. SELECTED POETRY & LETTERS, BYRON, EDWARD BOSTETTER, ED Byron was very, very unhappy
17. POCKET BOOK OF MODERN VERSE, OSCAR WILLIAMS (1954) Okay. Some of modern verse is good
18. A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS, AN INTRODUCTORY ANTHOLOGY, CZESLAW MILOSZ International poetry collections are good things
19. SELECTED POEMS AND TWO PLAYS, WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, ROSENTHAL, ED Yeats benefits from Selected as opposed to Collected
20.OVID, THE LOVE POEMS, A.D. MELVILLE, ED. And you can really learn something, lovers
21. THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, HAZEL FELLEMANBecause these uncritical anthologies always have some gems
22. ROBERT BROWNING, THE POEMS, PETTIGREW, ED. 2 VOLS Because it’s Robert Browning
23. A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY, SELDEN RODMAN (1938) Great snapshot of poetry in the 1930s: lots of ballads of political anguish
24. 100 GREAT POEMS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, MARK STRAND, ED. A very nice selection from a poet whose reputation is fading
25.POETRY OF WITNESS: THE TRADITION IN ENGLISH 1500-2001, CAROLYN FORCHE, DUNCAN WU, EDS Poetry handles real horror
26. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1988, LEHMAN, SERIES ED. ASHBERY, GUEST ED. The first volume in the series may be the best
27. ARIEL, SYLVIA PLATH A whirlwind of rhyme and rage
28. PABLO NERUDA, TWENTY LOVE SONGS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR, DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION(PENGUIN) Neruda may get you laid
29. GREAT POEMS BY AMERICAN WOMEN: AN ANTHOLOGY, SUSAN RATTINER(DOVER) Women once had a higher standing as poets
30. OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE, W.H. AUDEN, EDITOR Who said light verse was light?
31. PALGRAVE’S GOLDEN TREASURY, FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE (1861) Look out! Right-wing poetry!
32.LIBRARY OF WORLD POETRY, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT Worth a peek
33.100 POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE, KENNETH REXROTH blossoms and other stuff
34. BLACK POETS OF THE UNITED STATES: FROM PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR TO LANGSTON HUGHES, JEAN WAGNER Before rap
35. THE OXFORD BOOK OF NARRATIVE VERSE, PETER OPIE A narrative poem does not exist?
36. A BOY’S WILL, ROBERT FROST His first book, published in England while the 40 year old poet made contacts there
37. THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY 1945-1960, DONALD ALLEN Dawn of the post-war avant-garde
38. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1990, LEHMAN SERIES EDITOR, JORIE GRAHAM, GUEST EDITOR Has that wonderful poem by Kinnell…
39. FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY, JON SILKIN, EDITOR While being slaughtered, they wrote
40. SPANISH POETRY: A DUAL LANGUAGE ANTHOLOGY 16TH-20TH CENTURIES, ANGEL FLORES Dual Languages are a must, really
41. THE HERITAGE OF RUSSIAN VERSE, DIMITRI OBOLENSKY “From The Ends To The Beginning A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse” is available on-line
42. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2007, LEHMAN, SERIES EDITOR, MCHUGH, GUEST EDITOR One of the best volumes in the series
43. POETS TRANSLATE POETS, A HUDSON REVIEW ANTHOLOGY, PAULA DIETZ, ED. Nice historical sweep…
44. ART AND ARTISTS: POEMS, EMILY FRAGOS (EVERYMAN POCKET LIBRARY)Art really meets poetry; lovely poems
45. W.H. AUDEN COLLECTED POEMS Best poet of the 20th century; slighted by anthologies
46. POEMS 1965-1975 SEAMUS HEANEYNever quite made it to major status
47. POEMS BEWITCHED AND HAUNTED, JOHN HOLLANDER, ED (EVERYMAN’S POCKET LIBRARY) Some really darling pieces here
48. COMPLETE POEMS OF KEATS AND SHELLEY(MODERN LIBRARY) The two best—the best, the best
49. THE 20TH CENTURY IN POETRY, HULSE, RAE, EDS (PEGASUS BOOKS) Wonderful idea: poems in close chronology throughout the century
50. VITA NOVA, DANTE, MARK MUSA, TRANSLATOR (OXFORD) A great book for so many reasons
51. CHAUCER: THE CANTERBURY TALES (PENGUIN) father of English literature, we hear
52. HYPERION; BALLADS & OTHER POEMS, LONGFELLOW (1841) “Hyperion” is a very modern poem…
53. THE RAG AND BONE SHOP OF THE HEART: A POETRY ANTHOLOGY, ROBERT BLY, EDITOR A lot of Rumi and Neruda
54. WORLD POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF VERSE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT, WASHBURN, MAJOR, FADIMAN, EDSThe translations are terrible, the selections are generally weak, but kudos for the attempt
55. LESFLEUR DU MAL, BAUDELAIRE Ah…Baudelaire!
56. VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS: AN ANTHOLOGY, LEIGHTON, REYNOLDS, EDS (BLACKWELL) That backwards era when women poets sold better than their male counterparts
57. IMMORTAL POEMS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, OSCAR WILLIAMS Solid overview (150 poets) without too much emphasis on annoying moderns
58. ALEXANDER POPE, SELECTED (OXFORD POETRY LIBRARY) You could do worse than his verse
59. A TREASURY OF GREAT POEMS, LOUIS UNTERMEYERAlmost 2OO poets
60. AMERICAN POETRY: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, HOLLANDER, ED, LIBRARY OF AMERICA A good look around at two centuries ago
61. ANEID, VIRGIL, ROBERT FITZGERALD, TRANSLATOR Poet of the silver age…
62. THE POETICAL WORKS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, RUTH M. ADAMS INTRO She was the famous poet when Robert met her
63. THE ESSENTIAL RUMI, COLEMAN BARKS, ED Passion pushed to the limit of wisdom
64. EUGENE ONEGIN BY ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, STANLEY MITCHELL (PENGUIN) The most modern of all epics
65. DYLAN THOMAS, COLLECTED, PAUL MULDOON, INTRO Too drunk to write many poems; this may be good or bad
66. POETRY OF DEREK WALCOTT 1948-2013, SELECTED BY GLYN MAXWELL Between obligation and pleasure, we read…
67. BRITISH POETRY SINCE 1945, EWARD LUCIE-SMITH. The poor modern Brits, neither old nor quite modern
68. THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND, WALLACE STEVENS, SELECTED POEMS & A PLAY Pretentious rot, but fun
69. ROBERT LOWELL, COLLECTED Most overrated poet of the 20th century, but has his moments
70 AMERICAN PRIMITIVE, MARY OLIVER Our little Wordsworth
71. GORGEOUS NOTHINGS, EMILY DICKINSON, WERNER, BERRIN, EDS (NEW DIRECTIONS) A really bizarre document
72. ELIZABETH BISHOP, POEMS (FSG) Another one of those poets who wrote few, but good, poems
73. A CHOICE OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY, STEPHEN SPENDER(DIAL PRESS) Rare, if you can track it down…(it’s at the Grolier in Hvd Sq)
74. CHIEF MODERN POETS OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA, 5th Edition, SANDERS, NELSON, ROSENTHAL Can’t get enough of those chief poets
75. NEW AMERICAN POETS OF THE 80s, MYERS & WEINGARTEN Look back into the recent, recent past
Poet Edward Field, 89 years old, and the most entertaining guest in Our Deep Gossip.
Really stupid people, we say, cannot grasp any sort of complexity.
But then there’s another kind of smart, good, or educated person who errs by making things too complex.
Then we have the truly smart person who knows complexity, but also knows when not to be complex.
The three (crude) types mentioned above might be categorized as the one cared for by the system, the one of the system, and the rebel who breaks the system’s rules.
The system, in this case, is American poetry and the general puritan American culture surrounding it. We have just finished reading, on a beautiful afternoon, Our Deep Gossip, Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire by Christopher Hennessy, foreward by Christopher Bram, and instead of finding the “deep,” we found the simplicity of the intelligent rebel.
The rebel is not beholden to a lot of systemic obligations. The rebel speaks what might be called a queer truth, true not because it is queer, but true because its desire is of that immediate kind not trapped by any system. The rebellion can be expressed in a number of very simple ways: I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to rhyme, I don’t want to be polite, I don’t want to conform, I don’t want to have children, I don’t want to do what others expect me to do, I don’t want to make sense, I don’t want to be complex if I can be simple, I don’t want to put off pleasure. And all of these things might be called queer. But what they really are is actually anything but queer; they are manifestations of simple common sense. And this expediency makes the queer what every queer secretly knows itself to be: smart.
Our Deep Gossip is uncannily smart—right from the beginning of Bram’s foreward:
I’ve never understood why more people don’t love poetry. The best poetry is short, succinct, highly quotable, and very portable. It can take five minutes to read a poem that you will ponder for the rest of your life. Poetry should be as popular as song lyrics or stand-up comedy. Nevertheless, I often hear otherwise well-read people say, without embarrassment, “I don’t read poetry. It’s too difficult—” or strange or obscure or elusive. They will slog through hundreds of pages of so-so prose about a computer geek in Sweden or a made-up medieval land populated with princes and dwarves but freeze like frightened deer when confronted by a simple sonnet.
I cannot think of a better defense of poetry. This needs to be said over and over again. This is the sort of simple truth that is so simple that it rarely gets said. And why? Because inevitably poets feel the need to defend difficulty. Or the Creative Writing Director needs to not offend his fiction students. The system will not allow the simple truth to be spoken in quite the way Bram has expressed it. But when has a system ever cared for simple truth?
Edward Field is the first poet interviewed by Hennessy, and “deep,” again, is not what we get— we get something more to the point, more truthful:
…the cant idea is that [poetry] is about language. That’s one of two pernicious ideas about poetry. The second is the stricture against sentimentality. That is so evil! Every feeling you have is, of course, sentimental.
Field, and the other seven interviewees, don’t give us any “deep gossip” about lovers and friends; they make simple observations that make you realize that being gay is not some great mystery with all kinds of deep secrets any more than being straight is. Since heterosexuality is more invested (just generally) with the system of breeding, one might assume the gay sensibility is closer to pursuing pleasure without this massive system’s strictures and obligations; but no, not really; this assumption (by straights) is just one more reason the gay sensibility tends to have more common sense: it knows it is not as secretive and complex as it is thought to be, and this contributes to clearer thinking. Look at Field’s brilliant but simple take on Ashbery:
I think John Ashbery is beyond criticism. His work is nothing I’m interested in, but he says things in the exact words, and it’s beyond criticism. It’s like a cat meowing. A cat meows, that’s what it does. John Ashbery writes that way; there’s no way to criticize it.
Ashbery is famous for writing poetry that makes no sense, and all sorts of complex reasons (including the fact he’s gay) have been offered up, but as Ashbery himself airily observes in the second interview of the book, he had crushes on women when he first wrote poetry in his signature style; he did not think of himself as gay when first writing as Ashbery. And if there was any doubt whether his obscurity is intentional or not, Ashbery himself makes no effort to be mysterious about it: “I don’t think I ever know where my poetry is going when I’m writing.” And one finds Ashbery simple to the point of naivety responding to Frost’s famous epigram. Ashbery: “it [is] harder to play tennis without the net.”
The prolific Ashbery merely practices the extreme simplicity of the rebel Beats. As Field (is this “deep?”) puts it:
When I started writing, the more revisions you made on a poem, the better it was. Poets bragged that they’d made 125 versions of a poem. John Crowe Ransom wrote about one poem a year. Philip Larkin too. But Allen Ginsberg said, “First thought, best thought.” And it’s really a very good idea. And Frank O’Hara had the same idea.
Surely Richard Howard will give us some “deep gossip.” But no, the third to be interviewed only says things like: “My students: They don’t read.” Writing poetry, teaching, and translating for him is “one activity.” He has “many selves.” And, “I’ve never really had a father.”
Edward Field—we keep coming back to him because this elder poet sets the tone—discusses one of his poems in which his penis is a girl. Ah, so that’s the secret of how gays are gay! How sweetly simple!
Field revels in being a simple outsider bohemian— he strips the fancy from everything. The gay Andy Warhol, for instance, is not an elaborate example of camp or Conceptualism; in Field’s eyes Warhol’s just a “prole:”
if you see poetry as ‘high class,’ you’re not going to write about Campbell’s soup. …prole Andy Warhol never put on any airs…
Aaron Shurin is next, and he calls himself “unromantic” because coming out as gay he was “another person.” Which makes perfect sense. One can’t be a Romantic if one is two people. Byron thought of himself as Byron—not a as a million different people; sure, Byron had different roles and moods, but that’s not quite the same as being “another person.” Nor does Shurin, we are sure, think of himself as really being “another person,” and yet Byron he is not, and so we understand why he calls himself “unromantic.” But heterosexuals distance themselves from Byron as well: John Crowe Ransom did.
Wayne Koestenbaum is the seventh poet to be interviewed in Our Deep Gossip and he, too, keeps it simple. To wit:
Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Gertrude Stein—three of my idols and stylistic models—were profoundly matter-of-fact in their relation to weirdness…
Making God the subject of a sentence whose predicate is simply a ski bunny fills me with a sense of a deed well done, a day well spent. I get a Benjamin Franklin pleasure (the counting house of the affections) from writing a sentence like “God is a ski bunny.”
…poets who come up through the MFA route have a falsely idealized intellectuality, because they think intellectuality is the magic serum that they’re going to inject into poetry to lift it…
I’ll admit it: I have a baby fetish. I turn to jello when I see a baby. When I “finish” a poem…I get a “baby” sensation surrounding it.
The last “baby” quote from Koestenbaum is not queer at all. Or is it? Or does it matter?
Field’s ‘penis as a girl’ poem, “Post Masturbatum,” states simply, “Afterwards, the penis/is like a girl who has been ‘had’/and is ashamed…foolish one who gave in…” And this is echoed by Koestenbaum’s moral “With engorgement comes delusion. When you’re in that state, you’re not making good decisions.”
We flash back to Bram’s foreward, where he wrote, “people say, without embarrassment, ‘I don’t read poetry…”
Is “embarrassment” the key word here? If only people were ashamed to say they don’t read poetry! But they’re not. The non-poetry readers are not embarrassed. But Christopher Hennesy and the eight poets he interviews are not embarrassed, either, as Bram makes clear:
Neither Christopher Hennessy nor any of his eight genial, highly articulate guests express the slightest embarrassment over their love of poetry.
Perhaps there needs to be more tension between the two camps— some embarrassment, perhaps, on both sides.
When Hennessy approvingly quotes a Koestenbaum poem
My butt, at its best, resembles Faust’s dog.
It has an affectionate relationship to condiments.
he chortles, “Such loony lines!”
And this reminds us of Ashbery’s joke earlier: the simple use of a line Ashbery heard from the Antiques Road Show in one of his poems: “There’s a tremendous interest in dog-related items.” Both Ashbery and Hennessy laugh.
Is this what Bram means when he says “neither Christopher Hennessy nor any of his eight genial, highly articulate guests express the slightest embarrassment over their love of poetry?”
But doesn’t laughter depend on embarrassment? Field says funny poetry is a good thing, and that Auden changed everything for the better by elevating Light Verse to a higher place in the canon. Surely the humorous is a big part of modern and post-modern poetry.
But this is just one more piece of the whole common sense approach to Our Deep Gossip. Gay is embarrassing. And we laugh. But just as we would laugh at any number of things, sexual or otherwise, that are not gay.
Reading Jason Koo’s work is like watching someone who can’t make up their mind: Do I want to be a poet? Or a standup comic? Poet? Comic? Poet? Comic?
Jason Koo is obviously a very clever guy.
But what is this? It’s from something—and we think it’s supposed to be a poem—called “Standby at Chicago O’Hare.”
It is time to wonder if one could kiss Katie Couric
without thinking of The Joker.
Does that smile ever stop?
If I said, Katie, be sad, would she unhook that smile
from the nails in her cheeks?
The purgatorial ghosts at C-10 would like
to bludgeon her.
I can see this by the way they grip their Chiquita bananas.
It is time to try the McDonald’s Double Filet o’ Fish.
You knew that time was coming.
How much tartar sauce can be creamed on a thing?
How much tartar sauce can be creamed on Katie Couric?
I would like to stuff her face between these buns.
Double McKatie Couric.
If this gets yuks, it succeeds. If it doesn’t, it’s not even poetry. Even if you don’t like Katie Couric, it’s just creepy.
Professor Koo is the founder of Brooklyn Poets and has launched The Bridge, “the world’s first networking site connecting student and mentor poets.”
We wonder what kind of mentoring Koo does.
We wonder if Professor Koo tells his students, “It’s OK to use the hackneyed expression, ‘I mean,’ in your poems.”
at the “jazz” restaurant. Piles of pineapple. Sliced grapefruit.
Is there anything better than sliced grapefruit? I mean,
you don’t have to insert your spoon properly or anything.
The bags of coffee beans for sale in the coffee shop
from “How Would You Rate Your Lodging Experience?” –Jason Koo
“How Would You Rate Your Lodging Experience?” is a work of 52 lines in which Koo, after staying at a motel, answers this question humorously, just as if he were writing a jokey letter to a friend. Koo puts his jokey letter into quatrains to make it look like a traditional poem.
There. We’ve been “mentored” by Jason Koo. In five minutes. For free.
It is one thing to advocate for education to meet the needs of the universal citizen. But to sell education for personal gain is a totally different animal. Not that both can’t be corrupt, or cannot overlap, but there is a difference.
Here’s some of Daniel Nester’s interview with Koo at the Best American Poetry website:
So I guess you’re of the mind that writing can be taught? I mean, I am as well, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
I am, yes. I mean, of course it can–like anything else. I’m amused by this idea that writing poems can’t be taught, but things like yoga and tango can. Imagine signing up for a yoga or tango class with no previous experience, paying for it, then showing up the first day and hearing the teacher say, Okay, show me what you can do. And pointing at the floor. You’d be mortified–and pissed, because that’s not what you’re paying for. You’re paying the teacher to show you the basics, to introduce you to the discipline. You’re not expecting to become a master overnight or possibly ever. You’re interested in discovering what the discipline is about and seeing how you like it, how it might change you. And you pay experts for instruction because without them you would literally–yes, I’m going to use that adverb–not know how to make the first move.
Poetry’s a lot different than that.
For some reason, in the discipline of writing poetry, people assume they do know. Or maybe they’re not so arrogant to assume this, but they think maybe their poetic efforts are best served without the nuisance of instruction, the self-conscious shock of it. This is the legacy of bad Romanticism–people taking all the Wordsworth and Keats out of Wordsworth and Keats and leaving–themselves. Poetry as self-expression rather than art, a “practice”–that is what I love about yoga, how teachers and students refer to what they do as a “practice.”
The assumption being that they’re never going to perfect it. Hell, even lawyers seem to understand this about what they do! But not poets. Teachers still go into creative writing classrooms today and tell students just to bring in a poem and then they’ll workshop it–for the entire semester. I mean, really? Why does a teacher have to be paid to do that? That’s like the tango teacher going into a dance studio and saying, Show me what you can do. And the sad thing is that there are so many poet-teachers I know out there without full-time jobs who could teach the hell out of those classes where those students are being failed by their teachers.
I love that notion. “I could teach the hell out of that poet!”
