6
Charles Altieri
T.S. Eliot is probably the most important modernist American poet because his work seems to have “foresuffered” all of the problems driving the entire cultural enterprise. Consider Eliot’s poem “Opera,” written in 1909 when he was a graduate student at Harvard. The first 10 lines present the speaker at an opera performance fascinated by how the singers fling themselves at the “last limits of self‐expression.” Then the speaker turns to look at himself looking, a common feature in Eliot’s work:
We have the tragic. Oh No!
Life departs with a feeble smile
Into the indifferent.
These emotional experiences
Do not hold good at all,
And I feel like the ghost of youth
At the undertaker’s ball.
(Eliot 1996: 17)
Personal crisis becomes social and historical because traditions like our understanding of the tragic “do not hold good at all.” Efforts claiming to be pursuing arts of self‐expression seem now empty rhetoric, as if performances served primarily as pathetic bids for unwarranted attention. So, the speaker seems bound to respond with an equally theatrical and equally empty set of figures, as if the only way to respond to disappointment were not just to describe it but to embody it in his own art.
Compare the tone in the following explicitly imagist poem. This is the final stanza of “The Pike” by Amy Lowell:
Out from under the reeds
Came the olive‐green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun‐thickened water.
So the fish passed across the pool,
Green and copper,
A darkness and a gleam,
And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank
Received it.
(Lowell 2004: 20)
Here there is no overt self‐expression and no art intended to define a failed social order. The poet is content to present sensations, as if the sensations themselves could constitute a sufficient mode of intricate self‐consciousness capable of thriving independently of any social order. Lowell seems to seek forms of lyric satisfaction that can simply bypass how Eliot’s consciousness seems doomed to express its dissatisfied difference from what it observes. There are levels of communication and belonging between the world of the pike and the world of the willows that provide a satisfying alternative to Eliot’s hopelessly isolating chain of self‐reflections. Poetry and living well prove compatible arts.
Eliot’s alienated self‐consciousness offers one substantial measure of why imagism was so exciting to other young poets. Here was a mode of poetry equally suspicious of operatic ideals inspiring an intensely rhetorical poetry of good civic conscience. Yet the mind did not have to dwell on what set it apart from that civic life. Rather it could embrace what Pound called “a new realism” devoted negatively to the critique of sentimentality and rhetoric, and positively to the three basic principles of imagism: to produce “direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective,” “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” and “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome” (Pound 1968: 3). Such directness in image, diction, and rhythm would allow the new poetry to seek “the presentation” of an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” that gives “that sense of sudden liberation … which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art” (Pound 1968: 4). The new poetry could oppose “presentation” to “representation” and so project a poetry that did not labor to picture the real but rather to enact it in the process of laboring to restore a sense of value to immediate experience – an immense achievement in a society haunted by gaps between what could count as fact and what mattered for individual sensibilities.
I have been asked to produce an account of the massive enterprise built on these modernist values – roughly from 1912 to the early 1960s. Because one could complete this task just listing young poets who came to New York City during these years, I will have to impose some severe restrictions. In order to set the stage for appreciating the cultural and intellectual pressures driving this poetry I will focus on establishing five basic contextual frames for motivating the work poetry can accomplish. But I will not be able to attach these frames to cultural and historical particulars; readers can easily do that if they are interested. Instead, I have to concentrate on how poets’ imaginations succeed in making us care about the poets’ ways of articulating possible attitudes toward concerns distinctive to twentieth‐century life. Therefore, I will have to assume that one or two poems carefully read are more likely to get readers interested in a writer than an abstract survey of a career.1
Basic Frameworks from Which to Appreciate Modernist Poetry
My first frame will try to characterize the original modernists’ emerging understanding of how they could develop and orient modes of poetic attention sharply critical of the poets’ literary heritage. Therefore, we have to ask what sense of values drove Pound to elaborate imagist presentational ideals for the first self‐consciously modernist American poetry. But then, as we read a short Pound lyric, we will see that a second framework immediately becomes necessary. In many ways, the success of imagism created for other modernists the primary problems with which they had to grapple. Imagism managed to find spirit largely in awakening the senses – in relation to the world and in relation to what the language of lyric could establish. Yet what if there was something like an inner sensuousness characterized by the full energies of mind seeking to become present in the poet’s work? Then imagism had to resist from within its own enabling aesthetic principles. This is why Pound turned to vorticism, then classicism, then to the ideogrammic constructivism of his Cantos. And this is why poets like William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy tried to elaborate modes of presentation that stressed powers traditionally linked to spirit, like the powers to construct elaborate structures and to mine the full resources of the linguistic medium. Their hope was powerfully defined by George Oppen in 1934 as the effort to “construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry – from the imagist intensity of vision” (Dembo 1969: 161). Poetry could present the mind’s investments in constructing elaborate syntactic and relational fields, considerably expanding how images might take on resonance.
The idea of “construction” helps introduce my third framework by making it possible to link these experiments in developing distinctive lyric methods of thought with the cranky but immensely suggestive stress on impersonality in poetry making Eliot the most influential of the modernists. I will suggest that the ideal of impersonality made possible treating acts of lyric presentation as warranted by historical conditions rather than by subjective desires. Then poets could present themselves as primarily persons carrying out a craft rather than serving as designated crazies testing the boundaries of what culture could make of intense personal experience. As workers in a craft, poets could claim to be seeking kinds of knowledge rather than expressing personal conditions, and thus they could, in their eyes at least, vie with the sciences for authoritative assessments of the modern world. And, perhaps more important, a poetics of impersonality had to stress the internal relations constructed by the art work as the locus of expressive force, since they could not rely on overt personal energies. These internal relations, freedom from reference to a self, could be seen as making claims on the real based on how they amalgamated thought and feeling. So, art’s worldliness had to be intimately connected to its aesthetic complexity. Lacking subjectivity as the source of lyric energy and lyric satisfaction, such complexity could be imagined as directly social because it had the same appeal to universality as propositions in the sciences.
