T he Cam bridg e H isto ry of

A M ER I C A N P O ET RY

The Cambridge History of American Poetry ofers a comprehensive

exploration of the development of American poetic traditions
from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century.
Bringing together the insights of ifty distinguished scholars, this
literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has
played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the vari-
ety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have
met the needs of diferent communities at diferent times. The
Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of
multiple traditions and a dramatically l uid canon, providing cur-
rent perspectives on both major authors and a number of repre-
sentative igures whose work embodies the diversity of America’s
democratic traditions.

A LFRED B ENDIXEN teaches American literature at Princeton

University and is the founder and Executive Director of the
American Literature Association. His earlier scholarship empha-
sized the recovery of unjustly neglected literary texts and the
exploration of neglected genres, but his current focus is on the role
of genre in democratic culture. His most recent books include A
Companion to the American Novel (2012); A Companion to the American
Short Story (2010), co-edited with James Nagel; and The Cambridge
Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), co-edited with Judith
Hamera.

S TEPHEN B URT is Professor of English at Harvard University. His

books of literary criticism and scholarship include The Art of the
Sonnet (2010), with David Mikics; Close Calls with Nonsense (2009),
a inalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forms
of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007); and Randall
Jarrell and His Age (2002), winner of the Warren-Brooks Award.
He is also the author of three full-length books of poetry: Belmont
(2013); Parallel Play (2006); and Popular Music (1999), winner of the
Colorado Prize.
 THE CAMBRIDGE
H I S TO RY O F
A M E R I C A N P O E T RY
*

Edited by
ALFRED BENDIXEN
Princeton University

S T E P H E N B U RT
Harvard University
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© Cambridge University Press 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
The Cambridge History of American Poetry / [edited by] Alfred Bendixen,
Princeton University; Stephen Burt, Harvard University.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-00336-1 (hardback)
1. American poetry – History and criticism. I. Bendixen, Alfred, editor.
II. Burt, Stephen, 1971– editor.
PS 303.C 29 2014
811.009–dc23 2014014830
isbn 978-1-107-00336-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Notes on Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xix

Introduction 1
A l f r ed B e nd i xen and S te phen Bu rt

P a rt I
BE G I NN I N GS : P O ET RY B EFORE 1800

1 . Remembering Muskrat: Native Poetics and the

American Indian Oral Tradition 15
Betty Bo ot h D ono hu e

2 . Rhyming Empires: Early American Poetry in Languages

Other Than English 43
S us an C astil lo S tre et

3 . The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry 65

Ro be rt D aly

4 . Confronting Death: The New England Puritan Elegy 86

Je f f r ey A. H amm ond

5 . The Emergence of a Southern Tradition 109

Ji m E gan

6 . Poetry in the Time of Revolution 129

K e vin J. H aye s

v
 Contents

P a rt I I
A N EW NATI ON: P OE TRY F ROM 1800 TO 1900

7 . Asserting a National Voice 155

F r ank G ad o

8 . The Emergence of Romantic Traditions 177

Al f re d B end i xen

9 . Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field: Emerson

and His Contemporaries 192
C h r istoph Ir m sc her

10 . Edgar Allan Poe’s Lost Worlds 217

El iza R ic h ards

11 . Longfellow in His Time 238

Virgi nia J ac k s on

12 . Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the

New England Tradition 259
M ic h ae l C . C o h en

13 . Other Voices, Other Verses: Cultures of American

Poetry at Midcentury 282
M ary Lo ef f el h olz

14 . American Poetry Fights the Civil War 306

F aith B arr ett

15 . Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry 329

E d F ols om

16 . Emily Dickinson: The Poetics and Practice of

Autonomy 360
W endy M artin

17 . The South in Reconstruction: White and Black Voices 383

Jo h n D . K e rk e ri n g

vi
 Contents

18 . The “Genteel Tradition” and Its Discontents 403

El izabeth Re nk er

19 . Disciplined Play: American Children’s Poetry to 1920 425

Ange la S or by

20 . Dialect, Doggerel, and Local Color: Comic Traditions and

the Rise of Realism in Popular Poetry 445
D avid E. E . Sloane

21 . Political Poets and Naturalism 472

T yle r H o f f m an

P a rt I I I
F O R MS OF M OD E RNI S M , 1 900– 195 0

22 . The Twentieth Century Begins 497

Jo hn Ti m be rm an Newcom b

23 . Robert Frost and Tradition 519

S iob h an Ph il li ps

24 . T. S. Eliot 542
C h ar le s Altie ri

25 . William Carlos Williams: The Shock of the Familiar 557

Bo b P er el m an

26 . Finding “Only Words” Mysterious: Reading Mina Loy

(and H.D.) in America 583
C ri stanne M il le r

27 . Marianne Moore and the Printed Page 603

R ob in G . Sc h u lz e

28 . The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent Millay,

Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan 628
Le sl ey W h ee l er

vii
 Contents

29 . The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry

of Wallace Stevens 650
Ge org e S . Le ns in g

30 . Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and

the East Coast Projectivists 670
M att he w H of er

31 . Langston Hughes and His World 701

D avid C h i oni M o o re

32 . The Objectivists and the Left 728

M ark Sc ro g gin s

33 . “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”: Robert

Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and the
Middle-Generation Poets 750
D avi d Wo jah n

34 . Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World

of Real Feeling 775
R ic h ard F ly nn

35 . Writing the South 795

Er nest S uar ez

P a rt I V
B E YO N D M ODER NI SM : AM ERICAN P O ETRY,
195 0–2 000

36 . San Francisco and the Beats 823

Ste ph e n F r ed m a n

37 . The New York School 844

Br ian M . Re ed

38 . The Uses of Authenticity: Four Sixties Poets 869

Nic k H al pe rn

viii
 Contents

39 . James Merrill and His Circles 894

D avid Be rg m an

40 . Science in Contemporary American Poetry: Ammons

and Others 913
Ro g er G il be rt

41 . The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center” 937

E dwar d Brunne r

42 . Latino Poetry and Poetics 959

Ri go be rto G onz á le z

43 . Asian American Poetry 978

Jos e ph Jong hy un Je on

44 . Psychoanalytic Poetics 1003

Re ena S astri

45 . American Poetry of the 1980s: The Pressures of Reality 1027

L is a M . Ste inm an

46 . Black and Blues Conigurations: Contemporary

African American Poetics 1048
W alton M uyu m ba

47 . Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and the Neobaroque 1079

W il lar d Sp ieg e lm an

48 . Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry 1103

J os eph T. T ho m as, J r.

49 . Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry 1123

Ju li ana S pah r

50 . American Poetry at the End of the Millennium 1144

S teph en B urt

Selected Bibliographies 1167

Index 1197

ix
 Notes on Contributors

Charles Altieri has taught modern poetry for more than forty years, the last twenty at the
University of California at Berkeley, where he is now Rachel Stageberg Anderson Professor
of English. He has written numerous essays and nine books of criticism on theoretical
topics and on twentieth-century American poetry, including Act and Quality (1981), Self and
Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (1984), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American
Poetry (1989), Canons and Consequences (1991), The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of
the Afects (2003), The Art of Modernist American Poetry (2005), and the forthcoming Wallace
Stevens and the Challenges of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value.

Faith Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University. She is the author
of To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (2012) and of articles on the
poetry of Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Abraham Lincoln. With Cristanne Miller,
she co-edited Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (2005).

A l f red B en d i x e n teaches American literature at Princeton University. He is the foun-

der of the American Literature Association, of which he currently serves as Executive
Director. His books include Haunted Women (1985); an edition of the composite novel The
Whole Family (1986); an edition of “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott
Spoford (1989); and Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992). He is the associate editor of
The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999), the co-editor of The Cambridge
Companion to American Travel Writing (2009) and A Companion to the American Short Story
(2010), and editor of A Companion to the American Novel (2012).

Dav i d Be rg m a n , Professor of English at Towson University, is the author of Gaiety

Transigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (1991) and The Violet Hour: The
Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (2004). He is also the author of two books of
poetry: Heroic Measures (1998) and Cracking the Code (1985), winner of the George Elliston
Poetry Prize. With Katia Sainson he has translated Jean Sénac’s Selected Poems (2010).

E dwa r d Brun n er is Professor of American Literature at Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale. His books include Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2004),
W. S. Merwin: The Labor and Privilege of Poetry (1991), and Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and
the Making of “The Bridge” (1985); his recent articles have appeared in MELUS, American
Periodicals, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and International Journal of Comic Art.

xi
 Notes on Contributors

St eph en Bu rt is Professor of English at Harvard University. His books include The Art
of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (2010); Close Calls with Nonsense (2009); and The Forms
of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007), as well as several collections of
poems, most recently Belmont (2013). With Nick Halpern, he edited Something Understood:
Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (2009).

S u s an Ca st i l lo St r e et is Harriet Beecher Stowe Emeritus Professor of American

Literature at King’s College London. Her books include American Literature in Context to
1865 (2011), American Travel Writing and Empire (with David Seed, 2009), Colonial Encounters
in New World Writing 1500–1786: Performing America (2005), and two books co-edited with Ivy
Schweitzer, A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America (2005) and The Literatures of
Colonial America (2001). From 2005 to 2009 she edited the Journal of American Studies. She is
also a published poet and literary translator.

M i c h ael C . C o h e n is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. He has written many

essays on nineteenth-century poetry for journals such as American Literature, Arizona
Quarterly, and Victorian Poetry, in addition to the entry “Poetry of the United States,
Beginnings to 1900” for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). He is co-editor
of The Poetry of Charles Brockden Brown (forthcoming) and is inishing a book, entitled The
Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, that provides a material history of the
ways people read, wrote, circulated, and otherwise used poems in early American culture.

Ro bert Da ly , SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at the State University of New York at Bufalo, Leverhulme Fellow, and
Guggenheim Fellow, has written God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (1978),
the introduction to the John Harvard Library edition of Cooper’s The Pioneers (2011), and
many articles and reviews published in American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
American Literary History, Comparative Literature Studies, and elsewhere.

B etty Bo ot h D ono h u e is an independent scholar and an enrolled member of the

Cherokee Nation. She has written articles for the American Indian Culture and Research
Journal and Studies in American Indian Literature. She contributed an essay on the Mvskogee
poet Alexander Posey to the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1997) and a chapter entitled
“Oktahutchee’s Song” to Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2007). Her latest
work, Bradford’s Indian Book: Being the True Roote & Rise of American Letters as Revealed by the
Native Text Embedded in Of Plimoth Plantation, was published in 2011.

J i m E ga n is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Oriental

Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (2011) and Authorizing Experience:
Reigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (1999). His other
publications include essays on John Smith, eighteenth-century British-American mercan-
tile poetry, Benjamin Franklin, and the wonder tale in early America. In addition to his
scholarly publications, Professor Egan has published iction.

R i c h ar d F ly n n , Professor of Literature at Georgia Southern University, is the author of

Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (1990). He has written essays on poets such as

xii
 Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and June Jordan, as
well as a number of essays about children’s poetry, including “The Fear of Poetry” in The
Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (2009) and “Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet: Poets,
Children, and Readers in an Age of Prose” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature
(2011).

E d Fo ls om is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the Walt
Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org), and editor of the Whitman Series at the
University of Iowa Press. The Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa,
he is the author or editor of twelve books, including Walt Whitman’s Native Representations
(1994) and (with Kenneth M. Price) Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (2005), as well as numerous
essays on Whitman and other American writers appearing in journals such as American
Literature, PMLA, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He was featured in an episode of the
PBS documentary American Experience (2008), and he is now working on a biography of
Leaves of Grass.

Ste ph en Fre d m an is Professor of English and Concurrent Professor of American

Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Poet’s Prose (1983, 1990),
The Grounding of American Poetry (1993), A Menorah for Athena (2001), and Contextual
Practice (2010). He has edited A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry
(2005) and, with Steve McCafery, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work
(2010).

F r a n k Gad o is Professor Emeritus of English at Union College. The author of First

Person (1974), a collection of interviews with Wescott, Dos Passos, Warren, Updike, Barth,
and Coover; The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (1986); and William Cullen Bryant: An American
Voice (2006), he has also edited, with introductory essays, selections of works by C. B.
Brown, James Kirke Paulding, Stephen Crane, and Sherwood Anderson. He is currently
writing an article about R. H. Dana and composing books on the death of the liberal arts
college and on American literature’s deining preoccupations.

Ro g er G i lb ert teaches in the English Department at Cornell University. He is the

author of Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry (1991).
His essays and reviews have appeared in Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review,
Contemporary Literature, Parnassus, and other journals. He is currently completing a critical
biography of A. R. Ammons.

R ig o berto G on z á l e z is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose and the
editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (2010). The recipient of
Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, he is currently on the executive board of the National
Book Critics Circle and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State
University of New Jersey.

N i ck H a lper n is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

He is the author of Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill and Rich
(2003) and the co-editor, with Jane Hedley and Willard Spiegelman, of In the Frame: Women’s

xiii
 Notes on Contributors

Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler (2009) and, with Stephen Burt, of
Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (2009).

J e ff r ey A . H a m m on d is Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor

of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His scholarly books include Edward Taylor:
Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism (1993); Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of
Poetry (1993); and The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (2000). He is also
a creative writer whose publications in literary noniction include Ohio States: A Twentieth-
Century Midwestern (2002), Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age (2008), and Little Big World:
Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties (2010).

K e vi n J. H ay e s , Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, has written

several books, including A Journey through American Literature (2012), The Road to Monticello:
The Life and Mind of Thomas Jeferson (2008), and The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the
World of Ideas (2008). In addition, he is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Early American
Literature (2008). For The Library of William Byrd of Westover (1997), he received the Virginia
Library History Award. He is also the recipient of a Distinguished Service Award presented
by the Association for Documentary Editing.

M att h ew H o f e r is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. His

books include Oscar Wilde in America (2009), Sinclair Lewis Remembered (2012), and a forth-
coming expanded reprint of the 1966 photo-essay The Shoshoneans by poet Edward Dorn
and photographer Leroy Lucas. He has contributed chapters on poets, poetry, and poetics
to several volumes, and his essays have appeared in many journals, including Modernism/
Modernity, Paideuma, New German Critique, and Contemporary Literature. He also edits, for the
University of New Mexico Press, the series Recencies: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-
Century American Poetics.

T y ler H o ff m a n is Professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden and Associate

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of three books: Robert Frost
and the Politics of Poetry (2001), Teaching with The Norton Anthology of Poetry: A Guide for
Instructors (2005), and American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop (2011).
He is currently working on a study of performance and celebrity in modernist American
poetry, and he serves as editor of the electronic Whitman studies journal The Mickle Street
Review and as associate editor of the Robert Frost Review.

Ch ri sto ph I r m s c h e r is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University–

Bloomington. He is the author of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (2013); Public
Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (2009); Longfellow Redux (2006); and The
Poetics of Natural History (1999), as well as the editor of the Library of America edition of
John James Audubon’s Writings and Drawings (1999) and co-editor, with Alan Braddock, of
A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009).

Vi rg i n i a Jac k s on is UC Irvine Chair of Rhetoric and Communication at the University

of California–Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)
and co-editor (with Yopie Prins) of The Lyric Theory Reader (2013). Her next book, Before

xiv
 Notes on Contributors

Modernism: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry in Public, is forthcoming from Princeton

University Press.

Jo s e ph Jon g h y un J e on is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at

Pomona College. He is the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde
Asian American Poetry (2012). He is currently writing a book about transnational Korean/
American ilm and globalization.

Jo hn D. K er k er i n g is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He

is the author of The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (2003). His articles have appeared in such journals as American Literature, Studies
in Romanticism, and Victorian Poetry and such volumes as The Cambridge Companion to
Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and volume six of The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism. He is currently at work on a study of aesthetics and racial identity in the
twentieth-century United States called Racial Rhapsody.

G e org e S. Len s i n g is Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English at the University

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His many publications on Wallace Stevens and other
modern poets include Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (2001) and Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s
Growth (1986).

Ma ry L o ef fel ho lz is Professor of English and Vice Provost for Academic Afairs at

Northeastern University. Her books include Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory
(1991); Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945 (1992); and From School to Salon:
Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004). She is the editor of Volume D:
1914–1945 of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and, with Martha Nell Smith, she
co-edited A Companion to Emily Dickinson.

We n dy M a rt i n is Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Claremont

Graduate University, where she is also Vice Provost and Director of Transdisciplinary
Studies and holds the George and Ronya Kozmetsky Endowed Chair of Transdisciplinary
Studies. The author of numerous articles and reviews, she founded (in 1972) and contin-
ues to edit Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her books include The American
Sisterhood: Feminist Writings from Colonial Times to the Present (1972); An American Triptych:
The Lives and Work of Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich (1984); Colonial
American Travel Narratives (1994); The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American
Women (1996); The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002); Emily Dickinson (2007);
and Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary American Short Stories from the New Gilded
Age (2011). She also serves on the editorial board of the Heath Anthology of American
Literature.

C r i stan n e M i ller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor

of Literature at the University at Bufalo SUNY. Her recent books include Reading in Time:
Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012); Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina
Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler, a study of gender and literary community in New York and
Berlin (2005); and Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (1995), and she co-edited Moore’s

xv
 Notes on Contributors

Selected Letters (1997) and Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (1994). She is cur-
rently preparing a new reader’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems.

Dav i d Ch i on i M o o r e is Associate Professor of International Studies and English at

Macalester College. He has published numerous articles on Langston Hughes and other
African American as well as African writers, on postcolonial studies, and on globalization;
he is the co-editor, with Martin Bernal, of Black Athena Writes Back (2001), and he is currently
editing new editions of Hughes’s A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia and Hughes’s corre-
spondence with black South African writers.

Walton Muy u m ba is Associate Professor of American and African American literature

at the University of North Texas. He is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual
Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (2009); his essays have appeared in
College Literature, Oxford American, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Jo hn T i m be rm a n N e wco m b is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign. He has published three books on American poetry, Wallace Stevens
and Literary Canons (1992), Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity
(2004), and How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (2012), along with
a variety of essays on such topics as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen
Crane, W. B. Yeats, and skyscraper verse.

B o b P er elm a n is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical

works include The Marginalization of Poetry (1996) and The Trouble with Genius (1994); his
many books of poetry include Il ife (2006) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (1999).

S i o bh a n P hi l l i ps is Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College. She is the

author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (2009). Her
poetry and essays have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, The Los Angeles Review of
Books, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and other publications. She is working on
a book about poetry and letters in the period from 1950 to 2000.

B r i a n M . R ee d is Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is

the author of Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006), Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and
Contemporary Poetics (2012), and Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics
(2013), as well as articles in such journals as the African American Review, Boundary 2, Callaloo,
Contemporary Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and Open Letter.

E li za bet h R e n ke r is Professor of English at The Ohio State University. Her books

include Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (1996) and The
Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (2007). Her articles have
appeared in journals including American Literature, American Literary History, Early American
Literature, ELH, Arizona Quarterly, and Leviathan. Her book in progress is entitled The Lost
Era in American Poetry, 1866–1912. She is the recipient of an array of distinguished teaching
awards, at Ohio State and nationally.

xvi
 Notes on Contributors

E l i za R i c ha r d s is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative

Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Gender
and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (2004) and the editor of Emily Dickinson in Context
(2013). She is now completing a book on the relationship between poetry and journalism
during the U.S. Civil War.

R e e na Sast r i is Early Career Fellow in American Literature at the University of Oxford

and the author of James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (2007). Her writing has appeared in jour-
nals including Contemporary Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, and PN Review. She is at
work on a book about the idea of lyric in contemporary American poetry.

Ro b i n G. S c h u l z e is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. She is the

author of The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (1995) and the editor of
Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 (2002). The Degenerate Muse: American
Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene is forthcoming. She is the author
of numerous articles in the ields of modernist American poetry, textual scholarship, and
editorial theory.

M a rk S c ro g g i n s is Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author

of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (2007) and Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry
of Knowledge (1998) and the editor of Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky (1997);
his books of poems include Red Arcadia (2012).

Dav i d E . E . S loa n e is Professor of English and Education at the University of New

Haven. His books include Student Companion to Mark Twain (2001); New Directions in
American Humor (1998); Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy (1992); Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn: American Comic Vision (1988); American Humor Magazines and Comic
Periodicals (1987); The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830–1890 (1983); and Mark Twain
as a Literary Comedian (1979). He is currently working on a biography of his grandmother
titled Edison’s Daughter; American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals, Volume 2: 1985–2015;
and Local Color and Dialect Poetry in America.

A ng ela S o r by is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. Her book

Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917, appeared in 2005; she is
also the author of two poetry collections, Distance Learning (1998) and Bird Skin Coat (2009),
and co-editor, with Karen Kilcup, of a forthcoming anthology of nineteenth-century chil-
dren’s verse, Over the River and Through the Woods.

J u l i ana S pah r is Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Professor of English at Mills College. Her
many books of poetry, criticism, and creative prose include Well Then There Now (2011), The
Transformation (2007), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (2001), and Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective
Reading and Collective Identity (2001); she has edited several collections on poetry and poet-
ics, among them, with Joan Retallack, Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary
(2006) and, with Claudia Rankine, American Women Poets in the 21st Century (2002).

xvii
 Notes on Contributors

Wi llar d S p i e g e l m a n , the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist

University and editor-in-chief of Southwest Review, is the author of The Didactic Muse: Scenes
of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry (1989) and How Poets See the World: The Art of
Description in Contemporary Poetry (2005), as well as Wordsworth’s Heroes (1985) and Majestic
Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art (1995). He edited Love, Amy: The Selected
Letters of Amy Clampitt (2005).

L i sa M . St ei n m a n is the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College

in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of nine books, including Made in America: Science,
Technology, and American Modernist Poets (1989); Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and
Work (1998); Invitation to Poetry (2008); and, most recently, Absence & Presence (2013).

E r n est S uar e z is Ordinary Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the
Catholic University of America. He is the author of James Dickey and the Politics of Canon
(1993) and of numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry, and he is the editor
of Southbound: Interviews with Contemporary Southern Poets (1999); his current work also
includes studies of rock and blues.

Jo se ph T. T ho m a s , JR ., directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature

at San Diego State University, where he serves as an Associate Professor of English. The
inaugural Poetry Editor of The Lion and the Unicorn, Thomas writes on children’s and adult
poetry, the avant-garde, and comics. He is the author of two books, Poetry’s Playground
(2007), the irst extended academic study of contemporary American children’s poetry, and
Strong Measures (2007), a collection of procedural poetry. His next book explores the life and
work of Shel Silverstein.

L esley Wh ee l e r is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee

University. Her books include Voicing American Poetry (2008) and the poetry collections
Heterotopia (2010) and The Receptionist and Other Tales (2012). She has held fellowships from
Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other grantors, and she won
an Outstanding Faculty Award in 2012 from the State Council of Higher Education in
Virginia. Her blog is http://lesleywheeler.org.

Davi d Wo ja hn is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing

at Virginia Commonwealth University. His many books of poems include World Tree (2011)
and Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems (2006), a inalist for the Pulitzer Prize; many
of his critical writings are collected in Strange Good Fortune (2001).

xviii
 Acknowledgments

The editors want to thank Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press for his
continuous encouragement and excellent advice during the entire editorial
process. We also want to express our appreciation to our copy editor, Laura
Wilmot, for her meticulous attention to detail; to Diana Witt for preparing
the index; and to Caitlin Gallagher, Louis Gulino, Nathalie Horner, and all
the other people at Cambridge University Press who have helped to bring this
book into being.
Our greatest obligation is to the forty-eight contributors who agreed to join
us in this enterprise, produced splendid essays, ofered insights that shaped
the development of this literary history, and almost always responded to our
requests for revisions with remarkable eiciency and cheerfulness. We value
the expertise, advice, and commitment to this project that each of our con-
tributors has demonstrated during the process of development and revision.
We also want to thank the numerous friends and colleagues who have shared
their knowledge about various aspects of American poetry. In particular, we
want to express our gratitude to those who have organized sessions and sym-
posia on American poets at the various meetings of the American Literature
Association, where we have beneited from both formal presentations and
informal conversation.
Alfred Bendixen also wants to thank Rene H. Treviño of Texas A&M
University for his skillful editorial assistance during several phases of the pro-
duction of the manuscript. He is most grateful for the continuous support of
his wife and partner, Judith Hamera, brilliant scholar and inspiring teacher,
who always reminds him of the best possibilities that life has to ofer.
Stephen Burt thanks colleagues and staf in Harvard’s Department of
English for their attention and tolerance during the process of creating
this book: James Engell, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson, who served

xix
 Acknowledgments

as chairs and acting chairs, and undergrad program administrator Lauren

Bimmler have been especially helpful. Stephen thanks, additionally, Sandra
and Jefrey Burt, and Stephen is grateful irst and last for the support, the
patience, and the on-target advice of Jessica Bennett, and for the attention and
patience of our not-so-little ones, Nathan and Cooper.

xx
 Introduction
A l fr e d B e n d i xe n a n d St e ph e n B u rt

The Cambridge History of American Poetry explores the development of poetry

in the United States of America from its beginnings to the end of the twenti-
eth century. As a literary history, it aims to provide an informative and reliable
narrative of the crucial events, movements, authors, and works that mark the
creation of poetic expression over several centuries. Its focus is on both histor-
ical context and artistic achievement: thus, the discussions of poetry here illu-
minate the ways in which verse mattered to diferent groups at various times
as well as the ways in which individual poems exemplify particular values,
achieve speciic efects, and sometimes form artifacts of enduring power. The
narrative thus assesses the aesthetic achievements of numerous works, paying
appropriate attention to the artistic details that transform the arrangement of
sounds and visual shapes into poetic forms that possess the capacity to move
us emotionally, inspire us intellectually, or provoke us into action. Poetry can
be pleasurable and it can be powerful. It can entertain and it can educate. At
the foundation of this literary history is an inquiry into the many roles that
poetry has played in the development of American democracy in the course
of several centuries and in the private and public life of the American people.
The essays here discuss poems that served political purposes, expressed reli-
gious convictions, explored philosophical ideas, detailed uniquely American
experiences, celebrated triumphs, mourned personal tragedies, and expressed
the entire range of human experience from love to loss.
In our time, literary history is a matter of multiple contexts, and we are
committed to recognizing the complexity of historical forces and the mul-
tiplicity of audiences who found meaning in diferent kinds of poetic forms
and experiences. This means a commitment to the popular as well as the
elite, and to forms and writers excluded from previous discourse. There have
been surprisingly few attempts to provide a literary history of poetry in the
United States, and those have tended to focus on a relatively small number of
major voices and movements. Typical treatments might give attention to a

1
 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

couple of Puritan poets and then leap over to the nineteenth century with a
nod to Poe and the Transcendentalists and a dismissive shake of the head for
the old Fireside Poets and a declaration that the two poets from this century
who mattered – Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson – achieved greatness by
writing poetry in ways that poetry had not been written before. Even very per-
ceptive critics such as Hyatt Waggoner and Donald Staufer ofered surveys of
American poetry that treated the last half of the nineteenth century largely
by providing lists of poets who were once popular and deemed important
but could now safely be declared not worth reading. The twentieth century
received a bit more generous treatment, but the focus was again on major
authors and movements – especially the giants of high modernism. Although
it has clearly been impossible for us to cover every poet who published verse
during the past four hundred years, The Cambridge History of American Poetry
has been designed to provide the most comprehensive study of the practice of
poetry in the United States.
Recent challenges to literary canons, and to even the idea of a literary
canon, have raised questions about igures who once seemed unassailable.
Literary history is now marked by an increased recognition of the achieve-
ments of women writers and a greater attention to minority voices, espe-
cially African American ones. Moreover, there is also a deeper suspicion of the
artiicial wall that has separated popular from academic verse and a greater
willingness to examine the roles that poetry has played in various aspects of
American life. The Cambridge History of American Poetry seeks to capture many
of the insights into the place of poetry in American culture that have devel-
oped in the past two decades. While avoiding the idea of a grand narrative into
which all poetic works must either it or be labeled idiosyncratic, we attempt
to ofer a literary history that is both coherent and capable of recognizing the
multiplicity and diversity of roles that poetry has played and continues to play
in the United States.
The editors have consulted with each other throughout the process, but
Alfred Bendixen has assumed primary responsibility for the chapters focused
on work from before the twentieth century, and Stephen Burt, for chapters
on twentieth-century poetry. Instead of attempting to deine a narrow tra-
dition that can be traced back to Emerson or Whitman or some other single
voice, The Cambridge History of American Poetry joins current scholarship in
attempting to deine and explore multiple traditions and multiple trajectories.
For instance, the current process of canon revision is developing a fuller and
richer sense of what nineteenth-century American poetry meant and what it
achieved. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emma Lazarus, Frances Harper, and others

2
 Introduction

have found a place in college classrooms and textbooks and in this history.
Whitman and Dickinson are in conversation with a variety of other voices,
voices that represent the wide variety of verse forms that shaped our literary
past, and some voices that speak as passionately and persuasively to us as they
did to their own time.
The treatment of a drastically changing literary canon must be both sophis-
ticated and sensitive. Although it recognizes that the criteria by which we dis-
tinguish important poetry from mere verse have changed (and will likely con-
tinue changing), this literary history does not shun the task of distinguishing
major works from minor ones, while also respecting selected popular forms,
such as poetry for children (which, it turns out, cannot be disentangled from
the history of poetry for adults). In the process, we engage some of the most
important questions about the ways in which poetry works and the ways in
which poets matter. Deinitions of poetry – like deinitions of literature, of
verse (or “mere verse”), and of art – change over time and vary at any one
time, and we have tried to attend to that variation, without making the vol-
ume impossibly ambitious, or unmanageably long.
Selected bibliographies for each chapter, all at the end of the present vol-
ume, give recommended critical works (and, especially where such works are
scarce, anthologies) for readers who want far more depth than we can provide
here. Although our focus on poetry in the United States requires speciic atten-
tion to the development of distinctively American literary traditions, includ-
ing the role poetry played in the work of nation building and in shaping the
social and political life of the United States, we also recognize that poetry
crosses borders and boundaries, and that American verse has always existed in
the context of the transatlantic, the transnational, and the international.
The Cambridge History of American Poetry emphasizes the complex roles that
poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the vari-
ety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the
needs of diferent communities at diferent times. The volume thus begins
with a chapter – “Remembering Muskrat: Native Poetics and the American
Indian Oral Tradition” – that is neither a survey of ancient nor of contempo-
rary texts but instead a guide to the distinctive values that poetry possesses in
Native communities. The second chapter moves on to a treatment of poet-
ry’s role in the age of exploration and conquest with attention to the major
non-English traditions. The rest of this history focuses on poetry in English,
but the inclusion of this chapter recognizes both the interest that present-day
scholars take in the early non-English traditions and the basic fact that the land
that is now occupied by the United States of America began as a multilingual

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 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

and multicultural site of contest. The Puritan tradition receives emphasis in

Chapter 3, which focuses on the major poets, and Chapter 4, which examines
the development of the Puritan elegy. Early poets of what is now the American
South receive attention in Chapter 5, which deines a colonial tradition quite
diferent from its New England counterpart. The next two chapters survey
the roles poetry played during the American Revolution and the early national
period, with appropriate emphasis on the development of poetic forms, par-
ticularly the epic, directly related to the work of democratic nation building.
The complex process by which the principles of Romanticism emerged and
were fashioned into a variety of poetic forms is the focus of Chapter 8, which
also serves as an introduction to the chapters that follow on Emerson and his
contemporaries, on Poe, and on Longfellow. Longfellow and the Fireside or
Schoolroom Poets dominated the ield of American poetry for decades, and
no literary history can pretend to do justice to the nineteenth century with-
out examining the appeal they once held. The implications of a process of
canon formation that distinguishes between major and minor voices receives
attention in Chapter 13, “Other Voices, Other Verses: Cultures of American
Poetry at Midcentury.” In addition to chapters on Emily Dickinson and Walt
Whitman, we provide informative chapters on the poetry of the Civil War,
postbellum Southern poetry, the genteel tradition, children’s poetry, comic
traditions, and the political poetry of the late nineteenth century. Our hope
is that this volume will provide the foundation for further exploration of our
poetic traditions.
As our volume shifts into the twentieth century, we again confront the need
to recognize a canon in lux. “When the history of American poetry in our time
comes to be written,” F. O. Matthiessen decided in 1950, introducing the Oxford
Book of American Verse, “its central igures will probably be Frost and Eliot.”1
Richard Ellman, revising the Oxford Book in 1976, proposed an all-male modern-
ist quintet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, and Eliot), adding that “the labels
which many recent poets have adopted, such as Black Mountain, projectivist,
New York, beat, are not likely to survive.”2 (We think he was wrong.) Hugh
Kenner declared his century the Pound Era; Marjorie Perlof followed up with
“Pound-Stevens: Whose Era?” Readers in 1965 were told that they lived in the
Age of Lowell, while a more recent scholar calls the postwar decades the Age
of Auden; other readers have made it possible to believe that the early twenti-
eth century shaped the late twentieth principally through the delayed inluence
of Gertrude Stein.3 Harold Bloom, on the other hand, has announced that we
live in the Age of Ashbery, and indeed John Ashbery’s hard-to-interpret works
have become lodestars, or touchstones, for writers who agree on little else.

4
 Introduction

All these accounts have some power; none can be allowed to control a liter-
ary history that aims to respond at once to many strands of argument about
American poetry, to many accounts of its past, and (inevitably) to its contribu-
tors’ sometimes divergent senses of what matters now.
Our account of the twentieth century begins, as the century did, just before
the advent of the “New Poetry,” the preferred term in the 1910s for a verse
self-consciously modern (and, often, urban) in subject or style: we move from
the belated articulations of Santayana and Moody through the austerities of
Edwin Arlington Robinson and the vigor of Carl Sandburg. Robert Frost’s
New England people and places, his tragic sense, and his mastery of received
forms made his poetry modern and American and classical all at once; we look
at his career, and at some of his heirs. Later accounts of modernism as such
often started with the early poetry and the later dictates of T. S. Eliot: we focus
here on his earlier work, which is more inl uential and more informed by his
American youth.
Despite the neglect that he felt early on, William Carlos Williams has turned
out to be the most broadly inl uential of modernists, the one whose work
built the greatest number of paths for later generations; we consider him as
linguistic innovator, as craftsman, and as physician, along with that other inno-
vator, Stein. Mina Loy and H.D. became unquestionably modern poets who
led contrasting transatlantic lives; Marianne Moore’s work allows us to look at
paratexts and publishers, applying book history to modern poetry, while also
considering how she invented her forms.
Other poets, among them the popular, sometimes scandalous Edna St.
Vincent Millay and the exacting yet passionate Louise Bogan, adapted already
extant forms. Wallace Stevens brought the philosophical problems of the
Romantics and the emotive dilemmas of his own troubled, quiet life into
his own compositions, at irst apparently bountiful, later austere. While
these poets transformed nineteenth-century legacies, Pound and Williams
and their inheritors were making lines, forms, and modes that could sound
wholly new; we discuss those inheritors, among them the charismatic Charles
Olson and his colleagues at Black Mountain College. The 1920s saw a lood
of new literary production by African Americans, some of it also traditional
in form, some of it drawn from Black music and speech; preeminent was
Langston Hughes, whose international, as well as national, accomplishments
we highlight.
The writers of the 1930s were the irst to ask what came after modernism:
some wrote clear poems meant to alter public opinion, while others, such as
Louis Zukofsky and his sometime allies, built a leftist politics into their work in

5
 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

more demanding ways. After the Second World War, poets who emphasized
technique and tradition, who had learned from Stevens and Auden and Eliot,
dominated tastes at many universities and centers of publishing (especially
on the East Coast); some of those poets rejected their early styles for more
obviously personal voices. Robert Lowell led that journey, and we look at him
beside his contemporaries. Lowell’s close friends Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth
Bishop looked back to the Romantics, and at each other’s work, to ind paths
of their own. These writers learned their craft among older, self-consciously
Southern poet-critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and
Allen Tate, whose regional tradition remains productive – and divided – to this
day. Those poets represented – however uneasily – a postwar establishment,
with roots not only in modernist attitudes but also in the British past. Their
ways of writing and reading would face challenges from poets linked with
youth culture, with the West Coast, with visual artists and musicians, and with
a European avant-garde.
Especially as it approaches the present day, our history makes room not just
for several so-called canons, several tastes and senses of what poets matter
most, but also for several ways to write literary history. Some chapters orga-
nize themselves around single authors we see as major; others stay focused
on authors in self-conscious groups, such as the Beats and the San Francisco
Renaissance. Still other chapters organize themselves around a theme or an
idea. We consider the so-called New York School, postwar poets who learned
from the Continent and from painters; we then look at the political and cul-
tural changes of the 1960s, seeing how some poets turned away from society,
toward “authenticity,” and others made their practice more public (in part to
oppose the conl ict in Vietnam). We look at delections, riddles, and playful
evasions throughout the work of James Merrill, a poet both epic and lyric,
who set his elaborations against the raw fact of the age; we then look at facts
and ideas from science and technology as poets have used them, focusing
on A. R. Ammons. We look at the social fact and the social cohesion imag-
ined – or denied – by poets who made their style, and their fame, in the 1970s,
using (sometimes by antithesis) the model of that West Coast moralist, Yvor
Winters; and we look at the strands of U.S. Latino/a poetics, including but
hardly limited to the Puerto Rican poets and the Chicano movimiento in Texas
and on the West Coast.
We then survey the poetry of Asian Americans, which began about a cen-
tury ago and lourishes now. Midcentury poets were labeled “confessional”
when they revealed private shames, but a better label for the most thoughtful
among them is “psychoanalytic”; we look at the legacy of psychoanalysis and

6
 Introduction

autobiography from Sylvia Plath to the end of the century. Two poets who
gained fame in the 1980s, Charles Bernstein and Thylias Moss, show how sto-
ries about careers and institutions can at once shape and misshape our views
about poems. African American poetry belongs at once to the broader history
of American writing and to a history of its own: since 1960, that history incor-
porates the Black Arts Movement along with dissenters from it and the syn-
thesis found in poets of recent vintage. Though the late century could seem
hostile to inherited high culture, some poets continued to embrace it; we look
at them, and then at modern authors who wrote for the least sophisticated,
perhaps most demanding audience: children. American writing has always
used more than one language, just as it has (in the words of Marianne Moore)
“never been conined to one locality”: we look at poets from Connecticut to
Hawai’i who are creating new polyglot, hybrid work.
For periods when we can count all the books that got published, it is easy
to say which ones were inl uential, but the modern writers we view as signif-
icant inl uences are likely to be the ones most important to the contemporar-
ies whom we already like. Pick another set of contemporaries, and you will
have another account of the moderns; and such accounts have proliferated
since about 1960, in tandem with the exponential growth in publishing. We
have tried to do justice to several such accounts, and to several ways of tell-
ing a story, without mistaking variety for indecision. Our history endorses a
kind of pluralism without attempting to be all things to all people; it must
embody judgments of value, because it allocates a limited space. The rise
of self-skeptical and self-conscious pluralism – the once controversial, now
unavoidable notion that no one story can encompass everything signiicant –
is a story in itself. We conclude with poets who consider that story, among
them Jorie Graham, Rae Armantrout, and C. D. Wright, along with the chal-
lenges to all historical thinking posed by Stein and by that other late modern-
ist, Hart Crane.
“There is singularly nothing that makes a diference a diference in begin-
ning and in the middle and in ending,” Stein declared, “except that each gen-
eration has something diferent at which they are all looking. . . . The only
thing that is diferent from one time to another is what is seen and what is
seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.”4 Everything might
have been done another way; as T. S. Eliot also explained, each generation of
literary creators rearranges the story of its predecessors in order to create the
contexts it calls its own. This plural approach, in method as well as in canon,
has made for exclusions and emphases that could easily have gone other ways.
We might, for example, have organized entire chapters around Frank O’Hara,

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 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

or around Stein, whose teasing, provocative, repetitive prose about imagina-

tive writing captures the diiculty if not the necessity of doing literary history
in the irst place.
Other currently available stories make clear other directions we could have
chosen, especially as we approach the present day; some have been chosen,
and covered very efectively, by critics whose work we note. We might have
devoted another chapter to antimodernist poet-critics such as Robert Hillyer,
and another to the poetics of disability, with Larry Eigner at its center.5 We
might have had another chapter on religion and spirituality, connecting the
later T. S. Eliot to Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe, and Donald Revell; a chapter
on wilderness and farm in modern verse, on pastoral and antipastoral, link-
ing Snyder to Robinson Jefers, and to Wendell Berry; a chapter on visual
form, from Cummings to Ronald Johnson; or a chapter on modern Americans
abroad, with accents on Bishop, August Kleinzahler, and Claude McKay, him-
self both Jamaican and American.6 We might have devoted an entire chapter
to the post-1970 poetry and poetics of Native Americans, which we address
instead diachronically in the irst chapter and synchronically in the next-to-
last. Earlier histories of modern poetry have often put all the Black poets they
discuss into one or two chapters in which they rarely interact with non-Black
ones; we present African American writers in conversation with one another,
but also in chapters connecting them to non-Black work.
We might also have had whole chapters on poetic reactions to the First
World War, to the Second World War, or to other military action abroad.7
We might have examined the narrative impulse – and the resistance to it –
among modern long poems, from Stephen Vincent Benét’s once-popular John
Brown’s Body through Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and Anne Carson’s Autobiography
of Red (although Carson, inl uential in the United States, considers herself
Canadian). We might have pursued the modern poetry best seller from the
Benéts through Billy Collins and Maya Angelou.8 Gender and its conse-
quences, which some literary histories segregate into chapters on women or
feminism, appear and reappear throughout our book. So do questions about
the fate of premodernist forms, about meter and rhyme and stanza shape, in
a postmodernist world. We might have given the Imagists or the Black Arts
Movement or the language writers or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop chapters
of their very own. Instead, they are discussed – as are almost all the poets and
topics named above – under other rubrics, with other connections, inevitably
subsets of those that an ininitely long volume could have made.
As our collection approaches the third century of these United States, as
it addresses the ever-increasing diversity of models and inl uences within

8
 Introduction

American poetry, we move away from some questions that gave structure to
earlier literary histories; these questions loom large in our own coverage only
when they loomed large for the poets involved. We do not always ask (because
our poets have not always asked) what makes American poetry irst and last
American, nor do we attempt to construct (as previous literary historians have
constructed) a unitary national tradition. Asked what makes American poems
American, Randall Jarrell said that “when we read it, we are at home”; but
some American poets have not felt at home, and we listen to their inventions
too.9 Nor do we take the poetry’s ambition to be self-consciously American
(as opposed to international, or local, or Californian, or Latino, or innovative,
or musical) as an index of its value. We look instead at what poets and groups
of poets have tried to do. “Some books are undeservedly forgotten,” Auden
remarked; “none are undeservedly remembered.”10 Some left out here will be
remembered later elsewhere.
We end our history not at the moment of writing – we go to press in 2014 –
but instead at the year 2000; poems written afterward appear here only spar-
ingly, in order to illuminate what came before. The events of September 11,
2001, may or may not constitute a sharp break in American culture, but they
certainly generated voluminous response; so did such later developments as
Hurricane Katrina, the election of President Obama, the omnipresence of
digital social media, and the rise of the awareness, among nonscientists, of the
grave threat posed by global climate change. All these topics should merit sus-
tained attention in the next generation of literary histories; for us, however,
they are still current events.
We leave, as well, for the next generation to chronicle two more develop-
ments that most readers who encountered American poetry in books and
paper magazines would not have noticed during the 1990s. The irst is the rise
of poetry in American Sign Language, in live performance and through video
recordings; the second is the rise of poetic texts that depend on new digital and
computational media. Both of these important phenomena began before the
year 2000, but a responsible history of either would require its own chapter,
with a terminus ad quem closer to the present day.11
Much older than – but integrally related to – these developments are
other ways to see, hear, and create poetry not dependent on convention-
ally printed words, nor on verse lines. Questions about visuality and poetry,
about material texts and of shapes that words make on a page, come up in
several chapters. So do questions – thousands of years old – about poetic
recitation, performance, and the status of the spoken word. We do not dis-
cuss song lyrics, conceived and reproduced as such, because they have their

9
 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

own history, inextricable from the history of American music, on record

and in performance. Nor, for the same reason, do we give rap and hip-hop
compositions much attention on their own, although we do consider their
interplay with other poetic traditions. To include American music history
from the sheet music era to the MP3 would have strained our remit beyond
bearing. We do, however, discuss work for oral performance where it pre-
dates, and where it has proven inseparable from, a written tradition, as in the
case of Native American poetries, and of the Nuyorican Poets Café. We also
omit the poetic prose of works that are usually discussed as prose iction,
or as rhetoric, even when they have had an inarguable efect on American
poetry: we do not examine (although another history might) Walden, The
Making of Americans, On the Road, or the Gettysburg Address. We do con-
sider, more generally, the status of recitation, of printed or memorized
poems read aloud: American poems, in the seventeenth and in the twentieth
century, emerge from pages, but need not remain there, and address both
the eye and the ear.
This volume, like all such volumes, is responsible to its era, to the expec-
tations of its likely readers, and to our own sense of what matters and why.
The unsettledness of such questions, the diiculty of deciding what matters,
has toward the end of the twentieth century become one of the topics that
American poetry characteristically takes up. To take part in – to edit, to write
for, and indeed to read with attention – such a volume as this one is to con-
sider a set of readers “back then,” in the poets’ own day, in 1666 or in 1999;
to consider another set of readers, with settled opinions and expectations,
today; and, not least, to consider an individual reader, with her overdeter-
mined, unpredictable, even unique response to a poem heard aloud, memo-
rized, rewritten, examined silently on a screen, or contemplated quietly on a
page. We have tried to do justice to that experience too.

Notes
1. F. O. Matthiessen (ed.), The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1950), p. xxx.
2. Richard Ellman (ed.), The New Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), pp. xxv, xxix.
3. Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Age of Lowell,” in Michael London and Robert Boyers
(eds.), Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time (New York: David Lewis,
1970), p. 155; Aidan Wasley, The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American
Scene (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Douglas Messerli (ed.),
The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994).

10
 Introduction

4. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings, ed. Carl van Vechten (New York: Vintage,
1990), p. 513.
5. On Hillyer and midcentury antimodernism, see Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution
of the Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); on disabil-
ity, start with Michael Davidson, “Disability Poetics,” in Cary Nelson (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 581–601, and Jennifer Barlett, Sheila Black,
and Michael Nothen (eds.), Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (El
Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2011).
6. On travel, see Jefrey Gray, Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); on pastoral, antipastoral, wilder-
ness, and farm, starting points include Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep (eds.),
The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta,
2012); Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered Planet (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001); John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the
Vision of Nature, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Guy
Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens,
Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1990).
7. On U.S. poets’ reactions to the First World War, see Mark Van Wienen,
Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); on the Second World War,
Diederik Oostdijk, Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World
War II (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2011); Harvey
Shapiro (ed.), Poets of World War II (New York: Library of America, 2003);
and Paul Fussell, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
on Vietnam, Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic
Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and on
twentieth-century U.S. war poetry in general, Philip Metres, “ ‘With Ambush
and Stratagem’: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War,” in Nelson (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, pp. 331–68,
and Lorrie Goldensohn, Dismantling Glory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003).
8. On popular verse and its uses after 1920, see especially Mike Chasar, Everyday
Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); see also Joan Shelley
Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2010). On nonelite poets and verse composition, see
instead the discussion of teenaged South Boston poets in Maria Damon, The
Dark End of the Street (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
9. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (1953; Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
2001), p. 317.
10. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (1962; New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 10.

11
 Al fre d Be n dix e n and S t e phe n B u rt

11. For Deaf poetry and poetics in English and English translation, see Davidson,
“Disability Poetics,” and also John Lee Clark (ed.), Deaf American Poetry
(Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2009). Two seminal works
on digital, electronic, and Internet-based poetries are Loss Pequeño Glazier,
Digital Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001) and Bryan
Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003); at the time of writ-
ing, many other resources on digital poetics appear on Web sites such as
h t t p : / / w w w. w r i t i n g . u p e n n . e d u / b e r n s t e i n / s y l l a b i / r e a d i n g s
/digital-poetics.html (compiled by Charles Bernstein) and http://www
.netpoetic.com/2009/08/some-links-to-stuf/ (compiled by Stefans).

12
 P a rt I
*
B E G I N N I N G S : P O E T RY
BEFORE 1800
 Chapter 1
Remembering Muskrat: Native Poetics and the
American Indian Oral Tradition
B etty B o oth D on o h ue

MUSKRATS DANCING
In the hole they hide
little grey souls
this is the song
they are singing in Ojibwe . . .
Our cousins’ bones
with the roots are roasting
while we drink swamp water
the syrup you have all forgotten.
Minobagidinigeyaang / we are good and free
ji-niimiiwaad wazhashkwedong
and dancing in the mushrooms.1
In the beginning, the American Indian oral tradition actuated and broke away
from time. It called the world into existence and then disappeared into it.
It remains there now, emanating creative power just as it did at irst light.
Constantly exercising its ancient ability to penetrate time and inspire human
literary creations, the power of the oral tradition extends the length of the
continent and guides the minds of all poets attuned to it. The Native oral tra-
dition is an animate, creative spirit that touches all who listen. In the words of
the Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday, it is “pervasive.”2
The earth’s narrative motions began at Creation which, for Native people,
is a critical reference point in time. Long ago, it is said that it was Muskrat who
swam through murky loods to bring up earth in order to form a space on
Turtle’s back for Sky Woman and her sons. Or perhaps it was for Nanaboozhoo
and his friends. For whom he did it does not matter. What does matter is that
Muskrat responded to an oral imperative. He dived deep into water and car-
ried up earth, the residing place irst of narrative, and then of holy people and
animal-like beings, and inally of humans. He brought them together in this
visible sphere and caused them to interact. The oral tradition’s various tribal

15
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

creation accounts invariably link the generative word, the resulting narrative,
earth, animals, and people into one great chain of Native being.
Among most traditionalists, remembering the act of creation is essential
to any serious life event or narrative performance. Creation accounts are so
important that some Nations, like the Osages, cause “a man who had talked
with the gods” to attend a woman who had just given birth and recite a crea-
tion account to the newborn before it is allowed to nurse. The same medicine
person recites the account again before the infant can have water. He is called
one more time before the infant is given solid food. These recitations give
the child his tribal story and the associative traditions he will be expected to
uphold. The creation account sets the child on his tribal path.3
As part of a Native literary composition or ritual, the creation account
determines a work’s thematic trajectory and prepares the listeners’ minds
for comprehension. The ancient Sky Woman creation narrative, passages of
which are common to many Iroquois and Algonquian people, is alluded to
in this chapter’s epigraph, written by the Ojibwe poet Margaret Noori, and it
is repeated in greater detail by another Ojibwe poet, Linda LeGarde-Grover.
Both poets tell of Muskrat, who in long-ago time fashioned earth. Since no rit-
ual can begin without retelling an appropriate creation account, their versions
open this one. Noori ixes our thematic course by recalling the “swamp water
. . . [we] have all forgotten,” while LeGarde-Grover re minds us of the “ininite
grace of this merciful earth” upon which all life depends, the life that the oral
tradition called into being and sustains.

REDEMPTION
After the Great Flood, Nanaboozhoo and four animals loated on a raft look-
ing for the Earth, and a surface on which they could live and walk. Amik
(Beaver), Ojig (Fisher), and Nigiig (Otter) each exhausted their strengths div-
ing to ind where the ground originated, but they were unable to stay under-
water long enough to ind the bottom. As they despaired, the last and smallest
animal, Wazhashk (Muskrat), asked to take a turn. Nanaboozhoo and the
other animals told him that it was hopeless and urged him not to try, but the
muskrat insisted on doing what he could. Because of Wazhashk’s courage and
sacriice the earth was renewed.
Wazhashk, the sky watched this.
Mewinzhaa, long before the memory of mortals,
Wazhashk, the sky watched your timid, gallant warrior body
deliberate, then plunge
with odd grace and dreadful fragility

16
 Remembering Muskrat

into translucent black water, [and] . . .

break the surface
into concentric expanding disappearing rings as
water circled your departure,
for a moment transparently covering small soles,
tiny seed pearl toes
above that determined small warrior body
that hurtled from sight then
in an instant was pulled into cold dark depths,
seeking the inite in the veins of a waterlocked earth.
Wazhashk, the water covering the earth watched this.
Mewinzhaa, long before the memory of mortals,
Wazhashk, when you were obscured from the sky the water watched you
(lost from the sight of the praying four
alone on a small raft aloat on vast water)
nearly faint under crushing cold
alone then below the waterline
seeking the inite in the veins of a cumbrous earth
as wateringers intruded and invaded
all unguarded aspects of your small warrior body
now stif and graceless
pulled by will into icy dark depths.
Wazhashk, in that dark mystery
unknown and vast as the night sky
you continued your solitary plunge
(lost from the sight of all who lived abovewater,
who considered your size and your courage)
until in cold and exhaustion your silent voice whispered
ninzegizi nigiikaj
nindayekoz niwiinibaa
I am frightened I am cold
I am tired I must sleep
and was heard by the Great Spirit.
Wazhashk, you were heard and were answered
gawiin ni wi maajaa sin
gaawin gi ga nogan i sinoon
have courage, have courage in the darkness
you are not alone, I am always with you
have courage, have courage in the darkness
til your spirit roused and spoke

17
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

I hear, I am here, I will try

through my despair I will
And the Great Spirit watched this and guided you.
Mewinzhaa, long before the memory of mortals,
Wazhashk, the Great Spirit guided you, and watched
your small curled brown ingers
stretch curving black claws
to grasp the muddy, rocky breast
of a waiting Mother Earth.
And today, Wazhashk, hear us breathe,
our inhalations and exhalations a continuing song
of courage sacriice grace redemption a continuing song
since long before the memory of mortals.
With each telling of the story with each singing of the song
we once again rise to break the surface and seek
the inite beyond the grace of this merciful Earth,
the inite beyond the mercy of this graceful Earth.4
Because Muskrat has had such a long existence, it is itting that he be
regarded as emblematic of the American Indian oral tradition for purposes
of this essay. He understands that summarizing the voluminous amount
of information regarding Native orature carries risks. The extensiveness of
the subject and the tribal markers that distinguish one Native group from
another complicate the genre, but for an article of this nature, he agrees
that brevity must trump both in-depth analysis and tribal speciicity if a
readable overview is to be presented. An old risk taker himself, Muskrat
thinks the time has come to proceed, and he gives his blessing to the ven-
ture. Because the Native oral tradition operates outside time as well as in
it, it resists historiography. The poetics of the oral tradition, which governs
Native orality, also informs modern Native writings to the extent that there
is no clear demarcation between old and new, oral and written. Because of
this linkage, the oral tradition cannot be separated from the larger issue of
American Indian literature; the two are inextricably tied. What a modern
literary history can ofer is a review of the genre along with a notation of
the European American literary response to it. Present-day literary histories
must also begin to acknowledge the oral tradition’s efect upon European
American letters. Like the wind, the tradition is invisible, but it leaves indel-
ible marks.
At the time of Contact, literature in the Western Hemisphere was alive,
copious, and dynamic. It was “practiced” by ordinary people as well as by

18
 Remembering Muskrat

literary specialists, who were referred to as “persons-who-know-things,” or

medicine people. Literature was an action that had medical, religious, social,
aesthetic, intellectual, and didactic properties. It was an all-encompassing
part of life. Logocentric in the extreme, American Indian literature served to
instruct, to delight, and to bring forth. Generative rather than mimetic, it was,
and is, vital and puissant. Simply put, American Indian literature is creative
power controlled and propelled by a specialized vocabulary.5
Pre-Columbian Native people produced histories, orations, fables, elegies,
love songs, and epics. In addition to these familiar literary modes, America’s
First People also composed songs or poems designed to efect protection from
hurtful entities or to ensure success for particular undertakings. They created
traveling songs, welcoming songs, lullabies, war chants, and battle narratives.
Naming songs introduced infants to the Creator; vision recitations revealed
a person’s life plan or tribal obligations; coming-of-age ceremonies readied a
young person for adulthood; and corn-grinding songs removed spiritual impu-
rities from food. Rhymes, or perhaps rhythms, were composed by children at
play, just as jump rope verses are created today. Death songs left something of
the singer for his friends to remember. In the old world of the oral tradition,
American Indian life began, was lived, and ended with poetry.
The most important of all tribal compositions were the oral formulae
designed to efect change or bring about healing. I call these narratives med-
icine texts for the reason that they contain the poetics necessary to gener-
ate change. Navajo chants like Ghostway or Enemyway, the Elohi fragment of
the Cherokees, and the Iroquois Rite of Condolence provide examples of such
narrative conigurations. Medicine, a pan-tribal concept, is many things. It
is sometimes a healing potion; psychologically it can be a curative for any
human problem that is out of balance with the universe. Medicine is meta-
physical power that can alter reality, and it is the theme of all healing chants.
Medicine, with all its simultaneous connotations, generates both the oral
tradition and modern American Indian letters. Basically, medicine is literary
power.
American Indian medicine texts incorporate prose accounts, songs, poetry,
dance, and sacred objects in ritual form. A chant is composed of many inter-
woven narrative strands, and each strand is a complete story in itself. More
important, each constituent narrative is essential to the entire ritual protocol.
The strands that eventually become most critical to American literature are
the narratives featuring ancient tribal gods, hero warriors, plants, animals,
tricksters, and the earth. Embedded within the ancient texts are special songs

19
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

or combinations of powerful words that enable the chant to restore balance

and efect change. Humans, if they appear at all, are minor players. The
colors, numbers, symbols, and occasional references to wampum or cacao
used to enrich these works are usually tribally speciic, while the narratives
of land forms, gods, animals, tricksters, heroes, and plants, especially corn
and tobacco, are common to most. Corn and tobacco are American Indian
sacramentals that are essential elements of nearly all rituals and the texts that
accompany them.
Drawing conclusions from works in the oral tradition presents hermeneu-
tical obstacles. The impulse of Native literature is to create or make happen,
not to represent or self-express. The ancient orality is verbal power that must
be protected or kept secret in order to be efective, and it must be propelled
by sound that determines meaning. Once the original language that carries
the meaning is taken away, only a verbal casing remains, and it is safe to say
that much, but certainly not all, of the work collected by ethnologists consists
largely of fragments of long narrative cycles. These poems, often designated
“songs,” are something like the empty shells a locust leaves behind. They are
fairly accurate replications but are devoid of animation. Not only do we now
have random passages with which to deal, but these truncated sections are fur-
ther obscured by the codiied words, encrypted expressions, and metaphorical
ciphers contained within them. A particular song’s lyrics may also be broken
up with vocables or modiied in ways that make them unrecognizable to the
uninitiated. Just as many of the verbal patterns have been “adjusted” or left
incomplete by informants, they are also devoid of the ritual acts and para-
phernalia that accompany them. Finally, a signiicant number of the cultures
that surrounded the singers are either gone or transformed, so that at best we
can say we have impressions of how Native poetic expressions may have been
rendered. The selections we are privileged to examine, however, are beautiful
and worthy of poetic attention.
The origins of some of the medicine texts, such as the Navajo chants,
are uncertain, while others are said to be given to dreamers by spirits, psy-
chic revelations, or even certain bird feathers. At one time, the Papagos, or
Tohono O’odhams, believed that several illnesses, particularly those diseases
that present symptoms of nervousness, were caused by the spirits of the
dead. Warriors were especially susceptible to such illnesses, and so were their
unborn children. The following passages are two medicine songs employed
to heal warriors who had killed Apaches and had not handled their scalps as
Tohono O’odham culture required. These songs are part of a series of pieces
used to efect a cure for such ofenses. Because the songs are removed from
their original context and separated from their ritual protocols and music, it
20
 Remembering Muskrat

may be diicult to understand how they function as a curative purportedly

provided by birds, but it is possible to appreciate their poetic grace and under-
stand that the songs’ power and meaning lie partly in their arrangements of
ciphers and sounds.

THE SUNRISE
The sun is rising,
At either side a bow is lying,
Beside the bows are lion-babies,
The sky is pink,
That is all.
The moon is setting,
At either side are bamboos for arrow-making,
Beside the bamboos are wild-cat babies,
They walk uncertainly,
That is all.6
EVENING SONG
The sun is slowly departing,
It is slower in its setting;
Black bats will be swooping when the sun is gone,
That is all.
The spirit children are beneath,
They are moving back and forth;
They roll in play among tufts of white eagle down,
That is all.7

Portions of the very complicated trickster tales, the passages dealing with
the con artist aspect of Trickster, are perhaps the most familiar of all the oral
tradition’s genres. Trickster tales usually feature Coyote, Raven, Spider, or
Rabbit, depending on the Nation, and they are stories told to children for
the purpose of moral instruction.8 Originally trickster tales may have been
prose interpolations found in the very lengthy healing chants. Because they
are purposely designed to arouse laughter and provoke thought, they pro-
vide an engaging diversion. Because medicine chants are balanced in terms of
feminine and masculine properties, they include portions that engage youths
as well as adults. Trickster tales centering on a scoundrel or deceiver survive
because they lack the ceremonial formalities, exalted language, and para-
taxis of the longer works. They are short insertions that are humorous, eas-
ily remembered, and thematically consistent. The twentieth-century Coyote,
who eschews discretion, is little changed from his older, braggart brother,
who once stole ire.
21
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

SONG OF COYOTE WHO STOLE THE FIRE

I am frivolous Coyote; I wander around.
I have been the Black God’s ire; I wander around.
I stole his ire from him; I wander around.
I have it! I have it!9 (Navajo)

Those familiar with Coyote instinctively know that although he has the ire
now, he will not hold on to it unless he keeps very quiet. And, of course, he
will not. He cannot. Prudence is not in his nature.
All the signiicant action of a medicine text takes place at highly speciic geo-
graphical sites that the hearer must remember and venerate. These locations
constitute the text’s land narrative, and of all the narrative strands, the land
narrative carries the most interpretative weight.10 In 1621, William Bradford,
writing from Plymouth Colony, records an encounter with the oral tradition
that emphasizes the genre’s impulses. He relates that before the Indians came
to the English to make friends, “they gott all the Powachs of ye cuntrie, for 3.
days togeather, in a horid and divellish maner to curse & execrate them with
their cunjurations, which asembly & service they held in a darke & dismale
swampe.”11 Bradford’s remarks indicate that the shamans were using power
formulae to efect change and restore Native balance, and they were perform-
ing this ceremony in a ritually appropriate site.
Underlying the content of medicine texts are basic assumptions subscribed
to by most traditional Native people. Native ethoi do not correspond to
Western European literary conceptualizations. Instead they are discrete, dis-
tinctive assumptions about how the universe works through Logos and are as
basic to Native texts as, for example, belief in cause and efect is to Western
narrative. Three of the most important concepts are delineated here.
The irst principle is that narrative, or the spoken word, created the earth
and remains in it. Ancient gods presided at Creation and then went away.
Nonetheless, they left their essences in the earth, in stone formations, and in
bodies of water. These essences, or inner forms, are the keepers of the irst
creation account, or irst narrative, and they retain the animating spirits of the
primal forces orchestrating Creation. It follows that generative narrative force
resides in the earth and maintains its primal energy. Voicing this concept is an
untitled ancient Náhuatl hymn that proclaims that “the Old God / distended
in the navel of the earth / dwells in waters . . . [and] in the clouds.”12 The
American continents are covered with geographical land forms where this
energy can be approached. Lake Guatavita (Muisca), Bear Butte (Cheyenne),
Nanih Waiya (Choctaw), and the Sweet Grass Hills (Blackfeet) are examples.

