ALLEN GINSBERG, ADRIENNE RICH, EAVAN BOLAND, LOUISE GLÜCK, JORIE GRAHAM, JUDITH WRIGHT, GWEN HARWOOD, ALLEN CURNOW, JAMES K. BAXTER, W. S. MERWIN
Theodore Roethke numbered among his “more tedious contemporaries” in America the “roaring asses, hysterics, sweet-myself beatniks, earless wonders happy with effects a child of two could improve on.” The loudest poetry voices of the second half of the twentieth century were the Beats, preeminent among them Allen Ginsberg, who made noises about the American system and way of life, about sexual and spiritual liberation, about war and repression. “I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America,” he says in “Ego Confession.”
He also wrote poems. “His poetry made things happen,” said one obituary. That’s not quite right. His performances, his polemics, his affronting or affirming presence made things happen. His example as a performer touched poets remote from him in temperament, like Lowell and Bob Dylan. But the poems, the ones that are regarded as “great”: Do they exist apart from his voice, apart from their aurality, on the page as poems? With Robert Duncan and Paul Goodman, we are told, he “invented gay liberation”: “It was Ginsberg, perhaps more than any other individual, who helped turn marginal forms of behaviour into norms: psychedelic drugs, distrust of government institutions, sexual explicitness, guiltless hedonism, fear of nuclear energy.” His political and social impact was considerable; I remember his smoky, thronged performances in the 1960s as experiences in which nine tenths of my fellow undergraduates underwent temporary conversions, gratefully surrendering to the power of an event from which few of us stood back in disbelief. There was something medieval in the hysteria that the “sweet-myself” leader (he was a leader) evoked, emancipating us from the American dream into an alternative order. Rejection implies a system; anarchy is the most exacting political form and seldom lasts for long. Apart from the congregation’s suspension of intelligence during those performance events, I most remember the homespun textures, the voluminous hair and the smells—smoke of several varieties, sweat, scents. Ginsberg was a body and his mission seemed to be to deliver us back to a sense of our bodies as a place of grace and an instrument of praise.
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
But after the priest and prophet has departed and we are left clutching his book, what do the poems do?
There are three Allen Ginsbergs. First and most arresting is the young poet struggling under the constraining patronage of Williams, but with the soulful spirit already bubbling away in him:
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye...
Then there is the second Ginsberg (already a friend of Burroughs and Kerouac), visited by William Blake in the privacy of his room, Ginsberg being in the last throes of masturbation. Blake brushed him with angel dust and gave him wings—or filled him with helium, as well as social anger—and in the wake of these visitations came the poems Howl and later Kaddish. Then, traveling on a Japanese train, he became Allen Ginsberg III: a Buddhist no longer burning toward death but celebrating life (through his own) in all its muzzy “wholeness.” A gentler poet, American still, ambitious and—when need be—unscrupulous, playing to the gallery.
Ginsberg is not Blake, lacking the craft, the formal and spiritual skills of that master. Nor is he Whitman, though he’s often presented as Whitman’s heir. “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eying the grocery boys.” This is Ginsberg’s appropriation, simplified and sentimentalized. Whitman’s “I” was indeed inclusive. It is not that he “spoke for America” but his voice included everyone. Whitman’s poetry is full of characteristic detail rather than specific imagery. He is the poem’s vehicle but not systematically its subject. He honors the body politic and its wounds hurt him; his own wounds he regards as trivial, beneath the dignity of the larger poem. America is registered through him. By Ginsberg’s day, perhaps the body politic was too old and raddled to draw from the poet the passion it commanded from Whitman. If Ginsberg gets anything from his predecessor, it is a rhetoric, a long line (but, in Howl crammed full of chaotic specifics, rather than representative shapes). Ginsberg’s passion is for the marginal, the other societies which the empowered society excludes. Wounding the whole America of Whitman is his mission—perhaps to force into it, through those wounds, the Americas that America excluded. Like an anti-Savonarola, he loves to polarize the damned and the saved, the beat and the square, the “heads” and the gays over the straights, men over women. It is the female body he cannot get his imagination around: he observes it with horror and awe. His “I” is himself.
Ginsberg could be the priest of holy madness, anti-authoritarian, a man of generosity, a voice of the future; but he signed the papers to have his mother lobotomized, supported authoritarian individuals and regimes as long as they were ranged against his primary foe, the United States, was ungenerous to fellow poets if they were not of his camp and promoted himself at the expense of those around him, even after he had shaved off his beard and assumed the quiet demeanor of an almost dapper professor. The big days were in the 1950s, and his last four decades fed off the fat of the huge and unexpected pop-star success of his setting out. He remained a compelling performer, even of the awful later poems. Self-projection was his incomparable skill and it proved fatal to the work in the end: the voice could imbue a shopping list with transcendent significance.
It is to his first three books that future readers will attend, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish and Other Poems (1960) and Reality Sandwiches (1963). In 1963 Buddhism claimed him on the Kyoto-Tokyo Express. Nothing he subsequently wrote was wholly without interest, but, subdued by his new beliefs, the later work is after-echo.
Ginsberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, his father a poet and teacher, his mother a woman who suffered from mental illness. It was the presence of his father that at once inspired and inhibited his development. When he wrote Howl he dreaded not the censor but his father’s response to the lines “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, / who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, / who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may” and so on. Once he had got these facts down on paper and into print, he had broken a personal taboo and could say anything he liked in the future. The radical element in his work is not his politics, his homosexuality, his drug-taking, so much as the purging of inhibition, personal reserve, self-pity, the abandonment of the “bourgeois first person singular.” Egocentric he remains, but his is not the suffering lyrical “ego” of most of his contemporaries, even of some of his contemporaries among the Beats.
