WALLACE STEVENS, MARIANNE MOORE, ELIZABETH BISHOP, JOHN ASHBERY, AMY CLAMPITT, SHARON OLDS, MARK DOTY
We are unlikely to find anything so nearly carnal as H.D.’s “the forgotten first unsatisfied embrace” in Wallace Stevens’s verse. Certainly no war ever shook the foundations of his world, though two world wars happened some way off, in the Europe from which his beautiful books and some of his prints and pictures came, carefully parceled, and to which, promptly, he remitted payment but which he never visited. He had writer-correspondents—it would be too much to call them friends—and when they sent him a book of theirs to read he might reply: “Reading one’s friends’ books is a good deal like kissing their wives, I suppose. The less said about it, the better.” The friends’ wives that he kissed, chastely, were generally business associates. In 1916 he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Hartford, Connecticut, of which he became vice president in 1934 and with which he remained until his death in 1955. The photograph of him that hangs above my desk shows a gray-suited gray-tied Stevens, gray face and gray-white hair, emerging from a gray building. Color was reserved for the poetry. He was one of Eliot’s sins of omission at Faber and Faber: Why did he wait so long to publish Stevens, a poet more self-effacing than he was himself and quite obviously his peer? Perhaps there the answer lies. Asked what he thought of Four Quartets, Stevens with characteristic evasiveness replied, “I’ve read them of course, but I have to keep away from Eliot or I wouldn’t have any individuality of my own.”
Nine years Eliot’s senior, Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, of Dutch extraction on his mother’s side. His father was a lawyer. He was at Harvard from 1897 to 1900, and then at New York Law School, and was admitted in 1904 to the bar. He started practicing law, and married in 1909. Seven years later he signed his soul over to the Hartford.
He started writing poetry, with excessive reticence, in his teens. In his high-school magazine he published two quatrains, subscribed with his initials only, and entitled “Autumn” (which remained his favorite poetic season):
Long lines of coral light
And evening star,
One shade that leads the night
On from afar.
The second quatrain expresses adolescent sorrow, loneliness and anticipation. It was not until he was thirty-five that Harriet Monroe published—under the pseudonym Peter Parasol—some poems. Then she included an early version of “Sunday Morning” under his own name in Poetry (Chicago) the next year, in November 1915. The eighth numbered stanza reads:
She hears, upon the water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of the wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
It is hard to imagine a more astonishing debut in Poetry. Each line and each sentence is transparently clear, each image alive, the voices that speak are heard to speak. The difficulty only arises if we seek to paraphrase, because the poem as a whole is a process that cannot be reduced to a single meaning or set of meanings. It has taken us from a lawn, a late breakfast, a woman beginning a languid Sunday out of doors, through meditations on meaning, to a known wilderness.
He had published a few poems less visibly before, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” He went on to publish some symbolist plays “without character or action.” His first collection, Harmonium, appeared when he was forty-four (1923). His second book followed twelve years later: Ideas of Order, the year after he was made vice president. After that there was a veritable flood of books, culminating in Collected Poems in 1954. There was also a book of essays, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination, published in 1951. Significant work appeared after his death, notably Opus Posthumous.
But then all of his work is significant, even the uncharacteristically crabby letters where he refuses to lend a friend money or remonstrates for some real or imagined advantage taken. His day job does not impinge on the poems, even though it enables them. Poetry is a world apart from the world of habit and dailiness: its feet are not on that earth because it has wings. In Adagia, his aphorisms, he goes so far as to say that poetry is “life’s redemption,” after belief in God is no longer possible. It is a redemption that knows itself to be the Supreme Fiction and that nonetheless elicits belief. Like Blake he is an enemy of reason, which destroys; unlike Blake he has no metaphysic but a physic in both senses, a medicine and a material world made over, made real, taken back to what it is before habits of work and rest, of play and passion, have dulled or misshapen it. To take it back to is, the poet must first be aware of what has happened to it. Through the distorted world of dailiness he finds the real, and that is poetry, even when he does not write the poem: “The humble are they that move more about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.”
His verse is a language apart as well as a world apart. No modern poet is more lush in his cadences, more achieved in metrical experiment or more regular. Were his language not always engaged in subtle thought, he would dissolve in sounds the way that Swinburne does. But the lateral and inferential thought serves up surprising dictions: we linger, we do not run on. The poems are woven together by repetitions and echoes, by kinds of closure. He loves the long poem, series and sequence. He repeats syntactical and metrical patterns precisely, altering the language they contain. The most arduously achieved poem is often the most imaginatively improvised.
When Stevens read his verse aloud, he tended to kill his cadences quite dead. His voice seemed to grudge the words that emerge discretely, destroying the music the reader carries in his head. The voice works against the high artifice, as though it spoke from the very world the poems have freed themselves from. The voice can’t do the music.