22
 Remembering Muskrat

The earth’s creative energy is in constant, transforming motion. It is not con-

ined to sacred spots but is in heavy concentration at them.
The second principle maintains that people and the earth are the same
thing. They are so closely connected that there is no diference between them.
The Navajo sacred chant Blessingway articulates this precept: “It is the very
inner form of Earth that . . . remains stationary with me.”13
The third principle holds that Native words have creative energy, perhaps
something like the dark energy of quantum physics. The old gods used ritual
words to bring the cosmos into being, and they have given highly speciic and
sacred verbal formulae to people for the purpose of maintaining it. When the
balance, or beauty, is disturbed, it can be restored when the ancient words, in
their proper syntactical order, are spoken. Particularly potent are proper nouns
or the names of dynamic individuals or sacred sites that, when uttered, can
call up the power associated with the entity dwelling there. Certain American
Indian names, spoken today, still generate this primal energy. Atakullakulla.
Tecumseh. Once translated into Carpenter and Panther, the words are power-
less. Spoken in Cherokee or Shawnee, they invigorate. The Native convention
is that the power is not in the meaning; it is in the sound. Centuries ago, an
Eskimo poet articulated this verbal energy when he sang, “In the very earliest
time, / . . . words were like magic. / The human mind had mysterious powers.
/ A word spoken by chance / might have strange consequences.”14
In many American Indian belief systems, everything that exists, both ani-
mate and inanimate, is closely related to something else, and all things are
essential to the proper functioning of the universe, society, and individuals.
Because only people are inclined to disrupt the system, it follows, then,
that humans must work to maintain the primordial balance. Hence every
aspect of Native life is surrounded with ritual. Newborn children are seen
as integral components of the universe, and they must understand it and
conform to it. Because the opposite is also true, each entity must recognize
the other and be cognizant of the other’s expectations. This recognition pro-
cess begins at birth and is part of most tribal ceremonial protocols. These
observances vary from Nation to Nation and range from the very simple to
the complex.
THE CHILD IS INTRODUCED TO THE COSMOS AT BIRTH
Ho! Ye Sun, Moon, Stars, all ye that move in the heavens,
I bid you hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life.
Consent ye, I implore!
Make its path smooth, that it may reach the brow of the irst hill! . . .

23
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

Ho! Ye Winds, Clouds, Rain, Mist, all ye that move in the air,
I bid you hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life.
Consent ye, I implore!
Make its path smooth, that it may reach the brow of the second hill!
Ho! Ye Hills, Valleys, Rivers, Lakes, Trees, Grasses, all ye of the earth,
I bid you hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life.
Consent ye, I implore!
Make its path smooth that it may reach the third hill!
Ho! Ye Birds, great and small, that ly in the air,
Ho! Ye Animals, great and small, that dwell in the forest,
Ho! Ye Insects that creep among the grasses and burrow in the ground –
I bid you hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life.
Consent ye, I implore!
Make its path smooth, that it may reach the brow of the fourth hill!
Ho! All ye of the heavens, all ye of the air, all ye of the earth:
I bid you all to hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life.
Consent ye, consent ye all, I implore!
Make its path smooth – then shall it travel beyond the four hills!15
(Omaha)
This song, performed for a child when he is eight days old, was recorded by
Alice Fletcher and Francis LaFlesche (Omaha). It demonstrates the concept of
interdependence noted previously. The song is “a supplication to the powers
of the heavens, the air, and the earth for the safety of the child from birth to
old age” and perhaps beyond.16 The four hills suggest the four stages of life:
infancy, youth, adulthood, and old age. From the portion given to Fletcher
and LaFlesche, we see the repetition of four stanzas consisting of ive lines
interrupted by one stanza of seven lines. The numbers here are important
since four is the Native “perfect” number referring to the four directions, the
four seasons, the four stages of life, and the four elements: earth, wind, ire,
and water. Seven is a number with “medicine” connotations varying from
Nation to Nation. This narrative rite is one of many that punctuate a child’s
life. Among Omahas it precedes his introduction to the tribe, a ritual that is
followed by yet another ceremony that takes place once the child can walk
unaided and is “sent into the midst of the winds.”17 Poetic ceremonials help
the child mark every event in his life, from birth to death. Such events can
be daily occurrences like greeting the sun, rearing children, or performing

24
 Remembering Muskrat

life-sustaining tasks. Dawn is ritually greeted because it is a reenactment of

Creation, itself an ongoing process. The following text is a morning prayer,
given at daybreak, and it is followed by two lullabies.
PRAYER AT SUNRISE
Now this day,
My sun father,
Now that you have come out standing to your sacred place,
That from which we draw the water of life,
Prayer meal,
Here I give to you.
Your long life,
Your old age,
Your waters,
Your seeds,
Your riches,
Your power,
Your strong spirit,
All these to me may you grant.18 (Zuni)

PUWUCH TAWI
Puva, puva, puva
In the trail of the beetles
On each other’s backs are sleeping
So on mine, my baby, thou.
Puva, puva, puva.19 (Hopi)

WHY DID YOU CRY?

Why did you cry; why did you cry?
Have you stepped on a thorn; have you stepped on a thorn?20
(Yuma)
Just as infants were treasured, other forms of life were also crucial to human
survival. Like children put to sleep by song, seeds were also placed into the
ground with music. Crop cultivation was usually done by women and was
attended by lengthy rituals. Some songs, like this example, were handed down
through the generations, while others were composed for the moment.
CORN PLANTING SONG
I have made a footprint, a sacred one.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades push upward.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades radiate
I have made a footprint, over it the blades loat in the wind. . . .21
(Osage)

25
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

Other undertakings necessary to sustain life were likewise accompanied

by songs designed to focus energy on the task at hand. Hunting songs – such
as the Menominee sample noted here – were composed to attract game:
“When I begin this I ofer my song, so I may succeed in getting game.”22 Other
hunt songs celebrate a kill or relate the details of the trip after the hunter has
returned home. Some of these selections express the sadness of watching an
animal expire. Because American Indians tended to believe that a kill was pos-
sible only because an animal decided to sacriice itself for human sustenance,
most hunting songs center on the animal itself, not the hunter’s theoretical
skill. When an animal was killed, ritual protocols were carried out to thank
the animal and ensure other successful hunts.
WALRUS HUNTING
The walrus, I harpoon it,
Stroking its cheek.
You have become quiet and meek.
The walrus I harpoon it,
Patting its tusks.
You have become quiet and meek.23 (Eskimo)
Courtship, marriage, and divorce rituals had their poetic expressions as
well. Existing fragments of American Indian love songs continue to charm
and to reveal the ancient singers’ emotional states and personalities.
WHEN I THINK OF HIM
Although he said it
Still
I am illed with longing
When I think of him.24 (Ojibwe)

LOVE SONG
Look oft up the river, look oft and oft.
In spring at the breaking of the ice,
Look oft;
You may see me coming down in my canoe.
Look oft up the river, look anew, anew.25 (Maliseet)
WE MADE FIRE
Comrade,
In the daytime when we made ire
it was pleasant.
I understand women.26 (Mandan/Hidatsa)

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 Remembering Muskrat

Native love poems do not always articulate idyllic relationships. The fol-
lowing Ojibwe songs illustrate both unhappy and childishly spiteful romantic
connections:
HE IS GONE
I might grieve,
I am sad
that he is gone
my lover.27
YOU DESIRE VAINLY
You desire vainly
that I seek you.
The reason is
I come
to see your younger sister.28

According to the tenets of the oral tradition, it is thought that some songs
were gifts given to particular individuals by birds, animals, rocks, trees, and
the like. In the scheme of creation, birds and animals preceded people on the
earth and often acted as their guardians. Sitting Bull, the Lakota medicine man
and poet, speaks of receiving songs from birds, an eagle, and a wolf. Their
advice was crucial to him at various times in his life. On one occasion the med-
icine man composed a song to thank yellowhammers (likely northern l ick-
ers), who in a dream warned him of a grizzly attack that subsequently took
place. He avoided death by pretending to be dead and later thanked the birds:
Pretty bird, you saw me and took pity on me;
You wished me to survive among the people.
O Bird People, from this day always you will be my relatives!29

Among Native people, even today, there is an understanding that one’s own
songs are personal property. As such, songs can be gifts either given or received.
When a song is received, it is expected that the recipient will reciprocate or
“pay” for it, meaning that he will give back some token to express appreci-
ation. The following song was supplied for this chapter by Larry Daylight
(Loyal Shawnee), former art professor at Bacone College, the country’s irst
American Indian institution of higher learning. This composition was given
to Daylight by Johnny Whiteshirt (Cheyenne/Arapaho) in memory of a little
girl, a student at Bacone at the turn of the century, a time when Bacone also
educated elementary schoolchildren. Whiteshirt relates that when the girl’s

27
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

family left her at the school, she was very lonely. As she stood on the veranda
of a dormitory and watched her family depart in a horse-drawn wagon, she
knew that if she cried, she would anger the matron. As Whiteshirt watched
the girl, he could imagine her pain, and he composed this song. Years later,
he entrusted the song to Daylight in memory of the college’s Cheyenne/
Arapaho alumni.
ARAPAHO VERSE
On Nay Da Zey. Hon Nay Hon Na Nawy Naw Noo. Hay Yah-Hay Yah-Hay
Yah-Hay Aye
Yah-Hay Yah-Hay Yah-Hay Yoo.
Ewe Ne Ha Maw Bee Naw, Hay Gin Naw Taye, Yah-Aye Yah Hay Ya Yoem.
English Free Translation
They brought her here, and now I see her standing.
Lonely and frightened, she wonders if they will ever come back for her.
Chorus
HAY Yah-hay Ya-hay Ya-hay Yoo, Hay Yah-hay Ya-hay-Yoo.
YAH-Hay, Yah-Hay, Ya-Hay, Yah-Hay-Yah.
Yah-Hay, Yah-Hay, Yah-Hay-Yah.
Yah-Hay, Yah-Hay, Yah-Hay-Yoo.
YAH-Hay, Yah-Hay, Ya-Hay, Yah-Hay-Yah.
Yah-Hay, Yoo-Aye, Ya-Hay, Aye-Yah, Yah-Hay-Yoem.30
Just as the beginning of life was marked by music, so was the end, and
death songs are still as poignant today as those written long ago. The follow-
ing two Ojibwe songs ofer examples of the genre. Ga’witayac was killed in a
battle with some Lakotas. The bear had been his Manitou, or spirit guide. His
friends stood by him as he sang his death song, which expresses his feeling of
betrayal: “Large bear / Deceives me.”31 Namebines also was killed by Lakotas.
Having been shot in the abdomen, he was too badly wounded to move. As he
was dying he sang his death song and asked his colleagues to tell the women
at home how he died. He further requested the men to sing his death song
when they returned so that the women could dance to it as they commem-
orated his life: “The odor of death / I discern the odor of death / in front of
my body.”32
A feature of much American Indian poetry is its brevity, but when a song’s
short sentiments are expanded by repetition and vocables, the oral performance
is actually much longer than it may appear when frozen in print. Expanding
upon this verbal compression, in Songs of the Teton Sioux, Harry Paige points
out that Native songs are “mere outlines of artistic expressions. . . . They
are the stones dropped in the quiet pool which cause the ripples to spread”;

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 Remembering Muskrat

moreover, these expressions are primarily intimations of feelings to which the

hearer adds his own meaning.33 In this respect, the songs conform to Native
rules of narrative theory. A good story does not tell all of a story but allows the
listener to create his own interpretation, given his intellectual development at
the moment.34 American Indian narrative is always a reciprocal process that
involves the listener mentally adding what the singer has omitted.
Of the many works contained in the oral tradition, attraction formulae, or
love charms, inevitably elicit interest. Ojibwes are especially noted for their
love medicine, and Cherokees, too, have enthusiasts who admire their incanta-
tions. Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick (Cherokees) inter-
pret charm poetics. They posit that Cherokee attraction chants begin with rit-
ual power words followed by a declaration of the names of both the charmer
and the person to be enchanted, as well as the clan to which each belongs,
because these incantations are directed to a speciic person for a particular
reason. Love charms also invoke a spirit totem favored by the singer. They
follow a structure based on powerful numbers, either four or seven, and they
work symbolic colors into the verbal arrangement. Typically love charms are
recited at dawn on seven successive mornings at a creek or river. Traditionally,
Cherokees tend to enact important ritual performances near water, which,
like ceremonial ire, carries power to a target. They further accompany the
words with tobacco oferings. This process is called “going to water.” It should
be pointed out that the charms work only if they are recited in the carrier
language.35

CHEROKEE CHARM
Listen! I am to make my appearance!
Crow, I speak well!
Now under the Morning Red, now under the treetops I
just submerged myself.
I, _______, have just laid down the Pathway.
My Red Attire, desired by Red Eyes, I have just come to spread out.
Now I have plucked them out.
They will be in my body!
You will be unable to glance away.
Your thought is not to wander.
At my back upon the Eternal White Road will be the sound
of your footsteps.
I have come to draw away your soul!
Listen! Now You Little White Dog!

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 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

He has come to fondle your soul.

In what you have to do, you are not to desist!
This is my name, _______; these are my people, _______.36
(Cherokee; Adair County, Oklahoma 1882)
The Kilpatricks explain that here Crow is the spirit helper applied to. The
use of the word “red” indicates the color east and victory; “white” indicates
south and happiness. Within the body of the charm, code phrases referring to
medicine are embedded. Actual names and clans are designated in order for
the medicine to have speciic application. There are seven ritual stanzas. The
Kilpatricks point out that the poem can be paraphrased to mean something
like the following:
Under the red sunrise, with the help of Crow, I concentrate on victory. My
physical eyes I transform into mental eyes focused on winning you. I am cer-
tain that we will have a long happy life together. I will cause a small feeling of
joy, like a little white dog, to come into your soul and warm your heart when
you think of me.37
Obviously, English cannot do justice to this poem, but it is one example
of power-word arrangement. Belief in word power was expressed by early
Native writers, and that the notion is still accepted as a fact of Native life today
is corroborated by the words of a Cherokee poet, Gladys Cardif, who alludes
to it in the following lines. Notice that she fuses her words with ceremonial
ire, a constant in American Indian sacred observances.

IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH FINAL WORDS

. . . There are words so old
they must be honored when you come
to them, and only after
can they do their work.
Fire, circled, is like that.38
Like Cardif, other modern Native poets draw from the compositional
impulses of the oral tradition. For example, a little Tule/Yaqui lyric collected
in the nineteenth century does not difer substantially from a twentieth-cen-
tury Yakama selection.

TULE LOVE SONG

Many pretty lowers, red, blue, and yellow.
We say to the girls, “Let us go and walk among the lowers.”
The wind comes and sways the lowers,
The girls are like that when they dance. . . .39 (Yaqui)

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 Remembering Muskrat

LOVE SONG
She is a reed swaying in blue;
Chokecherries are the color of her
skin and her feet moisten the earth. . . .40
(Earle Thompson, Yakama)
Among modern Native poets, lyrical romantic expression, as in the preced-
ing poem, is rare. Noticeably absent too are nature allusions and whimsi-
cal metaphors, like the oft-quoted Ojibwe lines, “A loon I thought it was, /
But it was my love’s splashing oar.”41 In their place are old terrors and new
ambivalences. Although modern Native versiiers often seem cynical when
writing about male-female pairings, they are, nevertheless, consonant with
many twenty-irst-century European American oferings. The Cree poet Beth
Cuthand is typical of today’s Native poets in regard to dubious attractions.
She reconigures romantic longings with trickster allusions for modern Native
sensibilities when she voices her interlude with a stranger. In keeping with the
old tradition, she makes good the Pima observation that “Coyote commences
singing [and] / The young woman hurries forth / To hear the Coyote songs.”42
Of course, Coyote, who is preternaturally sexually ambitious and completely
untrustworthy, must be approached warily. In “Dancing with Rex,” Cuthand
understands that while “Me and Rex are brushing the dust / of our boots. His
canine teeth / glint in the light of lightning / and his heart beats audibly in
time to the drums.”43
Like many other ceremonial protocols, the ritual procedures surrounding
hunting continue to be performed today, as evidenced by the Mvskogee poet
Louis Oliver, Little Coon.
EMPTY KETTLE
I do not waste what is wild
I only take what my cup
can hold.
When the black kettle gapes
empty
and children eat roasted acorns
only. . . .44
Modern death songs – like those articulated centuries ago – even now express
the inevitable in terms of acceptance and courage. The Suquamish poet Agnes
Pratt in “Summer ’76” anticipates that she will “[walk] toward death / singing
all the time.”45
For the irst several centuries of this country’s existence, the oral tradition
chose to remain in relative obscurity. Preferring the company of Native people

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 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

and a select number of non-Native poets and writers, it eschewed the acad-
emy, journals, and publishing houses. Things, however, eventually changed.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was obvious to any informed
observer that American Native people were in distress. Most of the Eastern
Nations had either gone into hiding or had been destroyed by the onslaught of
civilization. Others had been forcibly moved West. Immediately following the
Civil War, the United States government began systematically “subduing” the
“hostile tribes” residing beyond the Mississippi, and in this case, “subduing”
can be read as “annihilating.” The oral tradition had to act; therefore, it did
not object when, ive years after Appomattox, a dedicated group of anthro-
pologists, ethnologists, linguists, and ethnomusicologists, likely fearing the
imminent loss of Native culture, and perhaps inspired by the previous work of
Henry Schoolcraft, began ieldwork among American Indians for the purpose
of collecting their songs and recording their customs. Their eforts produced
literally hundreds of bulletins and brought the oral tradition to the public’s
attention. In 1879, Congress established the Bureau of American Ethnography,
an oice that became a clearinghouse for publications about American Indian
culture. Researchers like Franz Boas, Daniel Brinton, Natalie Curtis, Frank
Hamilton Cushing, Frances Densmore, Francis LaFlesche, Alice Fletcher,
Berard Haile, Washington Matthews, James Mooney, and Elsie Parsons col-
lected materials taken from Native sources. They, and others like them, mined
their respective ields for a period extending from approximately 1870 to 1930,
and it was these ieldworkers who, perhaps oicially, realized the signiicance
of their inds in terms of literary excellence. Washington Matthews and Father
Berard concentrated on archiving Navajo chants, while James Mooney com-
piled Cherokee sacred formulae. These Native works are diicult to date but
are very old. On the other hand, many of the works that ethnologists like
Frances Densmore and Natalie Curtis assembled are more recent. Some of
their selections are possibly contemporaneous with the various informants,
while others are reported to be much older. Thus the volumes amassed by the
irst wave of researchers include materials ranging from ancient times to the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This ethnographic research eventually led to the creation of collections of
Native works. Perhaps the most well known of the irst run of Native anthol-
ogies are George W. Cronyn’s American Indian Poetry (1918), Margot Astrov’s
Winged Serpent (1946), and A. Grove Day’s The Sky Clears (1951). These three
titles are standards in the ield, and they provide accessible Native poetic works
adequate for pleasure reading or, with minor qualiication, for introductory
courses to American Indian literature.

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 Remembering Muskrat

Succeeding anthologies of works from the oral tradition like William

Brandon’s The Magic World (1971), James Houston’s Songs of the Dream People
(1972), Jerome Rothenberg’s Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), and Brian Swann’s
Coming to Light (1994) follow the earlier models and are pan-tribal. Other poetry
collections such as Ruth Underhill’s Rainhouse and Ocean (1979), Donald Bahr’s
Ants and Orioles (1997), Nora Dauenhauer’s series entitled Classics of Tlingit
Oral Literature (1987–1994), and Miguel León-Portilla’s Fifteen Poets of the Aztec
World (1992) are tribally speciic and highly detailed.
Works in the oral tradition fall roughly into four major categories: the ancient
tradition that existed before Contact; the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
works collected by ethnologists; the modern oral tradition, which is inten-
tionally nonliterate; and current written works, which are closely informed
by the oral tradition. Representative of the ancient works are the previously
mentioned Navajo chants, the Elohi fragment, and the Rite of Condolence. The
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections can be found in bulletins
issued by the Bureau of American Ethnology with titles like The Acoma Indians
or Ethnology of the Kwakiutl Indians. These volumes contain old works mixed
with contemporary selections. Current powwow music, personal lyrical sen-
timents, and contemporary secret ceremonials, such as those performed by
Southwestern Pueblos, are examples of the intentional nonliterate orature.
This work presently exists, and some of it, like the powwow music, circulates.
Much of it is considered private, if not secret, and it is inappropriate to access
it. Certain modern Native writings, such as the two Ojibwe pieces opening
this chapter, are manifestations of the oral tradition’s continuing presence
among us.
The irst non-Native people actually to confront the oral tradition were var-
ious explorers, missionaries, and colonists. Spaniards exploring the American
Southwest and Europeans traveling along the Atlantic coast and eastern water-
ways all reacted to Native song, and some of them recorded their impressions.
For example, in January 1612, one Father Biard, a Jesuit priest working near
what is now northern New York or Maine, wrote to his Provincial about an
encounter he and his group had experienced with a band of Armouchiquois
and the oral tradition:
All night there was continual haranguing, singing, dancing, for such is the
kind of life all these people lead when they are together. Now as we supposed
that probably their songs and dances were invocations to the devil, to oppose
the power of this cursed tyrant I had our people sing some sacred hymns, as
the “Salve,” the “Ave Maris Stella,” and others. But when they once got into
the way of singing, the spiritual songs being exhausted, they took up others

33
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

with which they were familiar. When they came to the end of these, as the
French are natural mimics, they began to mimic the singing and dancing of
the Armouchiquois who were on the bank, succeeding in it so well that the
Armouchiquois stopped to listen to them; and then our people stopped and
the others immediately began again. It was really very comical, for you would
have said that they were two choirs which had a thorough understanding with
each other, and scarcely could you distinguish the real Armouchiquois from
the imitators.46
These observations, like the Bradford passage cited earlier, verify early cul-
tural exchanges and reveal important attributes of the oral tradition. Both
note the connection between Native poetics and the earth, the irst princi-
ple of Native rhetorical theory, and they attest to its verbal power, or med-
icine. In these examples, the Armouchiquois are singing in a forest on the
bank of a river while Bradford’s powachs are in a carefully chosen swamp.
Forests, rivers, and swamps are sources of narrative and verbal power, and
verbal power is medicine. We know without doubt that the powachs had been
conjuring with formulaic codes, but we do not know with any certainty what
the Armouchiquois had been singing. Since they were men on a camping trip
away from home and amusing themselves before bedtime, we can only specu-
late. It is not much of an imaginative stretch to see how some Frenchmen, also
away from home and alone in the forest at bedtime, caught on.
Bradford’s remarks, like Father Biard’s, also provide accurate data
about the ancient singers. The powachs in question were led by the famous
Passaconaway, who was reportedly the most powerful of the Northeastern
Algonquian medicine men. According to William Wood, a visitor to New
England writing in 1634, Passaconaway could “make the water burn, the rocks
move, the trees dance, [and] metamorphise himself into a laming man.”47
Wood’s report attests to the strength of Native codes. Scholars are not sure
who the Armouchiquois were, but they believe that they were a very small
band of Northeastern Algonquians who could have been distantly connected
to the Penobscots, the Abenakis, and the Passamaquoddies.
Since Contact, Americans of one stripe or another have experienced the
oral tradition in some form. Reactions to it have varied from fear to humor-
ous tolerance and from mimicry to sincere appreciation. It is important
to point out, however, that parodic or not, fearful or not, and esteemed or
not, poetic conversations between Europeans and American Indians have
been taking place for at least four hundred years, and these dialogues have
resulted in Native modiications to the evolving American literature. Even
though Passaconaway’s ceremony did not bring about its desired end, it did

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efect changes in colonial life, thought, and discursive practices. Reactions

to American Indians and the oral tradition were entered into the developing
American literature and modiied it. The span is short from the Ojibwe’s “As
my eyes / search / the prairie / I feel the summer in the spring” to Wallace
Stevens’s “The river is moving. The blackbird must be lying.”48
In the period between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries,
American Indians were not part of America’s visible literary scene to any
signiicant degree, even though a few Native people, like Samson Occom
(Mohegan), William Apess (Pequot), Jane Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), George
Copway (Ojibwe), and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), published. American
Indians were, however, very much a part of America’s invisible literary land-
scape. American Indian ceremonial life had not stopped in the “civilized” East
or the yet-unconquered West. American poets responded, perhaps uncon-
sciously, to the tradition’s inherent power to inl uence. Although a clearly
marked interstice that allowed Native poetics and European American dis-
course to meld remains elusive, it is clear that exchanges took place, and sev-
eral American literary critics have noted the comingling.
In the twentieth century, at least seven literary critics, perhaps taking their
cues from the late nineteenth-century anthropologists, begin to appreciate
the beauty of the oral tradition and note its inl uence on American poetry.
Scholars like Mary Austin, publishing in 1923, and Constance Rourke, in 1942,
argue that American literature has Native features. Michael Castro, writing
in 1983; James Nolan in 1994; and Kenneth Lincoln in 2000 have kept up the
low of critical works enlarging this position. Austin believes that Native
people absorbed from the topography of America certain rhythms conso-
nant with human experience, and these rhythms are expressed in their oral
compositions. European American poets would later access these same land-
generated rhythms and thus forge “relationships . . . between aboriginal and
later American forms.”49 Rourke posits that American Indian treaty-signing
ceremonials were the irst American dramas. She compares the signings to
chronicle plays, complete with dramatis personae, speeches, songs, and “pre-
cise notations . . . [of] ceremonial action.”50 Castro explains that the Native
inl uence in American poetry surfaces when non-Indian poets respond to
their perceptions of American Indian culture and either egregiously appro-
priate it or sympathetically attempt to emulate it. As they either correctly or
incorrectly “interpret” their sense of Indianness, they bring the Native into
their works.51 Nolan believes that what has come to be known as “nativist” or
“Americanist” poetics, such as the “cadences of Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay,
or Gary Snyder,” is largely American Indian poetics, while Lincoln maintains

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that styles imported from Europe have “fused” with American Indian styles
and created a “hybrid literature.”52
Amplifying these European American positions, Native poets and critics
have vocalized concurrence. The Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny states that
“Native American chanters and writers who support and enrich [American
literature] . . . are . . . a strong post or two of its very foundation.”53 In his assess-
ment of the American literary canon, the Mvskogee critic Craig Womack
unequivocally states that “tribal literatures are not some branch waiting to be
grafted onto the main trunk, [but they] . . . are the tree.”54
From American poetry’s beginning, Native markers – such as American
Indian characters and themes, ceremonial rhetorical protocols, Native words,
and herbaceous ornamentation consisting primarily of corn, squash, and
tobacco – are profuse and unmistakable in colonial poetry. Despite the heavy
shadows cast by Puritan jeremiads and pious relections, Native poetics in
seventeenth-century American poetry became irmly established. Although
it is true that not all European American poets absorbed and transmitted
Native rhetorical formularies, those who did suiciently discharged their
errands into the wilderness. One of our earliest works, William Wood’s New
Englands Prospect (1634), provides an example of the imprint of Native poetics
on American letters. Prospect, written by an English visitor to America, is a
travelogue describing early New England. It is composed largely in prose but
includes verse interpolations or short poems. These verses are framed by com-
plex land narratives, complete with creation accounts and references to direc-
tions, seasons, bodies of water, vegetation, animals, colors, and Native people.
Prospect incorporates lists of Native words as well as the direct discourse of
Native people, many of whom were sachems. In early Native societies, the
headmen or sachems interacting with colonists were irst of all medicine peo-
ple. Sachems were the caretakers of their tribal stories. Having internalized the
Native Logos, they could summon its power. The wisdom derived from sacred
tribal narratives enhanced their lives and inspired others to follow them. The
headmen confronting Europeans were literary critics and wordsmiths. Their
words, and their names, had enduring strength.
Wood opens Prospect with an acknowledgment to Native literary power
when he reports on Passaconaway’s previously cited verbal abilities. His
decision to include the passage in his relation gives us a measure of the oral
tradition’s formidable strength and its allure for colonial writers. Prospect’s
verse interpolations, which are something like the holy songs in medicine
texts, praise trees, animals, birds, and ish and thus encompass entities of
earth, umbrage, air, and water in a ceremonial manner. In conformity with

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his English background, Wood’s animal song begins in a slightly Anglicized

fashion – “The kingly lion and the strong-armed bear, / The large-limbed
mooses, with the tripping deer” – but it quickly transforms into a more Native
or American rendering: “Black, glistering otters and rich-coated beaver, /
The civet-scented musquash smelling ever.”55 Once Musquash, or Muskrat,
is invoked by the power of the Algonquian word, Prospect becomes an exam-
ple of American Indian poetics at work. The power word, Musquash, unlike
“kingly lion,” puts in place a Native presence that is not contained by European
nature metaphors and conceits of royalty. It is unlikely that Wood was aware
of the literary signiicance of his discursive strategies, but Muskrat was. And
that has made all the diference.
American poets since Wood have continued to incorporate American
Indian poetics into their works. By the beginning of the eighteenth century,
European immigration to America increased, and as it did, American Indians
either assimilated into what had been their old communities and moved to the
cultural margins or they trekked West. They did not vanish, and neither did
their literary formulae. The forces governing Native poetics seemed increas-
ingly determined to adapt to a mode that would allow them to survive. Perhaps
for that reason, Native stylistics in eighteenth-century European American
poetry increase. Surfacing above the wave of the neoclassicism looding the
American literary scene are several signiicant works incorporating Native
modes. Among them is Roger Wolcott’s Brief Account of the AGENCY of the
Honourable John Winthrop, Esq; in the Court of King Charles the Second, Anno Dom.
1662 (1725). Brief Account is a testament to Pequot invincibility. In addition to
the poem’s visible Native markers and characters, American Indian poetics
also regulates its structure and theme. This epyllion ostensibly celebrates the
granting of a charter for Connecticut from Charles II to John Winthrop, but it
is more a commemoration of the Pequot war and a celebration of the Native
warriors engaged in it. In this work, the titular hero, John Winthrop, serves as
narrator, detailing carefully modiied particulars of the massacre at Mystic.
He is, however, not the epic hero; Sassacus is: “Great was his Glory, greater
still his Pride, / Much by himself and others Magnify’d.”56 The Native people
are counterbalanced by the English forces led by John Mason, but Sassacus
dominates the narrative, and his speeches frame the work.
By the nineteenth century, European American poets are beginning to read
the land for themselves and acknowledge Native inspiration. Philip Freneau’s
“timorous fancy [can] see / The painted chief,” while Walt Whitman can
“hear America singing.”57 In these instances, the key words are “see” and
“hear,” and they should be taken literally as well as metaphorically. Many of

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the mainstream works written in this epoch show an intense preoccupation

with nature, or, in Native terms, American Indians and the earth. It is as if the
land narratives central to American Indian medicine texts have overwhelmed
European American sensibilities and found new outlets for expression. In addi-
tion to the Native themes and stylistic devices emerging from the developing
literature, various philosophical movements, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
and Henry David Thoreau’s Transcendentalism, can be seen as deriving as
much from American Indian ontology and epistemology as from Kantian
thought. Even though the roots of American nature poetry have long been
traced to European Romanticism and prior preoccupations with Edenic meta-
phors, we must consider the fact that American poetry was written by persons
who, perhaps subconsciously, drew their inspiration from Native geographical
narrative sources and from the Native people with whom they associated.
In the nineteenth century, when the Western Nations were being militarily
subdued and sensationalized by newspaper headlines, the Eastern Nations
were living quietly beside their non-Indian neighbors, and the two groups
associated with one another. Equally important, traditional Native people
all over the United States continued to practice ancient rites, and the power
those oral texts exuded illed the air. To exclude these factors from theoretical
deliberations concerning the origins of American letters is to limit the scope
of American literature’s own creation account. As one might expect, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, well known for his interest in Native subjects, pro-
duced Indianized texts. The most obvious is Hiawatha (1855), but Evangeline
(1847) is also an example of how Native discursive strategies have embedded
themselves in canonical literature. The poem’s “forest primeval,” prominent
in Longfellow’s complex and sustained land narrative, frames and controls
this epic-metered dirge sung by “murmuring pines and . . . hemlocks.”58 Like
medicine texts, the poem orients itself directionally and stays on course for
the length of the poem. Beginning and ending in the East, Evangeline takes a
clockwise course, as action moves from Acadia to Louisiana, to the West, to
Michigan, and then to Pennsylvania. The entire work is punctuated by Native
interpolations, allusions, and sacramentals, particularly corn and tobacco.
The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of Native writers who draw
from the oral tradition. Among them are Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), Robert
Conley (Cherokee), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Joy Harjo (Mvskogee), Carter
Revard (Osage), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros
Ventre), and many others far too numerous to mention here. Despite the fact
that American Indian writers are now proliic and are published globally, Native
poetic devices remain a constant in twentieth-century European American

38
 Remembering Muskrat

poetry, and a signiicant amount of this verse displays the American Indian
markers and discursive strategies begun in the seventeenth century. Native
essences are observable in works ranging from William Carlos Williams’s
Paterson (1946–1961) to Lucille Clifton’s “the message of crazy horse” (1987).
In recent memory, Mary Oliver writes of “muskrats swimming / among the
pads”; Carl Sandburg once saw “three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines
River”; and James Wright “paused among the dark cattails and prayed / for
the muskrats.”59 As we move into the early twenty-irst century, we ind poets
like Jan Chronister, Jerah Chadwick, and Cecilia Lieder successfully combin-
ing Native poetics with European American renderings, as other non-Native
poets have previously done. There is little to suggest that these compositional
impulses will stop.
Whether or not it is widely acknowledged, the oral tradition persists. Native
people still greet the dawn with poetry. Creation accounts are told. Lore is
kept; ires tended; spirits fed; migrations recounted. Out of the darkness, the
headmen give the call. The response sounds. And the circle forms. The sacred
formulae move into action. Modern American Indian writers replicate the
ancient oral poetics while European American writers subconsciously absorb
and reshape its governing ordinances. Just as the Mesquakie poet Ray Young
Bear retains the vision of “the small muskrat’s clasped hands,” Carl Sandburg
is absolutely conident that once he “lean[ed] on an ash and watch[ed] the
lights fall, the red ember glow, and three / muskrats swim west in a fan of
ripples on a sheet of river gold.”60

Notes
1. Margaret Noori, “Wazhashk Wazhashkwedong,” unpublished poem, August
24, 2008. Used by permission of the author.
2. N. Scott Momaday, “The Native Voice,” in Emory Elliott (ed.), The Columbia
Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998), p. 14.
3. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis LaFlesche, note found in “The Omaha Tribe,”
Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1905–1906
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Oice, 1911), p. 116.
4. Linda LeGarde-Grover, “Redemption,” in Trail Guide to the Northern Experience
in Prints and Poetry (Duluth, Minn.: Calyx Press, 2008), pp. 32–33.
5. Betty Booth Donohue, Bradford’s Indian Book: Being the True Roote & Rise
of American Letters as Revealed by the Native Text Embedded in Of Plimoth
Plantation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), pp. xiii, 5. Reprinted
with permission of the University Press of Florida. An in-depth discussion of

39
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

the creative and healing power of Native poetics can be found in the preface
and irst chapter of this volume.
6. Frances Densmore, Papago Music (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Oice, 1929), p. 113.
7. Densmore, Papago Music, p. 114.
8. Vernida Casuse (Navajo), personal interview with the author, October
16, 2007.
9. Hasteen Klah, Navajo Creation Myth: The Story of Emergence, recorded by Mary C.
Wheelwright (Santa Fe, N.M.: Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, 1942), p. 136.
10. Donohue, Bradford’s Indian Book, p. 5.
11. William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), p. 98.
12. Miguel León-Portilla, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, trans. Grace
Lobanov and Miguel León-Portilla (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1969), p. 63.
13. Leland C. Wyman, Blessingway: With Three Versions of the Myth Recorded and
Translated from the Navajo by Father Berard Haile, O.F.M. (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1970), p. 136.
14. Jerome Rothenberg (ed.), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian
North Americas (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 45.
15. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis LaFlesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” in Twenty-Seventh
Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1905–1906 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Oice, 1911), pp. 115–16.
16. Fletcher and LaFlesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” p. 116.
17. Fletcher and LaFlesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” p. 117.
18. Ruth L. Bunzel, “Introduction to Zuni Ceremonialism,” in 47th Annual Report,
Washington Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 1932), p. 635.
19. Natalie Curtis, The Indians’ Book: An Ofering by the American Indians of Indian
Lore, Musical and Narrative, to Form a Record of the Songs and Legends of Their
Race (New York: Dover, 1907), p. 480.
20. Frances Densmore, Yuman and Yaqui Music (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 1932), p. 198.
21. Francis LaFlesche, The Osage Tribe: Rite of the Chiefs; Sayings of the Ancient Men
(Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1921), p. 296.
22. Frances Densmore, Memominee Music (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 1932), p. 63.
23. Originally collected by William Thalbitzer for The Ammassalik Eskimo. Part 2,
No. 3, Language and Folklore, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1923). The version
cited here comes from A. Grove Day (ed.), The Sky Clears: Poetry of American
Indians (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 40.
24. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Oice, 1910), p. 154.

40
 Remembering Muskrat

25. Curtis, The Indians’ Book, p. 13.

26. Frances Densmore, Mandan and Hidatsa Music (Washington, D.C.: Govern-
ment Printing Oice, 1923), p. 174.
27. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music – II (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 1913), p. 219.
28. Densmore, Chippewa Music, p. 218.
29. Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1957), p. 21.
30. Larry Daylight, personal interview with the author, November 18, 2010.
31. Densmore, Chippewa Music, p. 80.
32. Densmore, Chippewa Music, p. 114.
33. Harry Paige, Songs of the Teton Sioux (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1970),
p. 68.
34. Randolph Jacob, personal interview with the author, October 12, 1997.
35. Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick, Walk in Your Soul: Love
Incantations of the Oklahoma Cherokees (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1965; repr. 1982), pp. 3–27.
36. Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick, Walk in Your Soul, pp. 25–26.
37. Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick, Walk in Your Soul, pp. 26–27.
38. Gladys Cardif, “It has something to do with inal words,” in Joy Harjo and
Gloria Bird (eds.), Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native
Women’s Writings of North America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp.
259–61.
39. Densmore, Yuman and Yaqui Music, p. 199.
40. Earle Thompson, “Love Song,” in Duane Niatum (ed.), Harper’s Anthology of 20th
Century Native American Poetry (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), p. 254.
41. Densmore, Chippewa Music, p. 150.
42. George Cronyn (ed.), American Indian Poetry: An Anthology of Songs and Chants
(New York: Ballantine), p. 125.
43. Beth Cuthand, “Dancing with Rex,” in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language:
Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997), pp. 393–94.
44. Louis Oliver (Little Coon), “Empty Kettle,” in Niatum (ed.), Harper’s
Anthology, p. 5.
45. Agnes Pratt, “Summer ’76,” in Andrea Lerner (ed.), Dancing on the Rim of
the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing
(Tucson, Ariz.: Sun Tracks, 1990), p. 166.
46. Reuben Gold Thwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels
and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791 (New York:
Pageant, 1959), vol. 2, p. 37.
47. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 100–01.

41
 B etty B o ot h Don o hu e

48. Frances Densmore, The American Indians and Their Music (New York: The
Womans Press, 1926), p. 71; Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed.
Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997),
p. 76.
49. Mary Austin, The American Rhythm: Studies and Reëxpressions of Amerindian
Songs (1923; New York: Cooper Square, 1970), p. 19.
50. Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, ed. Van
Wyck Brooks (1942; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 61–62.
51. Maurice Kenny, “Foreword,” in Michael Castro, Interpreting the Indian:
Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. xvii–xxv.
52. James Nolan, Poet-Chief: The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and
Pablo Neruda (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 3–4;
Kenneth Lincoln, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American
Poetry, 1890–1999 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. xii.
53. Kenny, “Foreword,” p. xiii.
54. Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 6–7.
55. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 41–42.
56. Roger Wolcott, The Poems of Roger Wolcott, Esq: 1725 (Baltimore, Md.: Public
Domain Books Reprints Service, 2008), p. 37.
57. Philip Freneau, “Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying
Ground,” in David S. Shields (ed.), American Poetry: The Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 746; Walt
Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America,
1996), p. 176.
58. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings (New York: Penguin,
2000), p. 57.
59. Mary Oliver, “The Ponds,” in House of Light (Boston: Beacon, 1990), p. 58; Carl
Sandburg, “Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn,” in Cornhuskers (New
York: Henry Holt, 1918), p. 25; James Wright, “Northern Pike,” in Above the
River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), p. 217.
60. Ray Young Bear, “For the Rain in March: The Blackened Hearts of Herons,”
in Geary Hobson (ed.), The Remembered Earth (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1979), pp. 343–51; Sandburg, “Three Pieces on the Smoke
of Autumn,” in Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969),
pp. 91–92.

42
 Chapter 2
Rhyming Empires: Early American Poetry in
Languages Other Than English
S u s a n C a st i l lo St re et

When European explorers and settlers began to lood into what is now
known as North and South America, they were confronted not only with
a bewildering variety of new experiences but also with a plethora of sen-
sory impressions of the peoples and landscapes they encountered. Poetry in
the early Americas by explorers and settlers of European origin or descent
emerged at a time when sweeping changes were transforming almost every
area of life in early modern Europe, with the rise of nation-states, the shift
of power from monarchies underpinned by notions of divine right to pow-
erful mercantile elites, and the economic and cultural transformations aris-
ing from expansion into the New World. By imposing poetic form on what
seemed at irst to them an inchoate and bal ing reality, containing and giving
shape to the dazzling range of images and sensations they encountered in the
Americas, Europeans were able to give meaning and structure to European
imperial endeavors. This chapter examines poetry written in Spanish, French,
German, and Dutch in the early Americas, emphasizing the diverse ways in
which the epic and lyric modes produced aesthetic meaning out of new and
complex experiences.

Epic Poetry: Making Sense of Empire

In the initial phase of the colonization and settlement of the Americas, a cen-
tral question for Europeans was whether or not the indigenous populations
were in fact human and worthy of conversion to Christianity. In responding
to these debates over the humanity of the Indians in early modern Spain,
the genres of epic and mock-epic poetry enabled Europeans to articulate the
ideological basis for expansion while at the same time confronting some of
the troubling ethical issues raised by the stunning levels of violence against
indigenous people.

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 Sus an C ast il lo S tre et

David Quint has argued convincingly that the Virgilian epic, with its links
to the history of a speciic nation, to the notion of world domination, and to
a monarchical system and in some instances a particular dynasty, was singu-
larly well suited to simultaneously aestheticize and politicize European expan-
sion. For Quint, however, the Virgilian epic of the victors, with its linear, end-
directed teleology, also evokes a counternarrative of the vanquished in the
form of romance, arising from the epic tradition of Lucan. Quint emphasizes
Lucanian epic’s depiction of class conl ict, with a warrior aristocracy strug-
gling against a dominant monarchy bent on limiting its power. The appeal
of these literary modes for writers in the early Americas is evident: at the
same time that the dominant Virgilian strand celebrates in triumphalist form
a heroic narrative of imperial expansion, the Lucanian counternarrative ulti-
mately characterizes indigenous adversaries as animals or lacking full human-
ity, thus legitimizing European victories.1 Moreover, the strands of Lucanian
counternarrative describing the vanquished as noble savages who, despite their
courage and dignity, are nonetheless condemned to defeat allowed European
writers to address, at least notionally, some of the troubling ethical issues aris-
ing from the brutality and violence of the Conquest, although ultimately reaf-
irming European “rights” to territorial and ideological expansion.
For Spain, the natural riches of the Americas opened up the prospect of
unimaginable material wealth, but the colossal human cost of imperial expan-
sion raised troubling ethical issues and inspired intense ideological debate in
sixteenth-century Spain. One eloquent advocate of indigenous rights was the
remarkable Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, who has been both
exalted as a voice of conscience and denounced as a traitor to his country – as
he is thought to be the principal creator of the “Black Legend” of Spanish cru-
elty in the colonization of the New World. He was an eyewitness to many of
the key events in the conquest of New Spain, starting with the irst voyage of
Christopher Columbus. Additionally, he participated in the conquest of Cuba,
receiving land as a reward. In 1514, however, he experienced a change of heart
and came to feel that the Native peoples of America had been unjustly treated.
Las Casas soon became known as the champion of Native rights, successively
as a reformer at the court in Spain, an unsuccessful colonizer in Venezuela,
a friar in Hispaniola, the defender of Indians in debates among ecclesiastics
in Mexico, a promoter of the plan to Christianize the Indians of Chiapas by
peaceful means, an advocate before the court of the Emperor Charles V in
favor of legislation favorable to Indians, and the bishop of Chiapas. After
returning to Spain in 1547, at the age of sixty-three, he served as attorney-at-
large for the Indians during the last twenty years of his life.

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 Rhyming Empires

Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias ofers us a remarkable view of the extraor-
dinarily convoluted development of a Spanish discourse on the Native peoples
of the New World. Las Casas was one of the irst Europeans to comprehend
the implications of the discovery of the Americas. After the initial sense of
wonder and delight felt by Spaniards and Indians at irst contact began to
subside, Las Casas soon realized that the European refusal to acknowledge
the humanity of the Native peoples of America would lead to the worst sort
of oppression and direct violence on the part of the colonizers against the
indigenous populations of America. The polemic about the humanity of the
indigenous people of the Americas came to a head when Emperor Charles V
ordered that a debate on this issue should take place in 1550 and 1551 between
Las Casas and the eminent theologian Ginés de Sepúlveda. Concretely, two
matters were to be addressed. First, was it legitimate to make war against
the Native people in order to attract them to Christianity? Second, were the
indigenous peoples of the New World in such a deplorable state of barbarism
and inferiority in relation to other allegedly civilized nations that natural law
could be invoked as a rationale for obliging them to emerge from such a state,
by violence if necessary?
In his treatise Democrates II and in his Apologia, Sepúlveda’s irst argument
(based on Aristotelian philosophy and the concept of just wars) declared that
the Native people of the New World were in such a state of barbarism that
it was imperative to dominate them by force in order to liberate them from
this state and introduce them to Christianity. Sepúlveda’s arguments were
heavily based on the central premises of Aristotelian thought, and he alleged
that Aristotle does not distinguish between diferent types of barbarism. Las
Casas responded to this by citing Aristotle chapter and verse in order to invoke
the diferent sorts of barbarism described in the philosopher’s writings. The
irst category of barbarism was the type of action committed by cruel and
inhuman men, a group into which, according to Las Casas, all too many of
the Spanish conquistadores would it very well indeed. The second category
of barbarism in the Aristotelian sense comprised those who spoke a difer-
ent language, while the third category was that of human beings who are
not only inferior by their very nature but also incapable of self-government
and righteous living. This category was prominent in Sepúlveda’s arguments,
but Las Casas refuted his allegations by pointing out that Aristotle himself
believed that barbarians of this type are few in number, as nature always tends
toward perfection. But then the doughty priest nailed his colors to the mast
in no uncertain terms, stating: “Such barbarians should be attracted gently,
in accordance with the doctrine of Christ. With this, let us turn our backs on

45
 Sus an C ast il lo S tre et

Aristotle, for we have on our side Christ’s own mandate: love thy neighbour as
thyself.”2 He then accused Sepúlveda of manipulating Aristotelian concepts
for his own ends and added that the only category of barbarism (if any) that
might be appropriately applied to the Native people of the New World would
be the second kind. Moreover, Las Casas alleged that Sepúlveda had based his
opinions on one single text, that of the historian Fernández de Oviedo, who
owned Indian slaves and obviously had no interest in characterizing the Native
people as possessing the right to diference and autonomy.
Sepúlveda’s second argument justiied war against the Indians as a punish-
ment of their crimes against natural law, particularly idolatry and the practice
of human sacriice. In his response, Las Casas stated that Christian princes had
no jurisdiction over these questions, adding that Jews and Muslims in Spain
were subject to temporal laws, but not to the laws of the Church. He added
that if inidels were to be punished, the disbelief of the Jews and Muslims
would be far more worthy of condemnation, because they had heard the word
of Christ, but the Catholic Church in Spain did not punish them. Logically,
if these “inidels” living in Christian territory were not punished, it would
not make sense to condemn Native people who had never been exposed to
Christian doctrine.
The third argument of Sepúlveda emphasized that the Native people of the
New World oppressed innocent people in order to sacriice them to their idols
or to eat their lesh. He felt consequently that armed intervention was justi-
ied in order to prevent an act contrary to natural law. Las Casas responded
to this with a lengthy examination of the legitimate jurisdiction of Christian
princes over conquered inidels. In support of his argument, he diferentiated
between the Indians and the Turks, declaring that the latter had occupied
kingdoms that they had wrested from Christian princes and that the Indians
(unlike the Turks) had never knowingly blasphemed against Christ or mali-
ciously attempted to impede the preaching of the Gospel. He added: “In no
way is it convenient that those who go to preach the Gospel are accompanied
by armed force, and if they are, for this very reason the words of these same
preachers are not worthy of belief. What has the Gospel to do with ordnance,
and what have preachers of the Gospel to do with armed legions?”3 As to the
contention that Christian armies could save those who were doomed to be
sacriiced and/or eaten by the Native people, Las Casas objected to sacriicing
entire populations in order to free a few innocent people.
Sepúlveda’s inal argument justiied war against inidels to prepare the
way for the propagation of the Christian religion. He cited the parable of
the wedding guests, who were compelled to come to the ceremony by force

46
 Rhyming Empires

if necessary. Las Casas counterattacked by citing St. Augustine’s exegesis of

this parable in order to (once again) diferentiate between heretics (those who
have heard and rejected Christianity) and pagans (those who have never been
exposed to the Christian faith).
These debates on the ethics of the Conquest resonated strongly with many
of its protagonists. One such was Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, whose epic
poem La Araucana vividly articulates the dilemmas and contradictions of
the ideology underpinning the Spanish conquest of Chile. In 1535, Diego de
Almagro had led the irst group of Spaniards along with their Indian allies into
the lands south of Peru in search of glory and gold. They encountered ierce
resistance from indigenous groups, including the Araucanians or Mapuches.
Later, Pedro de Valdivia entered what is now Chile in 1541, founding the city of
Santiago, but strong Araucanian resistance continued.
Alonso de Ercilla irst learned of the Araucanian uprising in England, where
he was part of the entourage that accompanied Philip II to negotiate marriage
with Mary Tudor. The tales of Spanish heroism, adventure, and derring-do
clearly appealed to the young courtier, who subsequently enlisted in Alderete’s
1557 expedition, sent to reinforce his beleaguered compatriots. Ercilla was in
many ways the prototypical Renaissance courtier/soldier, and he wrote his
epic at a time of great creative ferment in Spanish literature. Frank Dawson
comments: “Spain possessed a romantic, medieval adventurousness in her
national psychology which found in the New World a marvelous outlet.” He
adds, “The New World with its immense riches and unusual physical phenom-
ena was a dream become reality; as if the weird lands and animals portrayed
in the popular romances of chivalry had come to life in the experiences of the
conquistadores.”4 Ercilla would have been familiar with the libros de caballería in
vogue at the time, and he was educated in the Italian humanist tradition, with
its emphasis on classical authors; it is said that he was familiar with the works
of humanists Tasso and Ariosto, and particularly with classics such as Virgil’s
Aeneid.5 His Araucanian epic is thus a heady mixture of chivalric romance
and battleield epic, a contrast between his vision of the might and glory of
Spanish arms and the courage and dignity – and indeed humanity – of their
Araucanian opponents.
La Araucana is characterized by freshness and immediacy. Ercilla states that
he recorded his impressions directly on the battleield during intervals in the
ighting, “often on leather due to lack of paper, and on scraps of letters, some
so small that they could hold only six verses,”6 giving his account eyewitness
authority, the credibility of “I was there and saw this with my own eyes.”
Later, Ercilla transformed these notes into cantos made up of octavas reales,

47
 Sus an C ast il lo S tre et

an Italianate verse form consisting of eight eleven-syllable lines (endecasíla-

bos) with an abababcc rhyme scheme. The irst ifteen cantos were published
around 1569, followed by fourteen more in 1578, and the inal section of the
poem, consisting of eight cantos, in 1589.
The poem reveals a curiously divided epic sensibility, proclaiming Ercilla’s
dual loyalty to the ideology of the Spanish crown on the one hand and to
notions of fairness and humanity on the other. One passage relates how
Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, is captured and assassinated
by his indigenous adversaries. Valdivia is brought before the assembled
Araucanians:
Caupolicán, rejoicing to see him alive,
present in state and in person,
with the voice of a conqueror and haughty gesture
threatens him and questions him at close quarters.
Valdivia, a miserable captive
responds and begs humbly, obedient,
that he not be killed, and promises him
to leave the land free, in lasting peace. (LA, pp. 20–21)
But this avails him nothing. In a temporary reversal of the conquistador–
conquered binary, the indigenous leader Caupolicán “with the voice of a con-
queror” condemns Valdivia to death. The Spanish leader is described as “a
miserable captive” who “begs humbly” for his life. But the fortunes of the
Spanish troops improve with the arrival of reinforcements, and in yet another
reversal of fortune, Caupolicán, the noble Araucanian leader, is condemned
to death by the invaders. He faces his executioners with remarkable courage
and composure:
Standing up above, turning his serene visage
From one side to the other, he remained there
Watching the great crowd of people thronging below,
Who gazed in astonishment at this incredible event.
They stared amazed, in fright and wonder
That Fortune could have brought this to pass.
He reached the pole where the atrocious sentence
Was to be carried out, with such a countenance
That he seemed to dismiss that terrible moment
As though it were nothing, saying:
Since Fate and my destiny
Have brought me to this death,
Let it come, it is I who want it, I who invite it. (LA, p. 197)

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 Rhyming Empires

Here in the midst of defeat, Caupolicán reclaims his agency as a speaking sub-
ject and asserts an unconquerable dignity. Unlike Valdivia, who had pleaded for
clemency, Caupolicán repudiates victimhood and faces death with courage,
insisting that it is by his own will that he chooses to accept Fate and to die.
The poem is full of memorable events and characters: ierce battles, the death
of the indigenous leader Lautaro, the presence of a shaman who carries the nar-
rator far above the earth to witness events happening elsewhere in the world,
and the poignant portrayal of Glauca, an Araucanian woman searching for her
husband among the dead. Ercilla was clearly aware that his description of the
indigenous leaders of Chile could be considered polemical, because it engages
the issues of the 1551 Valladolid debate on the humanity of the Indians and thus
the morality of the Conquest. In La Araucana, the Aristotelian category of bar-
barism as the type of action committed by cruel and inhuman men seems far
more applicable to the Spanish invaders than to their indigenous adversaries.
What is particularly powerful, however, is Ercilla’s depiction of the dignity and
valor of the Araucanian leaders, which directly refutes the idea that barbarians
are not only inferior by their very nature but also incapable of self-government
and righteous living. Ercilla’s loyalty to the Spanish crown did not prevent him
from acknowledging the heroic stature of his indigenous adversaries. In the pro-
logue to the irst part of La Araucana, he states in no uncertain terms:

If some feel that I am inclined to be on the side of the Araucanians, dealing

with their customs and bravery in more detail than barbarians might deserve:
if we look at their upbringing, customs, ways of warfare and of waging war,
we shall see that few have the advantage over them, and few are those who
have defended their land with such constancy and irmness against enemies
as formidable as the Spanish. (LA, p. 1)

La Araucana was widely read, and its inl uence on subsequent writers was
vast. In Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, La Araucana is one of only three
books spared from the frenzy of book burning. The epic poems of later writ-
ers imitated the neo-Virgilian model. One such was Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s
Historia de la Nueva México (History of New Mexico), published two decades
later. Pérez de Villagrá had served as captain and legal oicer on the 1598 expe-
ditionary force of Juan de Oñate to New Mexico; Oñate’s party consisted of
both adventurers seeking precious minerals and settlers who wished to estab-
lish farms and cattle ranches. Initially, the Native Americans of Ácoma Pueblo
had received the Oñate expedition well, but violence lared up when thirteen
Spanish soldiers who had allegedly caused problems were killed. A punitive

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 Sus an C ast il lo S tre et

attack under the leadership of Vicente de Saldívar was thus mounted and sent
against the Ácoma, and after a prolonged artillery attack against the city, sit-
uated strategically atop a mesa overlooking the surrounding ields, hundreds
of Ácoma were killed and the survivors horribly punished: the Spanish victors
amputated the right foot of every man over the age of twenty-ive.
The opening lines of Pérez de Villagrá’s poem draw directly on Virgil’s
Aeneid:

I sing of arms and the heroic man,

The being, courage, care, and high emprise
Of him whose unconquered patience,
Though cast upon a sea of cares
In spite of envy slanderous,
In raising to new heights the feats,
The deeds, of those brave Spaniards who,
In the far India of the West
Discovering in the world that was hid
“Plus ultra” go bravely saying
by force of war and strong arms.7
In Pérez de Villagrá’s work, the elements of Virgilian epic, with its emphasis
on the imperial valor of the victors, far outweigh any Lucanian counternar-
rative characterizing the Indians as courageous adversaries. The Ácomas are
presented as violent, barbaric, and riven by inighting. The poet denounces the
intransigence of Zutacapán, one of the indigenous leaders, and describes the
bloodshed in a grisly wealth of detail:

It regrets not, that brute, the ambition

Of that insane and lost barbarian,
The pitiable loss and misfortune
Which, caused by it alone, has come
Upon the unhappy, ill-fated town
Whose public squares and lofty walls we see
All overlowing with fresh human blood,
And a great store of the bodies of the dead,
From whose deep, terror striking wounds,
Terrible clots of blood emerged,
Congealed and liquid blood unheard of, too,
And bits of undigested food, as well,
From whence also had way been made
Through which their poor souls had escaped.
(HNM, pp. 136–37)

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Pérez de Villagrá’s poem consists of thirty-four cantos written in blank verse,

with a rhyming couplet at the end of each canto. Although the poet knew
Ercilla’s La Araucana, his posture toward the indigenous people of Ácoma is
very diferent from that of Ercilla toward the Araucanians. The only courage
Pérez de Villagrá recognizes in his indigenous adversaries is in their willingness
to commit mass suicide. In the following lines, there is a disturbing slippage into
tropes of animality as Pérez de Villagrá describes the way in which the mother
and sisters of Zutancalpo, another Ácoma leader, immolate themselves:
So, desperate and utterly heedless,
She cast herself backward into the lames,
And after her the four grieving sisters
Did also choose to be consumed there.
Together with their dead, beloved brother.
Thus they, with him, did hurl themselves
In, next their mother, who burned there. (HNM, p. 137)

The burning bodies of the women, twisting in the lames, are compared to those
of poisonous snakes, writhing sinuously in a desperate attempt to escape:
And like to the most monstrous snakes
Or poisonous, deadly vipers,
Who with each other intertwine
In clinging knots and twist about,
So these poor wretches were entwined
Among those ashes and embers
Which, crumbling and soft, seething
Fiercely, did burst out in a thousand spots,
And they, struggling up on the glowing coals
With shoulders, hands and feet, jointly
Attempted to get out. But all in vain … (HNM, p. 138)
Pérez de Villagrá’s grim, relentlessly teleological vision denies the humanity
of the indigenous groups who dared to oppose the imperial power of the sol-
diers of Philip II of Spain. Although many of the Ácomas chose suicide over
surrender, this is not presented as a heroic act of will as in Ercilla’s Araucana,
but rather as the desperate last act of a people doomed to be subjugated.

The Francophone Epic

The epic form took on slightly diferent contours in the writings of the
Francophone poets of the early Americas, who also employed the power of

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poetry to articulate and aestheticize imperial ideologies. France had begun to

consolidate its position in the Americas in the seventeenth century, after Henry
IV’s Edict of Nantes granted freedom of conscience to the Huguenots. In order
to enhance the inancial reserves of the monarchy, the king granted in 1602 a
charter awarding a monopoly to a group of Rouen investors in order to build
up the fur trade in what is now Canada. One supporter of these ventures, Jean
de Beincourt de Poutrincourt, a noble from Picardy, sailed for Port Royal in
1604. In his expedition was Marc Lescarbot, a young lawyer and writer who was
well versed in the classics and would become one of the earliest Francophone
poets in the Americas. After they arrived in Canada, Poutrincourt took part in
an expedition along with Samuel de Champlain and two Native leaders. On his
return, Lescarbot had arranged an extraordinary spectacle to welcome him.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the royal entry was a pageant in
verse designed to mark the arrival of representatives of the European monar-
chies to colonized territories. Lescarbot’s royal entry, titled Theatre of Neptune,
was performed on November 14, 1606. Its protagonist, Neptune, god of the
seas, was an appropriate choice to embody the might of France’s maritime
transatlantic empire. In the irst scene, Neptune, costumed in blue and bearing
his trident, was towed out to sea by a loat of six Tritons to greet the returning
Poutrincourt. Neptune declared:
Pause, Sagamos, pause here before me
And listen to a god who watches over you.
If you do not know me, Saturn was my father,
Jupiter and Pluto were my brothers …
Neptune is my name, and among the gods,
Neptune is one of those who wields
Greatest power under the vault of heaven.8

Later, Neptune set out French imperial hierarchies with stunning clarity:
Proceed joyously, and follow your path
Wherever Fate leads you, for I see Destiny
Preparing for France a lourishing Empire,
And this new world, which will proclaim far and wide
The immortal renown of de Monts and your own,
Under the mighty reign of Henry your King.
(TN, p. 5)

Even Neptune, the most powerful of the gods, is subordinate to the might of
the French monarch, as are de Monts and Poutrincourt, his representatives in
New France.