Anyone who thinks poetry can’t be taught should simply look at a pile of undergraduate submissions for a poetry contest. I saw this at Quinnipiac, where I teach and helped judge a contest last year. It was immediately obvious which poems were written by someone who’d taken a poetry class and which were not–you could toss the latter after glancing at the title and the splay of the poem all over the page, usually i i i staggering everywhere with no end in sight. The former were not necessarily good poems, and some were too obviously written on assignment (i.e. write a Shakespeare sonnet, boys and girls), but they at least showed consciousness of poem as craft.
One thing that people don’t seem to consider when they bemoan the culture of MFA programs and poem-sameness blah blah blah is how much worse poems might be without those programs. I mean, yeah, I don’t want to read 800 sestinas a day–I just threw that in for you, Daniel–but I’d rather read those than the kind of stuff I see in those undergraduate submission piles. Or that I’ve seen in slush piles for various magazines I’ve worked for. Yikes.
We agree that teachers should teach, but yoga and the tango are not the same as poetry, for a number of different reasons.
One has to get on the floor and ‘do’ yoga or the tango, to learn and benefit from these arts, and very specific physical steps are involved, which, if followed, will precisely reflect what yoga and the tango are.
If one were to read the poems of W.H. Auden, one would learn poetry, in the act of reading Auden, as much as one learns yoga by actually doing it. Dead Auden (his poems) is a better mentor than living Auden. Excellent poems mentor the best.
Judging by Jason Koo’s poetry, reading magazines and watching TV would probably be a better mentor than Jason Koo.
Auden, as “mentor,” would not help you to become a poet nearly as much as the poems of Auden would. Ratio of mentor power: Auden, 1, his poems, 1,000.
Now, if you slept with Auden, you might become a famous poet, but we don’t think Jason Koo’s website, The Bridge, is quite about that.
If you studied the poems of Koo instead of the poems of Auden, you wouldn’t be doing “yoga” anymore, for Koo and Auden are not the same thing. Here again, Koo’s analogy to yoga fails. Yoga contains variety, but yoga is basically a single discipline. By comparison, poetry is variety itself.
We love the reference to “bad Romanticism.” To those schooled by Modernism and the New Criticism, all Romanticism is “bad.” This is because “self-expression” is not allowed in the mentoring universe.
It wasn’t Jason Koo, who stayed in that motel, who expressed himself in that poem about staying in that motel. It was a mentored “practice” that wrote that poem.
When it comes to poetry these days, the only “self-expression” they want is your money.
The beautiful Robert Burns wrote love songs. He battles homely Auden in the North.
W.H. Auden takes on Bobby Burns as the 2013 Scarriet Poetry March Madness Tournament rolls on.
Auden, a 20th century “Romantic” poet, is the no. 6 seed in the North, and takes on no. 11 seed Robert Burns, the 18th century Scottish song-writer and balladeer. Auden, who wrote opera librettos, also wrote plenty of ballads, a form we’re sure can survive all.
What is the link between romantic love and sex? Surely there’s a fine line between them, which Freud managed to blur thoroughly.
We might say that as love is to sex, mental health is to bodily health.
One might even say that sex is where body and mind meet rather harshly, and love is where body and mind meet more delicately.
Freud, the doctor, is taken seriously as such, as Auden the poet, in this ballad, warns that childless women will get cancer.
Auden’s ballad, “Miss Gee:”
Let me tell you a little story About Miss Edith Gee; She lived in Clevedon Terrace At number 83.
She’d a slight squint in her left eye, Her lips they were thin and small, She had narrow sloping shoulders And she had no bust at all.
She’d a velvet hat with trimmings, And a dark grey serge costume; She lived in Clevedon Terrace In a small bed-sitting room.
She’d a purple mac for wet days, A green umbrella too to take, She’d a bicycle with shopping basket And a harsh back-pedal break.
The Church of Saint Aloysius Was not so very far; She did a lot of knitting, Knitting for the Church Bazaar.
Miss Gee looked up at the starlight And said, ‘Does anyone care That I live on Clevedon Terrace On one hundred pounds a year?’
She dreamed a dream one evening That she was the Queen of France And the Vicar of Saint Aloysius Asked Her Majesty to dance.
But a storm blew down the palace, She was biking through a field of corn, And a bull with the face of the Vicar Was charging with lowered horn.
She could feel his hot breath behind her, He was going to overtake; And the bicycle went slower and slower Because of that back-pedal break.
Summer made the trees a picture, Winter made them a wreck; She bicycled to the evening service With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She passed by the loving couples, She turned her head away; She passed by the loving couples, And they didn’t ask her to stay.
Miss Gee sat in the side-aisle, She heard the organ play; And the choir sang so sweetly At the ending of the day,
Miss Gee knelt down in the side-aisle, She knelt down on her knees; ‘Lead me not into temptation But make me a good girl, please.’
The days and nights went by her Like waves round a Cornish wreck; She bicycled down to the doctor With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She bicycled down to the doctor, And rang the surgery bell; ‘O, doctor, I’ve a pain inside me, And I don’t feel very well.’
Doctor Thomas looked her over, And then he looked some more; Walked over to his wash-basin, Said,’Why didn’t you come before?’
Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner, Though his wife was waiting to ring, Rolling his bread into pellets; Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.
‘Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do; It’s like some hidden assassin Waiting to strike at you.
‘Childless women get it. And men when they retire; It’s as if there had to be some outlet For their foiled creative fire.’
His wife she rang for the servant, Said, ‘Don’t be so morbid, dear’; He said: ‘I saw Miss Gee this evening And she’s a goner, I fear.’
They took Miss Gee to the hospital, She lay there a total wreck, Lay in the ward for women With her bedclothes right up to her neck.
They lay her on the table, The students began to laugh; And Dr. Rose the surgeon He cut Miss Gee in half.
Dr. Rose he turned to his students, Said, ‘Gentlemen if you please, We seldom see a sarcoma As far advanced as this.’
They took her off the table, They wheeled away Miss Gee Down to another department Where they study Anatomy.
They hung her from the ceiling Yes, they hung up Miss Gee; And a couple of Oxford Groupers Carefully dissected her knee.
Now we move from Auden’s Dr. Rose to Bobby Burns’ “Red, Red Rose,” a ballad which does not lack “creative fire”:
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I: And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee well, my only Luve And fare thee well, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.
There is no way to adequately explain the greatness of this little poem; it is like beauty or love itself: it has a truth beyond words.
Shakespeare, in his Sonnets, famously mocked the whole idea of simile, of metaphor, the whole notion of equating X and Y, of saying that this was “like” that. One only has to think of Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” or Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day,” both of which imply all comparison is odious, false, misleading, and tedious: my love’s eyes like the sun? Uh…not really. If I compare you to a summer’s day, will that work? Nope.
Burns seems to run right into this falsehood with “my love is like a red, red rose,” but one only has to reverse the stanzas in Burns’ ballad, putting the comparison stanza last, to see how the stanzas of action “I will come again,” are more important and are properly placed at the end. Burns’ poem moves quickly from the sight-oriented “red red rose” to the ideality of “in tune,” and “I will luve thee still,” to the final “And I will come again, tho’ it were…” It is not ostentatious, but the poem does have a movement: the simile of the rose is the pretty introduction, not the heart of the poem.
Just as the Auden ballad explicitly warns that standing water breeds disease (childless women get cancer), the Burns ballad implicitly champions movement and action (the lover’s pledge eclipses the rose simile).
Can it be these two very different poems from different eras have the same message?
They do!
In another North battle, we have this exquisite match-up: “Delight In Disorder” by Herrick (7th Seeded) v. “I Knew A Woman” by Roethke (10th Seeded). Holy Cow!
Here’s “Delight in Disorder:”
A SWEET disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness : A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction : An erring lace which here and there Enthrals the crimson stomacher : A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly : A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat : A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility : Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.
And “I Knew A Woman:”
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand; She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin: I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, Coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing did we make.)
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; She played it quick, she played it light and loose; My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; Her several parts could keep a pure repose, Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I’m martyr to a motion not my own; What’s freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)
Like Auden/ Burns, these two poems from different eras are very similar; although the Roethke ‘gets more into it,’ the Herrick says the same thing: “she moved more ways than one,” as the Roethke puts it.
This is a memorability issue: the Roethke is richer, but the Herrick sticks in the mind: who can forget, “Is too precise in every part.”So who do you give it to?And to finish first round North action: Wallace Stevens faces William Blake: “Peter Quince” (8th seeded) v. “How Sweet I Roamed” (9th seeded).
William Blake’s poem, the older one, has that quotable memorableness which so often more complex modern poems lack. It shines, this poem—it’s bright to look at:
How Sweet I Roam’d
How sweet I roam’d from field to field, And tasted all the summer’s pride ‘Til the prince of love beheld Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He shew’d me lilies for my hair And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his garden fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
The beauty of Love contrasted with the poet’s “loss of liberty” is sweetly, swiftly and deliciously rendered; Blake’s exhuberance knocks one over. No poet rages within formal convention like Blake—there’s a lesson in that alone.
Stevens, to our ears, gets the sound of Romanticism in places, and the sense of it in other places, but rarely gets it all at once. This poem has the feel of a jaded jingler, a soul not quite believing in song, even as it wishes to sing. Quince reminds us of Eliot’s Sweeney—and Eliot’s Mrs. Porter section from The Waste Land.
The four number one seeds: Goethe, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge, no surprise there…
Let the Road to the Final Four begin!!
ROMANTICISM: OLD AND NEW
THE NORTH
1. HOLY LONGING-GOETHE
2. STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING-FROST
3. LESBIA LET’S LIVE ONLY FOR LOVE-CATULLUS
4. THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS-LARKIN
5. WHY SO PALE AND WAN FOND LOVER?-SUCKLING
6. MISS GEE-AUDEN
7. DELIGHT IN DISORDER-HERRICK
8. PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER-STEVENS
9. SONG: HOW SWEET I ROAMED-BLAKE
10. I KNEW A WOMAN-ROETHKE
11. A RED, RED ROSE-BURNS
12. SYRINGA-ASHBERY
13. EDEN-TRAHERNE
14. LINES-RIMBAUD
15. FOLLOW THY FAIR SUN-CAMPION
16. IN BERTRAM’S GARDEN-JUSTICE
THE SOUTH
1. ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE-KEATS
2. LADY LAZARUS-PLATH
3. WHOSO LIST TO HUNT-PETRARCH
4. L’INVITATION AU VOYAGE-BAUDELAIRE
5. AMORES I,V-OVID
6. A SUBALTERN’S LOVE SONG-BJETEMAN
7. THE GARDEN-MARVELL
8. PRIMITIVE-OLDS
9. TANTO GENTILE-DANTE
10. THE GROUNDHOG-EBERHART
11. A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT-BARRETT
12. A COLOR OF THE SKY-HOAGLAND
13. ON THE BEACH AT CALAIS-WORDSWORTH
14. THE FISH-BISHOP
15. DORCHIA-POSEIDIPPUS
16. LITMUS TEST-NIKOLAYEV
THE WEST
1. THE CLOUD-SHELLEY
2. AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION-THOMAS
3. MARIANA-TENNYSON
4. AND YOU AS WELL MUST DIE, BELOVED DUST-MILLAY
5. O BEST OF ALL NIGHTS, RETURN AND RETURN AGAIN-PROPERTIUS
6. I THINK CONTINUALLY OF THOSE WHO ARE TRULY GREAT-SPENDER
7. DON JUAN (FROM CANTO III)-BYRON
8. MEETING AT NIGHT-BROWNING
9. UNDER THE LINDENTREE-VOGELWEIDE
10. PASSENGERS-COLLINS
11. LA! MORT QUI T’A FAIT SI HARDIE-D’ ORLEANS
12. RIVER ROSES-LAWRENCE
13. ODE ON SOLITUDE-POPE
14. LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE-YEATS
15. SONG FOR ST. CECILIA’S DAY-DRYDEN
16. DOVER BEACH-ARNOLD
THE EAST
1. KUBLA KHAN-COLERIDGE
2. THE RAVEN-POE
3. WAS THIS THE FACE-MARLOWE
4. HYSTERIA-ELIOT
5. WHEN IN THE CHRONICLE OF WASTED TIME-SHAKESPEARE
6. THE BLUE GIRLS-RANSOM
7. THE GOOD MORROW-DONNE
8. WORKING LATE-SIMPSON
9. LOVE-HERBERT
10. HERE AND NOW-DUNN
11. SINCE THERE’S NO HELP COME LET US KISS AND PART-DRAYTON
12. CYNARA-DOWSON
13. GOLDEN SAYINGS-NERVAL
14. WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY-HOUSMAN
15. BALLAD OF BARBARA ALLEN-ANONYMOUS
16. AT THE TABUKI KABUKI-MAZER
Edgar Lee Masters: Not sexy, but wrote prose poetry before WC Williams
Fads are born of flux, yet to their followers they’re as real as steel, or iron. Tell a member of the hardcore poetry community that Edgar Lee Masters and Edna Vincent Millay are more significant than William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens and watch them gag. Ron Silliman would gag. Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff would gag. Harold Bloom would die. There is a hiearchy. Flux may seem to be the modernist mode; it’s not. It’s iron.
The bookish Helen Vendler has made us love Wallace Stevens, the insurance agent, in his off-white suit; Stevens, like Alexander Pope, put his philosophy in verse (and somehow ended up being called modern for it), but the hardcore poetry community’s adoration of Bill Williams is based on nothing we can ascertain as very interesting. While he lived, no one liked Williams much—WCW mourned the fact that Auden blew him away at a public reading, but celebrity has made its way through unseen byways in Bill’s favor; it perhaps had something to do with his friendship with the notorious Pound, which led to his being tagged as some kind of “American” (New Jersey?) alternative to Pound and Eliot, or that he “helped” Allen Ginsberg (Ginsberg’s poet father Louis ran in the same art circles as Williams), but whatever the reason, WCW has been a bookish fad ever since the New Critics put “Red Wheel Barrow” in their poetry textbook Understanding Poetry and informed their readers his little poem was “lucid” and “fresh.”
The hardcore academic poetry community still somehow believes that sincerity and plain prose go together; perhaps they do, perhaps they are right, and perhaps I should end my essay right here on that note. Sincerity does go a long way in many people’s eyes, and the more I think on the word sincerity, the more I do feel worthy of punishment and feel I deserve to be accused of bad faith for questioning the worth of William Carlos Williams. If one squashes an ant, half the world will be indifferent and the other half will feel sorry for the ant; so why would any critic ever want to treat “Red Wheel Barrow” harshly? Better not go near it; but one keeps seeing it, and that’s the secret of Williams’ fame: one cannot squash the ant. It keeps going and going…
It is a little quixotic for Williams to complain, as he did, of T.S. Eliot’s foreign allusions: we wonder if Mr. Williams is aware that American implies foreign in its very soul? How can one poet ever claim that he, more than others, writes for Americans, in subject matter, style, or language? Isn’t such a claim suspect? We wonder why Mr. Williams and his supporters get a free pass in making it.
In William Carlos Williams’ first book (Poems, 1909), his poems are like this:
The Uses of Poetry
I’ve fond anticipation of a day
O’erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,
Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat’s long sway.
For, lest o’ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We’ll draw the latch-string
And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy’s transforming giant wing,
To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.
“Fruits all anguish mend??” This is dreck—yet it was published when Williams was 26. It was not until he was in his late 30s and joined the Kreymborg, Arensburg, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Man Ray, Louis Ginsberg, Marcel Duchamp “Dial” clique that the Williams of “The Red Wheel Barrow” emerged.
What most don’t realize, is that well before Williams found both himself and his coterie, Edgar Lee Masters, in his wildly popular “Spoon River Anthology,” already sounded more modern and impure than Williams:
Albert Schirding
Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
For I raised a brood of eagles
Who flew away at last, leaving me
A crow on the abandoned bough.
Then, with the ambition to prefix Honorable to my name,
And thus to win my children’s admiration,
I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,
Spending my accumulations to win — and lost.
That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris
For her picture, entitled, “The Old Mill” —
(It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)
The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.
—Edgar Lee Masters
Humble Spoon River, with its poetry in plain prose, was published in 1916, when William Carlos Williams was still trying and failing at rhyme.
In his book, Innovators & Outsiders, American Poetry Since 1950, Eliot Weinberger, who writes in his introduction of the great divide in American poetry: “the ruling party” and the “innovator outsiders,” begins his anthology with WC Williams. It’s typical Williams: mundane description plus a bit of avant-garde, modern art philosophy. “The Desert Music” describes a trip with his wife and some friends to a poor Mexican border town while tossing in bon mots such as, “Only the poem. /Only the counted poem, to an exact measure:/to imitate, not to copy nature, not/to copy nature,” daring you to make a connection between this snatch of earnest literary criticism and a trip to a Mexican border town, just as “The Red Wheel Barrow” dares you to connect “So much depends” with that barrow glazed with rain water.
It’s a rather bland compositional technique: the matter-of-fact imagery makes it ‘modern’ and the pasted-on lecture: only the poem—makes it seem different, mystical. How innovative and original is this poetaster technique? We don’t know.
As a reader you must decide between two points of view: ‘what the hell does he mean by only the poem?‘ or: ‘only the poem—of course! only the poem,‘ nodding sagely. There’s really no in-between: you must choose for yourself: are you smart or are you dumb? It’s a sly trick the sly poets play: because you don’t want to seem dumb. You do want to be in the crowd that knows the deep mystical zen significance of “so much depends,” don’t you?
Of course we know Williams was part of the modern art scene, and understood the direction things were going: painting was becoming flat: only paint upon the canvas!
“Only the poem” is a slogan obviously in this spirit—and barking a slogan in a poem about what a poem should be is to “flatten” the poem. “Don’t copy nature.” We don’t really associate Williams with the New York School, but there it is. The modernist Paris-moving-to-New York- art clique was small—but still fit the modern poetry clique within it pretty comfortably.
The formula first emerges most forcefully with “The Red Wheel Barrow.” Poetry, unlike painting, is difficult to flatten, because how do you get away with “anybody can do that” in language? The art world makes objects and once a museum owns an object, a certain legitimacy sets in, but with poetry, the stamp of radical approval is harder to get.
Williams struck on a method, which is pretty simple: First: copy nature in the poem up to a point, presenting an imagery from real life. Second: Add to the imagery some piece of philosophical jargon which does not fit the imagery or enhance it or extend it in any way at all. Voila! You have flattened the poem. Williams is intentionally boring. It’s a style, born of modern art. Present a red wheel barrow. Then flatten it with “so much depends.” So much depends on this object which I am objectifying on the flat-surface-object of my poem. This is the intention.
Here’s a lesser known poem by Williams, but typical; one can clearly see the flattening formula at work:
To Waken An Old Lady
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind —
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested —
the snow
is covered with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.
The imagery is precise and cute: “small,” “cheeping,” “skimming,” and nothing much, but it gets flattened by the wordy additions, “Old age is,” and “But what?” It’s the same strategy of “Wheel Barrow.” 1) Paint a little scene, 2) attach a declaration of some sort. Neither one enhances the other, and thus the whole thing is intentionally de-enhanced. We yawn, and feel mystified at the same time, as when we look at one of those modern art blank canvases at MOMA. The absurdity is brought mystically to the fore—and we can hear it in the phlegmatic “Old age is…” Shall I compare “cheeping birds buffeted by a dark wind” to “old age?” Of course I shall! It’s perfect!