From the French poets he learned about symbolism and made some of its elements his own. We are reminded time after time of the work of Paul Valéry, greatest of the later symbolists and a near contemporary of his, whose music too is a language apart and whom he read and learned from. But Stevens was intent on expressing where imagination lives (the real) and not how it lives, and this priority sets a distance between him and symbolism. He also read the Imagists and Eliot, and what he read, by his juniors as by his elders, made its not always detectable mark. Adagia is full of pellets of wisdom, for example: “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” By this token, metaphor takes us back to the real. He says it a dozen different ways: a poem’s subject is poetry. The musical images in his verse are different in kind from Eliot’s. Music is a language, not beyond language; and painting is a language too, on which the poems feed hungrily. In fixing the flow of the world in rhythm, in clear imagery and argument that grows out of the imagery, he achieves a transcendence within the world of the senses.
It is possible to read Stevens for years with intense pleasure and never to care what the poems mean because the sense of sense is so strong and the movement of emotion so assured. “There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel: a rhetoric in which the feeling of one man is communicated to another in words of the exquisite appositeness that takes away all their verbality.” Another poet produces this effect of compelling intimacy, so that as we experience pleasure we do not feel an urgent need to question meaning: Emily Dickinson. By contrast, within the magic of Yeats’s Byzantium poems we stop, construe, interpret, ask: What is the golden bird, what are the mosaics, what has tangled the syntax here? In Four Quartets we allow the poet himself to ask us to pause and “make sense.” Stevens gives us a different, more challenging freedom. If we do question his meanings and try to tie the poems in to them, we may be disappointed. The subtlety of his thought is less compelling than the magic of his grasp on the ear and eye, and on the “intellectual emotions.” If we reversed the clock we would say that “Kubla Khan” is Coleridge’s most Stevensian poem, creating a closed world where prose can gain no passage; a world in which imagination lives safely among the real.
He knew writers—William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore. They knew him and his work. He was part of the group, but always far off; he did not meet Marianne Moore in the flesh until 1943. He drank abstemiously. He never invited a literary friend to his house. He never visited Europe but stayed in America, at home or on holiday in Florida or elsewhere, falling in love with skyscapes and place-names, reconciling the blue of imagination with the green of reality. “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “Sunday Morning,” “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Credences of Summer” are quite indispensible. It is as though Valéry and the mature Rainer Maria Rilke had combined in English, or rather American, and not only French and English are a single language (as Stevens declared) but German too. If Pound broke the pentameter, Stevens repaired it, incomparably, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” not as a meter to run with but as a meter that orders speech and integrates “real” images into a deep amazement, a flexible instrument of the “Blessed rage for order”:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Donald Davie seems to suggest that one can more readily serve God and Mammon than admire both Pound and Stevens. Stevens, Davie said when at last his verse appeared in England in 1953, is after a “beauty” that Victorians would applaud, Pound after a different beauty (“the unconquered flame”). Stevens and Pound are different in kind, however, as Gower and Langland, or Smart and Johnson are. For Davie, Stevens is reaction in modern dress, “a Keatsian allegiance is the clue” to him. For Hugh Kenner his is “an Edward Lear poetic, pushed toward all limits.” It is as a romantic that he has been absorbed into the tradition, yet he owes as large a debt to Whitman as Ezra Pound does, as large a debt to French poetry—and if not to Italian, then to German—as Pound and Eliot and Yeats. He is often gaudy, he is sometimes silly, his forms hold in the way that premodernist form was required to hold. Yet Stevens chose his forms, fully understanding what was afoot in modern verse, and he chose them because what he wanted his poetry to hold was not an historical, political, theological or contingent world but a world that was unassistedly “real.” Of course the task was impossible, like all Promethean tasks, like the Cantos and Four Quartets and Paterson. His work is of a piece, and if there are longueurs in the later poetry, where he seems to jump up and down on more or less the same spot, or advance very slowly on his quarry, there is no point where the verse is untrue to its—and his—objectives.
For Stevens, Marianne Moore was “A Poet that Matters”—the title of his review of her. He wrote about his contemporaries sparingly (Williams and John Crowe Ransom—“Tennessean”—were others). “The tall pages of Selected Poems by Marianne Moore are the papers of a scrupulous spirit,” he begins, the physical book real in his hands. She is not overscrupulous but “unaffected, witty, colloquial.” We can grant the second and third adjectives, but the first is disingenuous, because Moore is affected, often delightfully so, but there is a willfulness in her art, in the ways in which she chooses and develops forms, surprises and deliberately misdirects our reading by her syntax and lineation; do her subjects—or, rather, her themes—require such subtle snares or is there an element of the quiz mistress about her, challenging us to construe, making conscious those elements in our attention which other poets take for granted? Stevens delights in her dryness, her difference from him in sound organization, her uncommon view of the richly complex or (until she unwads and then refolds it) confused commonplace.