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 Rhyming Empires

After Neptune’s greeting to Poutrincourt, the Tritons saluted him. This was
followed by the ofering of gifts by four “savages.” The irst saluted the French
king and his representatives:
… in your hands, you who represent the Majesty
of your Prince, may this province lourish in piety,
in civil manners, and all else that serves to establish
what is beautiful. (TN, p. 7)
A second “savage” ofered a gift of beaver skins:
Here is my hand, my bow, my arrow
Which have made a mortal breach
In the animal whose skin may serve
Great Sagamos, your majesty. (TN, p. 9)
The third “savage” ofered Poutrincourt scarves and bracelets made by his
mistress, while the fourth ofered to ish with his harpoon to supply the French
with food. After this, cannons were ired, and Poutrincourt and his troops
were welcomed to a banquet in Port Royal, with the gate to the fort decorated
to resemble a royal arch. The genre of the royal entry thus enabled Lescarbot
to harness the visual splendor of pageantry and performance along with the
epic power of the poetic word in the service of empire.
Although the indigenous people in Lescarbot’s epic drama are unequiv-
ocally seen in terms of their value to the French crown, the poet was also
capable of admiring their courage. One of his poems, “To Die for the French,”
describes a man who died in order to help the French:
Where would we ind a courage
Like that of the Savage
Who to give his friends succour
his own life did ofer,
which he felt he should expend
to our cause defend?9
What is clear, however, is that Lescarbot’s admiration for the subject of his
poem is radically diferent from that of Ercilla. The valor of the “savages” is
only praiseworthy when they give their lives for the French, not when they
rise up in resistance.

The Mock-Epic: Dumont de Montigny

With the advent of Enlightenment rationalism, however, a diferent strain
began to enter European poetry describing imperial endeavors. The mock-

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epic, with its sardonic, mocking undertones, highlights human frailties

and scofs at the foolishness of dreams of imperial grandeur. Jean-François
Dumont de Montigny went as a soldier to Quebec in 1715 and not long there-
after received a commission as a sublieutenant and engineer in Louisiana. It
was a turbulent time in the colony’s history, in the wake of the Mississippi
Bubble and the collapse of the Banque Générale Privée founded by John Law.
Law had bought the Mississippi Company in 1717, which was directly linked to
French colonization in Louisiana. On its collapse, many investors and colonists
were left stranded in a landscape of swamps and bayous, where many died of
yellow fever and malaria. Dumont continued to live in the colony, however,
until 1737, moving between New Orleans, Pascagoula, Natchez, and the Yazoo
River area, and frequently falling into conl ict with both Bienville, the gover-
nor of Louisiana, and Chépart, the commandant of the fort at Natchez.10
Gordon Sayre has observed that Dumont’s two-volume history of the col-
ony, Mémoires Historiques sur la Louisiane (1753), was clumsily edited by a hack
writer and is only loosely based on Dumont’s surviving manuscripts. These
contain a 4,692-line poem in four cantos that Sayre classiies as a mock-epic.
The irst canto tells the story of the revolt of the Natchez Indians, resulting in
the death of more than 250 French. Dumont attributes much of the responsi-
bility to Chépart, the commander of the fort:
And through steady labors, that fertile country
Grew many crops, and seemed to please everybody.
But by great misfortune, this land so charming,
Was ruled by Chépart, who thought himself a king.
When we say as a king, we mean he was a tyrant.
Remote from New Orleans, a hundred leagues distant,
From court of justice and the head commandant,
He became, in two words, tyrannic and arrogant,
Ill treating the bourgeois and even the savages,
Ordering the latter to vacate their villages. (DM)
In mincing couplets, Chépart is presented as both despotic and indolent, reluc-
tant to expend the efort required to clear the land, despite the ready availabil-
ity of slave labor:
Lands of ine quality, pleasing to his sight.
He vowed to seize them, though he lacked the right.
He did not wish to have to clear new land,
As others had done, when they arrived on the strand.
Blacks he had in plenty, and had he succeeded
He would have, at one stroke, made himself settled,

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His cabins built, his storehouse erected,

His lands all plowed and cultivated.
It was a worthy plan for a wealthy French man
But his power had made him too proud and too vain.
And sadly, dear reader, it was to prove fatal,
Not only for himself but also for us all. (DM)
When a cargo of French wine and foodstufs arrived in Natchez in November
1729, Chépart and two other men went to visit the Sun (or principal chief ) of
the Natchez bearing wine and brandy, demanding after dinner that the chief
give them women for the evening. Returning the morning after to the fort,
Chépart and his allies were warned that the planters, oicers, and interpreters
of Natchez had learned from their contacts among the Indians that trouble
was brewing. According to Dumont, Chépart reacted with bluster, throwing
the men in jail. On November 29, a delegation of Natchez chiefs arrived bear-
ing gifts and reiterating their good will. Chépart, in order to prove his point,
ordered the jailed oicials to be released, so that they could see for themselves
the folly of their warnings. But shortly thereafter, a general uprising occurred.
Chépart’s reaction to the attack, and his subsequent demise, is presented as
anything but heroic:
Chépart heard this noise, and jumped up, alert,
He shot out of his house, in just his nightshirt,
Ran into his garden, begging loudly for help.
It was too late, of course, for the Natchez now enveloped
Him, engaged in disputes over who would strike his deathblow
None wanted the honor, for no courage did it show,
To kill the man of whom they all said “He’s a dog!
Unworthy to be stricken with a warrior’s tomahawk.”
Nonetheless, he was, for the lowest of the Natchez,
A stinkard among them, got this dubious privilege. (DM)
The disgraced commandant met death clad in his nightshirt, begging for help,
and was ultimately dispatched by a stinkard, a member of the very lowest caste
among the Natchez. According to Dumont’s description, Chépart was viewed
with the utmost scorn by his indigenous adversaries, and only a man from the
lowest social stratum would deign to kill him. Once again, the power dynamic is
reversed, with the concomitant slippage into tropes of animality: Chépart’s very
humanity is denied by his Natchez foes, who describe him as a dog. It should also
be said, however, that Dumont de Montigny does not praise the Natchez, who
are depicted as duplicitous and violent, gleefully torturing their French captives.
In Dumont’s mock-epic, there is no glory for victors or vanquished.

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As the poem draws to its conclusion, Dumont describes an episode that,

although probably apocryphal, illustrates vividly the poet’s capacity for cor-
rosive satire:
One morning, at dawn, a sergeant, quite facile
In the ruses of war, whose name was Brinville
Was chosen for the job of aiming the cannon
And met with great misfortune on that one occasion.
He wanted the enemy to be mocked and harassed
So he lowered his britches and showed them his ass.
But in answer, the Natchez, they shot back a ball
Which lodged between his buttocks, a wound that was fatal.
(DM)
Dumont concludes:
For bravado, in short, he sufered mortally,
Which should warn us how deadly are the wages of folly,
And that the safest course on all such occasions,
Is to have a strong heart without losing one’s reason. (DM)
And indeed that is the point of the poem. Although one senses that Dumont,
despite his sardonic tone, is loyal to his country, imperial expansion becomes
not so much a heroic crusade as an enterprise riven with human vanity and
absurdity.

The Lyric
Unlike the epic, lyric poetry, with its emphasis on the emotions and feelings
of the individual, allows us a glimpse at the daily lived experience of diverse
human beings in the early Americas. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695),
justly considered the greatest lyrical poet of colonial Mexico, was known to
her contemporaries as the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of Mexico. She was
born out of wedlock to a Basque landowner, Juan de Asbaje, and a Creole
mother, Isabel Ramírez. Her father was for the most part absent from the
household, and most sources indicate that she was far closer to her mother, a
strong and intelligent woman who ran the family properties with great suc-
cess. As a child, the young Juana Inés was passionate about education, but
in Mexico at the time intellectual options for women were circumscribed;
indeed, most opted for a life of marriage and childbearing. In an autobio-
graphical memoir, she relates how, at the age of only three, she followed her
elder sister to a school where girls were taught to read and managed to per-
suade the teacher to teach her to read as well. Sor Juana Inés states:

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Being six or seven, and having learned how to read and write, along with all
other skills of needlework and household arts that girls learn, it came to my
attention that in Mexico City there were schools, and a University, in which
one studied the sciences. The moment I heard this, I began to plague my
mother with insistent and importunate pleas: she should dress me in a boy’s
clothing and send me to Mexico City to live with relatives, to study and be
tutored at the University.11
Study at university level, however, was not an option for women at the time.
Juana Inés thus continued her studies privately, teaching herself Latin and read-
ing widely on subjects ranging from astronomy to rhetoric and to theology.
Later, she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court and quickly became
a favorite due to her beauty, charm, and literary talent. At the age of twenty-
one, however, she entered a convent and dedicated herself to a life of study
and literary endeavor. The convent was one of the few spaces where a woman
could pursue intellectual interests relatively unhindered, and in the Convent
of Santa Paula, where she was to remain until her death, Sor Juana Inés assem-
bled a considerable library. As Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell have demon-
strated, life in the convent was far from austere, and Sor Juana’s rooms were
“more salon than cell”; there she received theologians, aristocrats, and others
to discuss intellectual topics and was attended by servants and a mixed-race
slave.12 In 1690 she challenged some of the opinions contained in a sermon by
the well-known Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Vieira. According to Sor
Juana, the biblical episode in which Christ washes the feet of his disciples was
proof of his love for humanity, not just an abstract airmation of love for its
own sake. Her dissent was viewed by her ecclesiastical superiors as temerity,
and the bishop of Puebla, using the female pseudonym of Sor Filotea, wrote
a letter demanding that she dedicate herself to her duties as a nun and give up
her intellectual concerns. Clearly, the young nun felt the pressure, particularly
since the Inquisition or Holy Oice was still active in stamping out heresy in
New Spain. She remarked ruefully,
Women feel that men surpass them, and that I seem to place myself on a level
with men; some wish that I did not know so much; others say that I ought to
know more to merit such applause; elderly women do not wish that other
women know more than they; young women, that others present a good
appearance; and one and all wish me to conform to the rules of their judg-
ment; so that from all sides comes such a singular martyrdom as I deem none
other has ever experienced. (SJI, p. xvii)

Sor Juana Inés came of age as a poet at a time when Spanish baroque poetry
was dominated by two literary giants, Luis de Góngora and Francisco de

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Quevedo. Her own poetry shows the inl uence of both Góngora’s culteranista
style, which was characterized by ornate syntax and dazzling wordplay, and
Quevedo’s mordant conceptista wit and intricate conceits. Indeed, the ornate
baroque aesthetic was singularly appropriate for an environment character-
ized on the one hand by rigid delimitations of race, caste, and gender and
on the other by the conl ict and eventual hybridity of diferent ethnicities,
religions, and cultures.
One verse form that Sor Juana Inés used to great efect was the romance,
characterized by eight-syllable lines (octosílabas) with the second and fourth
lines in assonant rhyme. This is the poetic form that she used when a man
from Peru sent her some clay vessels and suggested that she should “become a
man.” In her mordantly ironic response, Sor Juana comments that the Muses
themselves are struck dumb on hearing this gentleman’s verse, and that even
the god Apollo listens rapt. She adds,
To hear your lines, leet Pegasus
his lusty breathing will retain
that no one fear his thunderous neigh
as your verses are declaimed. (SJI, p. 137)
Later, she asks him to be her Apollo and her inspiration. Aware, perhaps, that
her savage wit might have repercussions, she states demurely:
You will think that I make mock;
No, nothing further from the truth,
To prophesy, my guiding spirit
Is lacking but a ine hair’s breadth. (SJI, p. 139)

She then goes on to reject any attempt to categorize or dismiss her according
to gender or marital status:
I know, too, that they were wont
To call wife, or woman, in the Latin
Uxor, only those who wed,
Though wife or woman might be virgin.
So in my case, it is not seemly
that I be viewed as feminine
as I will never be a woman
who may as woman serve a man. (SJI, p. 143)
Later, she adds,
To the degree that one is chosen
As the target for acclaim

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To that same measure, envy trails

In close pursuit, with perfect aim. (SJI, p. 143)
Although these words are ostensibly directed toward her fatuous Peruvian
interlocutor, Sor Juana Inés knew all too well that her brilliance, her literary
success, and her intellectual fearlessness had made her the target of backbiting
and envy. In a sonnet, she describes this phenomenon:
In my pursuit, World, why such diligence?
What my ofense, when I am thus inclined
Insuring elegance afect my mind,
Not that my mind afect an elegance? (SJI, p. 144)
For Sor Juana, wealth is not an end in itself but rather a means to cultivate
her mind:
I have no love of riches or inance,
And thus do I most happily, I ind,
Expend inances to enrich my mind
And not mind expend upon inance. (SJI, p. 144)

Another verse form used by Sor Juana Inés was the villancico, a Spanish lyric
meant to be sung and danced, often as part of a religious drama performed
within a church. Natalie Underberg has suggested that these vernacular com-
positions continued to retain within their form a “space” for subversive ele-
ments and thus were singularly appropriate as a vehicle for what she calls Sor
Juana’s “pro-woman” opinions. She adds that this is so partly because the genre
was itself seen as a minor one, and partly because the fact that the villancico
was accompanied by music and sung might distract audiences from the import
of the words it contained. The most relevant element of the villancico genre,
however, for Sor Juana’s purposes, was its use of carnivalesque elements and
of hagiography as “covers” for her feminist views.13 This is particularly appar-
ent in what is probably her most powerful villancico, written to St. Catherine
of Alexandria, with whom she clearly identiied strongly. According to popu-
lar tradition, Catherine of Alexandria was a young woman of noble birth. At
the age of eighteen, she is said to have upbraided Emperor Maximinus for his
persecution of Christians and attempted to convince him that it was wrong
to worship false gods. The emperor detained her in his palace and summoned
numerous scholars to persuade her of the laws in her reasoning. Catherine of
Alexandria, however, emerged victorious and convinced many of her learned
adversaries to convert to Christianity. She was condemned to die on the wheel,
but when she touched it, this instrument of torture is said to have crumbled.

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She was then beheaded on the orders of the emperor. The parallels to Sor
Juana Inés’s situation in 1691, just after her response to Sor Filotea, are clear: as
a woman under very considerable pressure from the ecclesiastical authorities
to abandon her writing and her studies, the theme of the martyrdom of St.
Catherine enabled her to airm the intellectual equality of men and women,
and to state that femininity and religious devotion are compatible with the life
of the intellect.14
The villancico to St. Catherine was irst performed in Oaxaca in 1691. The
refrain is both powerful and moving:
Victor! Victor! Catherine,
Who with enlightenment divine
Persuaded all the learned men,
She who with triumph overcame
– with knowledge truly sovereign –
the pride and arrogance profane
of those who challenged her, in vain,
Victor! Victor! Victor! (SJI, p. 189)
She makes a ringing case for intellectual freedom:
Illumination shed by truth
Will never by mere shouts be drowned
Persistently, its echo rings
Above all obstacles resounds.
Victor! Victor! (SJI, p. 189)
Sadly, however, Sor Juana Inés was forced to sell her library and was obliged
to devote the rest of her life to spiritual concerns. She died after nursing her
fellow nuns during an epidemic in Mexico City in 1695.

German-Language Lyric Poetry

When Germans began to settle in large numbers in North America in the sev-
enteenth century, they brought with them a rich tradition of poetry written in
High German, often on mystical or pietist themes. Probably the best known
of these poets is Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1720?), a polymath with diverse
intellectual interests. When Frankfurt became a center of the Pietist move-
ment, which advocated the reform of Lutheranism, Pastorius was drawn into
their circle; and when William Penn invited Mennonites and Pietists to emi-
grate to America to take part in what he called his “holy experiment,” Pastorius
set sail for America, where he founded Germantown. He was a remarkably

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proliic poet, writing poetry in Latin, Greek, French, German, and English. As
a paciist, he deplored factional strife:
Those who with pen or sword
Would prove their Master’s word
Durst not upon me call
For aught save deeds of peace –
For this I strive, nor cease
Whatever may befall.
Both friend and foe alike
I wish to serve aright,
And to turn harm from all.15
Life in early America, however, was far from easy. One melancholy poem ded-
icated to his former teacher, Tobias Schumbergius, bemoans the passing of
earthly glory:
… Hear, ye mortals, the conclusion I have drawn
They that now are throned in power, they shall also pass away
As there passes from our glasses imaged form or igure gay.
Where Death’s grievous hand shall leave us all beneath the churchyard stone
Pains infernal, life eternal, we shall reap as we have sown.16

Lyric Poetry in New Netherland

The Dutch territories in early America were also fertile ground for lyric
poetry. One early poet, Jacob Steendam (1636–1701), had published a collection
of poems in Holland titled Der Distelvink (The Thistle-Finch or The Goldinch);
it consisted of love songs, emblems, spiritual songs, and nuptial odes. Shortly
thereafter he sailed for New Amsterdam, where he established himself as a
merchant, later petitioning the authorities to be allowed to import slaves from
West Africa. “The Complaint of New Amsterdam,” published in 1659, presents
an eroticized vision of the colony as a young woman, daughter of Amsterdam,
born in wartime but neglected by her sponsors, the East India Company:
True, both simple ’twas and scant
What I had to feed my want.
Oft ’twas nought except Supawn17
And the lesh of buck or fawn.
When I thus began to grow
No more care did they bestow
Yet my breasts are full and neat,
And my hips are irmly set.18

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The virginal New Amsterdam appeals to her neglectful mother for protec-
tion from the encroaching English settlers, described unlatteringly as “the
swine”:
But for me, – yet immature,
Fraught with danger; for the Swine
Trample down these crops of mine,
Up-root, too, my choicest land;
Still and dumb, the while, I stand
In the hope, my mother’s arm
Will protect me from the harm. (LCA, p. 340)
The marauding English were not the only danger the Dutch faced. Another
Dutch-language poet, Henricus Selyns, in his poem “Bridal Torch” conjoins
the narrative of a 1663 Indian massacre that took place at Esopus, later called
Wiltswyck, with an epithalamion or poem celebrating the marriage of the
rector of the local Latin school, Aegidius Luyck, to Judith Van Isendoorn. The
poem begins with the line, “How soon the lame of war the lame of love
destroys,” setting up the central conceit of the poem. As it begins, Cupid is star-
tled by Mars, the god of war, who is depicted as allied to Indian treachery:
Nor does it Cupid please, who peace and love enjoys,
And starts, at sight of arms, to hide himself from danger.
He sees the treachery, unlooked for, but designed,
… His words are yet still warm, and does he not behold,
Alas! House after house, with Indian monsters posted?
Child upon child burnt up? And pregnant women roasted?
(LCA, p. 341)
But Cupid rallies. In a curiously specular image that is (perhaps unintention-
ally) comic, he too ires arrows, not of war but of love, at the bridal couple,
Luyck and Judith:
Seeking to hush his wrath by thus his arms restoring
He quickly seizes them, and draws his bow on high,
As if he wishes to pierce some special mark above him.
The fort, New Amsterdam, is now by all possessed;
While Judith stands beneath, Luyck looks from the embrasure,
And ere they see or think, he shoots Luyck in the breast.
(LCA, p. 341)
The smitten young man is rendered mute:
Luyck speaks not, for he feels something his heart is boring.
As all look up at Luyck, so Judith upward looks.

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He shoots a second time and pierces Isendooren.

This great commotion makes, and causes, far and wide
Re-echoings of joy. While he speaks not, the cry
Resounds throughout the land: “Joy to the groom and bride,
Joy to the married pair, and joy eternally.” (LCA, p. 341)
In an eerie mirroring of the images of the Indian massacre of the settlers,
the young Dutch couple are struck with the arrows not of war but of love.
European colonization and penetration of the continent are presented as an
enterprise of erotic power, institutionally legitimized.
As we have seen, explorers and settlers in the early Americas from the time
of irst contact gave shape and form to their experience through poetry. The
epic mode, as embodied in the work of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, Gaspar
Pérez de Villagrá, and Marc Lescarbot, allowed these poets to both articulate
the ideological basis for European expansion and at the same time attempt
to address some of the moral issues arising from the violence underpinning
European expansion in the New World. The mock-epic verse of Dumont de
Montigny, on the other hand, exposes the vanity and absurdity of European
eforts. The lyric mode in European languages other than English gives us a
glimpse of the diiculties the authors of such poems faced: for Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, her struggle to airm herself as an intellectual and poet despite the
restrictions placed on her because of her gender; for Francis Daniel Pastorius,
his awareness of the precarious character of earthly fame; and for Dutch poets
like Jacob Steendam and Henricus Selyns, the vulnerability of settlers who not
only were surrounded by hostile indigenous cultures but were facing factional
strife in their own communities. Although all these poets were dealing with
diferent realities, and although their aesthetic and political perspectives are
often dissimilar, the thread that runs through all their verse is an awareness of
the capacity of poetry to aestheticize and render intelligible the vibrant diver-
sity of the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Notes
1. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 8–13.
2. Angel Losada (trans.), Apologia de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda contra Fray Bartolomé
de las Casas y de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas contra Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda contra
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1975), p. 17.
3. Losada (trans.), Apologia de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, p. 25.
4. Frank Dawson, “Ercilla and La Araucana: Spain and the New World,” Journal
of Inter-American Studies 4:4 (October 1962), pp. 564–65.

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 Sus an C ast il lo S tre et

5. Dawson, “Ercilla and La Araucana,” p. 566.

6. Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana (Charleston, S.C.: Bibliobazar, 2009),
p. 1 (hereafter cited in the text as LA). My translation.
7. Gaspár Pérez de Villagrá, excerpt from History of New Mexico, in Susan Castillo
and Ivy Schweitzer (eds.), The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 132–33 (hereafter cited in the text as HNM).
8. Marc Lescarbot, The Theatre of Neptune in New France (Cambridge, Mass.:
Houghton Mil in, 1927), p. 3 (hereafter cited in the text as TN). Although there
is an English translation in this bilingual volume, I have opted to provide my
own translations of this text.
9. Marc Lescarbot, “Mourir pour les François,” http://www.gutenberg.org
/iles/21257/21257-h21257-h.htm. My translation.
10. Gordon Sayre, “Dumont de Montigny,” www.uoregon.edu/~gsayre
/DM.html (hereafter cited in the text as DM). Gordon Sayre’s translation.
11. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest and a Dream, ed. and trans. Dorothy
Sayers Peden (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. xxii (hereafter cited in the text
as SJI).
12. See Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (trans.), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Respuesta
and Selection of Poems (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New
York, 1994).
13. Natalie Underberg, “Sor Juana’s Villancicos: Context, Gender, and Genre,”
Western Folklore 60:4 (Autumn 2001), pp. 297–316.
14. See Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o las Trampas de la Fe (Barcelona: Seix
Barral).
15. Francis Daniel Pastorius, Circumstantial Geographical Description of Pennsylvania
by Francis Daniel Pastorius, in Albert Cook Meyers (ed.) and Gertrude Kimball
(trans.), Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1650–1707
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1912), p. 418.
16. Pastorius, Circumstantial Geographical Description, p. 424.
17. “Supawn” is boiled cornmeal.
18. Jacob Steendam, “The Complaint of New Amsterdam,” in Susan Castillo and
Ivy Schweitzer (eds.), The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), p. 339 (hereafter cited in the text as LCA).

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 Chapter 3
The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry
Ro b e rt Da ly

More than two hundred American Puritans wrote poetry that is still extant. In
their worldview, the physical world was itself a book written by God to con-
nect this world with the next, to link the lowly creatures with their creator,
because “that, which may be known of God, is manifest in them” (Romans
1:20). Earthly things had divine signiicance. As the American Puritan Samuel
Willard put it, “The things that are made lead us by the hand to him that made
them.”1 In the poetics based on that worldview, metaphor was intrinsic in the
world. The poet’s wit and ability participated in a natural process that led to
the supernatural. The lowly vehicle of each creature led to a divine tenor, and
part of one’s religious duty was to read that signiicance and contemplate that
journey.
The English Puritan minister Alexander Richardson was quite clear about
this duty: “And this teacheth man thus much, that he is to seek out, and ind
this wisdom of God in the world, and not to be idle; for the world and the
creatures therein are like a book wherein God’s wisdom is written, and there
must we seek it out.”2 An important part of their religious life was to med-
itate on both scripture and the world in words. As Edward Taylor relected
in his Preparatory Meditations, both the created world and the Lord’s Supper
ofered a link between nature and grace. “Dainties most rich, all spiced o’re
with Grace”3 would appeal to our sensuous faculties to lead us beyond them:
“And this rich banquet makes me thus a Poet” (2.110, 283). No wonder so
many wrote poetry, some still worth reading. William Wood’s rhyming cata-
logue of the wondrous creatures of New England; Edward Johnson’s historic
and Homeric epic, Good News from New England; and from many hands verse
meditations, acrostics, almanac verses, anagrams, invocations of the muse,
songs for the seasons illed with classical deities no longer worshipped but still
invoked, and songs to celebrate and commemorate births, storms, and mirac-
ulous deliverances from dangers real and imagined – all testify to the omni-
presence of Puritan poetics and poetry, the need to translate into enduring

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form on paper the permanent signiicance of transient lives. For Puritan poets
form served function, and the primary function was to explore, understand,
and preserve meaning. Of all this wealth of poetry, we can certainly still read
Anne Bradstreet, Roger Williams, Edward Taylor, and Jane Colman Turell for
pleasure and proit, and perhaps also a ifth writer, Michael Wigglesworth,
whose power and long popularity merit exploration.
Yet even while Puritans wrote poetry, read it, and memorized it, they
acknowledged its limitations and dangers so articulately that Puritanism and
poetry may seem at irst antithetical. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully
Translated into English Metre, published in 1640 and popularly known as the Bay
Psalm Book, was a book of religious poetry, yet John Cotton wrote a careful
preface to justify the poetry primarily for the sake of religion.
Standardized prayer was criticized as a papist and Anglican ritual, because
any good minister could and should “pray in the spirit,” that is, think and
speak in his own words. Yet “every good minister hath not a gift … to com-
pose extemporary psalms as he hath of prayer,” so the good minister was
permitted to depend on others to provide standardized psalms that he could
read and repeat. Yet Cotton made clear that the poetic and aesthetic were
there only to serve religion: “Neither let any think, that for the meter’s sake
we have taken liberty or poetical license to depart from the true and proper
sense of David’s words in the Hebrew verses, no.” Cotton assured readers that
the translators had kept “close to the original text” and “attended Conscience
rather than Elegance, idelity rather than poetry.” As the parallelism and bal-
ance suggest, Cotton’s argument is itself well written, yet there is no irony in
his precise insistence on the primacy of the religious work to be done by the
book: “If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some
may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s Altar needs not our polish-
ings: Ex 20.”4
In the Geneva Bible, the twentieth chapter of Exodus delineates what use
the Israelites may and may not make of the things of this world. Verses 4 and
5 make exactly the distinction the Puritans made: “Thou shalt make thee no
graven image” (Exodus 20:4) is followed by, “Thou shalt not bow down to
them, neither serve them” (Exodus 20:5). This distinction is crucial. Not all
images are forbidden. One must avoid images used in worship, images one
must bow down to and serve, images of God. The Puritans did not, however,
avoid all images. Puritan tombstones display not only engraved poetry but
also a plethora of graven images: winged death’s heads, skeletons, picks, shov-
els, scythes, coins, death’s arrow, and snufed candles sit beside the Tree of
Life, the Crown of Victory, the Palm of Righteousness, lowers, souls carried

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to heaven in the bellies of birds, souls igured as doves, and skulls and cinerary
urns with living roots and lowers growing from them. As this abundance of
religious art suggests, Puritans did not merely spurn the world and images
drawn from it.
Like Augustine, they considered the creatures of the sensible world less
a delusion or distraction than a gift from God. For that reason they were
not ascetics, Gnostics, or Manicheans, at war with the world. Indeed, only
ten years after Cotton’s careful preface, other Puritan ministers revised the
Bay Psalm Book. President Dunster of Harvard and Richard Lyon revised
psalms and added their translations of other biblical verses, mostly from the
intensely imagistic and beautiful Song of Solomon, “having a special eye,” as
they explained in their preface, “both to the gravity of the phrase” and the
“sweetness of the verse.”5 Cotton Mather noted their aesthetic intentions: “It
was thought that a little more of Art was to be employed upon the verses.”6
Puritans’ relations to the world were complex, paradoxical, and balanced, as
the prose and poetry of Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672) show.
Anne Bradstreet’s early poetry was taken to London by her brother-in-law,
John Woodbridge, apparently without her permission and, as she wrote later,
without a chance for revision. It was published there in 1650 as The Tenth Muse
Lately Sprung up in America … by a Gentlewoman in Those Parts. Bradstreet was,
as this subtitle made clear, a “gentlewoman,” the daughter of one governor
of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the wife of another. Her father, Thomas
Dudley, had been, in England, steward to the Earl of Lincoln, and as a child, she
had access to Sempringham Castle and the earl’s vast library, as well as several
tutors. She drew on a great range of sources, sacred and secular, for the forms
and materials from which she fashioned her own distinctive voice. Her poetry
shows her reading of Guillaume Du Bartas, a French poet now obscure but
then also admired by Milton and Dryden, along with Spenser, Sidney, Donne,
Herbert, Raleigh, and others. A second collection published in 1678 and a third
in 1758 demonstrate that her poems continued to ind an audience.
Her life had hardship and loss, yet she celebrated the beauty of the world
as an a fortiori argument for the generosity of a provident God, found in its
nature and history warrant for both her own religion and a permanently valu-
able feminism, and read it through the rational sacramentalism of Calvin. But
she strove to “wean” her afections from a love that terminated in the love of
creatures, rather than moving from them to a love of their maker. For her, pan-
theism and animism were understandable and not evil, but they were merely
the childish early stages of a process that continued throughout life, a pro-
cess she likened, in her “Meditations Divine and Moral,” to weaning. “Some

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children are hardly weaned” and do not wish to leave the breast for “more
substantial food,” so “God is forced to … lay al iction” on them so that they
may recognize the need to move on, to read the combination of beauty and
al iction as a propaedeutic to adult wisdom and learn to “shake hands with
the world, before it bid them farewell.”7 Even so common and earthly a thing
as weaning could lead to religious enlightenment if one meditated on it.
Like other Puritans, Bradstreet meditated not only on the Bible but also
on the world. The practice of meditation, of making abstract doctrine real
and true to human experience through an intense focus, was itself a poetics, a
way of channeling thought and feeling in language. In his Meditations from the
Creatures, “as it was preached in Aldermanbury,” the English Puritan minister
Thomas Taylor collected in 1628 several sermons on this subject. He argued
that there “are two great works,” left for us to read, “one written in the vol-
ume of the Creatures, the other in the volume of the Scriptures.” The relation
between the earthly and the divine was not mutually exclusive or even dualis-
tic: it was hierarchical. So David contemplates “the heavens and stars” because
“he is led to God by them.” The world is there to be read, because the “world
is his book,” in which there is “no letter without a part of God’s wisdom in it.”
For that reason, “the voice of the Creatures is not to be banished out of the
church.” Nature is a second scripture on which to meditate: “If all Scriptures
be proitable to teach and improve, then those that teach divine things from
natural.”8 To be sure, Thomas Taylor was aware that he had to make an argu-
ment, that most meditation focused on the Bible, but he ofered in Puritan
terms an argument developed earlier, in the Middle Ages, by writers like Alain
de Lille, Richard of St. Victor, John Scotus, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others:
the world was, like the Bible, God’s book, a it subject for religious contempla-
tion, and many Puritans read it as such.
As its title makes clear, Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” enacts a meditative
journey from the creatures to their creator, less by way of renunciation and
abandonment than by way of homology. The poem begins with a speaker’s
looking at an autumn evening. The evening is liminal and transient, but the
speaker is absorbed in its beauty: “Rapt were my senses at this delectable view”
(204). Still, this speaker is not Keats, Walt Whitman, or H.D.: the image is nec-
essary but not suicient. She immediately thinks of its spiritual interpretation,
its glossa, and reads the image to go beyond the image: if this earthly “excel-
lence abide below, / How excellent is he that dwells on high, / Whose power
and beauty by his works we know?” (205). The speaker phrases this linking as
a question. To be sure that one has found and understood a sacramental link
between the visible and the invisible worlds would be an act of presumption.

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Calvin’s rational sacramentalism does not claim that we can know for certain
that the links we see are real, only that our minds tend to make these links,
not that we do or can thereby know the mind of God. With that caveat in
mind, however, we can and should read the world. What is implicit in the
“Contemplations” Bradstreet makes explicit in her “Meditations Divine and
Moral”: “There is no object that we see, no action that we do … but we may
make some spiritual advantage of all” (272).
So autumn suggests a divine beauty and excellence; the “stately oak” (205)
will outlast the speaker, but even its many years “eternity doth scorn” (205).
When the speaker considers the sun, the temptation to romantic pantheism
grows stronger: “Soul of this world, this universe’s eye, / No wonder some
made thee a deity” (205). The sun, addressed in the intimate personal pronoun
“thee,” suggests soul and vision. Those who worshipped it are understood,
and only prior knowledge keeps the speaker from joining them: “Had I not
better known, alas, the same had I” (205).
Instead she joins David, the psalmist, in contemplating the creatures in
order to be, in Thomas Taylor’s words, “led to God by them.” The sun “as
a bridegroom from thy chamber rushes” (205) to court the earth and “in the
womb of fruitful nature dive,” bringing forth a plethora of earthly creatures
whose very existence is a hymn to God. Yet when the speaker attempts to join
this chorus, to “sing some song, my mazed Muse thought meet” in order that
“My great Creator I would magnify,” she inds that, unlike them, she cannot
sing: “But Ah, and Ah, again, my imbecility!” (206). The triple medial caesura
and halting alexandrine evince a diiculty not faced by “the merry grasshop-
per” and “black-clad cricket.” These sing smoothly in lowing lines and lead
the speaker to question how they can sing while “I, as mute, can warble forth
no higher lays?” (207).
Her answer is the fall of Adam and Eve. Human beings fell below other crea-
tures in the natural order of things, are weaker and more transient than they:
“When I behold the heavens as in their prime, / And then the earth (though
old) still clad in green,” they seem “insensible of time” with neither “age nor
wrinkle” on them. When they fade in winter, “A spring returns, and they
more youthful made.” Not so we. With two pauses, the alexandrine closes the
stanza: “But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid” (209).
What, then, is one to do? Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantics would
later argue that one should airm one’s place in the order of nature, that this
airmation would bring forth the new heavens and the new earth promised
in Revelation. This speaker seems to pursue the romantic argument: “Shall I
then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth, / Because their beauty and their

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strength last longer?” They have natural advantages. “Shall I wish there, or
never to had birth, / Because they’re bigger, and their bodies stronger?” This
speaker concludes that the wiser response to our inferiority in the order of
nature is to place our hopes not in nature but in the supernatural aspect of our
being. And now the halting caesuras come in the descriptions of nature: “Nay,
they shall darken, perish, fade and die, / And when unmade so ever shall they
lie.” Their apparent death in winter is metaphoric; their return to life in spring
is transient; and their inal death is permanent. Now the closing line runs
smoothly: “But man was made for endless immortality” (210). Where fallen
human beings are below other creatures in the order of nature, redeemed
ones are above them in eternity.
For that reason, when the romantic argument returns, it is phrased in the
subjunctive mood as a conditional contingent on a supposition contrary to
fact. The temptation to embrace nature and only nature is still there. Yet now
the speaker sees the wider context. The woods and river are beautiful, “And
if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell” (210). But of course the sun
will not shine forever. Nor can nature know the thoughts it occasions in us,
although it can be an “emblem true of what I count the best.” The ish are
“nature taught, and yet you know not why, / You wat’ry folk that know not
your felicity.” The ish may inspire contemplation but cannot attain it them-
selves, cannot know the happiness and freedom of which they are uncon-
scious metaphors. Only the speaker, “musing thus with contemplations fed, /
And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,” can remember nightingales heard
back in England and anticipate Keats’s desire to mount the wings of poesy,
to ly with them. But where he wished to ly with them forever, this speaker
“wished me wings with her a while to take my l ight” (211–12). Even the desire
to escape time is itself temporal.
The human being is a “sinful creature, frail and vain,” who “takes this earth
ev’n for heav’n’s bower” (213). Yet earth fades, where heaven endures. Earth’s
great failing is not that it is not real but that it does not last. As Bradstreet
explained in “Meditations Divine and Moral,” “All the comforts of this life may
be compared to the gourd of Jonah” (288), a real and beautiful gift of a lov-
ing God but not to be confused with its creator. Its very transience and decay
work to lead Jonah and the writer to the next step in the prose meditation, “for
were earthly comforts permanent, who would look for heavenly?” (289). The
contemplative speaker concludes that “Time the fatal wrack of mortal things”
shows that even good things – fame, wit, and gold – will not “scape time’s
rust,” that only “he whose name is graved in the white stone / Shall last and
shine when all of these are gone” (213–14).

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“Contemplations” is, then, a single poem, in thirty-three seven-line stanzas

that combine and modify Spenserian stanza and rhyme royal. The Spenserian
elements link her work not only to Spenser but also to the English Spenserians
who tried to keep alive Elizabethan values in Stuart times. Rhyme royal links
Bradstreet to English writers back to Chaucer, who used it in Troilus and
Criseyde. It calls back fond memories of England, like the “Philomel,” or night-
ingale, found in England but not in America.
In stanzas 1 through 6, the speaker celebrates the beauty of the physical
world and the religious use of metaphors drawn from it. In stanzas 8 and
9 she considers why she cannot unselfconsciously praise God as other crea-
tures appear to. In stanzas 10 through 17, she suggests that the fall of Adam
and Eve separated human beings from the rest of nature, forcing us to dwell
in consciousness and history, apart from the prelapsarian bliss of Eden. And
in stanzas 18 through 33, she works out a temporal resolution and a modus
vivendi. To airm one’s place in the order of nature would be to airm one’s
own comparative weakness and death. Instead, one must look to the supernat-
ural order for one’s real home and end, not with nature but with Revelation.
Contemplations, meditations, are parts of one’s religious duty, in which
nature is to be neither scorned nor worshipped, but read. Such reading will
link the two books, nature and the Bible; it will lead from the world of nature
to redemption and the white stone promised to “him that overcometh” in
Revelation 2:17: “a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” Like the Bible, nature contained
secrets not obvious to everyone but worth careful contemplation.
So did history and science. The majority of Bradstreet’s poems are not the
personal relections now frequently anthologized. Like the quaternions on
the four elements, the four humors, the four ages, the four seasons, and the
four monarchies, they focus on the outside world. What she wrote of her let-
ter “To My Dear Children” applies to her poetry as well: “I have not studied in
this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself,
but the glory of God” (240). Bradstreet writes public poetry that includes but
goes well beyond the personal. She imaginatively reoccupies many periods
in history. Doing so enables her to distinguish aspects of universal human
nature from the local and transient beliefs of a particular time and place. So
her famous humility about herself and her ability and willingness to look out-
ward are not personal or poetic failings but complex philosophical and literary
strategies.
In “The Prologue,” for example, she begins with the conventional dis-
claimer about her inability to do justice to her high theme: “To sing of wars,

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of captains, and of kings, / Of cities founded, commonwealths begun, / For

my mean pen are too superior things” (15). When the prologue is followed
by poems that do exactly these things, we are tempted to conclude that the
humility is merely conventional, perhaps even ironic. Yet the speciic evidence
suggests that she means it. Indeed the poem’s treatment of those who would
claim worthiness is satirical, suggesting that possessors of self-inl icted self-
esteem may be, like those who cling uncritically to the things of this world,
merely childish.
When she proleptically rehearses sexist arguments against her poems, she
writes, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle
better its.” As later lines make clear, this reductive synecdoche to “carping
tongue” is hardly an expression of fear and deference. The “despite they cast on
female wits” is such that, “If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, / They’ll
say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance” (16). Interestingly, these negative argu-
ments were not made at the time. John Rogers and Nathaniel Ward praised her
poetry. Her irst book, The Tenth Muse, was a best seller in London, and even
Cotton Mather, who had his doubts about both women and poetry, wrote in
1702 that “her poems … have aforded … a monument for her memory beyond
the stateliest marbles.”9 Only later critics, in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, began to make the arguments and dismissals she answers here.
She begins by alluding to the “antique Greeks” whose muses were women:
“Else of our sex why feigned they those nine / And poesy made Calliope’s own
child.” She writes that her detractors will say, “The Greeks did nought, but
play the fools and lie.” It’s a nice strategy. To dismiss poetry by women, one
has to dismiss the Greeks, one of the great fonts of Western culture. There
is no point in ighting an open battle that will end in defeat: “It is but vain
unjustly to wage war.” So she goes on to grant men “Preeminence in all and
each” but immediately adds, “Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours”
and addresses them: “oh ye high lown quills that soar the skies, / And ever
with your prey still catch your praise” (16). Now her critics, formerly “each
carping tongue,” are again reduced to synecdoche. Writing quills were made
from the wing and tail feathers of geese and turkeys, in the Renaissance hier-
archy of animals not noble parts of not noble birds, and her critics catch only
their own praise. She ends with a humble request, that for her poetry “I ask no
bays,” the leaves used in the wreaths given to the winners in the Greek poetic
competitions, as well as for cooking, but only “thyme or parsley wreath,”
used more for cooking than for victor’s crowns (17). It may be anachronistic to
call Bradstreet a feminist, yet much of her poetry can now be proitably read
through this lens.

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In her poem “In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth
of Happy Memory,” she can be much more explicit about Elizabeth than she
usually is about herself. Here the humble disclaimer includes all other writers
as well as herself: “No Phoenix pen, nor Spenser’s poetry, / No Speed’s nor
Camden’s learned history, / Eliza’s works, wars, praise, can e’er compact”
(195). Her inability to do justice to her high theme is shared with all other
writers, including those whom she admires. Her scorn for those who would
attribute this inability to sex or gender is self-controlled and complete: “Now
say, have women worth? or have they none? / Or had they some, but with our
Queen is’t gone?” (197–98). Here her learning in logic and history is brought
to bear. Bradstreet lives and writes with England and America controlled by
the masculine and none-too-bright House of Stuart. But it was not always so.
This political situation and the habits of mind that go with it are temporal and
contingent. Where her use of Spenserian and rhyme royal verse form in the
“Contemplations” quietly allied her with the English Spenserians who had
sung the praises of Elizabeth, where that choice of verse form was a subtle
political act, here she can be more direct.
If masculine supremacy were a fact of nature, then there should be no
exceptions, and this time should be like all other times. But that is not the
case: “Nay masculines, you have taxed us long, / But she, though dead, will
vindicate our wrong.” The poem can look back on a better time and use it to
alert and educate her current readers: “Let such as say our sex is void of rea-
son, / Know ’tis a slander now but once was treason” (198). Times change,
and may yet change again. By occupying various times, the poem can read
what we now call sexism as local and temporary. It can look back on a time
when it would have been less comfortable and forward to a time when it may
disappear, a time of “the heaven’s great revolution; / If then new things their
old forms shall retain, / Eliza shall rule Albion once again” (198). In our own
terms, neither sexism nor feminism is settled and ixed just yet. Both are con-
tested, and Bradstreet’s poetry enacts those contests.
Her prose writings, even to her children, show continual struggles and
choices: “I have often been perplexed that I have not found that constant joy in
my pilgrimage and refreshing which I supposed most servants of God have”
(243). She expected a time of assurance and calm and sometimes achieved it,
but only for a time, and her doubts are quite familiar to contemporary readers:
“Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures,
many times by atheism how could I know whether there was a God; I never
saw any miracles to conirm me, and those which I read of, how did I know
but they were feigned?” (243). In times of trial, then, she had no store of ready-

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made comfort from a settled conidence in her religion. For her, Puritanism
was a religion agonistes, a religion of struggle.
Even her coming to America, which we Americans tend to celebrate because
it led to us, is phrased as change and challenge: “After a short time I changed
my condition and was married, and came into this country, where I found a
new world and new manners, at which my heart rose” (241). Something about
the New World made her angry. Because it occurs in the same sentence with
her marriage, it is tempting to think it may have been masculine supremacy,
but that was hardly new or limited to America. One possibility is that it was
the requirement that members of American Puritan churches had to deliver
publicly, to ministers and elders, a conversion narrative and have its authen-
ticity judged by them. This requirement was indeed new and may well have
been ofensive. Some evidence for this conjecture is given in the next sentence,
in which whatever angered her is connected to joining the church: “But after I
was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined the church
at Boston” (241). Although the cause remains debatable, the efect is revealing.
She did not submit immediately, automatically, or under duress. It was only
when she became convinced that it was the way of God that she chose to sub-
mit and join. She worked her way to that decision, and her submission was
delayed, considered, and chosen.
One can see a similar process in her poems on her family, in her elegies,
and in her last poems, in which hopes for heaven are linked to life in this
world. “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” begins and ends with harsh
realities. The Puritans believed that marriage ended with death. The speaker
writes “farewell lines” to her husband, so that “when that knot’s untied that
made us one, / I may seem thine, who in efect am none.” She admits that
death ends the marriage and asks that her faults will be “interred in my obliv-
ious grave,” that “when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms / Yet love thy dead
who long lay in thine arms.” The poem puts transient experience into a more
durable form. It will outlast its writer and have a performative efect to “pro-
tect” their children “from step-dame’s injury” and to preserve her memory
and her request: “With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse; / And kiss
this paper for thy love’s dear sake, / Who with salt tears this last farewell did
take” (224). The request is all the more moving for its restraint. It asks only for
“some sad sighs” and a kiss. Bradstreet’s poetry translates world into word in
the hope of having that word afect the world.
Although Puritans did not consider marriage a sacrament, they did consider
married love a religious duty and source of happiness. Puritan poetry, unlike
poetry in the tradition of courtly love, is frequently addressed to spouses. In

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“To My Dear and Loving Husband” the love of wife and husband is both a
metaphor for God’s love in heaven and a way to it: “Then while we live, in
love let’s so persevere / That when we live no more, we may live ever” (225).
This world is linked to the next, and earthly love for husband and wife is com-
manded as a living metaphor for the love of God.
Misfortune, particularly the deaths of those we love, is doubly hard, because
the speaker wonders how such grief can coexist with the love of a provident
God. In her elegy for her grandchild Elizabeth, Bradstreet begins by bidding
farewell but cannot end there. She asks, “why should I once bewail thy fate,”
because the child is now in heaven, but cannot end there either. She notes that,
in the order of nature, “trees do rot when they are grown,” and “plums and
apples” fall only after they are “thoroughly ripe” (235). Puritans believed not
only in the general providence of God, but also in special providences, sudden
interventions in the natural order of things whose very improbability indi-
cated their divine origin. So “plants new set to be eradicate, / And buds new
blown to have so short a date” had to be “by His hand alone that guides nature
and fate” (235). This acceptance depends on humility about the intentions of
God but ofers a third way between comforting presumption and equally blind
deiance, as in her elegy on her grandson Simon Bradstreet. Simon is “Cropt
by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good” (237). There is no way to resolve this
contradiction, to demand some explanation from God, or to exact vengeance
for this afront, as Melville’s Ahab tried to do, without much success. There is
willed acceptance in the absence of understanding: “With dreadful awe before
Him let’s be mute, / Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute” (237). It is
a choice.
A similar contingency informs Bradstreet’s “Verses upon the Burning of
Our House.” The poem begins in terror and loss, with the hope that no one
else will have to endure such ire: “That fearful sound of ‘Fire!’ and ‘Fire!’ /
Let no man know is my desire” (292). The usual consolations, that the house
belonged to God and that he might have taken more, are true enough, but the
speaker cannot rest with either them or the harsh Manichean advice to “Raise
up thy thoughts above the sky / That dunghill mists away may ly.” Only when
heaven itself is igured as another, better house, “With glory richly furnished,
/ Stands permanent though this be led,” can the speaker end, and then only
with a request: “The world no longer let me love, / My hope and treasure lies
above” (293). She can pray that she will eventually stop loving the world, but
she has not achieved this goal yet.
In contemplating her own death in “As Weary Pilgrim,” dated August 31,
1669, Bradstreet relects that death will end “losses” and “sorrows” and that

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the grave that will “consume” her lesh is “the bed Christ did perfume” and the
entry into marriage with him. Yet these consolations do not end the poem. It
ends with a prayer and a proposal: “Lord make me ready for that day, / Then
come, dear Bridegroom, come away” (294–95). Even now, she is not yet ready.
Her poetry is about life on earth and the struggle to ind meaning in it. The
poems link biography, history, politics, and religion, the natural and super-
natural orders. In them the political is the personal. Although of its time and
place, her poetry still speaks to all who engage in that struggle and who look
back, as she did, on a past that will help them make some sense of present and
future.
Unlike Bradstreet, Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683) stayed with the ballad, a
popular form intended to reach a large audience. In his Key into the Language of
America (1643), he included thirty-two poems. These ofered a complex chal-
lenge to the usual dismissals of Native Americans. For Williams they were
simply other human beings with considerable natural virtues. He noted iron-
ically that they kept many of God’s commandments without knowing them,
while his fellow Puritans broke these same commandments while claiming to
be God’s chosen people: “If Natures Sons both wild and tame, / Humane and
Courteous be: / How ill becomes it Sonnes of God / To want Humanity.”10 He
noted that American Indians were frequently more generous, honest, brave,
altruistic, chaste, and careful of others than American Puritans, that they were
born white and had become dark only through long exposure to the sun and
their habit of anointing themselves with oil, and that the English had no right
to their lands.
He did so, moreover, in the metaphoric, biblical language that his fellow
Puritans could not help but understand, forging a linguistic community that
included both groups. When he wrote that “In wildernesse, in great dis-
tresse, / These Ravens have fed me” (46), he made clear that God’s provi-
dence transcended Puritan categories. When the Puritans called American
Indians “ravens,” they alluded to the Hebrew belief that ravens are unclean.
So Williams alludes to the biblical passage in which ravens feed Elijah (I Kings
17:6) to show that God’s providence includes them all.
Where most Puritans believed that typology, the belief that certain things
in the Hebrew testament forecast certain things in the life of Christ, applied
also to secular history and could link Israel with Massachusetts Bay and Moses
with John Winthrop, Williams followed Augustine in restricting it to the
Bible, so that no earthly group could claim to be the city of God or the new
Israelites. In his poems he gave American Indians the language with which to
charge Puritans with their pretension and hypocrisy: “We weare no Cloaths,

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have many Gods, / And yet our sinnes are lesse: / You are Barbarians, Pagans
wild, / Your Land’s the Wildernesse” (167). In these poems the Puritan logic
of exclusion is turned back on them by the people they have excluded. A rich
oral culture is given a voice in print. And the Puritans are charged with hav-
ing brought a biblical wilderness, a moral wasteland, to a wilderness that had
been merely natural.
Even now those who seek group superiority and historical exceptionalism
can beneit from reading, “Boast not proud English, of thy birth and blood,
/ Thy brother Indian is by Birth as Good,” and those who too conidently
speak for God and eternity can beneit from reading, “Make sure thy second
birth, else thou shalt see, / Heaven ope to Indians wild, but shut to thee” (81).
Williams wrote to expand the hermeneutic networks of his time and remains
pertinent in ours.
The extent to which the same may be said of Michael Wigglesworth (1631–
1705) is still debated. The Day of Doom: A Poetical Description of the Great and Last
Judgment (1662) sold out the eighteen hundred copies of its irst edition within
one year and remained popular in America and England for a century. Meat
out of the Eater (1670), a long poem on the uses and meaning of al iction and
solace for sufering, went through four editions in its irst ten years. At that
time Puritans were worried over a “declension” into confusion and secular-
ism. In 1662, when the Halfway Covenant widened church membership and
New England promptly went into a serious drought, the Puritan worldview
seemed threatened by a loss of meaning and a spiritual torpor. Wigglesworth,
a medical and a spiritual physician, sought to cure his lock. First in his class at
Harvard, where his college oration was entitled “The Praise of Eloquence,”
he had turned down the presidency of Harvard because of ill health, but he
was not too ill to write, and he wrote a poem to wake up his fellow Puritans,
to turn familiar doctrine into intense experience. In 224 thundering stanzas of
fourteener ballad in the common meter, a verse form they knew from their
hymns, The Day of Doom summoned his considerable rhetorical and poetic
skill. He used regular meter, full end rhyme, and internal leonine rhymes
to hold the poem and the apparent chaos of the world together, to sing of a
clearly organized supernatural order that would rule and end the confusions
of the human world. “Calm was the season, and carnal reason thought so
would last for ay.”11 But carnal reason would be no match for divine power.
Sufering would have meaning and would end, at least for God’s elect. The
Puritan order would rule, if not in the individual mind, then in the inal and
apocalyptic analysis. This blend of poetry and rhetoric clearly persuaded its
contemporary audience and was it comfort for hard lives.

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The riddles and paradoxes of Meat out of the Eater have more appeal to us,
because “Each Paradox, is like a Box, / That Cordials rare incloseth” (143).
The tone here is far more open and comforting, “That whoso will may take
his ill, / And gain where no man loseth” (143). These poems pray not for
better luck but for greater strength. They ofer a “Light in Darkness” that
“holds forth comfort from the Text, / To such as are in mind perplext” (145)
and articulate clarity, comfort, and inally a sturdy resolve: “Be cheerful
Sufering Saint, / Let nothing cast thee down” (275), because for the saint
pain is real but temporary, while God’s love is eternal. In God’s Controversy
with New England, a long poem written in 1662 but not published until late
in the nineteenth century, Wigglesworth wrote a valediction in his own
voice, also illed with love: “Cheer on, sweet souls, my heart is with you
all, / And shall be with you, maugre Sathan’s might: / And whereso’ere
this body be a Thrall, / Still in New-England shall be my delight” (102).
So it would remain. Generations of Puritans sought and found comfort
in his poetry, particularly The Day of Doom. When Edward Taylor’s wife,
Elizabeth, was dying, the verses on her lips were not her husband’s but
Michael Wigglesworth’s.
Despite conjectures, there is no compelling evidence that Edward Taylor
(c. 1642–1729) either pursued or forbade the publication of his poetry. He did,
however, preserve the poems in a large, leather-bound manuscript volume,
passed down to Ezra Stiles, Taylor’s grandson and president of Yale, and on
to the Yale library, where Thomas Johnson found it in 1937. He published his
collection in 1939. Thomas Davis and Virginia Davis collected more poetry
and published it in 1981. The poems reveal yet another orthodox Puritan,
but they also reveal how broad and various a category that is. Where Anne
Bradstreet and Roger Williams read God’s world as intrinsically metaphori-
cal, and Michael Wigglesworth avoided metaphors not sanctioned by biblical
precedent, Taylor used metaphors for their epistemological and devotional
value but also explored their limits.
Like the English metaphysical poets, he went well beyond a simple descrip-
tion of the natural world to a wit and humor intended to surprise, to link the
world to its deeper meanings, and to awaken the attention and afections of
both himself and his readers. He aimed for a discordia concors, a discord that
would lead to a deeper harmony, within both the poet and the world. Later,
John Dryden and Samuel Johnson would attack this literary correlative to a
worldview they did not share, yet such igures occur in both the Geneva and
the King James Bible, and the notion that God had written both the scriptures
and the creatures makes God look rather like a metaphysical poet, shocking

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us out of our inattention so that we may ind the deeper harmonies within an
apparently disordered world.
One reason for Taylor to follow these examples is evident in “The Ebb and
Flow.” A Puritan saint was expected both to have a profoundly transforma-
tive conversion experience, homologous to Saul’s sudden transformation into
Paul on the road to Damascus, and then to maintain that high level of com-
mitment, clarity, and fervor throughout life. So Taylor worried about declen-
sion not only in his colony and congregation but also in himself. In that irst
experience of grace, “My heart was made thy tinder box” and easily lamed
up at “holy Sparks of Heavenly Fire.”12 Yet now Taylor has become a minis-
ter, a role he igures through a surprising image suggestive of Catholic and
Anglican priests: “But now my Heart is made thy Censar trim, / Full of thy
golden Altars ire, / To ofer up Sweet Incense in / Unto thyselfe intire” (470).
A censer must hold ire over time and is, as every celebrant knows, always in
danger of going out. Now that the original experience of afective intensity
has been conirmed by a lifelong vocation with attendant duties, “If ind my
tinder scarce thy sparks can feel” (470).
Although every preacher, teacher, and writer has had this experience –
the realization that inspiration follows its own schedule – in Puritanism this
descent into the ordinary had grave portents. Perhaps the poet was deceiving
himself all along: “Hence doubts out bud for feare thy ire in mee / ’S a mock-
ing Ignis Fatuus” or merely the remains of a ire now “hid in ashes” (470). The
hard realization is that, like the tides, the ire comes from, belongs to, and is
controlled by God: “Yet when the bellows of thy Spirit blow / Away mine
ashes, then thy ire doth glow” (470). Although the poet could not retain the
ire, he could use poetry to translate it into a more enduring form that would
enable him to recall that irst experience of God’s grace and to prepare for
the next.
In God’s Determinations Touching His Elect, inished around 1682, Taylor wrote
a theologically conservative but metaphorically inventive and even comic
poem, to mock pride and despair and to encourage poor, doubting Christians.
From 1682 to 1725 he wrote the Preparatory Meditations, two series of poems to
prepare himself for the Lord’s Supper, given every six weeks at his church in
Westield, Massachusetts. These poems were based on the biblical passages on
which he preached the sermons in church. For Taylor the Lord’s Supper was
Christ’s metaphor for his metaphorical self and was not to be taken lightly.
When he felt his own lock insuiciently prepared for communion, Taylor
withheld it from them. The stakes were high, but God had ofered assistance
in a Bible and a world intrinsically metaphorical.

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In his Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper, Taylor is quite explicit about both
the justiication and the need for image and metaphor: “Natural things are
not unsuitable to illustrate supernaturals by. For Christ in his parables doth
illustrate supernatural things by natural, and if it were not thus, we could
arrive at no knowledge of supernatural things, for we are not able to see above
naturals.”13 Where Augustine had limited typology to the Bible itself, Taylor
extended typological reading to all creation. The natural world was rich with
supernatural meaning placed there by God and awaiting our attention. In
the irst poem of his second series of Preparatory Meditations, Taylor read the
“glory of the world slickt up in types / In all choise things chosen to typify”
(2.1, 83). Things meant, were chosen to mean, and were to be read for their
supernatural meaning.
Indeed, in “The Preface,” in God’s Determinations, we see God creating a
world of similes and metaphors: “Who Lac’d and Fillitted the earth so ine, /
With Rivers like greem Ribbons Smaragdine? / Who made the Sea’s its
Selvedge, and it locks / Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?” The lood of
metaphors goes far beyond those used in the Bible: “Who in this Bowling
Alley bowld the Sun?” (387). Even bowling has divine signiicance. The comic
joy is necessary, because “Man at muze, and in a maze doth stand,” while “still
his heart for fear doth pant within” (389). But the “Almighty this foreseeing”
sends aid, “makes to shine / Transplendent Glory in his Grace Divine” (399).
Taylor is a skilled disputant: Christ and Satan are given good arguments and
good poetry in the contest for human souls. Christ reassures in lilting rhymes
worthy of Noel Coward: “Oh Cheer, Cheer up, come see. / Is anything too
deare, my Dove, / Is anything too good, my Love / To get or give for thee?”
(414). But Satan is a canny psychologist and knows that depravity and doubt
dwell not just in theological argument but also in the human heart: “This
Language of thy heart doth this impart / I am a Saint, if thou no Sinner art”
(425). In other dialogues, Saint answers Soul’s own doubts and those from
“Satans Temptations” (441), but Satan is far from silenced. He is a wily soph-
ist with evidence from the “Uncharitable Cariages [sic] of Christians” (447).
Indeed, in this world, no one can inally win the argument. The conversion
experience cannot be willed, only awaited and recognized.
Once it has been, the poem can end in joy. It has been a comedy all along,
in both the medieval and the Renaissance senses. Like medieval comedy, it
moves to a happy ending. Like Renaissance comedy, it links high and low in
community. Where Herbert’s notion of salvation in The Temple had been indi-
vidual, with Christ inviting a single soul to dine, Taylor’s description is com-
munal, with a congregation of saints riding a stagecoach to heaven and singing

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together all the way. These are “the Saints who were / Encoacht for Heaven
that sang for Joy” (458), accompanied by stringed instruments, which they help
each other keep in tune: “And if a string do slip,” they “set it in a more melodi-
ous Tune / And a Diviner Harmony” (459). Taylor did not restrict salvation to
his own time and place: “Some few not in; and some whose Time, and Place /
Block up this Coaches way do goe / As Travellers afoot, and so do trace / The
Road that gives them right thereto / While in this Coach these sweetly sing /
As they to Glory ride therein” (459). As the easy rhymes and smooth enjamb-
ments suggest, those inally going to heaven can “sweetly sing,” but for those
on earth, the singing is far more diicult.
It would seem that Taylor had everything he needed: God “Plac’d man his
Pupill here, and ev’ry thing / With loads of Learning, came to tutor him”
(2.41, 156). The metaphorical world could igure forth the communicable
glories of God: “Thou’rt that Sun, that shines out Saving Grace” (2.68, 203).
It could inspire sacred poetry: “Then Glory as a Metaphor, Il ’tende,” and
“my Quill shall greet / Thyselfe with Zions Song in musick Sweet” (2.100,
262–63). Salvation could be igured as saints “Padling in their Canooes apace
with joyes / Along this blood red Sea” (2.78, 225) of Christ’s spilling blood, an
extraordinary igure that combines the Red Sea traversed by the Israelites, the
cruciixion of Christ, and the canoes of Native Americans. Where Bradstreet
had been inspired by “earthly comforts” that failed only because they were not
“permanent,” Taylor was inspired by natural beauty to think on the greater
beauty of Christ. Had Christ not been more beautiful than the creatures, “true
Wisdoms voice would bee, / That greater Love belong’d to these than thee”
(2.120, 301).
Christ had left behind a metaphor for his metaphoric self, the Lord’s Supper.
“To entertain thy Guests, thou callst, and place / Allowst, with welcome, (And
this is no Fable) / And with these Guests I am invited to’t” (2.110, 283). This
invitation led to Taylor’s poetry: “And this rich banquet makes me thus a Poet”
(2.110, 283). Taylor was aware that metaphor was not to be taken literally:
“What feed on Humane Flesh and Blood? Strange mess! / Nature exclaims.
What barbarousness is here?” (2.81, 231). To a literalist, the Lord’s Supper, the
notion that human beings should eat Christ’s lesh and drink his blood, is can-
nibalistic nonsense: “This sense of this blesst Phrase is nonsense thus. / Some
other Sense makes this a metaphor” (2.81, 231). Taylor was no biblical funda-
mentalist, and for him the words of scripture, like the sensible world, had their
primary reality as metaphor.
So Taylor had no doubts that metaphor was necessary. In his Christographia
sermons, he argues for the necessity of metaphor and links it to Christ’s

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mediation. It is entirely appropriate that “Christ Should abound in this Sort of

Speech … and this Sort of Speech never was expected to be literally true, nor
Charged to be a lying form of Speech, but a neat Rhetorical, and Wise manner
of Speaking.”14 Christ was the perfect metaphor, who spoke in metaphors, and
who ofered us the best copy to follow in our own writing: “This is the best
Example that can be: it is a Copy written by the pen of perfect Manhood, in the
Unerring hand of Godhead, in Christ and wilt thou not endeavour to Write by
this Copy?” (34). The answer is, of course, yes, because “these Metaphors we
spiritualized / Speak out … spirituall Beauty cleare” (2.151, 356).
Yet that endeavor turns out to be far more diicult than such justiications
might lead us to believe. Having set out to imitate Christ by using metaphors,
Taylor quickly discovers that they are, although necessary, hardly suicient,
even for the purposes of devotion: “My Metaphors are but dull Tacklings
tag’d / With ragged Non-Sense. Can such draw to thee / My stund afections
all with Cinders clag’d?” (2.36, 149). As in “The Ebb and Flow,” only Christ can
blow away the ashes and make the ire burn again. It is one thing to say that
the natural and secular vehicle cannot be worthy of its divine tenor, but many
Christians, Jesuit and Puritan, have argued that metaphors can igure the com-
municable glories of God. Not so Taylor.
Although metaphor works for the secular poetry of earth, “might yet serve
/ To hum a little touching terrene Shines” (2.82, 233), it cannot igure forth the
glories of Christ, as Taylor makes clear in the Christographia: “All our pencils
in all their drafts attain not to anything of the Excellencies of Christ’s opera-
tions” (468). Verbal metaphors remain inadequate. So do natural metaphors
created by God: “The Suns bright Glory’s but a smoky thing” to igure forth
any divine tenor, and “All other glories, that from Creatures spring / Are less
than that: but both are sorry Swashes” (2.100, 262). So “the Worlds Estate’s
not able” (1.9, 19) to provide satisfactory metaphors. Neither is the Bible.
Taylor writes of the metaphors in Canticles, or the Song of Solomon, “But yet
methinks the glory of thy hands / … / Metaphorized here too faintly stands”
(2.122, 305). Taylor makes this position clear in his Christographia: “There are
Some things whose Excellency is lourished over with metaphors. We borrow
the Excellency of other things to varnish over their Excellency withall. But
Grace excels all Metaphors. The varnish laid upon it doth but darken, and not
decorate it: its own Colours are too glorious to be made more glorious, by any
Colour of Secular glory” (253). Any and all metaphors of Taylor, nature, or
the Bible were bound to be insuicient. This fact might seem a death knell for
poetry, but for Taylor it became a poetics.