Now look at this poem by silly old Edna St. Vincent Millay, which no member of the hardcore academic poetry community wants to touch:
Recuerdo
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Edna Millay’s strategy is much different. Hers is a far more natural evocation of old age than the Williams. Old age has life in “Recuerdo;” it merely gets a metaphorical snapshot in “To Waken An Old Lady.” The realist mode fell out of favor in the hip artistic circles Williams travelled in during his middle age, but one can see how Millay’s poem succeeds on several levels—by contrast, the Williams, with its “Old age is…,” feels flat, formulaic, and artificial.
After it has been read, a novel can feel less substantial in a reader’s mind when compared to a brief poem—if the novel’s focus is narrow, and the poem’s is wide.
America buys more novels than poems because we don’t trust our minds. We need the concrete fact: I read 288 pages—and it was a ‘good read.’ The author took me somewhere. I had a good time with him. He bought me dinner, and then took me home.
The poet and his one-page poem, however, barely murmur hello. How rude is that?
It is true, that aesthetically, the novel which persists in keeping theme and plot narrowly tied up in a small, dim room, so that no chapter, character, or minor observance can move without bumping into one other, is usually a winner. Novels we read in an afternoon, that unwind from a single spool, novels we can picture nearly all at once, like The Great Gatsby, have that narrow vision we like. Compared to a novel like that, a one-page poem can be haphazard, sprawling, and damn confusing.
The confusing one-page poem is a wretched thing, and yet so many poets persist in it—why? The poet suffers from penis-envy, perhaps; he’s not a novelist, so he’s going to make up for it by bulking up his little poem with as many facts as possible. Poets used to view facts as the enemy. What happened? Why are poets now so in love with facts? You can say, with a sly, Ashbery grin, well they are not really facts, but this doesn’t alter the aesthetic impact, the stylistic impression, the final result in the mind of the reader.
The ‘revolution’ of 20th century poetry can be summed up thusly: Death to Victorian rhyming poetry that tells a moral story! The result, a hundred years later, is the Ashbery poem. With all its myriad little facts indifferently mixed together in a funhouse mirror tale, the Ashbery poem perfectly realizes that cry: Death to Victorian rhyming poetry that tells a moral story!
But at Ashbery’s back I always hear: Auden—who kept jabbering away like a Victorian, even as he walked in the cool, modern idiom, even as he awarded Ashbery the Yale Younger. Sometimes fine resemblances, more than the major distinctions, do us the most good. Auden—if you read his early obscure poems you see Ashbery—perfected that indifferent voice which pipes in with facts, not in the Victorian, earnest, writing-a-novel-in-a-poem sort of way, but carelessly, so that facts pour in and shape the poem, rather than the poem shaping the facts.
Isn’t this the major difference, after all, between the Victorian poem and the Ashbery poem? In the Ashbery poem, the facts shape the poem; in the Victorian poem, the poem shapes the facts. But still…the modern experiment can only go so far—and how far did it really go? Too far, because didn’t it kind of kill poetry’s public, as American poetry now survives on creative writing workshop students reading one another?
The poets cannot rhyme—the Victorians did that. The poets cannot tell moral stories—the Victorians did that.
But the best aesthetic revolutions should tell us what we can do, not what we can’t do.
Look at this poem by Auden. It features two characters: the ambitious Victorian and the indifferent Modern. It pre-dates Godot by 15 years. It’s a novel-in-a-poem:
Who’s Who
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.
The Moderns decided to chuck the “long marvelous letters” of the Victorian era, and replace them with blueprints of cryptic psychological truth. Auden is careful not to reveal the gender of the indifferent Modern. Maybe it’s Byron writing to Larkin? Or Byron writing to Auden, himself?
Enough yapping. Let’s rumble. Collins v. Mazer.
Collins may seem like a zombie Victorian rising from the grave, but he’s just another version of that Modern who refuses to answer that Victorian’s “long marvelous letters.” Collins is us. Ashbery is us. Just another modern version of that indifferent character in Auden’s “Who’s Who.” Collins is enjoying his little world. Note the wry reference to the 19th century:
THE BEST CIGARETTE
There are many that I miss having sent my last one out a car window sparking along the road one night, years ago.
The heralded one, of course: after sex, the two glowing tips now the lights of a single ship; at the end of a long dinner with more wine to come and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier; or on a white beach, holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.
How bittersweet these punctuations of flame and gesture; but the best were on those mornings when I would have a little something going in the typewriter, the sun bright in the windows, maybe some Berlioz on in the background. I would go into the kitchen for coffee and on the way back to the page, curled in its roller, I would light one up and feel its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.
Then I would be my own locomotive, trailing behind me as I returned to work little puffs of smoke, indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought, the signal that told the nineteenth century it was moving forward. That was the best cigarette, when I would steam into the study full of vaporous hope and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.
“holding one with fingers still wet from a swim” is glorious. This is what the poets should be giving us today, instead of X, Y, Z on a blackboard.
Collins foregrounds the writing process itself in the second half of the poem, and this reflexivity is a Renaissance trope. Collins is no Victorian, but he travels backwards a lot. But this is what poets do. The modern (post-modern, etc etc) poet is, in truth, an oxymoron. Collins is obsessed with clarity. (The future, i.e., the modern, is never clear.) That, alone, puts him above most of his contemporaries, who hint at everything, who struggle to say something so differently that obscurity results—because they think this makes them more literary, or more intelligent.
Collins may be guilty of hinting too much in this poem: the locomotive trope may be too clever for its own good, ostentatiously following its tracks over a cliff. Invoking 19th century progress is not exactly done in a joking manner; Collins, the first-person poet, is always so good-natured that the reader can relax (what’s wrong with that?)—and not worry about catching anxious irony and mockery. One puff of smoke equals another puff of smoke. The humor is gentle and self-effacing. There’s no reaching after “long marvelous letters.”
We have touched on a number of themes and they all come together in Ben Mazer’s poem—by which he hopes to pull off a miracle, and advance to the fourth round in Scarriet’s 2012 March Madness Tournament: defeating Ashbery, Heaney, and now, Billy Collins:
THE IMPERIALIST GOES TO INDIA
Hey, you look just like your facebook photo.
No, you don’t! I read your pores like a map
of everything that’s wrong with the world,
plus everything that’s right. Fields and fields
of daffodils and roses and poppies extending
all the way to the edge of the unshorn
virgin territories unexplored by balloon.
What is the word for this? It wells up
like silence in my groin and chokes
up in my throat like consonants
depleted of syllables. Ooooooooo
then nothing. I sit by a roadside
and have my fortune told. My lines speak triumph
but the voice that cloaks them is ominous.
I may have left Omaha and Idaho
to come to this, but I have fallen in love
and will not leave this till death wrenches me.
Like a librarian without a library
my love shines, she is loved by everyone!
Even small animals adorn her Madras
silks, would gladly die for her.
She cleans her perfect teeth with poppy seeds
and looks on me with a pure look of love.
What is it I see on the other side of myself?
I see, I see, a thousand monkeys
looking through a glass that separates
me from you—I see you trying
to penetrate the glass, but I can’t hear your words.
What are you saying? This drama is intense,
too much is swarming over the old castle walls.
Is this what my aunt meant back in Omaha?
Believe in yourself. Do what you love.
I thought that I had power, held the strings
to my own destiny, and those of others.
Or is that all a dream, will I awake
to find I loved what I already knew.
There is more anxiety in Mazer’s first-person—and there is something terribly endearing about the poem’s anxiety, because it’s so sad, without being complaining or hysterical, and it has hidden, nuanced humor: “plus everything that’s right.” The icy humor of the post-modern. plus everything that’s right.
How a poem ends is 90% of a poem’s success. We like how Mazer’s poem ends—with a poignancy that sums up the feeling of the entire poem.
By comparison, Collins’ ending feels too clinical: that comparison of train tracks to lines of poetry—we don’t like it! It spoils a nice poem. Puffing smoke like a locomotive, the industrious poet is a clown, here, and humor is the way we might say goodbye to our romantic cigarettes. The poem is certainly winning. But does it win against Mazer?
Ben Mazer. Don’t let his demeanor fool you. He’s funnier than Ashbery.
In a review of Ben Mazer’sPoems (Pen and Anvil Press, 2010) and John Beer’sThe Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium Press, 2010), Henry Gould begins:
If there is, or could be, a center of American poetry — a suspect, much-derided supposition — then John Ashbery, needless to say, lives at or near it. Ashbery: presiding spirit, native genius! That courtly gent, whose arctic blue eyes, disappointed mouth, and eagle beak, convened for the camera, curiously resemble portraits of T.S. Eliot in old age. Ashbery’s parasol-like plumage spreads a kindly shade over more recent laboring; his generous blurbs brighten the back pages of scores of advancing young upstarts. The work of two of the most promising, Ben Mazer and John Beer, reveal a substantial debt to their mentor — combined with the influence of an earlier poet, lurking behind both as he does behind Ashbery: that is, yes, Eliot, old Possum himself.
Gould is correct: Eliot and Ashbery are the templates of all modern poetry; one hardly has to talk about anyone else. Sure, one could discuss 19th century French poetry, or Elizabethan verse, or yammer on about Whitman, or go off on some insane Poundian tangent, or scream, What about women poets? Or, talk about the modern or post-modern age.Cars! World War One! Movies! Airplanes! TV! The bomb! The pill! Parody! The internet! But what would be the point? E. and A. already contain these things. Eliot has already been where you are going—in the past, and in the future. Your one advantage over Eliot, reader, is the present—but if only we could find it. I’m afraid we must make do with the “arctic blue eyes” and the “disappointed mouth” and the “eagle beak” of E. and A. for another century, or two.
Let’s be real simple for a moment: Shakespeare wrote about life; Keats wrote about feelings for life; since the grammaphone replaced Keats and the movies replaced Shakespeare, poets have nowhere to go but into parody, beginning with Eliot’s “a patient etherized upon a table” and “I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and, finishing with Ashbery’s parody of parody. Gould:
John Beer and Ben Mazer together diagram a paired dissociative offshoot from Eliot and Ashbery. Beer’s poetic stance radiates bitter, self-canceling ratiocination, whereas Mazer’s stance represents unaccountable, free-floating emotion. Beer mimes a sardonic, midwestern Baudelaire, while Mazer seems primed with Keatsian negative capability.
Beer and Mazer are offshoots; one is “bitter” and the other “unaccountable.” Parody is not always so—Shakespeare was a parodist of Dante—but in minor poets, “bitter” or “unaccountable” are the two forms the imitation inevitably takes. Mr. Beer and Mr. Mazer are not gardens, or even plants, but tendrils growing from a larger plant—in the garden of American Poetry where Gould, the reviewer, is an even-tempered and faithful gardener.
Gould seems more interested in Mazer. If this passage from Beer (indeed, ‘small beer’) which Gould quotes is any indication of Beer’s ability, we can see why:
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
I can smell the different perfumes,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France,
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell…
This is pure trash—far below Eliot.Eliot never wrote milk-and-water phrases full of throw-away words, like: “With the smell of…”, “I can smell the different…”, “The smell whereof shall breed a plague…” Beer is not even in Mazer’s league, much less Eliot’s, and we need not discuss Beer further.
Gould on Mazer is good:
In a jackhammer world that glorifies the transparent, the obvious, the literal, and polemical above all, the practice of this patient mode of symbolic representation is a lonely battle. Mazer reveals his discouragement: or rather, he mimes discouragement and near-despair. His heroes are sacred victims, like Hart Crane and Weldon Kees; he has an affinity for the disaffected Ashbery, to whom I believe he alludes obliquely (I could be mistaken) in these comically-botched lines (from an ambivalent fan letter?) in “Death and Minstrelsy”:
Although I am only a moderate admirer
of your poetry, there is not a single other
contemporary poet who I do admire.
Gould doesn’t know Mazer as I know him—Gould writes that Mazer “mimes discouragement and near-despair,” but Mazer’s “near-despair” is genuine; there is no miming; Mazer is certainly capable of mimicry, but Mazer really does mourn Hart Crane as a tragic, long-lost brother, and there’s nothing fake about it. Otherwise in the passage just quoted above, Gould gets Mazer down cold. I agree with Gould—those lines he quotes from Mazer have Ashbery written all over them, and I will add that 1) Mazer is perhaps the only living poet who can do Ashbery as well as, or even better than, Ashbery, 2) the “moderate admirer” lines are screamingly, achingly funny, 3) Mazer was not being intentionally funny when he wrote those lines—in fact, he probably wrote the lines out of indignation and hurt, since Mazer genuinely loves most contemporary poets (he is not hyper-critical, in the least—in fact, his spirit is quite the opposite) which 4) goes to show that Mazer’s genius does have a puzzling aspect that catches Gould somewhat off-guard.
Gould is one of the best critics writing today: sharp, witty, worldly. He is a tad too much in love with own cleverness, though; he struggles admirably against his own tendency towards self-conscious hipsterism. He is not quite as good as Logan, even though he’s much more likeable. Logan, however, would never be tempted to write of Ashbery this way:
Ashbery emerged in the 1950s, in tandem with the ascent of U.S. hegemony on the world stage. This was an America moving toward historical apex: a coalescence of technological-ideological certitude and might, in an atmosphere fraught nevertheless with extreme stress (think Dachau; Hiroshima; Cold War). In the poetry realm, it was a golden age of criticism. The New Critics, impelled by the same Faustian drives which haunted the culture at large, saw in the figure of Eliot a model, above all, of masterful knowledge and control. Eliot’s aphorism, that “the only method is to be very intelligent”, was inverted to suggest that intelligence was, indeed, a method — the method — and the project was to methodize it further: an intellectual instauration. The well-made poem, that autotelic object, was offered as a model of perfection: of feeling perfectly objectified in art; of beauty technically refined in verse. There was something in these formulae reminiscent of the smug certainties of the Restoration, of a Dryden “smoothing out” the rough-hewn lines of Shakespeare. It was the rationalism of a time wrung dry by civil strife, more comfortable with mild truisms than with debate. Method and craft produced the polished poem, just as American know-how built the superhighway system.
Ashbery, according to Gould, is a poet who “emerged in the 1950s,” along with the might of the post-war United States, and the “Some Trees” poet is finally likened (by way of the New Critics and Eliot) to the “American know-how [that] built the superhighway system.” The superhighway system is the efficient working thing of the New Critics, who “saw in the figure of Eliot a model;” — “intelligence” was Eliot’s ultimate guide to complex, functioning modernity, with Ashbery the road, and Eliot, the pylon.
Gould’s view is superficial and too contemporary, a sign of po-biz’s continual shrinking understanding of history. The New Critics did not find Eliot—they were an extension of him; Eliot’s early essays were the blueprint of New Criticism, and Eliot, in turn, was influenced by the James family: Henry James advocated intelligence as the ultimate aesthetic measure (a formula, finally, of empty-headed snobbery and entitlement) long before Eliot, and William James (who taught Gertrude Stein) had transformed Harvard into a modernist citadel with his nitrous oxide pragmatism before Eliot arrived there. W.H. Auden was writing Ashbery poems of wry obscurity in the late 1920s. Paul Engle, with his Yale Younger, his Masters Degree of his own poetry, and his Rhodes scholarship, launched the Creative Writing Program era with the help of the Rhodes Scholar New Critics, Tate, Ransom, Warren, and Brooks; Pound’s euro-frenzy and Williams‘ wheel barrow would land safely in American universities, and Englishmen like Ford Madox Ford and Auden would cross the Atlantic to teach writing in America, the latter famously delivering the Yale Younger to Ashbery. Our MFA students today have only a Wiki-knowledge of New Criticism (if that)—they know the head, but not the feet, of the business.
Ignorant of the motives and actions of these men—first Fugitives, then racist Southern Agrarians, then New Critics, and then Creative Writing mavens, we end up saying impossibly quaint and silly things like “Ashbery emerged in the 1950s” and he resembles a “superhighway system.” The New Critics (with Paul Engle) were far more important for what they did on a practical basis than for what they thought. We don’t need the metaphor of a superhighway system when we have the reality of a super writing program system.
With history’s oxygen dwindling in the MFA classroom, the trapped poets with their Wiki-knowledge produce increasingly light-headed nonsense, “miming” as Gould puts it, the “discouragement or near-despair” of an existence which fosters the inevitable human tragedies of drunken, Creative Writing profs who litter the 20th century, like Berryman, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Roethke, and Ted Hughes, or, rather,”comically-botched” lines:
Although I am only a moderate admirer
of your poetry, there is not a single other
contemporary poet who I do admire.
Mazer is an intuitive and emotional poet, not an intellectual one—which is why these lines are funny; funny in a good way.
Post-modern poetry doesn’t think. It reacts.
(One day we will begin to see that Ashbery’s work does not spring from mirth, so much as guilt, sadness, paranoia, myopia, and depression.)
Sincere passion, made by a Byron or a Shelley or a Tennyson, is out. And so is their music. Mazer, in his fleeting Ashbery moods, is the best we’ve got now.
Ashbery was clever to see Poe was right: poetry succeeds at what prose fiction can’t do.
We fall into the error of modern thinking by assuming all thinking in the modern era is modern thinking.
The truth is: Modern isn’t new, but rather what follows, and is attached at the hip to, the old.
So modern isn’t even modern, and by the same reasoning, post-modern is even less modern.
The more ancient, the more new.
But enough of this.
The point we want to make is that modern has nothing to do with a contemporary who happens to be clever enough to discover a small (or a large) truth.
Ashbery discovered an old truth, and if we persist in thinking that every success in poetry after 1900 is somehow a “modern” one, we blind ourselves to how Frost or Eliot or Ashbery succeeded.
The so-called ‘avants’ flatter themselves that being modern means breaking taboos, that poets like Byron and Pope walked in fear of taboos; but this is to treat truth as a taboo, so no wonder the ‘avants’ fall short of Byron and Pope in wit, and everything else.
Ashbery’s reputation is based on a principle that never varies. It’s a simple one, but it’s how we know Ashbery is Ashbery, and its simplicity in principle doesn’t mean it didn’t take a certain genius to discover it and persist in it—in order to rise to prominence in the crowded field of post-war American poetry.
Stop for a minute and think to yourself: what makes Ashbery Ashbery? What is it that he provides that no one else does?
Most cannot see that it’s what poetry does that other literary genres cannot do, which makes poetry work as poetry. The formula is too hyper-practical, too obvioius, too simple for them to see. They think contemporary poetic interest has something to do with “new” modernism “breaking taboos,” or some other foggy notion.
Let’s set the glorious record straight.
James Joyce was already well-known before he unleashed his Finnegan’s Wake on the world; had this been his opening gambit, it surely would have doomed him to obscurity. No fame rests on lengthy (or even moderately lengthy) works of fiction which defy sense and meaning. The reason is simple: few have the patience to read nonsense for a very long time. But who would deny we don’t get a certain pleasure from sweetly elegant, ambitious, and lofty nonsense, having absolutely no design upon us?
Enter the Ashbery poem (seen in glimpses here and there, in Gertrude Stein, influenced by her professor, William James b. 1842, early Auden, or Wallace Stevens, but never persisted in so as to define a career ) which, simply because of its lyrical brevity, enabled it to succeed at its literary mission: tickling the reader’s fancy with doses of pure nonsense in small enough bites to enjoy. (Byron’s epics, or any writing that self-consciously digresses, could also be seen as an influence.)
Surely the ‘Ashbery Poem’ appeared when it did because of other so-called “modern” developments, some sub-literary, some extra-literary, some literary, etc. but even so, it is crucial we don’t confuse the conditions for something with the thing itself.
We don’t see how even Mr. Ashbery, himself, could disagree.
The only semblance of order [in the Sonnets] is a division into two unequal heaps—Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to a young man, assuming, which is probable but not certain, that there is only one young man addressed, and Sonnets 127-154 are addressed to a dark-haired woman.