She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, four years before Eliot. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and his impact on Moore as moralist is clear, though her morality was neither orthodox nor dogmatic. Like him she “believed in” family (though she never started one of her own) and individual social responsibility—the emphasis being on the individual. From her mother she derived, she said, her sense of phrasing, her “thought or pith.” She studied at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1909, and then learned to be a typist.
She worked from 1921 to 1925 as an assistant in the New York Public Library, but already—indeed, since 1915—she had been contributing to the Egoist, Poetry and other journals. She knew Pound and Williams. In 1921, without her knowledge, H.D. and Bryher, with others, published her first book, Poems. Three years later, she added more poems and republished the volume as Observations. She became acting editor of the Dial for three years and under her it became a necessary magazine, with Thomas Mann, Eliot and Conrad Aiken among its contributors. She received a host of prizes, and in 1935 Eliot published her Selected Poems at Faber. Other books followed, and her Collected Poems in 1951. She translated La Fontaine’s Fables inventively, if laboriously (though not so inventively and laboriously as Louis Zukofsky translated Catullus), and the final fruits of her nine years’ labor appeared in 1954. “I fell prey to that surgical kind of courtesy of his.” A Complete Poems appeared in 1968, with a curious misprint in the Faber edition: “First published in England MCMXVIII,” predating her first book and rejuvenating her forever.
There is the Moore legend. First, the hats. A friend, remembering her in 1987, writes: “I remember she once began a story with ‘I was leaving Boston wearing two hats...’ I can’t remember the story itself, I was too much taken up with the preamble. The hats were obviously too big to pack. I think the tricorne was the first classic hat and the big flat-brimmed one was more often worn later; she wore it when she came to tea with us in our London flat. She was about to go on a holiday in a canal boat in England, which I found difficult to believe. But one had to be ready to believe anything of Marianne.” He remembers how, when he visited her in Brooklyn, “She sent me two dollars to pay for the journey from my New York hotel.” When she lunched with him at his hotel, “She retrieved a couple of the clam shells and popped them inside her glove to take them home. Her apartment was full of little treasures.” He also comments that, as against the judicious, measured generosity of her prose (advocating “achieved remoteness” and “aesthetic self-discipline”), her conversation was “sharp and even acerbic”; beneath the decorous exterior there was something “richer and less restricted.” Yet in the literary battles between her friends she never seems to have taken sides—on paper in any case. Most of her adult life she spent in New York (a flat in Greenwich Village, then in Lower Manhattan) and Brooklyn (to be near her brother, a navy chaplain at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard). She died in 1972.
She was learned—her footnotes to the poems can be as entertaining as the poems themselves—but was modest about it and never built up a theory of literature, never issued manifestos or caveats, never shouted. Her poem “Poetry,” originally five stanzas, thirty lines, she pruned down to three famous lines:
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
To plant “real toads,” the genuine, in “imaginary gardens”—another of her famous phrases. Temperamental and artistic reticence may be why she is less celebrated today than she should be. “Some feminine poets of the present day,” she wrote in 1935, “seem to have grown horns and to like to be frightful and dainty by turns; but distorted propriety suggests effeteness. One would rather disguise than travesty emotion; give away a nice thing than sell it; dismember a garment of rich aesthetic construction than degrade it to the utilitarian offices of the boneyard.” It is no wonder that feminist critics generally give her a wide berth: why does she stigmatize feminine poets as a separate category? (Her strictures apply across the board after the 1950s.) Modernists do not find her sufficiently vehement. Poets turn to her now as they always have done to learn about syllabics, about syntax (she is the late Henry James of verse). Her syllabics are straightforward. Instead of the verse being “free” or governed by meter or regular stress patterns, she chooses to build a stanza in which the lines have a predetermined number of syllables. Indentation underlines the parallels. The shape of the stanza indicates the syllabic disposition. With the addition of rhyme, this is one of the most restrictive measures a poet can deploy. It is her chosen measure. Commenting on her poem “Bird-Witted,” the poet Peter Jones declares that it “appears on analysis to have a ridiculous syllabic scheme: six ten-line stanzas with a firm rhyme scheme (a-b-a-b-c-a-d-e-g-c), the lines of each stanza with, respectively, nine, eight, six, four, seven, three, six, three, seven and four syllables. Yet the poem develops naturally, the form does not brake it.” He might have added that often the stanza, even a long and elaborate stanza, is a single sentence, a further formal challenge. The stanza rather than the line is her “unit of sense.”
Those who say that her verse did not develop may be unfamiliar with the uncollected early Imagist writing. However, once she found syllabics and worked them together with rhyme, she had her basic “grid,” variable but strict in its controls. With this vehicle her verse explored every area of her broad interests—the news, animals and plants, friends, poems, paintings, dance, cinema—whatever it came up against: “We adopt a thought from a group of notes in the song of a bird, from a foreigner’s way of pronouncing English, from the weave in a suit of clothes.” It is in its precise phrasing and the surprise of the syntax that the poetry remains fresh, its rightness so complex that every reading seems to deliver us a new poem. In “The Steeple-Jack” we read:
One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings—rising
steadily with a slight
quiver of the body—or flock
mewing where
a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea gray.