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He had been commanded to sing and told in advance that, this side of
heaven, no one song would ever be suicient. So he kept on singing with met-
aphors that he knew were inadequate and therefore free. God bowls the sun;
souls paddle their canoes on a Red Sea of Christ’s blood. In “Upon Wedlock
and the Death of Children,” Taylor begins with the common igure, found
also in Bradstreet, of children as lowers, beautiful but short lived and gath-
ered to God. Yet the metaphor will not hold: “But oh! the tortures, Vomit,
screechings, groans, / And six weeks Fever would pierce hearts like stones”
(469). The agony of dying children is nothing like the quiet beauty of low-
ers. Metaphors come from nature, “and nature fault would inde / Were not
thy Will, my Spell Charm, Joy, and Gem” (469). The only resolution is in the
will of God, and that will is a matter of speculative realism rather than com-
prehensible fact. That will was igured forth in nature, history, and scripture.
Taylor had, like many others, been commanded to use these in his songs.
One way to understand his sense of the limits of metaphor is to relect
that Taylor’s theology was unusually Christocentric. As he explained in the
Christographia, he believed that Christ, not the Father, had created the world:
“The Father himself executes nothing: but hath committed all the execut-
ing of his Decrees unto the Son, and this wisdom executing of the Decrees
appears in 1. The Works of Creation” (114). This is not heresy. Paul makes a
similar suggestion in Colossians 1:16. But it is unusual, and it links all metaphor
to Christ’s mediation, to the struggles of this world to apprehend the next.
But “Earth is not heaven: Faith not Vision. No” (2.96, 255). Taylor “fain
would something say: / Lest Silence should indict me” (1.21, 35), but even at his
most enthusiastic, he can be no more sure of his song than of his election. He
must make his poetry, then, on the paradox of a language he knows to be nec-
essary but inadequate, commanded but untrustworthy. The passion is in the
paradox, and at times he sounds like Samuel Beckett: “To see thy Kingly Glory
in to throng. / I can, yet cannot tell this Glory just, / In Silence bury’t, must
not, yet I must” (1.17, 30). Not to sing at all would have been disobedience and
despair. To imagine one’s song satisfactory would have been presumption and
pride. Thus Taylor, in many poems, yearned for death so that at last he would
inally be able to sing aright the songs he had tried to sing in life.
That ambition and struggle continued in Jane Colman Turell (1708–1735),
the daughter of Jane Clark and Benjamin Colman, minister of Brattle Street
Church and president of Harvard College. Like Bradstreet, Turell had access to
a great library and put it to good use. At age seventeen she paraphrased Psalm
137 to lament “Our lyres by us forsaken and unstrung,”15 and in another poem,

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“To My Muse, December 29, 1725,” she invoked her muse to ill her mind and
poetry “With rich ideas, great and unconin’d. / Instruct me in those secret
arts that lie / Unseen to all but to a poet’s eye” (791). With a nice sense of wit
and balance she asked, “O let me burn with Sappho’s noble ire, / But not like
her for faithless man expire” (791). She hoped to “be worthy of poet’s name”
(792) and clearly was, but when she died at twenty-seven, her husband printed
only a little of her poetry, explaining, “I might add to these some pieces of
wit and humor, which if published would give a brighter idea of her to some
sort of readers; but as her heart was set on graver and better subjects, and her
pen much oftener employed about them, so I choose to omit them, though
innocent enough” (788). Her father added that “she was sometimes ired with
a laudable ambition of raising the honor of her sex” (788), but the details and
the poems are missing. We can only mourn what we have lost, not because
of a lack of ire and ability on the part of the poet, but because of casual cen-
sorship by those who thought they knew better about what to value, even as
some later readers thought they knew better about Puritan poetry.
Bradstreet, Williams, Wigglesworth, Taylor, Turell, and more than two
hundred other Puritans wrote poetry, neither as a forbidden act of hereti-
cal deiance nor as a song of self-assurance, but as a part of their religion, an
unending struggle to connect transient life and lasting truth, to work out the
meanings of life, to connect the natural and supernatural orders. All varied.
None were typical. Yet these ive are linked to the hundreds of others who
wrote poetry both individually distinctive and collectively recognizable as that
of American Puritans. Although its forms and materials came from many
places, the poetry was, from the start, American. Although its quality varied,
it was, from the start, poetry, and much of it is still worth reading now.

Notes
1. Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and Fifty Expository
Lectures on the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism (Boston: B. Green and S. Kneeland,
1726), p. 37.
2. Alexander Richardson, The Logicians Schoolmaster (London, 1657), quoted in
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon,
1961), p. 162.
3. Edward Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 283. Subsequent quotations are
from this edition and are documented parenthetically. Quotations from the irst
and second series of Preparatory Meditations are cited with the series number
and poem number in addition to the page number.

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 The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry

4. John Cotton, preface to The Whole Booke of Psalms Faithfully Translated into
English Metre (Cambridge, Mass.: Stephen Daye, 1640), quoted in Perry Miller
and Thomas H. Johnson (eds.), The Puritans (New York: Harper, 1963), vol. 2,
pp. 670–72.
5. Quoted in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, vol. 2, p. 556.
6. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New
England, In Seven Books (1702), ed. Thomas Robbins (Hartford, Conn.: Silas
Andrus, 1855), vol. 2, p. 406.
7. Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 279. Subsequent quota-
tions are from this edition and are documented parenthetically.
8. Thomas Taylor, A Man in Christ, or: A New CREATURE. To Which Is Added a
Treatise, Containing Meditations from the CREATURES (London: Printed for I.
Bartlet at the gilt Cup in Cheapside, 1628), pp. 2–3.
9. Mather, Magnalia, vol. 2, p. 135.
10. Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, I – A Key into the
Language of America, ed. James H. Trumbull (New York: Russell and Russell,
1963), p. 39. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are documented
parenthetically.
11. Michael Wigglesworth, The Poems of Michael Wiglesworth, ed. Ronald A.
Bosco (New York: University Press of America, 1989), p. 11. Subsequent quota-
tions are from this edition and are documented parenthetically.
12. Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, p. 470. Subsequent quotations are from
this edition and are documented parenthetically.
13. Edward Taylor, Edward Taylor’s Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper, ed.
Norman S. Grabo (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), p. 43.
14. Edward Taylor, Edward Taylor’s Christographia, ed. Norman S. Grabo (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 273. Subsequent quotations are
from this edition and are documented parenthetically.
15. Jane Colman Turell, Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Pious and Ingenious Mrs.
Jane Turell … Chiely Collected from Her Own Manuscripts (Boston, 1735, Quoted in
The Heath Anthology of American Literature), ed. Paul Lauter, 6th ed. (Boston:
Houghton Mil in Harcourt, 2009), vol. A, p. 788. Subsequent quotations are
from this edition and are documented parenthetically.

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 Chapter 4
Confronting Death: The New England
Puritan Elegy
J e f f r ey A . H a m m on d

Diicult Commemorations
As hundreds of extant specimens reveal, the funeral elegy was the quintessen-
tial poem of early New England; the passing of a pious soul virtually mandated
a verse commemoration. These poems were largely ignored, however, in the
revaluation of American Puritan verse prompted by the rediscovery of Edward
Taylor’s poetry. It is not diicult to understand why; with its sing-song prosody,
formulaic images, and predictable rhetoric, the Puritan elegy has always been
diicult to appreciate either aesthetically or psychologically. Given the vibrant
intersection of art and mourning for which the poetry of loss is traditionally
valued, we might well ask: Where is the poetry and where is the sense of loss?
Such questions were being raised while these poems were still being writ-
ten. The young Benjamin Franklin, posing as the satirical Silence Dogood in
his brother’s New-England Courant, underscored the longstanding popularity
of such elegies by sarcastically praising a typical example as a “new species of
Poetry.” Franklin comments that this lament for “a Wife, a Daughter, and a
Sister,” creates “a Sort of an Idea of the Death of Three Persons,” which “conse-
quently must raise Three Times as much Grief and Compassion in the Reader.”1
Then comes Franklin’s famous elegiac recipe: “Having chose the Person, take all
his Virtues, Excellencies, &c. and if he have not enough, you may borrow some
to make up a suicient Quantity: To these add his last Words” and “a Handful
or two of Melancholly Expressions,” and pour the mix into “the empty Scull of
some young Harvard.” After a liberal sprinkling of “double Rhimes,” the recipe
concludes, “you must spread all upon Paper, and if you can procure a Scrap of
Latin to put at the End, it will garnish it mightily; then having aixed your Name
at the Bottom, with a Maestus Composuit, you will have an Excellent Elegy.”2

Parts of this chapter draw on my book The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and
Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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 Confronting Death

Franklin’s parodic “ingredients” accurately summarize the artistic failings of

the Puritan elegy as post-Enlightenment critics have deined them. Instead of
the distinctive voice of an individual poet, a generic speaker recites a chant-like
recitation of loss; instead of a concrete portrait of the deceased, virtues are
seemingly “borrowed” to depict someone too good to be real; and instead of
fresh language, standard “Melancholly Expressions” abound. William Empson
once remarked that the occasion of death has always been “the trigger of the
literary man’s biggest gun”;3 given the performative demands of elegy, why
did early New Englanders commemorate their dead in so formulaic a manner?
Their choice seems especially odd given the central role of texts within Puritan
culture; a seeming indiference to artistic form in elegy does not square well
with the Bible-stimulated attention to language apparent in other Puritan writ-
ings, especially sermons. Moreover, educated New Englanders were acquainted
with literary precedents that might have countered their rigidity in elegy. Taylor
owned copies of the Iliad, Theocritus, and Horace and was familiar with the
English metaphysicals; Anne Bradstreet read Sidney and the French Calvinist
poet Guillaume Du Bartas; and many Puritans, including Cotton Mather, held
Milton’s poetry in high regard. When early New Englanders turned to elegy,
however, they shunned Milton’s example in “Lycidas” by adhering to the very
conventions that gave Franklin such an easy target.
We cannot blame a lack of poetic talent – at least, not entirely. Although
Edward Taylor’s poetic gifts are abundantly clear from his meditative verse,
there is little to distinguish his elegies from the productions of hundreds of
lesser poets. Taylor’s elegy for David Dewey, for example, anticipates Silence
Dogood’s recipe with alarming precision. Dewey is portrayed in precisely the
“Three-Persons” manner that Franklin lampoons: as a father bringing his chil-
dren “up to Christ,” a husband whose grace “drencht” his “Consort’s heart,”
and a citizen whose “Grace did make thy Township Neighbourhood / Among
us, very pleasant, usefull, good.” Franklin’s critique is also borne out in a
highly generalized depiction of the deceased: Dewey’s “Conversation,” which
“gave a Shine / Of Prudence, Peace, and Piety Divine,” answers the recipe’s
call for a recitation of abstract “Virtues” and “Excellencies.” Taylor might even
be accused of “borrowing” some of these virtues by reaching into an unseen
realm to describe Dewey’s persistence as a saint who “Cudgeld” his body of
sin, never slacking the “raine” that he kept on a carnal element portrayed in
equally paradigmatic terms. Smaller touches also conirm Taylor’s commit-
ment to the elegiac formula. Although he keeps “Melancholly Expressions” to
a minimum, he proclaims that Dewey’s survivors must borrow his “Coin’s
Cambarick” to “wipe of of our Eyes the Tears of Sorrow.” Taylor even

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manages to “procure a Scrap of Latin,” as the recipe advises, to “garnish” the

poem: his “Sic levit mastus amicus, E. T.” is an anticipatory echo of Franklin’s
“Maestus Composuit.”4
We would expect a poet as talented as Taylor to have revealed more about
Dewey the individual and less about Dewey the generic saint, whose carnal
element would be raised “at the Resurrection of the Just” to rejoin the soul to
sing “with Saints and Angels” in the celestial choir. Such a poem might have
contained less dogma and more relection on the cycles of nature, the power
of love or memory to conquer time, or the permanence that art conveys to the
deceased, whose immortality is assured by a verbal monument more lasting
than bronze. Although these options were available to a poet whose Harvard
schooling acquainted him with their classical precedents, Taylor made other
choices. He did not see the result as an artistic failure, either; published with
Dewey’s writings in a commemorative pamphlet, this was the only complete
Taylor poem to see print during the poet’s lifetime.

Issues of Assessment
The central challenge of elegy, broadly considered, lies in negotiating the com-
peting demands of immanence and transcendence. The paradox of observing
a death in time by invoking the supposed timelessness of art helps explain
why, as O. B. Hardison observed long ago, critics have never known quite what
to do with occasional poems like elegies.5 Indeed, the historical conditions of
elegy work against the traditional assumption that great art somehow tran-
scends historical conditions. The canonical elegy, from “Lycidas” on down,
produces just such transcendence – or, more accurately, its illusion – by turn-
ing the occasion of death into an opportunity for seemingly timeless relec-
tions that delect attention from the occasion itself.
To approach the Puritan elegy on its own terms requires us to suspend for-
mal and thematic expectations shaped by such classic poems of loss as Shelley’s
“Adonais,” Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Whitman’s “Lilacs” – all of which
participate, more or less, in the pastoral tradition embodied in “Lycidas.” As
Hyatt Waggoner noted in the late 1960s, “To remember that while Puritan
Milton was writing ‘Lycidas,’ his American coreligionists were compos-
ing acrostic elegies is to recall how provincial American Puritanism quickly
became.”6 Ruth Wallerstein exposed a basic critical assumption underlying
such assessments by claiming that Milton “universalizes” his grief by putting
it “not in a religious form but in an artistic form.”7 Although Wallerstein’s
distinction between the “artistic” and the “religious” might seem valid from

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a New Critical perspective, early New Englanders would not have accepted
or perhaps even recognized it. The intermingling of these impulses within
Puritan discourse was too pervasive to permit so clean a separation.
Modern readers might ind it odd that although David Dewey died at what
we would consider a “young” thirty-six, Taylor does not bother to mention
what killed him. The omission was typical – and relective of a certain prag-
matism surrounding the writing of elegies in early New England. The vis-
ibility of death and dying within its close-knit communities invested elegy
with even higher stakes than Empson imagined; these stakes, however, had
less to do with the production of art than with the reassertion of social and
ideological continuities. Although the rate of infant mortality was probably
lower in New England than in Old England, it has been estimated that in
seventeenth-century Ipswich and Andover, one in ten children died at birth or
shortly thereafter; in more densely populated areas like Boston, the rate may
have been one in three.8 As late at 1734, Franklin brooded over a contemporary
calculation that “one half of Mankind” did not live to the age of sixteen, while
another quarter died before reaching thirty.9 Given these conditions, it might
seem less strange that Puritans saw death not as an aberration but as a conir-
mation – albeit an especially poignant one – of the normal scheme of things.
In their view, to “explain” death in physical terms was to ofer no explanation
at all; for that, one needed to turn to theology.
Puritans thus approached elegy as a situational reairmation of an entire
belief system. On the individual level, to die was to face life’s decisive question:
Am I saved? On the communal level, a believer’s death ofered an occasion
for celebrating society’s chief purpose: to nurture saved souls. Theology and
mission combined to make formal and thematic originality in elegy beside
the point; death’s disruption was to be countered with an insistent reasser-
tion of expected patterns of doctrine and experience. Because the religio-
aesthetic import of death was thought to be timeless and universal, Puritans
conventionalized their elegies to the point of essential sameness, subordinat-
ing the traditional qualities of good poetry – originality in thought and expres-
sion – to the goal of demonstrating and encouraging a godly response to loss.
Because this goal applied to everyone, the elegy shared a notion of audience
with the plain-style sermon, especially the funeral sermon; the prosody, imag-
ery, and themes of these poems bear out the Puritan view of elegy as an
insistently democratic genre. Although poems for teachers and clergy might
contain learned allusions appropriate to the deceased’s occupation, elegists
generally aimed to write as clearly and directly as possible for the widest con-
ceivable audience, including those who would experience the poem through

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oral recitation. By one estimate, only about half of adult males in seventeenth-
century New England were literate;10 although more recent studies have sug-
gested that this igure is too low,11 the “double Rhimes” that Franklin mocked
become more defensible in light of the oral dimension of literary experience
in Puritan culture.12
An elegiac stress on didacticism and accessibility did not hold up well under
subsequent artistic standards that privileged the formal beauty of texts at the
expense of their immediate cultural function. These standards remain pow-
erful: it is only fairly recently that critics have been able to approach elegy in
light of the cultural work that it performs – as a facilitator of actual grieving
within a particular historical moment. A functional approach to elegy thereby
replaces the ahistorical “reader” with the historically positioned “mourner”;
Peter Sacks, for example, has observed that because elegiac conventions reveal
“the actual project of mourning” in an anthropological and psychological
sense, elegies require attention “not so much to the igures of language as
to the workings of the mind that uses them.”13 G. W. Pigman takes a similar
approach to the Renaissance elegy “as part of the process of mourning rather
than the poetry of praise.”14 In his study of modern elegy, Jahan Ramazani
observes that “insofar as the elegy is a mimesis of mourning, psychoanaly-
sis ofers a more useful framework” than genre theory.15 And most recently,
Max Cavitch has underscored the cultural function of elegies by exploring
their role in shaping social identities and categories in eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century America.
Given the predictability of its forms and the conditions of its making, the
Puritan elegy is best approached neither as a universally applicable expression
of loss nor as an aesthetic document aspiring to transcend time, but as a ritual
script designed to orchestrate a particular process of mourning within a spe-
ciic culture. Such an approach acknowledges the livelier experiential dimen-
sion of Puritanism that has emerged over the last few decades.16 As David
D. Hall has observed, “Hostile to the magic of the Catholic system, these
people reinstated ritual practice at the heart of their religion.”17 Such reasser-
tion of ritual was especially evident in funerary rites; for all their debates sur-
rounding church polity, biblical interpretation, and the Sacraments, early New
Englanders were of a mind regarding the uses and practice of elegy. For them,
the value of elegiac poetry lay not in its formal beauty but in its capacity to
convey religious truth. This is, of course, to state the point in modern terms.
For the Puritan elegist, divine truth was artistic beauty; the spiritual message
of elegy was both stimulus and product of its aesthetic satisfactions.

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The Elegy in Early Modern England

It is in light of the ritual dimension of elegy – the notion that it can, in David
Shaw’s words, “comprise a kind of liturgy, releasing emotion even while con-
trolling it”18 – that the Puritan variant reveals its underlying nature and pur-
poses. At root, the ritual embedded in these poems relects the Puritan attri-
bution of timelessness not to art but to dogma; no elegy could be a genuine
monumentum aere perennius unless it reiterated divine truth. This view grew
out of debates in Reformed England over the role that artiice and ceremony
should play in commemorating the dead. Among the more radical dissenters,
elaborate funerary customs were distractions from the godly duty to mourn
properly. Objections among such dissenters to “Romish” funerals prompted
the Westminster Convention in 1645 to endorse what had become increasingly
popular practice: “Let the dead body, upon the day of Buriall, be decently
attended from the house to the place appointed for publique Buriall, and there
immediately interred, without any Ceremony.” The opposing view is summa-
rized in John Weever’s 1631 complaint that “wee, in these days, doe not weepe
and mourne at the departure of the dead, so much, nor so long, as in Christian
dutie we ought.”19 This debate intensiied with a rapid growth in the popular-
ity of elegies prompted by the rise of printing and literacy, humanistic individ-
ualism, and a national pride that encouraged poets to imitate the ancients by
commemorating Albion’s worthies. Laments for Sidney in 1586 and for Prince
Henry, son of James I, in 1612 solidiied the elegy as the most common type of
public verse in early modern England. A relaxation of traditional strictures on
grief and its expression during the later sixteenth century contributed to this
popularity,20 as did the role played by elaborate funerary rites in shoring up the
waning power of the aristocracy.21
Most elegists during this period took an approach to verbal mourning that
drew on Elizabethan patriotism and patronage and, later, Jacobean melan-
choly and popular devotional traditions. This type of poem, usually called the
“funeral” elegy to distinguish it from its pastoral cousin, was often incorpo-
rated into funerary rites, with the poem recited at the service and pinned to
the coin during the procession. Many Tudor and Elizabethan funeral elegies,
such as the popular poems of Thomas Churchyard and George Whetstone,
consisted of commemorations for nobility penned for general distribution.22
These poems ranged from what John Draper called “Cavalier panegyric”
to the more theologically oriented “Puritan lament,” the latter shaped by a
turn to piety and introspection inl uenced by Donne’s 1612 “Anniversaries”

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for Elizabeth Drury and by the outpouring of poems at the 1646 death of the
Protestant champion, the Earl of Essex. With the rise to wealth and patron-
age of a largely Puritan merchant class, Puritans took over the more explicitly
religious elegy, stylizing its forms, intensifying its millennial fervor during the
English Civil War, and using it as a vehicle for legitimizing Cromwell’s rule.
By midcentury, the funeral elegy was so closely associated with Puritans that
an anonymous writer equated “common formall Elegies” with the “Geneva
Jig.”23
The funeral elegy posed a sharp contrast to the classically based pastoral,
in which frank artiice enacted a retreat from the speciic occasion of death
and the mutability that it signaled into the ostensibly deathless sanctuary of
art. The highly artiicial and elaborate pastoral, decisively shaped by Spenser’s
lament for “Dido” in the “November” eclogue from The Shepheardes Calendar
(1579) and by his poem for Sidney, or “Astrophel” (1595), was relatively rare in
the nearly sixty years between the “November” eclogue and the climax of the
form in “Lycidas.” The subsequent canonical status of the pastoral was due, in
part, to its concern with poetic vocation, a theme that culminates in “Lycidas”:
Milton’s momentary questioning, in light of Edward King’s untimely death, of
his own dedication to the “thankless muse” leads to a recommitment embod-
ied in the poem itself – a recommitment always seen, of course, in light of
the subsequent achievement of Paradise Lost. “Lycidas” enacts an elaborately
staged threat to – and recovery of – the speaker’s poetic vocation, worked
out through the key elements of the pastoral: an idealized landscape, nostal-
gia for better times, an attempt to draw on the consoling power of nature, a
commingling of mourning with topical commentary, and a reassertion of
continuity and purpose in response to rupture and anxiety. The emotional dis-
tancing efected by these conventions not only emulated classical restraint but
enabled a shift from mourning to other tasks that could be performed through
mourning.
English Puritans who did not share Milton’s regard for the ancients or his
relatively more optimistic view of human nature adhered to the more direct
and “functional” sort of elegy. These poets either rejected the pastoral sur-
face altogether or bent it back to what they saw as its religious core, as Milton
himself briely did in St. Peter’s diatribe against the “Blind mouths” of cor-
rupt clergy. Consistent with corresponding trends in preaching, liturgy, and
church polity, this more severe elegiac model grounded itself more explicitly
in the immediate occasion; in contrast to commemorations for “Asphodel”
or “Lycidas,” funeral elegies gave the real names of the deceased and focused
squarely on the theological signiicance of the loss. Taking to heart Phoebus’s

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lesson in “Lycidas” to shift elegiac “fame” from the realm of poetry to the
realm of piety, funeral elegists rejected classical models in favor of the
Bible, homiletic traditions, and the popular iconology of death embodied in
funerary art, broadsides, and emblem books. Although a number of stock
images – weeping willows, ministerial shepherds, and churchgoing locks –
aforded brief glimpses of a quasi-pastoral landscape, these poems took their
ultimate precedent from the great biblical expressions of loss, especially
David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:19–27). Funeral elegists also
saw themselves as heeding St. Paul’s admonition to “rejoice with them that
do rejoice, and weep with them that weep,” taking care to “mind not high
things” and to “be not wise in your own conceits” (Romans 12:15–16). Unlike
the pastoral elegist, who was typically a university-trained man of letters
speaking as a professional “poet,” the funeral elegist emulated Pauline humil-
ity by presenting the poem as a frankly amateur performance that repudiated
the vocational concerns of the pastoral. Although Ben Jonson, that most
insistently “classical” of English poets, provided a striking example of elegiac
aestheticizing by calling his son his “best piece of poetrie,”24 most Puritans
would have seen Jonson’s trope as a tragically wrongheaded response to an
occasion so momentous as death.

The Elegy in Puritan New England

At irst, the more religiously explicit elegy assumed virtually identical form in
both Englands. Most of the signature traits of the New England elegy appear,
for example, in a poem written in 1636 by “I. L.” for Reverend John Rogers
of Dedham, Essex, whose grandson would become president of Harvard.
Celebrating the “happy change and blessed gain” of a generalized believer, the
poem ends with a call for survivors to repent in the face of a loss that signals
divine disfavor with “Our sleepy formall carelessnesse, / in hearing of God’s
word.”25 As the Rogers family illustrates, the English audience for such poems
coincided with dissenting emigrants to the New World; as a result, the plainer
style of elegy proliferated there, becoming increasingly codiied once the
Restoration forced a sharpening of New England’s cultural distinctiveness. At
the same time, funerary customs grew more elaborate as a means of reinforc-
ing a community with weakening ties to England.26 The New England elegy
also began to separate from its English counterparts by laying greater stress on
the commemoration of what William Scheick has called a “collective self ” that
enabled survivors to absorb the deceased’s piety.27 Once it achieved deinitive
form, the funeral elegy enjoyed remarkable stability in New England, resisting

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the shift toward neoclassicism and sentimentality that marked English elegies
soon after the Restoration until well into the eighteenth century.
Such conservatism relected the social realities of New England’s small
communities; Boston’s population at the turn of the eighteenth century was
only around 7,000.28 Puritan elegies were written for more intimate circles of
readers than those addressed by the more self-consciously “literary” poems
published in London and the university towns. As I have suggested, they
were also written for diferent kinds of readers. Unlike Milton, whose poem
appeared in a commemorative volume produced by and for Christian human-
ists intimately acquainted with classical discourse, New England’s elegists
eschewed literary conventions that might prove distracting to the uninitiated.
Their poems were not written to be “appreciated” as art in anything like a
modern sense, or even in the sense that Milton’s Cambridge readers would
have appreciated “Lycidas.” Rather, they were written to facilitate a process
of grieving that was thought to be as valid for the illiterate farmer as for the
university-trained minister.
In the Puritan view, conveying the religious signiicance of loss did not
require a poet’s skill so much as a prophet’s vision; indeed, the pious dead
presumably ofered more inspiration than even the most eloquent poet could
handle. As Urian Oakes declared in his famous elegy for Thomas Shepard, Jr.,
Poetick Raptures are of no esteem,
Daring Hyperboles have here no place,
Luxuriant wits on such a copious Theme,
Would shame themselves, and blush to shew their face.
Here’s worth enough to overmatch the skill
Of the most stately Poet Laureat’s Quill.29

So hyperbolic a rejection of hyperbole relected a determination to address

loss in the real world of small towns and congregations. While the imaginary
countryside of the pastoral elegy was antithetical to the actual social spaces –
the court, the city, the university – where it was most popular, the Puritan elegy
resisted any such delection from the local. This social grounding is relected
in how elegies were used; poems were recited within grieving families and
communities, meditated on in acts of private devotion, copied into diaries and
commonplace books, exchanged by ministers, and often published as broad-
sides. Even unpublished elegies circulated in manuscript far beyond the time
and place of their writing, thereby achieving a measure of permanence within
the collective memory. Taylor, for example, sent a poem on the deaths of his
two infant daughters to former college roommate Samuel Sewall, who gave

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a copy to Cotton Mather, who in turn reprinted two of its stanzas at the end
of a sermon on the proper handling of grief. And in an elegy for Urian Oakes,
Mather was able to cite seven elegists in a chain of serial commemoration that
reached back more than thirty years.30
As Mather’s commemorative chain suggests, elegists did not assert their
individual roles as poets so much as they inhabited the broader paradigm of
one pious soul commemorating another. The poem itself underwent a similar
delating of its status as a unique artifact by entering a larger body of oral and
written texts that remained in constant circulation. This nexus of mutually
reinforcing texts – other elegies, other kinds of didactic and devotional poetry,
sermons, journals, prose meditations, and such popular manuals as Edward
Pearse’s The Great Concern, or, A Serious Warning to a Timely and Thorough
Preparation for Death (Boston, 1705) and Cotton Mather’s Awakening Thoughts
on the Sleep of Death (Boston, 1712) – made a virtual industry of encouraging
an ongoing preparation for death. The essence of the Puritan ars moriendi lay
in Pearse’s claim that “The meditation of Death … greatly promotes our spir-
itual Life; therefore walk much among the Tombs, and converse much and
frequently with the Thoughts of a dying hour.”31

The Sin of Grief and the Exemplary Deceased

For all its self-proclaimed plainness, the Puritan elegy scripted an expe-
rientially elaborate process of mourning that worked to absorb the death
at hand – indeed, death’s very existence – into an underlying meditative
dynamic based on the conviction that although death relected the ongoing
legacy of the Fall, it also ofered a portal to eternal bliss. Because the death
to be truly feared was not the end of earthly life but eternal damnation,
Puritans reframed the great question of elegy – Why must we die? – in terms
set forth in Ezekiel: “Why will ye die?” (33:11). To this, Thomas Shepard, Sr.,
gave the standard answer: “The great cause why so many people die, and
perish everlastingly, is because they will; every man that perisheth is his own
butcherer or murderer.”32 The wages of sin encompassed not just death but
ordinary human responses to it. Because excessive grief signaled an over-
attachment to the fallen world and opposition to the divine will in taking the
deceased, Puritan elegies often convey ambivalence toward their reason for
having been written. Although it was perfectly natural to mourn a loss, the
problem lay in the fact that it was natural; everyone did it, whether saved or
damned, but only the true believer was capable of moving from natural grief
to renewed faith.

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The irst step in this process was to consider what, exactly, one was griev-
ing for. Samuel Willard of Boston’s Old South Church proclaimed that when
saints die, “there is no greater Argument to be found that we should excite
our selves to mourn by, then the remembrance that they were Saints.”33 The
proper object of commemoration was not the individual deceased so much
as the sanctity that he or she presumably possessed – the trait that made
the poem worth writing to begin with. As English dissenter William Ames
insisted, “inasmuch as faith is in each believer individually it is in the form
of those that are called.”34 The dead appear so much alike in Puritan elegies
because the goal was to make this “form” of faith as legible as possible. The
resulting emphasis was not on the particularity of the deceased but on the
gloriied identity that all saints were destined to attain. We see this emphasis
in Taylor’s commemoration of Dewey as a “noble Soul rein’d, all bright.”35 At
“the Resurrection of the Just,” Dewey’s puriied body would rise
out of the Dust,
Transcending brightest Gold, and shining Sun
In Glory clear; to which thy Soul shall run
And reunite, and perfectly repair
Thy Person spoild while ’ts parts asunder are.

By portraying the dead as distillations of piety, elegists pushed their readers

toward what English Puritan Richard Sibbes called “spiritual mourning”: sor-
row for one’s own sins. As Sibbes insisted, this was the only grief that did any
good: “Every mourner and weeper is not therein blessed, except his outward
losses, and crosses, and occasions, be an occasion through God’s blessing and
a means to bring him to spiritual sorrow and mourning.”36 Unlike natural
mourning, spiritual mourning was considered a “happy estate and condition”
because it increased the survivor’s likelihood for salvation. Puritans thus prac-
ticed with a vengeance the truism that funerary rites are not for the dead but
for the living. The belief in purgatory had been swept away by the earliest
Reformers, along with the attendant practice of praying for the dead, espe-
cially those who seemed saved.37 Why pray for someone who was now seated
in eternal bliss? As Willard proclaimed, when death, “which is in it self an evil
thing,” comes to “a Child of God,” faith transforms it into “a thing of very
great worth.”38 To mourn for those who have received their reward, Willard
insisted, is merely “superl uous.”39
If mourning the dead was superl uous, heeding their spiritual example was
not. “We should be so afected with the death of such,” Nathanael Appleton
urged, “as to be more careful than ever, to imitate all that we saw great & excellent

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in them.”40 Although the Puritan elegy might seem to have idealized the dead
beyond any hope of imitation, the task of assimilating them to the broad
patterns of sanctity resulted in abstract diction that made them seem more
imitable. Who would not wish to become a soul who was, as Oakes por-
trayed Thomas Shepard, Jr., “Lovely, Worthy, Peerless,” “Precious, Pleasant,”
“Learned, Prudent, Pious, Grave, and True,” and “a Faithful Friend?” (APS,
p. 213). So preserved, the pious dead were written into permanence as ongoing
spurs to the survivors’ spiritual health. Samuel Danforth II thus hoped that
Thomas Leonard’s “Posterity / May imitate his Virtues, and may say / His
GOD shall be our GOD” (APS, p. 490). To that end, it was
. . . proper that to mind we call
The Greatness of our Loss; the qualities
And Usefulness of our deceased Friend,
Whose Pilgrimage on Earth is at an end.
(APS, p. 488)

This search for “qualities” and “Usefulness” prompted elegists to assimilate the
dead to the “Pattern and Patron of Virtue” that John Norton found in Anne
Bradstreet (APS, p. 460). Mather similarly encouraged Oakes’s proper “Use”
by his survivors (CM, p. 53). And in a poem for President Charles Chauncy of
Harvard, Taylor extolled the deceased’s ongoing value as a paradigm of holi-
ness, “Dif using all by Pattern, Preaching clear Rich Pray’res, & such like thro’
his Practice heer.”41
Elegists undertaking to “dif use” this pious “Pattern” sought to provide
clear evidence that the dead, as Willard put it, had “lived and died Saints”:
“this onely will endure and be fresh and Flourishing, when Marble it self shall
be turned into common dust.”42 Perhaps surprisingly, the stress on lessons to
be derived from the saintly dead applied even to deeply personal losses. How,
Taylor asks in a poem for his irst wife, Elizabeth Fitch, will their children
and grandchildren know her “Vertuous shine” “unless I them deine?” (TMP,
p. 111). Benjamin Tompson similarly declares that he has written his elegy on
his sister-in-law Mary “for the imitation of the living.”43 Generalized depic-
tions of the dead were also common in English funeral elegies44 and in funeral
sermons on both sides of the Atlantic;45 such portraiture had ainities with
the Renaissance genre of the “character,”46 which exerted a major inl uence
on Puritan biography generally.47 New England’s elegists often went further,
however, by depicting the dead as no longer merely human – the precise result,
Puritans believed, of a saint’s gloriication. Mather proclaimed that even an
appropriation of the biblical ecce homo was insuicient to describe what Urian

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Oakes had become by dying: “see the Man / (Almost too small a word)!” (CM,
p. 59). While the primary model for saintly panegyric was David’s lament for
Saul and Jonathan, the desired outcome came from the resurrective tropes
of the New Testament, especially Jesus’s words on hearing of the death of
Lazarus: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be gloriied thereby” ( John 11:4). By depicting the death of a
saint as Christ saw Lazarus’s death, New England’s elegists tried to move their
readers from mourning a loss to anticipating a resurrection.

Reading the Dead as Ritual Repentance

The saintly paradigm was especially evidenced by a “good death,” also a
standard feature in English funeral elegies.48 The function of what Franklin’s
recipe listed as the deceased’s “last Words” was to conirm the dying saint’s
eager embrace of a self whose carnal element was already “dead.” Deathbed
speech was invested with quasi-prophetic status, as when Taylor recorded
Dewey’s dying response to the weather: “The Wind is high, quoth hee, /
But by to Morrow I’st above it be!”49 Taylor provided similar witness to the
“holy Counsill” and “Death Bed Charges” that emerged during Samuel
Hooker’s inal hours: Hooker, observing his numb hands and arms, pro-
claims that “They are Dead, you see, and I / Have done with them” (TMP,
p. 119). Such testimonies of deathbed stoicism brought particular consola-
tion in poems of personal loss. Cotton Mather took immense comfort from
his wife Abigail’s inal utterance: “I faint, till thy last words to mind I call; /
Rich Words! Heav’n, Heav’n will make amends for all” (CM, p. 44). John
Cotton attributed a similarly pious leave-taking to his daughter Sara: “Pray,
my Dear Father, Let me now go Home!” (APS, p. 382). In their recapitula-
tion of St. Paul’s assertion that “I have inished my course, I have kept the
faith” (2 Timothy 4:7), these deathbed utterances repeatedly conlated the
personal with the biblical. An anonymous poet conirmed the Pauline stance
in the venerable John Alden of Plymouth and Duxbury, who “with St. Paul,
his course now inished, / Unclothed, is quietly put to bed”: “His Family and
Christian friends he blest / Before he did betake himself to rest.”50 An espe-
cially striking example of the neobiblical death appears in Taylor’s elegy for
Zecharia Symmes, an “aged Nazarite” who utters the deathbed cry, “my
Head! me head!” (TMP, p. 22). Although Symmes’s words hardly constitute
a peaceful end, Taylor could not have missed their echo of the words spoken
by the Shunammite’s son, stricken in the ields and destined to be raised by
Elisha (2 Kings 4:19).

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Such blurring of current and biblical realities points to the ambiguous

relation between the “real” and the “ictive” in these poems, especially those
that attribute celestial speech to the deceased. John Wilson, for example, has
William Tompson announce a saint’s steadfastness from beyond the grave. “Do
not acount me lost,” the deceased proclaims: “in his righteousness i stood /
Before my father just” (HP, pp. 15, 17). Benjamin Tompson has Edmund Davie
assert the saint’s reward with typical directness: “I’m now arriv’d the soul
desired Port,” Davie claims: “I’ve hitt the very Place I wisht at heart, / I’m ixt
for ever: Never thence to part” (APS, p. 223). And Taylor’s Samuel Hooker uses
the joys of heaven as a goad for survivors to persevere: “In Faith, Obedience,
Patience, walk a while / And thou shalt soon leape o’re the parting Stile, / And
come to God, Christ, Angells, Saints, & Mee” (TMP, p. 122). Puritan readers
did not, of course, take such postmortem speeches as literal transcriptions –
but they would not have regarded them as mere “ictions,” either. As Astrid
Schmitt-von Mühlenfels has noted, words from the dead had supreme biblical
warrant;51 by ofering a more acceptable sacriice than Cain, Abel “obtained
witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he, being
dead, yet speaketh” (Hebrews 11:4). These speeches also reinforced a sense
of community that encompassed all saved souls, whether living or dead.
Survivors were made to feel that they were being coaxed to glory by an ever-
increasing company of saints with whom they once shared life’s trials.
Ultimately, the pious dead ofered more than advice from beyond the grave –
they ofered selves from beyond the grave, perfected versions of the redeemed
identity for which survivors also yearned. This identity embodied what Ames
called the “double form” of the true believer: “that of sin, and that of grace,
for perfect sanctiication is not found in this life.”52 By underscoring death’s
separation of the deceased’s spiritual and carnal elements, elegists encouraged
mourners to seek the saintly duality within themselves. Taylor thus proclaims
that Dewey, “dichotomiz’d / By death’s sharp Sword,” is “both parted, and
departed”; his soul and body now “standeth part from part” like “the Zenith
from the Nadir.”53 By attesting that Dewey’s natural self had been “rebellion’s
Kennel, Disobediences Chest,” Taylor directed the survivor’s grief toward an
anticipation of the larger healing of a self that had also been “spoild” and rent
“asunder” by sin. Although saving faith could not be mimicked, the desire to
attain it could thereby be encouraged through a kind of reverse mimicry, in
which the deceased’s spiritual battles were shown to have been similar to the
reader’s. Elegists frequently attested that despite the celestial glory of the dead,
the deceased had struggled, too; indeed, their struggle was inseparable from
their glory. By equating the survivor’s anxious present, however tentatively,

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with the deceased’s earthly past, the Puritan elegy presented the deceased’s
celestial present as a hopeful harbinger of the survivor’s future. Taylor thus
assured readers that Samuel Hooker, for all his glory, had been beset by spiri-
tual turmoil as diicult as theirs. The earthly Hooker’s inner life had been “A
Stage of War, Whereon the Spirits Sword / Hewd down the Hellish foes that
did disturb” (TMP, p. 117). Like the pastoral “Saint” who counsels “Soul” in
Taylor’s Gods Determinations, the deceased ofered supremely comforting tes-
timony; for all the doubts that plagued survivors, he or she was made to say,
“’Twas so with me.”54
By commemorating the dead as perfected versions of the saintly para-
digm, elegists exploited the widespread Puritan trope of the soul as a “text”
to be studied for signs of grace. The explicated dead served as guides for
survivors to read their own inner texts and gauge the degree to which they
also manifested the “character” of the saved soul.55 Because all such inner
texts were to be read against the Bible as the ultimate source and arbiter of
gracious experience, elegies routinely grounded the dead irmly within the
pages of scripture. A frequent starting point for decoding neobiblical piety
was the deceased’s name, which was often rearranged into an anagram that
revealed his or her redemptive essence. The anagram functioned within the
elegy much as a biblical text served as the stimulus for a sermon.56 Puritans
saw the ability to decipher such messages as a gift, like wit and eloquence gen-
erally, and exercised the facility in many situations, not all of them serious.57
When applied to elegy, however, such devices as anagrams, puns, acrostics,
and biblical parallels were more than merely ornamental; they helped clarify
the deceased’s salviic message. In addition to proclaiming Dewey “David by
Name, David by Nature,” Taylor thus cites the deceased’s “Dewy Tears” of
repentance on a particular fast day, the “Dewy Rhymes” with which he had
instructed his children, and the “Grace’s Dew” that had “drenched” the hearts
of the deceased and his wife.58
The decoded name was only a starting point for assimilating the deceased
to the all-encompassing text of scripture. Occupational references frequently
evoked biblical types, with the political leader lamented as a latter-day Moses
or Joshua; the housewife as a Tabitha or Dorcas, whom Peter raised from
the dead; and the minister as a prophet or an apostle, usually Elijah or Paul.
The framing of the deceased as a neobiblical text is often quite explicit; when
Benjamin Tompson commemorated his father as a thundering “Textman,”59
he spoke to the deceased’s essence not simply as an advocate for the Bible but
as its anthropomorphized embodiment. Francis Drake similarly proclaimed

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that Jonathan Mitchell’s heart contained “The Scripture with a Commentary

bound” (APS, p. 459). And in an unusually elaborate example of deceased-as-
text, Benjamin Woodbridge anatomized John Cotton as “A living breathing
Bible: Tables where / Both Covenants at large engraven were” (APS, p. 410).
Like scripture itself, the dead were to be explicated so that their redemptive
message could be opened and disseminated. As Benjamin Tompson wrote
of his sister-in-law Mary, “Let her example as a Coppy stand / To Childrens
Children upon every hand” (HP, p. 5). Elegies gave literal form to the status of
the dead as gracious “copies” to be circulated for the ongoing spiritual beneit
of the living.
The lessons of the textualized dead, like those of scripture, were not merely
private. The public dimension of the Puritan elegy emerges most clearly in
the repeated assertion that God was removing pious souls from the world
as punishment for the collective sins of survivors. Oakes proclaimed that
“Our sins have slain our Shepard! we have bought, / And dearly paid for, our
Enormities!” (APS, p. 219). At John Norton’s passing, John Wilson went so far
as to urge his readers to imitate the disciples’ response to Christ’s prediction
of betrayal at the Last Supper: to search “our wayes and spirits” and “say as
the Disciples did, / Lord, is it I? Is’t I?” (HP, p. 90). With the widely perceived
declension of the Puritan mission in the later seventeenth century, elegists
increasingly adopted a jeremiad tone as they lamented the rapidly dwindling
ranks of the godly. In a poem for John Allen, Taylor complained that the great
“Spirituall Gamesters” were slipping away in alarming numbers; after deliv-
ering a roll call of fallen worthies, Taylor asked, “Shall none / Be left behinde
to tell’s the Quondam Glory / Of this Plantation?” (TMP, p. 31). As with pri-
vate sin, however, elegy both lamented the crisis and performed the remedy;
Taylor’s ostensible pessimism was countered by the poem’s very existence.
Who is left to tell us New England’s “Quondam Glory”? The answer was
implicit in every Puritan elegy: “We” are – and we are telling that glory even
as we write and read. By diminishing the distance between private grief and
public reformation, elegies absorbed individual mourners into a godly com-
munity capable not only of producing souls worthy of heaven but of prop-
erly marking their translation there.60 Marking such translations boded well
for survivors who hoped someday to undergo the same change. In keeping
with St. Paul’s statement that “with the mouth confession is made unto sal-
vation” (Romans 10:10), the Puritan elegiac ritual led readers through a verbal
performance of mourning that opposed death’s sting with renewed hopes of
eternal bliss.

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The Legacy of the Puritan Funeral Elegy

Like all rituals, the process of mourning scripted by the Puritan elegy had
meaning only within a speciic cultural and historical context. It could not
survive the social, literary, and religious inl uences that began to ilter in from
post-Restoration England; by the turn of the eighteenth century, the rigid
directives of elegy were loosening in accordance with ideological shifts relec-
tive of an increasingly diverse society with multiple and often competing con-
cerns.61 One such shift was the growing prevalence of neoclassical aesthetic
standards that broadened the goals of elegy from purely homiletic aims to
a variety of concerns that echoed the wide-ranging relections in “Lycidas.”
Another shift was the rise of natural religion and, with it, a sharp decline in
biblical authority; nature, not scripture, was increasingly providing the chief
inspiration for poetry, including elegy – and it was no longer a nature con-
strued as fallen. With the rehabilitation of the natural realm as a source of
elegiac consolation came a moral rehabilitation of the reader; Deism and
Romanticism both worked, although in diferent ways, to render obsolete
the Puritan insistence on repentance as the only appropriate response to the
occasion of death. Elegy, at least in its “literary” variety, no longer worked to
reairm dogma but instead sought to absorb loss into universal cycles that
consoled without resorting to explicitly Christian beliefs and discourse. The
elegiac consolations of nature came with a twist. What had served for Milton
chiely as a source of tropes was embraced, by the early nineteenth century,
as quasi-scientiic reality; with the full lowering of the Romantic absorption
of the dead into Wordsworth’s “diurnal course” came a more literal construal
of death as a reintegration into natural cycles. The imagined landscape of the
pastoral was thus generally eschewed for a natural landscape that was con-
ceived – and depicted – as “real.”
A clear legacy of the Puritan elegy can be seen in the fact that the social
landscape of elegy remained real as well. Mourning continued to provide a
prime opportunity for addressing societal concerns, although the range of
these concerns broadened far beyond spiritual reformation. The social and
political relevance of elegies was due, in part, to their regular appearance in
the burgeoning colonial press. At the beginning of the eighteenth century,
there was only one newspaper in the colonies; at the time of the Revolution,
there were around forty. That popular elegies became a staple of these publica-
tions helped elegy remain the primary species of occasional verse in America
well into the nineteenth century. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain mocked the more
lugubrious of these poems through the mechanical “tributes” of Emmeline

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Grangerford, who produced them obsessively until she inally succumbed to

an inability to rhyme the name Whistler. Like Franklin before him, however,
Twain overlooked the cultural work that popular elegies continued to per-
form. Despite their prosodic stifness and verbal conventionality, the thou-
sands of elegies written and read in post-Puritan America by all classes, includ-
ing the marginalized, ofered a forum for critiquing and reasserting political
and social categories. The result was a collective conversation in which recur-
ring occasions of loss generated ongoing reconstructions of American futu-
rity. As Max Cavitch has shown, the many laments for George Washington as
a “national father” exempliied an elegiac mode in which “communal expres-
sion” was “itself a kind of civic action” (AE, pp. 87, 92). Elegies and elegiac
relections that lamented the passing of a pristine American landscape, such
as Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” also played a role in assimilating the displacement
of the Indians to “nature’s plan” by articulating what Cavitch calls “imperialist
nostalgia”; as Cavitch points out, African American elegies did important cul-
tural work as well, lamenting an absence of lineage and thereby performing
“threatened continuity as a form of identity” (AE, pp. 131–32, 185).
With social and political themes pervading the full range of elegiac verse, the
chief distinction in American elegy became – and largely remains – between
poems designed for popular audiences and those written for a more tradi-
tionally “literary” readership. Whitman’s twin laments for Lincoln exemplify
this distinction. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” gives full voice
to a pastoral tradition iltered through Romantic sensibilities. By attesting to
“Lilac and bird and star twined with the chant of my soul,” Whitman absorbs
Lincoln’s death into a natural cycle that does not ofer immediate consolation
so much as it creates a chastened sense of community with all living – and thus
dying – things: “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
“Lilacs” employs the open prosody characteristic of most of the poems in
Leaves of Grass; its unrhymed lines, deined by breath length, approximate the
cadences of natural, though elevated, speech. When Whitman addressed the
same topic for a popular audience, however, he followed the Puritan model
by turning to ballad meter and a regular rhyme scheme. Published in the
New York Saturday Press seven months after the assassination, “O Captain!
My Captain!” features the accessible allegory of a ship of state and the heavy
irony of a captain “Fallen cold and dead,” even though “the prize we sought
is won” and the “voyage [is] closed and done.” “Lilacs” is clearly one of the
great poems in English, but to assert, by contrast, that “O Captain!” is a bad
poem is to overlook the fact that the latter is a very diferent kind of elegy,
written for diferent aims and readers. I have been suggesting that a similar

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recognition of cultural function and rhetorical purpose applies to the Puritan

elegy. Whitman’s artistic choices in “O Captain!” recall Taylor’s in his elegy for
David Dewey; in each instance, a gifted poet writes in a conventional manner
for nonelite readers. What’s more, both poets succeeded in the attempt; while
the Dewey elegy was Taylor’s only published poem, “O Captain!” was repeat-
edly anthologized during the poet’s lifetime.
The prosody of “O Captain!,” an acoustic echo of the Puritan elegy, survives
in the stock commemorative verses – usually couplets or quatrains – that still
appear among the death notices in today’s newspapers; many of these verses
also follow the Puritan lead by asserting the traditional consolations of religion.
A far more signiicant survival, however, lies in the continuing elegiac impulse
toward communal self-examination and commentary. In the popular realm,
this impulse has generally been transferred from elegiac poetry to obituary
prose, in which the death of a famous person still prompts a dual recognition
of rupture and continuity. When obituaries proclaim that a prominent death
relects the “end of an era,” as they often do, the implication is that a new era
has begun. As we have seen, the motif of succession suggested by such asser-
tions of continuity was exploited by pastoral and Puritan elegist alike; while
Milton voiced his determination to rededicate himself to the muse and carry
on for the fallen Lycidas, his New England contemporaries voiced a belief that
whoever commemorated the pious dead properly was likely to inherit their
piety. Of course, these early modern elegists were hardly alone in their concern
with lineage and inheritance; this has been – and will probably remain – a uni-
versal trait of elegy. After all, the oldest elegy that we have, David’s lament for
the “mighty” Saul, was sung by Saul’s successor as king of Israel.

Notes
1. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of
America, 1987), pp. 19, 21.
2. Franklin, Writings, pp. 21–22.
3. William Empson, Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949),
pp. 58–59.
4. Edward Taylor, “Edward Taylor’s Elegy on Deacon David Dewey,” Proceedings
of the American Antiquarian Society 96:1 (1986), pp. 82–83.
5. O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance
Literary Theory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp.
107–08.
6. Hyatt Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Boston:
Houghton Mil in, 1968), p. 13.

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7. Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1950), p. 113.
8. Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and in Life
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977), p. 16.
9. Franklin, Writings, p. 228.
10. Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social
Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974),
p. 13.
11. David Cressy, “Literacy in Seventeenth-Century New England: More
Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), pp. 141–50; David D.
Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in William L. Joyce
et al. (eds.), Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass.: American
Antiquarian Society, 1983).
12. Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1606–1783 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 131; David D. Hall, “Readers and Reading
in America: Historical and Critical Perspectives,” Proceedings of the American
Antiquarian Society 103:2 (1994), p. 348; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice
of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 157–61.
13. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 22.
14. G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p. 46.
15. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 28.
16. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual
Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); David Leverenz, The
Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social
History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980); Hambrick-
Stowe, Practice of Piety; Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The
Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983); Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious
Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Gatta, Gracious
Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1989); Jefrey A. Hammond, Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan
Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
17. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in
Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 167.
18. David W. Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 229.
19. David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and
Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 101, 105.

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20. Pigman, Grief, pp. 3, 126.

21. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965),
pp. 572–81.
22. Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 17–26.
23. John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New
York: New York University Press, 1929), p. 57, ix.
24. Ben Jonson, The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 20.
25. John W. Draper (ed.), A Century of Broadside Elegies (London: Ingpen and
Grant, 1928), p. 21.
26. Stannard, Puritan Way, 122–26; Ronald A. Bosco, “Introduction,” in Ronald A.
Bosco (ed.), New England Funeral Sermons (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles
and Reprints, 1978), pp. xii–xiii.
27. William J. Scheick, “Tombless Virtue and Hidden Text: New England Funeral
Elegies,” in Peter White (ed.), Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century
American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1985), pp. 290–96.
28. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in
America, 1625–1742 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 143.
29. Harrison T. Meserole (ed.), American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1968;
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), p. 210 (hereafter
cited in notes and in text as APS).
30. Cotton Mather, Cotton Mather’s Verse in English, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1989), p. 51 (hereafter cited in notes and text
as CM).
31. Edward Pearse, The Great Concern, or, A Serious Warning to a Timely and
Thorough Preparation for Death (Boston: 1705), p. 65.
32. Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert, in John A. Albro (ed.), The Works of
Thomas Shepard, 3 vols. (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853),
p. 68.
33. Samuel Willard, The High Esteem Which God Hath for the Death of His Saints
(Boston: 1683), in Bosco (ed.), New England Funeral Sermons, p. 16.
34. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John D. Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim
Press, 1968), p. 176.
35. Taylor, “Edward Taylor’s Elegy,” p. 83.
36. Richard Sibbes, Spiritual Mourning, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), Works of
Richard Sibbes, 7 vols. (1862; Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983),
p. 268.
37. Stannard, Puritan Way, p. 99.
38. Willard, High Esteem, p. 5.
39. Willard, High Esteem, p. 17.

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40. Nathanael Appleton, A Great Man Fallen in Israel, in Bosco (ed.), New England
Funeral Sermons, p. 202.
41. Edward Taylor, Edward Taylor’s Minor Poetry, ed. Thomas M. Davis and
Virginia L. Davis (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 33 (hereafter cited in notes and
text as TMP).
42. Willard, High Esteem, p. 18.
43. Kenneth B. Murdock (ed.), Handkerchiefs from Paul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1927), p. 3 (hereafter cited in notes and text as HP).
44. A. L. Bennett, “The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance
Personal Elegy,” Studies in Philology 51 (1954), pp. 110–14.
45. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century
Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 174–215,
xxvi–xxviii.
46. Robert Henson, “Form and Content of the Puritan Funeral Elegy,” American
Literature 32 (1960), p. 15.
47. Josephine K. Piercy, Studies in Literary Types in Seventeenth Century America
(1607–1710) (1939; Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969), pp. 68–75.
48. Bennett, “Principal Rhetorical Conventions,” p. 117.
49. Taylor, “Edward Taylor’s Elegy,” p. 83.
50. Ola E. Winslow (ed.), American Broadside Verse (1930; New York: AMS Press,
1974), p. 13.
51. Astrid Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Die “Funeral Elegy” Neuenglands: Ein gattungs-
geschichtliche Studie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1973), p. 98.
52. Ames, Marrow of Theology, p. 170.
53. Taylor, “Edward Taylor’s Elegy,” p. 83.
54. Edward Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 436.
55. Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, pp. 157–61; John Owen King III, The Iron
of Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion from the Puritan Conscience to
Victorian Neurosis (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp.
13–82; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative; Scheick, “Tombless Virtue”;
Hall, Worlds of Wonder, pp. 21–70; Hammond, Sinful Self, pp. 3–36; Jefrey
A. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 42–68.
56. Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Die “Funeral Elegy,” p. 54.
57. Jefrey Walker, “Anagrams and Acrostics: Puritan Poetic Wit,” in White (ed.),
Puritan Poets and Poetics.
58. Taylor, “Edward Taylor’s Elegy,” p. 82.
59. Kenneth Silverman (ed.), Colonial American Poetry (New York: Hafner, 1968),
p. 145.
60. Henson, “Form and Content”; Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Die “Funeral Elegy,”
pp. 24–31; Silverman, Colonial American Poetry, pp. 121–32; Hammond, American

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 Je f f r ey A. Ha mmon d

Puritan Elegy, pp. 156–59, 187–89; Emory Elliot, “The Development of the
Puritan Funeral Sermon and Elegy: 1660–1750,” Early American Literature 15
(1980), pp. 151–64.
61. For later developments in American elegy, see Silverman, Colonial American
Poetry, pp. 202–29; Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Die “Funeral Elegy,” pp. 125–38;
Stannard, Puritan Way, pp. 147–63; Elliot, “Development of the Puritan Funeral
Sermon and Elegy”; Hammond, American Puritan Elegy, pp. 205–10; Max
Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) (hereafter cited in text
as AE).