My fourth and fifth frameworks have to suggest why modernist values ultimately failed to inspire younger poets – first in the 1930s and then in the period of expanded access to the universities that flowered into the culture of the 1960s. Classical modernist poetry appealed primarily to what we might consider the reader’s potential best self. It pursued difficulty so that there could be no easy sentimental emotions. And its constructivist ambitions required it to cultivate only those feelings that satisfied the mind’s needs for contemplative intensity. Poets like Pound and Williams and Crane cared immensely about public policy, but they felt that the only way poetry could change policies was to develop different imaginative priorities for the people setting the policies. Such an ideal could not survive the social turmoil of the 1930s, where it often seemed any kind of concern for reflective distance was less a sign of careful intelligence than a sign of fear of commitment. Political action was necessary and poetry had to show the way, ideally by still avoiding easy rhetorical appeals to action and cultivating what could be made present by control of the medium.
The fifth framework invokes a very different political stage – not economic struggle so much as struggles to establish new cultural values. The situation was exacerbated because by the late 1950s a popular school of literary criticism, the New Criticism, had reduced modernist poetry to an intensely metaphoric text emphasizing complex internal intricacy and so requiring contemplative distance to assume the self‐reflexive attitude the work demanded. Efforts to produce new forms of thinking were subsumed into traditional notions of paradox and irony. But five books of poetry published in a seven‐year window altered that vision radically and restored the early modernist sense of excited and free reverie that would substantially alter aesthetic values and elaborate questions and concerns still basic for contemporary poetry and poetics.
John Ashbery’s Some Trees (1955) produced a strange, often unintelligible but nonetheless fascinating blend of personality and impersonality, high seriousness and camp, intensity of metaphoric density side by side with sheer delight in the strange direct power of common names. Here poetry’s fidelity was not to constructivist standards so much as to the mind’s capacity to produce fascination with mobile arrangements of cultural details. Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1963) returned poetry to the intricacies of personal expression for men and women by rejecting any language of truth in favor of needs to attune to a person’s needs and negotiate sharp differences among ways of constructing the world. Robert Creeley’s For Love (1961) made the same demands as Lowell for attuning to personal differences. But Creeley treated the person very differently. In accord with Charles Olson’s poetics of process, the individual was less a substantial and enduring psychological entity than a variable locus of energy trying to merge with what seemed the most forceful aspects of the world encountered. Poetry was an intensifier of force and emphatically not an instrument for complex affective judgments. Finally, we will see how Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) broke all the rules of New Critical projections about poetry and in the process proved the most socially revolutionary book of the poetry in the century.
Pound’s Imagism
Amy Lowell’s poem is not one of these greatest works of art because it is labored and slow in developing its relations among sensual fields. And there may be no visible method of metrical composition, although the final description of the pike has a phrasal music of some interest. Pound quickly saw the danger of poems like Lowell’s taking up the imagist label, so he found himself having to make sure that the senses in poetry were driven by intense verbal energy, which meant finding a mind at the core of the poet’s making. Compare “The Pike” with Pound’s version of an intellectual and emotional complex in his “April”:
Three spirits came to me
And drew me apart
To where the olive boughs
Lay stripped upon the ground,
Pale carnage beneath bright mist
(Pound 2010: 39)
There are ghosts here of sorts, but no alienated fears of being at an undertaker’s ball. Instead, Pound wants to introduce a level of concentrated compression that will bear the invocation of spirits as our guides for reflecting on the implications of the olive boughs stripped upon the ground.
The poem makes visible a situation worthy of the spirits’ attention because it elaborately balances life and death, destruction and creation by composing a distinctive scene where in effect what dies makes for a lyrical awareness of how other modes of vitality take on vivid presence. Here talk of spirit seems justified because so much depends on what the poem does to supplement what it says. There is no abstract talk about life and death, and no rhetorical attempt to browbeat an audience into believing something not in evidence, even about spirits. There is only direct evocation of a situation, condensing the scene to its vibrant elements and resisting any dependency on self‐expression. All the energy that could have gone into self‐expression is required to find just the right words and just the right sounds to raise the moment into what can become memorable for its power rather than for any associations the reader might make with the scene depicted. The richness of presence blocks any ghostly alienation.The music achieved by word play is crucial in giving this poem a memorable sense of presence. Just look at the weight and intricate balance of the final line, toward which everything builds. This is one way to give the impression of the poem speaking in a present that does not depend on personal feeling or the assertion of opinion. The first two words stretch out long a’s while the final ones play the full range possible i sounds. The consonants further elaborate the relational field language can offer by making the middle word alliterate with “bright” (while both alliterated terms echo the plosive p which opens the line). It is as if the Latinate assertiveness of “pale carnage” requires the other sound devices to stabilize the verbal situation. Poetry becomes a site for developing possible intelligences, almost free of the need to have the intelligence mediated by persons.
Pound was fascinated by these emergent intelligences that gave style and vibrancy to specific moments while making us aware of the powers available within distinctive cultural traditions. He was soon to develop an “ideogrammic method” that was not content with single evocative images, but superposed images to develop categorical terms without relying on sheer conceptual abstraction. As he put it in ABC of Reading (1934), the abstraction red could be built on several related images tying the concept to the world (1960: 22). More important, each image cluster had performative as well as denotational attributes, so the ideogram provided also a test of the powers of the cultural frame responsible for the particular distribution of images. His Cathay was concerned primarily with how the Chinese deployed images to capture evocative concreteness, while his Homage to Sextus Propertius tested his own capacity to wield the rapier‐like satirical wit of Latin poetry on his contemporary world. Then he would build in his Cantos an encyclopedic presentation of various cultures all in the work of defining values and composing for the modern world a sense of the accomplishments possible for a mind educated in accord with Poundian principles. His first canto rendered an Odyssean visionary passage in the rhythms of Old English poetry; his second canto crossed the lyrical concrete effusions of Greek lyricism with an Ovidian tale of Dionysius making himself present that would become a contemporary possibility for pagan worship; the third canto evokes Spanish picaresque forms to capture his own memories of exile. And so it goes.