Paterson: William Carlos Williams. It is not surprising that Williams—who admired the early Ginsberg—should have written the preface to Howl and Other Poems. “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” Ladies are in particular peril from the poem. Hell must be defined before “Holiness” can get to work. Another Beat poet, Gregory Corso, said, “I am the substance of my poetry.” Ginsberg is substance too: he pours all the verbal jewelry and garbage in his mind into the poem, and then performs it in those long, hectic, racing lines where the best we can do is snatch at the sense. Reading it on the page, do we try to “construe” it as we do other poetry? Do we try to read quickly so as to replicate the poet’s vocalities? Do we take the long lines as single aphoristic units? It is a poem to be heard. On the page it is like a complex musical score. Not only does it need to be performed, it should be heard by a group. It is not a poetry for the private reader. The performance poets who have learned from Ginsberg say that they will alter their poems in response to a specific audience, to immediate public events, to the city in which they are performing. Textuality is beside the point. When you slow it down every assertion (it is a poem of assertions) becomes questionable, even the opening lines:
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,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...
The sentence runs on and on, syntax not so much abandoned as dissipated. Were these indeed the best minds of his generation? What had happened to their intelligence? “Minds” is wrong—“spirit,” “soul” or “imagination” might have served better. But points of diction are beside the point. If we strip away the more rhetorical adjectives and adjectival phrases the poem says as much:
I saw the minds destroyed by madness,
dragging themselves through the streets at dawn looking for a fix,
hipsters burning for the connection to the dynamo in the machinery of night,
who sat up smoking in the darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...
The poet’s mouth needs to cram itself full of words: half a mouthful won’t do.
Williams had never seen anything quite like Ginsberg before. He was astonished by the way the poet let himself say anything: he “experiences it to the hilt.” This is not quite right: the language goes to places the poet would not and could not go. Rising on his own enthusiasm, Williams declares: “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.” Nonsense, but good sales copy. “4 Sniffs & I’m High.”
Ginsberg studied at Columbia University, knew Burroughs, whose prose electrified him, and Jack Kerouac. He fell miserably in love with Neal Cassady, whose full-voiced letters to Kerouac affected the style of the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums quite as much as it did Ginsberg’s own. Conversation and the intimate epistle that let rip with rage, fantasy, affection, description—language that allowed itself maximum liberty—were the crucial elements that formed Ginsberg’s style.
He dropped out of college for a year, traveling and doing odd jobs. Wandering became a vocation. The reading tour was a way of life, a heroic progress around the globe again and again. He was the guru of the Beats, and he spread the word, so that throughout Europe he became an icon and fathered dozens of would-be Beats. His most celebrated stopover was in Prague, where, in 1965, students elected him king of the May and he was immediately deported. He wrote “Kral Majales” to commemorate this heroic martyrdom at the hands of “the Marxists” who “have beat me upon the street.”
In interviews he told how his poems came to him, what combinations of drugs helped him to release the language of Howl (Part II was “composed during a peyote vision”) and other poems, including his most important, Kaddish (written after “an injection of amphetamine plus a little bit of morphine, plus some Dexedrine later on to keep me going, because it was all in one long sitting”). “First thought, best thought,” he declared.
Kaddish is a long lament, following a Hebrew form, for his mother. The pain is real, and with grief, guilt and anger he evokes the world of which she was made and by which she was unmade.
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer
This poem in particular belongs to Ginsberg; the other poems belong to his generation. It was Kerouac who described his friends as the “beat generation.” He might have been alluding to the jazz beat, or to the sense of being “beat”—tired out with things as they were, dropouts. Or is there a connection with “beatitude”? That is the spin Ginsberg would have given it. By that token, writers remote from the druggy subculture aspects of the Beats in the 1950s and 1960s might be gathered into its fold.
Ginsberg dropped on American poetry like a bomb; his generation outgrew him and American poetry has outgrown him. Adrienne Rich, a more profound and consistent radical, redefines the spaces that English-language poetry can occupy. Ginsberg’s is a poetry of powerful but local revolt; Rich’s is a criticism and a revolution.
Hazlitt remembers how Wordsworth and Coleridge were passionate for liberty; but after the French Revolution “failed,” love of liberty was displaced by a hunger for legitimacy and the security that goes with it. Time alters many poets in this way. Adrienne Rich breaks the pattern. Her (increasingly green) radicalism has grown, changing in complexity as events change and she herself grows older. She will not allow herself to be marginalized again, as she was, inadvertently, in her first world. She sets her cap against “degradation,” a term that has a different sense in different contexts. In the arts, she contrasts the movie on the big screen with the movie on television, an image of technological and critical reductiveness, consumerism, passivity. She speaks in her prose of the 1970s of re-visioning, a function her poetry sets out to perform. How did she come to terms with feminism and with her own sexuality? Unlike Ginsberg, changed by a single moment of apprehension, for Rich the process is long and difficult: “the awakening of consciousness is not like the crossing of a frontier,” it is not like religious conversion, no divine “grace” descends: it is a becoming conscious, a deliberate, rigorous reconstruction of self. What is she working with? We can begin by giving her labels, like a well-traveled suitcase: American, half Jew on her father’s side, liberal-socialist, disabled; woman, daughter, wife, mother; lesbian, lover; feminist, radical-feminist. All and none of these sobriquets—used selectively by one faction or another—characterize her as a writer or explain why she has been to some extent responsible for changing the reading, writing and teaching of poetry by women, gay men and others.
We can place her in space and time: Adrienne Cecile Rich. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1929. The Depression, Roosevelt, the New Deal, idealism. Her Jewish father was a pathologist at Johns Hopkins University, her mother a southern Gentile. During her childhood, the Second World War ran its course. In 1951 she graduated from Radcliffe College (Harvard). McCarthy was hunting witches, there was Eisenhower, Korea, Hungary. In the period after her graduation she published two books of poems, enjoyed a Guggenheim Fellowship, married and had three sons. Her first book, A Change of World (1951), was selected by Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series. He patronized her in his complacently schoolmarmy foreword: the poems “are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them and do not tell fibs.” It does not take a feminist reading to sense the sexual distaste. Auden had a neat skill for infantilizing the other, when he wasn’t Aunt Sallying it as in “Miss Gee.” Auden’s manner and tone express the urbane disdain for the woman poet that was commonplace at the time. Sylvia Plath, roughly Rich’s contemporary, was jealous of her spectacular early success. She saw Rich one night: “Short black hair, great sparking black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella: honest, frank, forthright and even opinionated.”
In the 1960s there was Black Power, the rise of feminism and the gay movement. There was Vietnam. It is necessary to set her in these contexts because they provide occasions first for her formal strategies and tentativenesses, then for the emerging assurance that has made her a figure central to the American women’s movement and to the liberalization of American poetry.