The juxtaposition of Dürer and the seascape before her has much in common with the juxtapositions of Imagism, though she keeps the two worlds discrete, allowing them to touch only at illuminating points.
For Stevens it is the “real” that liberates imagination; for Moore it is “disinterested ends,” a willingness to identify without identifying with, to draw without faking the lines for effect. Syllabics freed her from the iambic measure more completely than Pound’s vers libre freed him: she was not in peril of a meter taking hold of her or her objects, which her language holds steadily and whole. “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing,”
is an enchanted thing
like the glaze on a
katydid wing
subdivided by sun
till the neetings are legion.
Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;
like the apteryx-all
as a beak, or the
kiwi’s rain-shawl
of haired feathers, the mind
feeling its way as though blind,
walks along with its eyes on the ground.
Her reading voice meticulously conveys the syntactical line. Randall Jarrell identified “her lack—her wonderful lack—of arbitrary intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of sociological significance.” Her poems cannot be suborned to any ends but their own. “The Jerboa,” “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’ ” “The Pangolin,” “Elephants,” “Like a Bulwark,” “The Arctic Ox (or Goat),” “To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto”—there is an abundance of wonderful poems, one of the best being “What Are Years?” (which uncharacteristically has no footnotes):
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
In 1946, reviewing North & South, Miss Moore declared: “Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being unspectacular.” Elizabeth Bishop took her early bearings from Marianne Moore. They met, they corresponded, and Miss Moore’s approbation meant a poem could be let free into the world. For Bishop it was an invaluable apprenticeship, and she kept faith with Moore as long as she could, but her reticences and those of her master were different in kind. There is a clarity that the reader has to work for and a clarity that is, at least initially, less effortful, more enchanting. It has to do with voice, dialogue and with a less consistently experimental approach to form, a greater rhythmic regularity. After Bishop went her own way, in 1955 she wrote “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” celebrating their intimacy with a rather Whitmanesque abandon. Auden has touched her art as well, and Miss Moore:
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.
What Moore continued to admire in Bishop she admired at the outset: “Some authors do not muse within themselves; they ‘think’—like the vegetable-shredder which cuts into the life of a thing. Miss Bishop is not one of these frettingly intensive machines. Yet the rational considering quality in her work is its strength—assisted by unwordiness, uncontorted intentionalness, the flicker of impudence, the natural unforced ending.” Hers is an art that (she quotes a poem of Bishop’s) “cuts its facets from within.”
Bishop might have been the daughter Moore never had, twenty-four years her junior. Or Moore might have been the mother Bishop lost. In her introduction to The Diary of “Helena Morley” Bishop writes: “Happiness does not consist in worldly goods but in a peaceful home, in family affection,—things that fortune cannot bring and often takes away.” Born in 1911 (her father died when she was eight months old; her mother was committed to a mental institution when she was five) in Worcester, Massachusetts, she was reared by her mother’s parents in Nova Scotia and by an aunt in Boston. She graduated from Vassar College in 1934. Her life was one of travel: to Florida, Europe, Mexico, and Brazil, where she lived for many years. Her final years were spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she taught and where, in 1979, she died.
After Moore, her closest poetic connection was with Robert Lowell, her contemporary, to whom she dedicated “The Armadillo” and from whom she received the dedication of “Skunk Hour.” They maintained a candid and affectionate exchange, willing to offer severe criticism when they felt it was required. He celebrated her—a poet so utterly different from him in technique and temperament—with fascinated love in Notebook (1970), where he considers her meticulous, patient method of composition:
Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach something? My dear,
you hang your words in air, years old, imperfect,
pasted to cardboard posters, gay lettered, gapped
for the unimagined phrases and the wide-eyed Muse,
uneasy caller, finds her casual friend.
This he revised later:
Do
you still hang words in air, ten years imperfect,
joke-letters, glued to cardboard posters, with gaps
and empties for the unimagined phrase,
unerring Muse who scorn less casual friendships?
The body of her Complete Poems is not extensive: she published, after North & South, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Poems (incorporating A Cold Spring with her first book, 1955), then her first major book, Questions of Travel (1966), Complete Poems (1969) and the very small, immaculate collection of ten poems, Geography III (1977). In 1983 a comprehensive Complete Poems was published, and in 1993 One Art: Letters. In 1997 her paintings, a charming adjunct to her work and a record of her travels, appeared as Exchanging Hats.