For my purposes, the important point is that Pound never abandons imagism but builds upon it or, better, makes the image itself a component of more capacious units of thought. I cannot handle here the complexity of such constructions in the Cantos. But I can show how a two‐line poem made of a 30‐line poem manages to correlate thought with the play of images by adapting the ideal of masses in motion at the core of the vorticist aesthetic. This is “In a Station of the Metro,” an example of how Pound transformed the lyric logic of “April,” written one year earlier: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet black bough” (Pound 2010: 39). Here Pound adapts the direct presentation of the thing to the constructivism that would underlie the ideogrammic method by stressing how the juxtaposing of those images could produce within the poem the circulation of large cultural forces.
“Metro” does not directly invoke the three spirits of “April.” Instead, spirit has to be located in raw energy of the concentration that cut a 30‐line poem to two lines where nothing at all is wasted. Compression forces each element of the poem into assertive volubility. Compare, for example, the difference between “The apparition” and “an apparition.” “The” asserts and demands attention to this particular event. Yet it also raises questions about what kind of an event it is that warrants such insistently Latin diction and such a precise sense of the kind of sensations involved. “Apparition” answers these questions because it abstracts from the sensuous image. The reader has to look into something where there are few distinctions in physical appearance because the faces are in disembodied crowds. And the generality of the Latinate diction allows Pound to build a strong juxtaposition between the initial scene of vague social routine and the sharp detail of “petals on a wet black bough.”
Thus, there is a great deal more than sensation involved in this emotional and intellectual complex. Traces of quite different worlds enter the poem. First, “apparition” introduces spaces of unreality like dreams or myths. Then the “wet black bough” offers what seems an utterly direct image of the subway train probably gleaming from the rain it encountered when it ran above ground. But the bough also introduces the most mysterious aspect of the poem. This subway car reminds us of Persephone’s descent into hell, updated to a technological context. Imaginative worlds and physical images get folded into one another, as if to be adequate to modern technology we had to reinvent the space of the gods. But now the work of the gods is rendered simply by having us see the mechanized world in very old lights. A poetry adequate to modern reality would have to establish creative uses of perception to unlock recesses of mind capable of inhabiting fully what the mind can make of matter (or matter of mind).
Williams and Loy: The Transformation ofImagist Ideals from Within
William Carlos Williams opened imagism to a more dynamic sense of nature and varieties of voice by his interest in foregrounding syntactic relations, while Mina Loy developed an elaborate rhetoric sustaining her images that was impossible to confuse with the old public righteousness. As J. Hillis Miller pointed out in his revolutionary book Poets of Reality (1965), Williams began as a poet of mild romance pastoral that provided an alternative world to the world he encountered daily in his medical practice. But he soon learned from painterly exemplars how to be modern and deploy the edges and the weights of sentences to make the manipulation of his medium his basic instrument for treating his poems as ways of valuing the world. Williams’s “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital” (1923) will have to stand for how he transformed imagist ideals from within. The scene is a road to a contagious hospital in late winter. For 15 lines the late winter landscape just sits there, sponsoring no verbs. But by shifting to thoughts of infants at the hospital, the poem begins to locate incipient vitality in signs of transformation to spring:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold familiar wind
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined –
It quickens: clarity, outline of life
But now the stark dignity of
entrance. Still the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.
(Williams 1986: 183)
The grammar is intricate and inventive, as if spring evoked complementary powers in nature and in mind. Notice, for example, how the chain of active verbs begins with an adverb “Now,” as if the sense of awakening had to be inclusive before specifics could emerge. Then we get the passive verb “are defined” as introduction to “it quickens,” a lovely way to continue the overall awakening while the pronoun stresses the way that spring could not care about individual personality.
Then time gets as intricate as space, with a second “now” and the expression “still the profound change / has come upon them.” The passive verb introduces changes of state while “still” functions almost as verb because of how it combined adjectival and adverbial functions. Now the total scene takes on presence as modes of activity. And that prepares the way for individual acts of attention to blend mind more fully into the process of awakening. The past participle “rooted” is crucial in time and in space because these objects then seem to make themselves more than transient elements of a changing scene. They are enduring constituents returning (as Persephone returns). But “rooted” alone would seem too abstract, so Williams uses “grip down” to present an active human equivalent for what a sense of roots affords attention.
Williams’s most satisfying move then emerges. Initially, “begin to awaken” may seem excessively verbose for a poet as economical as Williams. But then the realization dawns that while “awaken” presents a coherent single state, “begin to awaken” involves a much broader sense of potential duration. Now “now” takes on duration because the verb implies continuing possibility, something that in fact only the mind can produce because the possibility extends beyond the present tense of the scene. Attention to grammar culminates in making the powers of consciousness a visible force for completing the effects of awakening to spring.
Loy did not often write about nature. Human eros was her preferred topic for most of her career – both as celebration of sexual energy and as the site of a tragic dilemma, because for women at least, sex seemed to evoke thoughts of love, and to think one was in love was to be tempted to give up one’s individual will. Loy wrote a “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) calling on women to give up on the need to feel that sex had to blossom into love. And she wrote a poetry that made that refusal plausible because of how fully it could celebrate a freedom of imagination to define possibilities of fulfillment in the intricacies of self‐consciousness. (That self‐conscious would turn profoundly heartbreaking in the late poems reflecting on her life in the Bowery.)