Note how Auden’s skepticism regarding the first “heap” (“assuming…there is only one young man…”) does not extend to the second (“are addressed to a dark-haired woman.”)
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare sums up the common view of the ‘Dark Lady’ section:
The next sonnets, 127-152, are known as the ‘Dark Lady’ group, addressed to or concerned with an unfashionably dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-complexioned mistress. For the most part, these poems reproach her: she is a tyrant, black in deeds as well as in looks, (131) and an adultress (152); she has seduced the poet’s friend (133-4); the poet is foolish to love anyone so obviously unworthy (137, 147-152) and is clearly deceiving himself (138), asking her in one sonnet to confess her infidelity (139) and in the next to say she loves him even though this is not true (140). The poet, aware of the delusions of lust but unable to avoid its trap (129), woos his mistress regardless with a series of sexual puns on the name ‘Will’ (135-6, 143); he is torn between a ‘man right fair’ and a ‘woman colored ill’, suspecting they are lovers (144). –Stanley Wells
We know all sorts of things about this ‘dark lady.’ She is “unfashionably dark-haired, dark-eyed and dark-complexioned,” she’s “a tyrant,” an “adultress,” she has “seduced the poet’s friend,” and so forth.
Such is the conventional wisdom, and there is even an historical figure, Emilia Bassano Lanier, who is a much-named candidate for this ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets.
Scarriet, however, has solved the puzzle, but in order to do so, we had to 1) actually read the Sonnets and 2) trash the conventional wisdom in the process.
It wasn’t hard.
It will be hard to swallow, though, since so many scholars’ reputations are based on pure trash.
Pity the scholars, because not only is the Dark Lady going to be blown to bits, but the so-called ‘Young Man,’ as well.
There is no Dark Lady. There is no Young Man.
How could so many have been so wrong on so famous a work for so long?
So here’s what one finds when one actually reads The Sonnets, all 154 of them, in the sequence, as published, in 1609, and read by millions since then:
The Sonnets are gender-neutral.
119 of the first 126 sonnets (the so-called Young Man sonnets) do not specify a gender. Sonnet #7 puns on sun/son and #13’s “You had a father, let your son say so,” but this belongs to Shakespeare’s breeding/increase theme which dominates the first 14 sonnets, a theme which Shakespeare never abandons.
The sequence is gender-neutral until #20, however:
The knotty #20 and its “master mistress” is accompanied by #21’s “So it is not with me as with that Muse” and “let me truly write and my child is as fair…” and “let them say more that like of hearsay well/I will not praise that purpose not to sell” referring back to #20’s “love’s use:” the commerce of love—procreation and “increase” (#1).
“So it is not with me as with that Muse…” (#21) is just one indication that Shakespeare composed the Sonnets not as a ‘person of interest’ in the scholars’ imagined soap-opera, but from a loftier perspective, as a God participating in the human, not as a human participating with the God-like, or struggling with romance, or other short-lived concerns. The aim of the Sonnets is much higher than that. We must not only note the gender and the content of the Sonnets themselves but get the perspective straight: Shakespeare is the Muse in these sonnets, or even the Muse of the Muse of these Sonnets. The Sonnets are not impressionistic poetry. Shakespeare, the philosopher, has something to say.
Sonnet #21 refers to “any mother’s child” and #22 features “as tender nurse her babe from faring ill.” The business of progeny, lines of descent, lines of verse, “eternal lines,” (#18) dominates the early sonnets. So when does the famous Young Man enter? We have to wait until #33: “Even so my sun one early morn did shine/With all triumphant splendor on my brow;/But out alack, he was but one hour mine” to find a specific reference to what is possibly a Young Man or male friend or male lover, yet “sun” has us wondering if “sun” is not “son,” since Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven. The “he was but one hour mine” far more likely refers to Shakespeare’s son than it does to a male lover, if we note the words of #33 itself and also note that the child is an important theme in the whole sequence. Reading #33 in its entirety, the scenario of grief for a lost son jumps out at us, with the couplet stating the poet, even in his grief, will not lose faith “in heaven’s sun” even though “suns of the world may stain.”
It isn’t till sonnets #40, 41, and 42, the ‘friend and mistress betray the poet’ poems, that we finally get some sort of ‘story’ that involves a ‘male friend’ and the poet’s mistress. But the mistress is at play here, too, in the first definintive glimpse of the Young Man. We forget that until this point, for the first third of the so-called Young Man sequence, there is no Young Man story whatsoever. Not only that: in #42 Shakespeare informs us that, “my friend and I are one.” Have the scholars simply made up a story which does not exist? If we simply read the sonnets as Shakespeare wrote them, we have to say, yes.
In the sonnets leading up to the ‘betrayal’ triptych (40-42) we have a lot of platonist mathematics (“we two must be twain although our undivided loves are one” #36) and the parent-child theme is still going strong (“as a decrepit father takes delight to see his active child do deeds of youth”#37) so why the sudden lurid romance of the supposed young man cheating with the poet’s mistress? Not only does it not make sense in the sequence, it also doesn’t make sense that if a ‘story’ is so vital, it would be confined to just a few poems; discerned through Shakespeare’s teasing and philosophical words, we see that the ‘love triangle’ of #42 is not even that: there are four characters: thou, her, the poet, and a friend (who gets the mistress, not the ‘thou,’) and then the triptych ends: “she loves but me alone!” So where is this ‘young man sleeping with his mistress’ story? It doesn’t exist. It merely lives in the feverish imaginings of a blind pedant (or two).
#54 repeats the theme of Chapter 2 (Chapter 1, the first 14 sonnets are about procreation) in which the poet’s verse (rather than children) makes the youth immortal.
#63 finds a male pronoun again, but in terms of a mistress: “his beauty in these black lines be seen” is the precise theme of the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ sequence, which opens, “In the old age black was not counted fair” (#127). The “his” is not important; Shakespeare is keeping beauty alive with his poetry, repeating the theme of #53, which looks back to #16-18. To think that a genius like Shakespeare is thinking of a brunette is absurd; he’s a bit more clever than that. The so-called ‘Young Man’ sequence contains more examples of the ‘beauty as black’ theme than references to a young man.
If we didn’t get it the first time, Shakespeare repeats the trope in #65, without the male pronoun—as in 95% of the ‘Young Man’ sequence: “in black ink my love may still shine bright.”
Not that “my love” has to be a woman. Shakespeare intentionally eludes gender and biography and real names in the Sonnets because it’s obviously not his ultimate concern. Shakespeare’s use of the phrase “my love” is tricky; we can never assume he means ‘my (male) lover.’ He might be referring to a son, or a child. He might be referring to himself: “O no, thy love, though much, is not so great./It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,/Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,/To play the watchman ever for thy sake.” (#61) No male pronoun in this sonnet, either.
In fact, after #67 and 68, which speak of a “him,” but in highly grandiose religious terms, the male pronoun is absent for the rest of the ‘Young Man’ sequence.
The only exception is two rival poet sonnets (#80,86), and the rival poet may be Shakespeare himself, who drops self-reflexive hints everywhere. He tells the Muse what to do (#100) and explains what his Muse does (#21), for instance.
Shakespeare makes April a male, and flowers, too (#98,99). In #93 Shakespeare calls himself “husband” and refers to “Eve’s apple.” In #53 he compares “you” to “Adonis” and “Helen” as one of the ” millions of strange shadows” that “on you tend,” not using the male pronoun in that poem either. Typically, the “you” is described as a God, not a mortal.
In #108 we get “sweet boy,” but this poem, like #33, sounds like it could very well be an ode to the poet’s son: “like prayers divine,/I must each day say o’er the very same;/Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,/Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.” “Hallowed thy fair name” certainly implies a baptism, and the sun is “no old thing old” in #76: “Far as the sun is daily new and old, /So is my love still telling what is told.” And we know Shakespeare loves to pun on son/sun.
There is no male pronoun after #108, except for that last poem (#126) in the ‘Young Man’ sequence, which clearly refers to cupid.
This brings us to the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ group (#127-152), which indulges in the happy pun of black ink, seen already in #27 (“makes black night beauteous”), #63 and #65 as already mentioned, together with the numerous references to day and light v. night and darkness, and there’s also multiple punning on dark “deeds,” documents (with black ink) and actions.
Much is made by scholars of #144, because it seems to explicitly recap the ‘betray’ triptych (#40-42). In #144, we have a “man right fair” and a “woman colored ill” and “I guess one angel in another’s hell.”
#41, 42, and #144 make up the scholars’ trump card. Without these three poems, the ‘Poet’s Male Friend Sleeps With Poet’s Mistress!’ story collapses. To extrapolate a feverish autobiographical tale from The Sonnets’ metaphorically philosophical coolness is a mug’s game. Shakespeare’s “To win me soon to hell, my female evil/Tempteth my better angel from my side” (#144) is plainly a calculated morality play, not a sweaty confession.
Scholars err in assuming the “woman colored ill” is the Dark Lady; this is both a misreading and a dumbing down of Shakespeare, the sly master. First, there’s no “black” in #144. Secondly, the “hell” in #144 is the same “hell” we see in #129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”) . The “woman colored ill” is the same as #21’s “So it is not with me as with that Muse,/ Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse” and not the Dark Lady, for look how Shakespeare’s mistress is described in the first of the Dark Lady sonnets (#127):
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.
For since each hand hath put on nature’s pow’r,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow’r,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
There is no “hell” of sonnets #129 and #144. Instead, there is the “mourning” of poetry which exists because of separation and grief, the “black ink” that pathetically strives to keep beauty green—because of death.
And we also get Plato (Shakespeare’s philosophical Muse) right here: “art’s false borrowed face.”
The boy is Shakespeare’s son.
The Rival poet is Shakespeare.
The Black Lady is a pun on black ink.
The Sonnets are witty Platonist philosophy, (see “The Phaedrus”) not the soap-opera scholars make of it.
Happy the poet who has his own library, and can look into those sweet books of the past, old familiar books which act like dreams and add perspective to sorrow, just as the sweet cypress tree in the vista marks the misty mile.
I plucked my old paperback Petrarch Selections (Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mark Musa) from the shelf yesterday and buried myself in a world of black and white, shadows, hopes, and dreams.
Musa reminds us sternly in his introduction:
It was one of Petrarch’s main concerns in his Latin writings to teach his fellow Italians to regard the great writer-statesmen of ancient Rome not as distinguished dead figures of the past but rather as living models of the present and future and worthy of imitation.
How many themes relate to Petrarch! He was famous in his day—and crowned laureate in Rome—for a forgotten Latin epic, and not for his Italian love sonnets to Laura, known as the Canzionere. Musa, again from the introduction:
In a letter written two years before his death on 18 July 1374 he refers to his poems written in Italian as nothing more than ‘trifles’ and expresses the hope that they will remain unknown to the world. Nevertheless, the fact remains that he spent a lifetime preparing for the publication of the poems, revising and polishing his ‘trifles’ from at least the second half of the 1330s until his death—this we know from the many corrections and notes in his own copy of the poems, preserved today in the Vatican Library.
Laura, the real person, is unknown, like the figures of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and reading both Sequences, it is obvious the Englishman is responding to the Italian, if in a more overtly secular manner.
W.H. Auden was sure Shakespeare was horrified when his Sonnets were made public, but that’s nonsense; Shakespeare’s Sonnets are addressed to mankind; they reveal no private secrets; and likewise Petrarch speaks to us as he wrestles with his soul in the Canzoniere. Surely Petrarch was being coy when he called his poems “trifles.”
Petrarch and Shakespeare both stay true to their great theme: What is worldly beauty; what is personhood; in what ways do both illuminate me and deceive me?
I was embroiled in youthful love of poetry and learning when I read Francisco Petrarcha’s opening sonnet in his Rime for the first time, and I was deeply impressed:
You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes
of those sighs on which I fed my heart
in my first vagrant youthfulness
when I was partly other than I am,
I hope to find pity, and forgiveness
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials.
Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;
and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world’s delight is a brief dream.
translated A.S. Kline, 2002
Anyone reading Petrarch today has to be wary of falling under a religious spell. Modern poetry distinguishes itself from ancient poetry, if anything, by its secular nature. I’ve never been religious, but I’ve still had to be careful about falling in love with Petrarch. Shakespeare, 250 years closer to our day, makes it alright to indulge in a certain religious feeling, and perhaps this is part of Shakespeare’s genius, and yet Petrarch and his burning love for Laura, makes it easy to have one’s cake and eat it, too—we can all revel in Petrarchan aspirations without feeling estranged from contemporary poetry.
We find in the Canzoniere this little gem:
Diana never pleased her lover more
when just by chance all of her naked body
he saw bathing within the chilly waters,
than did the simple mountain shepherdess
please me, the while she bathed the pretty veil
that holds her lovely blonde hair in the breeze,
so that even now in hot sunlight she makes me
tremble all over with the chill of love.
# 52, trans. Musa
I can’t imagine a contemporary poem like this, and not because of any special genius the Petrarch poem exhibits, but because of the innocent connection to simple life and the extraordinary combination of chastity and passion. Yet it strikes me as being a great Imagiste poem, too.
Petrarch is more of an influence than he is given credit in our time. The Modernists ignored him. But look at this poem:
That nightingale so tenderly lamenting
perhaps his children or his cherished mate,
in sweetness fills the sky and countryside
with many notes of grief skillfully played,
and all night long he stays with me it seems,
reminding me of my harsh destiny;
I have no one to blame except myself
for thinking that Death could not take a goddess.
How easy to deceive one who is sure!
Those two lights, lovely, brighter than the sun,
whoever thought would turn the earth so dark?
And now I know what this fierce fate of mine
would have me learn as I live on tears:
that nothing here can please and also last.
#311, trans. Musa
Here is the basis for Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale’ and Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ two of the best known poems of our era.
And this sounds like Whitman, not perhaps by the matter, but in the forthright, optimistic style of the speech:
Go now, my grieving verse, to the hard stone
that hides my precious treasure in the earth;
and there call her, who will respond from Heaven
although her mortal part be darkly buried,
and tell her I am weary now of living,
of sailing through the horrors of this sea,
but that, by gathering up her scattered leaves,
I follow her this way, step after step,
speaking of her alone, alive and dead
(rather, alive, and now immortalized),
so that the world may know and love her more.
Let her watch for the day I pass away
(it is not far from now), let her meet me,
call me, draw me to what she is in Heaven.
Petrarch is a major poet and a major influence, and deserves more attention today. He is the template for all great lyric poetry.
Here, in no particular order, are Scarriet’s best poems (in English) of the 20th century.
Obviously not definitive. Just things we noticed.
Why these poems?
Because they hide from nothing, and all, on some level, break your heart. Poe was right when he said poetry appeals to the heart and not the head. Because many heads get this wrong, and think poetry is some kind of mental exercise, the universe has been turned upside-down for the last three-quarters of a century by a certain never-resting snobbery infesting perches in the taste-making branches of higher learning. The poems on this list don’t get lost in minutiae, have no interest in proving how smart, or intellectual, or street they are. They all aim for that middle ground which has intercourse with the earthy and the abstract, filtering each, as they combine nature with nature to make art.
If art is what we do to become gods, if art is what we consciously do, we don’t see why art should express the suicidal, or make us miserable, or express the ugly, or the random. Certainly melancholy approaching pain is allowed, but misery?
The usual coteries, which have slathered their cliquish influence over American Letters, are notably absent. Our list reflects poetic talent, whether or not it happened, or happens, to reside within machinations of puffery. Some poets may be puffed, but not all the puffed are poets.
The Vanity of the Blue Girls -John Crowe Ransom The People Next Door -Louis Simpson litany -Carolyn Creedon Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening -Robert Frost Recuerdo -Edna Millay When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone -Galway Kinnell Sailing To Byzantium -William Yeats Dirge Without Music -Edna Millay The Groundhog -Richard Eberhart Musee Des Beaux Arts -W.H. Auden Elegy for Jane -Theodore Roethke I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great -Stephen Spender Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night -Dylan Thomas The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -T.S. Eliot The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner -Randall Jarrell In California During the Gulf War -Denise Levertov Wild Peaches -Elinor Wylie Moriturus -Edna Millay Whitsun Weddings -Philip Larkin A Subaltern’s Love Song -John Betjeman Aubade -Philip Larkin Patterns -Amy Lowell A Supermarket in California -Allen Ginsberg Her Kind -Anne Sexton Not Waving, But Drowning -Stevie Smith i stopped writing poetry -Bernard Welt Dream On -James Tate Pipefitter’s Wife -Dorianne Laux On the Death of Friends In Childhood -Donald Justice Daddy -Sylvia Plath Resume’ -Dorothy Parker Time Does Not Bring Relief -Edna Millay If I Should Learn, In Some Quite Casual Way -Edna Millay Evening in the Sanitarium -Louise Bogan At Mornington -Gwen Harwood Those Sunday Mornings -Robert Hayden Psalm and Lament -Donald Justice The Ship of Death -D.H. Lawrence One Train May Hide Another -Kenneth Koch Encounter -Czeslaw Milosz Anthem For Doomed Youth -Wilfred Owen The Little Box -Vasko Popa For My Daughter -Weldon Kees The Golden Gate -Vikram Seth The Grass -Carl Sandburg Mending Wall -Robert Frost Peter Quince at the Clavier -Wallace Stevens The Fresh Start -Anna Wickham Bavarian Gentians -D.H. Lawrence River Roses -D.H. Lawrence The Hill -Rupert Brooke La Figlia Che Piange -T.S. Eliot “Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments” -Archibald MacLeish What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why -Edna Millay What They Wanted -Stephen Dunn Down, Wanton, Down! -Robert Graves Cross -Langston Hughes As I Walked Out One Evening -W.H. Auden Love on the Farm -D.H. Lawrence Who’s Who -W.H. Auden The Waste Land -T.S. Eliot Snake -D.H. Lawrence At the Fishhouses -Elizabeth Bishop And Death Shall Have No Dominion -Dylan Thomas Reasons for Attendance -Philip Larkin Fern Hill -Dylan Thomas Distance From Loved Ones -James Tate The Hospital Window -James Dickey An Arundel Tomb -Philip Larkin My Father in the Night Commanding No -Louis Simpson I Know A Man -Robert Creeley High Windows -Philip Larkin The Explosion -Philip Larkin You Can Have It -Philip Levine Diving Into the Wreck -Adrienne Rich Pike -Ted Hughes Pleasure Bay -Robert Pinsky The Colonel -Carolyn Forche Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey -Billy Collins The Triumph of Narcissus and Aphrodite -William Kulik The Year -Janet Bowdan How I Got That Name -Marilyn Chin Amphibious Crocodile -John Crowe Ransom The Mediterranean -Allen Tate To A Face In A Crowd -Robert Penn Warren Utterance -Donald Davidson The Ballad of Billie Potts -Robert Penn Warren Preludes -T.S. Eliot Sweeney among the Nightingales -T.S. Eliot Journey of the Magi -T.S. Eliot The Veiled Lady -Maura Stanton Prophecy -Donald Hall Archaic Torso of Apollo -Rainer Maria Rilke Of Poor B.B. -Bertolt Brecht Women -Louise Bogan Bored –Margaret Atwood A Happy Thought -Franz Wright The Idea of Ancestry -Etheridge Knight Smiling Through -Reed Whittemore Histoire -Harry Mathews The Request -Sharon Olds
John Ashbery, looking like a funny old Englishman—the last living heir of the Mad Hatter madness known as Modernism
1. Reflections on Verse Libre, 1916
This is where the camel got his nose in the tent. Eliot’s questionable logic about what poetry is slips past the Gates.