A reader coming to Bishop for the first time might begin with the poem “Over 2,000 illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” in which the poet thumbs through the old illustrated book, reflecting on the images that are given meaning, are redeemed, by the story they illustrate: the Nativity, the life, death and Resurrection of Christ. As she meditates on the images, the illustrations provoke a reverie of her own: memories occur to her, one after another, her travels, always her travels, her illustrations, with no resolving incident to make them cohere or mean. “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’ ” she says, and taking up the concordance again longs for the validating Nativity, and the innocence of sense that she can never make.
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
—and looked and looked our infant sight away.
The eye misreads the image, and in that misreading is the vulnerable candor, so oblique that we almost miss it: “a family with pets” appropriates the Nativity to fill a hunger, a human gap, in herself. The longing to find rather than forge connections between experiences, with a beloved, with the past, provides the dynamic of her poems. She looks and looks with such attention that what she sees is almost surrealized in its literalness: “glimpses of the always more successful surrealism of everyday life.” Randall Jarrell says: “All her poems have written underneath, I have seen it,” and seen it with wry and anxious interrogation. In “The Fish” she sees into the creature she has caught:
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim bladder
like a big peony.
The voice affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it came clear to her, a process of adjusting perception until the thing is seen. Or the feeling is released. She can re-create innocence in a poem like “First Death in Nova Scotia,” reclaim it in a major poem like “The Moose,” from her last collection.
Her early poems are more or less rigorously formal, a formality that goes with their symbolic mode. But as she moved from symbolism toward the natural world, so her measure changed; she learned with instinctive precision to deploy free verse that mimes the movement of voice and thought. As with Moore, the enabling instrument is syntax, a syntax not always on its points, like Moore’s, but seemingly casual, informal, barefoot or slippered. The effect is intimate, rapt, the voice always subject-defined, its repetitions and qualifications building toward a precise sense of the subject. The focus is often dreamlike in its fixedness: the dream can arrest, rewind, fast-forward. Causal contingencies are removed so that objects are, regardless of their histories or uses. Geographies, not histories: maps, the sea, the picture, the arresting and the setting down. The first poem in her first book is called “The Map.”
Travel is a place in which to get lost (and found). Time’s tyranny is loosened. In travel, connections occur, and connection is epiphany, a point of understanding that can be joyful or devastating, as in the villanelle “One Art.” Experience is released, when it can be, in an action: freeing a fish, opening a book, shampooing her beloved’s hair after a disagreement (“The Shampoo” is one of the most delicate love poems by a woman for a woman in the language), or simply moving on. Hers is a world of sensual rather than causal contingencies, contingencies that give a clear if brief defining stability to a wandering subjectivity.
Few poets of the century are as candid as Elizabeth Bishop. We know more about her from her poems, despite her reticence, her refusal to confess or provide circumstantial detail, than we do of Plath or Lowell or Sexton, who dramatize and partialize themselves. Bishop asks us to focus not on her but with her. Her disclosures are tactful: we can recognize them if we wish. Her reticence is “polite.” Given her vulnerability, she could have “gone to the edge,” as A. Alvarez likes poets to do, praising Plath and Lowell for their extremity. Instead she follows where William Cowper led, using language not to go to the edge but to find her way back from it; using poetry—in an eighteenth-century spirit—as a normative instrument. Even in her harshest poems, such an art is affirmative.
One of Elizabeth Bishop’s passionate American admirers is John Ashbery, which may at first seem curious because Ashbery and Lowell are chalk and cheese, yet Bishop appealed to both. And Ashbery’s work appealed to her. In his first book she could hear Auden (who meant more to her than critics generally acknowledge) and Stevens, but made over into something irregular, unpredictable—volatile. He can modulate from hilarity to heartbreak in a couple of phrases. You cannot pin him down, but as with Proteus there is something other than evasion in his droll, increasingly languid changes of key, register and volume. A poem like “The Instruction Manual” may owe a debt to Bishop herself, the early Bishop of North & South, with its informal symbolic allegories: Ashbery’s description is an evasion; the occasion of the poem is an evasion of a boring task; the poem is about exclusions, but also about vision. What he may owe to Bishop principally is a sense of intimate, self-correcting speech and the “surrealism” of the everyday. His debts to Gertrude Stein are greater. Her notion of “cubist literature,” that a writer can abandon meaning for a multidimensional, new art, appealed to him: simplify syntax and make a series of reversals and apparent inconsequentialities, hesitancies, surprises, local but numerous and cumulative. Ashbery is less programmatic but he loves the voices in Stein, and the Frenchnesses, and those subtle phrasal metamorphoses, the way she moves through sounds to a resolving sound as in “Lifting Belly,” the way she encodes a private sexuality, creating a language at a distance from a shared context. He also values Laura Riding—the poet and story writer rather than the polemicist—for poems like “Nor is it Written,” where the verse eludes paraphrase, the Proteus in the cave cannot be snared but changes shape and sound. Ashbery’s is a deliberate and informed freedom from conventionality in all its aspects. It is not a freedom easily won: it was wrung from exile (an expression more dramatic than he would use), and from committed attention to different literatures and arts.