Auden was, of course, one of the elders she respected, and her early verse belongs with the New Criticism and the conventional closures of the early Movement. American and British poetry were briefly in phase. Her work was assured from the outset. In retrospect the radical seeds were already sown in the first poems, but it was with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1962) that the important changes began, continuing through her next three collections with their “political” titles Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971). She was teaching open admissions at City College, New York, in touch with aspiring writers from every ethnic and social background. The suburban world receded. In that year her father and her husband died. These losses and new experiences led to her highly controversial volume Diving into the Wreck (1973), where she combines her voices—mother, lesbian, teacher, wife, woman. In “At a Bach Concert” she wrote:
A too-compassionate art is only half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.
To make a whole art, it was necessary first to fill in the other half, which might mean, for a time, that compassion will give way to a harsh truth-telling, telling the truth not only to the world but to the self. To tell the truth in poetry there have to be the forms, the words and the will to use them.
There is an almost too tidy pattern in her development, not that she set out to grow as she has done but that when the truth of an idea becomes clear to her, she will act upon it even if that action is against the grain of her instincts. Thus from the tight and efficient conventional forms of her early work she has, step by step, learned to abandon resources and create new ones in their place. The old forms bear a weight of previous attitudes, values and expectations. To speak clearly of the things she wishes to speak of she needs a singular style, not eccentric or idiosyncratic but one that, when it needs to do so, can incorporate prose, the speaking voices of others, a poetry that is open and belongs (she dates her poems scrupulously) to a time in her life and in history, an occasion. The truth always has a context, is always particular. The words “bomb,” “woman,” “peace,” “love,” mean one thing in 1951, something different in 2001—different not only for the poet who uses them but for the society in which the language lives. Dating poems is not a way of confining them to their occasions in time but a gloss on where they come from, part of the process of reading the occasion back into them. This is true even of the early poems. In The Diamond Cutters (1955) she visits Europe, still bruised by war damage, and declares:
We come like dreamers searching for an answer,
Passionately in need to reconstruct
The columned roofs under the blazing sky,
The courts so open, so forever locked.
And some of us, as dreamers, excavate
Under the blanching light of sleep’s high noon,
The artifacts of thought, the site of love,
Whose Hadrian has given the slip, and gone.
The little metrical rush of the last line reveals what skill she leaves behind when she abandons meter. Here already, inadvertently, is the manifesto of the poet who will write Diving into the Wreck and the feminist and radical-feminist poetry that will excavate and reinterpret the ruins. She is the new custodian, cherishing and changing. In “Diving into the Wreck” she writes,
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.
Compassion and commitment do not always go together; or rather, compassion must know when it should turn to anger and action if it is not to become complicit in the ills it compassionates. “Art” gives way to a greater immediate intensity; balance goes in favor of a different kind of truth-telling. In the title poem of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law she becomes restless. Her art and her sense of what a poet ought to be and how a poet ought to speak have restrained her too long. A different note enters her voice; she implicates herself.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.
The poems show women—Emily Dickinson among them—as figures of strength in action or achievement, as forms of Woman:
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
With this volume Adrienne Rich forgets her manners and turns from a concern with style to a responsibility to voice. Eavan Boland records, “For the first time, we hear a distinctive note: the sound of a silenced woman suddenly able to voice a conventional suppression in terms of an imaginative one.”
Adrienne Rich knew something fundamental had occurred. “I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials according to a prior plan.” It was 1964. “The poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experience I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.” It was a change that many of her contemporaries, male and female, went through, leaving behind the acceptable and sanctioned world of the closed lyric in search of the “deep image.” Unlike her contemporaries, Rich had some idea of what she would like to find, so that when—in the unconscious, on the television screen, in the street—she happened upon it she would recognize it. Where they as often as not dredged up ghostly forms and false gods, she had a shareable shape to look for. Conventional forms will not be of use here. The line, unpunctuated, becomes a rhythmic unit, matter-of-fact and firm. The music is vertical, not horizontal, a sequence of alert phrases rather than an integrating flow. In Diving into the Wreck she says
...the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down
feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire...
Eavan Boland writes of her poems: “They contest the structure of the poetic tradition. They interrogate language itself. In all of this, they describe a struggle and record a moment which was not my struggle and would never be my moment... And yet these poems came to the very edge of the rooms I worked in, dreamed in, listened for a child’s cry in... I felt that the life I lived was not the one these poems commended. It was too far from the tumult, too deep in the past. And yet these poems helped me live it... Truly important poets change two things and never one without the other: the interior of the poem and external perceptions of the identity of the poet.”
The later books are variously polemical. In 1997 Eavan Boland introduced Selected Poems, which includes work from before and after Wreck that had appeared in The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995). Changes between 1951 and 1997 are large. Feminism, lesbianism, political affection and disaffection spoiled her good manners. So too did a sense of the internal alterations of poetry necessary if she was to find, and then tell, the “truth” of experience as a woman—not confessional strategies that would individuate and bourgeoisify her, but comradely strategies that would be serviceable as processes for her readers, enabling them to enact for themselves the adjustments her poems proposed.
In the foreword to her first substantial book of essays, Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), Rich wrote, “The entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over. One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.” If for Octavio Paz modernism is a tradition of discontinuity, for women writers it is “the phenomenon of interruption.” I keep thinking of Charlotte Smith and Charlotte Mew. Rich has been one of the important writers busy drawing out and drawing together a relatively coherent tradition of women’s writing, international and multicultural, whose beginnings are grasped and understood.
Her second major prose collection seems to rebel against the radical feminist separatism implied in the first. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993) suggests that separatism may have done its work and that the writing can again become inclusive. “The oppressor’s language” has been to some extent made over. Because her poems insist on their occasions, their place in history, they do not invite imitation, but their processes and concerns can be transposed. She is formally the most enabling of poets, though in terms of texture we might feel she has deliberately impoverished herself.