2. Understanding Poetry, eds. Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, 1938 (first edition)
The Great Consolidation: the textbook which greeted the GI Bill/Baby Boomer post-war university influx. Modernist footsoldiers, the New Critics, praise Williams and Pound, bash Poe.
3. The Waste Land, 1922
Publishing scheme launched by Pound & Eliot’s crafty lawyer and Golden Dawn/Aleister Crowley associate & British Intelligence agent, John Quinn.
4. Criticism, Inc., 1938
Essay by John Crowe Ransom launched the idea that Critics in journalism are worthless and must be trained to understand the ‘new writing’ in the universities. It is the New Critcs—the ‘Rhodes Scholar’ American wing of European Modernism—who begin the Creative Writing Program Era in American universites where contemporary poets essentially teach (canonize) themselves.
5. From Poe to Valery by T.S. Eliot, 1949
T.S. Eliot, honoring the memory of his New England, Unitarian, and Transcendentalist grandfather, William Greenleaf, caps off the Long March of Crazy-ism through American Letters, as Eliot, fresh off Nobel Prize Win, delivers a withering attack on Poe, the old enemy of William Greenleaf Eliot’s associate, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
6. How To Read by Ezra Pound, 1929
Leading Crazy-ite Modernist suggests syllabus of Homer, Confucius, Dante, and 19th century French authors for the English-speaking undergraduate student.
7. Poets Without Laurels by John Crowe Ransom, 1938
In this brilliant essay, influential New Critic (mentor to Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell) introduces Wallace Stevens to the world, champions Allen Tate, and declares Byron hopelessly old-fashioned in Modernist mop-up operation.
8. North of Boston by Robert Frost, 1915
When Amy Lowell confronted Ezra Pound and cohort Ford Madox Ford (who later meets Allen Tate and teaches in America) in their famous Imagiste contretemps in London in 1914, Frost, also in town, stood aloof, his future success as the New England Wordsworth already in the bag.
9. The (Pisan) Cantos by Ezra Pound, 1948
A mish-mash by a madman is lauded by New Critics on the award committees after the U.S. arrests the head Modernist honcho for treason.
10. Some Trees by John Ashbery, 1956
T.S. Eliot’s friend, W.H. Auden, part of the Isherwood/Huxley ‘British invasion,’ passes the American academic torch as Yale Younger Poet Prize judge to ‘poetry about nothing,’ in a culmination of a Modernist Take-over of American poetry by a select group of academically-connected friends.
Three wild and crazy Englishmen (Auden, Lewis, Spender) hang out in Venice
In an earlier post, “Fiction v. Poetry,” we used W.H. Auden’s Introduction to Shakespeare’s The Sonnets (Signet/Penguin 1964) and his argument against “vulgar, idle curiosity” in favor of “anonymous” William Whomever-peare and pure enjoyment of his Platonic “Vision of Eros,” to make our case for elegant poetry, and against gossipy fiction.
Critics complain that TV is killing literature, but so-called literary fiction has been killing literature long before the boob tube arrived. I Love Lucy didn’t make us stupid. Henry James did.
The poets of Modernism can be divided into the car-salesmen and those who really were brilliant.
E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and most of their followers, for instance, are merely car salesmen.
T.S. Eliot, Chrisopher Isherwood, and W.H. Auden were brilliant and talented men, and others in their circle, like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, were consciously involved in politics and cultural change. The British Empire, which was at its height in 1914, groomed its poets for active work; the poet as soldier has a long tradition in Britain, from Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney to the Cambridge Apostles and Auden’s friend, Sir Stephen Spender, member of the Communist Party and an editor for thirteen years of a magazine secretly funded by the CIA. Nothing like the British poet-spy hybrid has ever existed in America, except, perhaps, for the mysterious Mr. Poe (was he in Paris, was he in St. Petersburg, was he murdered, or not?) and the hybrid practice is hardly on the more plain and practical Americans’ radar screen.
Auden’s insistence, then, that “artists” and “men of action” are two separate creatures—is this a ploy by this world-traveling, transatlantic citizen, once rumored to be part of Kim Philby’s Soviet spy ring? Emerson, in “The Poet,” goes a long way in establishing this distinction when he calls the Poet a “Sayer” as opposed to the “Knower” and the Doer.” “Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men,” Emerson says sourly, establishing his pedantic categories. But these fine distinctions Auden and Emerson make are finally a bunch of hogwash: Emerson and Auden would have us believe that Hitler’s speeches had nothing to do with Hitler’s guns, that the material state of our poetry has nothing to do with the material state of our state.
Auden’s poetry was first accepted and published by T.S Eliot, at Faber. Auden is not considered a genuine modernist; Auden’s poetry rhymes, and he has a marked sympathy for great writers of the past, so on the surface, at least, Auden seems to run counter to the Futurism of Pound, the anti-Romantic animus of Eliot, and experimental modernism, in general.
But Auden could not have been part of this influential, Modernist clique without having some share of the characteristics of that clique, and never mind that Auden chose Ashbery for the Yale Younger, and also Merwin–who attended one of the earliest Poetry Workshops at Princeton—set up by Allen Tate, the leader of the American wing of Eliot and Pound’s European Modernist clique. Yes, in case you didn’t get it, we’re talking about a clique.
OK, so talented people get to know each other and help each other out. What else is new?
Associations, purely in themselves, justify an historical interest, but there’s more involved. It’s not rocket science. We need to know two things; first: we need to read the clique members in question, and second, we need to ask: What is Modernism?
Scarriet has already done a lot of work investigating the writings and prejudices of leading Modernists like Pound and Eliot, who were notoriously anti-Romantic and anti-populist. But for the second question, the art critic and poet Charles Baudelaire (because Anglo-American High Modernism originated in the middle of the 19th century, and mainly in France) will be a great help.
The world—and even the world of artists—is full of people who can go to the Louvre, walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past two rows of very interesting, though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian or a Raphael—one of those that have been most popularized by the engraver’s art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, ‘I know my Museum.’ Just as there are people who, having once read Bousset and Racine, fancy that they have mastered the history of literature.
Fortunately from time to time there come forward righters of wrong, critics, amateurs, curious enquirers, to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does not contain the whole secret, and that the minor poets too have something good, solid and delightful to offer; and finally that however much we may love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners.
In this brief excerpt from Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), we see American Modernist poetry of the 20th century and all the steps which led to it, in total.
1) we see the spirit of the England’s pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—Baudelaire even refers to Raphael—with its narrow, cult-like, manifesto-ism, 2) the misanthropic spleen aimed at middle-class people who go to museums and are moved by great paintings of the past, 3) the appeal to the “minor poets” (for what is Modernism if not a great hierarchy of minor poets?) and their 4) “particular beauty” (as if major poets have no “particular beauty!”) and 5) “circumstance” (what is Modernism but fragments blown by the winds of circumstance?) and 6) “the sketch of manners.” As if great artists and poets from the past do not give us “manners!” Hogarth, anyone? “The Rape of the Lock?” But here is Baudelaire busily doing what Pound, Eliot, and their followers will do over the next 100, 150 years, up to our present day: 1) A blanket, or crudely selective, rejection of the glories of the past, especially the 18th century, and the early 19th century, while celebrating the ephemera of “particular beauty” among friends and minor contemporaries. 2) A manifesto-ist misanthropy, 3) A hatred of the lower classes, and their middle class tastes and aspirations.
Fortunately from time to time there come forward righters of wrong, critics, amateurs, curious enquirers, to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does not contain the whole secret, and that the minor poets too have something good, solid and delightful to offer. The Modernists always protested too much.
One more note: 4) A crucial geopolitical fact emerged with the origins of Modernism: the alliance of former enemies Great Britain and France; these two new friends fed each other’s decadence, and discovered together a certain imperial animus towards Germany, Russia, and the United States. The problems the U.S. had with Britain and France during their mid-19th century, Civil War-era of is a much neglected subject.
But back to Auden and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. We would expect, then, that T.S. Eliot-annointed Auden, would tend to be anti-Shakespeare, as this is the calling card for every Modernist: Celebrate obscure minor artists while knocking down the great Past Masters. Eliot’s attacks on Hamlet, Milton, Poe, and Shelley are well-known; Pound pretty much sneered at every Past Master he possibly could.
So do we find Auden, in his famous 1964 Introduction, attacking Shakespeare, or, at least damning him with faint praise?
We do.
Auden’s first major point is: “it’s good that Shakespeare was anonymous,” a New Critical point (another Modernist calling card, as Eliot and his right-wing American henchman, Ransom, popularized New Criticism). Here, on the second page of his Introduction, is Auden, the New Critic:
Even the biography of an artist is permissable, provided that the biographer and his readers realize that such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artist’s work.
Auden, as chummy as he was, could certainly be an ogre when laying down the Party Line: Auden will make it “permissable” to write the biography of an artist, but only if you and I “realize that such an account throws no light whatsover upon the artist’s work.” Thank you, Mr. Auden.
He defends his crazy idea brilliantly, of course:
The relation between his life and his works is at once and the same time too self-evident to require comment—every work of art is, in one sense, a self-disclosure—and too complicated ever to unravel. Thus, it is self-evident that Catullus’s love for Lesbia was the experience which inspired his love poems, and that, if either of them had had a different character, the poems would have been different, but no amount of research into their lives can tell us why Catullus wrote the actual poems he did, instead of an infinite number of similar poems he might have written instead, why, indeed, he wrote any, or why those he did are good.
This is great stuff, isn’t it? I’d hire this guy as a subversive for my country in a minute. This is uncannily good reasoning. Auden first concedes the field to the anti-New Critical argument: “every work of art is a self-disclosure,” Auden admits, but Auden’s concession is two-sided: the anti-New Critical position is “self-evident,” but also “too complicated ever to unravel:” if Lesbia had been a little different, then Catullus’s poems to her would have been different—but how? We don’t know. And therefore we can’t know anything about the relation between the maker and the made.
But is this true?
And is this true for Poe, who wrote his “Raven” not because he happened to have the hots for some particular person, but because he wanted to demonstrate how a popular poem could be written? Or, for Shakespeare, whose sonnets contain Platonist philosophy, and not just personal gossip? We grant that connections between life and art are often tenuous and difficult to trace—but should we close the door on attempts to make connections, on micro, or macro, levels? To do so seems arbitrary and silly.
Auden then proceeds, “Let us forget all about Shakespeare the man, leave the speculations to the foolish and idle, and consider the sonnets themselves,” and begins his discussion of “the sonnets themselves” rather weakly:
The first thing which is obvious after reading through the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets as we have them, is tha they are not in any kind of planned sequence. The only semblance of order is a division into two unequal heaps—Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to a young man, assuming, which is probable but not certain, that there is only one young man addressed, and Sonnets 127-154 are addressed to a dark-haired woman. In both heaps, a triangle situation is referred to in which Shakespeare’s friend and his mistress betray him by having an affair together…
Sometimes batches of sonnets occur which clearly belong together—for example, the opening series 1-17, in which the friend is urged to marry, though, even here, 15 seems not to belong, for marriage is not mentioned in it.
In this brief summation, Auden is utterly wrong. First, how can Auden say there is “no planned sequence” when the first 14 poems pertain to “increase?” Auden is being obtuse when he replaces “increase” with “marriage.” Sonnet 15 does fit, even though it doesn’t refer to “marriage,” for, as we see in its final couplet, “And, all in war with Time for love of you,/As he takes from you, I engraft you new.” The first 14 poems celebrate “increase” of the flesh. 154 (the number of TheSonnets) is divisible by 14. Sonnet 15 marks a shift in the theme. With Sonnet 15, immortality is bought not by having children, but by making poems. Auden saying Sonnet 15 doesn’t fit because it doesn’t mention “marriage” is ludicrous.
Auden is also wrong to assert that every poem in the first 126 are “addressed to a young man (or men),” since the great majority of the first 126 poems are genderless. Nor are the final 28 poems all addressed to “a dark-haired woman.” Scolding others for being biographically “foolish,” Auden falls into the same error himself, making all sorts of biographical assumptions. Auden does have the intelligence to say The Sonnets are not precisely carnal in nature, but that doesn’t prevent him from making all sorts of biographical, carnal speculation—flying in the very face of his own principle.
So according to Auden, the sonnets have no order.
Auden’s second point is that they are “extremely uneven in poetic value.” Auden quotes some Wordsworth (who Auden admires) calling the Dark Lady sequence “abominably harsh, obscure, and worthless,” with Wordsworth detailing the “chief faults” of the sonnets as a whole, thus: “sameness, tediousness, quaintness, and elaborate obscurity.” Imagine William Wordsworth accusing William Shakespeare of “sameness.” The mind boggles. Wordsworth is the token Romantic the Modernists tolerate, fearing to look like goons if they hate all the Romantics; Wordsworth has that certain dullness which makes him palatable to good, grey Modernism. Then Auden lets us know what Walter Savage Landor thought: “not a single one is very admirable.”
Auden himself claims to admire only forty-nine of the sonnets, and quickly adds that Shakespeare did not want any of them published, since they are basically a sweaty-palmed, sexual “confession.”
Auden doesn’t give one shred of evidence why Shakespeare should have been embarrassed by these poems—Auden’s theory is founded on the very type of speculation he condemns as “foolish” and “idle” and “vulgar.”
Auden then makes a few scattered formal and rhetorical observations, praising Shakespeare’s skill, citing a few isolated passages, and concludes the essay by putting the Sonnets in a Platonist milieu—the beloved’s “beauty” can belong to the flesh (bad) or to character (good) and loving the beloved unconditionally is the sonnet’s most important trope. Auden is sure the Sonnets grew out of visionary dream, in which Shakespeare fell into a kind of trance which made him somewhat mad. Auden wants to turn Shakespeare into a puritanical, visionary, passionate, self-doubting, Catullus. None of it is very convincing, and mostly because Auden can’t stop himself from investing the Sonnets with unfounded and crude, biographical and fictional elaborations:
The story of the sonnets seems to me to be the story of an agonized struggle by Shakespeare to preserve the glory of the vision he had been granted in a relationship, lasting at least three years, with a person who seemed intent by his actions upon covering the vision with dirt.
As outsiders, the impression we get of his friend is one of a young man who was not really very nice, very conscious of his good looks, able to switch on the charm at any moment, but essentially frivolous, cold-hearted, and self-centered, aware, probably, that he had some power over Shakespeare—if he thought about it at all, no doubt he gave it a cynical explanation—but with no conception of the intensity of the feelings he had, unwittingly, aroused.
In other words, according to Auden—who condemns any historical speculation regarding Pembroke or Southampton—Shakespeare was in love with Auden’s boyfriend, Chester Kallman, and had thoughts of marrying Chester, except, that is, when he was being distracted by a dark-haired woman—who also liked Chester.
Auden ends his Introduction with a long, irrelevant passage from The Two Noble Kinsmen—a passage scholars cannot even be sure was written by Shakespeare. Evidently, the publishers were howling for Auden to finish his Introduction, and, drunk on Pinot Noir, he quickly did.
Reading the Sonnets with Auden’s “story” in mind, a reader will quickly be disappointed, for there’s no “story” at all in the Sonnets. It’s a far more sophisticated document than that.
The poet W.H. Auden once proclaimed, “Idle curiosity is an ineradicable vice of the human mind. All of us like to discover the secrets of our neighbors, especially the ugly ones.”
Those dullards who read novels and short stories, but “can’t understand poetry,” are no better than the stereotypical bon-bon eating housewives watching their soaps. Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of poetry which cannot be understood, and many poets today intentionally write their poetry so it cannot be understood. I refer to the dullards who will always choose fiction over poetry, no matter how good the poetry happens to be. It’s time to point out an unspoken truth: many fiction readers are driven by what W.H. Auden calls “idle curiosity.”
With the greatest forethought and care do I speak this uncomfortable truth: Fiction generally has little to do with “art,” and far more to do with “idle curiosity.” Despite the stamp of legitimacy given to “fiction,” as opposed to, let’s say, “daytime drama,” the educated who lavish attention on “works of fiction” are simply satisfying an urge, a vulgar craving for gossip and “ugly secrets of our neighbors” in a safe, socially legitimate way.
Reading “fiction” is assumed to be healthy, virtuous, and intelligent, and, no doubt, these things do apply on a certain level, but what’s the overriding attraction that makes “fiction” more popular than poetry?
Despite the educated, bookish milieu, the denotation “literary,” the studious pose in the lamplight of quiet women with long hair reading novels, the intricate artwork on the covers, the authoritative blurbs in distinguished address, the thoughtful reviews in the press, fiction is nothing but vulgar gossip by other means.
True, so-called “literary fiction” has a certain anthropological interest: as we learn the gossip of other lives not our own—the 200 page encapsulations of marriage, divorce, adultery, nervous breakdowns, crime, jealousy, betrayal, and lust—with the more observant authors tossing in second and third hand descriptions of other times and places, “learning,” in a random manner, is taking place. And we all know that reading an educated author will tend to increase our vocabulary, to some extent. True.
But is anthropology art?
No, the central feature of reading fiction is that “ineradicable vice” which Auden puts his finger on, when, in his introduction, he dismisses the vulgar who only want to read (and study) Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the “dirt.”
Auden glories in a lucky circumstance of purity: “Shakespeare,” Auden says, “is in the singularly fortunate position of being, to all intents and purposes, anonymous.”
The other notable position Auden establishes in his famous introduction to The Sonnets is that he makes a distinction between the poet and the “man of action”:
The political interests of a king’s mistress, for example, may influence his decisions on national policy. Consequently, the historian, in his search for truth, is justified in investigating the private life of a man of action to the degree that such discoveries throw light upon the history of his times which he had a share in shaping, even if the victim would prefer such secrets not to be known.
So the historian’s interest in gossip is justified. Even so, history is not considered art—so why, then, should mere fiction, where interest in gossip is not justified, be considered art? The historian takes raw life and puts an order to it, but is still not considered an artist; so why should the fiction writer, who does what the historian does, but on a more trivial level, be considered one?
Auden scolds:
It so happens that we know almost nothing about the historical circumstances under which Shakespeare wrote these sonnets…This has not prevented many very learned gentlemen from displaying their scholarship and ingenuity in conjecture. Though it seems to me rather silly to spend much time upon conjectures which cannot be proven true or false, that is not my real objection to their efforts. What I really object to is their illusion that, if they were successful, if the identity of the Friend, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet, etc, could be established beyond doubt, this would in any way illuminate our understanding of the sonnets themselves.
Their illusion seems to me to betray either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the relation between art and life or an attempt to rationalize and justify plain vulgar idle curiosity.
According to Auden, it’s a wonderful thing that we don’t know the biography of the poet. (Likewise, if we knew nothing about a novelist, it would be less evident that the novelist is merely writing an embellished memoir.) In Shakespeare’s case, there is no chance the Bard will be a “victim” of “idle curiosity,” marring the pure enjoyment of the poetry.
But Auden has forgotten something, hasn’t he? What if Shakespeare presented himself in his poems? What if Shakespeare’s “biography” were clearly in the poems?
Fiction, of course, is autobiography, with the occasional, added historical research, or embroidered fantasy. Fiction is voyeurism, thinly disguised. The movement known as “Realism” has long been touted as a vital “literary” movement, but “Realism” is nothing more than the moment when the Trojan Horse of Letters broke open to an army of gossip-mongers; 19th century “Realism” saw Idle Curiosity conquer literature; True Art was stabbed by crass democracy in the chest (think soap operas) and snobby elitism in the back. (think Henry James).