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 Chapter 5
The Emergence of a Southern Tradition
Ji m E ga n

People from a range of social positions wrote poetry in colonial Georgia,

Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Indentured servants, college presidents,
lawyers, tobacco merchants, schoolmasters, actors, doctors, and clergymen
all tried their hand at verse. Poems appeared in a variety of diferent formats,
including newspapers and books, but were also scribbled in diaries and letters
and tacked up on fences. They were circulated to friends and, less often, ene-
mies. Poems were incorporated into works of prose, prefaced plays, and were
used to promote colonization and inl uence political decisions. Although the
variety of writers is remarkable, so, too, are the absences. Due to power-
ful social forces that limited their educational opportunities and frowned on
women establishing public personas, few women from these colonies pub-
lished their poems during this period. Even fewer people of African descent
appeared in print, although people with such lineage certainly expressed
themselves in various poetic forms. Few Native Americans, either, published
poetry from this region in this period, even though poetry was a rich part of
many of their oral traditions. All those who did leave a legacy of poetry for us
to read share a common bond. They were not southerners.
Because the South did not exist before the American Revolution, no British
colonist in the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, or Georgia wrote southern
poetry. The inhabitants of the colonies that would later make up the American
South did not even consider themselves Americans until only a few years before
the Revolution. They were just as British as anyone who lived in England, and
they explicitly and passionately rejected being labeled as “Americans” when-
ever Londoners so much as hinted at it. The inhabitants of Britain’s staples
colonies did not feel they had given up their claim to their British identities.
Instead, they cast themselves as simultaneously British and not entirely like
people who lived in Britain. Living in the colonies gave the colonists, they
insisted, a perspective on the world that people in Britain lacked, but residing
in the wilds of America in no way compromised their status as members of

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what they saw as a worldwide community of British people. Before a distinc-

tive brand of poetry from the American South could emerge, then, the South
itself had to be born, and its writers had to adopt new ways of imaging their
own identities so that they would embrace their status as poets writing for a
national tradition that had to be built from the ground up.
Britain’s colonies south of the Mason-Dixon line did share a common iden-
tity as staples colonies, as colonies, in other words, that produced valuable
raw goods to be shipped back to England to be transformed into commodities
that then could be sold at home and, under the right economic circumstances,
around the world. The colonists’ focus on commerce haunted them through-
out the period, for the arbiters of taste in England wondered how poetry of
distinction and reinement could emerge from a place so devoted to making
money and a people who left, or whose ancestors left, the civilized conines
of England to live in the savage climes next to or even amid so-called savage
peoples. Great poetry, at least according to some, did not grow in a culture
whose soil was fertilized by commercial activities.
Colonial poets from below the Mason-Dixon line ofered no apologies for
the commercial nature of their communities. They never wavered in their
belief that, as Charles Hansford puts it in “My Country’s Worth,” “the greatest
kindness to a country paid / Is to endeavor to increase its trade.”1 Instead, they
challenged the theories of identity formation, of how individuals and commu-
nities develop their distinctive characteristics and abilities, used by English arbi-
ters of taste to deny even the possibility that colonists in British America could
produce poetry worth reading. In poem after poem, their verse put America’s
vast commercial potential on display, comparing it time and again with the
most desired of goods from the most desired of regions, the East, to elevate
America by connecting it with both great wealth and ancient civilizations with
distinguished traditions of cultural production. When Richard Lewis com-
pares the goods extracted from America by British labor to “India curtains”
(APSE, p. 382), when James Kirkpatrick calls Georgia “India,”2 or when James
Sterling speaks of the virtues of “joining the Atlantic and Tartarian Wave”
(APSE, p. 405), they are all trying to elevate American commerce and the cul-
ture that supports it by references to the place Europeans were looking for
when they stumbled across America instead.
Given the inevitably social nature of commerce, the ixation on sociality
we ind in poetry in the staples colonies should hardly be surprising. Poets
wrote about social relations between the sexes, but they also wrote about the
trials and tribulations of forming social bonds between men and the manners
appropriate to forming productive social bonds within a community. With

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some notable exceptions, only rarely does one ind poetry from the staples
colonies plumbing the depths of the psyche or trying to ascertain the speak-
er’s ultimate fate in the afterlife. Poets in the staples colonies preferred to use
poetry to understand interactions between people rather than to show them
in solitary revelry. As such, their form of choice is social satire, a form that
dominates the poems of the period. Hudibrastic poetry was extremely pop-
ular, but the colonists’ desire to engage with poetic models popular among
British poets of the period led them to adapt neoclassical satiric models to
the colonial environment. Horace was often imitated or paraphrased (some-
times both in the same poem), georgics and Virgilian eclogues found much
favor, and some meditative poems were published as well. The poets from the
staples colonies wrote far fewer poems on religious topics than did their fellow
poets in New England, and they relied even more heavily on Alexander Pope
as a model for poetic form and subject.
From the very earliest years of colonization, promotional material rou-
tinely pitched colonization through poetry. The authors of prose tracts
encouraging people in England to support eforts to plant English commu-
nities on American soil often burst into verse. As a result, poetry was inextri-
cably linked with colonization and was a crucial ingredient in helping readers
and promoters alike imagine a world in which all the activities associated with
colonization – including, but not limited to, sending people across an ocean,
spending huge sums of money on supplies and materials, and displacing entire
communities by any means necessary – not only made sense but also, and
perhaps more importantly, seemed necessary for the health of any impor-
tant nation. Poetry having little explicitly to do with colonization emerged in
these promotional tracts as well, and one need look no further than the most
proliic promoter of English colonization of America, John Smith. Smith’s
most famous poem, “The Sea Marke,” touches on a subject rarely covered in
seventeenth-century southern verse: the spiritual life of the individual (APSE,
p. 7). The poem appears in Smith’s Advertisements for the Experienced Planters
of New-England, a prose work devoted exclusively to Smith’s views of English
colonization up and down America’s North Atlantic coast. In the poem, the
warnings ofered by a dead sailor’s wrecked ship about the dangers of a partic-
ular area serve as a metaphor for the deadly fate awaiting all of us.
Ballads, one of the most popular poetic forms in early seventeenth-cen-
tury England, served the purposes of colonial propagandists particularly
well. Little is known of Richard Rich, the man listed as the author of one
of the earliest ballads to promote Virginia, “Newes from Virginia” (1610).
Rich turns tragedy into opportunity when he tells the story of a voyage of

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colonial reinforcements on their way to Virginia who were shipwrecked on

Bermuda. Not only did the potential colonists survive their ordeal, but, in fact,
they managed to reproduce on the island (he tells us that two children were
born while they repaired their vessel), so when they do, eventually, make it to
Virginia, they help bring new life to the inhabitants. Life in Virginia is depicted
as one of abundance and possibility, where workers and food are plentiful, and
where even members of the nobility have settled. In fact, the colony looks, in
social structure and otherwise, like a kind of mini-England. The poem further
shows that the colonial venture mixes the goal of expanding England’s reach
with that of glorifying God by following the claim that “Wee hope to plant a
nation where none before hath stood” with the line, “To gloriie the lord tis
done, and to no other end.”3
The irst wave of colonists produced little poetry, especially in comparison
with the British colonists to the north. Poetry began on a high note in the sta-
ples colonies, though. The irst major poetic production in the region, George
Sandys’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, achieved greater stature within
English poetic circles than any other work of poetry produced in the British-
American colonies, even if its American origins were seldom mentioned.
Born into an aristocratic family in England, Sandys came to Virginia in 1621
after his niece’s husband was appointed Virginia’s governor. His work as the
Virginia Company’s treasurer left him enough time to continue his translation
of Ovid, begun while still in England and irst published in London in 1626.
Sandys makes the connection between his translation and his life in America
in a dedicatory letter to King Charles, in which he says that although the trans-
lation “Sprung from the Stocke of the ancient Romanes,” it was nonetheless
“bred in the New-World, partaking of the rudenesse whereof it cannot but
participate; especially having Warres and Tumults to bring it to light in stead
of the Muses.”4 Indeed, the “Warres and Tumults” mentioned seem to have
had a profound inl uence on the decisions he made as translator, shaping his
portrait of the people represented in Ovid’s work in such a way that he com-
pares Native Americans to Romans (OM, p. 3).
Whether or not they were translating Latin poetry, few nobles of Sandys’s
stature chose to leave their lives in England behind to set out on the tough
life to be found for English people in America. Far more common were those
less fortunate, as James Revel’s poem on the life of an indentured servant,
“The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen
Years Transportation, at Virginia, in America,” illustrates (APSE, pp. 156–63).
We know nothing of the author except what he tells us in his verse, and we
are not even sure whether the author and his narrator are ictional creations

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of some unknown writer or composites of life in the colonies for indentured

servants. The poem’s story is suiciently generic that only minor changes are
necessary in an 1823 version, “The Life of James Revel,” which transports the
narrator to Botany Bay. The Virginia version of the ballad tells the story of a
young man with loving parents and a good upbringing who falls victim to the
lures of a life of crime, a mistake that leads to his arrest and transportation to
the colonies, a popular punishment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England. Life as a laborer in the colonies helps Revel see the error of his ways,
and when he is reunited with his parents in the ballad’s inal lines, we see that
labor by wayward English subjects in America rejuvenates English families
while simultaneously teaching proper work habits to those at the bottom of
the social ladder. The poem provides a clear if highly compressed picture of
indentured servants, who made up a signiicant portion of the population of
the staples colonies, and it ofers intriguing scenes of those servants working
the ields alongside slaves brought from Africa.
The poems in George Alsop’s A Character of the Province of Mary-land are
also written from the perspective of an indentured servant, but Alsop displays
a wit, poetic skill, and depth of emotion one inds in no other seventeenth-
century verse from England’s staples colonies. We have only a few tantalizing
details about his life. Birth records suggest a London arrival in 1636, but noth-
ing has been found to tell us when he died. The evidence indicates he was an
indentured servant in Maryland for four years, beginning in 1658, and that he
lived in the colony for two more years. Sometime after his return to England
he became an Anglican minister, but the trail goes cold at that point. The only
verse of his we have is from A Character, but this poetry is so distinctive that it
has remained alive. For the most part, the poems are extensions of the work’s
eforts at promoting colonial Maryland. They appear as part of the volume’s
introductory materials, at the ends of chapters, and in the book’s appendix, a
collection of letters Alsop sent home.
Alsop’s best-known poem remains “Traique is Earth’s great Atlas” (APSE,
p. 146). The ten lines of rhymed couplets extol the value of commerce for the
health of both the nation and its individual members in clear, evocative lan-
guage while it advocates for a change in England’s mercantilist economic pol-
icy to permit Maryland to exchange goods directly with merchants in nations
other than England. “Heaven’s bright Lamp, shine forth some of thy Light,”
included in one of Alsop’s letters, expresses its support for monarchical rule by
ridiculing the victors in the English Civil War (APSE, pp. 146–47). Alsop’s dis-
dain for his country’s new Puritan leadership runs so deep that he casts England
as a modern-day Sodom, where commoners have replaced true nobility in

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places of distinction. From the speaker’s position in the New World, England,
rather than America, looks like a savage and uncivilized world. In the process,
Alsop provides a rare glimpse into the l ip side of what would later be called
the American dream when he writes, “Persons of Honour, which did before
inherit / Their glorious Titles from deserved merit.” Alsop makes similar use
of the New World in the volume’s most challenging and interesting poem,
“The Author to His Book” (APSE, pp. 144–45). In witty and sometimes bawdy
language, the speaker twists some standard igures of speech, such as the ig-
ure of the poem as the author’s child, to criticize the idea that life in America
literally transforms English people’s bodies and minds so fundamentally that
they can no longer claim to be English. In the process, the poem suggests a
more lexible model of English identity.
The same concern for commerce displayed in Alsop inds poetic expression
in The Sot-Weed Factor (London, 1708), by Ebenezer Cooke (sometimes Cook),
one of the most powerful verse satires in American writing before 1820 (APSE,
pp. 239–58). Although more is known of his life than of Alsop’s, Cooke remains
something of a mystery nonetheless. Probably born in England in around
1667, he moved back and forth between the New World and the Old World
before settling permanently in Maryland sometime in the 1710s; there he lived
until his death, sometime after 1732. The Sot-Weed Factor achieves its efects by
playfully and bitingly employing some rather well-known satiric conventions
to new ends. The poem follows the merchant on his trip through the rough-
and-tumble world of colonial Maryland, where the colonists have adapted so
well to the local environment that, to the narrator at least, they seem more
Indian than English. The judges are illiterate, the colonists drink more often
than work, and their food is inedible by those with reined tastes. While the
colonists are mocked for being not English enough, the narrator is lampooned
for being too English, in that he demonstrates a palate so delicate that a drink
of local water renders him immobile for six months. In the end, the poem ima-
gines English identity in terms of exchange and transformation rather than in
terms of an unchanging purity of bloodlines.
Cooke went on to publish a number of other poems, although none are as
good as his irst, and all his subsequent publications were in Maryland. In addi-
tion to several occasional poems, Cooke published two more long poems, The
Sot-Weed Redivivus in 1730 and The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion
in 1731.5 A so-called third edition of the original The Sot-Weed Factor appeared
in 1731 as well, with only minor changes. Redivivus is a 540-line poem divided
into three cantos, all in the Hudibrastic style. While the irst The Sot-Weed
Factor moves the reader along with one preposterous twist after another in an

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already ridiculous plot, Redivivus uses a contemporaneous controversy – the

debate over the use of tobacco as a form of paper money – to hook its audi-
ence. As such, the poem is diicult for modern readers, but those able to make
it through see that Cooke investigates the nature of language and collective
identity in ways that extend and complicate the issues that the poet took up in
The Sot-Weed Factor of 1708. The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion is
also diicult because of its reliance on local details unknown to later readers,
but it, too, rewards careful readers by using those details to ponder the more
philosophical questions regarding leadership that grew out of this speciically
colonial uprising.
Bacon’s Rebellion inspired two other poems of note from the period. John
Cotton of Queen’s Creek has been identiied by Jay B. Hubbell as the author
of both of these works – found among a collection of manuscripts discov-
ered in the nineteenth century – which present Bacon and the rebellion from
diametrically opposed positions. “Bacon’s Epitaph” casts Bacon as a modern
Alexander by describing him as having “Marrs and Minerva both in him,” a
standard trope for the Greek hero, who ights for the liberty of the people.6 In
sharp contrast, “Upon the Death of G.B.” charges Bacon with the misuse of
his silver tongue to lead people to their deaths in the service of treason against
their true protector, the king of England. Scholars have advanced various the-
ories to explain why Cotton would lionize in one poem the same igure he
lambasts in another. Some analysts contend that Cotton’s two poems illus-
trate that he sought to rise above the fray, others argue that the poems might
have been used to make the poet appealing to both sides, while still others see
the poems as rhetorical exercises of the kind that were quite common in the
period. Given the relative lack of information about Cotton and the context in
which the poems were produced, we may never have a satisfactory answer.
If the staples colonies produced relatively little poetry in the seventeenth
century, the eighteenth century witnessed a comparative explosion. Poetry
was everywhere, issuing from the presses that sprang up across the region
in the early eighteenth century, circulating in manuscript among members
of the social clubs that came alive in the period, and appearing on the front
pages of newspapers alongside foreign news and advertisements for runaway
slaves. Any person in the staples colonies at this time who sought to better
him- or herself simply could not avoid poetry, for the taste and reinement
necessary to write and appreciate ine poetry became a sign of one’s status as
a civilized person. And the production of poetry by the inhabitants of the col-
onies showed the world, and themselves, that the colonists were as civilized
as those in England who made them the butt of their jokes. Writers in the

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staples colonies were especially consumed with belles lettres, with the use of
writing to promote sociability and conversation and pleasure, and, even more
so, they were quite keen on demonstrating their regard for the very qualities
belles lettres promoted. In this sense, much of the poetry in the staples colo-
nies represents a kind of performance on paper, a performance in which the
writer shows him- or herself, and the society of which he or she is a part, to be
worthy of inclusion in the civilized societies of Europe, the very societies, of
course, that gave value to belles lettres in the irst place.
The arrival of printing presses with the inancial backing to withstand
the inevitable if unpredictable lean times that periodically beset the colo-
nies helped accelerate the production of poetry. Maryland saw its irst stable
press in 1726 (the colony had an earlier press in the seventeenth century,
one that featured a woman at the helm and is certainly worthy of further
study, but it didn’t last and issued nothing of relevance to the history of
poetry in the region), followed by one in Virginia in 1730 and South Carolina
in 1731. One man, William Parks, deserves credit for establishing the irst
presses in both Maryland and Virginia, and for overseeing the publication
of a vast body of poetry in both these colonies. His importance to the his-
tory of poetic production in the staples colonies cannot be overestimated.
Richard Lewis’s 1728 poem The Mouse Trap earns the distinction of being,
in the words of J. A. Leo Lemay, “the irst belletristic book published in the
South,” while William Dawson’s Poems on Several Occasions by a Gentleman
of Virginia in 1736 was the irst volume of poetry published in Virginia.7
Poets even wrote poems extolling the virtues of the press for the cultural
advancement of the colonies. John Markland’s “Typographia: An Ode, on
Printing” (Williamsburg, 1730), for instance, sees the press as a way of allow-
ing the colonists to “pursue” the same “Vertues” as their “Fathers” when
it helps them “detect” and “correct” their “Errors” as well as better “dis-
cern” “Truths” from “Falshood[s].”8 James Sterling singles out for praise the
moral good print does in his revision of a poem he had published in Britain,
“On the Invention of Letters” (American Magazine, March 1758), a history
in verse, accompanied by copious notes, of print from ancient to modern
times. The poem is especially noteworthy for its self-conscious American
perspective on these matters, announced in the opening lines when Sterling
notes that he writes from “regions distant from maternal climes,” thereby
insisting that geographic space distinguishes his work from other poems on
the subject.9 Joseph Dumbleton calls “The Printer . . . the Poet’s Friend” in
“The Paper Mill” (1744), a poem on a new paper mill established by Parks to
supply his press.10

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The books of poetry issued from these presses may have been loss leaders in
comparison to the other, more proitable, materials coming of the press, but
they signaled the colonists’ sophistication and reinement even if they failed
to recoup as much of their investment as did other works. The real poetic
bonanza is to be found in the newspapers that emerged from these presses,
beginning with Parks’s Maryland Gazette in 1727. Begun in 1732, the South
Carolina Gazette published perhaps the most poetry, and perhaps the most
distinguished and accomplished poetry, of any of the periodicals issued in the
staples colonies, including works by Richard Lewis, James Kirkpatrick, and
James Sterling. Local periodicals were not simply outlets for regional poets.
Far from it. They published writers from the other colonies as well as works
of local color, and they frequently included works by British authors. Much
publication was anonymous, thus complicating our ability to identify poems
of American origins. The periodicals’ inclusion of poetry by colonial authors
marks the beginning of a poetic tradition in which the colonists themselves
composed at least part, if not always all, of the imagined audience. Authors in
the staples colonies were beginning to think of themselves as simultaneously
British and not entirely British, simply by virtue of where they lived.
Much of the poetry published in the major periodicals of the region deals
with the relations between the sexes: many poems concern courtship or take
up the problems faced by lovers, spurned and otherwise. In many of these
poems, women take the brunt of the criticism, although sometimes, it would
seem, female authors are able to explore the foibles of men as well. An early
instance of women participating in public discourse about relations between
the sexes appears in issues from the South Carolina Gazette of 1732, in which a
dialogue in verse erupts between several male and female poets. “Secretus”
ofers his praise for an “American pastoral nymph,” which prompts “Belinda”
to reply, which, in turn, produces a poem from “Dorinda.”11 Poetry on court-
ship allowed women a small window of opportunity, at least on occasion,
to publicize their views on what constituted value in male partners, as hap-
pened, for instance, in the poetry columns of Purdie and Dixon, published
in the Virginia Gazette of 1768–1769. Of the poetry published that appears to
have been written by women, one in particular stands out: “Carolina, a Young
Lady,” published in the August 3, 1747, South Carolina Gazette by a still uniden-
tiied, although probably female, author. With considerable wit, the speaker
exposes the absurdity of her father’s rules – once such rules are thoughtfully
examined – regarding male visitors, and, in the process, makes a case for greater
autonomy for women while subtly casting such autonomy as a political issue
whose implications extend beyond mere household, domestic relations.

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Religious poetry appeared in the periodicals, too, as well as in books

of poems, although far less often than in New England. Samuel Davies’s
Miscellaneous Poems, Chiely on Divine Subjects, for instance, came of the Virginia
press in 1752, and some of Dawson’s poetry could be considered religious.12
Thomas Cradock, a rector and schoolteacher in Maryland, wrote poetry that
conformed to standards of taste and reinement derived from England. He
produced devotional poetry and a number of elegies, published a new trans-
lation of the Psalms, and circulated in manuscript a pastoral poem satirizing,
among other things, the unsavory behavior of some pastors as well as many
aspects of social mores and structures in midcentury Maryland society. His
“To Thyrsis” (published in the American Magazine or Monthly Chronicle in 1757),
although not religious in the traditional sense of the word, has drawn some
praise.13 The almost-one-hundred-line-long poem imitates Horace’s second
epode and ofers advice on how to live a proper life amid the trials presented
in one’s daily life. His most ambitious work was never published but was cir-
culated widely in manuscript. The ten poems that comprise “The Maryland
Eclogues” render life in the colonies through classical structures.14 We witness
scenes of clergymen abusing the trust of their congregants, convicts urging
one another to sing of their transgressions, drunk planters reminiscing about
a recently deceased planter, and Native Americans bemoaning the loss of their
lands to the English. Eclogue 4 tells the tale of a male slave hoping to seduce
a female slave, only to be rebufed because she is engaging in sexual relations
with her master. We should avoid labeling such couplings between people
of African and European descent as miscegenation, though, for, as we will
see subsequently, the modern notion of race was emergent but hardly dom-
inant. It had diferent meanings and associations and operated on diferent
principles. In the case of Cradock’s master and slave, their sexual relations
seem to represent merely poor management, rather than posing a threat to an
as-yet-unimagined biological diference between races.
A few years after Parks left Annapolis to open a print shop in Virginia,
Jonas Green established a new press in Maryland. Given his more precarious
inancial situation and the often dismal proits one saw from books of poetry,
Green took longer to publish books of poetry in Maryland than had Parks.
Nevertheless, Green’s inl uence on poetic production in colonial Maryland
was signiicant. The reborn Maryland Gazette began publishing poetry of
quality in its irst few issues, and it continued to publish distinguished poetry
throughout Green’s life.
Green was also a poet himself, but a consideration of his poetry leads us
away from the world of print to club culture. While his work as a printer

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shows the importance of printed poems in this period, his work as a poet
reveals the crucial role manuscript circulation played in the staples colonies.
Green was the poet laureate for the Tuesday Club in Annapolis, a gathering of
men that formed in 1746. Similar clubs formed in various colonial cities during
the period and had a large inl uence on cultural life in the staples colonies.
And wherever there were clubs, there was also much poetry. The writing of
poetry required particular forms of knowledge, a well-read background, and
wit, which showed – and helped produce – one’s taste and reinement. Poetry
promoted and produced aesthetic pleasures that were, in addition to what-
ever civilizing, political, and/or economic functions those pleasures produced
and/or disguised, valuable to the club’s members simply for the fact that they
were pleasurable. Clubs, clearly, were fun for their white, male memberships,
and they thrived, before the Revolutionary era helped spell their doom by cast-
ing them as necessarily tied to the very political systems the new nation sought
to cast aside. Although many clubs came to life in this period, none produced
works of such literary quality as the Tuesday Club. As laureate of the club,
Green was, not surprisingly, responsible for its most entertaining verse. Green
wrote acrostic poems and epigrams, congratulatory poems that mocked the
person being congratulated and anniversary odes that lampooned the source
of celebration, and mock-epics in which the heroes were always shown to be
something considerably less than heroic. He did all this with great wit and
poetic skill.
One particularly interesting example of manuscript poetry to emerge out
of club culture can be found in writings from the 1750s of the “Dinwiddianae”
group. The writers in this group, who were probably members of the Hickory
Hill Club but whose most proliic contributor was almost certainly the attor-
ney John Mercer, used satiric prose and verse to attack the policies of Governor
Robert Dinwiddie and his political associates for taxes that were deemed too
high and military defenses that were seen as too lax.15 The poems included
in the collection include Hudibrastic satire, mock-epics, and ballads sung to
the popular “Chevy Chase,” and the authors ofer what by this time seems
a requirement for poets in the staples colonies, namely, a direct homage to
Alexander Pope amid an adaptation of Pope’s formal qualities and thematic
interests. The poems in the collection break the mold of midcentury staples
colony poetry by rejecting the formal diction of much of the neoclassical
poetry of the period. Instead, these poems favor rough rhymes and meter
as well as ethnic dialects, including rather pedestrian Scottish dialect for the
character meant to lampoon Governor Dinwiddie, a dialect that provides a
pointed contrast to the Irish dialect used by those the poem held in higher

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esteem. These rhetorical choices are authorized by the many sly and not-so-
sly allusions to the ancients designed to indicate with a wink and a nudge that
the author might not be from quite as low a position as the poems indicate.
Whatever the social position the authors of the poetry might have occupied,
the poems, especially when read in relation to the collection in general, posi-
tion themselves as speaking from outside the centers of power against auto-
cratic and inattentive leaders, including those in Great Britain.
Richard Lewis not only wrote the best British-American neoclassical poem,
“A Journey from Patapasco to Annapolis,” but also produced the staples col-
onies’ best body of poetic work. Few facts have emerged about the life of
the region’s impressive poet. The most extensive research on Lewis’s life was
done by J. A. Leo Lemay, who found that Lewis was probably born in Wales
and most likely emigrated to Maryland in 1718 after briely attending Balliol
College, Oxford. However, no deinitive record of Lewis in the colonies can be
found before 1725, when he wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London about
an explosion. Lewis irst became visible in print with the 1728 Annapolis publi-
cation of The Mouse Trap, or the Battle of the Cambrians and Mice. After a preface
to Benedict Leonard Calvert, the governor of Maryland, with some igures
of speech worth much further study, The Mouse Trap ofers a translation of
Edward Holdsworth’s Latin poem, Musicpula, that, like its original, presents
a satiric but afectionate look at life in ancient Wales. Parks’s Annapolis press
issued two other works from Lewis in 1732: “Carmen Seculare,” a roughly
three-hundred-line celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of the col-
ony of Maryland that ranges over the colony’s history, present situation, and
no doubt glorious future; “The Rhapsody,” a meditative pastoral poem of
approximately 125 lines that focuses the reader’s attention on the natural world
as an allegory of philosophical questions regarding the individual’s place in the
cosmos.16
The best of Lewis’s work appears in the poems published exclusively in
periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. “Food for Criticks” not only describes
the distinctive qualities of the American environment in detail but also asks
the reader to value these qualities mostly for the aesthetic pleasure sim-
ply experiencing them can provide instead of for their commercial poten-
tial (APSE, pp. 396–400). The qualities of American nature, according to the
poem, provide a peculiarly good source for poetic inspiration, a source that
the poem suggests holds the potential for poetry that will surpass that pro-
duced by classical authors. This idea eventually brought Lewis some notori-
ety. First published in the Maryland Gazette in 1729, “To Mr. Samuel Hastings
(Ship-Wright of Philadelphia),” an occasional poem of almost 130 lines, uses

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its praise of shipbuilding to challenge the common conception of the colo-

nists as provincial ignoramuses lacking in culture. The poem’s incorporation
of mythological and religious igures into a carefully organized verse shows
Lewis’s neoclassical inl uences, but what is striking about the poem is the
way Lewis uses the staples drawn from American nature – in this case, trees –
to grant British communities in America a cosmopolitan sophistication. The
traic in goods goes more than one way, however; thus the trees shipped
out of America are magically transformed into other items so that “Indian
curtains screen” the colonists when they sleep (APSE, p. 382). Given that such
screens were, in eighteenth-century England, understood as signs of cultural
sophistication, this image in particular reminds his readers on both sides of the
Atlantic that the colonists themselves are no less civilized than their so-called
betters in England. The poem also goes on to suggest that commerce has the
power to further English empire by literally transforming the “climes” where
such commerce eventually ends up into English territories. Trade with other
peoples shows them the virtues of English ways and so converts them into
Englishmen, and all this comes about only through the transformation of the
natural products found only in America.
“A Journey from Patapasco to Annapolis” bests all of Lewis’s other poetic
eforts (APSE, pp. 386–95). Although earlier printings might now be lost, the
poem probably appeared irst in the May 21st edition of the Pennsylvania
Gazette, after which a number of other colonial newspapers reprinted it.
Nearly four hundred lines long, the poem follows its speaker on the trip men-
tioned in the poem’s title, taking him through a thunderstorm and past farms,
all the while afording him the opportunity to convey, in vivid and moving
couplets, the splendor of the natural world of America. The speaker’s journey
serves as a igure for the various stages of life itself and for the philosophical
voyage that the narrator experiences as he travels through geographic space,
using the things he sees to stimulate his meditation on the place of humans
in the cosmic order. In the end, the doubts these scenes raise about man’s
ultimate insigniicance in relation to the grandeur of the natural world, and,
indeed, even about the existence of a God at all, are resolved through the
speaker’s carefully articulated and reasoned use of his senses to demonstrate
the existence of a creator and an afterlife for the worthy.
The speaker’s remarks on the hummingbird – a creature distinct to the New
World, and one that had fascinated European travelers – drew, and continue
to draw, the most attention. The bird’s “ever-l utt’ring Wings” that “l ing”
what the speaker describes as “Ten thousand Colours” outward “mock the
Poet’s and the Painter’s Skill” when its “ever-varying Dies” produce “A living

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Rainbow” (APSE, pp. 388–89). Had Lewis stopped here, he might have been
known for a ine description of a compelling creature, but he has the audac-
ity to have the speaker postulate that, had certain classical authors witnessed
the hummingbird’s “wonders,” it would have been the hummingbird rather
than the “Phoenix” that would have been “immortalized” in verse. By then
proceeding to claim that the hummingbird was “Above all other Birds – their
beauteous King,” Lewis has laid down the gauntlet for British neoclassical
poets to defend their choice of aviary igures of poetic inspiration (APSE,
p. 389). Alexander Pope would do so in Book IV of The Dunciad, in which he
would make oblique reference to Lewis’s image by saying that “The dull may
waken to a Humming-bird.”17 Lewis had clearly struck a nerve by representing
American things not simply as comparable to those from the Old World but as
superior to them, and, as such, here, and in his other nature poetry, he opened
up new formal and conceptual possibilities.
One of Lewis’s chief rivals as most accomplished poet of the staples colonies
is James Kirkpatrick, who was born in Ireland with the surname “Killpatrick”
and emigrated to South Carolina in 1717 after having studied at the University
of Edinburgh without earning a degree. Kirkpatrick practiced medicine in
America, and he returned to London in 1742 after having caught the atten-
tion of British oicials by successfully administering inoculations during a
smallpox outbreak. His Analysis of Innoculation, published in London in 1754,
earned him great renown throughout medical communities across Europe.
He remained in England until his death in 1770, and his work on inoculation
has kept his name alive in medical circles. Although he produced only a few
poems, they are accomplished enough to merit our attention.
Kirkpatrick’s “An Address to James Oglethorpe,” irst published in the
February 3, 1733, issue of the South Carolina Gazette, lauds the future colo-
ny’s potential to produce luxury items that might be used by English people
and sold by English merchants throughout Europe. The poem’s focus on,
among other items, silk and perfume, which were considered valuable in part
because they were exotic goods from Asia that showed the tasteful nature of
those who possessed them, was rather standard poetic fare by the time “An
Address” appeared in print. Kirkpatrick twists what had become a clichéd
set of images into a new vision when he, through his deft and creative use
of metonymy, erases the geographic distinction between America and Asia.
This rhetorical sleight of hand elevates America’s value in relation to Europe,
which, in the end, suggests that English communities in America deserve to
be ranked among the civilized communities in the world. In 1737, Kirkpatrick
published An Epistle to Alexander Pope, Esq. from South Carolina in London; this

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work is surely one of the – if not the – best tributes to Pope in the eighteenth
century.
The Sea-Piece, Kirkpatrick’s most important poem, was published in London
in 1750 but was written at least partly in the colonies.18 The poem tells the
story of the speaker’s journey across the Atlantic from England to Carolina.
The narrative, though, is really only a ruse for exploring weighty philosoph-
ical questions while also describing life at sea and the life of the sea. We are
treated to lengthy digressions from the poem’s putative plot to learn of the
many nightmares the speaker has while onboard, nightmares prompted by
the speaker’s fears of what life will be like in the supposedly savage land of
America. The speaker ultimately is calmed by a dream in which his father
waits on the docks in America to welcome him to his new home away from
home. We hear of the pirates that captured him on a previous attempt to emi-
grate to America, pirates who ultimately left him onshore in the town of his
birth. The poem also ofers detailed descriptions of nautical terms and of the
diferent kinds of storms one encounters at sea as well as speculations on zool-
ogy and other emerging subields of the nascent scientiic movements.
In seeking to make British trade it for eighteenth-century neoclassical
forms and styles, Kirkpatrick was forging relatively new ground for British
poetry. The Sea-Piece distinguishes itself from other “empire of the sea” poems
in ofering a new way of imagining British identity in a world in which every
place on earth and – at least potentially – every person on earth can be made
to be British. Poets writing from outside Great Britain thus ofered ways of
retaining one’s British identity while living in a distinctly un-British environ-
ment, eating food one cannot ind in Europe, and engaging in cultural prac-
tices and traditions found nowhere in the British Isles. Kirkpatrick proposes
an unusual alternative model for identity in the face of British expansion
across the globe. He casts Britishness itself as a mystiied other at the heart of
communal identity, a mystiied identity used to deine Britishness through its
many and inevitable distortions around the world. In this way, The Sea-Piece
makes transformation rather than conformity the criteria for inclusion in the
British community. The distorted images of home found in the colonies, The
Sea-Piece suggests, are no less a part of the deinition of true Britishness for
their being grotesque versions of England. Indeed, he contends, the imagined
community composed of British subjects scattered across the globe living on
non-British soil represents the very ideal of Britishness itself rather than an
aberration.
Among those British-American poets of the staples colonies who wrote
poems about the expansion of the empire, none were more proliic than James

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Sterling, who was also one of the very few who immigrated to the colonies
with a reputation as a poet already established. Before he came to America,
indeed, by the time he was twenty years old, Sterling was a rising literary star
in his native Ireland. His poetic output only increased once he arrived in the
colonies, and the quality of his verse, scholars agree, also improved in the
New World. Born in Ireland in 1701 and graduated from Trinity College in
1720, Sterling made his way to America in 1736, and he was ultimately assigned
to a congregation in Maryland. Much of his published verse appeared anony-
mously and was not identiied by scholars until the twentieth century, so we
may yet discover that Sterling was even more proliic than we already know
him to be. He published occasional poems celebrating a variety of events,
and scholars now generally praise his experimentation with various rhymes
and/or meters in his poetry, while inding the ideas and issues he raises in his
poems more conventional and less striking. Sterling does distinguish himself
in one way, at least. Few poets, if any, devoted as much verse to championing
the cause of America’s future glory, known as translatio studii, the movement
of civilization from east to west. Sterling’s “Occasioned by His Majesty’s Most
Gracious Benevolence to His British Colonies in America, Lately Invaded by
the French,” which appeared in the Maryland Gazette of December 1754, and
“The Patriot,” irst printed in the April 1758 issue of the American Magazine,
represent two instances in which Sterling employs this trope. Sterling tried his
hand at one of the most popular forms of American neoclassical verse with
“The Pastoral,” a poem that adapts standard neoclassical forms to forward the
cause of letters in the colonies generally.
Sterling’s most noteworthy attempt to champion American things saw
print in 1752. An Epistle to the Hon. Arthur Dobbs, Esq.: In Europe from a Clergyman
in America announces on its title page the perspective it takes on British expan-
sion. The narrator refers to himself in the body of the work as a “tuneful
Savage” who writes from the “uncultured Paradise” of the New World (APSE,
p. 405). Of course, the poem itself is designed to render these deinitions
ironic by showing the poet to be tuneful indeed and America to have sui-
cient culture to produce a great poem in the irst place. Using a formalized
language that sometimes seems to take itself a little too seriously, the poem,
in 1,600 lines of heroic couplets divided into three sections, celebrates Dobbs’s
search for the Northwest Passage to emphasize the as-yet-untapped poten-
tial of America. None of Sterling’s images present the natural world, or any
of the subjects he takes up, in striking or surprising ways; as poetry, in other
words, Sterling’s poems are not especially successful. Nonetheless, they ofer
wonderful illustrations of the way eighteenth-century poets in the staples

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colonies use the people and places of the East, in particular, China, India,
and Arabia, as crucial points of comparison. The poem thus illustrates one of
the ways Americans in this period co-opted the igure of the East to demon-
strate America’s value in the face of European eforts to bypass the continent
entirely so that they could reach the more lucrative markets found in Asia as
quickly as possible. In the process, An Epistle also draws on the cultural cachet
attached to the East by Europeans during this period to suggest America’s
own cultural sophistication.
England’s Caribbean colonies would have been included in the category
of the staples colonies for English readers and writers on both sides of the
Atlantic, and it is in a work from these islands that one inds the most exten-
sive engagement with slavery in poetry of the period. James Grainger’s The
Sugar-Cane, an approximately six-hundred-line, four-book georgic, ofers itself
simply as an instruction manual on the proper methods of planting, culti-
vating, and raising the sugar cane (APSE, pp. 492–515). It is, in fact, a medita-
tion on the cultural beneits of the transformation of natural products into
commodities. His readers would have been well aware that the colonial sugar
cane that brought its owners extraordinary riches was actually cultivated by
slaves, so Grainger was obliged to defend the practice and ofer images of life
on a colonial plantation that would show the necessity of such seemingly
unsavory practices as slavery in an empire that touted its own love of liberty.
Grainger’s encyclopedic representation of sugar cane production lead him to
devote the whole of Book IV to a detailed discussion of slaves. After lamenting
the necessity of slave labor, Grainger proceeds to explain which Africans make
the most productive slaves and how to manage one’s slaves on the massive
sugar plantations that had sprung up throughout the Caribbean. Grainger’s
language concerning race shows how we have to be very careful when inter-
preting eighteenth-century works dealing with seemingly familiar categories
of collective identity. For Grainger’s discussion of which Africans make the
best slaves reveals the permeable, rather than ixed, nature of racial identities
in this period. At the close of the poem, in fact, one of the beneits that the
commercialization of natural objects found in England’s overseas empires will
bring England is, he says, the production of new, speciically British “races.”
Grainger even asserts that the appearance of these new “races” of people
borne out of Britain’s overseas expansion will signal the triumph of Britain
throughout the globe.
The radically diferent notion of race, as well as other forms of collective
identity, we ind in poems like Grainger’s reminds us of the particular care we
need to take when poets in Britain’s staples colonies engage racial matters. An

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exchange of poems in two March issues of the South Carolina Gazette in 1732,
its irst year of publication, makes this plain as well. The eight lines of “The
Cameleon Lover” tells the tale of a white man’s sexual relations with a woman
of African descent, while “The Cameleon’s Defence” one week later adopts
the voice of the male lover in casting the power of love to overcome all social,
rather than biological, restrictions. By suggesting that the complexion of the
presumably British-American male lover literally changes after sexual relations
with a woman described as possessing “the dark Beauties of the Sable Race,”
the irst poem is especially interesting for the way it skillfully engages, perhaps
even asks its readers to interrogate, the commonplace early eighteenth-century
view of the malleability of a person’s complexion.19 For the dominant view of
complexion at the time held that changes in a person’s skin might be produced
through external stimuli like the environment or sexual relations, a view in
stark contrast to more modern views of the ixity of racial categories.
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, not only was Robert
Bolling probably the most proliic poet from Virginia to publish, but he also
has the distinction of writing one of the most humorous satires in verse of
the period. He did all this in addition to producing a number of other short
works that evidence his considerable poetic skill. Bolling was born into a
prominent Virginian family, and, like many male children from such families
at the time, he was educated in London. His experience in London, where
most of his London associates were dismissive of Americans and America,
can be seen in his poetry, in which he occasionally contrasts life in America
with life in London to highlight the positive features of America and its
social world that receive little credit in England. Bolling published his poetry
in American and British periodicals, including the Virginia Gazette and the
London Magazine. His considerable skills at classical languages and his wide
reading of material from not just England but all over Europe gave a depth
of reference to his work that one rarely inds in poetry from the staples col-
onies in the middle of the eighteenth century. He published translations and
imitations of classical works and genres as well as many occasional poems.
Indeed, one reason Bolling’s writings have not become better known among
scholars is because a knowledge of the intimate details of speciic historical
situations, events, and persons is necessary to understand them. Many of
them, in other words, are so tied to the occasions of their production that
they have become diicult to comprehend as the years have passed and the
occasions that prompted them have faded into obscurity. Even Bolling’s best
poem, the mock-epic “Neanthe” in Hudibrastic verse, written probably in
the early 1760s and circulated in manuscript but never published during his

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lifetime, sufers from the fact that the reader must know too many of the peo-
ple featured in the poem for its humor to be as efective as it once was (APSE,
p. 625). Its tale of the battle for the hand, so to speak, of a woman, Neanthe,
who is the opposite of chaste and is anything but physically beautiful, retains
much of its bite in part because of the absurdity of its portrait of the title
character but also because of the implicit satire on courtship rituals and the
idealization of feminine virtue.
Richard Beale Davis thinned the ranks of anonymous verse in the Virginia
Gazette by one poet when, in 1971, he identiied James Reid as the author of a
number of poems from that periodical. Although comparatively little is known
of Reid’s life, we do know that he was born in Scotland and attended school
there. In the colonies, Reid worked as a tutor in the late 1760s, and his writings
show that he was clearly enamored of the literary life. Indeed, Reid’s irst iden-
tiied poem, from the Gazette of September 1768, is labeled “To My Pen” and
identiies the poet’s “chiefest joy” to be “center’d in” that object.20 Reid pub-
lished a number of other short poems, writing on death and courtship, among
other standard topics, but his most poignant poem seems autobiographical. In
“To Ignorance,” Reid speaks in the voice of a character mocked for his subpar
abilities as a dancer as well as his drab clothing; he paints a compelling picture
of an outsider who is made the object of ridicule by mainstream society for
matters that those with the proper perspective know to be trivialities while his
critics overlook qualities of far more gravity. The character of the outsider ofer-
ing an unlattering portrait of American society as focused on supericialities
while ignoring more weighty aspects that all humans endure as they struggle
through life would have a long life in American literature. Much of the nation’s
most powerful literature utilizes this very structure. But as we have seen in the
preceding pages, well before Reid, well before the Revolution, and well before
the South emerged as a distinct community with its own ways of organizing
the world, writers in this region challenged the criteria used to determine social
hierarchies by presenting themselves as outsiders. Their very exclusion from
the most desirable social and/or geographic spaces allowed them to see, they
claimed, the world anew. It was, in part, from their position of exclusion that
their poems helped give rise not only to the emergence of a southern tradition
in American poetry but also to the distinctly modern ways of understanding
race, commerce, and the good life with which the South became associated.
Notes
1. David S. Shields (ed.), American Poetry of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 131 (cited hereafter in text as APSE).

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2. James Kirkpatrick, “An Address to James Oglethorpe,” in “Two Colonial Poems

on the Settling of Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 37 (1953), p. 131.
3. Burton Egbert Stevenson, Poems of American History (Boston: Houghton
Mil in, 1922), p. 41.
4. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (eds.), Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished,
Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, trans. George Sandys (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 3 (hereafter cited in the text as OM).
5. Ebenezer Cooke, Sotweed Redivivus; Or the Planters Looking-Glass (Annapolis,
Md., 1730); Ebenezer Cooke, “The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon’s
Rebellion in Virginia,” in The Maryland Muse (Annapolis, Md., 1731).
6. John Cotton, “Bacon’s Epitaph” and “Upon the Death of G.B.,” in Jay B.
Hubbell, “John Cotton and Ann Cotton, of Queen’s Creek,” American
Literature 10 (1938), pp. 187–89.
7. J. A. Leo Lemay, Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1972), p. 111.
8. Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin (eds.), Southern
Writing, 1585–1920 (New York: Odyssey Press, 1970), pp. 242–47; Richard Beale
Davis (ed.), The Colonial Virginia Satirist (Philadelphia: APS, 1967), p. 246.
9. James Sterling, “A Poem: On the Inventions of Letters and the Art of Printing
. . . ,” American Magazine or Monthly Chronicle, March, 1, 1758, p. 281.
10. Davis et al. (eds.), Southern Writing, p. 192.
11. “Belinda,” “To Secretus,” South Carolina Gazette, February 19, 1732; “Dorinda,”
“To Belinda,” South Carolina Gazette, March 25, 1732.
12. Samuel Davies, Miscellaneous Poems, Chiely on Divine Subjects (Williamsburg,
Va., 1752).
13. Thomas Cradock, The Poetic Writings of Thomas Cradock, 1718–1770 (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 115–17.
14. Cradock, Poetic Writings, pp. 139–201.
15. John Mercer, “O Dinwiddianae or Select Poems Pro Patria,” in Davis (ed.), The
Colonial Virginia Satirist, pp. 15–16.
16. Richard Lewis, The Rhapsody (Annapolis, Md., 1732); Richard Lewis, Carmen
Seculare (Annapolis, Md., 1732).
17. Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad, in Four Books,” in Aubrey Williams (ed.),
Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1969), p. 371.
18. James Kirkpatrick, The Sea-Piece: A Narrative, Philosophical and Descriptive Poem
(London, 1750).
19. “The Cameleon Lover” and “Sable,” “The Cameleon’s Defence,” in Kenneth
Silverman (ed.), Colonial American Poetry (New York: Hafner, 1968), pp.
322, 323.
20. Richard Beale Davis, “James Reid, Colonial Virginia Poet and Moral and
Essayist,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 79 (1971), p. 11.

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 Chapter 6
Poetry in the Time of Revolution
K e v i n J . H ay e s

As Parliament and the Lords of Trade made more demands and placed more
restrictions on the American colonies in the run-up to the Revolution, the
colonists lashed back in anger. The Americans ultimately expressed them-
selves with violence, but they also expressed themselves through verse. Poetry
became an outlet for their indignation. Some poems from the Revolutionary
War circulated in manuscript among like-minded readers. Others appeared in
newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets as a way of disseminating ideas and
sentiments to a wider audience. The oral culture provided another method of
dissemination, as many Revolutionary songs were sung in public. Oftentimes
these diferent means of expression overlapped. A song sung in the streets
would be printed in a local newspaper, reprinted in distant papers, and then
sung in the streets of those distant cities. The story of poetry in the time of the
American Revolution is a story of the interaction between manuscript, print,
and oral culture. From the Stamp Act crisis through the Revolutionary War,
colonists used poetry to vent their anger, express their political beliefs, and
articulate the principles that deined the new nation.

The Stamp Act Crisis

When the news that Parliament had passed the Stamp Act reached America
in May 1765, the colonists were outraged. Once the act went into efect that
November, they would have to pay taxes on all kinds of printed material:
almanacs, bills, legal documents, newspapers, and even playing cards. The tax
itself was not the fundamental problem. What annoyed the colonists was that
it was being imposed by Parliament, where they had no formal representation.
Responding to their complaints, Thomas Whately, who had framed the Stamp
Act, said the American colonists, like all British subjects, were “virtually repre-
sented in Parliament; for every member of Parliament sits in the House, not

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as Representatives of his own constituency, but as one of the August Assembly

by which all the Commons of Great Britain are represented.”1
The colonists found Whately’s concept of virtual representation both
absurd and callous, as “An Essay on the Virtues of the Word Virtue or Virtual”
argues. An anonymous work, “Essay on the Virtues” is the earliest known
poem published against the Stamp Act. It irst appeared in the New York
Gazette, July 4, 1765, and the Boston Post Boy reprinted it on July 15, 1765.2 Like
much American verse from the Revolutionary era, it follows the conventions
of Augustan poetry established by John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Like
Pope’s “Essay on Man,” “Essay on the Virtues” is written in heroic couplets
clustered together in verse paragraphs. Paradoxically, even as the American
colonists revolted against oppressive British legislation, they strictly followed
the standard rules of contemporary British verse.
“Essay on the Virtues” broadens the political controversy into a seman-
tic one. As the British stretched the meaning of the word “virtual,” the poet
argues, they tortured the English language, ultimately rendering words
meaningless:
Since Terms are confounded, and Words on the Rack,
And White is oft taken for Blue or for Black,
Since Nonsense now passes for sound Sense and Reason,
And Words are let loose to ix what Sense you please on;
“Tis virtual!” the same to stay here or go there,
To breathe a free British or some other Air;
A Freeman in London, or Vassal at Bender
In Efect are the same – the Masculine Gender:
Thus good Things and bad Things, and great Things and small Things,
Are here reconciled – and virtually all Things.
During the mid-1760s, British linguists and lexicographers were seeking to
ix the English language by establishing standards for the language in terms
of deinition, spelling, and pronunciation.3 According to this poem, however,
colonial policy made the meaning of words more vague in order to apply
them to whatever arbitrary and capricious policies they wished to impose
on their colonial subjects. Not only did Parliament pass arbitrary laws that
restricted American political freedom, but the British also imposed arbitrary
rules of language that efectively restricted freedom of speech, even freedom
of thought, among their distant subjects.
In Newport, Rhode Island, the war of words over the Stamp Act that had
been carried on in the local press escalated to violence when a mob hanged
in eigy two men who had spoken in favor of the Stamp Act. Onto the

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gallows the mob posted “A New Song.” The irst stanza begins: “He who for
a Post or Base sordid Pelf / His Country Betrays, Makes a Rope for himself.”
Subsequent stanzas encouraged colonists to stand their ground in defense
of liberty, to maintain their rights, and to spurn all unjust taxes, concluding,
“These Eigy’s First, the Next the Stamp Papers Burn.”4 The eigies hung
most of the day, but in the late afternoon the mob set ire to the gallows. The
posted poem burned with the rest, but its physical destruction scarcely mat-
tered. The locals had either made their own manuscript copies or committed
the song to memory by singing it repeatedly.5
“A New Song” quickly spread outward. One Newport resident, for example,
sent a manuscript copy to a Boston friend, and Bostonians soon started singing
it. “A New Song” was printed on September 6, 1765, in the Connecticut Gazette
and the New Hampshire Gazette and three days later in the New York Mercury.6
Numerous other anti–Stamp Act poems appeared in the colonial press in the
coming weeks, the most substantial being Benjamin Church’s “A Dream on
the Stamp Act,” which appeared in the Boston Evening Post, October 14, 1765.
Born in Newport, Benjamin Church (1734–1778) moved to Boston in his
boyhood. In 1750, he entered Harvard College, where he made his reputation
writing satires on his classmates and professors. After graduation, he studied
medicine locally and in London. Before 1759, he established a medical practice
in Boston. For the egotistical Church, writing satirical poetry and dispens-
ing medical advice were of a piece: both provided ways for him to build a
contemporary reputation. The Choice (1757), which represents his inest poetic
accomplishment, echoes a similarly titled poem by British poet John Pomfret
celebrating the gentlemanly life. Although The Choice focuses largely on an
airmation of moral choices, it marks a substantial break with the Puritan
verse of the past and puts New England poetry smack in the middle of the
Augustan age. Church wrote little more until the Stamp Act controversy gave
him an opportunity to apply his satirical powers. The Times (1765), published
as a sixteen-page pamphlet, critiques British colonial policy in heroic couplets.
The patriotic speaker of The Times identiies with the American land. “Wild
as the soil,” he is “a wild exotic neighbour to the bear.” Nature is his “parent,
mistress, muse and guide.”7 Church had an ear for popular rhetoric. Much of
the best colonial American literature reinforced the colonists’ links with the
land. His sincerity remains unclear. Some see him as an American patriot,
while others ind him a talented opportunist who understood how to capture
the attention of patriotic readers.
Church structured “A Dream on the Stamp Act” as a dream vision, a com-
mon literary device among early American authors.8 Once the speaker of the

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poem falls asleep, diferent paper documents come alive to plead their cases –
bonds, court papers, probate papers, diplomas, license papers, and newspa-
pers. Church’s use of personiication is charming and efective. Responsible
for granting liquor licenses, License Paper states:
For Ages past, I’ve ill’d the gen’rous Bowl.
And pour’d seraphick Pleasures on the Soul
Of old and young, the Statesman and the Priest,
And lull’d their troubled Mind to quiet Rest.9
Although the primary speaker of “A Dream on the Stamp Act” is an American
patriot, Church hesitated to commit himself to the Revolution. After hos-
tilities began, American authorities caught him corresponding with British
oicers. Church was taken prisoner, tried, convicted, and ordered transported
to Martinique. He sailed in 1778 but perished at sea.
The Stamp Act went into efect November 1, 1765, almost bringing commer-
cial and legal business to a standstill, as colonists refused to use the stamps.
The British had greatly underestimated American resistance to the act, which
Parliament repealed in March 1766, partly due to the eforts of Benjamin
Franklin, who testiied before Parliament against the act. Directly after the
repeal Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which gave it the right to bind
the American colonies to whatever new laws it felt necessary: a legislative
sword of Damocles. Colonists temporarily ignored the implications of the
Declaratory Act to celebrate their victory: the repeal of the Stamp Act. They
celebrated in many ways; poetry provided one medium of expression.
“The Repeal,” a ninety-ive-line occasional poem written in heroic couplets
(but containing one odd short line toward the end for emphasis), may be the in-
est poem written to celebrate the Stamp Act’s repeal. Although “The Repeal”
appeared anonymously, Thomas Burke (1747–1783) is now recognized as its
author.10 Born in County Galway, Ireland, Burke came to America in his teens.
He irst settled in Virginia, contributing many poems to the Virginia Gazette.
His most enduring poem, “The Repeal” begins by depicting ancient Greece
and Rome as exemplars of freedom. With liberty secured, citizens of antiquity
“Greatly unbending o’er the social bowl, / Indulged the transports of a genial
soul.”11 Burke’s diction recalls Church’s in “A Dream on the Stamp Act.” He
conjures up an idealistic image of ancient culture to establish a point of com-
parison for colonial America, a modern society whose behavior is similarly
guided by its love of freedom. The repeal of the Stamp Act gives Americans
new hope. No more, Burke asserts, will the British “threat America’s free sons
with chains, / While the least spark of ancient ire remains.”12 The second half

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of Burke’s poem pays homage to British politicians instrumental in the act’s

repeal. It ends with an image of fertility. Speaking for American men in gen-
eral, the poet apologizes to their wives for ignoring them in this time of polit-
ical strife: “Too long indignant tumults and alarms / Have made us heedless
of your lovely charms.”13 American men and women can now come together
and bring forth children into a world of freedom and liberty. Needless to say,
Burke spoke too soon.
In 1772 Burke left Virginia for central North Carolina, where he became
active in politics. He served as delegate to the Continental Congress from
1777 to 1781, when he was elected to a one-year term as governor of North
Carolina. Despite his political ambitions, Burke continued to write poetry,
leaving a volume of his verse in manuscript at the time of his death, which has
since been published as The Poems of Governor Thomas Burke of North Carolina.
This edition demonstrates Burke’s fondness for love poems, pastoral verse,
satirical verse, poetical dialogues, and heroic hymns to nature in the manner
of James Thomson, whose writings inspired many early American poets.
Alexander Martin (1740–1807), who succeeded Burke as governor of North
Carolina, was also a fair poet. America (1769), Martin’s patriotic paean to liberty,
presents a dialogue between the poet and the “Genius of America.” Martin
reprised the allegorical character in A New Scene Interesting to the Citizens of the
United States of America, Additional to the Historical Play of Columbus (1798), a
twelve-page verse dialogue between Christopher Columbus and the “Genius
of America.”14 Martin’s other writings include “A Description of Charles Town
in 1769,” a short satirical poem told from an outsider’s point of view that cri-
tiques the natural and social world of Charleston, South Carolina.15 “Genius
of Freedom! Whither Art Thou Fled?” is Martin’s poignant elegy to General
Francis Nash, who died in combat during the Revolutionary War. The poem
exempliies numerous elegiac poems to emerge from the war, during which
many American soldiers gave their lives.16 That two successive governors of
North Carolina would distinguish themselves as poets indicates the close ties
between leadership and creative expression that existed in early America.
Great leaders and great poets share some important traits: the power to think
quickly, to improvise, and to imagine creative solutions under pressure.

The Poetic Circle in Revolutionary America

Not all poetry written during the Revolutionary era was politically motivated.
Many people were writing more personal manuscript verse and sharing their
handwritten compositions with close friends, who were busy writing verse

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themselves. In Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and elsewhere

poetic circles formed as like-minded writers came together to appreciate and
critique and to encourage and promote the poetry of other members of their
groups.
In the 1760s, a lively poetic culture associated with the Academy of
Philadelphia emerged. The Reverend William Smith (1727–1803), the poetry-
writing provost of the academy, inspired many students to start writing verse,
including Nathaniel Evans (1742–1767). While at the academy, Evans formed
friendships with several local poets, including Jacob Duché (1738–1798),
Thomas Godfrey, Jr. (1736–1763), and Francis Hopkinson (1737–1791). Because
of their passion for pastoral verse, these four became known as the Swains of
the Schuylkill. Hopkinson, the wittiest poet of their circle and a distinguished
musical composer, would go on to write some of the most popular ballads of
the Revolutionary War, including “The Battle of the Kegs” (1778), which tells
a fanciful tale of some kegs of gunpowder loating down the Delaware River
that frighten British soldiers into shooting at anything and everything that
loats.17
Many women began writing poetry during the Revolutionary era. Boston
historian and playwright Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) is one of the best-
known female poets of the time. Although she published a collection of her
verse in 1790 as Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, her Revolutionary political
dramas – The Adulateur (1773) and The Group (1775) – may contain more genuine
poetry than her lyric verse. In terms of literary signiicance, Warren’s poetry
and drama is overshadowed by her most substantial work, History of the Rise,
Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Ann Eliza Bleecker’s
“Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne” is a moving account of her despair at
the death of her daughter when she and her family led the British advance.
She also wrote some efective lyrics, but her poems were not collected until
1793 in The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker. In Philadelphia, several
Revolutionary female poets came together to share their writings. At her
home, Elizabeth Graeme (1737–1801) presided over a salon that attracted many
local poets, including Susanna Wright (1697–1785), Hannah Griitts (1727–1817),
and Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736–1801). The manuscript poems of these
four women possess a playfulness absent from Warren’s published verse. For
the most part, these women circulated their poetry among themselves and
a handful of other readers. Stockton created a manuscript collection of her
verse, which she titled, Only for the Eye of a Friend. Many poems from other
members of their circle survive solely because Griitts’s cousin Milcah Martha
Moore transcribed them in her commonplace book. The modern edition of

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this notebook vividly re-creates the literary world of Revolutionary America.

Its contents demonstrate that the female poets of colonial Philadelphia wrote
in many diferent verse genres: acrostics, biblical paraphrases, dream visions,
elegies, meditations, occasional poems, and verse epistles.
These two poetic circles overlapped as the Swains of the Schuylkill found
themselves frequently attending Graeme’s salon. In addition to writing poetry
of his own, Nathaniel Evans undertook the task of editing Thomas Godfrey’s
poetry for publication after his untimely demise. In 1765, Evans published
Godfrey’s posthumous works as Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects, with the
Prince of Parthia, a Tragedy. Godfrey’s lyric poetry is unremarkable, but The
Prince of Parthia remains a landmark in American literary history. When this
verse tragedy was performed in 1767, it became the irst American tragedy per-
formed on the stage.18 Evans, in turn, died young, and Elizabeth Graeme and
William Smith assumed the responsibility of editing a posthumous collection
of his works, Poems on Several Occasions, with Some Other Compositions (1772).
“To Benjamin Franklin, Esq; L.L.D.: Occasioned by Hearing Him Play on
the Harmonica,” for example, demonstrates Evans’s technical skill as a poet.
Already Franklin had established a reputation for business acumen, scientiic
genius, and political savvy; now he demonstrated his musical genius. Having
invented and constructed from glass an instrument he called an armonica,
Franklin enjoyed giving performances. Besides paying tribute to Franklin’s
genius, Evans indicates the power of music – and, by implication, poetry – to
move the soul. Music lets man transcend the earthly, elevating himself to
a higher spiritual plane. A thirty-line poem written in heroic couplets, “To
Benjamin Franklin” ends with the following exclamation: “ ’Tis this enchant-
ing instrument of thine, / Which speaks in accents more than half divine!”19
Also included in the Evans collection are verses he and Elizabeth Graeme
exchanged. The playful, l irtatious manuscript poems were not originally
meant for publication. Graeme kept most of her poems in manuscript, never
intending them for a readership beyond her own intimate circle. Other mem-
bers of her circle behaved similarly. Poetry for Graeme was a social activity;
it let her ingratiate herself to other poets, gathering around her a group of
like-minded souls. Yet Graeme also had personal reasons underlying what she
wrote. For her, writing poetry was a kind of therapy. Her considerable output
includes a metrical paraphrase, “The Psalms of David.” Psalms had long been
a text Graeme used for meditation as part of her closet devotions.20 Forced
to cope with the deaths of her mother and sister in 1766, Graeme returned
to the psalms. The practice of versifying the psalms was not unusual. Three
years earlier Francis Hopkinson had gathered numerous versiied psalms for

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A Collection of Psalm Tunes, with a Few Anthems and Hymns (1763). By putting
psalms into verse, Graeme both diverted and comforted herself, activities that
helped her to come to terms with her grief.21
As she and William Smith prepared Evans’s collected poems for publication,
Graeme realized she could not efectively publish his poems to her without
publishing hers to him. Instead of signing her own name, she used her pseu-
donym: Laura. Evans had sent her some lines copied from Alexander Pope’s
“Eloise to Abelard”; she responded with “A Parody on the Foregoing Lines,”
which depicts the life of a country parson and implicitly critiques Evans’s
ministerial life. Graeme noted his studious habits – “In Greek and Latin, pious
books he keeps; / And, while his Clerk sings psalms, he – soundly sleeps.”22
This poem prompted a verse response on Evans’s part, “An Epistle to Laura,
on Her Parody.” The l irtatiousness of “An Epistle” made Graeme uneasy, as
she explained in “Laura’s Answer”:
Haste not to bend at Hymen’s shrine;
Let friendship, gen’rous friendship, be
The bond to fetter you and me,
Vestal, Platonic – what you will,
So virtue reigns with freedom still.23
Graeme would wed Hugh Fergusson, whose loyalty to the British crown
prompted others to question his wife’s dedication to the American cause. They
need not have. Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson remained a staunch American
patriot.
While Elizabeth Graeme and other members of her poetic circle in
Philadelphia shared their poems in manuscript, Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784)
eagerly sought to publish her verse. Wheatley’s desire for publication partly
stems from her lack of a close-knit circle of friends and fellow poets with
whom she could share her writings. Her status as a slave, needless to say, ren-
dered pleasant evenings reading poetry an impossibility. Yet Wheatley also
sought to publish her works as a way of asserting herself, a way to eface any
intellectual barriers separating her from others, and a way to insist on her
humanity and her individuality in the midst of a cruel and unjust system that
efaced black people’s humanity and individuality.
On her arrival in a slave ship, John and Susannah Wheatley purchased Phillis
as a domestic servant. They taught her to read English, mainly to acquaint
her with the holy scriptures. A natural-born learner and a voracious reader,
she used the Augustan poems she read as models for her early verse, which
she began writing in her teens. A funeral elegy, “On the Death of the Rev.