Eavan Boland was not influenced by Rich, “And yet,” she says, “these poems came to the very edge of the rooms I worked in, dreamed in, listened for a child’s cry in,” and perhaps in her ambitious poem “Anna Liffey” the refrains and cadence pay a kind of tribute to Rich. Boland’s own life and moment are remote from Rich’s, however; her mission and her poetry quite different.
Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a senior diplomat: Irish ambassador during her childhood to the Court of St. James and then to the United Nations (“My father had a superb intelligence, but it was a rational one”). Her mother was a painter, trained in France, her work on view at the National Gallery, Dublin. Orphaned early, her mother had a foster mother who was a fine storyteller, and into the young poet’s childhood her mother introduced “this wonderful fragrance of the unrational, the inexplicable, the eloquent fragment.” “What We Lost,” from the sequence “Outside History,” evokes the broken narratives between women. A countrywoman is sewing, evening gathers, the candles are lit, a child waits. Tea is poured, and in the quiet domestic interior, where so many of Boland’s poems are set,
The child grows still, sensing something of importance.
The woman settles and begins her story.
Believe it, what we lost is here in this room
on this veiled evening.
The woman finishes. The story ends.
The child, who is my mother, gets up, moves away.
In the winter air, unheard, unshared,
the moment happens, hangs fire, leads nowhere.
The light will fall and the room darken,
the child fall asleep and the story be forgotten.
The fields are dark already.
The frail connections have been made and are broken.
The dumb-show of legend has become language,
is becoming silence and who will know that once
words were possibilities and disappointments,
were scented closets filled with love-letters
and memories and lavender hemmed into muslin,
stored in sachets, aired in bed-linen;
and travelled silks and the tones of cotton
tautened into bodices, subtly shaped by breathing;
were the rooms of childhood with their griefless peace,
their hands and whispers, their candles weeping brightly?
The last ten lines are a single sentence making the connections between objects though the connections between words are lost. When the stories are forgotten the artifacts, the made and cherished things, are the only text the woman has to work with in making her connections, discovering the active verbs and running syntax of a sentence she could call her own. It was her mother—and her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey, whom she married in 1969—who gave her “a sense of the geography of the imagination.”
She lived in London from the age of six to twelve, in a large residence, rather displaced by her accent and her culture from other children. “Some of the feelings I recognise as having migrated into themes I keep going back to—exile, types of estrangement, a relation to objects—began there.” Boland lived in New York for a time, returning to Ireland in her midteens to school. Before going up to university she took a job and saved to print her first pamphlet of poems in 1963. She attended Trinity College, Dublin. Hers is the generation of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Brendan Kennelly. Patrick Kavanagh was as important to her as he was to them. But apart from the intellectual stimulus of that environment, there were deprivations she began to feel. The “genderless poem” is what was expected of her. There was the danger of becoming an honorary male poet or, in the cruel terminology of some feminist critics, a “male-identified female poet.” In “The Achill Woman,” the poet, a student preparing for finals, retires to a rural croft to revise “the Court poets of the Silver Age” and one evening encounters a countrywoman, speaks with her and begins to find herself. It is an incident to which Boland has referred in prose essays and interviews, the point at which she began to apprehend her Irishness and her womanhood as something given, positive and in the broadest sense political:
but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend
the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery
and language borrows from ambition—
The poets she could no longer comprehend were those who, like Spenser and Ralegh, had fought to control the ancestors of that Achill woman.
Boland attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book, New Territory, appeared in 1967. She had already begun to break away physically and imaginatively from the Dublin scene, to create a gendered space and insist on its different boundaries and its very distinct dynamic. “I went to the suburbs. I married. I had two children.” Here she discovered, as she wrote, “that what went into the Irish poem and what stayed outside it was both tense and hazardous for an Irish woman poet.” Irish women have had to negotiate from being objects in the Irish poem to being authors of it. In earlier poems, “You could have a political murder but not a baby.” It was a time of cautious adjustment—like Rich, she knew that change in life as in art has to be worked for and cannot be effected in a moment. “I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the life.” In 1975 The War Horse appeared, an uneasy collection, followed by two books that mark a radical departure for her, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), poems that confront the subject matter of love, womanhood, motherhood—the physiology, the tensions and emotions of the complex domestic vocation. “Night Feed is the book I could have been argued out of, if I had let myself listen to what was around me.” But she listened to poems, to Plath’s poetry, for instance, which took her closer to her experience and through natural reticences about bringing into a poem the facts of menstruation and childbirth, breastfeeding and the dailiness of a woman’s life. It was a case of “the visionary risk of the life I lived becoming the poems I wrote.” Kavanagh, Clarke and Padraic Fallon had to work out from the great poem of Yeats; they had to “write a whole psychic terrain back into it.” Indeed, the overshadowed Irish poet, the poet who isn’t Yeats, or Heaney, has always to clear a space in the shadow of these presences. Boland was writing “a whole psychic terrain” into the Irish poem as well, not again but for the first time.
After Night Feed and some poems in The Journey (1986) she was labeled a “domestic poet.” She accepted the label and saw herself as a subversive, “an indoor nature poet,” having memorably described what nature poets do—“someone like Frost, or the best of John Clare, for example. Their lexicon is the overlooked and the disregarded. They are revelatory poets. They single out the devalued and make a deep, metaphorical relation between it and some devalued parts of perception... What happens is that the poet becomes the agent in the poem for a different way of seeing.” Frost and Clare: Theirs is not formal innovation but an extension of the lexicon, a new “diction” accommodating experience and voice.
At every point it is the poetry that registers her intentions, that alters and develops in response to what is no longer available, what is newly perceived. But the poem is not instrumental, though the prose that surrounds it may be. Rich uses her poems to make declarations; her poems can be useful, use may even be their primary intention. Boland respects her art in a different way. Truthfulness is not, as in Rich, primarily to the moment. Language is more stable for her than for Rich. Of her feminism, she says it is “an enabling perception but it’s not an aesthetic one. The poem is a place—at least for me—where all kinds of certainties stop. All sorts of beliefs, convictions, certainties get left on that threshold. I couldn’t be a feminist poet. Simply because the poem is a place of experience and not a place of convictions.” Such clarity challenges her generation and is an example to the next.