This is poem XXIV from “Songs to Joannes,” a brief example of how she crosses an H.D.‐like imagist poem presenting the onrush of desire with the refusal to surrender the verbal powers to stage the freedom of a bemused ironic distance:
The procreative truth of me
Petered out
In pestilent
Tear Drops
Little lusts and lucidities
And prayerful lies
Muddled with the heinous acerbity
Of your street corner smile.
(Loy 1996: 62)
The poem’s single painfully twisting sentence manages to establish an intensely self‐critical view of her commitments to eros. Yet eros has its ways around self‐criticism – here in how eros morphs into fascination with the powers of language making present the image of “the heinous acerbity / of your street corner smile.” This expression melds an effort at distance with what may be continued longing, if only because of the lover’s capacity to solicit such figures.
Even the effort at an objective view of “procreative truth” generates an intense subjective investment that both reinforces and counters the effort at distance. Alliteration succeeds in reducing teardrops to things without any emotional weight. But a second alliterative exercise complicates the picture by proposing a marvelous equation among “lusts” and “lucidities / And prayerful lies,” the one ostensively diminishing the body and the next two diminishing the mind. Yet there is a longing here within the sense of pathos that cannot quite align itself with reducing the procreative to a matter of truth. And that ambivalence seems to me extended and intensified by how Loy makes use of the closing image’s power to present “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” No one had described a lover quite like this, and perhaps no one can quite parse what the image entails.
But that is Loy’s point. She wants to use imagist modes of presentation with the intention of complicating the gap between what we see and how we think about what we see. Here image is carried by the compressed strangeness of the phrase “heinous acerbity,” which reinforces the difficulty of seeing just what a street‐corner smile involves. In such a way, the image is thrown back upon language. And language cannot quite instruct desire because of its own inability to control the relation between smile and “heinous acerbity.” There may be ultimately no way to govern or even understand what attracts erotic fascination. One can insist on reducing that fascination to an effect of procreative truth, but that does little to block the imaginative appeal of that smile, and the diction it solicits. The image comes to stand as a force demanding that we subsume reality into the imaginations it elicits.
Eliot’s Impersonality and New Versions of Subjectivity
But now the scene for poetry gets complicated because while imagist poetics defined the possibilities of presentational ideals it did not fully realize them. Even Williams and Loy seemed not to dramatize fully the psyche’s capacity for expressing powers of responsiveness to the possible significance of experience. Full responsiveness might require conceptual supplements to imagism that more directly addressed concerns about value and about what versions of knowledge poetry might foster that was capable of competing with the sciences. Such capacities probably required of the poets that they more fully take advantage of the examples set by modernist painting. This work had shown what art could do by stressing the compositional powers of its own medium to create experiences centered on creativity rather than receptiveness, or, better, to create experiences where creativity and receptiveness seemed inextricable from each other.
This is where Eliot’s ideal of impersonality takes on considerable power. If the person is not the center of the poem, the work done by the medium must come to the foreground, especially if one wants to align with presentational ideals that refuse to locate the power of lyric in what it pictures rather than in what it performs. Critics rarely pay attention to the positive aspects of how Eliot on impersonality stresses the force of the medium: “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium […] in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (Eliot 1950: 9). Now emphasis is on the poem as object, with its capacity to fold into itself complex patterns of relationship and modulations of tone. Poetry is not natural speech but speech constructed for its capacity to produce intense experience by virtue of the poet’s capacities as a maker to absorb sensuality into mental processes. And those processes can be considered available to all readers because they are properties of the object and not fantasies of the subject.
Early in his career T.S. Eliot made brilliant use of the presentational aspect of images by binding them closely to an emphasis on how psyches process and distort the objective world. Constructive activity seemed inseparable from impressionist perspectivism. This danger within constructivism is everywhere in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). For Eliot, the mind is a powerful inventive force, but it is often driven by the need to escape reality so that people can go on living the lies that can seem their only substantial possessions. The greatness of the poetry here is in the music by which the struggle to escape expresses its own desperation:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
(Eliot 1969: 3)
Who is this “you”? And what does the treatment of “you” tell us about the speaker? There is so little information rendered that “you” could be anyone – a rather scary reminder of what we risk when we use pronouns without supplementary context. But Eliot wants it this way because for Prufrock the ambiguous qualities of “you” derive from the malleability of “I.” “You” becomes essentially a grammatical function indicating the false promise that “I” has actual interlocutors who might anchor it within an interpersonal world. (This imaginary “you” comes dangerously close to the “you” of all lyric address.)
Then we have to ask why this journey so quickly gets absorbed in an elaborate metaphysical conceit, borrowed from a tradition where metaphor is asked to merge physical and metaphysical. At first the image is simply of recognizing the evening as having its own form of presence, spread out against the sky. But the speaker seems to hear himself say “spread out” so that he fleshes out that term with a surprising and intensely pathological figure of the patient etherized upon a table. This leaping to imaginary identifications comes to define Prufock’s pathos throughout the poem: he adapts the mind at its most powerfully transformative in ways that are pathetically bound to its own pathology.
This pathos is nowhere more intense than in a moment near the middle of the poem where Eliot’s philosophical training takes on imaginative life:
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –
(They will say “how his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
(Eliot 1969: 4)
The music here is intricately expressive because all of the monosyllables seem to have the feel of failed efforts to carve out a social identity. After all, the emphatic rhymes seem to turn everything back to an enclosed self‐consciousness. And then there is the casual but sharp analytic intelligence here. Prufrock wants to assert his subjectivity by controlling aspects of his appearance. But there are simply too many aspects of appearance for the individual to control. Thus there is the inevitable triumph of the “They” over the “I.” Here the “I,” unable to accept its defeat, is condemned to the Sisyphean task of trying to attach identity to fragments open to the world’s judgment. We see why “human voices wake us, and we drown” (Eliot 1969: 7).