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Mr. George Whiteield,” which she addressed to Whiteield’s English patron,

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, gained Wheatley international
renown and secured the countess’s patronage. Visiting London with her mas-
ter’s son in 1773, Phillis Wheatley arranged publication of Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).
In “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” an eight-line poem in heroic
couplets, Wheatley ponders her fate:
’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be rein’d, and join th’ angelic train.24
This work, though brief, demonstrates Wheatley’s skill as a poet. The phrase
“benighted soul” is a cliché that frequently occurs in eighteenth-century devo-
tional literature, mainly in autobiographical narratives in which their authors
explain how they received the light of Christianity. In the hands of this poet
from Africa, the phrase takes on added complexity, becoming a double enten-
dre and forming the irst of four images of blackness in the poem: “sable race,”
“diabolic die,” and “black as Cain.”
John Gay coined the phrase “sable race” for Trivia: or, The Art of Walking
the Streets of London (1716). In a blatantly racist episode, Gay uses the phrase to
describe a black boy who shines shoes. The editor of a popular verse-writing
handbook, The Art of Poetry (1762), which Wheatley may have known, gave
Gay’s episode greater currency by using it as an example to illustrate how to
include a narrative episode within a longer poem.25 Wheatley herself coined the
alliterative phrase “diabolic die” to express the scorn some people felt toward
African people. Making this phrase part of a quoted sentence, Wheatley uses
direct discourse to introduce another voice to her poem – that of her oppres-
sors – and to create a sense of drama. When the poet returns in her own voice
after this quoted sentence, she appears chastened. Her use of the proverbial
comparison – “black as Cain” – almost seems to accept the perspective of her
oppressors. James Kilgore has compared “On Being Brought from Africa” to
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” Like the speaker of Dunbar’s
poem, Wheatley also wears the “mask that grins and lies.”26
Wheatley continued writing verse through the Revolutionary era. “To
His Excellency George Washington” (1776) constitutes one of the best

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contemporary tributes to Washington. This poem demonstrates her expertise

at turning heroic couplets and brings to bear many diferent poetic devices –
apostrophe, classical allusion, epic simile, personiication – to form a moving
tribute to Washington in his role as commander in chief of the Continental
Army. Many other examples could be selected to illustrate Wheatley’s skill
as a poet, but her individual works may be less signiicant than her overall
accomplishment. Allan Morrison inds in Phillis Wheatley the same passion
and love of words as in Gwendolyn Brooks. Biographer Vincent Carretta calls
Wheatley a “genius in bondage.” Perhaps the most commonly used epithet is
still the best: Phillis Wheatley is the mother of African American literature.
As a result of her growing renown, Wheatley formed the center of a de
facto poetic circle, as other marginalized poets communicated with her either
in verse or by letter. Jupiter Hammon (1711–c. 1806), the irst published African
American poet, made Wheatley the subject of one poem. Together Hammon
and Wheatley mark a rising level of group consciousness among black
people in eighteenth-century America.27 Born into slavery on Long Island,
Hammon published his irst poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ,
with Penitential Cries,” in 1760. His religious devotion shows in nearly all his
work, including the poem to Wheatley, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley,
Ethiopian Poetess, Who Came from Africa at Eight Years of Age, and Soon
Became Acquainted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (1778).
For “An Address,” Hammon eschewed heroic couplets – still the predom-
inant form of poetry in American literature – and wrote in ballad stanzas.
“An Address” consists of twenty-one four-line stanzas. Hammon’s diction is
biblical, and he goes so far as to key his biblical allusions to speciic passages
of scripture. Hammon’s piety is sincere, but it can be cloying. “An Address”
lacks the complex ambiguity of Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa
to America.” Although she was snatched from her homeland, brought to
America, and sold into slavery, Hammon sees Wheatley’s odyssey as a positive
one because it brought her from paganism to Christianity. The poem begins:
O Come you pious youth! adore
The wisdom of thy God,
In bringing thee from distant shore,
To learn his holy word.28
This seems like strange talk from one slave to another. Hammon’s poem sug-
gests that God sanctioned Wheatley’s capture and enslavement. Regardless,
it indicates the rhetorical power of Christianity among African American
slaves. Although most were powerless to escape their condition, Christianity

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provided a metaphorical escape, a way they could empower themselves by

working toward their eternal salvation. By accepting Christianity, slaves could
ind something positive in their enslaved condition.
In terms of his contribution to the history of American literature, Samson
Occom (1723–1792) is best known for his sermons, but he was a fair poet as
well. It was not his poetry but his bold stance against slavery that brought him
into Phillis Wheatley’s orbit. After reading his tirade against slavery, she ini-
tiated a correspondence with Occom, writing him a heartfelt letter to praise
his outspoken views.29 Both Mohegan Indian and Presbyterian clergyman,
Occom became a missionary and brought Christianity to numerous other
Native Americans. A fund-raising trip to England put him in contact with
George Whiteield and the Countess of Huntingdon, who befriended him and
became his patron as well.
Although a Latin elegy honoring the Reverend Thomas Thatcher by a Native
American Harvard student named Eleazar, which Cotton Mather included in
Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), deserves recognition as the irst published
poem by a Native American, Samson Occom was the irst Native American
to publish poetry in English.30 He also edited Choice Collection of Hymns and
Spiritual Songs (1774), an anthology of devotional poems that included several
of his own composition. The imagery of “The Slow Traveller,” a brief poem
containing six ballad stanzas, anticipates Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume.” Both
Occom’s poem and Poe’s disembody the soul and then personify it, depicting
the soul as an ambulatory companion to the self. The title character is the
speaker of Occom’s poem; his soul rushes ahead. The slower traveler urges
the soul to continue forward, assuring him that he will keep him in sight as
they progress toward heaven. The traveler encourages his soul to look out for
him once he reaches heaven, where the two will be reunited. Like nearly all of
Occom’s verse, “The Slow Traveller” relects the author’s heartfelt devotion
to Christian belief.31
While the importance of Wheatley, Hammon, and Occom has been rec-
ognized only recently, another group of poets – the Connecticut Wits – con-
stituted the foremost poetic circle in Revolutionary America. When Elihu
Hubbard Smith (1771–1798) compiled American Poems (1793), the very irst
anthology of American verse, its contents were largely devoted to the work
of the Connecticut Wits. (In neglecting southern writers, Hubbard estab-
lished a tradition among anthologists of American literature that continues
to the present.) The Connecticut Wits came together during the early 1770s at
Yale College, where John Trumbull (1750–1831), Timothy Dwight (1752–1817),
David Humphreys (1752–1818), and Joel Barlow (1754–1812) all became friends.

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Despite their diferences in age, they came to know one another because tal-
ented students often stayed at Yale to earn their master’s degrees and also to
tutor undergraduate students. These four would remain active poets through
the Revolutionary period. Because many published their best verse during the
1780s, their work makes a itting conclusion to the story of poetry during the
time of revolution. Trumbull, on the other hand, wrote his most renowned
works in the 1770s.
Trumbull was admitted to Yale when he was seven years old, but he did not
matriculate until he turned thirteen. He graduated in 1767 and took his M.A.
in 1770. He remained at Yale as a tutor until 1773, when he went to Boston to
read law with John Adams. As a tutor, Trumbull was inspired to compose The
Progress of Dulness (1772–1773), a satirical poem written in Hudibrastics, that
humorous form of iambic tetrameter couplets that Ebenezer Cook (some-
times spelled Cooke) and Robert Bolling had used so efectively earlier in the
century. “On the Adventures of Tom Brainless,” the irst part of The Progress of
Dulness, satirizes the New England college student, portraying Tom Brainless
as a dunce and a dullard and attacking Yale’s stagnant curriculum and stale
pedagogy. The next two parts characterize a fop named Dick Hairbrain and
Harriet Simper, a l ighty young woman whose beautiful clothing masks her
moral and mental vacuity. The irst part is the strongest. While Dick and
Harriet are character types derived from eighteenth-century English satire,
the character of Tom Brainless is original. He is the type of insensitive and
unthinking student that had been part of the American scene at least since
Benjamin Franklin lampooned Harvard students in his Silence Dogood essays
a half century earlier.
In August 1774, Trumbull published An Elegy on the Times, which chronicles
the plight of Boston in the face of the Port Bill, the punitive legislation enacted
in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. Abandoning hope of remedying
injustice through oicial recourse, the colonists now had to rely on their own
strength and perseverance. Trumbull explains:
Ours be the manly irmness of the sage,
From shameless foes ungrateful wrongs to bear;
Alike removed from baseness and from rage,
The lames of faction and the chills of fear.32
Trumbull’s diction echoes Thomson’s tragedy Tancred and Sigismunda (1745).
Applying Thomson’s language to describe the behavior and attitude of the
American colonists in the face of the king’s injustice, Trumbull enlarges on the
positive qualities of Thomson’s masculine ideal: prudence, good judgment, a

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belief in the importance of liberty, resistance to war unless absolutely neces-

sary, an appreciation of the value of controlling the passions and maintaining
reason, and an understanding of the importance of upholding what is right.
Trumbull soon began writing versiications, a type of political parody that
involved transposing a serious work of prose into satirical poetry. The colonial
tradition of travestying political speeches in verse extends back at least as far as
the 1730s, when the Boston poet Joseph Green (1706–1780) versiied the speeches
of Governor Jonathan Belcher. Green’s verse parodies circulated widely in man-
uscript and may have inluenced Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), whose poem
“The Speech Versyied” travesties an address by Virginia governor William
Gooch in 1747.33 On the eve of the Revolutionary War, the bombastic proclama-
tions issued by General Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts,
provided a new impetus for verse parody. Gage’s swaggering assertion of his
royal authority and the heavy-handed tone of his public statements inspired
Trumbull and other American satirists to undermine his authority by trans-
forming his proclamations into satirical verse.34 The American patriots were
not the only ones to use versiication to parody serious political documents.
In the coming years, Loyalist poets would parody documents issued by the
Continental Congress. Political pundits nowadays sometimes worry about the
American public receiving its news through parody news broadcasts. Americans
have been getting news through parody since the nation began.
In A New Proclamation!, published irst in the Connecticut Courant, August
7–14, 1775, and subsequently as an eight-page pamphlet, Trumbull speaks in
Gage’s voice to demonstrate the governor’s insensitivity to the plight of the
American colonists. Speaking of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in this
poem, Gage absolves the British regulars from culpability. They “little mis-
chief then had done, / But kill’d eight men at Lexington.” Trumbull also has
Gage make fun of how the Americans reacted to the British troops: “And
bragging high, as though you beat us, / No more mind Reg’lars than musqui-
toes.”35 Portraying American braggadocio, Trumbull good-naturedly captures
an aspect that would become a deining trait of the national character and
manifest itself in such characteristic American types like the backwoods brag-
gart known as a “ring-tailed roarer.”36
Trumbull’s mosquitoes in A New Proclamation! constitute an important use
of indigenous imagery. Throughout the history of early American literature,
the mosquito had helped deine whether someone had the right stuf to be
a colonist. Responding to those who complained about mosquitoes in Of
Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, William Bradford wrote: “They are too deli-
cate and unit to begin new plantations and colonies, that cannot endure the

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biting of a mosquito. We would wish such to keep at home till at least they
be mosquito-proof.”37 The tenderfoot speaker of Ebenezer Cook’s The Sot-
Weed Factor has so little experience in the woods that he mistakes a mosquito’s
buzz for the sound of a rattlesnake. Complaining that “Musquitos on the Skin
make blotches,” the speaker of Alexander Martin’s “Description of Charles
Town” identiies himself as an outsider.38 The Americans who resist the British
forces at Lexington and Concord have withstood mosquitoes, and they can
now withstand British regulars. Trumbull reused the motif in M’Fingal (1775),
depicting the British regulars in much the same manner as Cook depicts his
sot-weed factor. Inexperienced, they hear the sound of mosquitoes and other
insects and assume they are bullets: “No more each Reg’lar Col’nel runs /
From whizzing beetles, as air-guns, / Thinks hornbugs bullets, or thro’ fears /
Muskitoes takes for musketeers.”39
A New Proclamation! gave Trumbull a good starting point for M’Fingal. He
borrowed ifty or so lines from this versiication, taking words he had attributed
to Gage and putting them in the mouth of his eponymous hero, a supercilious
and self-centered Tory. Trumbull essentially took his earlier work and used it
to broaden the scope of revolutionary satire, creating a memorable character
who could represent the faults of all Loyalists (RV, p. 510). The 1775 version of
M’Fingal takes place at a New England town meeting. Squire M’Fingal attends
to debate the legitimacy of the American rebellion. Honorius, an American
patriot, defends the rebellion in the face of long-standing British oppression.
Instead of denying the British treachery, Squire M’Fingal attempts to justify
British behavior on the basis of self-interest (RV, p. 511).
Trumbull irst published M’Fingal as a single canto, but he revised and
expanded it considerably toward the end of the Revolutionary War. He split
the one-canto version into two, adding a number of lines to the end of the irst
canto and the beginning of the second to make a smooth transition between
them. He then added two more cantos, publishing the four-canto version of
M’Fingal in 1782. The poem changed considerably because the political situa-
tion had changed considerably. With the Revolutionary War nearing its end,
Trumbull recognized new satiric targets. Once Squire M’Fingal is tarred and
feathered by a group of rebels, Trumbull shifts his satire to attack the issue of
mob violence. Yet Trumbull’s tone also changed. While the one-canto M’Fingal
used the low burlesque conventions associated with Hudibrastic verse, the
four-canto version is more elevated in tone, and it incorporates numerous
allusions to the works of Homer, Virgil, and Milton (RV, p. 512). Trumbull’s
mock-epic anticipates the serious national epics that fellow members of his
poetic circle would publish after the Revolutionary War.

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Philip Freneau: The Poet of the Revolution

Like John Trumbull, Philip Freneau (1752–1832) travestied General Gage’s
proclamations by turning them into sharp-witted satiric verse. Freneau’s Gage
travesties include General Gage’s Soliloquy (1775) and General Gage’s Confession
(1775). These political parodies were not his irst forays into poetry, however.
Freneau experimented with verse while a student at the College of New Jersey
(later, Princeton). Collaborating with his classmate Hugh Henry Brackenridge
(1748–1816), Freneau produced his irst signiicant work, A Poem, on the Rising
Glory of America, which Brackenridge read at their commencement in 1771 and
which they published the following year. The poem paid homage to the spirit
of Great Britain and anticipated the day when the British spirit would shine
throughout America – already a commonplace theme in American literature.
A few years later Freneau changed both his attitude and the poem drastically.
For later editions of Rising Glory, Freneau revised or expurgated lines prais-
ing Great Britain. Throughout the Revolutionary period, no other poet more
staunchly defended the cause of American independence.
A Voyage to Boston (1775) may be the inest of Freneau’s parodies of General
Gage. Echoing Alexander Martin’s America, Freneau introduces the speaker of
the poem to the “Genius of America,” who provides him with a magic vest
that makes him invisible and assigns him the task of using the vest to enter the
“dome of state / Where Gage resides our Western potentate.”40 The poet’s
portrayal of Gage and his minions resembles the famous scene from Paradise
Lost as Satan gathers the other fallen angels around him. Gage, “chief of all
the Pandemonian crew,” asks the others to explain the British humiliation
at Lexington and Concord (VB, p. 10). They ofer a few fatuous excuses but
cannot explain how the Americans fought so well: “They fought like those
who press for death’s embrace / And laugh the grizly monarch in the face”
(VB, p. 11). Gage ultimately concludes that they should attack an enemy more
suited to their abilities, so they resolve to steal a sheep. As Gage and his “black-
guard crew” fall asleep, the poet leaves the statehouse, returning his magic
vest to the Genius of America and proceeding to celebrate the bravery of the
American troops and their dedication to liberty (VB, p. 14).
Employment as private secretary to a prominent planter took Freneau to
St. Croix in the Danish West Indies, but after he returned home, he enlisted
as a private in the New Jersey militia in 1778. By no means did his military
duties hinder his writing. That year he produced a strongly anti-British study,
American Independence. Before the year’s end he began serving on a coastal pri-
vateer and, while ferrying tobacco to St. Eustacia in May 1780, was captured by

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a British man-of-war and held for six weeks aboard the Scorpion, a prison ship
anchored in the Hudson River. The experience inspired The British Prison-Ship
(1781), an angry poem illed with invective that catalogues the horrors of life
aboard. Although The British Prison-Ship has a kind of raw power, the numerous
poems Freneau wrote satirizing British generals and celebrating the American
patriots are much more efective both as poetry and as propaganda.
Freneau’s elegy, “To the Memory of the Brave Americans under General
Greene, in South Carolina, Who Fell in the Action of September 8, 1781,” is
one of the strongest from the Revolutionary period. Sir Walter Scott, who
borrowed a line from it for Marmion, called it “as ine a thing as there is of the
kind in the language.”41 Consisting of eight four-line stanzas, Freneau’s poem
exhibits great verbal economy, something that cannot be said for much of his
earlier heroic verse. As Scott’s attraction to the poem suggests, it possesses
a Romantic quality. Overall, Freneau’s poetic career spans the Augustan and
Romantic eras. Although many other American poets continued using heroic
couplets into the early nineteenth century, Freneau embraced the forms and
sensibility of the emerging Romantic era.
After the conclusion of hostilities he wrote his best-remembered non-
political poem, “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786), which may be his crown-
ing achievement as a poet. Consisting of four six-line stanzas that rhyme
ababcc and taking for its subject a Carolina wildlower, the poem breaks with
Augustan verse in both form and subject. The speaker initially attributes to
the wildlower a beauty no man can see. Freneau thus introduces an irony:
if no man can see the lower, how is the poet able to describe its beauty? The
poet’s presence essentially destroys what he describes. He is the snake in the
garden, the one whose presence ruins Eden. As the poem continues, however,
the lower becomes a symbol for man. The poet laments that this beautiful
lower will wither away with the arrival of autumn: “Unpitying frosts, and
Autumn’s power / Shall leave no vestige of this lower.” In the inal stanza, the
pace of the poem slackens as the poet seeks some kind of philosophical rec-
onciliation, deciding that the lower will end where it began: “If nothing once,
you nothing lose, / For when you die you are the same.” After these lines,
the poet closes on a melancholy note that anticipates the poetry of Robert
Frost: “The space between, is but an hour, / The frail duration of a lower.”42
The wildlower functions as counterpoint to the poem itself. The lower, like
man, is destined to die, but the poem endures. Through the act of writing, the
poet creates something beautiful that transcends the ephemeral beauty of the
wildlower.

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The Quest for Epic

Throughout the eighteenth century, many readers considered Milton’s bibli-
cal epic Paradise Lost the single greatest poem in the English language. Many
British poets since Milton had sought to write epic poems themselves, with
uneven results. Because nation-building had formed a prominent subject
of traditional epics going back to Homer’s Odyssey, with the success of the
Revolution, many American poets turned their attention to the epic. The new
nation deserved an epic poem to commemorate its founding. From Nathaniel
Tucker in the South to the Connecticut Wits in New England, many poets of
the Revolutionary era tried their hands at epic verse to celebrate the founding
of the irst modern democracy.
Coming to America from their family home in Bermuda, Nathaniel Tucker
(1750–1807) and St. George Tucker (1752–1827) both looked forward to pro-
fessional careers, but the two enjoyed poetry as well. Nathaniel came to
Charleston, South Carolina, where he could study medicine with his older
brother Thomas Tucker.43 St. George went to Williamsburg to attend the
College of William and Mary. While living in Charleston, Nathaniel wrote
The Bermudian (1774), a topographical poem modeled on Oliver Goldsmith’s
“The Deserted Village” (1770). Goldsmith’s poem inl uenced much American
poetry during the inal third of the eighteenth century. Before publishing The
Bermudian, Nathaniel sent a manuscript copy to St. George, who shared it
with his Williamsburg friends, a circle that included Samuel Henley (1740–
1815), Thomas Jeferson (1743–1826), and James McClurg (1747–1823). These
men came together as members of Virginia’s irst scientiic organization, the
Philosophical Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, but all cher-
ished poetry. Henley was a professor at the College of William and Mary who
also gave public lectures about how to write poetry.44 Henley published poetry
in the Virginia Gazette and collected several of his poems in an appendix to his
oriental tale, The Story of Al Raoui (1799). Dr. James McClurg dabbled in poetry.
Although not known as a poet, Jeferson admitted writing some verse in his
youth. The only instance of Jeferson’s poetry that survives, however, is a play-
ful verse apology written from Dolly’s Chop House in London in 1786: “One
Among Our Many Follies.”45
St. George Tucker arranged for the publication of The Bermudian in
Williamsburg, and Henley wrote an introductory poem, “To the Author: A
Sonnet.”46 The form Henley chose is unusual and indicates his wide-ranging
literary interests: sonnets were generally out of favor during the Augustan age.

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A polymath and a student of world literature, Henley had a sixteenth-century

edition of Petrarch in his Williamsburg library.47 This sonnet also indicates
Henley’s knowledge of seventeenth-century English verse, as it compares The
Bermudian to Edmund Waller’s “The Battle of the Summer-Islands” (1645). The
example of The Bermudian reveals the lively poetic culture in Williamsburg and
in the South more generally. That the South produced few well-known poems
during the late eighteenth century does not mean that southerners were not
actively writing and sharing and enjoying one another’s poetry.
The encouragement of St. George Tucker and his Williamsburg friends,
followed by a London reprint of The Bermudian and favorable reviews in the
major British periodicals, prompted Nathaniel Tucker to pursue poetry fur-
ther. He settled in England to practice medicine but maintained close ties
with America. At the end of the Revolutionary War, he began writing America
Delivered, an allegorical epic patterned on Paradise Lost. He abandoned the
work but used material from it for a masque celebrating the greatness of
America that he called Columbinus, which he never published.
St. George Tucker was a good poet himself. He wrote such patriotic verse
as Liberty, A Poem on the Independence of America (1788) and political satire, most
notably, The Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar (1796), a pseudonymous work
contemporary readers found so good that they thought Freneau had written
it. But St. George Tucker really excelled when it came to writing vers de société,
that is, poems that capture the strengths and weaknesses of people during their
social interactions. For example, “The Belles of Williamsburg” (1777), which
he co-wrote with James McClurg, circulated in numerous manuscript copies
throughout Virginia, as its readers tried to guess which women it represented.
Even after St. George Tucker turned judge, he continued to write poetry. His
inest poem, “Resignation” (1807), is spoken by an old man, who regrets the
loss of youth and all the wonders it represents as he faces the deterioration
that comes with age. But the speaker of the poem ultimately accepts his age,
realizing his pain will not last much longer and taking delight in the wisdom
of a lifetime. John Adams, for one, adored this poem. He commented: “I know
not which to admire most, its simplicity, its beauty, its pathos, its philosophy,
its morality, its religion, or its sublimity.”48 Although Nathaniel and St. George
Tucker shared a love of poetry, they approached it in very diferent ways. St.
George enjoyed poems of the moment, those that captured special occasions,
satirized political events, or described people he knew. Nathaniel chose more
ambitious subjects, although his ambition outstripped his ability, as his unin-
ished epic America Delivered indicates.

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Timothy Dwight chose the epic form for The Conquest of Canaan (1785),
an eleven-book poem written in heroic couplets. Dwight saw himself as an
American Milton but stopped short of Milton’s use of blank verse. The heroic
verse of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey Dwight found more appropriate. While
Nathaniel Tucker chose a nationalistic theme for America Delivered, Dwight
selected a biblical theme for The Conquest of Canaan, which retells the story
of Joshua, a powerful military hero who leads the chosen people to victory.
Dwight’s biblical epic has numerous ties to American history. The portrayal
of New England as the “new Canaan” had been an important part of Puritan
literature since the early seventeenth century. Furthermore, Joshua seems
remarkably similar to George Washington in both his leadership and his mil-
itary expertise. Throughout The Conquest of Canaan, Dwight makes the anal-
ogy between the biblical story and American history explicit with reference to
many heroes of the Revolutionary War.
Other members of the Connecticut Wits took inspiration from the epic.
Apparently David Humphreys conceived “The Anarchiad,” which he and
other members of his circle wrote together. It appeared serially in the New-
Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine (October 26, 1781–September 13, 1787).
Inspired by mob uprisings and other threats to the fragile new democracy,
“The Anarchiad” presents a series of fragments supposedly from an ancient
epic about a war waged by “Anarch” to restore “Chaos and substantial night”
to his nation. The phrase echoes the concluding lines from The Dunciad (1728–
1743), Pope’s scathing attack on eighteenth-century literary culture, and thus
shows how deeply Pope continued to inl uence early American verse in terms
of both metrical form and satiric tone (RV, p. 515).
Joel Barlow, another member of the Connecticut Wits, wrote the most
renowned epic to emerge from the postwar years. The Vision of Columbus (1787)
or The Columbiad (1807), as Barlow titled his revised and expanded version of
the work, depicts Christopher Columbus as a sad old man dying in prison.
Suddenly, an angelic igure appears – yet another version of the “Genius
of America” – to demonstrate to Columbus what his great discovery had
wrought, to show him the future glories of America. As Nathaniel Tucker had
done in Columbinus, Barlow creates a gallery of allegorical characters, many
derived from indigenous American mythology.49 Like The Conquest of Canaan
and “The Anarchiad,” The Vision of Columbus expresses important ideas circu-
lating in the intellectual and political worlds of post-Revolutionary America.
All of these early American epics, ambitious though they may be, are more
important as cultural artifacts than as literary art.

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Barlow was much better when he turned from epic to mock-epic. “The
Hasty-Pudding,” which he wrote in France in 1793 and irst published in New
York Magazine in 1796, is his inest poem. Written in heroic couplets, “The
Hasty-Pudding” reinforces the debt Revolutionary poetry owes to Alexander
Pope.50 Although its form aligns “The Hasty-Pudding” with the Augustan age,
its content, especially its celebration of the folk customs and foodways of
rural America, shares much with the nascent Romantic era. The speaker of
the poem is an American in Paris. Homesick, he longs for some hasty pud-
ding, the kind of cornmeal porridge he grew up eating in America. In the irst
of three cantos, the poet traces the history of hasty pudding, going back to
pre-Columbian times. This history constitutes a characteristic device of much
long Augustan verse: the progress piece. The link to pre-Columbian times lets
Barlow imbue the poem with original American mythology.
In its second canto, the poem shifts from the scene of consumption to the
scene of production as it describes the rituals of planting, cultivating, and har-
vesting corn. Throughout this canto, the poet stresses the value of hard work,
which comes to fruition during harvest time. The third canto paints a picture
of rural harmony, ranging from the joys of youth, to the courtship games that
bring young men and women together, and to the happiness and productiv-
ity of a husband and wife working together. It ends with a close-up of a bowl
illed with hasty pudding. Emphasizing how milk can enhance the taste of
hasty pudding, the poet even ofers a paean to the cow. He demonstrates the
contentment that comes with recapturing the simple pleasures of youth.

Conclusion
Reviewing a critical study of Revolutionary verse for Poetry in 1916, Harriet
Monroe said of the era, “It was a period which produced full-grown patriots,
but its poets were extremely sophomoric.”51 Given the radical new approaches
she was promoting in Poetry, her disdain for early American verse is under-
standable, but she was by no means the irst to criticize early American patri-
otic verse. Continuing his appreciation of St. George Tucker’s “Resignation,”
John Adams remarked, “I had rather be the author of it than of Joel Barlow’s
Columbiad.”52 Adams’s remark is essentially a call to reprioritize early American
verse. Those weighty national epics may be attempts at great poetry, but they
are not as successful as some of the poignant lyric poems the Revolutionary
poets produced, many of which started as modest poems circulating in man-
uscript. Although those epics are seldom read now, the impulse they relect
has continued. The long poem has become one of the deining features of

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American poetry, as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” and Herman Melville’s

Clarel testify. Even the poets Monroe championed in Poetry turned to long
poems to prove their poetic mettle. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Ezra Pound’s
Cantos, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson – all can trace their roots to
Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus. The impulse to deine the meaning of the
United States within an epic poem is as old as the United States itself.

Notes
1. Thomas Whatley, The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies, and the
Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered (London: for J. Wilkie, 1765), p. 109.
2. J. A. Leo Lemay, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and
Magazines and in the Major English Magazines through 1765 (Worcester, Mass.:
American Antiquarian Society, 1970), nos. 2042 and 2044.
3. Kevin J. Hayes, The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), p. 56.
4. Edward Gray, “William Almy to Elisha Story,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts
Historical Society 55 (1921–1922), p. 237.
5. Lemay, Calendar, no. 257.
6. Lemay, Calendar, nos. 2055–57.
7. Benjamin Church, The Devil Undone: The Life and Poetry of Benjamin Church,
1734–1778, ed. Jefrey B. Walker (New York: Arno Press, 1982), pp. 157–58.
8. Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jeferson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 532.
9. Church, Devil Undone, p. 177.
10. J. A. Leo Lemay, “Sixty-Eight Additional Writers of the Colonial South,”
in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (ed.), A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern
Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), p. 339.
11. [Thomas Burke], “The Repeal,” in Frank Moore (ed.), Songs and Ballads of the
American Revolution (New York: Hurst, 1855), p. 28.
12. Burke, “The Repeal,” p. 29.
13. Burke, “The Repeal,” p. 31.
14. Richard Walser, “Alexander Martin, Poet,” Early American Literature 6 (1971),
pp. 55–58.
15. Kenneth Silverman, “Two Unpublished Colonial Verses,” Bulletin of the New
York Public Library 71 (1967), pp. 62–63.
16. Mary Bayard Clarke (ed.), Wood-Notes; or, Carolina Carols: A Collection of North
Carolina Poetry, 2 vols. (Raleigh: W. L. Pomeroy, 1854), vol. 2, pp. 235–37.
17. Francis Hopkinson, A Collection of Psalm Tunes, with a Few Anthems and Hymns
Some of Them Entirely New, for the Use of the United Churches of Christ Church and
St. Peter’s Church in Philadelphia ([Philadelphia: Printed by William Dunlap],
1763), pp. 169–73.

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18. Jason Shafer, “Early American Drama,” in Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Early American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp. 463–64.
19. Nathaniel Evans, George Washington’s Copy of Poems on Several Occasions, ed.
Andrew Breen Myers (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), p. 109.
20. Kevin J. Hayes, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1996), pp. 36–37.
21. Anne M. Ousterhout, The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth
Graeme Fergusson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004),
pp. 111–12.
22. Evans, George Washington’s Copy, p. 149.
23. Evans, George Washington’s Copy, p. 154.
24. Phillis Wheatley, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 53.
25. The Art of Poetry on a New Plan: Illustrated with a Great Variety of Examples from
the Best English Poets, 2 vols. (London: for J. Newbery, 1762), vol. 1, p. 192.
26. James C. Kilgore, “The Case for Black Literature,” Negro Digest, July 1969,
p. 66.
27. Lerone Bennett, Jr., “The Black Pioneer Period,” Ebony, October 1970, p. 50.
28. David S. Shields (ed.), American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 477.
29. Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin,
2001), pp. 152–53.
30. Robert Dale Parker, Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of Early American
Indian Poetry to 1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p.
48; Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American
and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003),
p. 78.
31. Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership
and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 235.
32. John Trumbull, The Poetical Works of John Trumbull, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn.:
Samuel G. Goodrich, 1820), vol. 1, p. 209.
33. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006–2009), vol. 2, pp. 550–53.
34. Colin Wells, “Revolutionary Verse,” in Hayes (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of
Early American Literature, pp. 508–9. This essay will be cited subsequently in the
text as RV.
35. [John Trumbull], A New Proclamation! (Hartford, Conn.: Ebenezer Watson,
1775), pp. 5–6.
36. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931;
New York: New York Review Books, 2004), pp. 37–69.

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37. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Modern

Library, 1981), p. 159.
38. Silverman, “Two Unpublished,” p. 62.
39. John Trumbull, The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull: The Progress of Dulness
and M’Fingal, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962),
p. 141.
40. Philip Freneau, A Voyage to Boston (New York: John Anderson, 1775), p. 8. This
collection will be cited subsequently in the text as VB.
41. Quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, “Freneau, Philip Morin (1752–1832),” in H. C. G.
Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
60 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 20, pp. 976–77.
42. Philip Freneau, The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution, ed.
Fred Lewis Pattee, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: University Library, 1902–1907), vol.
3, pp. 306–07.
43. Lewis Leary, The Literary Career of Nathaniel Tucker, 1750–1807 (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1951), pp. 10–13.
44. “A Course of Lectures,” Virginia Gazette, January 2, 1772, p. 3.
45. Hayes, Road to Monticello, p. 314.
46. Nathaniel Tucker, The Complete Published Poems of Nathaniel Tucker Together
with Columbinus: A Mask, ed. Lewis Leary (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles
and Reprints, 1973), p. 33.
47. Hayes, Road to Monticello, p. 353.
48. Quoted in Charles W. Coleman, Jr., “St. Memin Portraits: St. George Tucker,
Judge of the U.S. District Court for Virginia,” Magazine of American History 7
(1881), p. 218.
49. J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Contexts and Themes of ‘The Hasty-Pudding,’ ” Early
American Literature 17 (1982), p. 9.
50. Lemay, “Contexts,” p. 8.
51. [Harriet Monroe], “The Spirit of ’76 in Poetry,” review of The Spirit of the
American Revolution, as Revealed in the Poetry of the Period, by Samuel White
Patterson, Poetry 8 (1916), p. 267.
52. Quoted in Coleman, “St. Memin Portraits,” p. 218.

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*
A N E W NAT I O N : P O E T RY
F RO M 1 8 0 0 T O 1 9 0 0
 Chapter 7
Asserting a National Voice
Frank Gado

With the Revolution, our literature acquired a dramatically new role and pur-
pose: having invented a nation, we were now to invent the terms of its dis-
tinctive expression. The noblest literary pedigree rested in poetry, and the
eighteenth century, true to its penchant for taxonomic hierarchies, exalted
the epic as its highest form. To be sure, Americans had written commendable
lyrical poems, but these were deemed modest accomplishments. Even after
a century of independence, the eminent critic E. C. Stedman would lament
that the country’s best poets excelled in the lyric, a genre he said suited limited
ambitions. True grandeur, he asserted, would arrive “when poets of the upper
cast desire to forego their studies and brief lyrical l ights . . . to produce the
composite and heroic works that rank as masterpieces.”1 Only the emergence
of an American epic would certify our credibility as a literary power and, more
important, fortify our sense of nationhood.
This compulsion both inspired and crippled. As Philip Freneau mocked
at the outset, “Bards of huge fame in every hamlet rise, / Each (in idea) of
Virgilian size: / Even beardless lads a rhyming knack display – / Iliads begun,
and inished in a day!”2 The Aeneid had the major inl uence, principally because
it pointed toward the creation of the Roman republic – the very model for the
American political experiment – and in Columbus these bards perceived an
analog to Aeneas as the conveyer of a declining civilization to a new land.
Curiously, prior to independence Columbus had been far to the back of the
public mind. He was a Catholic, after all, who had sailed for the politically
repressive Spanish monarchy – the counterpart to the “tyrannical” England
that the American colonists had insisted should treat them as equal subjects,
entitled to parliamentary representation. Rather inconveniently, too, he had
failed to recognize that this “new world” he discovered was not merely a new
side to the old world of the Orient, and he never set foot on the continental
mainland or on soil that would become the United States. Nevertheless, the
new nation needed a mythology of its founding that rose above a dispute

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over taxes, shipping rights, and the participation of a minority in determining

legislation, and so, regardless of the incongruence with historical fact, the
Genoese navigator was pressed into service as avatar of a new age, as agent
for a divinely ordered destiny. “Columbian” suddenly became a synonym for
“American,” and his name bespeckled the map. That he would also assume the
role of epic hero was almost ineluctable.
Besides many shorter poems invoking Columbus, at least three epics
bore the title The Columbiad, and several others were planned but aborted.
Overshadowing all the rest, however, was Joel Barlow’s. The young man had
already resolved to vie for immortality by writing a major poem when he went
of to the newly established Dartmouth College. Soon transferring to Yale, he
drew close to Timothy Dwight, then a tutor who had completed (but not yet
published) his epic, The Conquest of Canaan. By 1779, while teaching at Dwight’s
school in Northampton, Massachusetts, Barlow had decided on Columbus as
his subject but felt unprepared to engage the full scope of an epic. Instead, he
chose the scheme of a prophetic vision, a fairly common genre of that period.
Eight years later, he had composed the nine books of The Vision of Columbus,
describing the broken Great Discoverer, imprisoned by the Spanish crown,
being raised from his cell by an angel to witness the wondrous future born of
his four voyages. The poem seemed to augur a brilliant career. In its irst ive
years, ive editions were printed, including one in England.
Over the next two decades, Barlow continued to write poetry – includ-
ing arguably his best work, “The Hasty-Pudding” and “Advice to a Raven in
Russia” – but his focus ixed on foreign turmoil. His political treatises led to his
being named a citizen of France after its revolution, and as American consul
in Algiers from 1795 to 1797, he negotiated an important treaty with Tripoli.
Even so, the intention to elevate The Vision into a true epic persisted – in the
preface to The Columbiad (1807), he refers to the earlier poem as a “sketch”
for the grander design. The extent of the changes was notable. A long prose
“dissertation” in the earlier version recounting Peruvian history and laud-
ing the Incan leader Manco Copac was condensed and rendered in couplets,
thereby more closely stitching the story of another continent to the epic tapes-
try but at the cost of thematic incoherence. Similarly, previously abbreviated
accounts of English settlement, French Canada, and the military history of
the Revolutionary War become a progression of dioramas lacking connection
to Columbus as the martyr to a vision of future greatness.
Ironically, Barlow’s ambition undercut his talent, for once he departs from
the tedium of long patches of merely descriptive couplets and of labored valor
in the commemorative battle scenes – elements he apparently thought epic

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form required – his passion for human liberty excites the poem to a higher
level of visionary fervor than in its 1787 precursor. The angel of The Vision was
little more than a tour guide; reconceived here as Hesper, the genius of the
Americas charged to defend the New World’s claims to glory, he is a dramatic
presence. When Atlas, the genius of Africa (named for the Atlas Mountains),
hurls Hesper’s idealism back into his teeth, angrily reminding him of the
horrors accompanying the enlightenment extolled by civilization, Hesper
is stripped of his pretensions. The African sharpens his attack: “Enslave my
tribes!” when nature has “cast all men equal”? Human equality commands
common justice: “Their ibres, feelings, reasoning powers the same, / Like
wants await them, like desires inlame.”3
This stern castigation of Hesper’s blithe defense of liberty is, of course, a
challenge to the reader as well. If America is to fulill its prophecy to lead the
world toward a millennial ideal, it must resolve to “purge all privations from
[its] liberal code,” primarily by abolishing slavery. Barlow’s poem elaborates
the same argument advanced in his earlier essay, “Advice to the Privileged
Orders of Europe.” No American writer of the federal period preaches our
national exceptionalism with greater conviction, or, contrary to Washington’s
counsel in his Farewell Address, exhorts the new nation more ardently to meet
our internationalist obligations. Our principles of equality, free elections, and
federalism – a “holy Triad” – will prove a beacon for mankind that “should
forever shine.” The power of “Almighty Freedom,” he concludes, will not
only transform humanity’s political institutions, sow prosperity, and foster
pan-national citizenship but also release the imagination.4 Technology will
master the Mississippi’s loods, create canals to permit ships to cut between
continents, and invent machines for submarine and aerial travel. And the peo-
ple of “Columbia” will take their destined precedence in arts and literature.
Matching the optimism for his nation, Barlow invested in a lavish printing
of The Columbiad, conident it would assure his fortune and everlasting fame.
He grossly miscalculated. Sales of the deluxe edition fell far short of expecta-
tions, and although other editions, including printings in France and Britain,
fared somewhat better, critics everywhere disparaged it; it was said that few
who bought the book turned many of its pages. Columbianism as the central
motif for treating America’s dramatic entry into history had already crested.
Virginian Daniel Bryan was no less visionary than Barlow in his opposition
to slavery and his almost mystical devotion to the union. He, too, clung to
neoclassical conventions in poetry. And Columbianism echoes in his constant
reference to the United States as Columbia. The Adventures of Daniel Boone
(1813), however, signaled a new direction – literally – for the epic impulse,

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looking west instead of east for his American apotheosis. In 1784, John Filson’s
popular account of Daniel Boone had presented a living symbol of the irre-
pressible spread of settlers through the mountain barrier, but it took three
decades for our literature to seize irmly on the frontiersman as the national
hero. That is Bryan’s singular distinction. His epic unspools from the moment
in Creation between Order’s emergence from Chaos and the appearance of
light, but its plot proceeds from Firmamental Hall on the summit of Allegany,
where the angels who tend to terrestrial matters are meeting. Enterprise rises
and nominates “The Hero,” Boone, to explore and settle Kentucky. His can-
didate, the angel says, is so tender “his soul revolts / From needless cruelty, to
meanest life. / He would not crush with wanton tred a ly, / Nor e’en with
useless agonies of pain / Torment the poisonous snake.”5 Yet his slaying of
panthers and bears in his mission to render Kentucky safe for civilized folk
shows he is no St. Francis, and his rescue of a kidnapped maid he then delivers
to her iancé proves his virtue. The rough outline of the frontier adventure
that James Fenimore Cooper would exploit is clearly in place here, not only
in the rescue of an imperiled damsel by a natural man but also in the more
important tragic theme of the hero who, in blazing the way for civilization,
destroys the very Edenic wilderness he loves.
Unlike Cooper, however, Bryan skirts the compelling irony in this essential
contradiction. His Boone consists entirely of deeds: no consciousness develops
as a stage for dramatic resolution of meaning. More damaging, Boone’s role
as the roughhewn new democratic force does not conjoin with the author’s
involvement of angels and divine cosmological purpose cast in orotund dec-
lamations. At times, The Adventures of Daniel Boone veers close to spooing the
epic it purports to be. Bryan would have somewhat more success in the next
decade with “The Lay of Gratitude” (1826), written to honor Lafayette during
his visit to America, and “The Appeal for Sufering Genius” (1826), a plea to
aford artists the means to survive, but the fruit of his aspirations never rose
above tumid oration.
James Kirke Paulding, a much superior writer, also saw the West as the
key to what set the United States apart, and for the better part of a decade
his reputation ranked among the highest of his generation. No one defended
our literary nationalism against British scorn more pugnaciously or was more
steadfast in scolding British haughtiness. And no American before him had
proved competent in as many genres. He advanced the art of the short story,
won praise as a satirist, wrote four novels and an epistolary iction about life
in the South, and crafted a lampoon of Davy Crockett for the stage that, in
two diferent versions, enjoyed huge success in America and England. Almost

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perversely, however, it is the rare literary historian who would grant credit to
his poems, despite his having thought himself primarily a poet. And indeed, it
was his mockery of Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel in his audacious
The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle (1813) that established his reputation.
The Backwoodsman (1818) employs none of the comic touches displayed in
his other verse and some of his iction. His venture into epic called for utmost
seriousness. Although consideration of Paulding has generally restricted him
to the Knickerbocker conines of New York City, his ambitions were national
in scope. A fervent supporter of Andrew Jackson and a close friend of his
neighbor Martin Van Buren, he ofered his epic as a model for drawing the
westering frontier into our literary consciousness. The epic opening lines aim
directly at lofty European conventions: his tale, he announces, will be “sim-
ple” and obedient to a “humbler” muse, a manifestation of democratic pride.
The “glorious feats” of “steel-clad knights, renowned in other days,” he snick-
ers, would today be crimes leading to the gallows, and he disdains “the stately
dames of royal birth, / That scorn’d communion with dull things of earth.”
Similarly, he rejects fairies and preternatural fright igures.6 Instead, his epic
will exalt an ordinary man, Basil, driven by poverty from his New York farm to
the fertile Western soil that will sustain his family in dignity.
Scenic description and a protagonist meant to be an exemplar of ordinar-
iness, however, are unpromising basic elements in a genre virtually deined
by the extraordinary, and emphasis on Basil’s valor through mere multiplica-
tion of perils survived soon proves wearying. Inevitably, despite the prefatory
advertisement that this would be a democratic epic celebrating the common
man, Paulding bowed to the necessity of an antagonist to Basil’s mission.
The reader enters Paulding’s narrative squarely on the side of the white
settlers, propelled by fate “To push the red-man from his solitude, / And
plant reinement in the forest rude” (TB, p. 62). The bloody process of west-
ern expansion presumes that the establishment of civilization, serenity, and
order requires the vanquishment of the savage. Midway through the poem,
however, this perspective inverts: although the Indians previously character-
ized as “wily” and “murderous” lose none of their ferocity, they are now cast
as victims rebelling against their fate. Launched as a tribute, the epic at this
point becomes a tragedy. Drawing from the recent history of the Indian Wars,
Paulding introduces Tenskwatawa, a sachem better known among whites as
the Prophet, who totally rejects any reconciliation with the United States. In
a three-day alcohol-induced trance, the Great Spirit communicates with him
through a vision in which the tribes’ lost hegemony is restored. This vision
inlames pan-tribal war against white settlements and federal troops that

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intensiies until subdued by the government’s superior power at Tippecanoe.

Paulding, however, elaborates his version of Tenskwatawa beyond what his-
tory records. For all his preaching vengeance against the whites and the hypoc-
risy of their God, his more profound quarrel, ultimately, is with the injustice
of the Great Spirit, who has abandoned his people and been indiferent to the
destruction of their culture.
The Prophet’s complexity and messianic zeal elevate The Backwoodsman
above all other epics of this period, but his presence also creates a problem
for the author. That the whites are guilty of every wrong the Prophet lists
is beyond dispute, yet history prevents justice from prevailing. Not only
must the Indians lose, but those who evict them from their ancestral terri-
tory must emerge as heroes if the poet is to remain true to his declared pur-
pose. To square this circle, Paulding employs a climactic encounter between
the Prophet and an old boatman preaching the Gospel who declares he has
come “to lead thee to bright paths of peace and joy” through the transform-
ing beneits of civilization. The Prophet sneers at such efeminacy. To be “the
product of your Christian love,” he says, would be “of every attribute of man-
hood shorn”; echoing the code of the Old Testament retribution, he demands
nothing less than murderous repayment of the white man’s evil (TB, p. 125).
Nevertheless, the missionary’s teaching of love has struck a chord of com-
mon humanity: in an ironic reversal, the Prophet spares his enemy, boasting
of greater “Christian” virtue than the Christians who have slaughtered his
people.
Paulding thus has it both ways: the whites, despite their treachery, are evan-
gels of redemption and progress; the Indians, despite their cruelty, are inher-
ently good people provoked by evil. As the war moves further west, Paulding
laments the senseless carnage while stressing the valor on both sides: among
the dead and dying, a German mercenary and an Irish immigrant who fought
for a share of paradise in the New World embrace their equally brave fallen
Indian adversaries in knightly brotherhood. The inale takes this heroic equi-
librium a step further with the introduction of a scapegoat: a Briton (imported
from history) who, after having fought honorably for his country, betrays his
race. As the Prophet concedes the defeat of his cause, he turns on the Briton,
accusing him of having taught the tribes to scalp their enemies, to dishonor
their word, and to practice deceit; then, with the last of his strength, he plunges
his knife into the Briton’s chest. Symbolically, this act of retribution clears the
way for eventual reconciliation with the good settlers. In a coda, Basil sud-
denly reappears, and we are informed of his rise to “judge, general, congress-
man, and half a score of goodly oices,” while his progeny prosper in an era

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of peace (TB, pp. 173–76). With the extirpation of the serpent, the promise of
Eden has been restored.
Despite its poetic deiciencies (not the least of which is its language), The
Backwoodsman extracts a major story from events now generally ignored and
invests it with mythic power. Paulding saw in the Prophet an indomitable
will, a “No in thunder” that bears the potential for tragedy in the develop-
ment of American literature – and indeed, much of him will be reborn in
Melville’s Ahab. An isolato, the Prophet “forsakes the love of woman, glory,
or of gain. . . . All were condemned in one intense desire, / That scorched his
brain and heart with quenchless ire” (TB, p. 91). In pursuit of human dignity,
he ironically disavows community and all tempering mercies. “Sever’d from
all his copper-colour’d race,” he is a creature of darkness, reborn from “a dis-
mal glen whose deep recess, / The Sun’s life-giving ray never did bless” (TB,
p. 88). The similarity is at times uncanny. He, too, is a “blasted tree” that draws
down the scarring lightning from heaven to ignite deiance. And in embracing
the destruction of those he champions as preferable to humiliating acquies-
cence, he exhibits the Promethean pride that will doom the Pequod: “Great
Spirit! ev’n in this my dying hour, / I do defy thee, fearless of thy power. / Be
it thy want of might, or lack of will, / Or one or both, I do defy thee still” (TB,
p. 168). Poor Basil’s Rotarian envoy seems pitiably sallow by comparison.
Given Paulding’s close ties to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson,
who, two decades later, would force the Cherokee onto the Trail of Tears, it
is not reasonable to read this epic as providing an absolution for the sins of
western expansion. Instead, the Prophet’s inal words warn of the nightmare
being brooded by injustice:
Hear my last adjuration – Spirit, hear!
Let slip a race of powerful demons forth
From the deep bosom of the blasted earth,
To wage eternal vengeance in our name,
To wrap the world, in one wide wasting lame,
Sweep from their lands usurp’d the white man’s fame,
And plant still bloodier monsters in their place.
Concluding with “one last dying curse,” he calls on the Spirit to “Bring thou
one half of that detested race / Against the other, marshall’d face to face” until
they have murdered each other – a prophecy of the Civil War forty-three years
before shots would be ired at Fort Sumter (TB, pp. 169–70).
While Paulding was writing The Backwoodsman, another Knickerbocker,
Robert Sands, was collaborating on an epic about an Indian subject with his
college friend, James Wallis Eastburn. After Eastburn’s early death left Sands

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to complete the task, the copyright for Yamoyden was issued to the deceased
minister and his unidentiied “friend.” The long narrative poem unexpectedly
proved both popular and, in its subject matter, inl uential. The historical con-
tent concerns Metacom, the “King Philip” who, in 1675, rallied New England’s
tribes to wage a bloody war against the colonists, believing that they had
murdered his brother, but its story is essentially a romance about the interra-
cial pairing of the young chief Yamoyden and Nora Fitzgerald, the Christian
daughter of an irascible Puritan who had denounced their union. Because
Yamoyden opposes violence, Metacom arranges to kidnap the couple’s baby
daughter. This sends Nora in search of her child while ighting of visions of
the grisly horrors the girl may be sufering; at the same time, Fitzgerald leads
a white rescue party for Nora, who is herself being pursued by the Mohegan
assassin recruited by Metacom. But once the Mohegan inds Nora, her beauty
converts him from his purpose, and they paddle frantically to Yamoyden. As
they proceed from their canoe, the counselor of peace is ironically caught in
the middle of hand-to-hand combat between an Indian band and the whites
directed by Fitzgerald. A tomahawk crashes toward Fitzgerald’s head, but his
son-in-law delects it into his own chest. As Yamoyden lies dying, Fitzgerald
anoints him with holy chrism, and Nora clasps her husband’s hand. Yet another
death extinguishes the lights: “The father gazed in anguish wild, / He prest the
bosom of his child, / There beat no pulse of life.”7
The lovers’ story obviously condemns bigotry, yet Yamoyden’s Christian
self-sacriice also implies vindication of the whites’ religious values – a ques-
tion not raised by the course of preceding events. Moreover, there is no epic
dimension to the mixed marriage or the threat to the family’s lives. And the
authors were apparently alert to the deiciency. Contradicting their portrayal
of Metacom as a personiication of evil, a coda presents him as a tragic king,
more worthy of a crown than “the breed of palaces.” Instead of advocating
assimilation or brotherhood, the poem ends by restating the wrongs done to
the Native peoples and, by implication, suggests that the literary exaltation
of the defeated race will become the duty of our national writers. Metacom’s
“champion,” Sands predicts, will be acclaimed “a sacred bard” everywhere
that “Albion’s tongue is heard, or Albion’s songs resound.”8
Despite the brief term of its success, Yamoyden marks a shift to the nation’s
westward destiny as a deining subject of our national literature. America
still may have wanted to see itself as reviving classical principles – in 1824,
arguing for cultural nationalism in the North American Review, the renowned
Harvard classicist Edward Everett urged our poets to focus on “comparison
of the heroic fathers of Greece with the natives of our woods” – but the

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international tide of Romanticism was washing over the merlons of a classi-

cally educated elite.9 Yamoyden, even more than The Backwoodsman, is essen-
tially a verse romance, and the ambivalence at its core about westward expan-
sion was soon to migrate to the novel. For the immediate future, it would
unfold in Cooper’s Leatherstocking cycle, not in verse.

*
For Washington Allston and Richard Henry Dana, as for some others in the
camp striving for literary nationalism, epic glory was a false goal. Both were
intent on an aesthetic reorientation, not regression, and circumstances exposed
them to the same forces of change. Allston, although South Carolina born, spent
his childhood and early youth in Newport, Rhode Island, virtually in the same
household as the Channing and Dana children, then in the care of their grand-
father, William Ellery. Allston’s close ties with Edmund Dana (Richard Henry
Dana’s brother) continued at Harvard, where, as admirers of Robert Southey
and Ann Radclife, they rebelled against the dominance of neoclassicism in the
school’s intellectual life. After graduation, Allston left behind the provincialism
of his native country, irst to study painting under Benjamin West at London’s
Royal Academy and then to immerse himself in European art on a two-year
tour, focusing on Paris and Rome. In 1809, now married to Anne Channing, he
returned to England and, for the better part of the next decade, enjoyed the com-
panionship of the Romantic poets. After his wife died, however, he yearned for
her family and Massachusetts. A dozen years after his return, he married Martha
Dana, another of William Ellery’s grandchildren and the sister of the Dana
brothers. Although chiely recognized as a painter in the United States, “the
American Titian,” as he was called, was also an accomplished poet, far surpass-
ing what his contemporary countrymen’s sparse attention would indicate. The
leading British poets were more generous, recognizing him as a true genius.
As cerebral in his poetry as in his art, Allston explored the nature of aes-
thetic efects, in course coining the term “objective correlative” (to be made
famous a century later by his fellow Harvard alumnus and expatriate T. S.
Eliot.) In his own writing, his espousal of the Romantics inclined him toward
the sonnet, and he surpassed all previous American poets in the form. Among
the nineteen he inished, those responding to particular paintings stand out.
“On a Falling Group in the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo” summons
“the thought of space interminable”; Raphael’s Three Angels before the Tent
of Abraham evokes the idea “of Motion ceaseless, Unity complete”; Tibaldi’s
On Seeing the Picture of Æolus stirs him to feel “Like one who, reading magic
words, receives / The gift of intercourse with worlds unknown.”10 His sonnets

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illustrate the contesting appeals of reason and emotion, and he especially

favors images of motion and imbalance, because they sharpen awareness of
the shimmering boundary between earth and transcendence. “On Rembrandt;
Occasioned by His Picture of Jacob’s Dream” fastens on very realistic “vision-
ary scenes” that “Yet in their random shadowings give birth / To thoughts and
things of worlds to come / And ill the soul, and strike the reason dumb” (WA,
p. 152). Perhaps his most provocative critique occurs in “On the Luxembourg
Gallery,” a meditation on Rubens, whom he once lauded as a liar he would
rather emulate “than tell the truth in the poor, tame manner in which some
painters do.”
O Rubens, thy mysterious art,
The charm that vexes, yet enslaves the heart!
Thy lawless style, from timid systems free,
Impetuous rolling like a troubled sea,
High o’er the rocks of reason’s lofty verge
Impending hangs; yet, ere the foaming surge
Breaks o’er the bound, the rel uent ebb of taste
Back from the shore impels the watery waste.
(WA, p. 153)

Like this exemplar of the baroque, Allston relects a training in classical

restraint on the cusp of yielding to the dynamism of emotion. The sonnet
explicates a painting that he experiences as a dramatic clash of opposing ideas
and instincts. Perhaps no single poem so tersely captures the impending trans-
formation in aesthetic concepts.
When Allston met Coleridge in Rome, the relatively unsophisticated young
American found a mentor. Earlier, his enthusiasm for Romantic ideas notwith-
standing, he had looked broadly to the past for formal models. “The Sylphs
of the Seasons,” which lent its title to his irst collection (1813), employs the
Scottish stanza, invented at the turn of the sixteenth century and in common
use since the beginning of the eighteenth. His couplets, as in “Two Painters”
and “The Paint-Kings,” ring of the age of Pope in their wit, and seventeenth-
century strains emerge in such playful poems as “Thought,” “A Smile,” “Art,”
and “The Mad Lover at the Grave of His Mistress.” At times, he indulges in
doggerel, sharply scolding bad taste: in “Eccentricity,” for example, he makes
sport of several recent fads (including the raging popularity of Childe Harold
and of the Graveyard Poets). After Rome, however, a Romantic aesthetic
reigns: sentiment combines with fancy. “The Angel and the Nightingale,” per-
haps his best poem, presents a personal review of his artistic life, from the
Wordsworthian opening lines of part II – “In childhood’s dawn what bliss it is

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to live, / To breathe, to move, and to the senses give / Their irst fresh travel
o’er this glorious Earth!” – to the achievement of success and fame, and to the
poisonous jealousy that then leaves him isolated, yet still pure, innocent, and
fulilled in his vocation.11
Richard Henry Dana, Sr., now remembered mostly as the father of the
author of Two Years before the Mast, deserves far greater recognition as a metic-
ulous editor and a pivotal igure in the history of American poetry. Dana spent
his adolescence warmed by the foment of the Monthly Anthology Club, a
group of young Federalists in the Boston area eager to promote a nationalist
literature within the bounds of taste and tradition as a bulwark against abuses
by a democratic culture. Like his brother Edmund and Washington Allston,
members of the club’s inner circle, Richard protested against slavish adher-
ence to classical and neoclassical texts, which were to be learned by rote. A
recalcitrant student, he was expelled from Harvard. But his literary passions
persisted, and after a short turn at the law, he joined in founding the North
American Review, a reincarnation of the Anthology Club publication devoted
to fostering an American literature. Editorial duty honed his critical views.
His review of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets created an immediate stir by
arguing for Shakespeare’s superiority over Pope; soon he had established him-
self as the foremost advocate of Wordsworth and Romanticism in America.
But Dana’s zeal caused a rift among the Review’s editors, and although he
remained in Boston, in 1821 he launched another periodical, The Idle Man,
published out of New York.
Dana hoped New York’s larger population and more receptive citizens
would enable the periodical to succeed suiciently to sustain him in a literary
career. Sadly, neither contributions by Allston and William Cullen Bryant nor
Dana’s own well-executed essays and novellas generated enough interest to
warrant its survival. But then, at the age of thirty-eight, Dana began writing
poetry, and suddenly the literary career that had eluded him lourished briely,
but around 1833 his creative production faltered. Perhaps he could not meet
the high standards he had set for himself: James Russell Lowell, commenting
not altogether in good humor on Dana’s inlexible convictions, rhymed that
his fellow Bostonian was “so well aware of how things should be done / That
his own works displease him before they’re begun.”12 Other factors may have
interfered as well. Although he attributed an almost miraculous recovery from
years of fragile health to his having taken up writing poetry (and he would
continue hale and it until his death at ninety-two), his mental state over the
years declined into an increasingly bitter pessimism. A religious conserva-
tive, he took issue with the Transcendentalists, even though his emphasis on

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spirit had much in common with their views. The nation’s preoccupation with
building wealth fed his despair. And the popularity of such poets as Charles
Sprague, whose facile commissioned products earned many times more than
Dana’s carefully wrought verse, especially stoked his resentment. Yet despite
his alienation, he was a signiicant force in the evolution of American poetry.
Rufus Griswold dedicated his landmark anthology, The Poets and Poetry of
America (1842), to Allston, but he chose Dana as one of the ive great poets
(along with Halleck, Bryant, Longfellow, and – particularly galling to Dana –
Sprague). To be sure, Griswold’s authority would diminish, yet he was not
alone in awarding Dana a high place.
Most commentary on Dana’s poetry agrees that “The Dying Raven” tops
the rest. Its simple language subtly transforms the dying black bird who has
survived the bleak winter into a metaphor for faith through sufering as nec-
essary to life’s eventual renewal. Dana would never surpass it in rich, exact
description, and in the cadence of its phrasing, which anticipates his fellow
New Englander, Robert Frost. His most popular work, however, displays a
quite diferent appeal. A verse narrative, “The Buccaneer” tells a shocking
story: Matthew Lee, believing himself above conscience, commits murder,
but the magniicent horse Lee steals from his victim later carries the killer to
his death in the sea where his master had perished. Clearly a Gothic extension
from Dana’s psychological iction in The Idle Man, this fanciful confection of
retributive justice probably fed Poe the idea for his irst tale, “Metzengerstein.”
That said, however, there is nothing in Dana’s rendering to show verse’s advan-
tage over prose. Dana’s own favorite was “The Changes of Home,” which is
similar in theme but not in message to Wordsworth’s “Michael.” Returning
to his origins, where he inds only unhappy outcomes, the poet rejects “the
old, familiar things” for “the wide and foreign lands . . . that suit the lonely
soul” and sets of “for the dashing sea, the broad, full sail / And fare thee well,
my own, green, quiet Vale.”13 This simple concluding choice hardly justiies
the lengthy detail of the visits that precede it, however, and one must won-
der whether there is a cost in cutting ties to his past. Occasionally, Dana’s
gloom lifts, delightfully, as in “First Love” and at the start of “Factitious Life”
(in which he complains that, instead of inclining their ears to words of love,
maids now prefer the talk of materialistic philosophers), but he seems unable
to long resist excursions into gaumy Swedenborgianism.