He is a poet of multiple voices, some spoken, some written, some borrowed or stolen, some parodied or invented to suggest period. These voices he does not juxtapose, as Pound does in the Cantos. It is hard to think of a poet from whom he differs more than he does from Pound. He takes and orchestrates the voices: verbal material from the world he grew up in, the world we live in, and echoes from the language of literature (often the most obscure), art, B-movies, the comics. Occasionally his own “I” speaks. We listen our way around to one of the other sides of cliché, to the “real” of Stevens’s world.
His style is inimitable, which is why he has attracted many imitators. Some poets have learned their own, rather than his, lessons from him. The Language Poets declare a debt to The Tennis Court Oath, and he admires and is puzzled by their “deconstructions,” speaking with special warmth of Clark Coolidge (“He uses language almost as if words were objects in a kind of assemblage”), Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein and Leslie Scalapino, and from the fringes of the group Anne Lauterbach and Stephen Ratcliffe. There can be no doubt of the earnestness of these poets, and little doubt of their achievement as a skeptical public gradually allows itself to engage with some of their concerns.
Ashbery licenses two kinds of freedom: a positive freedom from conventional constraint, which makes new forms of movement possible, new in directions; and a negative freedom, which issues in the ludic inconsequentialities of his lesser followers and is to be found in the less accomplished of his own poems.
He was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and grew up on his father’s farm in Sodus, New York. He didn’t get on well with his father, “a plain ordinary farmer and we were rather poor.” It wasn’t that he was a farmer or they were poor, but his father had “a violent temper.” His best days were spent with his grandparents in Rochester. His grandfather was a professor at the university and a distinguished physicist, the first person in America to experiment with X rays. He was also a classicist, well-read, with a library full of nineteenth-century classics including Dickens, Browning and Shelley. He was gentle and supportive. When Ashbery was seven his grandfather retired and with his wife moved to a village on the shores of Lake Ontario. Ashbery tasted the Fall of Man: he loved the city and disliked the country and now there was no excuse for staying in the comfortable, solemn, gloomy stability of the Victorian home. He has tried to replicate it, buying himself a Victorian house in Hudson, New York. “I always felt a great nostalgia for living in the city.” Most “lost domains” are rural; his was urban. He did not visit New York City until he was seventeen.
At sixteen he was despatched to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts to prepare for college. He was writing poems. A friend stole his work and submitted it to Poetry. At the same time, Ashbery sent his poems to Poetry, getting a harsh reply. It seemed that the doors to publication had been slammed in his face by the plagiarism of a confidante.
His next stop was Harvard, from which he graduated in 1949. His senior thesis was on Auden, with whose work he was “smitten.” “I think it is always the first literary crush that is the important one,” he says, expressing himself as he so often does in libidinal terms. A month before he left he made the acquaintance of Frank O’Hara. He undertook an MA in English at Columbia in 1951, worked in publishing, and with O’Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch began writing, collaborating and occasionally publishing work. This was the undeliberated birth of the so-called New York School of poets, growing up alongside the more celebrated and controversial painters whose work O’Hara was to be instrumental in curating at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1955 Ashbery left the United States, staying away with only occasional visits back until 1965. It was the Korean War and McCarthy that made elsewhere seem attractive.
In A Calendar of Modern Poetry (1994) John Ashbery chose to be represented by four poems: “He,” the inexhaustible “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher... ,” “Rivers and Mountains” and “At North Farm.” He reflects that the poems he wrote in his first decade of serious endeavor, from eighteen to twenty-eight, “seem to have a (for me) pleasingly surrealist shimmer.” In a sense he was writing for his friends. They were all busy writing, not preserving their work. A poem may survive because Ashbery transcribed and sent it to a friend—to Koch when he spent a year abroad he sent the only surviving copy of O’Hara’s “Memorial Day 1950.” The four poets collaborated on poem sequences, single poems; a novel, The Nest of Ninnies, was written by Ashbery and Schuyler together, out of affection or boredom, or to pass the time. John Cage stimulated collaborations, and Cage looms large from time to time in Ashbery’s resolutely unsystematic thinking.
The first two poems he preserved, from his undergraduate years, were “Some Trees” and “The Painter,” written in his teens. Turandot and Other Poems appeared in 1953, but when he was twenty-seven he got his poems together again to make his official first collection, which was singled out by W. H. Auden as a Yale Younger Poet selection and was entitled Some Trees (1956). But “even before that book appeared in America I had gone to live in France where I would end up spending the next ten years.”
To begin with he found it hard to write in France, without the sound of American speech in his ears. After a time he began to develop a style he describes as “slightly new.” That “slightly” packs a reticence worthy of Moore, who, asked to write a testimonial for his second book, permitted herself four words: “I find him prepossessing.” Not a very helpful sentence for his most awkward and suggestive volume, The Tennis Court Oath (1962).