Perhaps the greatest innovation in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is its utter rejection of perspectivism as necessarily doomed to mere impressions. He raises the possibility that by layering perspectives in an intense composition poetry might engage more fundamental sources of suffering, and thus be able to stage what it might take to find means of collectively finding relief from that suffering. Here both sympathy and possible relief depend on learning to hear what is expressed in the mélange of voices constituting this collectivity. Sympathy might be an instrument for developing a sense of objectivity about the sufferings and the projected needs insistent in these voices, even if honesty forces the structure of the poem to collapse into the incoherence that plagues its agents.
The opening of the poem moves effortlessly from an April landscape to a set of quiet voices representing pre‐World War I upper bourgeois society, at ease with saying “we.” That is enough to warrant a very different prophetic voice that probes for the truth of those bourgeois emotions:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images […]
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(Eliot 1969: 38)
This prophetic voice, and this interpretation of the shadows, pervades the poem as something collectively noticed but also collectively repressed so that individual voices have to bid to be heard in the social negotiations required to gain the attention of others. Human kind can hear the pain but it lacks the patience and the courage to probe that pain for its causes and what they might indicate as possible solutions.
So, the poem develops three lengthy sections chronicling the various pains and disappointments endemic to the pursuit of secular eros, followed by a brief eloquent quasi‐elegy for those who think they are still living. It is only with the final section that the prophetic voice returns with its own form of lyrical logic, this time taking the subject position rather than offering direct address:
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road […]
If there were water we would stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think.
(Eliot 1969: 47)
The poem positions “we” between literal and metaphorical landscapes – in a space where the inner life is strangely transparent in its desperate fusion with its environment. That fusion, however, forces the voice to ask repeatedly, where can life‐giving water be found? Even in this final section the poem cannot provide a satisfactory response, probably because there is no direct answer possible to such abstract questions. But the seeker can at least shift focus to another kind of scene (of Christ at Emmaus) that recollects the shadows of an earlier passage, at least in the sense that the only hope for the real seems to inhere in the unreal:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
(Eliot 1969: 48)
I think the other one walking beside you represents all the common suffering that the poem has made present. This is the audience for whom the god died, an audience now hopeful of attaching to his resurrected form. But the poem dissolves into other strange phenomena where the speech of the thunder proposes three spiritual challenges as possible interpretations of Upanishad wisdom. Yet no amount of religious sources can bring redemption to this society because it is simply unwilling to honor any demands that might induce change of its destructive but trusted forms of habitual behavior. Eliot proved that an impersonal poetry has the power to analyze collective spiritual crisis because it is not seduced by imaginary needs and defenses. And Eliot proved that a writing that cannot rely on personality can nonetheless develop dense internal relationships capable at every instant of having the metaphoric hover within what the voices express: it takes great art to convince us that we have no hopes of spiritual greatness.
Stevens and Moore: Presentation as Act of Mind
Eliot’s version of impersonal objectivity may offer the most severe modernist understanding of what might be the most satisfying mode of presence. But it may not be the deepest or the most satisfying model. I reserve that honor for Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore because they so richly understood that impersonality and even objectivity need not be conceived according to analogues with scientific method. There may be a kind of impersonality distinctive to a lyricism that seeks to reject personal expression for an imagined intimacy with basic ways of experiencing as other people experience. Here objectivity and impersonality are not states of describing the world but of engaging it in a certain way. Both poets follow a variety of paths in their search for dramatizing the social roles imagination can play.2
Early Stevens was impersonal about eccentricity. Naturally shy, he thought that the idea of person was far more aesthetically engaging than a performance based on personality because it could be more suggestive, more strange, and more bitterly opposed to the ordinary mortality that he conceived imagination fighting. The short poem that best represents his commitment to the aesthetic during those years is “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow” (1923):
My titillations have no footnotes
And their memorials are the phrases
Of idiosyncratic music.
The love that will not be transported
In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner,
But muses on its eccentricity,
Is like a vivid apprehension
Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster,
Or paper souvenirs of rapture,
Of bliss submerged beneath appearance,
In an interior ocean’s rocking
Of long, capacious fugues and chorals.
(Stevens 2015: 84)
The movement from “my titillations” to “the love” exemplifies how Stevens begins with the personal, only to prefer a reflective mode that can reach for generalization in complex figural terms open to all readers. The bliss of eccentricity lies in its repudiation of appearance and the conceptual order anchored there. Instead of the souvenirs of rapture derived from a tired rhetoric there has to be an objective immediacy or inner sensuousness where bliss is equivalent to feeling carried primarily in the music of intricate sound play. The word “bliss” is sufficient to organize the music of plosives combined with s sounds in the first line of the concluding stanza. But the next two lines go beyond the characterization of bliss to fully instantiate it, as if poetry could make beauty real without worrying about concepts. There cannot be another poem with this many various o sounds deployed for the full self‐sufficiency of feeling packed into two lines. And the final pun on corals provides a visual surplus anchoring the feeling to this “interior ocean.”
As we move later in Stevens’s career we have to see how his commitment to music gets increasingly wound into how thinking itself becomes the primary means of resisting appearance and establishing social relations. We can see the change clearly if we contrast “The Snow Man” from his first volume Harmonium (1923) with “The Plain Sense of Things” from his last volume The Rock (1955). The earlier poem stressed impersonality as a condition of generalized thinking. The later poem replaces the distance imposed by impersonality with the opposite possibility – that poetry can achieve a level of transpersonal intimacy that enables it to speak for and speak as the core of desires making us all fundamentally human.
“The Plain Sense of Things” is less severe and much more elaborate about what a mind of winter demands from us:
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
[…]
Yet the absence of imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
(Stevens 2015: 530–531)
Stevens chooses here to reject the single sentence, perhaps because the focus on thinking seems less important now than recognizing all that is involved in the atmosphere that thinking produces as it engages this plain sense of things. And that nature cannot be named directly. Naming this ultimate ground takes analogical work. Thus the tone is much less bitter than it is in “The Snow Man” because the plain sense of things comes to engage more than just the mind of winter. The poem becomes a means of emotionally accepting all inevitability, as if there could be a poetic version of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wish for a mysticism that involved the world as the totality of facts and nothing else.