*
While Boston, via a small intellectual band clustered at the North American
Review and Harvard, was driving the debate over a national expression in

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literature, New York City consolidated its position as the cultural capital. The
fact that Connecticut native Elihu Smith, who assembled the irst anthology
of American poetry (1793), established himself in New York, not Boston, indi-
cates the way the cultural lines of force would develop. By the turn of the cen-
tury, New York City had the largest population, the most wealth, the greatest
sophistication, and the most dynamic mix of people. Some of its writers were
natives – or nearly so; others were naturally drawn from the small towns of
neighboring states to wage their careers. Unlike other cities, New York ofered
a vibrant array of literary and social clubs in which creative artists mingled
and tested their concepts. From Italian opera to the Hudson River School in
art and from novels to new periodicals, what emanated from New York caught
attention in the other major cities; the low of inl uence in the other direction
was minimal.
No more interesting example of New York’s prol igate talent begs for notice
than John Howard Payne, now remembered (if at all) as the author of “Home,
Sweet Home.” Although born in 1791 in lower Manhattan, he grew up in
Boston. At fourteen he returned to New York to work as a bookkeeper, but
within three months he launched his own newspaper reporting on the local
stage, and in February, six weeks later, his comedy, Julia, opened with a nota-
ble cast at the city’s principal theater. The quality of the adolescent’s mind so
impressed William Coleman, the owner-editor of the New-York Evening Post,
that he secured a sponsor for Payne’s college education and what Coleman was
sure would be great public service in the republic. Payne had little patience for
academic studies, however: after two years at Union College, he left for New
York to begin an astonishingly successful acting career, and then for London and
Paris, where he added translation and playwriting to his pursuits. His biogra-
pher credits him with being only a “minor poet,” and both literary histories and
anthologies ignore this aspect of his work, yet no American of his generation
showed greater potential. Surveying “the annals of letters,” Coleman judged
him uniquely gifted: “Boys have sometimes appeared who wrote pretty, nay
good, verses at an early age; but nothing can be found in the youthful eforts of
Cowley, Pope, Milton and Chatterton evincing a [superior] strength of mind.”14
Most of Payne’s unpublished writings from his late teens and the heady
years of his early stage success have presumably been lost, but what has sur-
vived is truly remarkable. An untitled poem, apparently written on his river
trip north to college (although published in 1813), would suggest indebtedness
to Poe’s favorite devices – except that Poe was not yet born. “On the deck of
the slow-moving vessel, alone,” the poet watches the moon’s “soft smile” light
“the quivering wave.” Although the ray is compared to “Christianity’s gleam,”

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the imagery implies something quite diferent. The “tenderness” of the “gen-
tle,” “pure” beam of light as it seems dreamily to contemplate “nature’s
repose” suggests a chaste lover restraining sexual desires excited by the quiver-
ing below him. The closing quatrain then reprises this repressed tumult:
And I felt such an exquisite wildness of sorrow
While entranced by the tremulous glow of the deep,
That I longed to prevent the intrusion of morrow,
And stay there forever, to wonder and weep.
(AFH, pp. 416–17)

The title of a poem fragment apparently written at about the same age sig-
nals an intent to link the Cohoes Falls at Troy, New York, to the mythological
Troy’s Mount Ida, the Mountain of the Goddess – perhaps by tying suicide
(or suicidal thoughts) to a frustrated suit for the favor of a local “goddess.”
As only a dozen lines and bits of three others remain, one can do no more
than guess what the complete design might have been. Even so, the poem is
worth notice. In mood and minute, sustained attention to natural movement,
it evinces awareness of the Romantic redeinition of poetry at a time when
Lyrical Ballads was barely known in the United States – and that very limited
consideration mostly expressed disapproval. Payne’s fragment attests either
an astonishingly quick absorption of the new poetry’s lessons or a precocious
leap beyond his countrymen. Here Payne’s protagonist, “shunning the noisy
haunts of men,” vividly “joy’d to mark” the Hudson’s “distant waters, torn up
by the crags, / Rippling and sparkling as they sprang in air”; then, after a line in
which Payne seems artfully to confuse the human subject and natural object,
the fragment ends with a conjunction of whelming sound and transcendent
silence, of terror and reverence:
The stream, impetuous, plunges the abyss;
Then lows along, exulting to be free,
With roar at which earth trembles. Here he paus’d:
For inspiration liv’d in every wave,
And the aw’d soul was mute. (AFH, p. 417)
Excepting only Bryant, Dana is often cited as America’s best portrayer of
nature in verse during the nineteenth century’s early decades, yet nothing in
Dana outshines the probative drafts of this sixteen-year-old.
Unprovidentially, Payne set too little store by his gift for poetry. Already in
childhood, he strove for fame and direct, personal acclaim. Poetry could not
give him that audience – or the money it brought; the stage could. By four-
teen, he clearly understood the choice he faced. As he put it in the epilogue to

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Julia: “If the cash be rare – / What, genius, is thy boasted lot? – despair!” Why,
then, produce “a ton of verses! / If wits will write, why, let them write, and
starve: / For me, thank Heav’n! I have my goose to carve.”15 To his misfortune,
despite his copious production, the duplicitous practices of the theaters and
his own ineptitude in business matters ensured that few geese made their way
to his table. Possibly the most compact brief attesting young Payne’s poetic
lair lies in the conceits of this example:
THE DEAF SEEING DANCING
The unexcited looker-on of love
Is like the deaf seeing dancing. – Withheld
The inspiration that appears to make
The loor the light toe touches, spring to meet
Its kiss, the wild bound looks like madness. – So
The heart’s dance seems, of the heart’s music robb’d,
A reel of bacchanals. (AFH, p. 421)

Poetry’s appeal to Payne did not diminish as he aged. “Silently,” written

when he was forty-one, deftly and delicately solicits a woman’s discretion in
love (“Favors, to be kind, must be / Ever granted silently.”) “Star Gazing,”
probably from his later years, seems quite modern in its conversational speech
rhythm. “Like thee, I love the stars,” three of its ive stanzas begin, moving
the poem from aesthetic appreciation to an understanding, through the stars’
distance, of “those triumphs of the little / Which makes the spirit wither
up in scorn.” The ifth stanza concludes with the poet, having accepted the
fate the stars decreed, free again “to love the stars” purely for their beauty
(AFH, p. 419–20). Among the unpublished poems rescued after his death in
1851, “Face to Face with Death” invites us to look on his spirit, “just ready for
its l ight,” as it “confesses”
Its less than nothingness; and sees with wonder
Its once poor pathway strew’d with broken hopes
And mad ambition’s ruins: – while the forms
Of slighted friends, hours murder’d, and the voice
Of warning, spurn’d, and long forgotten guilt
Call from their graves. (AFH, p. 421)

Payne’s judgment on himself was harsh if not altogether inaccurate. Even so,
his unrecognized talents as an exceptional poet merit serious reconsideration.
The pity is that so little remains for the reassessment.
William Coleman had an even greater efect on the literary fortunes of
Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. Fortuity brought the two

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poets together at a dull reception where, to amuse himself, Drake wrote a few
stanzas about boredom, and Halleck added lines of his own. Having enjoyed
the sport, they produced several more in the same vein and submitted them
to the Evening Post. The next day, Coleman lauded the poems in his paper and
requested a visit. On arriving at the Coleman home, Drake introduced him-
self as “Croaker” (a name taken from a character in a Goldsmith comedy);
Halleck, following his lead, extended his hand, saying, “Croaker, Jr.” With
that, the series acquired the tag “Croakers”: the irst, “To Ennui,” appeared
on March 13, 1819, and the rest followed at fairly regular intervals. Coleman
printed the poems with great fanfare, and New York, its curiosity piqued by
their anonymous authorship, delighted in these jousts against its elite.
Before year’s end, Halleck, his identity still thinly veiled, published “Fanny,”
a long stretch of Byronic froth washing over his townsmen’s foibles and follies.
Among those he “sings,” for example, is “a poor devil,” of whom “It was not
known that he had ever said / Any thing worth repeating,” yet who “excelled
them all / In that most noble of the sciences, / The art of making money”;
consequently, his “brilliant traits of mind, and genius” shone “like the mid-
night lightning.”16 No poem had ever equaled it in winning an American city’s
favor. Copies were so coveted, they were sold and resold at up to twenty times
the original price, and two years later he published a much-expanded edition.
Halleck’s cleverness attracted admirers, and the city’s literary arbiters
boasted of him as the nation’s irst master satirist, but, perhaps heeding his
friend (and probable lover) Drake, he expanded his poetic repertoire. His hagi-
olatrous tribute, “Robert Burns,” mirrored America’s afection for the Scottish
poet. “Alnwick Castle” contrasts the valorous past with the crass present,
thereafter a prominent theme. His most celebrated poem, “Marco Bozzaris,”
eulogized the hero of Greek independence killed in July 1823. Halleck’s previ-
ously noted similarity to the Byron of Beppo and Don Juan now extended to the
Byron who enlisted in the Greek cause.
The marriage of “beautiful Joe” Drake devastated Halleck, and although
he tried to rationalize it as “a sacriice at the shrine of Hymen to shun the
‘pains and penalties’ of poverty,” he never recovered. After Drake succumbed
to consumption in 1820, Halleck’s bitterness continued to feed on itself until
his death in 1867. (His will provided that Drake’s body, along with the bodies
of his family, be exhumed and buried with his.) Halleck’s patently homosexual
“Young America” scorned marriage while extolling what is clearly pederastic
love. It was among the last poems of his ever-dwindling output.
Drake’s major work, The Culprit Fay, preceded his collaboration in the
Croakers: it was written the summer of 1819 on a dare to prove that American

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locales could accommodate a sustained invention about fairies as well as any in

Europe. Supposedly inished in three days, it mines the same vein as Friedrich
de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, published eight years previously, although Drake
probably never read the German tale. The premise appears early, in the ifth
stanza, in which the fairies hie to “the elin court” to hear a judgment passed:
A scene of sorrow waits them now,
For an Ouphe has broken his vestal vow;
He has loved an earthly maid,
And left for her his woodland shade;
He has lain upon her lip of dew,
And sunned him in her eye of blue,
Fann’d her cheek with his wing of air,
Played in the ringlets of her hair,
And, nestling on her snowy breast,
Forgot the lily-king’s behest.17
Luckily for him, she is sexually “unstained,” but acquittal on the more seri-
ous charge of disobedience still requires him to perform a series of redemp-
tive quests around the country. This device enables Drake to cram in lots of
scenery, starting with the environs of West Point, where he wrote the poem.
Like more insistent literary nationalists, Drake here incorporated American
lora and fauna and native settings, but these attentions to calamus, sturgeon,
and katydids hinder development of anything more than a supericial scheme
dressed in the manner of essentially European fantasy. Ironically, this infe-
licitous yoking probably boosted its astonishing initial success with readers
schooled to believe that European conventions were the mark of superiority.
Such familiar elements from an American pen signaled that our poetry had
come of age, and the poem received extravagant praise – until Edgar Allan
Poe did both Drake and Halleck irreversible damage in an 1836 review. Poe
mocked Drake’s notion that a one-inch elf could be suspected of carnal rela-
tions with a human measuring “six feet in her stockings”; then, taking aim at
Drake’s putatively inventive imagery, he reduced it to a parlor game anyone
could shine at.18 The ridicule made it diicult to take Drake quite so seriously
again. Poe then detailed the faults and unpoetical qualities of both Drake and
Halleck. Poe did acknowledge Drake as the better poet of the two, but he also
recognized that neither rose much above the level of facile wit.
The outstanding poetic talent of the period was William Cullen Bryant. A
native of Cummington, Massachusetts, he won the esteem of the young liter-
ary establishment in his state, but his rise to national attention dates from his
closing his law practice in the Berkshires to accept co-editorship of the newly

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launched New-York Review in 1825. The decision made him a New Yorker. Soon
after that magazine and its extension as the product of a merger collapsed,
William Coleman hired him as an assistant at the New-York Evening Post. A
once passionate Federalist, Coleman probably remembered the young man
as the author, at thirteen, of The Embargo, a best-selling anti-Jefersonian verse
diatribe, but Coleman’s paper also promoted the city’s culture, and Bryant’s
credentials, as not only a poet but also an intimate of artists, were outstand-
ing. Whether this new career in journalism would prove felicitous, however,
was uncertain – his friend Dana opposed the move. Bryant would continue
to write poetry all his life, but building the Post and exercising political sway
cut into time he might otherwise have devoted to poetry. On the other hand,
working at the Post was “better than poetry and starvation.”19 In a short time,
close association with its writers gave him a literary inl uence far beyond what
he could have had in any other city.
Raised under the strict regimen of his maternal grandfather, a Calvinist
deacon, Bryant was a sickly child who feared death’s imminence and infernal
punishment. But once his physician father, a pioneer homeopath, returned
from his stint as a ship’s doctor, he provided an anodyne to the grandfather’s
brimstone by teaching Cullen to love and respect nature as a source of healing
for both body and soul. Later, while serving in the state legislature in Boston,
Peter Bryant encountered ideas that would be reined as Transcendentalism,
and he conveyed them to Cullen. Perhaps most important, as a poet manqué
who had assembled one of the best verse collections in the state, Dr. Bryant
also trained the boy to value poetry – especially, as did almost everyone with
educated tastes, the works of Alexander Pope.
When Bryant’s father submitted his son’s poems to his friend Willard Phillips
at the North American Review, his fellow editor Dana famously exclaimed, “Ah,
Phillips, you have been imposed upon; no one on this side of the Atlantic
is capable of writing such verses.”20 From then on, Dana became Bryant’s
friend, most trusted adviser in matters of poetry, and staunchest advocate.
The North American proceeded to print some of Bryant’s best early poems,
as well as an essay on English metrics that surpassed any previous American
scholarship on the subject, but he was still a relatively unknown outsider in
the hinterlands when, in the spring of 1821, his boosters at the magazine per-
suaded Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society to invite him to speak at the college’s
August commencement.
Seizing the chance, Bryant, who had once planned to write an epic featur-
ing Columbus, spent the summer composing The Ages, a sequence of tableaux
illustrating his vision of American history. Belief in the epic as the necessary

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American poem, although enfeebled, was not yet dead. Poems, the slim vol-
ume published on the heels of his Harvard appearance, leads with this same
nationalistic hymn – as would all his subsequent collections. Even though
Bryant later acknowledged that The Ages was inferior poetry, it advertised his
aspiration to be America’s bard.
“Thanatopsis,” which immediately stirred the most comment, closed the
volume (except for The Ages, the dates of composition determined the poems’
order). The portion of the poem previously published in the North American
Review had been only a fragment, beginning, “Yet a few days, and thee / The
all-beholding sun shall see no more / In all his course.” The next ifty-six lines
of highly enjambed blank verse ofered no rejoinder to its bleakness. For the
Poems version four years later, Bryant wrote a new opening and close. Now
nature, not the poet, reveals the barren fate of all that is mortal but concludes
that this same death is merely obliteration of consciousness, and no more to
be feared than sleep. In its denial of a hereafter, the poem becomes an airma-
tion of life, an exhortation to glory in existence.21
In denying a hereafter and a divinity beyond material nature, “Thanatopsis”
should have startled the faithful, yet it set of no alarms. Perhaps “To a
Waterfowl,” written in 1818 while the poet questioned his choice of law as a
career, served as a shield. Believers embraced that poem as airming God’s
providence: the bird making its “solitary way” across the sky is in the “care” of
a “Power” who will guide his creature “from zone to zone”; hence the lonely
wanderer who is observing the waterfowl need have no fear about his own
course in life. But the popular perception and Bryant’s intention were almost
certainly far apart. Bryant’s Power is nature itself: if the waterfowl manifests
what is inherent in its being, the observer can learn the lesson and live accord-
ing to his instincts. “To a Waterfowl” and “Thanatopsis” preach the same ser-
mon. Although later in life Bryant would accept baptism as a Unitarian and
refer to a more conventional view of God in his poems, he never abandoned
his trust in nature as life’s absolute guide and teacher.
Recognition as his country’s preeminent poet did not come until the 1832
Poems, published in New York and, through the intercession of his friend
Washington Irving, in London. But even though the earlier collection, which
had only modest success in the Boston area and sold few copies beyond it,
failed to excite reviewers, it was a signal of reorientation in our national verse.
Although Bryant was certainly not the irst American poet to write about
nature, such poems as “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” and “A Winter
Piece” describe his scenes in the manner of a painter, deining and illing his
frame; his close association with artists, particularly of the Hudson River

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School, speaks to a fundamental ainity. Bryant approaches nature as a phil-

osophical poet; a Transcendentalist well before Transcendentalism’s tenets
were codiied, he celebrates “the eternal low of things” through constant
mutation.22
Equally important on another front was the sophistication he brought
to the craft of poetry: not only a student of traditional English forms, he
surveyed verse conventions in the several other languages he mastered and
from which he translated. His early poems ofer a sampler of meters and
rhyme schemes, from the quatrains of “The Yellow Violet,” in trimeter, and
of “To a Waterfowl,” in which the irst and fourth trimeter lines of the qua-
trains enclose pentameter pairs; to the anapestic tetrameter quatrains of the
remarkable “I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion”; and to the inven-
tive blank verse of “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood.” In the rhymed
poems, with rare exceptions, the rhymes occur in the natural course of state-
ment, not for the sake of the scheme, and whether rhymed or unrhymed, the
verse often weaves alliteration and assonance to achieve melodic values. Again
and again, he insisted that the natural rhythms and tone of speech lay at the
foundation of poetry, not the coninements of metrical uniformity. Nothing
Bryant wrote during these years, however, better illustrates his testing of pos-
sibilities than the opening added to “Thanatopsis” in 1821. The argument for
trisyllabic feet in iambic pentameter that he had begun to advance in an 1811
essay here lowers into a strategic irregularity quite similar to what Gerard
Manley Hopkins would later mean by his term “sprung rhythm.” And with
impressive control, he pushes meter beyond a system of stresses to attempt to
orchestrate length and pitch in the sounds of his words. “Thanatopsis” is not
Bryant’s best poem, but it best illustrates his ingenuity in expanding the ways
of poetic expression.
Bryant’s inl uence on Robert Frost is obvious. Clearly, Isabelle Frost’s
requirement that her son recite “To a Waterfowl” from memory, along with
other works by her favorite poet, left a lasting imprint. The two poets share
a strong commitment to spoken language and to Frost’s famous dictum that
poetry “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”23 Less obvious – or so one can
infer from its having gone unnoticed – is Walt Whitman’s deep debt to Bryant.
They met as journalists in the early 1840s, and common interests brought
them together for long walks. Bryant was being urged to write a long poem,
in sections, about America, and perhaps with that in mind, he revived a tech-
nique he had used two decades earlier in making a poem the detailed image of
the sight seen. Later, he expanded the concept to rely on lists of visual encoun-
ters. Whitman irst becomes Whitman during this decade, and the similarity

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of the opening of “New Year’s Day, 1848” to that of such a poem as Bryant’s
“Summer Wind” is inescapable. As Whitman draws closer to Leaves of Grass,
the power of Bryant’s example increases: “Noon,” “An Evening Revery,” and
“Hymn of the Sea,” when read aloud, show Whitman’s indebtedness. That
remarkable correspondence would extend to his mentor’s “The Night Journey
of a River.” The most dramatic foreshadowing of Leaves of Grass, however, is
in “The Prairies,” which Bryant wrote on returning from a visit to his broth-
ers in Illinois. One of his best and most exuberant uses of blank verse, this
panegyric to the cycle of peoples sustained by the fecundity and beauty of the
amplitude of American land expresses the epic instinct that had motivated The
Ages and sparked the new nation’s conidence in its destiny as it displaced the
old Indian order.
Like many other poets, Bryant lapsed into more conventional verse as he
grew older. His obligations as owner-editor of the Evening Post absorbed his
energy, and he himself conceded that the quality of his poetry was in decline.
Toward the end of his life, aware that the baton had passed to new genera-
tions of American poets, he produced graceful versions of The Iliad and The
Odyssey, declaring that translation was the proper work for old poets. Even so,
over the almost two decades when he was at his best, Bryant was as original
and consequential a poet as his country has produced.

Notes
1. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poets of America (Boston and New York:
Houghton, Mil in, 1885), p. 19.
2. Philip Freneau, The Poems of Philip Freneau (Princeton, N.J.: The Princeton
University Library, 1907), vol. III, p. 9.
3. Joel Barlow, The Columbiad (London, 1809), p. 298.
4. Barlow, The Columbiad, pp. 301–14.
5. Daniel Bryan, The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone;
and The Power of Virtuous and Reined Beauty (Harrisonburg, Va.: printed by
Davidson and Bourne, 1813), p. 45.
6. James Kirke Paulding, The Backwoodsman (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1818), pp.
7–8. Further quotations are hereafter cited parenthetically as TB.
7. James Wallis Eastburn and Robert Charles Sands, Yamoyden, a Tale of the Wars
of King Philip (New York: printed by Clayton and Kingsland, 1820), p. 252.
8. Eastburn and Sands, Yamoyden, p. 255.
9. Edward Everett, “Politics of Ancient Greece,” North American Review 18 (1824),
p. 398.
10. Washington Allston, The Sylphs of the Season, with Other Poems (Boston:
Cummings and Metcalf, 1813), pp. 149–51. Further quotations from this edition

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are hereafter cited parenthetically as WA. Allston was not the only signiicant
American artist of the period to turn to poetry: the painter Thomas Cole
(1801–1848) also produced some verses of note.
11. Washington Allston, Lectures on Art and Poems, ed. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
(New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850), pp. 301–06.
12. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (Boston: Houghton, Mil in, 1891),
p. 61.
13. Richard Henry Dana, Poems and Prose Writings (New York: Baker and Scribner,
1850), p. 58.
14. Quoted in Grace Overmyer, America’s First Hamlet (New York: New York
University Press, 1957), p. 52; this volume will be cited subsequently in the text
as AFH. All poems by John Howard Payne subsequently quoted here are in a
brief appendix to this book, pp. 415–21.
15. John Howard Payne, Julia, or, the Wanderer (New York: David Longworth,
1806), p. 87.
16. James Grant Wilson (ed.), The Poetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck (New
York: D. Appleton, 1860), pp. 103–04.
17. Joseph Rodman Drake, The Culprit Fay; and Other Poems (New York: George
Dearborn, 1836), p. 12.
18. Edgar Allan Poe, “Joseph Rodman Drake – Fitz-Greene Halleck,” in G. R.
Thompson (ed.), Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984),
p. 521.
19. Letter to Richard Henry Dana, quoted in Parke Godwin, A Biography of
William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1883), vol. 1, p. 235.
20. Frank Gado, William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice (Hartford, Vt.: Antoca
Press, 2006), p. 11. A slightly diferent version of Dana’s interrupted response
is reported in Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 79.
21. William Cullen Bryant, Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant (New York and
London: D. Appleton, 1907), p. 21. A brief account of the composition of
“Thanatopsis” can be found in Gado, William Cullen Bryant, pp. 160–61.
22. The phrase occurs in “An Evening Revery,” in Bryant, Poetical Works, pp. 194–
95. For a discussion of this key notion throughout Bryant’s poetry, see Gado,
William Cullen Bryant, pp. 179–82.
23. Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” in Collected Poems of Robert Frost
(New York: Henry Holt, 1939), p. 110.

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 Chapter 8
The Emergence of Romantic Traditions
A l f r e d B e n d i xe n

Calls for the creation of a national literature rang throughout the irst half
of the nineteenth century, but poets struggled to ind verse forms capable
of capturing the distinctive nature of the American landscape and American
cultural life. An early fascination with the epic soon gave way to other forms,
particularly those focused on detailing the speciic qualities of native scenery.
Narrative poetry also attracted attention but failed to produce anything com-
ing close to the later achievements of Longfellow in this mode. The earlier
examples are interesting mainly because of their treatment of frontier adven-
ture and occasional lashes of passion. For instance, in its inest moments,
John Neal’s “Battle of Niagara” (1818) unites vivid description and narrative
vitality into a powerful reading experience; it is certainly the most signiicant
American literary work to emerge from the War of 1812. Neal abandoned
poetry for iction and never quite fulilled the promise he showed in either
genre, although he did play an important role in encouraging other writers.
One problem facing aspiring poets was that the literary models most avail-
able to them were British works that clearly relected the values of an aristo-
cratic society in which order and stability were more important than l uidity
and change. Thus, the many American admirers of Alexander Pope found
themselves attempting to master the heroic couplet, a form whose persistent
commitment to rhyme and meter seems more suited to defenses of reason
and order in Augustan England than the exploration of republican values in
the post-Revolutionary United States. The advent of Romanticism seemed
to promise larger possibilities, with its openness to a wide range of poetic
forms, its exaltation of the artist as hero, its commitment to inding meaning
in nature, its emphasis on revealing the signiicance of the ordinary and com-
monplace, and its airmation of new and bolder ways of perceiving reality.
It took a surprisingly long time for American poets to embrace the possi-
bilities that Romantic modes ofered. Emerson certainly deserves the most
credit for liberating American poetry and inspiring a remarkably wide range

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of poets, but the emergence of a powerful Romantic tradition in the United

States had a long foreground. Attention to American Romantic poetry has
focused almost entirely on the Transcendentalists, but that reduces a rich ield
of poetic experimentation and achievement to a small part of New England
culture. A number of poets practiced varieties of Romanticism that are quite
diferent from the Transcendentalist tradition, especially in their treatment of
nature, sensuality, and myth. Although many of the works discussed in this
chapter are not part of the current canon of American writing, they deserve a
clear place in our literary history. These authors not only attracted signiicant
critical attention and popular acclaim but also established larger possibilities
for American verse.
American Romanticism has its real beginnings in New York, not New
England. The most important early examples were the work of two paint-
ers for whom poetry was a crucial means of deining and airming aesthetic
values. Washington Allston’s impressive sonnets on art, most of which focus
on works by Europeans, won acclaim from the British Romantics and deserve
attention from any scholar interested in ekphrastic modes.1 Allston represents
the beginning of an American tradition in which the sonnet became a self-
relective form often devoted to airming the power of artistic expression,
either as a general fact or as a tribute to a speciic genius. Another impor-
tant artist, Thomas Cole, also produced skilled verse in a variety of forms,
including some poems designed to accompany the ambitious paintings that
represent the greatest achievements of the Hudson River School. Although
he never quite matches Allston’s mastery of phrase, Cole is unequalled in
his emphasis on the power and limitations of the artistic imagination in its
complex relationship to nature. In “A Painter,” Cole’s airmation of nature’s
beauty includes an expression of regret at his own inability to match the “wild,
and wondrous hues” of the mountains and woods he paints.2 His fullest air-
mation of the power of art is in “Lines Suggested by Hearing Music on the
Boston Common at Night,” which details the emotional impact of musical
form on a sensitive listener immersed in the “Ocean of sound sublime!!” (LOA,
p. 230). His most important poem, however, is “The Lament of the Forest,”
in which “the voice of the great Forest” deplores the desolation awaiting the
American landscape at the hand of an emerging industrialism: “Our doom is
near: behold from east to west / The skies are darkened by ascending smoke;
/ Each hill and every valley is become / An Altar unto Mammon, and the gods
/ Of man’s idolatry” (LOA, pp. 231, 235). Cole’s poem is thus part of an emerg-
ing ecological tradition in American literature that found its initial expression
in popular poetry.

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The American relationship to the natural world embodied a crucial conl ict
between reverence for the glories of a bountiful nature and the desire to con-
vert that bounty into cash and productive industry. In this regard, George Pope
Morris’s “The Oak” merits special attention as one of the earliest environmen-
tal poems in our literary history to achieve immense popularity. The poem’s
defense of the natural world against crude materialism rests on a nostalgic
airmation of childhood memories and human connections, which were also
threatened by the emergence of a commercial mentality: “Woodman, spare
that tree! / Touch not a single bough! / In youth it sheltered me, / And I’ll
protect it now” (LOA, p. 251). This is not the abstract fusion of self with nature
embodied in the Emersonian oversoul, but a more personal relationship to
nature based both on the emotional resonance of childhood experience and
on a clear insistence that a healthy relationship to the natural world entails
mutual protection. The tree shelters the child, who grows into a man with
the moral understanding that nature merits defending against those solely
interested in monetary gain. Thus, sentiment and nostalgia join together to
rebuke the worst forms of what will ultimately become industrialized capi-
talism. A similar vein of nostalgia runs through Samuel Woodworth’s “The
Bucket,” which also evokes idyllic memories of a childhood immersed in the
simple pleasures of nature as it transforms an ordinary object – an “old oaken
bucket” – into the repository of pastoral values (LOA, p. 70). Both of these
poems were soon turned into immensely popular songs and along with John
Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home!” constitute a reminder that popular
verse and song frequently converted the Romantic appreciation of a simple
life in nature into nostalgia and sentiment, which reveal an underlying discom-
fort with the rise of an increasingly commercial and materialistic culture.
Not all American poets indulged in nostalgic sentiment. Of those who
attracted signiicant attention both at home and in England, none was more
daring or more original than Maria Gowen Brooks, whose lush and passion-
ate verse earned her praise and the title “Maria Del Occidente” (Maria of
the West) from the British poet laureate Robert Southey. Brooks’s irst book,
Judith, Esther, and Other Poems (1820), contains a number of emotionally expres-
sive lyrics but is especially notable for the powerful and sensuous dramatiza-
tion of the Old Testament heroines in the title poems. In these works, espe-
cially “Judith,” Brooks transforms the biblical framework into a vehicle for
the forceful expression of female power in which heroism becomes a female
virtue. Her sensuous language and fascination with erotic experience distin-
guish her verse, which can also be densely allusive. For example, “Written after
Passing an Evening with E.W.R. A******, Esq. Who Has the Finest Person I

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Ever Saw” bases its erotic longing on allusions to Sappho: “thus from the bath
young Phaon came, / With that divine infusion / All glowing to the Lesbian
dame, / Like a bright dream’s illusion.”3
Brooks devoted much of her Romantic fervor to the creation of a long
poem, Zóphiël: Or the Bride of Seven, the irst canto of which appeared in 1825
and then was expanded to six cantos with copious footnotes in the English
edition of 1833. This remarkably ambitious work attracted signiicant notice
and some admiration, for both its passionate verse and the blending of eroti-
cism, unrequited love, and death at the basis of its extraordinary plot, which
was drawn from the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. A fallen angel, Zóphiël,
responds to the torments of his unrequited love for the mortal and virtuous
Hebrew maiden Egla by ensuring the deaths of her irst six husbands before
the marriages can be consummated. The heroine inally escapes the angel
and marries her destined mate, the seventh husband. The psychologically rich
portrayal of Zóphiël as both angel and demon, victim and villain, adds new
dimensions to the emerging tradition of the Byronic antihero. Although the
book sold poorly, Brooks attracted critical acclaim; a new edition was brought
out in 1879, edited by the poet Zadel Barnes Gustafson (the grandmother of
Djuna Barnes).
The current critical assessment sees Brooks largely as an aberration, a solitary
and undisciplined genius, a powerful voice that had no inl uence and left little
trace. That view, however, rests on the dismissal of a number of other women
poets who also dealt with passionate subjects in unladylike ways. A more gen-
erous assessment might see Brooks as the beginning of a tradition of erotic
poetry by American women, a tradition that includes Mary E. Hewitt’s three
Sappho poems (1850), Harriet Prescott Spoford’s “Pomegranate-Flowers”
(1861), Adah Isaacs Menken’s Infelicia (1868), and Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Poems
of Passion (1883). Reading these works together suggests that Romanticism
fostered a vibrant although largely neglected tradition of passionate poetry
by American women that at various times has earned either considerable crit-
ical praise or a large popular audience. The most signiicant fact of this tradi-
tion is its insistence on recognizing the reality of sexuality, especially female
sexuality, and on exalting in the fact that women can experience what Emily
Dickinson calls “Wild Nights” in the poem of hers that its most clearly in this
tradition.4 Sometimes women poets use the language of lowers and nature
to explore the female body, as in Spoford’s “Pomegranate-Flowers” or Lucy
Larcom’s “Flowers of the Fallow,” thus providing an intriguing counterpart
to the Calamus poems of Walt Whitman. As Emily Stipes Watts and others
have noted, allusions to the classical igure of Sappho rendered sexuality into

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a topic it for poetic expression, and women writers actively sought sources
in mythology, as well as classical and biblical literature, that challenge the
restraints of a patriarchal culture.
Recent scholarship is giving increased attention to the poets mentioned in
the previous paragraph, who were either sadly missing or unfairly maligned
in older literary histories. The work of recovering neglected women poets has
now been going strong for several decades, resulting in impressive studies and
anthologies of nineteenth-century women poets by Paula Bernat Bennett,
Eliza Richards, Elizabeth Renker, Cheryl Walker, Emily Stipes Watts, Shira
Wolosky, and others. Of course, nineteenth-century editors did not completely
ignore women poets. In the preface to his 1849 collection, The Female Poets of
America, Rufus Griswold singled out Maria Gowen Brooks, Elizabeth Oakes
Smith, Frances Osgood, and Sarah Helen Whitman for special praise.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith became a signiicant feminist voice who worked in
multiple genres during a long, multifaceted career, but she irst gained atten-
tion with “The Sinless Child,” a long poem that appeared in the Southern
Literary Messenger in 1842. One of the deining works of the sentimental tra-
dition in the United States, “The Sinless Child” idealizes the life and death of
the virtuous child, Eva, whose incredible beauty and spiritual demeanor have
the power to transform, convert, and save those who fall within her inl uence:
“Her cheek was pale with lofty thought, / And calm her maiden air; / And
all who heard her birdlike voice, / Felt harmony was there.”5 In prose head-
notes introducing each of the seven parts, Oakes Smith explains her didactic
purpose with excessive clarity. Thus the note for the inal section explains
her virtuous heroine’s inevitable death: “The true woman, with woman’s
love and gentleness, and trust and childlike simplicity, yet with all her noble
aspirations and spiritual discernments, she hath known them all without sin,
and sorrow may not visit such. She ceased to be present – she passed away
like the petal that hath dropped from the rose – like the last sweet note of the
singing-bird, or the dying close of the wind harp.”6 Although this immensely
popular work may seem quaint to twenty-irst-century readers, it shaped
the development of sentimental writing in its time and even inspired the
depiction of little Eva in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Few poems have been so
inl uential. Oakes Smith wrote other poems that may speak more meaning-
fully to our time, including the remarkable “Ode to Sappho”; “The Drowned
Mariner,” a vivid narrative that earned a place in the “extracts” at the start of
Melville’s Moby-Dick; and a number of impressive sonnets, some of which,
like “An Incident” and “The Bard,” ofer intriguing insights into her view of
the female artist.7

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Of the poets Griswold cites, Frances Osgood stands out as the most origi-
nal and versatile, uniting in her best poems a technical mastery of rhyme and
meter with an imaginative playfulness and sharp wit. Osgood’s aesthetic val-
ues ind fullest expression in the clever and energetic piece “A Flight of Fancy,”
in which the female Fancy plays havoc with the male igures of Conscience
and Reason, who temporarily capture her but ultimately fail to imprison her.
The poem provides a vivid defense of a female imagination with a vitality that
both disturbs and deies restrictive male values. Some of her poems appear
more conventional, such as those about her daughter, “Ellen Learning to
Walk” and “Her Child Playing with a Watch,” but even these evince an energy
rarely found in poems about domestic life as well as a keen awareness of gen-
der dynamics. Her most interesting and most original poems, however, often
deal with love relationships between men and women, revealing a sharp wit
and command of irony that preigure Edna St. Vincent Millay. For instance, in
“He Bade Me Be Happy,” she punctures the presumption of a man who keeps
returning to a woman with whom he has broken up: “He bade me ‘Be happy,’
he whisper’d ‘Forget me,’ / He vow’d my afection was cherish’d in vain. / ‘Be
happy!’ ‘Forget me!’ I would, if he’d let me – / Why will he keep coming to say
so again?” (W, p. 113). Her ironic comedy both delates masculine conceit and
questions feminine judgment in “The Lily’s Delusion”: a lower on a lake is
beguiled by the smile of a star, unaware that “the star but smiled / To see him-
self relected there” (B, p. 65). Osgood’s remarkably fresh and sometimes dar-
ing treatment of the relationships between men and women in poetry actually
led her into a public l irtation with Poe in 1845 that involved the exchange of
poems published in the Broadway Journal. Although one rumor actually claims
Poe was the real father of Osgood’s third child, many scholars believe the rela-
tionship was platonic. Osgood’s “The Hand That Swept the Sounding Lyre”
is a noteworthy elegy to Poe, published not long before her own death from
tuberculosis in 1850 (W, p. 131).8
Osgood was not the only woman whose involvement with Poe has
stirred speculation. Of his l irtations with female poets, that with Sarah
Helen Whitman, who claimed the title of “Poe’s Helen,” deserves mention.
Whitman began as a follower of Transcendentalism but became the most
ardent of Poe’s admirers, producing a number of poems praising him, most
notably “To – – ,” and “ ‘The Raven.’ ” Her most interesting work may be the
1877 poem “Science,” an attack on evolution that plays of of Poe’s “Sonnet –
To Science.” Regarded in her own time as “the epitome of the ‘poetess’ ” and
praised for her work’s “purity, its feeling for nature, and its fervent idealism”
(W, p. 54), Whitman is a talented lyricist, but her poetry’s primary value

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seems to be in relecting a female counterpart to Poe’s special variety of

Romanticism.
Although Poe had such a distinctive metrical voice that his best works were
imitated and parodied by both men and women, the responses by female
poets often add intriguing insights into gender roles. Women poets seem more
likely to engage Poe in verse conversation, sometimes in praise but some-
times undermining the foundations of his peculiar Romantic obsessions. Thus
Phoebe Cary’s comic transformation of “Annabel Lee” to “Samuel Brown”
relies on switching the gender roles of the two main characters in its depiction
of lost love and moving from the seaside to a town:

The ladies not half so happy up there,

Went envying me and Brown;
Yes! that was the reason, (as all men know,
In this dwelling down in town,)
That the girl came out of the carriage by night,
Coquetting and getting my Samuel Brown. (B, p. 98)

The parody dismisses Poe’s exaltation of the death of beautiful women as the
subject of great poetry and substitutes an emphasis on social realities.
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to a number of female
poets who were once popular, including Alice and Phoebe Cary, Lucretia
Davidson, Emma Embury, Lucy Larcom, and Lydia Sigourney. It is no longer
possible to dismiss these writers as mere sentimentalists churning out endless
elegies for dead children and pretty domestic poems about home and gar-
den. We have a larger understanding of their engagement with political and
social realities and of their diicult place within a complex cultural milieu.
Nevertheless, much of their verse seems graceful rather than powerful. Too
often, moral relection leads to didactic pronouncement instead of some kind
of transformative vision.9 It should, of course, be noted that a similar judg-
ment can be made against numerous male poets who also once commanded
popular audiences but are now largely forgotten, such as Charles Fenno
Hofman, Cornelius Mathews, Fitz-James O’Brien, Epes Sargent, Nathaniel
Parker Willis, and William Winter. Hofman, in fact, received twice as much
space as any other poet in Griswold’s groundbreaking 1842 anthology, Poets
and Poetry of America, but has been almost completely ignored since then.
Literary historians now must confront the basic but complex issue of
whether a work seems to have some enduring quality, some capacity to speak
to multiple generations, or is best regarded as an artifact that reveals the inter-
ests and limitations of a speciic time.10 For instance, although there were a

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fairly large number of Transcendentalist poets, current literary attention has

focused almost entirely on Emerson, Thoreau, Jones Very, and Christopher
Pearse Cranch. Recently, scholars of Margaret Fuller, most notably Jefrey
Steele, have been attempting to establish a place for her poetry within the
canon. Much less attention, however, is going to the verse of William Ellery
Channing or the late sonnets of Bronson Alcott, while the poetry of William
H. Furness, Charles T. Brooks, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, Theodore
Parker, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan remains largely ignored. Lawrence Buell,
whose knowledge of the Transcendentalists is unrivaled, has emphasized the
high quality of Ellen Hooper’s poetry, which, somewhat surprisingly, is not
included in the major anthologies of poetry by American women. Her artistry
is demonstrated in an untitled sonnet which begins:
Better a sin which purposed wrong to none
Than this still wintry coldness at the heart,
A penance might be borne for evil done
And tears of grief and love might ease the smart.
But this self-satisied and cold respect
To virtue which must be its own regard,
Heaven keep us through this danger still alive,
Lead us not into greatness, heart-abhorred –
Buell calls this poem “one of the neglected gems of Transcendentalist poet-
ics: moving eloquently and surefootedly from the opening declaration to the
remarkable airmation of willingness, in efect, to be damned in order to
escape from the Sahara of smugness. It is such a poem as Hester Prynne might
have written.”11
There may be reasons for Hooper’s neglect, including the lack of a good
critical edition of her poetry, but if Buell is right in his high assessment of her
work, as I think he is, then this is clear evidence that the work of recovering
the poetry of American women is still in its early stages. As eforts to explore
a growing canon continue, it is almost certain that other unjustly neglected
poets will be discovered. A recent edition of the unpublished writings of Jane
Johnston Schoolcraft, who produced poems in formal rhymed English as well
as in her native Ojibwa, certainly enlarges our appreciation of the possibilities
for poetry in the early nineteenth century.12 Schoolcraft is most interesting
when she translates native oral lore into efective English, but her poems con-
vey her personal experience with power and grace.
For a long time, it was customary to think of most of the women poets
of the early and mid-nineteenth century as sentimentalists, scribbling poems
about gardens and children and pretty days and producing the endless elegies

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that led to Mark Twain’s famous satire of Emmeline Grangerford’s verse in

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Feminist scholars have taught us to respect the
emotional power of a reader’s response both to personal tragedy, such as the
death of a child, and to social and political evils, particularly slavery. It is cer-
tainly true that a good bit of women’s poetry does focus on the death of chil-
dren, which was a more common experience in the nineteenth century than
now, and that devaluing this kind of poetry seems to at least implicitly devalue
the pain and sufering that was part of the lives of many American women.
Nevertheless, many of the most powerful poems by women seem inspired by
a diferent kind of Romantic impulse, one that leads these writers into more
original, more engaging, and sometimes more daring confrontations with
the world. Romanticism emphasizes a greater awareness of the richness of
ordinary life, often exalting acts of perception that uncover the true meaning
of the mundane details of human experience. In this respect, it is not sur-
prising that some of the strongest poetry by American women focuses on a
fuller apprehension of the speciic kinds of work that women do. Thus, Alice
Cary’s “The Washerwoman” is a tribute to the working poor, and an implicit
statement that a truly democratic literature must recognize the labor as well
as the sufering of women. In her inest poem, “To a Shred of Linen,” Lydia
Sigourney ofers a meditation on female creativity that moves meticulously
from a contemplation of housekeeping to the issues of female authorship.
Lucy Larcom’s “Weaving” brilliantly uses this central metaphor to move from
a single woman at the loom to the “world of women” as they engage the real-
ities of home and nation during the Civil War (W, p. 229). It is not surprising
that treatments of women’s work often embody the act of writing poetry in
clearly gendered forms of labor.
It is also tempting to point to the vast number of poems by women about
the act of writing poetry in a society hostile to art, but this is a theme just as
easily found in poetry by American men. It is important to stress the diver-
sity of women’s poetry in this period, which ranges from the broad comedy
of Phoebe Cary’s poem on women’s sufrage, “Was He Henpecked?” to the
abolitionist lyrics of Sarah Louisa Forten, and to the dark Romanticism of
Alice Cary’s tale of murder, “The Sea-Side Cave.” Indeed, Romanticism’s fas-
cination with adventure and myth and the world of the fairy tale leads to a
number of vigorous poems by women, including Rose Terry Cooke’s power-
ful “Bluebeard’s Closet” and the feminist rewriting of Mother Goose rhymes
provided by A. D. T. Whitney. First published in 1860 and enlarged and revised
in 1870 and 1882, Mother Goose for Grown Folks cites and responds to the tra-
ditional verse of nursery rhymes in ways that might be comic or ierce. In

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“Victuals and Drink,” for instance, Whitney begins: “And were you so foolish
/ As really to think / That all she could want / Was her victuals and drink?”13
She ultimately compels us to recognize a process of spiritual starvation that
al icts “the famishing heart, / And the feverish brain” of women whose emo-
tional and imaginative needs remain unmet.14 The best of Whitney’s Mother
Goose poems challenge conventional assumption by establishing a fascinating
dialogue with both the original nursery rhymes and the larger culture.
Romanticism’s fascination with myth and adventure is, of course, not
limited to female poets. William Wetmore Story’s dramatic monologue,
“Cleopatra,” is astonishing in its delineation of the speaker’s movement into
“the jungle of memory” (LOA, p. 679), a dream world in which she can ful-
ill her passionate desire to become a wild animal, culminating in her calling
to Anthony: “Come, as you came in the desert, / Ere we were women and
men, / When the tiger passions were in us, / And love as you loved me then!”
(LOA, p. 681). The poem combines raw sexuality and voluptuous description
with a remarkable psychological portrayal of the tragic queen. Much of nine-
teenth-century American poetry was devoted to dramatizing the passions and
intrigues of the classical past, particularly in the form of verse drama, which
constitutes one of the most underexamined genres in our literary history. The
range of plays in blank verse includes the irst professionally produced play by
an American author, Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia (1767); William
Dunlap’s historical drama, André (1798); James Nelson Barker’s treatment of
Puritan history, Superstition (1824); Robert Montgomery Bird’s tragedy, The
Broker of Bogota (1834); Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Romantic comedy, Tortesa the
Usurer (1839); George Henry Boker’s Romantic tragedy, Francesca Da Rimini
(1855); and Julia Ward Howe’s Leonora (1857), which is set in early eighteenth-
century Italy. In short, poetry played an instrumental role in the development
of American drama, attracting both a popular audience and the talents of
some highly capable poets.
A fuller literary history also requires recognizing the speciic ways in
which Romantic modes developed and lourished in the southern states.
In general, southern writers tended to place more emphasis on polished,
graceful form, on the musicality of the verse, and less on abstracting some
grand philosophical truth from nature. The strongest poetic inl uence for
most poets is Byron, and the great theme is death and loss. In fundamental
ways, the poetry is less theological, less intellectual, and less political than
that produced in New England. The expression of emotion is the main focus
of this poetry, which is often free of the didacticism that marks much nine-
teenth-century American verse. The typical poet is not a professional author

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struggling to get by with editorial work of various kinds, but a gentleman

whose income comes from the practice of law and perhaps the ownership
of a plantation. Authors are much more likely to produce nature poems or
fashion Romantic ballads about other times and other lands than to deal
with slavery or the unpleasant reality of racism. With some notable excep-
tions, southern verse tends to be both more graceful and more supericial
than its northern counterparts.
In addition to Poe, the principal antebellum southern igures are Edward
Coote Pinkney, Richard Henry Wilde, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Thomas
Holley Chivers, and William Gilmore Simms. During his short life, Pinkney
produced some of the most graceful love poems of his time, particularly in
“Serenade” and “A Health,” both of which are devoted to praising beautiful
women: “Look out upon the stars, my love / And shame them with thine
eyes”; “I ill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone, / A woman, of her
gentle sex, the seeming paragon” (LOA, p. 248). His “Italy” ofers unqualiied
praise of that country, while “The Voyager’s Song” relishes the quest for the
fountain of youth without any deeper consideration of the implications of the
desire to avoid aging and time. Richard Henry Wilde’s most famous poem,
“Lament of the Captive,” is best known for its opening lines: “My life is like
a summer rose” (LOA, p. 84); his inest work is his sonnet “To the Mocking-
Bird,” which is among the best of the numerous poems Americans have writ-
ten about this bird.
American poets, particularly southerners, often turned to the mockingbird
because their own native land lacked the bird dearest to the English poetic
imagination, the nightingale. In addition to the qualities that it shares with
most birds – the capacity to ly and sing – the nightingale is one of the few
birds that sings boldly during the night. Furthermore, it evokes the myth of
Philomela, who is transformed into a nightingale after being viciously raped
by a man who cuts out her tongue.15 Thus, both ornithological fact and
mythological reference evoke the transformative power of poetry, its ability
to confront the darkness of human experience and give voice to those who
have been cruelly silenced. But the American landscape lacked nightingales.
The principal poetic bird of our literary tradition has been the mockingbird,
which possesses a vast capacity for mimicry and can be quite assertive but is
not inherently tied to deeper mythological meaning. In paying tribute to the
“Winged Mimic of the woods” (LOA, p. 85), Wilde distinguishes between the
“Wit, sophist, songster, Yorick” of the day who is “Archer mocker, and mad
abbot of misrule!” and the “soft, sweet, solemn, pensive strain” of the bird at
night: “As if thou didst, in this thy moonlight song, / Like to the melancholy

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Jaques complain, / Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong, / And sighing

for thy motley coat again!” (LOA, p. 86). In his blending of literary allusions
(Yorick versus Jaques) and the contrasting moods of daytime mockery and
nighttime complaint, the poet skillfully inds dramatic signiicance and phil-
osophical depth in a bird native to the United States. Wilde’s most ambitious
work was the long poem Hesperia, which was not published until 1867, twenty
years after his death, in an edition prepared by his son. In four cantos in ottava
rima, the poet ranges over almost the entire American landscape, producing a
peculiar and complex blend of topological epic, personal autobiography, and
Byronic relection.
During his relatively short life, Philip Pendleton Cooke earned a measure
of fame with the ballad “Florence Vane,” perhaps the most hardheaded of the
numerous poems southerners enjoyed writing about the deaths of beautiful
women, a theme that is also the basis of Cooke’s “Young Rosalie Lee” (one
of the inspirations for Poe’s “Annabel Lee”). These were collected in his only
book, the misleadingly titled Froissart’s Ballads and Other Poems (1847), along
with some mediocre nature poems and a number of narrative poems, mostly
in ballad format, that convey a sense of medieval adventure (three of which
are drawn from Froissart).
Among the voices who inspired Poe and shared his love for musicality and
his fascination with death, none are closer in spirit or tone than Thomas Holley
Chivers, who often vigorously defended Poe but accused him of plagiarizing
his “To Allegra Florence in Heaven” in “The Raven.” Chivers’s characteristic
poem mourns the death of a loved one, inds solace in the thought of a heav-
enly afterlife, and seeks angelic presences in this world. It is distinguished by a
strong sense of rhyme and metrical form, and an emphasis on musical rhythm
that sometimes values sound over meaning.
Other than Poe, William Gilmore Simms is the most important literary ig-
ure the South produced before the Civil War, but his distinction rests primar-
ily on his iction, particularly his historical novels. He was, however, a proliic
poet who sometimes went beyond the simple nature poetry that dominated
his region to produce work relecting a signiicantly more complex search for
meaning within a natural world that remains largely inscrutable, particularly
in “The Lost Pleiad” and “The New Moon.” Both of these poems take the
measure of the observer’s attempt to understand the heavens, of the attempt
of a inite mind to comprehend an ininite universe, without indulging in the
sense of loss and mourning that marks much verse. There is no grimmer,
bleaker, more Gothic landscape in all of American poetry than that pictured

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in Simms’s “The Edge of the Swamp,” an unrelenting portrait of danger and

despair. The complexity of nature also appears in the skillful way in which
the low of the river in his sonnet “By the Swanannoa” conveys the voice of
nature in the l ux of time. With the exception of Frost’s “Birches,” Simms’s
“The Grape Vine Swing” may be the most complex of the American poems in
which the speaker looks back on a natural scene of his childhood. In the irst
stanza, the grape vine is addressed as a predator, explicitly compared to both a
springing cougar and a strangling serpent, but by the second stanza, the rela-
tionship to nature becomes complex and sexual:
Yet no foe that we fear to seek,
The boy leaps wild to thy rude embrace;
Thy bulging arms bear as soft a cheek
As ever on lover’s breast found place:
On thy waving train is a playful hold
Thou shalt never to lighter grasp persuade;
While a maiden sits in thy drooping fold,
And swings and sings in the noonday shade!16
It is in the poems looking back to boyhood that Simms becomes most original,
especially in “Boy Lost in the Woods,” a tale of “erring childhood,” in which
a boy’s l ight from home and family into the woods does not lead to the con-
ventional moral: “It made me what I am – though it may bring me / To block
or halter yet – a fearless patriot, / Ready to stand by any hapless urchin, /
Doom’ed to three aunts and thirty ugly cousins.”17
The richness of Simms’s imagination also appears in some longer poems,
including Atalantis: A Tale of the Sea (1832) and “The City of the Silent,” which
was composed for the dedication of a Charleston cemetery in 1850 and con-
verts the fascination with death as poetic subject into a fully engaged and
intellectually charged exploration of burial customs before moving to its
airmation of Christian immortality in its inal couplet: “Show that faith still
sought an upward goal, / And challenged wings for the immortal soul!” (LOA,
p. 368). His poetry also includes a number of historical ballads and narra-
tives, the most enduring of which has been “The Swamp Fox.” His Civil War
poetry relects Confederate zeal and then despair but is not particularly distin-
guished. Nevertheless, Simms’s best poetry reveals a mind not content with
the easy gloriication of natural beauty, a mind determined to seek for deeper
meanings in a diicult world. He is clearly among the poets of the nineteenth
century who deserve more sustained attention and who demonstrate the mul-
tifaceted nature of American poetic expression.

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 A lfr e d B e ndi x en

Notes
1. For a useful introduction to the ekphrastic, see John Hollander, The Gazer’s
Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
2. John Hollander (ed.), American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York:
Library of America, 1994), vol. 1, p. 228. All further citations from this volume
are identiied in the text with LOA and the page number.
3. Maria Gowen Brooks, Judith, Esther, and Other Poems (Boston: Cummings and
Hilliard, 1820), p. 43. For a perceptive account of Brooks as a transnational ig-
ure, see Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe
Circle,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54 (Fall 2008), pp. 75–109. For
the importance of Sappho to American women poets, see Emily Stipes Watt,
The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1977), pp. 75–81.
4. For a valuable overview of this tradition, see Karen L. Kilcup, “ ‘Wild Nights’?
Approaches to Teaching Nineteenth-Century Erotic Poetry,” in Paula Bernat
Bennett, Karen L. Kilcup, and Philipp Schweighauser (eds.), Teaching Nineteenth-
Century American Poetry (New York: Modern Language Association, 2007) and
Paula Bernat Bennett, “Sex, Sexualities, and Female Erotic Discourse,” in Poets
in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–
1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 159–80. Although it
does not focus on poetry, also useful is Dorri Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy
in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
5. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “The Sinless Child,” in The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth
Oakes Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: J. S. Redield, 1846), p. 35. The author’s name is
sometimes hyphenated: Elizabeth Oakes-Smith.
6. Oakes Smith, “The Sinless Child,” pp. 85–86.
7. The most valuable representations of Oakes Smith’s poetry can be found in the
anthology Cheryl Walker (ed.), American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 66–77. Poems cited
from this edition hereafter will be identiied with W and the page number. “The
Drowned Mariner” may be found in the anthology Paula Bernat Bennett (ed.),
Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 45–46.
Poems cited from this edition hereafter will be identiied with B and the page
number.
8. For a fuller exploration of Poe’s relationship to American women poets, see
Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
9. The most cogent attack on sentimentalism in American literature is Ann
Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977);

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 The Emergence of Romantic Traditions

perhaps the most important and inl uential defense of the qualities often
condemned as sentimental appears in Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs:
The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985). For an excellent example of the revisionist scholarship that is
revealing the complexity of poets once dismissed as sentimentalists, see Nina
Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” in Feminism and American Literary
History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 151–66.
10. Thoughtful explorations of the role of values and the canon may be found in
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991) and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
11. Lawrence Buell, “The Transcendentalist Poets,” in Jay Parini (ed.), The
Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), pp. 113–14.
12. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky:
The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, ed. Robert Dale Parker (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
13. A. D. T. Whitney, Mother Goose for Grown Folks (New York: Rudd & Carleton,
1860), p. 70.
14. Whitney, Mother Goose for Grown Folks, p. 73.
15. Cheryl Walker emphasizes the importance of the myth for women writers
throughout The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before
1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), but she relies on a difer-
ent and more complex version of the myth, in which Philomela becomes a
silent swallow, her sister Procne becomes a nightingale, and the rapist Tereus
becomes a bird of prey; see pp. 21–22. The most common version in the
English tradition has Philomela becoming a nightingale.
16. William Gilmore Simms, “The Grape Vine Swing,” in James Everett Kibler, Jr.
(ed.), Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1990), p. 152.
17. William Gilmore Simms, “Boy Lost in the Woods,” in Kibler (ed.), Selected
Poems of William Gilmore Simms, pp. 84, 93.

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 Chapter 9
Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field:
Emerson and His Contemporaries
C h r istoph Ir m sc h e r

On May 20, 1837, the Albany Evening Journal printed a poem titled “To a Shred
of Linen” by Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865), now somewhat condescendingly
remembered, if at all, as “the Sweet Singer of Hartford.” Mrs. Sigourney,
talking to a rag? Not to worry, the editor assured his readers, this poem was
funny. In fact, if all literary ladies stuck to their shreds of linen, he quipped,
and if they did so as beautifully as Mrs. Sigourney, then there would be fewer
complaints about them.1 Often misunderstood as an excessively sentimental
and possibly not very smart poet and a writer of ponderous advice handbooks
for mothers and daughters, Sigourney in this poem displayed an unexpectedly
witty, even iconoclastic, streak. Not one to waste her readers’ time, Sigourney,
after giving us her title, proceeds to shred, literally, her very irst line in two:
Would they swept cleaner! –
Here’s a littering shred
Of linen left behind – a vile reproach
To all good housewifery. Right glad am I,
That no neat lady, train’d in ancient times
Of pudding-making, and of sampler-work,
And speckless sanctity of household care,
Hath happened here, to spy thee. She, no doubt,
Keen looking through her spectacles, would say,
“This comes of reading books:” – or some spruce beau,
Essenc’d and lily-handed, had he chanc’d
To scan thy slight superices, ’twould be
“This comes of writing poetry.” – Well – well. . . .
Establishing herself as someone who is not neat – who is, if truth be told, dif-
ferent from her pudding-producing, sampler-stitching female contemporaries,
as well as from the carefully decked-out, dressed-up male ones – the speaker
declares her interest in the piece of discarded cloth she has seen. Then, as if to
distract the reader from too much attention to herself, the speaker demands

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that the piece of cloth explain itself. Which, of course, it cannot. Instead
Sigourney, in metrically rocky lines that add to the conversational tone of the
whole exercise, herself supplies the linen’s history, beginning with the stalk
of lax harvested and lailed by the New England farmer and moving on to
the farmer’s wife getting the bundles of ibers ready for spinning. And spun
they are, by a singing maiden at her wheel, her “rustic lover” relaxing by her
side. Note that while women work in Sigourney’s poem, the men do nothing,
or close to nothing: calculating “the mass of skeins” produced by his bride,
the rustic lothario, in his excited imagination, transforms them into shelves
groaning under the weight of cheese and butter (all hand-churned by his dam-
sel), the proits from which might perchance get him a new coat someday.
Woven into a pillowcase, the newly produced linen for many years proved
serviceable to diferent classes of people: the young, the innocent, the sick,
and the sleepless, all of them at one point or another rested their weary heads
on it. Think of the tears that were shed into it; think of the secrets it heard.
Now all that’s left is a shred, but nevertheless, the linen won’t talk. Thus, in
mock disgust, the speaker sends it on for recycling:
Wilt tell no secrets, ha? – Well then, go down,
With all thy churl-kept hoard of curious lore,
In majesty and mystery, go down
Into the paper-mill, and from its jaws,
Stainless and smooth, emerge. – Happy shall be
The renovation, if on thy fair page
Wisdom and truth, their hallow’d lineaments
Trace for posterity. . . .
This turn of events has important consequences. It brings the shred’s life story
to a conclusion. And it clears the stage for the real poetry to begin. After the
tattered linen is magically and mysteriously transformed into pristine paper, it
eagerly awaits the lines to be written by “wisdom and truth.” Confronted with
these “hallow’d lineaments” (the poetry on the page), the complaints of “the
spruce beau” mentioned at the beginning of the poem are forever silenced:
So shall thine end
Be better than thy birth, and worthier bard
Thine apotheosis immortalize.
But how can we forget what we just learned? How can we, faced with the near
tautology in the inal line (“apotheosis immortalize”), not remember that this
white sheet of paper before us, about to be digniied by bardic utterance, was
once a stalk of lax in a ield? The real apotheosis, we can’t help but feel, is not

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what is to come once the real poets have taken hold of the new sheet of paper.
Rather, it is the one the poem has already described – the one that turns a plant
into cloth and cloth into paper.

*
Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, found himself hankering after such “worthier
bards.” In fact, the Sweet Singer of Hartford and the Sage of Concord had
more in common than standard accounts of literary history let us believe. But
Emerson (1803–1882) had more in mind than just “lineaments” of truth and
wisdom. In 1842, just one year after the publication of Sigourney’s Select Poems,
Emerson was working on his essay “The Poet,” in which he announced, among
other things, that America was still looking for her Dante, a poet liberating
enough to survey, “with a tyrannous eye,” the current state of the nation and
celebrate it. “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our isheries, our
Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues,
and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern plant-
ing, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas,” all these were yet unsung: “I look
in vain for the poet whom I describe.” His lament seems even more poignant
when we consider that Emerson, too, had been writing poetry, for decades.2
When Whitman burst on the American scene in 1855 with the irst edition
of Leaves of Grass, he looked very much like the bard whose coming Emerson
had predicted. But in 1842, as Emerson found himself wishing for an American
bard, Walter Whitman was still scrambling to make ends meet in New York,
building houses and working for a variety of newspapers. And while Whitman
was hunkering down in New York, next to his cases of type, his ingers stained
with ink and his muscles taut from hard work, an “advancing multitude” of
settlers (conjured up at the end of William Cullen Bryant’s 1836 poem “The
Prairies”)3 was continuing to push west. This was a time for loud voices, loud
men, for brawn more than brain. Emerson took things into his own hands:
“Merlin I” was his attempt to join the fray, his plea for a poetry written with
hammer and mace, America’s destiny made manifest.4 Merlin is a composite
igure, a muscular wizard-poet cobbled together from what he had read about
the legendary sixteenth-century Welsh Myrrdhin and from fragments of the
Arthurian romances:
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or ill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader’s art,

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 Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field

Nor tinkle of piano strings,

Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze. . . .
Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard. (CPE, p. 92)
This is poetry that wants to say “yes, in thunder.” Of course, Emerson is after
lashes of insight – into the secrets of the universe, no less! – not after noise
for noise’s sake.5 At the same time, it is hard to ignore the noise his own poetry
makes. Lurking in the back of Emerson’s mind was the Aeolian harp, favored
instrument of the Romantic poets. But Emerson’s harp, unlike Coleridge’s,
needs human players: it is not responding to the wind’s gentle caresses, pro-
ducing “soft-loating witchery.”6 This is magic of the rough kind: rudely
plucked by the “kingly bard,” the wizard harp moans, gasps, and screams.
Emerson gives us not poetry slowly trembling into sound, but poetry belting
out its need to be taken seriously. As Emerson’s poem goes on, it becomes
more and more evident that Emerson himself cannot fully play the role that
he has assigned for himself. Lines about bad verse – about the kind of poetry a
poet should never write – turn themselves into bad or at least awkward verse:
He shall not seek to weave,
In weak, unhappy times,
Eicacious rhymes;
Wait his returning strength.
Bird, that from the nadir’s loor
To the zenith’s top can soar,
The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey’s length.
Nor profane afect to hit
Or compass that, by meddling wit,
Which only the propitious mind
Publishes when ’tis inclined. (CPE, p. 93)
Emerson disliked poetry in which the meter inl uenced what the poet wants
to say.7 But in “Merlin I,” as his meter adjusts and readjusts to the argument
he wishes to make and as his lines alternate between three, four, and even
seven beats, Emerson begins to lose focus, too. Instead of soaring to the skies,

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Emerson’s poetry falters, getting entangled in lines that are less than perfect.
Rather than fulilling its poetic vision, “Merlin I” talks about what the poet
should not do, and Emerson inds himself gesturing toward a better poetry
that is still to come, much as Sigourney’s “To a Shred of Linen” did – poetry, in
other words, that Emerson appears to admit he cannot write.
“To a Shred of Linen” was published at the beginning of the Great Panic
of 1837. After British banks had raised interest rates, American banks had to
scale back their loans. Businesses and farmers throughout the nation suf-
fered grievous losses, and the price of cotton plummeted by 25 percent.
These were hard times, and it’s no wonder that traces of the political sit-
uation enter the poem, too – note the speaker’s relief that no one sees her
admiring her rag. This was not a good time to be wasting one’s talents on
literature. Emerson’s “Merlin I” was also written at an unpropitious time,
the year that the United States entered into its “shabby and to us disgraceful
War” (in the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)8 with neighboring
Mexico, a war that cost, some think, 15,000 American and 25,000 Mexican
lives. As much as Emerson might have wanted “Merlin I” to be representa-
tive of the times, of falling trees, political stumps, and booming cannons, it
wasn’t even representative of the best of his own poetry. The conversational,
self-mocking tone of Sigourney’s “To a Shred of Linen” is more in line with
the Emerson who is suspicious of what “the priest’s cant / Or statesman’s
rant” might do to his “honied thought” (“Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing”
[1846]; CPE, pp. 61–62). “Merlin I” tells us little about the Emerson who is
skeptical of his own orthodoxies – the same Emerson who, in Nature, had
written that it was really hard to be a Transcendentalist when there was
someone digging in a ield nearby.9
As early as 1833, Emerson’s closest ally, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), who
was then only twenty-three, had written an unrhymed poetic sketch titled
“Meditations,” in which the speaker faults herself for looking at nature as noth-
ing more than a canvas on which to project her ideas of human greatness:
In former times
I loved to see the lightnings lash athwart
The stooping heavens; I loved to hear the thunder
Call to the seas and mountains; for I thought
’Tis thus man’s lashing fancy doth enkindle
The irmament of mind; ’tis such his eloquence
Calls unto the soul’s depths and heights; and still
I deiied the creature, nor remembered
The Creator in his works.