Like Rich, she acknowledges the importance of workshops. In 1982 she started one in Kilkenny, where those who attended experienced “the freedom to speak with other women of hard things; speaking from shared experience of womanhood” and writing out of it. She remains an active teacher, now in the United States, where she is director of the writing program at Stanford University.
Her own work of the 1980s was marked by a sharpening interest not so much in form and genre—traditional, lyric, unmetered or whatever—as in the line. Her first major book, The Journey, understands as part of her radical transition a necessary stylization to bring line and voice into accord, then line, voice and stanza. She began to risk again the long line, taking her bearings and some of her narrative and imagery from Virgil. She is the most classical woman poet since H.D.
Outside History (1990) is her most popular book. “Here I was in a different ethical area. Writing about the lost, the voiceless, the silent. And exploring my relation to them. And—more dangerous still—feeling my ways into the powerlessness of an experience through the power of expressing it. This wasn’t an area of artistic experiment. It was an area of ethical imagination, where you had to be sure, every step of the way—every word and every line—that it was good faith and good poetry. And it couldn’t be one without the other.”
Boland is a poet who understands what she is up to with uncanny clarity. Her major sequences often appear alongside a substantial essay, telling herself and her readers what she intends, discussing the difficulties of composition and defining the space the poem occupies. In a Time of Violence (1994) was no exception: “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. That’s a very different undertaking for a woman poet than for a poet like Yeats... A woman poet has to grow old in poems in which she has been fixed in youth and passivity: in beauty and ornament. The sexual has to be separated from the erotic... The woman poet has to write her poem free of any resonance of the object she once was in it.” “Anna Liffey” is her most ambitious poem to date, a highly rhythmical fusion of self, woman, mother, river. It is rapt, repetitive, the song of a kind of Liffey-maiden, not a meditation but a forward vision. There are uncharacteristic echoes in it—of “Diving into the Wreck,” perhaps; of the Eliot of “Ash Wednesday” and maybe of Four Quartets. Surely not! But I think there are. Her misgivings about modernism have much to do with the fact that the experimentation and the solutions proposed were aesthetic. The aesthetic solution excludes; Object Lessons, her substantial prose work, considers some of those exclusions, and the 1995 Collected Poems reveals how rapidly a poet who takes risks one at a time can move, and how far she can go. The progression, book to book, is part of the fascination of her work.
The American poet Louise Glück provides the same fascination in her trajectory, different though that trajectory is. In an essay she writes, “One of the revelations of art is the discovery of a tone or perspective at once wholly unexpected and wholly true to a set of materials.” This truth to materials—language, occasion, antecedent—is the proof of a poem. For the poet the question of truth (variously conceived) outweighs all others. In “The Silver Lily” she says:
White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.
And in the crook, where the tree divides,
leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight
soft greenish-silver.
We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who’ve been with a man—
after the first cries,
doesn’t joy, like fear, make no sound?
This, from her Pulitzer Prize collection The Wild Iris (1993), embodies the tact for truth that opens possibilities without affirming anything. Helen Vendler wrote of the connections such a poetry makes: “Her poems... have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry... What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.”
Glück’s earlier books include Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), the Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990). She teaches at Williams College and lives in Vermont. Her firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness. “Hawk’s Shadow” is terrifyingly prescient, as though Yeats’s Leda answered back.
Embracing in the road
for some reason I no longer remember
and then drawing apart, seeing
that shape ahead—how close was it?
We looked up to where the hawk
hovered with its kill; I watched them
veering toward West Hill, casting
their one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
shape of the predator—
Then they disappeared. And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me.
Every end of a book is for her a “conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off,” in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the just-finished volume as defining the tasks of the next. It is a conscious but not a predetermined evolution, marking time in changes. Readers hear specifics of sequence: the ferocious tension of her first book moves toward the finely spun lyricism of the second. The nouns of that book acquire intimate weight and become the icons of her third collection, then rise to an archetypal, mythic scale in the fourth. The fifth, Ararat, is perhaps her least successful, its place in the sequence less certain. But the poems are as various as the force of the poet’s intelligence is constant. The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.
There is a similar sense of connected development, book by book, in the more expansive, less certain work of Jorie Graham. She explores the erotic with unusual clarity and assurance. In “The Strangers,” from her book The Errancy (1996), she writes:
The hand I placed on you, what if it
didn’t exist, where it began, the declension
of your opening shirt, dusk postponed in each glazed and arctic
button, pale reddish shirt—what if it doesn’t
exist—these fingers browsing the cotton surface, swimming in the steadfast surface—
what if there’s no place it can exist
this looking for a place to lie down in,
to make a tiny civilization...
It is a pensive, erotic book and follows on the substantial selection—from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991) and Materialism (1993)—in her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Dream of the Unified Field (1995). Graham approaches a number of numinous characters, each an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political or spiritual desire—desire seeking its place in an age of betrayed values, where dreaming is rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. Error she explores as a heroic form of finding one’s way—a purposeful wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage in which the heart’s longing is guide. Lovers celebrate the body; angels deliver celestial warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal; a few soldiers sleep before a sepulcher while something inexplicable happens behind their backs. In its abundance, the poetry is remote from Glück’s and Boland’s; in its refusal to clarify it has little in common with Rich’s, either; yet these three poets in one way and another have helped clear a space for this questing work, in which sacred and spiritual, celestial and corporeal, attempt to coexist. Graham writes in “The Visible World”:
I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
manoeuvre, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters... A series of successive single instances...
Frames of reference moving...
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged and rippling
mosses.
Her poetry insists that “the visible world” exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the merely subjective or lyrical, she ventures with philosophical rigor into an area “saturated with phenomena,” in Helen Vendler’s phrase, a place of shifting perspectives and abrupt changes, sometimes vertiginous in their reversals. Poetry and science collaborate in her work, finding a tense equilibrium. History, too, has a place. Hers is a new kind of narrative, offering open forms full of possibility. Her inclusive art takes big risks. Ashbery describes her “utterance that swings with the conviction of Blake’s, that one does not want to stop listening to.” Her Blake has little in common with Ginsberg’s. Blake insisted that he wrote the Prophetic Books “from immediate dictation and even against my will.” He doesn’t always know what he’s saying. Graham is that sort of poet, finding what she has to say less in the process of saying than in reflecting on the finished work.