In 1994, introducing the poems of his friend Pierre Martory, with whom he became close friends in Paris and who helped to teach him French, he says, “I have begun to find echoes of his work in mine. His dreams, his pessimistic résumés of childhood that are suddenly lanced by a joke, his surreal loves, his strangely lit landscapes with their inquisitive birds and disquieting flora, are fertile influences for me, though I hope I haven’t stolen anything—well, better to steal than borrow, as Eliot more or less said.” French itself, which he eventually mastered, he found “too clear a language for poetry. The exception to the rule being Rimbaud of course. I don’t know how he managed to cloud the language the way he did and still keep to the rules of French.”
In Paris it was not only poetry that affected him. There was the then explosive and fascinating world of pictures, and he was an art critic. He draws an analogy between his fascination with the line-break (“It has a mysterious thrill”) and the painter’s obsession with “the edge.” Musical life featured Webern and others. The sparsity of Webern was of a piece with the breaking down of language and cadence he was working at; he thought he might achieve the “kind of timbre” he heard in the music. Other composers he has found suggestive and enabling, their concerns answering his, their strategies transposed into his own medium. But it was probably the writers who meant most to him, and especially Raymond Roussel: “He boasted that there was absolutely nothing real in his work, that everything was completely invented. I think that could perhaps be said of my work as well.” He wrote poems in French “and translated them myself into English, with the idea of avoiding customary word-patterns and associations.”
The poems of his French decade in The Tennis Court Oath he describes as fragmented: “I intended to put the pieces back together, so to speak, when I could figure out a way to do so.” Some of the fragmentation was literal: he used cut-up techniques, buying American magazines and picking lines at random to make poems. The poems may not have been successful, but it was a way of curing himself of writer’s block.
It’s as well to remember that among all the avant-garde material with which he is associated, there is the other Ashbery, who loves Chaucer and ballads, one of whose favorite authors is Walter Pater (in Houseboat Days he incorporates passages by Pater into his poems), who advocates the work of Thomas De Quincey, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, always seeking in English literature pockets of unjust exclusion and bringing passages back to our hearing.
Though Ashbery and O’Hara are often evoked together, Ashbery is different in kind from O’Hara. He admires O’Hara’s effortlessness, a function perhaps of O’Hara’s more unproblematic adjustment to New York and his homosexuality, his natural campness, his carelessness about the opinion of others unless he loves them. Ashbery is complex. Like O’Hara he is in love with French writing (O’Hara loves Pierre Reverdy particularly, Ashbery loves Roussel). He is intrigued by deliberate and systematic experiment, the OuLiPo group in particular. He wrote and writes in French, and translates. His cityscapes are not so consistently New York as O’Hara’s. He tunes in to Americas and Europes and Orients, often all in the same poem. While O’Hara walks about New York and makes poems, Ashbery doesn’t. He tends to stay at home. He teaches at Bard College and lives part of the week in Hudson. In short, his is a different and intellectually more varied world.
The constant element in his verse is “the dream,” a template or a series of templates, and in this if in no other immediate way he resembles Philip Larkin, whose verse too has a repetitive dynamic. It is not a theory and never deliberately done: “I would prefer not to think I have any special aims in mind, as I might then be forced into a program for myself,” he says.
An Ashbery poem is “a snapshot of whatever is going on in my head at the time”: occasion, the process and so on are conflated, the poem becomes inseparable from its moment in time; even as the “meanings” of the moment drain away, the poem remains wedded to it, does not aspire to timelessness but insists on time, on the moment in its complexity. The serene and transcendent are continuous with the time-bound: Is the oven on? Will love survive? And where am I supposed to be for lunch? What “special aims” does he not have? There is never a consistent or coherent “plot” in his poems; if there is an argument it is unlikely to be logical; there are no consistent “image complexes”; no coherent meters, no rule about correct syntax. There are no rules. “I suppose I try to write from the point of view of the unconscious mind,” he says. The “unconscious mind” can have considerable energy. In “A Wave” it washes a long way up the conscious beach, and the unstoppable rush of the enormous poem Flow Chart—a kind of fever chart—is uniquely ambitious, a series of surprises and pleasures that few readers have yet managed to assort into the sense of a whole. This is not “a cabinet of curios, collectables” but a veritable Harrods.
Ashbery has been immensely prolific in the years since his French exile. With Rivers & Mountains (1965) he began to reclaim the readership he had lost with his in-your-face experimental writing; The Double Dream of Spring (1970), the very difficult Three Poems (1972) in prose, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which made him the most celebrated poet in the United States, followed. Later collections include Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1988), Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1996) and Wakefulness (1998). These are not slim volumes but substantial works.
Ashbery insists on overhearing. He seldom uses the same voice or the same formula twice. Amy Clampitt, on the other hand, whose work recalls now Moore, now Bishop, has a poetic scheme. However different the subject matter and tonality of her poems, once they are under way it is possible to foresee how they will pick their path through the language. Indeed, anticipation is one of the pleasures of her poetry.