According to Auden, knowing the gossip of kings, their mistresses, and other “men of action” is useful because of its political and historicalcontext.
But Auden doesn’t finally resolve his own argument.
1. Shakespeare’s sonnets themselves make the biography of their author irrelevant—Auden implies it’s the other way around: By accident of history, we know almost nothing of Shakespeare; hence we can enjoy Shakespeare’s poems purely, without indulging in “idle curiosity.”
2. Auden’s implication is that without historical or scholarly context, which is produced by the “man of action” who “shapes history,” we getgossip for gossip’s sake; we get what is at heart, idle curiosity. In other words, fiction. The literary term “fiction” means two things: First, whatever is not true, but secondly, and just as important, whatever we take to be truthful on some other level, to varying degrees. “Realism” is essentially saying of “fiction:” oh hell, you know what? This may be fiction, but it’s true! Auden, because he is a man of high learning, of classical learning, of exquisite sensibility and good sense, puts it very truthfully: if we spy on the intimate dealings of men of action, we are gathering useful knowledge, but if we spy on the intimate dealilngs of our neighbors, we are vulgar and near-criminal; we are indulging a “vice.” Depending on the context, then, literary fiction’s apparent strength of being ‘otherwise true,’ is, in fact, nothing but the “vice of idle curiosity.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets, however, are not the news or gossip of a king, or a “man of action.” And secondly, they are not a work of “Realism.” Yet Shakespeare has “shaped the world” far more than Auden’s “men of action,” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets present a far more intimate story than any work of “Realism.”
Can it be possible that the great Auden is blind to the significance of The Sonnets?
It really makes one wonder, for in taking great pains to dismiss the “idle curiosity” that would read biography into the poems, Auden allows himself this observation:
So far as the date of their composition is concerned, all we know for certain is that the relation between Shakespeare and the Friend lasted at least three years:
‘Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Auden here is doing precisley what he chided everyone else for doing. Auden is certain (!) there is “a Friend” with whom Shakespeare had a “three year relationship,” based on his reading of one line in one of the poems. This is even more startling, given the fact that Auden writes:
The first thing which is obvious after reading through the one hundred fifty- four sonnets as we have them, is that they are not in any kind of planned sequence.
Auden finds no internal order in the sequence of TheSonnets, even though there is quite a substantial one (we shall talk about this later)—but he does find in The Sonnets a Platonic “vision of eros”—which shows Auden is on the right track. For Auden, Shakespeare’s unerring ear, his confessional writing (permissible, we assume, because of Shakespeare’s fortunate anonymity), and his “vision of eros” combine to make The Sonnets a far greater work of art than any mere story with a chronological plot.
Auden several times falls into the error he condemns, imagining Shakespeare’s relationship with a “young man” and a “dark-haired woman,” and their behavior with each other, over a “three year” period, even as he explains to us that The Sonnets expresses a Platonic vision of life, not a soap opera one.
Auden fails to pin down the essence of Shakespeare’s famous work, but at least gets things generally right.
But then Auden got it somewhat right—because he was a poet.
Like Hawthorne and Poe, the last great American fiction writers before Realism reared its ugly head, Auden, who died in 1973, burned with a certain integrity as American poetry was dwindling into irrelevance.
And so we end with Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 25, as it refers to Auden’s “man of action.” Here is a drop of honey from Shakespeare, the golden honey bee, a poem worth ten-thousand Realist novels, at least:
Let those who are in favour with their stars Of public honour and proud titles boast, Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most. Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread But as the marigold at the sun’s eye, And in themselves their pride lies buried, For at a frown they in their glory die. The painful warrior famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toiled: Then happy I, that love and am beloved, Where I may not remove nor be removed.
We shall proceed more or less chronologically, though it’s tempting to go the way of David Letterman and work up to: “and the Number One Poetry Criticism Text is…”
1.The Poetics—Aristotle
The ultimate rule-book. Learn these rules, then break them. And learn this: Aristotle was the abstract philosopher, Plato the grounded and practical one. If you ‘get this,’ you’ll save yourself a lot of confusion and heartache. If you like rules, it doesn’t get any better than this:
Having thus distinguished the parts, let us now consider the proper construction of the Fable or Plot, as that is at once the first and the most important thing in Tragedy. We have laid it down that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude, for a whole may be of no magnitude to speak of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary and consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described. Again: to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either in a very minute creature…or in a creature of vast size—one, say, 1,000 miles long.
No critic today could write “this must” and “this is impossible” about such fundamental things, but it is good somebody did—for now we can blame Aristotle for “Quietism” and those neanderthals who sell, and everything else.
2. The Republic—Plato
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Plato and Aristotle is that they weren’t German. Both are clear. The practical nature of Plato—who dared, without a shred of sentimentality, to put poetry in the context of society—is inescapable. Randall Jarrell, John Dewey, and Helen Vendler are pumpkins next to Socrates. If you haven’t digested The Republic, (or the Symposium, or the Ion) you can’t have a conversation about art or literature; you’re blowing bubbles.
3. Vita Nuova—Dante
Yes, it has a lot of poetry—good literary criticism usually does. It also has a story and mystery and passion and zero academic pretense. Beyond all that, it’s a guide to writing intelligible verse. Dante is the passionate combination of the soul of Aristotle and the body of Plato.
4. The Sonnets—Shakespeare
Irked by the didactic nature of these poems? Let your eyes be opened. We reveal here the long-lost secret. This famous sonnet sequence (Auden is wrong; it does have an order) is Literary Criticism at its very highest— perhaps the greatest ever written. Study this book.
5. Essay on Criticism—Pope
Enlightenment jewel of Literary Criticism. A fountain of wit. It will sharpen your musical ear, too. Poetry never sounded so coldly sublime. Criticism never sounded so warmly effusive.
6. A Defense of Poetry—Shelley
Forget all those other defenses. This one has defensive backs who weigh 300 pounds. Romanticsm deserves a soaring document like Shelley’s—the Wordsworth School (O treason!) would clip Shelley’s wings with socialist-tinged pedantry. Don’t let it.
7. Philosophy of Composition—Poe
Like all great great criticsm, this document is a shadow created by divine poetry too bright to read. Lurking behind Criticism is the Poem, lurking behind the philosophy of Plato is the poem of Plato, lurking behind the created is the creator, known only in the space between them. Those who indignantly sputter (and they are legion): “B-b-but P-p-poe can’t say that!” reveal themselves as sheep. Poe is damned for being too formalist, too abstract, too mathematical, just as Plato is, when both are, in fact, the most practical critics we have. America’s Classical Restraint is demonstrated for the world by Emerson’s quiet attack on Poe in his famous essay,”The Poet.”
8. The Sacred Wood—T.S Eliot
Pre-Raphaelite Criticism comes to fruition in this document of High-Church, Harvard-educated, Anglo-American, Arnoldian, anti-Romantic, French Decadent Modernism. Eliot is the most concentrated and toxic drink of the literature of decay. Rimbaud’s dying Romanticism sickens us after a while with sweet excess; Eliot, however, flatters our institutional pride; Eliot is the devil as the well-dressed, soft-spoken gentleman; Rimbaud’s decadence we can finally keep at arm’s length, but Eliot worms his way into our intelligence; cunningly selective, he is a finishing school for academic slyness, a how-to guide for freezing-out the passionate past with New Criticial hypocrisy. The undergound streams of Poe and Emerson combined to create a weird Third: a strange specimen of hostile suavity. Eliot is the pendulum swinging from ‘the sugar of poetry hiding the medicine of learning’ to ‘the medicine of poetry hiding the sugar of learning.’ (The smart ones keep clear of this pendulum entirely.)
9. Poets In A Landscape—Gilbert Highet
Archaeological criticism—the plain approach to Criticism is exemplified by this sweet evocation of poetry as stories of people in history, in this case, 7 ancient Roman poets. A classical scholar, professor Highet, who translates the poetic examples in this book, was born in Scotland, and was a beloved teacher at Columbia from 1937 to 1972. While his colleagues were exploiting the rise of the Creative Writing business model, or indulging in Nietzchean, Deconstructive, post-Modernist frenzy, professor Highet made an excursion to Italy and wrote this beautiful book, which treats poetry as the result of not only the structure of the Latin elegaic couplet, or the relation of Catullus to Caesar and the woman who broke his heart, but the very surrounding air.
10. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet—W. Jackson Bate
The document of self-conscious Modernism—by an 18th century expert aware of how belated Romanticsm and Modernism really are. (Beating Harold Bloom’s far less readable Anxiety of Influence to the punch by several years, he made Bloom belated, as well.) If the modern sensibility is a guilty evasion of the past, if Modernism is nothing but the paranoia of that evasion in the scream of a butterfly, The Burden of the Past is the reasonable antidote to this anxiety. This little book (a collection of four lectures, in fact) is so sane and broad in its approach, and unites so many authors and eras in its universal theme, that it will substantially increase anyone’s literary I.Q. in one or two readings. It’s one of those books in which you’ll feel the need to pick up a highlighter, but it will be useless, because you’ll end up highlighting every line.
Poetic reputation: do we want to know how the sausage gets made?
Last year, the Scarriet Final Four, using David Lehman’s Best American Poetry volumes 1988 through 2009, was “That’s Not Butter” by Reb Livingston, “Composed Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey” by Billy Collins, “The Year” by Janet Bowdan, and “The Triumph of Narcissus and Aphrodite” by William Kulik.
This year, using Berg and Vogelsang’sAmerican Poetry Review’s anthology, The Body Electric, we got “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, “litany” by CarolynCreedon, “Eileen’s Vision” by Eileen Myles, and “What They Wanted” by Stephen Dunn. How the Brit Larkin slipped in, we’re not sure, but he was included in the APR, and won his games fair and square to advance to the Final Four. Creedon, Dunn, and Myles are not exactly household words.
Last week Jeopardy! had an American Poetry category: Ogden Nash, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsberg were the five answers: Stevens‘ most famous poem, “The Emperor of Icecream,” drew a blank, as did Ginsberg and Hughes; only Frost and Nash were recognized by one of the three Jeopardy! contestants.
As we have watched a field of 64 get reduced to four, and then one, for two years now, we wonder if Scarriet’s March Madness Tourney is the only such competition in the world.
There are many who sneer at poetry and competition. But look, when a poet wins a major prize today, when a poet wins recognition, should we really be so naive or hypocritical in convincing ourselves that the renown of someone like JohnAshbery is not the result of poems and poets competing against each other?
And if not, what the hell is it?
What pushes someone like Ashbery to the top?
I ask this, because to win a March Madness Tournament, you have to have a poem entered that’s good enough to beat other poems, in match-up after match-up, and I don’t know that Ashbery has one poem that has that ‘breakthrough’ quality to win against “litany” by Carolyn Creedon, for instance. Ashbery’s poems all read like clever jokes, and such poems don’t tend to win against the really accomplished poem of poignancy and beauty. I doubt an Ashbery poem could go very far in a March Madness Tournament, under the scrutiny of refs and rabid fans.
Ashbery defeated O’Hara for the Yale Younger Poetry Prize—one judge, Auden, played his own “March Madness Tournament,” after smoking a few hundred cigarettes, and Ashbery won that Tournament. From a just issued review:
Wasley’s book [The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene, Princeton U. Press] vividly catalogues Auden’s social connections, friendships and influence among East Coast, Ivy League-educated, formal, emerging poets. Ginsberg and Ashbery wrote college essays on Auden; the pre-Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath adored Auden’s “burlap-textured voice”. We’re taken to parties and table talk, and to theatres where Auden explains a play’s reference to the entire mezzanine: “Shelley, my dears!” Still, must we learn who drilled the peephole to the toilet? Who looked?
This lineage study is redolent of smoking-jacket, anecdote and club. Auden dislikes the Yale Younger Poets submissions; he asks Ashbery and Frank O’Hara for manuscripts (or Chester Kallman, Auden’s lover, does); Ashbery’s poems are selected. Nowadays, if a public university manages its competitions this way, it will be exposed and condemned (as in the case of the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series). Nearly everyone – poets, critics, even Wasley’s back-cover blurbers – is from the universities of Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Princeton.
Did you catch that? Both Ashbery (Harvard) and Ginsberg (Columbia) wrote Ivy League college essays on Auden.
Iowa wasn’t the only place where the U.S. Poetry Workshop formula was being pushed in the 1940s; Allen Tate, one of the leading figures in the Anglo-American Modernist Clique—which got its ultimate marching orders from Pound and Eliot—started the ball rolling at Princeton, and Auden was Eliot’s chosen trans-Atlantic successor.
Maybe Chester Kallman ran into Frank O’Hara, or John Ashbery, or Allen Ginsberg in a men’s room, and the rest is history?
Anyway, the point is, there’s always going to be competition—winners and losers—and to pretend this is not the situation, is silly. To pretend ignorance only make the “winning” that much more dubious, and perhaps, unfair.
Note, also, how the work of Foetry.com (which exposed the U.GA Poetry Series when Alan Cordle caught Bin Ramke cheating) is now part of the normal poetry dialogue these days. We hope you caught that, too.
Everyone in their hearts knows there are winners and losers in poetry; the question is, do we have the courage to make the process as transparent as possible?
Some say poetry comes down to one thing: novel juxtaposition. What is metaphor if not this? Aristotle put Metaphor at the center, and the rest of ancient theories are concerned with proper and coherent imitation of life when humans jump up on stage. Modernity has not added anything new—only a few quirks and quibbles. The important modern critics like Poe (rigorously, classically) and Eliot (bizarrely, haphazardly) recall ancient standards. The rest is vanity. Auden puts his finger on things in a letter to Frank O’Hara in 1955: “I think you (and John [Ashbery], too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
But to return to novel juxtaposition and proper and coherent imitation: Carol Muske’s poem, “A Former Love, A Lover of Form,” has it all: vivid elements which combine in surprising ways, actual life exemplified, concision, a leisurely observation of things which finally blossoms into a forceful, epigrammatic close.
James Schuyler, in “Red Brick and Brown Stone,” is anxious to present life vividly and concisely, even if it’s a lonely, boring one of stifling routine.
There is more distress in Muske’s poem, a greater novelty of juxtaposition, and hers finally has more intellectual interest.
Muske wins easily, 82-64.
Before we say goodbye to Schuyler, we should say a word about him, because his story is a typical one in modern American poetry: just as Pound was a secretary to an iconic Brit, Yeats, Schuyler was a secretary to Auden. Later Schuyler became associated with O’Hara, Ashbery and the Modern Art culture in New York City (The New York School)—Schuyler’s roommate from 1961 to 1973 was the painter Fairfield Porter, trained at Harvard and the Art Student’s League, a post-WW II haven for Abstract and Pop artists. Schuyler rejected Auden’s formalism.
The Modernist revolution was mostly male, and in terms of criticism, overwhelmingly so. We are still in the shadow of that revolution, which featured William James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, I.F Richards, Ford Madox Ford, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, Edmund Wilson, William Empson, Allen Tate, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Richard Blackmur, Robert Graves, W.S. Merwin, Yvor Winters, George Santayana, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, John Crowe Ransom, E.E. Cummings, Paul Engle,Robert Penn Warren, W.K Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Hugh Kenner, M.L. Rosenthal, Robert Lowell, and Harold Bloom.
This list is not just poets who happened to be men. These men were not just poets; they shaped the critical outlook of our age.
This outlook replaced the passions of the Romantic and Victorian heart with the mutterings of a priesthood, a male priesthood, thumping its chest about whatever the male talks about when he retires with his pals to smoke after dinner. The male poets certainly didn’t agree about anything; this was no male conspiracy; they ranted and raved and chuckled and guffawed about the usual self-important male stuff, and the pomposity was almost sickening and terribly self-important: the Pounds and the Olsons hyperbolic and puffed up, the Ashberys and the O’Haras joking and sly, Thomas Eliot classical and aloof, D.H. Lawrence and Allen Ginsberg sexually vigorous, the New Critics, learned and doctrinaire, puffing on their pipes, it was all very male, 90%, even 95% male, with a few token females, H.D. and Marianne Moore enthusiastically following, just thrilled to belong to the club.
And why should the women complain? The general spirit of Modernism was more open and democratic than the Victorian mode had been; Edna Millay was a terrific poet, but she was a little too good in a Victorian, Romantic sort of way, so she wasn’t really allowed into the club, but in the long run, this was good for women, because Modernism, though it was run by males, really wasn’t about men lording it over women; the “parish of rich women” who bankrolled Yeats, Pound and Eliot were happy to give, and the women were right: even though women poets were far more plentiful and respected in the Victorian era than in the Modern one, eventually the general spirit of the Modern Age would prove beneficial to women.
Lady poets thrived in the 19th century, and when the lady poet was no more, a nadir was reached for women poets during the time Modernism vanquished Victorian manners: Modernist male poets and critics outnumbered Modernist female poets and critics in 1925 by 100 to 1, but today the ratio is now much closer to 50/50.
True, we find it shocking that poetry magazines feature men over women by 3-2, or 2-1 sometimes, but isn’t this better than 100-1? If we judge by trends, historically the pendulum is swinging rapidly towards the female since the Golden Age of Modernism.
Thanks to Modernism, men liberated women.
There were a few socio-cultural bumps along the way. When WW II ended, the GI Bill saw millions of men newly studying liberal arts in the universities. During the booming post-war economy women tended to be homemakers and nurses, not liberal arts college students, and as poetry became a place of grad school success, it took women a few generations to catch up in that regard.
But here’s the quesiton.
Does the Muse care about gender?
If all those males during the Modernist era were opening doors for women, setting the table for future women poets, even while Pound was at war with Amy Lowell and Hugh Kenner was dismissing Edna Millay, even though on the surface, male poets during the Modern era were not particularly nice to women, the sensibility of the Modern criticism and poetry, in its democratic and open impulses, was splendidly good for women.
So then: It’s not the gender of the poets that finally matters, it’s the poetry and the politics of the poetry itself.
When I hear males in po-biz now promising to include more women, I wonder: really? Do the poems know about this? Must the poems know the gender of their authors? Should poems be gender-aware? And why? Isn’t that all very Victorian?
Should poets be bean-counters?
If twice as many men submit poems to a magazine, for instance, should editors really pick and choose just to make the numbers match up?
The Romantics, like the Moderns, were mostly male, but there was a difference. The Romantics featured effeminate men, like Shelley, a blending of the male and the female. One could argue that a sensitive man is better than either gender stereotypically itself.
A sensitive man is the essence of poetry.
A sensitive man solves everything.
Equality of the sexes is something that is fought for outside of the poem.
The dyer’s hand is not gendered. The poem is not male or female. The poem is where male and female mingle in order to disappear.
Or, we could argue, instead, that women shouldn’t disappear in poetry, but assert themselves. But how? As women? But again, isn’t that putting roles into the mix, and isn’t that old-fashioned and Victorian? Isn’t that what Modernism got us away from?
It’s rather a lose-lose proposition: push for the female, and you regress, push for the genderless, and you banish the very gender you are supposed to defend.
Reading Homer is like...You are 22. It is mid-summer. You are playing the board game Risk with young and old family members, drinking ouzo, eating lamb on a large, open-air porch.