On the other side of the world, Judith Wright never lets her poetry “out of her hands.” One feels she could vouch for and justify every syllable she sets down, even those from the weak middle books, where she tried to swallow too much philosophy. Yet she does in Australia, and with fewer literary resources, some of the things that Boland and Rich do in Ireland and the United States. She marks out a space, not only for the experience of woman in poetry, but for the experience of other voices that the tradition and history of Australia have silenced or driven (until latterly) to the margins. Was her celebrated “Lament for Passenger Pigeons” influenced by Eliot? Stevens? Dante? Its themes are ecological, feminist avant la lettre. Its generic nature is not quite satire, or elegy: Is there a new genre, material celebration? Could it be that the poem is largely her own, as the later poems undoubtedly are, and in their themes the early poems as well?
Wright was born in 1915, the year of Gallipoli, in New South Wales. The First World War overshadowed her early years: her history seemed to be happening in another world. Then came a harsh Depression, the Second World War (when Australia was genuinely threatened, Darwin was bombed and history was nearer at hand). These facts overarch the early and middle work.
Wright’s antecedents were English, French, Scots, “pastoralists rather than farmers”—owners of shire-sized lands on which sheep were raised. Her father was an enlightened landholder interested in native Australian things and even in the people. Early on she was aware of Aboriginal dispossession and the brutal inequity of the terra nullius position (the legal position that the land was previously unpossessed) of the national government. “Niggers Leap,” “Bora Ring” and other poems touch on the theme, and on the “clearances,” which in the interests of creating pasture altered the ecology of the country forever.
She was brought up thirty miles from the nearest town and started school at thirteen. Before that she did “correspondence lessons,” supervised by her mother, who died when Wright was eleven, and whose pedagogic role was filled by an aunt and then governesses. She hated her Anglican boarding school: its arbitrary rules and disciplines strengthened the individual and rebel in her. Serious education for women was not considered important at the time. Her paternal grandmother, who possessed an excellent library, encouraged her to go to university; she was the first woman in her family to do so. She did clerical work for a time, associated herself with the journal Meanjin Papers and lived modestly and creatively. Her early books caused a small stir: she was doing something unusual and from the outset her themes were not those of the male writers of the day. They doffed their caps to her (which kept her in her place without robbing her of her self-respect). The Moving Image appeared in 1946. Her chief model appears to have been the King James Version of the Bible. In 1949 a more original and radical volume followed, Woman to Man, and in 1953, The Gateway. She married Jack McKinney, a nonacademic philosopher with whom she collaborated in works that her admirers did not admire.
Her poems changed direction. They became deliberately philosophical, centering on ideas that no longer came with the embodied wholeness, the psychological completeness of the earlier poems. Her later books do not stay at this point, however: she grows through the ruminative period, so that from book to book, widely spaced (The Two Fires, of 1955, The Other Half, of 1966, Alive, of 1973 and Phantom Dwelling, of 1986), she recovered her own skills, much enhanced by what she had learned during the collaborative period. In 1986 she announced that she would write no more poems, dedicating her remaining years to the issues of land rights. In 1991 she assembled A Human Pattern, her definitive selected poems, ending with the astonishing sequence of ghazals, a poetic form like the couplet, “The Shadow of Fire,” which in their condensed brevity owe a debt to Oriental verse, and in formal choice to Persian. She deliberately aligned herself, after the decades of working in European forms, with the cultures nearer at hand: she became an Asian. So in “Notes from the Edge” she declares
I used to love Keats, Blake;
now I try haiku
for its honed brevities,
its inclusive silences.
Issa. Shiki. Buson. Bash¯o.
Few words and with no rhetoric.
Enclosed by silence
as is the thrush’s call.
The main verb disappears, the poems seek stasis. In “Dust,” a ghazal from the sequence, she puts her new approach to the test:
In my sixty-eighth year drought stopped the song of the rivers,
sent ghosts of wheatfield blowing over the sky.
In the swimming-hole the water’s dropped so low
I bruise my knees on rocks which are new acquaintances.
The daybreak moon is blurred in a gauze of dust.
Long ago my mother’s face looked through a grey motor-veil.
Fallen leaves on the current scarcely move.
But the azure kingfisher flashes upriver still.
Poems written in age confuse the years.
We all live, said Bash¯o, in a phantom dwelling.
The rift between her “European vision” and the “non-European reality” in which she lived had begun to trouble her in her middle years.
The blue crane fishing on Cooloolah’s twilight
has fished there longer than our centuries.
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
and he will wear their colour till he dies;
but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in
and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake.
Between the “construct” of European nature and the “reality” of the Aboriginal sense of and contact with nature was a vast gulf. How could a poet of the privileged classes negotiate it? Being a woman helped, being a woman of liberal temperament and strong character. The women she wished to reach—writers in particular—welcomed her, especially Oodgeroo (Kath Walker), whose work Wright has championed.
There is in the middle work an oversimple set of dualities which the poems play between: man and woman, outdoors and indoors, labor and love—raw and cooked, as Lévi-Strauss puts it. It was more complex cultural dichotomies that led to the great poems in Phantom Dwelling: they were not susceptible to easy polarizations, and besides, Wright did not want to become native but to understand what it meant, and what her ancestors had done to it and its meanings. Her prose books The Generations of Men (in semifictional form) and The Cry for the Dead (a more literal narrative) explored this area.
Though Wright belongs chronologically to the generation of A. D. Hope and James McAuley, she seems to belong equally to the two generations that followed, her own work changing and leading the changes in Australian writing and opening a way for the new poetry of the older people. Like them she has a sense of good and of evil; the latter is not metaphysical so much as a sense of good wasted. Moral rather than metaphysical, her poems are didactic, moving between personal, social and ethical concerns. Man is continually touched by a grace he repeatedly denies. It is almost too late, she says; but like Cassandra she keeps talking—now in prose.