This acceptance requires elaborating the roles imagination has to play when we confront issues of necessity and poverty. At first the poem engages the imagination simply as the maker of analogies. Yet analogy per se only manages to flesh out the scene as “inert savoir.” The “this” of factual observation dominates. Things change in the fourth of five stanzas (I omit the third), when the speaker realizes that all this sense of failure also had to be imagined. There is something productive and something creative about simply recognizing how coming to this plain sense of things is inevitable. Here inevitability is not simply a fact. Because such a judgment takes imagination, the poem shifts from description to metaphor.
Now imagination is asked to fill out the feelings that the silence elicits. Figures multiply in time and complicate in space – from the idea of the great pond without reflections, to the fact that this condition offers a full expression of silence, to the wonderful elaboration of the silence as that of the rat come out to see the waste of lilies. I think the unexpected casual mention of the rat manages in a single stroke to bring all animate being into need for imagination. The rat too lives in a world of meanings, which is also inevitably a world of feelings. And by expanding the scene, the poem can with great compression switch from the work of imagination to the force that calls upon us to enact our imaginations. Now the opening “as if” gives way to the simple yet multiple functions of “as” because the poem has moved from hypothesis to the production of equivalences requiring that we think differently about our feelings. To think generally about imagination is to have to recognize how this imagining in fact provides a kind of knowledge, not so much about the world as about how necessity ties us to the world. This recognition of necessity means that there is something vital within the “nothing” available to the imagination.
This something is not a god (unless one accepts Greek mythology). This something is the abstract recognition that fleshing out the plain sense of things in our imagination entails repeating an ancient drama of witnessing what mortality demands and asking how we can will what destroys us. To deploy the full powers of imagination is to recognize their origin in our need to know the condition all humans share. The value of this knowledge consists in how the poem provides weight, compressed intricacy, and, with the rat, almost a dollop of wit, that are the human side of the “as” marking what we can bring to what necessity requires of us.
Moore is quieter than Stevens, in part because she is even more concerned with how the subtlety of artifice can capture feelings that accompany perception but are not themselves visible without coming to presence in the work of art. Let me begin with Moore at her quietest, relying almost entirely on the work of syllabic metrics to sharpen and make strangely objective what could otherwise be mere pious universalization. In “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” (1924), mastery of craft becomes a civilizing virtue and source of collective wisdom:
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first,
and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
not brittle but
intense – the spectrum, that
spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword by their polish.
(Moore 1994: 83)
Notice how the speaking “we” has no overt expressive function. It serves simply as a means of focusing on properties of the object. Somehow the object must take on powers of speech. It matters a great deal then to observe how the poet’s craft engages this challenge. The rhymes produce considerable vitality because of the contrast between the first couplet in each stanza’s straining for monosyllabic masculine rhymes and the second’s playing with radically feminine multisyllabic connections. The rhyme of “perpendicularity” with “see” must rank as one of the more inventive rhymes of all time, even before one recognizes how the “see” concludes an all monosyllabic line sharply contrasting with the Latinate multi‐syllable features of the next line. This indeed is how poetry as an art establishes its essential perpendicularity in relation to visual material.
When we ask why this matters we are immediately confronted with another question: what pay‐off is there for Moore by rejecting traditional English metrics for classical syllabics? Each stanza has lines of 4, 6, 12, and 12 syllables. This syllabic mode mobilizes the length of words and sentences to make the structure feel a surprising balancing of extended weights. Again, the point is to make art substantial even as it tries for very subtle description. Art’s polish becomes a dynamic feature appearing as discovery rather than as mere assertion by the poet. The poet has not only referred to an art work but also constructed a kind of self‐conscious verbal structure to celebrate how art endures by having a present tense and capacity to surprise despite its distance from us in space and time.
Moore soon learned other more public modes of bringing vitality to apparently impersonal presentation. I think “An Octopus” (1924) is one of the richest poems in the canon of American poetry for its exquisite intricacy of tone and capacious intelligence in characterizing the various inhabitants on Mount Rainier in Washington state. The poem matters largely because it is so varied and precise in its impersonal descriptions, but there is also an insistent constructivist aspect that displays how those descriptions may hang together to establish a dynamic sense of an entire ecosystem.
This passage occurs after a stunning 38 lines characterizing the overall form of the mountain. At this point it is time to focus on particulars:
What spot could have merits of equal importance
for bears, elk, deer, wolves, goats and ducks?
pre‐empted by their ancestors,
this is the property of the exacting porcupine,
and of the rat “slipping along to its burrow in the swamp
of pausing on high ground to smell the heather”;
of “thoughtful beavers
making drains which seem the work of careful men with shovels”
and of the bears inspecting unexpectedly
ant‐hills and berry bushes.
(Moore 1994: 72)
These lines blend a playful ear with a remarkable ability to bring the weight of civilization to the description of natural phenomena. Consider the list in the second line. At first it seems simple description. Yet what chance is there that nature itself would provide a set of all one‐syllable animal names? And if one is struck by the strange incompleteness of this effort at completeness, one might conclude that the question of how to handle a string of syllables asking for equal stress is the basic reason for the selection. After all, the description that follows introduces at least one multi‐syllable beast, the porcupine, accompanied by an adjective not typically applied to that animal. So, the descriptions also elicit awareness of the many ways that properties can be attributed to the space of the mountain. Yet the heightening of self‐consciousness here is remarkably free of irony. Rather the self‐awareness seems a means of sharing the delight of watching the mind test its resources for the generosity involved in paying careful attention. “The bears inspecting unexpectedly” can serve as an elegant example of description liberated to take a pleasure in itself not available in the sciences.