Reading Wallace Stevens is like…You are 60. It is fall. You are squeezed into a little uptown Manhattan jazz club, slightly buzzed, but hungry. An elegant stranger looks you up and down and it seems they are going to speak to you, but they only end up giving you a snooty look, and turn away…
Reading John Ashbery is like…You are 20. You are talking to your favorite English teacher in a bar who you happened to run into by accident, for the first time outside of school. You are drunk on 2 drinks; he seems sober on 12. He’s really cool, and he sure can talk, but you keep waiting for him to get to the point…
Reading W.H. Auden is like…You are 36, It is early spring. You are listening to a trio play Vivaldi in a museum. Your amusing friend has excused himself and they’ve been gone for quite some time, and you’re a little worried.
Reading Poe is like…You are 9. It’s late winter. You are drawing a vase of lilacs early in the morning before anyone else is up, and you’re doing a crossword puzzle at the same time.
Reading T.S. Eliot is like… You are 17. It is autumn. You are rowing across a lake in a rowboat, wearing a suit; a slightly older person in a stylish hat is with you. You are afraid they don’t love you.
Reading Frank O’Hara is like… You are 29. It is spring. You are playing poker at a drunken party for high stakes and you are winning. You ask somebody please put another record on the phonograph.
Reading Philip Larkin is like… You are 49. It is spring. You are purchasing a ticket at a railway station. You have just had a nice meal, with drinks before and after.
Reading WC Williams is like… It is mid-winter. You are 99, and staring at yourself in the mirror.
Reading Wordsworth is like… You are 12. It is late summer. You are playing hide and seek with your younger cousins in the woods. You are tired of looking. Everyone, it seems, is gone. It is starting to rain.
Reading Dante is like….You’re 31. It is the beginning of spring. You are at a rap concert, but you hate the music. Your beautiful date, it is obvious, dislikes the music, too. You finally discuss this in the lobby. You both stay. You don’t know where else to go.
Reading Charles Bernstein is like… You’re 2. It is winter. You are indoors, where it is quite warm. You are hitting your sister, 1, with a scrabble board.
Is it just me, or does modernist poetics seem puerile in the extreme?
In my (2003) Norton -Third Edition- of Modern Poetry (including Contemporary vol. 2 which Scarriet will review later) there are 864 pages of poetry and 135 pages of poetics, the latter of which contain nothing that could be called iconic or indispensible, except perhaps T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Walt Whitman is the first entry. But he had no poetics. Whitman: “here are the roughs and beards and space…” Etc. With Walt we get the rhetoric of Emersonian expanse, which in its good will and windiness, finally cancels itself out. Poetics? Pastry.
Next we get a few of Emily Dickinson’s letters to T.W. Higginson—which not only contain no poetics, but do not even show Emily in a very good light; her wheedling tone is not attractive.
Next, some letters by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.”
No doubt.
“I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm…it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone…I do not say the idea is altogether new…”
Doh! not new at all.
Then we have W.B. Yeats, and who reads his prose? Yeats and his friend, Arthur Symons, influenced Ezra Pound and Eliot; Yeats writes, “The Symbolist Movement in Literature [is] a subtle book which I cannot praise as I would, because it has been dedicated to me,” and Yeats is right: the book is so subtle that today none care what Symons had to say about “symbolism,” a word used in so many subtle ways since Symons’ day that the word has now returned to its orginal meaning: ‘this stands for that,’ and everyone is happier.
Yeats: “A poet never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always phantasmagoria.” And Yeats, again: “Style is always unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done.”
Well, he’s honest.
Next up, T.E. Hulme, expelled from Cambridge U. in 1904, part of FordMadox Ford & Pound’s Imagism crew, “a critic of pacifism,” WW I casualty : “I object even to the best of the romantics. I object to the sloppiness…”
Oh, is that what the best poets in English were? Sloppy?
Now we get a real treat: excerpts from the magazine Blast. Like most little modernist magazines, it lasted only a few issues, even as some now-forgotten female, an heiress or lady of title, was emptying her bank account for it, just so the world could be honored by the wisdom of RichardAldington, Wyndham Lewis and E. Pound:
“BLESS ENGLAND!”
“The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius—”
“In dress, manners, mechanical inventions, LIFE, that is, ENGLAND, has influenced Europe in the same way that France has in Art.”
“Machinery is the greatest Earth-medium: incidentally it sweeps away the doctrines of a narrow and pedantic Realism at one stroke.”
“Fairies have disappeared from Ireland (despite foolish attempts to revive them) and the bull-ring languishes in Spain. But mysticsm on the one hand, gladiatorial instincts, blood and asceticism on the other, will be always actual, and springs of Creation for these two peoples.”
“England is just now the most famous favourable country for the appearance of great art.”
“…our race, the most fundamentally English.”
“We assert that the art for these climates, then, must be a Northern flower.”
“It cannot be said tht the complication of the Jungle, dramatic tropical growth, the vastness of American trees, is not for us.”
“Once the consciousness towards the new possibilities of expression in present life has come, however—it will be more the legitimate property of Englishmen than of any other people in Europe…”
I wish I could say BLAST was merely English patriotism, but knowing something about the authors, I have a feeling it is something far worse…
There follows a “Feminist Manifesto” from Mina Loy, which tells women:
“To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your “virtue” the fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity…”
No wonder Loy was one of the few women intellectuals invited into the Modernist men’s club…
After a two very brief prologues (Amy Lowell and Wilfred Owen) E. Pound returns with gems such as:
“Surely it is better for me to name over the few beautiful poems that still ring in my head than for me to search my flat for back numbers of periodicals and rearrange all that I have said about friendly and hostile writers.
The first twelve lines of Padraic Colum’s ‘Drover’: his ‘O Woman shapely as a swan, on your account I shall not die’: Joyce’s ‘I hear an army’; the lines of Yeats that ring in my head and in the heads of all young men of my time who care for poetry: Braseal and the Fisherman, ‘The fire that stirs about her when she stirs’; the later lines of ‘The Scholars,’ the faces of the Magi; William Carlos Williams’ ‘Postlude,’ Aldington’s version of ‘Athis,’ and ‘H.D.’s” waves like pine tops, and her verse in ‘Des Imagistes’ the first anthology; Hueffer’s [Ford M. Ford] ‘How red your lips are’ in his translation from Von der Vogelweide, his ‘Three Ten,’ the general effect of his ‘On Heaven’; his sense of the prose values or prose qualities in poetry; his ability to write poems that will sing to music…”
E. Pound names “the few beautiful poems that still ring in my head” and they are all his publishing partners andfriends! What a startling coincidence! Joyce, Yeats, Williams, Aldington, H.D, and Ford Madox Ford! How uncanny! What exquisite taste! What rare and discerning judgment!
We are now two-thirds done with “Poetics” of the Moderns, which commenced with Whitman.
T.S. Eliot gets 10 pages.
Next, William Carlos Williams, from the prologue to Kora In Hell:
“The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me this is the gist of the whole matter.”
Can anyone tell me what this means. Or this:
“The instability of these improvisations would seem such that they must inevitably crumble under the attention and become particles of a wind that falters. It would appear to the unready that the fiber of the thing is a thin jelly. It would be these same fools who would deny touch cords to the wind because they cannot split a storm endwise and wrap it upon spools.”
Enough of Mr. Williams. He is too busy fighting off “fools…”
D.H. Lawrence (a preface to New Poems, U.S. edition) follows:
“Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance.”
Yes, by all means!
Langston Hughes makes an appearance:
“One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,’ meaning, I believe, ‘I want to write like a white poet’; meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself.”
Enough of that logic…
Next, Hart Crane defends his ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ in a letter to Poetry editor HarrietMonroe. She found the poem obscure. It is obscure. Hopelessly so—Monroe was right.
Wallace Stevens’ turn:
“Poetry is not personal.”
“All poetry is experimental poetry.”
“It is the belief and not the god that counts.”
“Poetry must be irrational.”
“We live in the mind.
“Every man dies his own death.”
“Realism is a corruption of reality.”
And other gems.
The final 25 pages of “Poetics” finds 3 pages of Robert Frost (The Figure APoem Makes), 7 pages from a Transatlantic Interview with the crackpot Gertrude Stein, 6 pages of Marianne Moore (6 too many) and finally, 10 pages of W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand.
What is wonderful about Mr. Auden is that he is only educated modern poet who does not speak down to his audience.
It is probably no surprise that modernist poetics is so paltry. Modern poetry is enjoyed by the few, and with the general public out of the way, the old need to apologize for, or defend, poetry is no longer there. Small ideas appeal to small audiences, and since the modern poets have turned their backs on the larger public, small has been the rule.
Unfortunately, however, I have the uncomfortable feeling that modern poetics is less than small. Something about it feels downright silly and childish, or even worse, manifesto-ish. And still worse: obscure, grumpy, condescending.
I don’t see how one would want to teach Homer without teaching Plato at the same time; nor would I ever dream of teaching modern poetry without first teaching Homer and Plato, Dante and Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, Shelley and Poe. I don’t see how what is typically taught as modern poetics can even be calledpoetics at all, when compared to what came before.
Here are the teams. They play in little bucolic ballparks. No DH.
National League
Philadelphia Poe
New York Bryants
Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers
Cambridge Longfellows
Boston Lowells
Concord Emersons
Brooklyn Ashberys
New Jersey Ginsbergs
Tennessee Ransoms
Maine Millays
American League
Brooklyn Whitmans
New England Frost
London Eliots
Rapallo Pound
New Jersey Williams
Hartford Stevens
New York Moores
Cambridge Cummings
Amherst Emily
Iowa City Grahams
Baseball Poetry Commissioner: the honorable Harold Bloom
Player Union Rep: Camille Paglia
There are still some hold-outs, most notably W.H. Auden from the Ashberys.
Scouting Report Highlights:
NL
The brawling Philadelphia Poe features Lord Byron in the clean-up spot and Alexander Pope does mound duties as the ace of a pitching staff not afraid to throw inside.
The elegant New York Bryants have Abraham Lincoln as their chief twirler and the slugging Thomas Cole hitting no. 4 in a highly distinguished lineup.
The Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers bring William Lloyd Garrison as their ace and Charles Dickens just signed up to play centerfield.
The Cambridge Longfellows have Washington Irving roaming center and Dante and Horace as mound aces.
The Boston Lowells field Mark Twain at short, Robert Browning in left, and Charles Eliot Norton and Leigh Hunt as their dominant hurlers.
Beware the Concord Emersons: William James is their ace, Swedenborg bashes from the cleanup spot, and Thoreau tends centerfield.
The Brooklyn Ashberys have Frank O’Hara leading off and Andy Warhol is their ace. Kenneth Koch and James Tate anchor the infield, while Charles Bernstein is in the bullpen.
The Ginsbergs of New Jersey have William Blake slugging from the No. 4 hole, Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan as their double play combination and Mark Van Doren and William Burroughs on the mound.
The Tennessee Ransoms have Allen Tate at catcher and Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, I.A. Richards, and Paul Engle on the hill.
Rounding out the National League, we have the Maine Millays with Edmund Wilson and Philip Sidney pitching, with Sappho out in center.
AL
The Brooklyn Whitmans have Oscar Wilde and F.O. Matthiessen as no. 1 and no. 2 starters, with Lawrence Fernlinghetti, C.K. Williams and William Michael Rossetti providing up-the-middle defense at second, short, and center.
The New England Frost have William Wordsworth in the clean-up spot with Louis Untermeyer as their no. 1 hurler.
The London Eliots have Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell on the mound with Tristan Corbiere at first, Jules LaForgue at third, and Arthur Symons behind the plate.
The Rapallo Pound are stocked, with Benito Mussollini in right, Hugh Kenner on the mound and Ernest Fenollosa at shortstop. Negotiations are continuing with Joyce, Yeats, and Duchamp.
The New Jersey Williams have Man Ray as their ace and Robert Creeley in the lead-off spot. They also want Duchamp.
The Hartford Stevens have pitching depth with George Santayana, Helen Vendler, andJohn Hollander. James Merrill is in the clean-up spot.
The New York Moores have Elizabeth Bishop at the top of the lineup and Pater in the bullpen. Ted Hughes is their big slugger.
The Cambridge Cummings have Picasso batting no. 3 and Scofield Thayer and T.E. Hulme anchoring the pitching staff.
The Amherst Emily has Thomas Wentworth Higginson as their pitching ace with Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett in the outfield.
Finally, the Iowa City Grahams have Bin Ramke and Peter Sacks as key pitchers and James Galvin powering the middle of the lineup.
Stay tuned for complete team rosters.
We’ll give you updates during the season…every trade, every management dispute… individual stats, stat leaders, and team standings as the season progresses.
…………………………………Do not dare to breathe …………………………………a word against the men
………………………………...your willing white wings
…………………………………support …………………………………and speed …………………………………as they descend …………………………………cupped in your dark, swelling web.
…………………………………When otherworldly lovers grub …………………………………for too much light …………………………………and knowledge …………………………………it’s your proud-beaked perfect flight
…………………………………that staggering tricks them out again …………………………………to clever little fever pigs …………………………………like dildo gods
…………………………………who still breathing quick celestial air
Twas the night of Thanksgiving and out of the house
Tiger Woods came a flyin’, chased by his spouse.
She wielded a nine iron and wasn’t too merry,
Cause a bimbo’s phone number was in his Blackberry.
He’d been cheatin’ on Elin, and the story progressed.
Woman after woman stepped up and confessed.
He’d been cheatin’ with Holly, and Jaimee, and Cori,
With Joselyn, and Kalika. The world had the story.
From the top of the Tour to the basement of blues,
Tiger’s sad sordid tale was all over the news.
With hostesses, waitresses, he had lots of sex,
When not in their pants, he was sendin’ them texts.
Despite all his cryin’ and beggin’ and pleadin’,
Tiger’s wife went investin’ — a new home in Sweden .
And I heard her exclaim from her white Escalade,
“If you’re gettin’ laid then I’m gettin’ paid.”
She’s not pouting, in fact, she is of jolly good cheer,
Her prenup made Christmas come early this year.
…………………………………………………….Anonymous
Next in level of popularity, there is this:
THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR
Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,
And the winter winds are wearily sighing:
Toll ye the church bell sad and slow,
And tread softly and speak low,
For the old year lies a-dying.
Old year you must not die;
You came to us so readily,
You lived with us so steadily,
Old year you shall not die.
He lieth still: he doth not move:
He will not see the dawn of day.
He hath no other life above.
He gave me a friend and a true truelove
And the New-year will take ’em away.
Old year you must not go;
So long you have been with us,
Such joy as you have seen with us,
Old year, you shall not go.
He froth’d his bumpers to the brim;
A jollier year we shall not see.
But tho’ his eyes are waxing dim,
And tho’ his foes speak ill of him,
He was a friend to me.
Old year, you shall not die;
We did so laugh and cry with you,
I’ve half a mind to die with you,
Old year, if you must die.
He was full of joke and jest,
But all his merry quips are o’er.
To see him die across the waste
His son and heir doth ride post-haste,
But he’ll be dead before.
Every one for his own.
The night is starry and cold, my friend,
And the New-year blithe and bold, my friend,
Comes up to take his own.
How hard he breathes! over the snow
I heard just now the crowing cock.
The shadows flicker to and fro:
The cricket chirps: the light burns low:
‘Tis nearly twelve o’clock.
Shake hands, before you die.
Old year, we’ll dearly rue for you:
What is it we can do for you?
Speak out before you die.
His face is growing sharp and thin.
Alack! our friend is gone,
Close up his eyes: tie up his chin:
Step from the corpse, and let him in
That standeth there alone,
And waiteth at the door.
There’s a new foot on the floor, my friend,
And a new face at the door, my friend,
A new face at the door.
……………………………………Tennyson
The two most popular versions of poetry, then, are poems of Humor and Elegy. The anonymous joke-poem now popular on the internet appeals to the spirit of satire and fun.
The 19th century boasts triumphs of melancholy and sadness, like “The Raven,” a poem which itself was quickly satirized.
Is it an accident that the two most popular versions are two defining moods on opposite ends of the human emotional scale: jest and buffoonery on one hand, quiet, dignified sorrow on the other?
The next level of popularity are probably the twin types of Wisdom and Love.
Poems with a simple, yet philosophical message tend to be sonnet-length; Shakespeare’s sonnets can be found in this category, and, most recently, perhaps, Frost’s famous “The Road Not Taken.”
Poems of “wisdom” have been on the wane these last 50 years, or at least successful ones of this type, as anything resembling the didactic has been banned by the sophisticated indirectness currently fashionable.
“Do Not Go Gentle” is more a pleading than a piece of advice, but more recently the wisdom bird has been spotted in the poetry of Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, for instance. This may be the essence of both these poets’ appeal: plain-spoken wisdom. So perhaps this class of poem has not disappeared, after all.
The Love poem, like the Wisdom poem, seems to have declined among the critically acclaimed in the modern, and especially post-modern eras. You just don’t find MFA grads expressing “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” sentiments in poetry.
From Petrarch through Auden, love was nearly the sole subject of the lyric. In poetry today, how far has love fallen? Opening at random one of those big anthologies, I find this ‘Song’ from Thomas Stanley (d. 1678), and here are the first two of its five stanzas:
I prithee let my heart alone, Since now ’tis raised above thee, Not all the beauty thou dost own, Again can make me love thee;
He that was shipwrecked once before By such a siren’s call, And yet neglects to shun that shore, Deserves his second fall.
………………………………………Thomas Stanley
How delightful that we get not only the Love poem, but a Wisdom poem, too. This makes a kind of sense in the popularity scheme we are constructing, with Humor and Elegy on the top tier and Love and Wisdom existing together on the second.
Characteristics of the genres can certainly mingle, and many an ambitious bard has probably sought to conciously use Love and Wisdom and Humor and Elegy all in the same poem in order to produce a masterpiece of popularity: one comes to mind right away, in fact: Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.” It has the properties of all four, does it not? It is elegaic: it mourns the swift passage of time; it is a love poem, certainly; it surely has an archness, which is a part of its appeal, and it contains a common-sense argument, as well, and thus is also a wisdom poem. And as the centuries pass, “To His Coy Mistress” is moving up the ladder of most popular poem of all time.
Is it possible that contemporary poems do not stick in the mind for the simple reason that without one of these four types to guide it, Humor, Elegy, Wisdom, or Love, the popular taste feels immediately at sea, no matter how skilled the versifier? Might this be some kind of natural law?
Let us, again, open another book at random, this time to a poem from a contemporary; here is the first stanza, from “Victim of Himself” by Marvin Bell:
He thought he saw a long way off the ocean cresting and falling, bridging the continents, carrying the whole sound of human laughter and moans—especially moans, in the mud of misery— but what he saw was already diluted, evaporating, and what he felt were his teeth grinding and the bubbles of saliva that broke on his tongue.
………………………………………………Marvin Bell
Bell is certainly no slouch as a poet, but reading this, why is it pretty certain this poem will never be popular?
1650 Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America: By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts published in London.
1773Phillis Wheatley, a slave, publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
1791The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is published in Paris, in French. Ben Franklin’sAutobiography appears in London, for the first time in English, two years later. Had it been published in America, the Europeans would have laughed. The American experiment isn’t going to last, anyway.
Franklin, the practical man, the scientist, and America’s true founding father, weighs in on poetry: it’s frivolous.
1794 Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey make plans to go to Pennsylvania in a communal living experiment, but their personalities clash and the plan is aborted. Southey becomes British Poet Laureate twenty years later.
1803 William Blake, author of “America: A Prophecy” is accused of crying out “Damn the King!” in Sussex, England, narrowly escaping imprisonment for treason.
1815 George Ticknor, before becoming literature Chair at Harvard, travels to Europe for 4 years, spending 17 months in Germany.
1817 “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant appears in the North American Review.