Gwen Harwood, five years Wright’s junior, brings different priorities to Australian poetry. Born in Brisbane in 1920, she had a radiant childhood. She spent much of her life in Tasmania. A musician by training, she combined two vocations. She was deeply familiar with Wittgenstein, whose words “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” set her on her way to becoming a poet. Raising her family, she kept her poetry private until the 1950s, when she began letting the work out. Her reputation has grown steadily: a wide public responds to her generally upbeat and positive vision. The poems are scrupulously crafted, rhymed, lyrical (and sometimes very funny). Beside the open, large-scale and “answerable” poems of Wright, Harwood’s work is more “social” in an eighteenth-century way, “polite” even when it is being boldly erotic, satirical and self-parodying. There is nothing insistently of her country in the poems—a detail, a place name—but for her the sole challenge is being human, not being human and Australian. In “Carnal Knowledge II” she writes:
Roses knocked on the glass.
Wine like a running stream
no evil spell could cross
flowed round the house of touch.
God grant me drunkenness
if this is sober knowledge,
song to melt sea and sky
apart, and lift these hills
from the dark shadow of what was,
and roll them back, and lie
in naked ignorance
in the hollow of your thigh.
This is the obverse of A. D. Hope’s vehement, disgusted eroticism and Ginsberg’s misogyny. Here is a poet who wrote from the body simply, without the wild complications of Jorie Graham. In elegy, lyric and satire she celebrated the facts of being, making poems out of what the flesh in love, in childbirth, motherhood, aging and loss, taught her. She died in 1995.
Allen Curnow also celebrates, but in a language that has made necessary choices, engaged with modernism and learned to make new forms. He was born in Timaru, New Zealand, in 1911. Educated at Canterbury and Auckland universities, after a period of study for the Anglican ministry he turned to journalism, working as far afield as Fleet Street. In 1951 he joined the English Department at the University of Auckland, where he taught until 1976. He has published poetry, plays and criticism and edited two books of New Zealand verse. With James K. Baxter and C. K. Stead he stands at the head of a distinctive New Zealand poetry. In 1939 he published his first book, Not in Narrow Seas, which was entirely excluded from his highly selective Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941–1997. It was, despite his later view of it, an important volume, setting out to add to “the anti-myth about New Zealand.” From such deliberate, even essayistic intent and formal conventionality his work has moved far. The distilled Early Days Yet reduces the volume of his oeuvre to 240 carefully chosen pages, about a third of his actual output.
Curnow is a poet who remembers his journalistic training. There is great particularity about the poems and there are journalistic subjects, too: the kidnapping and murder of the Italian politician Aldo Moro and urgent news stories that emerge from history with all the freshness of a morning headline. He also remembers what language must do and what it can do in verse. The various musicality of his writing is unique in New Zealand poetry; against Baxter’s Jacobean consonantal rhetoric, Curnow generally seems to be close to song, even when the language of the poem seems closest to speech. The changes of key can be sudden and effective—he is by turns funny, coarse, commonplace, scabrous, impassioned. The late poems spend their time in retrospection, a kind of return journey looking at the first years not with nostalgia but as places that are because they were, and are real still, only fading. They never lose hold on the present. This is the summation of the themes in “Continuum,” the title poem of his 1988 collection:
The moon rolls over the roof and falls behind
my house, and the moon does neither of these things,
I am talking about myself.
It’s not possible to get off to sleep or
the subject or the planet, nor to think thoughts.
Better barefoot it out the front
door and lean from the porch across the privets
and the palms into the washed-out creation,
a dark place with two particular
bright clouds dusted (query) by the moon, one’s mine
the other’s an adversary, which may depend
on the wind, or something.
A long moment stretches, the next one is not
on time. Not unaccountably the chill of
the planking underfoot rises
in the throat, for its part the night sky empties
the whole of its contents down. Turn on a bare
heel, close the door behind
on the author, cringing demiurge, who picks up
his litter and his tools and paces me back
to bed, stealthily in step.
Curnow is described by Peter Porter as “this modern master.” “He has been a major voice at every stage of his career,” writes C. K. Stead, “knowing what he is about, moving at his own pace, inventive, unpredictable, writing poetry which strikes me, as it has done serially over the years, as unsurpassed by the work of any other poet at present writing in English.”
Curnow survived; James K. Baxter died at the age of forty-six, with over 600 pages of Collected Poems (1979) in a volume that excluded his more scabrous and ephemeral writings. He was one of the most precocious poets of the century, whose neglect outside New Zealand baffles me. He is certainly uneven. The poetry that was damaged by his serious alcoholism and much of the later work written with the assistance of drugs but without an articulate supporting culture of the kind that sustained Ginsberg is poor, but the best writing, some of it from the darkest periods, is “major,” if that word retains any useful sense today.
In a lecture he recalls how he wrote his first poem. “I climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea, and there fell into the attitude of listening out of which poems may rise—not to the sound of the sea, but to the unheard sound of which poems are translations—it was then that I first endured that intense effort of listening, like a man chained to the ground trying to stand upright and walk—and from this intensity of listening the words emerged—
‘O Ocean, in thy rocky bed
The starry fishes swim about—
There coral rocks are strewn around
Like some great temple on the ground...’
I was then seven years old. I don’t think my methods of composition have changed much since that time. The daimon has always to be invoked; and there is no certainty that he will answer the invitation.” His first book was published when he was eighteen. It was called Beyond the Palisade and included a number of elegies. Allen Curnow spotted him and included his work the next year in the first of his key anthologies of New Zealand poetry. Later Baxter turned on Curnow, on his poetry and his politics.
Baxter embodies contradictions: a patriot who could be savage about his native land; a Roman Catholic who insisted on a kind of independence within the Church that broke its rules and institutions; a missionary to the Maoris whose culture he sentimentalized and, in a way, adopted; a father who watched his children inject drugs. One could go on, but such facts do not tell us much about how he got there or what the poems do with his experience.
Baxter’s father, an Otago farmer who educated himself, was a pacifist during the First World War. His mother, the daughter of a professor of English and classics, herself educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, encouraged her son to write. He was born in 1926. When he was eleven the family went to Europe for two years, and he returned ill at ease with the New Zealand world. His father’s pacifism set the family apart, and this exclusion told on the boy. When he went to university in Otago at the age of seventeen, he soon fell into alcoholism. He dropped out, took odd jobs, tried again at university. “In Christchurch I associated with Denis Glover and Allen Curnow and became a member of the Church of England.” After many struggles he became a BA. In 1958 he traveled to India and Japan, saw the poor, and began the long march of conscience toward his conversion to Catholicism and Jerusalem, the religious community he established in 1968 and where he became the wild guru. He wrote in “Tokyo 1958”:
The wind has a wrestler’s legs. The sun’s bonfire
Blazes at dawn on flooded streets.