Despite Moore’s pleasure in the slow time it takes to enjoy finding language for the full range of states the mountain offers, I must move directly to the conclusion, which makes a striking contrast with Stevens’s “The Plain Sense of Things.” Here the philosophy is all in the refusal to philosophize, except by putting the particulars together in a way that celebrates the immense power of what the mountain also puts together:
Is “tree” the word for these things
“flat on the ground like vines”? […]
“their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape”
from the hard mountain “planed by ice and polished by the wind” –
the white volcano with no weather side;
the lightning flashing at its base,
rain falling in its valleys and snow falling on the peak –
the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed,
its claw cut by the avalanche
“with a sound like the crack of a rifle,
In a curtain of powdered snow launched by a waterfall.”
(Moore 1994: 76)
The poetry resides in the ability of swift synthesis, echoing verbally what the mountain does visually. And the civilizing intelligence consists in establishing a sufficiently capacious yet humane perspective to acknowledge the horrible indifference of nature to human concerns – without resentment and with almost a bemused acceptance of what the mountain displays about acceptance.
The passage begins by wondering how words can apply accurately to the storms that the mountain both produces and has to endure. Moore finds these words partially in apt quotations that serve as descriptions, and partially in changing the perspective. From close focus on the trees the poem shifts to a position where it can take in the entire volcano, with the various contexts for which it is responsible. From this perspective, balance is possible on the largest of levels: “rain falling in its valleys and snow falling on the peak.” But this mode of reconciliation with the brutal aspects of the mountain setting is somewhat too easy, and not sufficiently respectful of the powers of its irreducible otherness to human cares and desires. Therefore the poem moves with amazing celerity from the view of the “claw cut by the avalanche” to hearing the sound of the avalanche to imaginatively projecting what it would be like to be within the avalanche. That imaginative state would be remarkably similar to reflecting on how the observer’s eye coexists with the interpretive mind trying to take in the whole without excessively humanizing its impact.
Exploring the Possibilities of a Political Poetry: The 1930s
Some of us lament the fact that even these models of objective universality were not sufficient to save modernist principles. Gradually the sense of a common modernist project fell apart, requiring the historian to elaborate at least two further thematic clusters for the story of American poetry in the twentieth century. Historically the major challenge to modernism was caused by the Great Depression, since poets had a difficult time speculating on ideals of form and composition when there was such a visible need for directly addressing social issues. This, for example, is Williams in 1935 concluding a volume with “You Have Pissed Your Life.” The first and final stanzas are the same, reducing thinking to infantile repetition:
Any way you walk
Any way you turn
Any way you stand
Any way you lie
You have pissed your life.
(Williams 1986: 401–402)
In reaction to such despondency there emerged a widespread effort to produce ways that poetry could still claim all the virtues and permissions the culture affords to works of art without abandoning the sense of social responsibility that modernism had seen as the problematic domain of rhetoricians.
From that time on, American poets have periodically emphasized values that emerged directly from political struggle.3 Politically engaged poetry became a viable option because it afforded possibilities of witness, discipline, and community as ennobling alternatives to lives mired in efforts to find private respite from the inhuman and frequently destructive aspects of life under late capitalism, especially in its manifesting clear interconnections between economic greed and environmental insensitivity. The 1930s saw three quite different traditions for pursuing that sense of social struggle. The first was poetry enthusiastically aligning itself with socialist political agendas; the second brought to bear objectivist aesthetic techniques to socially charged situations; and the third initiated widespread intense protest from the perspective of those racial others who did not share much at all in the American dream. I have to refer to Cary Nelson (1989) for an elegant defense and demonstration of what socialist poetry could accomplish. But I will engage briefly here with representatives of the other two modes of political poetry.
Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Muriel Rukeyser (not quite an Objectivist) devoted their entire careers to seeking social justice by poetic means. But the best short example I know of objectivist aesthetics applied to political situations is George Oppen’s “Street” (1965), because of how he involves objectivist ideals of creating “measure” to complex social situations:
Ah these are the poor,
These are the poor –
Bergen Street
Humiliation
Hardship
Nor are they very good to each other;
It is not that. I want
An end to poverty
As much as anyone
For the sake of intelligence
“The conquest of existence” –
It has been said, and is true –
And this is real pain.
Moreover. It is terrible to see the children,
The righteous little girls;
So good, they expect to be so good.
(Oppen 2008: 127)
Measure consists of a carefully calibrated relation between two perspectives. We have to distinguish a perspective that introduces the readers to the presence of the poor from the ironic attitude in the last three lines that projects a future of constant disappointment and frustration. In effect, we have to see what engages us humanly about the poor while also recognizing that our sympathy will not go very far toward changing what is likely to remain oppressive in such lives. The poem concentrates on the girls because their lives are rarely violent or theatrical. Instead they let themselves participate in or be interpellated within the imaginary values of the mainstream society. But that is why their condition is fundamental to how poverty exacts its costs. The problem here is not just that the girls will not have the resources enabling them to fulfill their expectations. There is also an immense internal price to be paid because they will always live divided lives, judging themselves by standards that are not really appropriate and passing down these contradictions to their children. They will try to act as if they could join a world whose refusals will always be seen as their fault.
If we wrench chronology a little we can use Oppen as a suggestive guide to why Langston Hughes’s political poetry still carries a punch, while managing to escape his tendencies toward the sententious. “Evenin’ Air Blues” (1941) finds in the voice of a character, or the character’s way of voicing his reality, something close to what Oppen treats as awareness of structural conditions that go far beyond appearance:
Folks, I come up North
Cause they told me de North was fine.
I come up North
Cause they told me de North was fine.
Been up here six months –
I’m about to lose my mind.