Clampitt builds explanatory lines into the texts, or adds footnotes at the end of her books, explicating whatever may be obscure to the reader. This courtesy—or condescension—marked her first major collection, The Kingfisher (1983), published in her sixty-third year. There was a sense of freshness in this late debut, but What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1989) and Westward (1990), for all their sumptuousness of allusion, occupied much the same ground as The Kingfisher. Her Collected Poems, published in 1997, three years after her death, is too much of a good thing. “The exotic is everywhere,” she wrote; “it comes to us / before there is a yen or a need for it.” If the exotic is everywhere and in everything, it becomes commonplace. Clampitt is a wondering, eager earthling in an age of Martians (and the Martians took her up with enthusiasm). Her long poem “The Prairie” takes Bryant’s wonderful poetic discovery, his new imaginative frontier, and finds it stale, baroque like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, Europeanized. Clampitt’s poetry says there are no more frontiers. There is the mystery of detail. Here is the voice of a poet born and raised in Iowa, who settled in and settled for New York (where she worked, among other things, as an editor at Oxford University Press). But unlike the New York poets (Ashbery especially) she keeps a single speaking voice and a kind of Midwestern accent. This is her poverty and her wealth. Her syntax in its precision, as in “Grasses,” can’t but put us in mind of Marianne Moore:
the oats grow tall,
their pendent helmetfuls
of mica-drift, examined stem
by stem, disclose
alloys so various, enamelings
of a vermeil so
craftless, I all but despair of
ever reining in a
metaphor for
And so the single sentence of the poem flows back, flows on. Claiming for herself a place in the English Romantic tradition (Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, are her polestars), she overlooks the fact that her own poetry begins not in a sense, or a memory, of fullness, but is made of fragments, which syntax and rhythm fuse each to each, although in the end the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Sharon Olds is, like Clampitt, an immigrant to New York, having been born in California and spent her childhood there. Though she is twenty-two years younger than Clampitt, her first book predates The Kingfisher by three years. Satan Says appeared in 1980. The Sign of Saturn, a substantial gathering from her first three books, appeared in 1991, and her controversial volume The Father (1992) was received by some readers as a brave act of extreme poetic candor, by others as an error of taste and judgment, a deliberate sensationalism. It focuses her lived and imagined abuse in a confessional rage at once complex, harrowing and appallingly literal. She reports that Galway Kinnell, by gentle questioning, made her realize that she was using the word “love” loosely, that at some points she meant “hate” or “fear,” and the feat of saying these things and defining feeling was a liberation. The remedy for her is right love, and this, too, she expresses with vehemence: love for her own children, for example, her day-to-day world, merit a pared-down language of praise. The seeming nakedness of expression in The Father, the literal valency of the narratives and her adroit play with metaphor make us at first believe the poems as fact. We then adjust our focus onto how they are working, and working on us. Her technique recalls more that of Anne Sexton than of Sylvia Plath. At the beginning of her career, she reports, neither Plath nor Sexton much mattered to her: she wanted poems about Vietnam, the theme that obsessed her.
When she reads in public, Olds does not introduce her poems. “I want each poem to have all its body parts,” she declares, “to be complete. Sometimes afterwards I like talking a little about a poem. I suppose I feel a great separation between conversation and poems.” And yet her poems have a voice, less artful than Clampitt’s but generally consistent and coherent. Both women reconstitute the “lyric I” which Ashbery has so assiduously and effectively dissolved.
Beyond John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, at different distances along the very uncertain road, we might come upon the work of Mark Doty, in particular his collection My Alexandria (1995), of which Philip Levine wrote, “If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.” Doty’s poems in a different spirit do what Bishop’s do, they come back from an abyss, a thoroughly contemporary abyss of bereavement through the HIV-related illness of a lover. They are poems that offer to the dying, not as elegy but as celebration, the common world they have shared and made. The language is baroque, the syntax full of interesting risks, the subject matter and the scenes now familiar, now hauntingly strange. We might also find the brittlely elaborated work of the late Amy Clampitt, or Stephen Tapscott’s nuanced lyrics of vision and rapt disclosure. Or Jorie Graham, whose sense of the “surface” is like Stevens’s sense of green, and whose blue guitar is busy trying to play a new real music out of the Region of Unlikeness and out of the human body, sexual and alive, in its connections with and disconnections from the world.
You wake up and you don’t know who is there breathing
beside you (the world is a different place from what it seems)
and then you do.
The window is open, it is raining, then it has just
ceased. What is the purpose of poetry, friend?
And you, are you one of those girls?
The floor which is cold touching your instep now
is it more alive for those separate instances it crosses
up through your whole stalk into your mind?
We might find a way to the Language Poets, to the English experimentalists. Or we might more sensibly go back to Seven Dials and start down another street.