Typhoon Ida is hungry over Tokaido.
Houses are smashed like kites.
Bring ladders for the poor. They fall
Like scraps of clay from the potter’s wheel.
In 1958 Oxford University Press took him on and he began to find readers abroad.
He certainly found models abroad. He drew on Dylan Thomas and Yeats; then on MacNeice among the 1930s poets, and on some of his American contemporaries, notably Lowell, whose Life Studies made an impact. The Jerusalem Sonnets (1970) mark a high point of candor and originality, in his language, his forms and his human vision.
In 1943 he was seventeen. He wrote “Prelude N. Z.,” which begins,
No dream, no old enchantment chains this land;
Its ice and dripping forests know
one spell alone deeper than spell of snow:
The life that knows not life. There stand
nor megaliths nor tombs upon our plains;
Torrential rains
on man-unmastered mountains flow; our valleys
waken to thunder-volleys...
It is less the sense of the poem, which is an amalgam of Hopkins, Thomas and native atavisms, than the prosody which is astonishing; the control of the diminishing rhymed line, the way in which syntax and meter work in counterpoint to generate the shape of the stanza, are unusual at any time of day. It is only rhetoric, but of a high order, and the rhetorically less ambitious poems of the same period are, several of them, excellent. “The Bay,” written when he was twenty, finds language for a landscape that as it is created in the mind’s eye becomes imaginary—and more real. “Songs of the Desert,” also an early work (fourteen poems in a sequence) is his first attempt at extended form and an exercise in oblique confession. His first major sequence is “Pig Island Letters,” informal and emphatic, intemperate.
The Jerusalem Sonnets are written in couplets, rhyme wandering in and out at will. The community is a place where people and animals also wander in and out, lost in their spiritual or psychic thoughts. The thirty-sixth sonnet, “Brother Ass, Brother Ass,” characteristically begins in humor and goodwill, then leads toward the Crucifixion. Throughout the sequence there are wonderful similes: “Like an old horse turned to grass I lift my head / Biting at the blossoms of the thorn tree.” The thirty-nine sonnets are his best single achievement, and his last sequence, Autumn Testament, retains some of its virtues, but the verse is tired, the syntax short of breath, the poet become so much the guru that the poems aspire to the status of homily and parable.
Why did Baxter write so much? His is not the casual copiousness of the Beats or Frank O’Hara; he is not effusive or “spontaneous.” He revised his poems. He worked hard at them and there is progression, and yet a final thinness of subject, as though the language exceeds its occasions two to one. And Baxter repeats himself, not always saying it better the second time round. Elements in his lifestyle in his last years recall the world of the Beats, but he believed—he had Christ even if he did address Lenin as “Brother”; he had a ritual, a communion based on a revealed God. He carried on his back the weight of the Fall, and neither drink nor drugs lightened that burden. Indeed, it grew heavier with each escape and return, even to the dusty pared-down world of Jerusalem. His is not Ginsberg’s Blake of liberation but the Blake who writes, in his very different Jerusalem, how “all the tortures of repentance are tortures of self-reproach on account of our leaving the divine harvest to the enemy, the struggles of entanglement with incoherent roots.” The Gospel and the faith should free mind and body to make, to work the imagination, but they remain, outside the act of creating, the trammeled mind and body he describes.
Though Baxter was not a “sweet-myself” Beatnik, in a sense he deserved to be; a society with men of Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s vertiginous anarchy might have sustained and directed his talent and energy into formal innovation. The pain of his huge talent, the spilling of so much of it over conventional stones, leaves the reader bemused. Baxter does not quite make it new; he does not make it consistently real. The success is huge and rhetorical, the failure intimate and formal.
William Stanley Merwin, a year Baxter’s junior, took some of the same lifestyle byways that led the New Zealander into a life of fatal vision. But he was not so cruelly driven as Baxter, nor has he made such strenuous demands on himself in service of his art. He was a precocious youngster, writing—he reports—hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister, when he was a boy, and then illustrating them. Such close proximity to a living religious vocation seems both to have inspired and repelled him. At Princeton he discovered poetry of a more modern and less monitory kind and, urged along by John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur, he found his other vocation, studying foreign literatures and becoming a formidable translator, of El Cid and the Song of Roland as well as the French Symbolists and Octavio Paz. His own poetry has now led, now followed, his work as a translator. There are some fifteen volumes of translation and a similar number of original collections.
There was a time in the late 1960s when translation seemed to have destroyed the texture of his verse. He discovered (indeed, he may have helped to invent) the “international style” of translation, without semantic depth and rhythmically undemanding, a fact he recognized and described in his poem “Losing a Language.” He develops in an intriguing pattern, from the deliberated, archaizing formalism of his first book, A Masque for Janus (1952), the title itself alluding to a ceremonial and courtly mode long exhausted, to his recent books designed to be read as books and including a vision rooted in the threatened ecology of Hawaii, where he leads a life more deliberately “primal” than that he lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where he spent his formative years.
He is a persuasive essayist and prose writer: his own work is subjected to his shrewd critical investigations. The 1988 Selected Poems reveals how the poet was falling to pieces in The Carrier of Ladders (1970), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and which unaccountably remains his most celebrated volume. Since that time he has reinvented himself, on this side of Vietnam, and with a devotion to the planet which has moved from the baroque to the Doric, a style that has consciously simplified itself even as its themes have become more demanding. Detail gives way, sometimes fatally, to type and archetype. His use of rhymed form, as in “Lament for the Makers” with its very distant allusion to Dunbar, is awkward: now beguiling, now appalling. Elegy itself, as a form, falters and—given how copious a poet he has been—ends in a ghostly irony. The “clear note” the dead poets were hearing
never promised anything
but the true sound of brevity
that will go on after me.
In his prose writings, especially in Unframed Originals (1994), the world of lived particulars is real in ways the poetry at times forgets to be.