This mornin’ for breakfast
I chawed the mornin’ air
This mornin’ for breakfast
Chawed the mornin’ air.
But this evenin’ for supper,
I got evenin’ air to spare.
Believe I’ll do a little dancin’
Just to drive my blues away –
A little dancing
To drive my blues away,
Cause when I’m dancin’
De blues forgets to stay.
But if you was to ask me
How de blues they come to be,
Says if you was to ask me
How de blues they come to be –
You wouldn’t need to ask me:
Just look at me and see!
(Hughes 1995: 225)
Written in 1941, this poem is part of a new beginning for Hughes. He rejects any complex analogizing or sentimental gestures to focus on what voicing can display. First there is sheer lament, then economical summary of a life, then the brilliant turn to self‐reference. People sing the blues because they feel blue and they think that these feelings are likely to persist. The logic is simple: there is no need to explain – indeed the simple exhibiting of social conditions is all we need to make the connection between expression and the underlying conditions. But while this simplicity makes understanding easy, it may make change utterly unlikely because the underlying conditions seem so intractable. The blues predict more blues.
The simple poetic act of sheer display is even richer in “Harlem [I]” (1949) because the poem makes it clear how there might be a collective voice of Harlem available to poetry if the poet can discipline the “I” to construct a plausible “we”:
Here on the edge of hell
Stands Harlem –
Remembering the old lies
The old kicks in the back,
The old “be patient”
They told us before.
Sure, we remember.
Now when the man at the corner store
Says sugar’s gone up another two cents,
And bread one,
And there’s a new tax on cigarettes‐‐
We remember the job we never had.
Never could get,
And can’t have now
Because we’re colored.
So we stand here
On the edge of hell
In Harlem
And look out on the world
And wonder
What we’re gonna do
In the face of what we
We remember.
(Hughes 1995: 363–364)
This “we” works because the claims for it are not exalted. In fact, the great triumph of this poem is to exhibit how completely and simply there is a “we” fundamental to the experience of Harlem. But the great tragedy presented by this poem is the presence of recurring doubt about whether this “we” will settle for wondering what to do or whether this wondering can be prelude to action. As with Oppen’s “Street,” the achievement of poetry for politics is to insist empathically on what blocks action while opening for imagination a practical force for change.
Postmodernisms in American Poetry
Others in this collection will tell most of my final story – the immense revolution that was generated by the publication of five books in a seven‐year period that sponsored various forms of what became called “postmodernism.” All the critical instruments agree that what once seemed revolutionary modes of writing had hardened into a quite limited orthodoxy under the authority of late modernist poets whose criticism had come to matter more than their poetry. Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and others had banded under a loose allegiance labeled the New Criticism. That criticism focused on dramatic impersonality, on complexity and paradox as what such impersonality could achieve, on artifice controlling passion, and, as we might expect from such values, a quite conservative politics stressing the values of contemplation and irony rather than the expression of desires somehow to break out of a deadening cultural regime.
Then came the miraculous decade to which I have referred in characterizing my fifth framework. Its various versions of postmodernism seem to share two fundamental commitments that shape their stylistic and psychological innovations. Modernism increasingly seemed to occupy an ivory tower, despite the fact that at its origins the impulse was to address the immediate realities of social life. But modernism always insisted on transforming the real into manifestly self‐conscious constructions with their own intense inner reality. Postmodernist writing tried to engage popular culture rather than provide alternatives to it, especially in its adapting standard ways of talking and incorporating the images and sensibilities shaped by the music and visual media. And it insisted that only a poetics of constant processes of reinvention within this commitment to media could escape the enormous power of commodification in capitalist economies. Ideals of disclosing truths largely gave way to struggles to cultivate an imaginative freedom to manifest individuality in the skills by which elements from various worlds could be combined into continuous fabrics.
Here I have space only to address briefly Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) because of how it both absorbed and guided new modes of freedom and compassion basic to emerging features of cultural life. Ginsberg’s was not great poetry if one calls on any classical definition of poetry. Yet he did exemplify what could be accomplished by writing that did not worry about classical definitions of poetry but concentrated on a radical non‐constructivist version of presenting how the situated body takes on language. Ginsberg’s way of rejecting the decorums of the New Criticism made the excesses of rhetoric a space for witty self‐consciousness rather than sanctimonious disdain. And wit did not dissolve in irony but created a generous speaking voice bemused by its own turns and twists as it tries to speak truth to power. Modernism cannot seem any more remote than when reading the conclusion of Ginsberg’s “America” (1956):
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? […]
America I will sell you strophes $2,500 apiece $500 down on your old
strophe […]
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the army or turn lathes in precision parts
Factories. I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
(Ginsberg 2006: 156)
The result was achieving the most profound cultural impact of any American poem in the twentieth century – both directly on behavior and indirectly in presenting attitudes to racial relations and sexuality that would soon have direct political and poetic consequences.
Finally, that sense of social responsibility led poets also to experiment with how a modern constructivist poetry could absorb social mores rather than fight them in terms of purifying the ways of the crowd. John Ashbery did not have nearly the cultural impact that Ginsberg had. But his influence on ambitious poets was far more extensive because he substantially altered modernist constructivist values by trying to engage popular culture rather than provide alternatives to it, especially in its adapting standard ways of talking and incorporating the images and sensibilities shaped by music and visual media. Notice both the tone and the scope of Ashbery’s most programmatic statement about poetic construction – now a matter less of deliberate artifice than of strange states of bemusement, profound largely because the evidence of careful planning gives way to collisions that occur among modes of discourse:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush Rousseau‐like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in so doing be undone.
(Ashbery 2008: 519–520)
Finish gives way to bemused process, understanding to generative accident, and forceful lyrical statement to the mysteries of enjambment.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 17 (LITERARY SELF‐FASHIONING IN THE PHARMACOLOGICAL AGE).
Notes