1824 Byron dies in Greece.
1824 Lafayette, during tour of U.S, calls on Edgar Poe’s grandmother, revolutionary war veteran widow.
1832 Washington Irving edits London edition of William Cullen Bryant’sPoems to avoid politically offending British readers.
1835Massachusetts senator and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier mobbed and stoned in Concord, New Hampshire.
1835 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appointed Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard.
1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes 500 copies of Divinity School Address anonymously. He will not publish another book for 6 years.
1838 Poe’s translated work begins appearing in Russia.
1843 Transcendentalist, Unitarian minister, Harvard Divinity School student Christopher Pearse Cranch marries the sister of T.S. Eliot’s Unitarian grandfather; dedicates Poems to Emerson, published in The Dial, a magazine edited by Margaret Fuller and Emerson; frequent visitor to Brook Farm. Cranch is more musical and sensuous than Emerson; even Poe can tolerate him; Cranch’s poem “Enosis” pre-figures Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.”
T.S. Eliot’s family is deeply rooted in New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism through Cranch and Emerson’s connection to his grandfather, Harvard Divinity graduate, William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington U., St. Louis.
1845 Elizabeth Barrett writes Poe with news of “The Raven’s” popularity in England. The poem appeared in a daily American newspaper and produced instant fame, though Poe’s reputation as a critic and leader of the Magazine Era was well-established. During this period Poe coins “Heresy of the Didactic” and “A Long Poem Does Not Exist.” In a review of Barrett’s 1840 volume of poems which led to Barrett’s fame before she met Robert Browning, Poe introduced his piece by saying he would not, as was typically done, review her work superficially because she was a woman.
1847 Ralph Waldo Emerson is in England, earning his living as an orator.
1848 Charles Baudelaire’s first translations of Poe appear in France.
1848 James Russell Lowell publishes “A Fable For Critics” anonymously.
1848 Female Poets of America, an anthology of poems by American women, is published by the powerful and influential anthologist, Rufus Griswold—who believes women naturally write a different kind of poetry. Griswold’s earlier success, The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) contains 3 poems by Poe and 45 by Griswold’s friend, Charles Fenno Hoffman. In a review, Poe remarks that readers of anthologies buy them to see if they are in them.
1848 Poe publishes Eureka and the Rationale of Verse, exceptional works on the universe and verse.
1849 Edgar Poe is murdered in Baltimore; leading periodicals ignore strange circumstances of Poe’s death and one, Horace Greeley’sTribune, hires Griswold (who signs his piece ‘Ludwig’) to take the occasion to attack the character of the poet.
1855 Griswold reviews Whitman’sLeaves of Grass and calls it a “mass of stupid filth.” The hated Griswold, whose second “wife” was a man, also lets the world know in his review that Whitman is a homosexual. Whitman later includes the Griswold review in one of his editions of Leaves.
1856 English Traits, extolling the English race and the English people, saying it was English “character” that vanquished India, is published in the U.S. and England, by poet and new age priest Ralph Waldo Emerson, as England waits for the inevitable Civil War to tear her rival, America, apart.
1859. In a conversation with William Dean Howells, Emerson calls Hawthorne’s latest book “mush” and furiously calls Poe “the jingle man.”
1860 William Cullen Bryant introduces Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union; the poet advises the new president on his cabinet selection.
1867 First collection of African American “Slave Songs” published.
1883 “The New Colossus” is composed by Emma Lazarus; engraved on the Statue of Liberty, 1903
1883 Poems of Passion by Ella Wheeler Wilcox rejected by publisher on grounds of immorality.
1888 “Casey at the Bat” published anonymously. The author, Ernest Thayer, does not become known as the author of the poem until 1909.
1890 Emily Dickinson’s posthumous book published by Mabel Todd and Thomas Higginson. William Dean Howells gives it a good review, and it sells well.
1893 William James, Emerson’s godson, becomes Gertrude Stein’s influential professor at Harvard.
1897 Wallace Stevens enters Harvard, falling under the spell of William James, as well as George Santayana.
1904 Yone Noguchi publishes “Proposal to American Poets” as the Haiku and Imagism rage begins in the United States and Britain.
1910 John Crowe Ransom, Fugitive, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, takes a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.
1910 John Lomax publishes “Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads.”
1912 Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine; in 1880s attended literary gatherings in New York with William Dean Howells and Richard Henry Stoddard (Poe biographer) and in 1890s met Whistler, Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Aubrey Beardsley. Ezra Pound is Poetry’s London editor.
1913 American Imagist poet H.D. marries British Imagist poet Richard Aldington.
1914 Ezra Pound works as Yeats‘ secretary in Sussex, England.
1915 Edgar Lee Masters’Spoon River Anthology published. Masters was law partner of Clarence Darrow.
1917 Robert Frost begins teaching at Amherst College.
1920 “The Sacred Wood” by T.S. Eliot, banker, London.
1921 Margaret Anderson’sLittle Review loses court case and is declared obscene for publishing a portion of James Joyce’sUlysses, which is banned in the United States. Random House immediately tries to get the ban lifted in order to publish the work.
1922 T.S.Eliot’s “The Waste Land” awarded The Dial Prize.
1922 D.H Lawrence and Frieda stay with Mabel Dodge in Taos, New Mexico.
1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1923 William Butler Yeats wins Nobel Prize for Literature
1924 Robert Frost wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1924 Ford Madox Ford founds the Transatlantic Review. Stays with Allen Tate and Robert Lowell in his lengthy sojourn to America.
1924 Marianne Moore wins The Dial Prize; becomes editor of The Dial the next year.
1924 James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children opens.
1925 E.E. Cummings wins The Dial Prize.
1926 Yaddo Artist Colony opens
1927 Walt Whitman biography wins Pulitzer Prize
1930 “I’ll Take My Stand” published by Fugitive/Southern Agrarians and future New Critics, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate defend ways of the Old South.
1932 Paul Engle wins Yale Younger Poet Prize, judged by member of John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive circle. Engle, a prolific fundraiser, builds the Iowa Workshop into a Program Writing Empire.
1933 T.S. Eliot delivers his speech on “free-thinking jews” at the University of Virginia.
1934 “Is Verse A Dying Technique?” published by Edmund Wilson.
1936 New Directions founded by Harvard sophomore James Laughlin.
1937 Robert Lowell camps out in Allen Tate’s yard. Lowell has left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College.
1938 First Edition of textbook Understanding Poetry by Fugitives Brooks and Warren, helps to canonize unread poets like Williams and Pound.
1938 Aldous Huxley moves to Hollywood.
1939 Allen Tate starts Writing Program at Princeton.
1939 W.H. Auden moves to the United States and earns living as college professor.
1940 Mark Van Doren is awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1943 Ezra Pound indicted for treason by the United States government.
1946 Wallace Stegner founds Stanford Writing Program. Yvor Winters will teach Pinsky, Haas, Hall and Gunn.
1948 Pete Seeger, nephew of WW I poet Alan Seeger (“I Have A Rendevous With Death”) forms The Weavers, the first singer-songwriter ‘band’ in the rock era.
1948 T.S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize
1949 T.S. Eliot attacks Poe in From Poe To Valery
1949 Ezra Pound is awarded the Bollingen Prize. The poet Robert Hillyer protests and Congress resolves its Library will no longer fund the award. Hillyer accuses Paul Melon, T.S. Eliot and New Critics of a fascist conspiracy.
1950 William Carlos Williams wins first National Book Award for Poetry
1950 Gwendolyn Brooks wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1951 John Crowe Ransom is awarded the Bollingen.
1953 Dylan Thomas dies in New York City.
1954 Theodore Roethke wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1957 Allen Tate is awarded the Bollingen.
1957 “Howl” by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg triumphs in obscenity trial as the judge finds book “socially redeeming;” wins publicity in Time & Life.
1957 New Poets of England and America,Donald Hall, Robert Pack, Louis Simspon, eds.
1959 Carl Sandburg wins Grammy for Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland’sLincoln Portrait with the New York Philharmonic.
1959 M.L Rosenthal coins the term “Confessional Poetry” in The Nation as he pays homage to Robert Lowell.
1960 New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen, editor.
1961 Yvor Winters is awarded the Bollingen.
1961 Denise Levertov becomes poetry editor of The Nation.
1961 Louis Untermeyer appointed Poet Laureate Consultant In Poetry To the Library of Congress (1961-63)
1962 Sylvia Plath takes her own life in London.
1964 John Crowe Ransom wins The National Book Award for Selected Poems.
1964 Keats biography by Jackson Bate wins Pulitzer.
1965 Horace Gregory is awarded the Bollingen. Gregory had attacked the poetic reputation of Edna Millay.
1967 Anne Sexton wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1968 Shakespeare’sRomeo & Juliet, directed by Zeffirelli, nominated for Best Picture by Hollywood.
1971 The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner published. Kenner, a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., saved Pound’s reputation with this work; Kenner also savaged the reputation of Edna Millay.
1971 W.S Merwin wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1972 John Berryman jumps to his death off bridge near University of Minnesota.
Berryman, the most “Romantic” of the New Critics (he was educated by them) is considered by far the best Workshop teacher by many prize-winning poets he taught, such as Phil Levine, Snodgrass, and Don Justice. Berryman’s classes in the 50’s were filled with future prize-winners, not because he and his students were great, but because his students were on the ground-floor of the Writing Program era, the early, heady days of pyramid scheme mania—characterized by Berryman’s imbalanced, poetry-is-everything personality.
1972 Frank O’Hara wins National Book Award for Collected Poems
1984 Harold Bloom savagely attacks Poe in review of Poe’s Library of America works (2 vol) in New York Review of Books, repeating similar attacks by Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot.
1984 Marc Smith founds Slam Poetry in Chicago.
1984 Mary Oliver is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1986 Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse, is published.
1987 The movie “Barfly” depicts life of Charles Bukowski.
1988 David Lehman’s Best American Poetry Series debuts with John Ashbery as first guest editor. The first words of the first poem (by A.R. Ammons) in the Series are: William James.
1991 “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia is published in The Atlantic. According to the author, poetry has become an incestuous viper’s pit of academic hucksters.
1996 Jorie Graham wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1999 Peter Sacks wins Georgia Prize.
1999 Billy Collins signs 3-book, 6-figure deal with Random House.
2002 Ron Silliman’s Blog founded.
2002 Louis Menand’sThe Metaphysical Club wins Pulitzer Prize.
2002 Garrison Keillor’sGood Poems published.
2004 Foetry.com founded by Alan Cordle. Shortly before his death, Robert Creeley defends his poetry colleagues on Foetry.com.
2004 Franz Wright wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
2005 Ted Kooser wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
2005 William Logan wins National Book Critics Circle Award
2006 Fulcrum No. 5 appears, featuring works of Landis Everson and his editor, Ben Mazer, also Eliot Weinberger, Glyn Maxwell, Joe Green, and Marjorie Perloff.
2007 Joan Houlihan dismisses Foetry.com as “losers” in a Poets & Writers letter. Defends the integrity of both Georgia and Tupelo, failing to mention Levine is her publisher and business partner.
2007 Paul Muldoon succeeds Alice Quinn as poetry editor of The New Yorker.
2008 Poets & Writers bans Thomas Brady and Christopher Woodman from its Forum. The Academy of American Poetry On-Line Editor, Robin Beth Schaer, is shortlisted for the Snowbound Series prize by Tupelo at the same time as Poets.org bans Christopher Woodman for mentioning the P&W letter as well.
2009 The Program Era by Mark McGurl, published by Harvard University Press
2009 Following the mass banning of Alan Cordle, Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords and Christopher Woodman from Harriet, the blog of The Poetry Foundation, a rival poetry site is formed: Scarriet.
David Lehman uses half his introduction to Best American Poetry 2009 to attack William Logan.
Now we know things are really out of hand.
Lehman creeps up on his prey by first alluding to negative criticism in general:
“The notion that the job of the critic is to find fault with the poetry — that the aims of criticism and of poetry are opposed — is still with us or, rather, has returned after a hiatus.”
But who would argue against the idea that one of the functions of criticism is to find fault with poetry? Lehman implies that this “hiatus” was a good thing. No finding fault with poetry! Ever!
Even if Lehman is speaking of criticism rather than reviewing, why shouldn’t criticism be able to find fault?
“The critical essays of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden are continuous with their poems and teach us that criticism is a matter not of enforcing the “laws of aesthetics” or meting out sentences as a judge might pronounce them in court. Rather, the poet as critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them. Yet today more than a few commentators seem intent on punishing the authors they review. It has grown into a phenomenon.”
Lehman has obviously never read T.S. Eliot’s criticism of Edgar Poe (From Poe to Valery, 1949) in which Eliot “punishes” Poe severely. Poe alone has been attacked by any number of critics: Yvor Winters, Aldous Huxley, Harold Bloom, T.S Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch, and earlier this year in the New Yorker by a history professor at Harvard. In fact, there has been no “hiatus” when the target is America’s greatest writer. Negative reviewing was, of course, practiced by Poe, among other things, and Poe said it very explicitly: “A criticism is just that—a criticism.”
When Lehman says, “A critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them” he sounds like a person who wants to eat without chewing. When did “enjoyment” of literature preclude honest opinion about it? Does Lehman seriously believe that being “nice” to a poem is how we “enjoy” it? What does he think we are? Little kids?
Lehman, like Camille Paglia, is dismissive of ‘French Theory:’
“The characteristic badness of literary criticism in the 1980s was that it was heavily driven by theory and saddled with an unlovely vocabulary. T. S. Eliot, in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), says he “presumes” that “no exponent of criticism” has “ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic activity” — that is, an activity to be undertaken as an end in itself without connection to a work of literature. Eliot did not figure on post-structuralism and the critic’s declaration of independence from the text. If you wanted criticism “constantly to be confronted with examples of poetry,” as R. P. Blackmur recommends in “A Critic’s Job of Work,” you were in for a bad time in the 1980s.”
But even worse than critics off in a world of their own, according to Lehman, are critics who review poetry without being nice:
“Every critic knows it is easier (and more fun) to write a ruthless review rather than a measured one. As a reviewer, you’re not human if you don’t give vent to your outrage once or twice — if only to get the impulse out of you. If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you’ll injure not only your sensibility but your soul. Frank O’Hara felt he had no responsibility to respond to a bad poem. It’ll “slip into oblivion without my help,” he would say.”
Actually, it’s not “easier” to write a “ruthless” review–erudition and patience go into “ruthless” reviews all the time. It’s easier to be funny, perhaps, when being ruthless; this, I will grant, but ruthless without humor falls flat; ruthless and humorous is devastating–the review every poet fears.
As for O’Hara’s remark–echoed by contemporary critic Stephen Burt: Isn’t the critic a philosopher? And when would you ever tell a philosopher: ‘only write about the good stuff?’
Now Lehman goes after his real target–William Logan.
“William Logan typifies the bilious reviewer of our day. He has attacked, viciously, a great many American poets; I, too, have been the object of his scorn. Logan is the critic as O’Hara defined the species: “the assassin of my orchards.” You can rely on him to go for the most wounding gesture. Michael Palmer writes a “Baudelaire Series” of poems, for example, and Logan comments, “Baudelaire would have eaten Mr. Palmer for breakfast, with salt.” The poems of Australian poet Les Murray seem “badly translated out of Old Church Slavonic with only a Russian phrase book at hand.” Reviewing a book by Adrienne Rich is a task that Logan feels he could almost undertake in his sleep. Reading C. K. Williams is “like watching a dog eat its own vomit.”
For many years, Logan reserved his barbs for the poets of our time. More recently he has sneered at Emily Dickinson (“a bloodless recluse”) and condescended to Emerson (“a mediocre poet”).”
Oh Lehman, stop being such a big baby. Emerson was a mediocre poet. Logan has praised Dickinson’s work–calling her a ‘bloodless recluse’ is well…kinda…true. Should there really be a law against giving Frank O’Hara or C.K. Williams or Hart Crane a bad review?
Far better poets have been far more vilified–and for political reasons, too.
Logan is merely expressing his taste.
Lehman, you shouldn’t take this so personally.
One person finds the weather too cold and goes indoors; another remains outside because they find the weather pleasant.
‘But,’ Lehman might reply, ‘ poets are not the weather, they create in order to please.’
All the more reason why there should be a wider divergence of opinion on poems than the weather.
Poems ask us to love them, and in ways far more nuanced than a breezy, foggy evening balanced between warm and cold.
There is nothing worse for poetry in general than telling people they have to like it. Critics like Poe and Logan actually help the cake to rise.
Don’t you remember what Keats said about the talking primrose? It tells us to like it. So we don’t.
It goes without saying that I don’t agree with all of Logan’s judgments, but simple common sense impels this question:
Drugs like caffeine and nicotine are wonderful stimulants for poetry.
Five packs a day, and you, too, could be a great poet.
In 1939, a transition year marking the start of WW II, the poet W.H. Auden was divided.
Auden was between jobs, homelands, faiths, political beliefs, romances–as well as drags on his cigarette.
The English poet was about to settle in the U.S. (New York) say goodbye to friend Christopher Isherwood (who moved to California in April) meet and“marry” Chester Kallman–a devotee of anonymous men’s room sex, abandon his atheism for the Church of England, give up his Marxism for a belief in Western Democracy, and abandon travel reporting for college teaching.
In a Nation article in March 1939, Auden played prosecutor and defense—rhetorically dividing himself—in debating the poetic worth of W.B. Yeats–who had died in January of that year.
Yeats’ death surely made Auden, famous and middle-aged in 1939, reflect on his own worth as a poet, and, naturally on the worth of poetry itself in a brutal age approaching war.
Are we surprised, then, that poetry’s most divided and ambiguous statement about itself, emerged in March of 1939, in a poem by Auden on W.B. Yeats?
We really don’t need to puzzle over the meaning of “Poetry makes nothing happen,” for it is clearly the utterance of a helplessly divided and self-pitying man: “Poetry makes Auden happen” is closer to an accurate statement, for poetry makes a great deal happen. Auden, the famous poet, felt sorry for himself as he contemplated the death of another well-known poet (Yeats) falling like a tiny droplet in the ocean, a day when a “few thousand” were aware of something “slightly unusual.”
Or, if Auden wasn’t pitying himself, the phrase probably sprang from Auden’s sense–which one can detect in the Nation article–that Yeats was (and this is probably correct) a right-wing loon; “poetry makes nothing happen” was a description of Yeats’ poetry, not poetry.
Auden looked around at the world in 1939 and said, rather gruffly, after smoking a pack of cigarettes with a few Pinot Noirs, ‘look, Yeats believed in fairies and Hitler is about to set the world on fire…
It was Yeats–Auden thought he was a freak.
Auden knew poetry–in general–made things happen.
After all, poetry created the poet, Auden, who made the ambiguous statement, ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ in the first place.
The idea that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ is…silly.
Auden married Kallman–and, to no one’s surprise, Chester broke Wystan’s heart. Shall we say, then, “Marriage makes nothing happen?”
We should remember that poetry is much larger than W.H. Auden or W.B. Yeats, or any individual, and that sordid details and facts pale beside universals, and small facts can suddenly become universals, depending on the context. We should remember what Percy Shelley, whose poetic treatment of the death of John Keats blows away Auden’s ditty on Yeats, said in his A Defense of Poetry:
“The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live.” –Shelley, A Defense
A long poet does not exist.
Sure, a poem, or a poet, or poetry might–sometimes–make nothing happen.
Fairy dust and puffs of smoke make nothing happen. Most of us know that.
But, again, Shelley:
“The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.” –Shelley, A Defense
Scarriet 