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Fuller ofers a trenchant critique of what would become one of the corner-
stones of Transcendentalist thought – the insistence on the primacy of the
solitary human individual. Writing from the perspective of a disenchanted
worshipper at the altar of the self (“The proud delight of that keen sympathy
/ Is gone”), Fuller touchingly ofers a prayer in which she hopes that, given a
future that now seems more uncertain, love might serve to guide her:
But O, might I but see a little onward!
Father, I cannot be a spirit of power;
May I be active as a spirit of love,
Since thou hast ta’en me from that path which Nature
Seemed to appoint, O, deign to ope another,
Where I may walk with thought and hope assured. . . .10
Fuller’s “spirit of love” quietly rebels against one of the most iconic images
of Transcendentalism before Emerson had even had time to formulate it: the
image of the solitary eyeball melting into the horizon, in a process of com-
plete transformation and self-expansion that renders all human company irrel-
evant. Her plea that she be allowed to see just “a little onward” l ies in the face
of the Transcendentalist conidence in the future.
And Fuller was not alone in her doubts about the power of “man’s lashing
fancy.” The most perfect expression of that power was Emerson’s transpar-
ent eyeball fantasy – the notion (irst expressed in Nature) that if we aban-
don ourselves fully to our acts of looking, we become as big as the world
around us. We see fully, and we are being seen, too. It was precisely this gran-
diose image of the poet as larger-than-life Transcendentalist that a contempo-
rary of Emerson’s – the very funny Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892), a
poet, painter, and musician, and one of the most original talents of the era –
wanted to undermine. Cranch was a full-ledged Emerson disciple, celebrat-
ing “the language celestial / Written all over the earth, written all over the sky”
(“Correspondences” [1844]).11 But his humor prevented him from accepting
anything lofty at face value (he had, he said later, always felt that Emerson’s
poetry lacked “elbow room”).12 Witness his caricatures, the most famous of
which glosses Emerson’s transparent eyeball metaphor from Nature by depict-
ing a horrifyingly engorged eyeball on spindly legs, wearing a top hat and tails
and standing somewhat forlornly in a landscape, complete with mountains
and clouds, that apparently refuses to melt before his gaze.13 A lesser-known
cartoon spoofs Emerson’s Merlinesque supposition that greatness is a func-
tion of inner conidence: “A great man angles with himself; he needs no other
bait.”14 But watch the rather scraggly-looking ish in the water that, piranha-

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like, snap at the great man’s feet, ready to make a meal of him. The great man
looks as if he is having second thoughts.

*
Such second thoughts came naturally to Emerson the poet. Although he had
been writing poetry since he was able to hold a pen,15 Emerson sometimes felt
he was a mere versiier: “I am a bard least of bards. I cannot, like them, make
lofty arguments in stately, continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, ani-
mals, & the periodic stars to say my thoughts, – for that is the gift of great
poets.” Orpheus he was not; if he was a poet, he was so by virtue of his prox-
imity to the other, truly great ones.16 Critics have tended to agree: “Poet he
would have liked to be, scholar he never doubted he was,” writes Lawrence
Buell, in the best recent discussion of Emerson’s work as a whole.17 Yet the
poems collected in the 1846 edition of his Poems show that the Emerson who
manages to avoid lofty thoughts, who feels no desire to set the world around
him into song, often achieves a surprising intimacy. This intimacy emerges
more clearly when we look at his work not (as is mostly done) in terms of
Emerson’s own writerly ambitions but against the foil of the poems produced
by his less self-consciously “bardic” contemporaries.
Take, for example, a poem by one of the most popular poets of the era,
Frances S. Osgood (1811–1850), “Ellen Learning to Walk.” Osgood’s poem
was included in A Wreath of Wildlowers of New England, published in 1838,
when the poet and her portrait-painter husband were living in London. The
Boston-born Osgood, although a ixture in New York literary salons, always
considered herself a New England poet at heart: “New England’s Mountain-
Child,” she called herself in her poetry, although she admitted that she also
wanted to be seen as a “rich Magnolia” among the “woodland-gloom.”18
Emerson would have rejected any attempt to associate him with Osgood,
whom he held personally responsible for keeping the bookstores stocked
with her poetic “ ‘Wreaths’ and ‘Flora’s chaplets.’ ”19 But Osgood was a shrewd
and supremely self-aware poet. “Ellen Learning to Walk” unfolds a domes-
tic drama that quickly rises beyond its apparent theme, a child’s irst steps,
and turns into an allegory about gender. As the poet-speaker identiies with
her daughter’s faltering eforts, the child’s father is made to seem uncooper-
ative (although we may assume he has been told not to help) and even a bit
hostile:
My beautiful trembler! how wildly she shrinks!
And how wistful she looks while she lingers!

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Papa is extremely uncivil, she thinks, –

She but pleaded for one of his ingers!
What eloquent pleading! the hand reaching out,
As if doubting so strange a refusal;
While her blue eyes say plainly, “What is he about
That he does not assist me as usual?”
Come on, my pet Ellen! we won’t let you slip, –
Unclasp those soft arms from his knee, love;
I see a faint smile round that exquisite lip,
A smile half reproach and half glee, love.20
Metrically, this is an extremely skillful poem. Osgood alternates four-beat
mostly anapestic verse in lines 1 and 3 of each stanza (sometimes propelled by
an iambic substitution, as in the poem’s opening line) with the extrametrical
anapestic trimeter of lines 2 and 4 (again, with the odd iambic initial pushing
of ). Osgood’s lexible handling of the four-line stanza, which evokes the 4-3-4-3
iambic beat structure of the ballad stanza, is an efective way for capturing the
animated scene the poet describes for us. The substitution of a masculine end-
ing (“love”) for the feminine ending, along with the obvious fact that this is an
identical rhyme (“love” / “love”), marks the mother’s heightened participation
in the drama as the “uncivil” father fades into the background. The poet’s “I”
emerges from the parental “we.” Osgood’s poem begins to stutter and sputter,
as the stresses appear to wander too (“bráve báby”; “a bít! – trý it”). The alliter-
ation (“foot falters forward”) reveals the energy behind the daughter’s attempts
not to lose her balance while the mother continues to coach her:
So! that’s my brave baby! one foot falters forward,
Half doubtful the other steals by it!
What, shrinking again! why, you shy little coward!
’Twon’t kill you to walk a bit! – try it!
There! steady, my darling! huzza! I have caught her!
I clasp her, caress’d and caressing!
And she hides her bright face, as if what we had taught her
Were something to blush for – the blessing!
Now back again! Bravo! that shout of delight,
How it thrills to the hearts that adore her!
Joy, joy for her mother! and blest be the night
When her little light feet irst upbore her!
It becomes obvious, despite the poet’s attempt to mask her involvement by
referring to herself in the third person, that this is really the mother’s story

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the poem tells (“Joy, joy for her mother!”). In the subtly gendered drama of
Ellen’s struggle to stand on her own feet is relected the poet’s quest for joyful
independence.
Emerson, too, invoked the intuitive independence of children as a model
for adult behavior, although it seems that he gravitated to the “nonchalance
of boys” rather than to the fussiness of little girls: “A boy is in the parlour what
the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his
corner on such people and facts as pass by. . . . He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.”21
And in his early lecture, “Domestic Life,” he imagined the change that takes
place when the “little talker” becomes a little walker: “He walks daily among
wonders: ire, light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of the house,
the red tin horse, the domestics, who like rude foster-mothers befriend and
feed him, the faces that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing; yet warm,
cheerful and with good appetite the little sovereign subdues them without
knowing it; the new knowledge is taken up into the life of to-day and becomes
the means of more.” These lines relect Emerson’s experiences with his own
son Waldo, creative, tempestuous, funny, who had convinced him that “the
household is the home of the man, as well as of the child.”22
It was a disaster of mythic proportions, therefore, that befell Emerson in
January 1842, when Waldo contracted and quickly died from scarlet fever.
Emerson’s stunned response to that death – comparable in intensity to
Charles Darwin’s equally traumatic loss of his daughter Annie in 1851 – has
elicited much commentary, as has the movement from despair to philosoph-
ical abstraction in Emerson’s memorial poem for Waldo, “Threnody” (1846;
CPE, pp. 117–24). The knowledge, ofered at the end of the poem, that heaven
is not made of adamant and gold but is, instead, “a nest of bending reeds,
/ Flowering grass, and scented weeds,” that the world is a “ruined system”
watered with the tears of the bereaved, could not have consoled the poet who
simply missed his “wondrous child, / Whose silver warble wild / Outvalued
every pulsing sound / Within the air’s cerulean round” (CPE, pp. 124, 117).
Missing Waldo, in “Threnody,” is a matter of no longer seeing him walk. If
Osgood wrote about a child’s irst steps, Emerson remembers his last:
And wither now, my truant wise and sweet,
O, whither tend thy feet?
I had the right, few days ago,
Thy steps to watch, thy place to know;
How have I forfeited the right?
Hast thou forgot me in a new delight? (CPE, pp. 117–18)

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Among Emerson’s achingly clear memories of Waldo is his walk to the village
school in the mornings, a regular parade that made a “festival” of each and
every day: “When every morn my bosom glowed / To watch the convoy on
the road.” Waldo was the captain of that parade, and in the speaker’s memory
it suddenly seems as if Waldo were strutting past his window again, “Stately
marching in cap and coat / To some tune by fairies played; / A music heard by
thee alone / To works as noble led thee on.” In the poem’s next section, how-
ever, reality has set in again, and Emerson is reduced to imagining Waldo, the
“deep-eyed boy,” only through the places where once he went:
The painted sled stands where it stood;
The kennel by the corded wood;
The gathered sticks to stanch the wall
Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall;
The ominous hole he dug in the sand,
And childhood’s castles built or planned;
His daily haunts I well discern, –
The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn, –
And every inch of garden ground
Paced by the blessed feet around,
From the roadside to the brook
Whereinto he loved to look. (CPE, p. 119)
Emerson’s painful feeling of being forever separated from Waldo is mirrored
in the syntax of the passage: a heap of nouns (“sled,” “kennel,” “sticks,” “snow-
tower,” “hole”) combined with verbs or verb forms that do not indicate but
rather obscure agency (“to staunch,” “built or planned,” “gathered sticks,”
“paced”). Waldo the maker, builder, planner, gatherer, and pacer is gone. The
speaker’s assertion of control is belied by the one imperfect rhyme in the pas-
sage (“well discern”/ “barn”). For Emerson, Waldo’s death was a “wandering
away,” measured by the steps that fade into the tunnel of the past, leaving the
father with one thought only: “I am too much bereft” (CPE, p. 121).

*
Against such bereavement, against any attempt to attribute meaning to human
sufering, Emerson wrote his great tribute to the medieval Persian poet Saadi
Shirazi. A celebration of Saadi’s sensualism and shaped by Emerson’s eclectic
reading of Persian poetry, “Saadi” argues precisely against a view of the world
that sees darkness where there is only sunlight:
Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say
Endless dirges to decay,

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Never in the blaze of light

Lose the shudder of midnight;
Pale at overlowing noon
Hear wolves barking at the moon;
In the bower of dalliance sweet
Hear the far Avenger’s feet. . . . (CPE, p. 100)
The shuddering fakirs allow Emerson to give free rein to his frustration with
“the wintry coldness at the heart” that some of his friends, too, associated with
New England (the last line comes from a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper).23
Emerson’s rushed catalectic trochees, along with the aggressive fricatives
and strained plosives that dominate these lines, mimic the pent-up tension
that grips these Eastern Puritans. Their bodies taut with suppressed desire,
Emerson’s fakirs (and it’s possible that Emerson wanted us to think of them as
“fakers” too24) cannot ind release except in the pain they inl ict on themselves
and others. “Drink not the Malaga of praise,” they preach,
But do the deed thy fellows hate,
And compromise thy peaceful state;
Smite the white breasts which thee fed;
Stuf sharp thorns beneath the head
Of them thou shouldst have comforted;
For out of woe and out of crime
Draws the heart a lore sublime. (CPE, p.100)
Here Saadi’s (and Emerson’s) theology kicks in. Rejecting the implements of
self-torture, he opts for sunlight, laughter, and delight in life:
And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy;
For Saadi sat in the sun,
And thanks was his contrition;
For haircloth and for bloody whips
Had active hands and smiling lips. . . . (CPE, p. 100)

Thus equipped, Saadi will be a teacher to his people, a poet-healer, as Emerson

suggests, in anticipation of the role that Walt Whitman would carve out for
himself. Even when he writes about the night, the light of his poetry shines
brighter even than the sunshine celebrated in the tributes to the day written
by the later Sui poet Jami:
Sunshine in his heart transferred
Lighted each transparent word,
And well could honoring Persia learn

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What Saadi wished to say;

For Saadi’s nightly stars did burn
Brighter than Dschami’s day. (CPE, p. 101)

The poem ends with the Muse speaking to Saadi, asking him to not seek any-
thing that lies beyond the walls of his own cottage. Instead, she encourages
him to trust in the transformative power of his imagination, which will turn
even his household servants into “blessed gods.” At the same time, though,
the pleasure Saadi takes in his vocation is no mere escapism; it comes with the
demand that he take his immediate environment seriously. That this injunc-
tion is presented to the American reader in the form of a poem honoring an
old Persian poet is an irony that Emerson had fully intended. His version of
localism was not meant to be a parochial one.
But this is precisely where Emerson’s later poem “Hamatreya” (written
in 1845 or 1846) picks up. The title reminds us again of Emerson’s debt to
Asian religion and literature, although the word itself cannot be found, as
one of Emerson’s earliest critics pointed out, with some exasperation, in any
“English or foreign dictionary that the largest libraries can aford.”25 Most crit-
ics acknowledge that Emerson was alluding to a sacred Hindu text, the Vishnu
Parana, in which “Maitreya” is a disciple of Parana, who relates to his student
the wisdom the earth has imparted to him.26 Whatever the source, Emerson
must have enjoyed the jarring efect that came from the contrast between the
exotic word in the title and the list of names, Concord farmers all, that make
up the entire irst line of the poem, a self-conscious refusal to deliver poetry
of the usual kind:

Minott, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint

Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, lax, apples, wool, and wood.
Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,
Saying, “ ’Tis mine, my children’s, and my name’s:
How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!
How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the lags
Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize;
And, I airm, my actions smack of the soil.” (CPE, p. 28)

Notice the emphasis on ownership (“ ’Tis mine,” “my own trees,” “my hill”) –
not an innocent topic at a time when many Americans still thought they had
the right to own human beings. If Emerson has his farmers suggest that the
relationship between land and landowner resembles that between a dog and

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his master, the irony is palpable. The next few lines spell it out: confronted
with such human hubris, the earth laughs, and her amusement expresses itself
in lowers (and not in the products of human agricultural labor mentioned
earlier: corn, lax, wool, etc.). “Proud of the earth which is not theirs,” all
these farmers end up as earth themselves. Where are these men, asks the
poet, and he supplies the answer, as pithy as it is chilling: “Asleep beneath their
grounds” (CPE, p. 28). Emerson then gives his farmers another opportunity to
embarrass themselves, this time as landscape architects:
“This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat. . . . ”
(CPE, p. 28)

Ofering his own conclusion (“Ah! The hot owner sees not Death, who adds
/ Him to his land”), the poet then allows the earth to strike back, in a section
that is visually and metrically set apart from the rest of the poem, as blank
verse yields to clipped lines that refuse to adhere to a normative beat pat-
tern. This is no longer Saadi’s Muse or the Great Heart of “Threnody,” but a
more commanding voice: “Mine and yours, / Mine and not yours,” the earth
responds, making fun especially of lawyers who draw up deeds and wills and
think that one can inherit a piece of land. Says the earth:
“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone.
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?” (CPE, p. 29)

By virtue of their very economy, these lines, coming after the dull, repetitive list
making of the farmers, carry the weight of persuasion. But the reader is in for
a surprise when, in the inal section of the poem, the speaker reveals who is the
one that is most afected by the earth’s intervention: it is the poet himself!
When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave,
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave. (CPE, p. 29)

The poet here is no Saadi but another Concord landowner, diferent from his
neighbors only in that he is given the beneit of insight before it is too late, at

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least in theory. Emerson reserves the strongest opprobrium for himself, com-
paring his need for ownership, his “avarice,” to sexual desire. If the poet seems
to have escaped death, the inal image of the poem makes us doubt that he
has been much luckier than his dead, boastful neighbors. If “Saadi” was about
the poet able to transcend day and night, time and place, “Hamatreya” shows
the poet stuck in Concord. Emerson ends the poem not cheered by the earth’s
laughter but chastened by rattling bones, feeling the shudder of death in the
here and now. And anybody who would like to dismiss it as a persona poem
would only need to remember that Emerson wrote “Hamatreya” between
inalizing real estate deals in Concord.27
“Saadi” and “Hamatreya” remind us once again that Emerson’s poetry is
better than its reputation, and better than his own opinion of it. As in his
essays, Emerson presents meaning as process, but without the inality of pro-
phetic insight attached to any of its lines. His poetry remains unpredictable:
sounding like doggerel in one moment, it veers into high-lying metaphors the
next. It won’t do to attribute such lexibility to a lack of poetical talent. Rather
than celebrating the Bard, his poetry features a more low-key character: one
who, like Saadi, is open to diferent viewpoints and who is lawed himself, like
the speaker of “Hamatreya.” Above all, Emerson’s poetry is conversational:
not only in the form of the dialogues that, often literally, inhabit his poems,
but, more important, in the exchanges that his poems – such as “Saadi” and
“Hamatreya” – have with one another.28
In his best poems, Emerson does not wish to build monuments to rival
those of princes. He set the tone for this reduced vision of poetry’s power
early, in one of his most carefully made poems, “The Snow Storm” (lines
from which John Greenleaf Whittier later used as the epigraph to Snow-Bound
[1866]). The poem, written in 1835, details the arrival of a nonhuman force
that “hides,” “veils,” and obscures, sending humans indoors. The irst stanza
imitates the kinetic, disruptive energy of the storm through the line breaks
that separate subject from verb (“air / hides”; “feet / delayed”) or verb from
preposition (“sit / around”; “enclosed / in”). The poet invites the reader to
inspect the storm’s transformative energy, emphasizing how “ierce,” “wild,”
and “savage” it is. The storm is an architect without any sense of propor-
tion, defying the notion of “Balance-loving Nature” that Emerson invokes in
“Merlin II” (CPE, p. 93). But more than anything the snowstorm is an ironist,
mocking the human desire for decoration: hanging marble wreaths from
dog kennels, shaping bushes into swans, and adding a “tapering turret” to
the farmer’s gate. The poem ends with breathless run-on lines describing
the departure of the snowstorm and the amazement of the poet at the quick

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work the mad wind has done – work that takes an artist “an age” to imitate
in his or her medium:
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow. (CPE, p. 34)
In a sense, though, the mad snowstorm also ofers an analogy for Emerson’s
poetry, which often seems written rapidly, infused with the knowledge of its
own provisional nature, and aware of the fact that, whatever the poets might
do, life elsewhere slowly goes on.

*
Given the conversational nature of his best poems, it seems odd that Emerson
accepted as his disciple someone whose main efect on others seems to have
been to silence them. When Jones Very is “in the room with other persons,”
Emerson wrote in his journal, “speech stops as if there were a corpse in the
apartment.”29 Jones Very’s best-known poems were written – or they hap-
pened to him, as he would have wanted his readers to think – in 1838 and 1839,
when he was in a state of permanent ecstasy, teetering on the brink of insanity.
When Emerson irst met him, Very (1813–1880), the son of a Salem sea captain,
was a student at the Harvard Divinity School and a Greek tutor to Harvard
freshmen and already had a well-deserved reputation for being “cracked.”
He didn’t help matters when he informed Elizabeth Peabody that he was the
Second Coming and told his startled students that they should “lee to the
mountains,” because “the end of all things” was “at hand.”30 His eccentricities
earned Very a dismissal from his Harvard teaching job and a few weeks at the
McLean Asylum for the Insane.
None of which slowed him down: he continued to badger Emerson for his
alleged lack of “obedience” to God, without, however, wanting to give up on
his services as an editor (for the volume of Very’s poems he generously pub-
lished in 1839, Emerson whittled the two hundred poems Very had provided to
a more manageable sixty-ive).31 Despite his irrepressible preference for formal
poetry (notably the Shakespearian sonnet), Very is still considered the most
“rough hewn” of the Transcendentalists.32 However, the stereotypical image
of Very as a mildly annoying – though gifted – kook, a kind of Christopher
Smart redivivus, is only partially correct. He did feel vastly superior to his

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contemporaries, including Emerson, and regarded them as spiritually bereft.

In “The Dead,” he compared them to lealess trees, stripped not by autumn
but by the distance they have created between themselves and God. They
were the ones who have died, said Very, not those lying in the cemeteries: “And
in their show of life more dead they live / Than those that to the earth with
many tears they give” (JV, p. 77).
Very irmly believed that the living God was with or even within him.
In “The Presence,” written in his “severely monastic room in Salem,” Very
exclaims: “I sit within my room and joy to ind / That Thou who always loves
art with me here, / That I am never left by Thee behind” (JV, p. 78).33 Note the
odd use of “joy” as a verb, which, to be sure, has a biblical ring (as in Habakkuk
3:18 or 2 Corinthians 7:13) but also turns the experience described from an
abstraction into a concrete act. However, as Very clariies elsewhere, it is ulti-
mately up to God to lead us to where we need to be, to guide us to the “place
just right,” as the Shakers would have called it:
The hand and foot that stir not, they shall ind
Sooner than all the rightful place to go;
Now in their motion free as roving wind,
Though irst no snail so limited and slow;
I mark them full of labor all the day,
Each active motion made in perfect rest . . . (JV, p. 193)

While our feet carry us where we must go, our eyes are free to roam.
Very’s poetry is rich with visual impressions. According to Very, we haven’t
even begun to look. “Find thee eyes and look thee there,” he shouts impa-
tiently in “Autumn Leaves,” berating the reader for stepping heedlessly over
the leaves on the ground, not recognizing their beauty (JV, p. 188). But in
Very’s poetry, the human eye does not, Emerson-style, expand to godlike
proportions to encompass the horizon. Instead, it contracts to the level
of the smallest objects: everything is worth a look. In the “The American
Scholar,” Emerson had suggested that our bodies, even our feet, were lined
with eyes, a rather negative, Hamlet-like experience: beset with multiple
insights, our minds are never at rest but keep swirling, “embarrassed with
second thoughts.”34
Where Emerson wanted to look up, Very looked down. He liked the eyes
on his feet. A perfect example of that downward look is “The Columbine,”
a poem addressed to a small, hardy plant found in woodlands and meadows
and known for the distinctive shape of its petals. As if the columbine were his
friend, Very addresses her directly; if it weren’t for the title, the irst two lines

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could have been addressed to a lover. It is only in line 3 that the speaker’s desire
to “forget” his humanity is unveiled as a wish to become part of the world of
plants. And so he does, at least for most of the poem:
Still, still my eye will gaze long-ixed on thee,
Till I forget that I am called a man,
And at thy side fast-rooted seem to be,
And the breeze comes my cheek with thine to fan;
Upon this craggy hill our life shall pass,
A life of summer days and summer joys,
Nodding our honey bells mid pliant grass
In which the bee half hid his time employs;
And here we’ll drink with thirsty pores the rain,
And turn dew-sprinkled to the rising sun,
And look when in the laming west again
His orb across the heaven its path has run;
Here, left in darkness on the rocky steep,
My weary eyes shall close like folding lowers in sleep.
(JV, pp. 61–62)
The alliteration and internal rhyme at the beginning of the irst line (“Still, still
my eye will”) enact the moment of deep, self-absorbed looking that triggers
the quasi transformation. Gazing at the lower, the speaker becomes a lower
(although not the lower). The speaker roots himself into the ground, next
to the columbine, fanned by the same breeze on the hill that also touches
the plant, resting “my cheek with thine.” The creative blurring of human
and plant worlds persists throughout the poem. However, the speaker does
not substitute himself for the columbine’s consciousness. In an act of respect
that we would now call ecological, he joins it in a life that the next few lines
render physically palpable: nodding his blossoms, heavy with pollen, thirstily
drinking in the rain, waking up in the morning, “dew-sprinkled,” excited to
greet the sun. The transformation is not a complete one, nor was it intended
to be such: the water-absorbing “pores” of the plant serve as a reminder of
the speaker’s former humanity, as does, in the inal line, the reference to the
“eyes” that close, eyes that are “like,” although not the same as, the petals of
the columbine folding back at night.
Similar to these acts of abandonment to the natural world are moments in
Very’s poetry in which the speaker inds himself longing for a kind of perma-
nent childhood. In “The Song,” for example, confronted with a landscape too
wide and rivers extending too far, the speaker feels the power of poetry slip-
ping from his grasp. He lets the tide carry him back to his childhood haunts:

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When I would sing of crooked streams and ields,

On, on from me they stretch too far and wide,
And at their look my song all powerless yields,
And down the river bears me with its tide;
Amid the ields I am a child again,
The spots that then I loved I love the more,
My ingers drop the strangely-scrawling pen,
And I remember nought but nature’s lore;
I plunge me in the river’s cooling wave,
Or on the embroidered bank admiring lean,
Now some endangered insect life to save,
Now watch the pictured lowers and grasses green;
Forever playing where a boy I played,
By hill and grove, by ield and stream delayed. (JV, p. 70)

Readily abandoning his “strangely-scrawling pen,” the speaker swims in the

water, sits on the river’s bank, and holds communion with the insects and
lowers. If this were all, “The Song” would not be a very interesting poem: a
garden-variety regressive dream, even if cast into the form of a Shakespearian
sonnet. But look at his handling of syntax in the poem’s inal lines: the two
actions described by inite verbs (“plunge” and “lean”) frame a number of
other activities (“insect life to save”; “watch the pictured lowers”; “forever
playing”; “by ield and stream delayed”) that seem strangely subjectless, a
perfect illustration of the kind of permanent present, the state and place of
arrested development, into which the speaker projects himself, an ininitely
prolonged state of happiness, stripped of the demands of adult life. Note, too,
how the poem ends on the verb “delayed,” a witty admission on the poet’s part
that, yes, he knows what he is doing: proof, of course, that the poet-speaker
has never really let go of his pen. It would not be an exaggeration to say that
in Very’s “The Song” we see a fantasy in play that would come to dominate a
much later poem, Leaves of Grass, composed by that leaning, loaing, lounging
New York poet Walt Whitman.35

*
When Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Emerson’s other great literary dis-
ciple, sought the afections of the young Ellen Sewall from Scituate, he gave
her a copy of Very’s poems. This was not the reason the courtship failed. In
fact, Ellen said she rather liked them. In her journal, however, Ms. Sewall
confessed that what had really touched her was Thoreau’s poetry. Critics
have not shared this feeling. Thoreau wrote “few, if any, great poems,”

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declared his biographer Walter Harding.36 And yet, readers willing to give
Thoreau the poet a chance will ind his verse leavened with a sense of dark
humor that was unavailable to Emerson or Very. Consider this verse frag-
ment from his journal, composed when Thoreau was holed up in Concord
in the spring of 1841, frantically trying to read or write as loud sounds
coming from the kitchen below kept interrupting him. Thoreau was suf-
iciently disturbed to speculate on the implements the people below were
using. Was it tongs? Or perhaps a shovel? Clearly, Thoreau was no Saadi at
that point, capable of transforming the “foolish gossips” down below into
“blessed gods.” But his reading in Eastern mysticism still came to the res-
cue: mentally transforming the sound of tongs-on-tea-kettle into a gong,
he was able to turn his house (a “hovel”), irritating kitchen sounds and all,
into an exotic place of worship:
They who prepare my evening meal below
Carelessly hit the kettle as they go
With tongs or shovel,
And ringing round and round,
Out of this hovel
It makes an eastern temple by the sound.
This was not the irst association the poet had. Earlier, the clanging pots had
reminded him of how cow bells
Mid birches sounded o’er the open land,
Where I plucked lowers
Many years ago,
Spending midsummer hours
With such secure delight they hardly seemed to low.37
In just a few lines, and with a considerable dash of wit, Thoreau’s poetic
sketch soars over the pots and pans in the kitchen and travels across the phys-
ical and mental landscapes that mattered to him, all anchored in a sound that
could not be more trivial. Thanks to the mind’s capacity to remember or to
transform, a poem that starts in anger is allowed to end on a note of “secure
delight.”
But that delight is a past experience, a memory, not a reality, a theme
Thoreau explores in another poem (“Sic Vita” [July 1841]) that revolves around
a single conceit: the speaker comparing himself not to a hardy columbine
but to a bunch of uprooted violets, with some sorrel and weeds mixed in, a
rather unsightly “nosegay,” carelessly plucked for no evident reason. He is a
“parcel of vain strivings,” sighs the poet, loosely tied together by a wisp of

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straw, subject to chance and circumstance, “Dangling this way and that.” The
central stanza of the poem summarizes the dilemma, ending rather drably in
ae and a sounds, with the assonance of “But” and “cup” clinching the speaker’s
unspoken complaint.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up.
Which have no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.38

While some buds have been left on the severed violets, “in mimicry of life,”
the poet fears he will soon be known only in his withered state, and then not
at all. The much-needed turn in the poem comes rather abruptly, namely as an
attempt to ind some ecological sense behind his uprooting and to look at it as
an act of planned husbandry rather than careless displacement.
But now I see I was not plucked for nought,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer lowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

From this new perspective, the humble cup turns into an ornamental vase.
Or does it? Some elements in those inal stanzas do seem to work against an
entirely positive or, yes, “kind” reading of this inal moment: not only the
“strange” place where the poet (as a decaying bunch of violets) inds him-
self but the very language of agricultural management, which sounds almost
proto-eugenic (“the stock thus thinned”). Note the lingering uncertainty
(“Such as God knows”) and the disconcerting inal image we are left with:
the drooping poet, left to die, as nature – perhaps, perhaps not – renews itself.
Whatever alliances with nature that the Transcendentalists might have thought
they had formed, they were temporary ones, reminders that while nature lives
on, in “fruits and fairer lowers,” humanity inevitably limps behind.

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*
In one of his cartoon parodies of Transcendentalist philosophy, Christopher
Pearse Cranch takes his cue from Emerson’s professed wish to “expand and
live in the warm day like corn and melons” and reminds us of the ridiculous-
ness of that metaphor, which was never intended to be anything more than an
image.39 He depicts a human as a fat melon sitting on the ground, wearing a half-
embarrassed smile and adorned with some impressive leaves sprouting out of his
head. Cranch’s half-serious poem “Bird Language” responds even more directly
to Emerson’s conviction that all natural facts were spiritual facts. Overhearing
a conversation taking place between ive bobolinks, “laughing together / Over
some ornithological joke,” the poet wonders what all the fuss is about. He dis-
cusses possible explanations for the birds’ unrestrained laughter – a “querulous
catbird,” the “cawing of crows high over the trees,” “some chipmunk’s chatter,”
or perhaps a weasel, “stealthy and sly,” hidden away under a stone wall – only to
recognize that he just doesn’t know. The next step in the poem will make sense
to anyone who has ever been in a social setting surrounded by people laughing
uproariously for no immediately evident reason: the poet suspects that the birds
are laughing about him. “Or was the joke about me at my easel, / Trying to catch
the tints of the sky”? Cranch’s irony is quite complex: as if it were not enough
that the bobolinks could be making fun of him as a poet, he now fears that they
might be ridiculing his abilities as a painter, too. He rescues himself from despair
by deciding that if he can’t understand what the language of the birds means, he
can at least appreciate the music they make. Cranch was an accomplished lutist,
who once entertained the folks at Brooke Farm with his playing, and he knows
how to make his poem sing the way the bobolinks do:
Still they lew tipsily, shaking all over,
Bubbling with jollity, brimful of glee,
While I sat listening deep in the clover,
Wondering what their jargon could be.
’T was but the voice of a morning the brightest
That ever dawned over yon shadowy hills;
’T was but the song of all joy that is lightest, –
Sunshine breaking in laughter and trills.
Vain to conjecture the words they are singing;
Only by tones can we follow the tune
In the full heart of summer ields ringing,
Ringing the rhythmical gladness of June!40
Cranch’s simple quatrains begin to levitate, thanks to the alliterating plosives
(b, t, and k sounds) he employs, which suggest not only the birds’ bursting

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into song but the poet’s own participation in the music. As the poem, too,
indulges in tones rather than words, Cranch builds toward the conclusion, in
which poet and birds both enter into the “full heart of summer.” The climac-
tic nature of the moment is underlined by the wonderful device of repeating
the present participle “ringing” while also separating it by a line break. In the
inal line, the r alliteration and g and l consonance mark the moment of inal
release. Interestingly, the poet still hasn’t understood what the ornithological
joke was that had gotten the bobolinks all a-titter. To return to Sigourney’s
self-deprecating “To a Shred of Linen,” what we see in “Bird Language” are
not the “hallow’d lineaments” of Wisdom and Truth but a tune whistled on
a warm summer night, with the speaker sitting in a ield “deep in the clover.”
And that, after all, is a place that Emerson would have enjoyed too. In his
journal, Emerson described how gardening helped him forget the desire to
“bite his enemies”: smoothing the ground, he’d smooth his temper; pulling
out the grass he didn’t want, he’d pull out the splinters in his soul; and, inally,
something wonderful would happen: “I can hear the Bobalink’s song & see
the blessed deluge of light & colour that rolls around me.”41

Notes
1. Albany Evening Journal 8.2219, May 20, 1837, p. 2. The poem also appears in
Sigourney’s Select Poems of 1841.
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (published in Essays: Second Series, 1844), in
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of
America, 1983), p. 465.
3. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1832), in John Hollander (ed.), American
Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1994), vol.
1, p. 164.
4. “Merlin I” was included in Emerson’s irst collection, Poems (1846). See Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations, ed. Harold Bloom and Paul
Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994), pp. 91–93. Further references to this
edition appear in the text, preceded by CPE.
5. See Paul Kane, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Eric L. Haralson (ed.), Encyclopedia
of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998),
pp. 145–50, 145.
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (1795/1796), in E. H. Coleridge
(ed.), The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Milford, 1935), pp. 100–02.
7. See “The Poet”; Emerson, Essays, p. 450.
8. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, May 27, 1846, Journal, October 1, 1845–28
February 1847, Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS
Am 1340 (200).

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 C h r isto ph I r msc he r

9. Emerson, Nature, chapter VII: “You cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if
laborers are digging in the ield hard by” (Essays, p. 42).
10. Margaret Fuller, “Meditations. Sunday, May 12, 1832,” in Arthur B. Fuller (ed.),
Life Without and Life Within: Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems (Boston:
Taggard & Chase, 1860), pp. 881–83.
11. Hollander (ed.), American Poetry, vol. 1, pp. 590–91. On Cranch and Emerson,
see the essays by Nancy Stula (“Transcendentalism: The Path from Preaching
to Painting”) and David M. Robinson (“Christopher Pearse Cranch and the
New England Transcendentalists”) in Nancy Stula, Barbara Novak, and David
M. Robinson, At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher
Pearse Cranch (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2007).
12. See his later essay, Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Emerson’s Limitations as a
Poet,” The Critic 17 (February 27, 1892), p. 129.
13. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Standing on the bare ground . . . ,” in Christopher
Pearse Cranch, “Illustrations of the New Philosophy: Drawings, 1837–1839,”
Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1506 (4).
14. Cranch somewhat unfairly truncates a sentence from Emerson’s early lecture
“Domestic Life,” in which Emerson argues against men pursuing wealth for
its own sake: “The wise man angles with himself only, and with no meaner
bait” (the lecture was published in 1870, as chapter V of Society and Solitude; for
this quotation, see Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters
[Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870], p. 103); Christopher Pearse Cranch, “A great
man angles with himself,” in Cranch, “Illustrations of the New Philosophy,”
Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1506 (5).
15. Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic
Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1950), p. 407.
16. Emerson, Journal VA [February–March 1863], in Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), vol. 15, p. 308.
17. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005),
p. 40.
18. Frances S. Osgood, “New England’s Mountain-Child,” in Frances S. Osgood,
Poems (New York: Clark & Austin, 1846), p. 190.
19. Emerson, Nature (1844), in Emerson, Essays, p. 545.
20. Osgood, Poems, pp. 199–200.
21. Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1842), in Emerson, Essays, p. 261.
22. Emerson, “Domestic Life,” in Emerson, Society and Solitude, pp. 88–89, 90.
23. Ellen Sturgis Hooper, “Better a Sin Which Purposed Wrong to None” (irst
published privately around 1872), in Lawrence Buell (ed.), The American
Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2006),
pp. 478–79. Hooper (1812–1848), who was a participant in Margaret Fuller’s

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“conversations,” left a small body of verse whose “compresse intensity” her

editor Buell compares to Emily Dickinson (p. 477).
24. The earliest instance of the word “faker” as a noun cited in the Oxford English
Dictionary dates from 1846.
25. William Sloane Kennedy, Clews to Emerson’s Mystic Verse (New York: The
American Author, 1903), p. 221.
26. See Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), pp. 407–08.
27. In 1844 Emerson bought fourteen acres of land near Walden Pond, and in
January 1847 he purchased three acres of land adjoining his Concord property;
see Richard R. O’Keefe, Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean
Reading (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), p. 20.
28. See Saundra Morris, “ ‘Metre-Making’ Arguments: Emerson’s Poems,”
in Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.
218–42, 224.
29. Emerson, Journal D, June 16, 1839, in Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous
Notebooks, vol. 7, p. 213.
30. Helen R. Deese, “Introduction,” in Jones Very, The Complete Poems (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. xi–lviii, xvi. Further references to this
edition appear in the text, preceded by JV.
31. Jones Very to Emerson, November 30, 1838, in Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the
Eccentrics (1996; New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 140.
32. Paul Kane, in Kane (ed.), Poetry of the American Renaissance: A Diverse Anthology
from the Romantic Period (New York: Braziller, 1995), p. 174.
33. Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics, p. 148.
34. Emerson, Essays, p. 68.
35. Note the beginning of Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), lines 4–5: “I loafe
and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of sum-
mer grass”; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael
Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 662.
36. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, new ed. (1970;
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 95. The Ellen Sewall
story is recorded on pp. 98–99. See also Elizabeth Witherell, “Thoreau as
Poet,” in Joel Myerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 57–70.
37. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Maine Woods, and Collected Essays and
Poems, ed. Robert Sayre and Elizabeth Witherell (New York: Library of
America, 2007), p. 1070. The date of the journal entry is April 4, 1841.
38. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 1068–69. The poem also appears, without a title, in
Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).

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39. Emerson, Nature, in Emerson, Essays, p. 38; Cranch, “I expand and live in
the warm day, like corn & melons,” in Cranch, “Illustrations of the New
Philosophy,” Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1506 (3).
40. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Bird Language,” in Hollander (ed.), American
Poetry, vol. 1, pp. 623–24.
41. Emerson, Journal D, June 12, 1839, in Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous
Notebooks, vol. 7, p. 211.

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 Chapter 10
Edgar Allan Poe’s Lost Worlds
E l i za Ri c h a r ds

It has proven irresistible to identify Edgar Allan Poe the person – abandoned
by his actor father, orphaned by his actress mother, disowned by his wealthy
southern foster father, widowed early by his tubercular cousin and child-bride
Virginia, inancially defeated by his own self-destructive tendencies as well as
a badly paying literary marketplace, and dead before he was forty – with his
distinctly alienated and melancholy poetic personae. The incurable sorrow
of the male speaker who mourns his lost Lenore, or Ulalume, or Annabel
Lee, as well as the persistent, solitary questing of one who “wander[s] home
but newly / From that ultimate dim Thule,” and who numbly describes the
apocalyptic dreamscapes of “Dream-Land,” or “The City in the Sea,” or “The
Valley of Nis,” accrue to Poe the person.1 Starting with Marie Bonaparte, a
psychoanalyst closely ailiated with Sigmund Freud, Poe has been diagnosed
by dozens of critics as both a hopeless melancholic and a great poet, whose
psychic pain is the source of his artistic brilliance. Poe, readers imagine, lived
“out of Space – out of Time”; he inhabited the forbidding, depopulated men-
tal geographies that he depicted in his poetry and wholly rejected the politi-
cal, social, and cultural geographies that surrounded him (P, p. 344). Charles
Baudelaire is just one of many readers who have concluded that the antebel-
lum literary marketplace threatened to destroy Poe’s soul: “From the midst of
a greedy world, hungry for material things, Poe took l ight in dreams.”2 For
these readers, Poe retreated into the world inside his head, where he enacted
a total rejection of the world he lived in, unrelieved by the hope of a better
world to come.
Although this identiication of poetic persona with poet is certainly com-
pelling, and although it might also be justiiable, it nevertheless short-circuits
the exploration and analysis of an equally compelling and less familiar aspect
of Poe’s work. For however maladjusted or melancholic Poe may have been,
he was highly attuned to and engaged with the poetry of his predecessors and
his contemporaries, European and American. He conspicuously displayed his

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understanding, appropriation, recombination, synthesis, and deployment of

the poetic conventions, inventions, and inheritances of his day. His knowledge
of the literary ield was extensive; he internalized it fully, advertised it heavily,
and disseminated it widely. The saturation of his verse with allusions to poetry
familiar and unfamiliar, remembered and forgotten, and elite and popular is
remarkable and has not yet received suicient scholarly attention. Renowned
writers of the British tradition like Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson; less familiar but popu-
lar and inl uential British writers such as William Cowper, Edward Young,
Thomas Hood, and Thomas Moore; distinguished New England writers such
as William Cullen Bryant, John Neal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell
Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; women writers on both sides
of the Atlantic such as Felicia Hemans, “L.E.L.” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon),
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lydia Sigourney, Amelia Welby, Frances Sargent
Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith; and southern
poets such as Thomas Holly Chivers, William Gilmore Simms, and Philip
Pendleton Cooke – all these writers and many others left an impression on
Poe’s work. Of those living in his time, many corresponded with Poe; some
were active collaborators, some were competitors, some were professional
acquaintances, and some were enemies, friends, or romantic interests. Poe
not only read but also wrote about the work of his contemporaries, and many
of them read and wrote about his work. Poe’s book reviews, his “Marginalia”
and “Literati of New York” series, and his essays on poetics testify to a vibrant
critical and aesthetic engagement with a vast poetic ield largely unfamiliar to
most readers of today, for whom poetry is usually a less central form of cul-
tural communication than it was in the mid-nineteenth century.
Poetic literacy was at a peak in this period, and Poe was fully immersed
in the social networks that produced and disseminated poetry to a wide
readership. As editor of three leading literary magazines spanning the East
Coast – the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Graham’s Magazine in
Philadelphia, and the Broadway Journal in New York – he was fully embedded
within the literary culture of his day. To suggest or assume that he simply
rejected this richly varied cultural and aesthetic terrain diminishes his accom-
plishments. Exploring his work within the literary network of which he was a
part can tell us a great deal about poetry as a form of cultural currency in the
early nineteenth century. Pursuing this approach diminishes some aspects of
his poetry’s strangeness, idiosyncrasy, and originality, for in fact many poets of
the time wrote like Poe; he is simply the one who holds the most prominent
place in U.S. literary history. But by situating Poe within a broader poetic ield,

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readers can also gain an appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of

his contributions to the literary culture of his time. We can understand the
place that poetic conventions of despair, dreaminess, alienation, and dislo-
cation hold in antebellum literary culture, and then we can begin to distin-
guish what is truly diferent about Poe. For to locate Poe within the context
of nineteenth-century poetic culture is not to say that he is not exceptional;
closer comparisons with the work of his contemporaries help us to arrive at
a more nuanced sense of what is really distinctive about his modes of poetic
communication. An insistence on Poe’s utter originality, in other words, can
shut down avenues for understanding and interpreting his signiicant contri-
butions to literary history.
For, paradoxically, it is not his consummate performance of diference that
diferentiates him. The isolated, tortured genius, unappreciated by his cul-
ture and thrown back on his own inner resources, was a well-known, highly
recognizable igure by the time Poe assumed the persona. Byron – who, like
Poe, was prone to personal scandal, wrote mellil uous poems about exotic
places, and condemned social hypocrisy in satirical verse – is perhaps the
closest prototype for Poe’s poetic performance, although Shelley, Coleridge,
Keats, Felicia Hemans, and the Graveyard Poets all leave a perceptible impres-
sion. Poe was not alone, moreover, and he was certainly not the irst in the
American context to adopt the type of poetic identity that made Byron a
celebrity. John Neal, who early on recognized Poe as a kindred spirit, and Fitz-
Greene Halleck, whom Poe reviewed rather caustically, both assumed Byronic
stances before Poe.
In 1844, at the peak of his career, just before he created a sensation with
the publication of “The Raven,” Poe located himself within this tradition.
Distinguished critic and poet James Russell Lowell had been charged with
writing a biography of Poe for Graham’s Magazine and asked Poe to write up
a “sort of spiritual biography” that he could draw from. On July 2, 1844, Poe
responded:
There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when
nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the “mountains and
the woods,” – the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away
whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I
scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures. This is also
the temperament of P. P. Cooke, of Virginia, the author of “Florence Vane,”
“Young Rosalie Lee,” and some other sweet poems – and I should not be sur-
prised if it were your own. Cooke writes and thinks as you – and I have been
told that you resemble him personally.3

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 E l iza R i ch ar ds

Here Poe not only associates himself with Byron, who craves solitary “com-
munion” with nature and is prone to frenzied – even “diseased” – creative
trances; he also attributes this same temperament as a compliment to other
poets he admires – fellow southerner P. P. Cooke, whose poetry bears a strik-
ing resemblance to Poe’s own, and Lowell himself. Poe implies that all true
poets possess this temperament and share a common vision and practice. It
may seem strange as far as other professions and pursuits go, but this behav-
ior actually deines the practice of the true poet: it is a culturally recognizable
norm for the poet to be socially aberrant.
Raymond Williams and others have noted that the igure of the “romantic
artist” emerged as a feature of the “period in which the market and the idea of
specialist production received increasing emphasis.”4 As Williams says,

it is tempting to see these theories as a direct response to the actual change

in relations between artist and society. Certainly, in the documents, there are
some obvious elements of compensation: at a time when the artist is being
described as just one more producer of a commodity for the market, he is
describing himself as a specially endowed person, the guiding light of the
common life.

Writers wishing to reinforce a sense of protected individuality deined them-

selves antagonistically in relation to their readers; this stance enabled them to
publicize their work while insisting that they were not doing anything of the
sort. This is not so much a kind of duplicity or hypocrisy as a way of adapting
earlier modes of authorship to new economic and social conditions. But, as
Williams also says, “the response is not merely a professional one. It is also . . .
an emphasis on the embodiment in art of certain human values, capacities,
energies, which in the development of society towards an industrial civiliza-
tion were felt to be threatened or even destroyed.”5
Poe recognizes that the igure of the romantic artist negotiates complex
interactions between poets, their poetic personae, and the marketplace; as a
third- or even fourth-generation Romantic, living in a country that actively
deined itself in terms of democratic industrial capitalism, he brings the
igure to a newly compressed, intensiied, and even exaggerated point that
tends to expose its own contradictions. Poe’s poetry repeatedly dramatizes
the ways that “certain human values, capacities, [and] energies” are not only
threatened but actually extinguished. The only possible human response
is to look for them elsewhere, in vain. Such dramatization of impossibility
paradoxically keeps these intangible qualities alive via the sense of nostal-
gia evoked in their negation. This is the important social and cultural work

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 Edgar Allan Poe’s Lost Worlds

of Poe’s poetry, work that he shares with his Romantic predecessors and
contemporaries.
“Israfel,” which Poe published repeatedly (with some revision) in magazines
and books from 1831 to 1845, portrays the plight of a poet who labors to appre-
hend celestial beauty in a worldly environment. The earthly speaker compares
himself unfavorably with the angel Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a lute, and
who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures,” as Poe’s epigraph from the
Koran tells us (P, p. 175). According to T. O. Mabbott, Poe derived this gloss not
directly from the Koran but from his primary model for the poem, Lalla Rookh
(1817), an oriental romance by Thomas Moore (P, p. 172). While in Moore’s
comparison the earthly singer approaches the angel’s perfection, in Poe’s ver-
sion the human artist falls hopelessly short. Fully aware of his inferiority, the
speaker devotes the irst six stanzas to unstinting praise of the heavenly angel’s
poetic perfection. In the two concluding stanzas, he delineates the restrictions,
a result of the fact of being human, that doom his own attempts at apprehend-
ing supernal beauty. Because the poet does not ind “merely – lowers” sui-
cient, quotidian existence drops out of view as he focuses on an impossible
but laudable goal: singing like an angel (P, p. 176). His failure is ensured from
the outset by his inferior resources; he must simulate celestial music by putt-
ing words on a page, whose fallen materiality cannot capture the music of the
spheres. Israfel, whose heart is a stringed instrument, and whose voice is per-
fectly adapted to accompaniment, has an insurmountable advantage. In other
words, Israfel is the ideal Romantic poet, one who can literally “sing from the
heart” – the cliché underpins the poem. The impossibility of achieving that
ideal leads the earthly poet to a melancholic sense of despair.
Although the poem certainly encourages readers to associate the failed
earthly poet with Poe, it also conveys the irony that Poe is simultaneously
traicking in and critiquing literary conventions of tortured poetic genius.
Israfel, for example, is not as angelic as he irst appears, and heaven is not as
starkly opposed to earth as the speaker suggests. Israfel’s celestial audience
behaves very much like an earthly celebrity’s fan club. The stars are “giddy,”
and the moon is so “enamored” of Israfel that she is “tottering”: they all but
ask for Israfel’s autograph. Israfel, moreover, seems to have a competitive
streak not suited to an angel. The speaker stresses not only how well Israfel
sings but also how no one can sing better; Israfel silences his competition, ren-
dering all other heavenly inhabitants “mute.” The celestial dwellers, in short,
display distinctly human traits of competition, ambition, passion, and envy.
These are indications that either heaven is not much diferent from earth, or
Israfel is a projection of the poem’s human speaker, designed to torture him

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by confronting him with his own sense of inadequacy and artistic failure. (In
“The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe attributes the scholar’s interrogation
of the raven, which he knows will always result in the response “nevermore,”
to “the human thirst for self-torture.”6)
Signs that the latter is the case emerge not only from his human description
of the celestial spheres but also from the halting syntax, uneven rhythm, and
erratic rhyming patterns that both summon a more melodic supernal realm
and foreground the impossibility of representing it. The fourth stanza, for
example, consists of a sentence fragment:
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty –
Where Love’s a grown up God –
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star. (P, p. 176)
The speaker begins to tell us something about “the skies,” where thoughts,
love, and glances are diferent from ours, but then the verb is missing. Poe
used of-rhymes occasionally and pointedly, for to him perfect rhymes sum-
moned a more perfect language. The sequence of perfect rhymes in the irst
stanza – dwell, well, Israfel, tell, spell – degenerates by the second, as if the
speaker couldn’t keep it up; he starts by rhyming “love” and “above” and then
adds a syllable and shifts the vowel, as if he had run out of words and had to
change the rhyme. Even then, they are of: he rhymes “even” with “seven,”
underscoring the human poet’s unheavenly propensity for linguistic disso-
nance. Although the lines are loosely iambic, the line lengths vary greatly, and
Poe inserts a number of words that throw a wrench in the rhythmic works:
“tottering” is a good example. An accomplished versiier highly sensitive to
the musical qualities of language, Poe here uses his skills to fashion a certain
poetic clunkiness, ofering a joke for those readers for whom scansion is a plea-
surable, integral part of reading poetry.
Poe thus slyly suggests that his very depictions of otherworldliness are
intended to stir worldly desires; more particularly, his poem invites readers to
take pity on the unnamed poet and assuage his sense of insecurity by admir-
ing his work. If this was Poe’s goal, he was successful. Seeking to comfort
the speaker, readers have repeatedly responded by ousting Israfel and put-
ting Poe in his place; in doing so, they not only erase the diference between
the mirror images of earthly and angelic poets but also identify Poe with his
speaker, which the poem encourages them to do. Perhaps the irst to perform

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this alchemy was Frances Sargent Osgood in “Echo-Song,” published in the

Broadway Journal of September 7, 1845: Poe was the editor at the time and
therefore responsible for Osgood’s publication. In this poem Osgood, who
carried on a public and eventually scandalous l irtation in an exchange of
poems with Poe in the Journal, brings Poe’s speaker’s desires down to earth:
I know a noble heart that beats
For one it loves how “wildly well!”
I only know for whom it beats
But I must never tell! (qtd. in P, p. 234)

Quoting Poe’s description of Israfel, irst Osgood recognizes the angel as an

idealized projection of the earthly poet; second, she unmasks Poe’s speaker as
identical with himself; third, she redirects Israfel’s heavenly, impersonal pas-
sion toward a particular, human, female lover. Such a response indicates the
complex, nuanced engagements of readers of his time, who register Poe’s
own play with poetic convention and respond in kind. More earnestly, Hervey
Allen entitled his biography of Poe Israfel, hoping to install the poet in the eter-
nal halls of poetic fame that Israfel occupies within Poe’s poem.7
The evocation of other worlds where lowers are not “merely – lowers”
characterizes much of Poe’s major work. Several of his poems – “The Valley
of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea,” “Dream-Land,” and “El Dorado,” for exam-
ple – describe fantastical landscapes that “resemble nothing that is ours”
(P, p. 201). Poe’s surreal landscapes mark their place in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century revival of medieval romance that gives Romanticism its
name. According to Harold Bloom, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and
others internalized the romantic quest narrative “in the name of a humaniz-
ing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity. The poet takes the patterns
of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life, so that
the entire rhythm of the quest is heard again in the movement of the poet
himself from poem to poem.”8 In his vastly popular Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1812–1818), for example, Byron charts his responses to the exotic places he
travels through – Portugal, the Mediterranean, and the Aegean Sea – on his
self-exile from England. “Childe” is a title for a young man who is a candidate
for knighthood, ironically applied in Byron’s poem to a wealthy, restless young
man seeking the meaning of life through aimless traveling:
Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolv’d to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;

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With pleasure drugged, he almost long’d for woe,

And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.9
Dissatisied with all he knows, Childe Harold looks for something that will
make him feel alive without knowing what it is.
Crossing the boundaries of the real in a similar quest, Poe’s speakers actu-
ally do “seek the shades below” and sometimes ind them. Like many of his
landscape poems, “Dream-Land” invites readers to experience vicariously the
speaker’s trip to a place that inverts the laws of nature. As in Byron’s Childe
Harold, or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound – whose “Echo” choruses are one of
the rhythmic, imagistic, and linguistic prototypes for “Dream-Land” – the
speaker travels to an exotic land; but unlike these other poems, nothing hap-
pens once he gets there. Reporting on his travels to a place beyond the farthest
point on the known horizon, the speaker cultivates an otherworldly atmo-
sphere not only with his imagistic description but also with intensive, intricate
sonic patterns:
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule –
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space – out of Time.
Bottomless vales and boundless loods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of ire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters – lone and dead, –
Their still waters – still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily. (P, pp. 343–44)
The sonic properties substantially contribute to the poem’s otherworldly
impression. The repetition of vowels, consonants, morphemes, words, and
whole phrases, sometimes with slight variation, encourages the reader to
enter an alternative zone that deies the normal, daily, pragmatic functions

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of language. The adjective “lolling” seems to precede “lily,” for example, irst
because it mirrors and doubles the l and i sounds in “lily,” although the image
of dying lilies is consistent with the static, “dismal,” “unholy” landscape,
because the lily is a conventional symbol for Christ. The dominant meter,
trochaic tetrameter, is often used for chants, incantations, and the speech of
supernatural beings because it inverts the normative representation of spo-
ken English in iambic pentameter: Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest and the
witches in Macbeth speak in trochees, for example, as do Shelley’s Echoes in
Prometheus Unbound; Poe’s poem echoes these Echoes:
By the woodland noontide dew,
By the forests, lakes and fountains,
Through the many-folded mountains,
To the rents and gulphs and chasms
Where the Earth reposed from spasms . . .10
The poems share anaphoric phrasing (“By the . . . By the”) and disyllabic fem-
inine end rhymes (“chasms” and “spasms” in Shelley, for example, “chilly”
and “lily” in Poe). They also share the words “dew,” “lakes,” “mountains,”
and “chasms.” Poe exaggerates and sustains the trance-inducing qualities of
Shelley’s language. His trochaic rhyming couplets, recursiveness, and repe-
tition all encourage the reader to attend to the rhythm at the expense of the
meaning of the words. These echoes of the Echoes code Poe’s landscape as
an extension and revision of Shelley’s. It is more surreal, more remote, more
forlorn, and more “melancholy.”
Using spatial and temporal terminology to describe a place “out of Space –
out of Time,” the speaker forces language to evoke something that is beyond
its ability to signify. The speaker’s description is therefore a translation or
approximation that dramatizes its limitations. Apocalyptic events, which
usually signify the end of everything, are the ongoing norm in this strange,
timeless land. The speaker observes a landscape that is, impossibly, frozen
in continuous collapse: loods pour outwards, mountains fall, seas ascend to
the iery skies. Spatial terms are simultaneously asserted and negated: lakes,
deined by their boundaries – they are larger than ponds, smaller than seas –
“endlessly outspread,” and “forms” can be discerned but not discovered, a
distinction seemingly without a diference but apparently signiicant in a way
we cannot apprehend.
The poem both evokes a world beyond the dimensional categories of
human perception and seeks to convey the sense of disorientation that
experiencing such a world would generate in a human visitor through an

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elaborate deployment of suspension and repetition. Narrative, a key mode

for describing change over time, be it a physical adventure, a spiritual trans-
formation, or a psychological insight, stagnates here. The speaker’s modi-
fying phrases describe his location but hold action at bay. The irst stanza’s
suspension is resolved by the termination of an action: “I have reached this
land.” The third stanza retraces the irst two, repeating phrases, syntactic
structures, and descriptions: most extremely, the last four lines of the second
stanza are repeated almost verbatim in the third stanza. In the irst three stan-
zas, in other words, Poe generates the antipode of the Romantic quest nar-
rative by working within its terms. Rather than moving forward, the speaker
loops back to describe what he has already described; the recursiveness disori-
ents the reader in the way it stimulates a sense of déjà-vu; we wonder if we
have already read what we are reading and return to reread the earlier lines,
only to ind that we have indeed read the same lines and are now rereading
them once again.
In the second half of “Dream-Land” we inally learn that the speaker’s wan-
dering is motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by a preoccupation with
the dead. The weird landscape serves as the stage for the traveler’s encounter
with ghosts of former intimates, “sheeted memories of the Past / – Shrouded
forms that start and sigh / As they pass the wanderer by” (P, p. 344). He sug-
gests that his “woes” are so unimaginably profound that he inds solace in this
place that would leave most people “aghast.” Although he inds some measure
of peace, however, he cannot ind resolution, for the “weak human eye” can-
not bear to look directly at what the traveler wants to see: the specter of his
lost loved one. The poem ends almost exactly as it began, reinforcing the hope-
lessness and continued misery of the speaker, who “wandered home” just as
he wandered to “this ultimate dim Thule.” The almost exact repetition of the
irst stanza at the poem’s conclusion inscribes the speaker within a doomed
circle of loss; he is right back where he started from.
How does Poe’s particular, rather perverse engagement with the inter-
nal quest romance make sense within this tradition? What does it say not
about the possibility of Poe’s psychic disturbances but about what he is trying
to communicate to his readers? For he published “Dream-Land” and other
poems with similar themes not just once but repeatedly, in magazines as well
as books, and clearly wished to reach a broad readership. In the same letter
to Lowell quoted previously, Poe ofers an explanation for his poetic preoc-
cupation with death. It is a curiously external, even scientiic explanation of a
shared, religious experience that complicates Bloom’s irmly individual, inte-
riorized, psychological understanding of Romantic questing:

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The unparticled matter, permeating and impelling all things, is God. Its activ-
ity is the thought of God – which creates. Man, and other thinking beings,
are individualizations of the unparticled matter. . . . What we call “death”
is the painful metamorphosis. The stars are the habitations of rudimental
beings. . . . At death, the worm is the butterly – still material, but of a matter
unrecognized by our organs – recognized occasionally, perhaps, by the sleep-
walker directly – without organs – through the mesmeric medium. Thus a
sleepwalker may see ghosts. Divested of the rudimental covering, the being
inhabits space, – what we suppose to be the immaterial universe.11

Poe explains that death is a transformation from “particled” to “unparticled”

matter. What we understand to be spirits or ghosts is “space,” and, conversely,
what we understand to be space is ghosts: the two are synonymous. Mediums
properly attuned – and Poe was writing at the very brink of the moment when
American Spiritualists would claim to have initiated communications with
other worlds – could convey to the sleepwalker’s inner eye – not his physical
“organ” – the animate qualities of what most people on a daily basis see as
empty space.
Readers of Poe’s inal cosmological “prose poem,” Eureka, will perceive the
germ of that longer treatise in this passage, which throws into question the per-
sistent tendency to think of Poe’s poems as expressions of an isolated genius
enclosed within his own tortured mind. Here, he portrays death and the after-
life as shared experiences: “the painful metamorphosis” is undergone by all. It is
“unparticled matter,” or “God – which creates,” within individual persons, per-
haps, but impersonally. In this understanding, the poet is a vehicle for common,
shared expression. The poet’s success is deined by how closely he approaches
the expression of impersonal beauty; this approach ofers a foretaste of the
inal unity of unparticled matter that we will all join after death. Poe advances
his theory of poetry’s role in mediating approaches to immortality in “The
Poetic Principle.” Poetry whets rather than appeases “a thirst unquenchable”
that “belongs to the immortality of Man”: “It is no mere appreciation of the
Beauty before us – but a wild efort to reach the Beauty above” (ER, p. 77).
The unavoidable drive to seek a supernal beauty known to be unattainable for
the living person means, for Poe, that melancholia, a “certain, petulant, impa-
tient sorrow,” is the appropriate sentiment for poetic expression. It is not just
a personal but a collective feeling, expressed by and mediated through poetry;
the poet mourns his inadequacy even as he conveys “brief and indeterminate
glimpses” of “divine and rapturous joys” through his poems; his readers “weep”
with him, for he transports them to the edge of an experience they want but
cannot have. In this respect, Poe’s theory of art and individuality has something

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in common with Emerson’s, as expressed in “The Poet,” “Self-Reliance,” and

“The Over-Soul,” regardless of how intensively they both disavowed the resem-
blance, and how diferent their means of deining transcendence. The primary
diference is that Emerson (at least in those works) believes one can accomplish
in human form what Poe believes is impossible: for Emerson, “poets are . . .
liberating gods”; for Poe, they wish they could be, but can’t, so they mark the
distance between the human and the divine.12
For Poe, the properties of poetry that stir desires for impossible beauty are
the elements of language that are irrelevant, or at least secondary, to its signi-
fying capabilities. Poetry is “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter
is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral rela-
tions. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with
Truth” (ER, p. 78). In his hierarchy of the arts, music is above poetry because
of its superior ability to transport the listener to the sphere of immortality;
poetry holds these capabilities only insofar as it can function as music: “We
are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are
stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there
can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense,
we shall ind the widest ield for the Poetic development” (ER, p. 78). This
belief that music holds divine powers – a truism in the nineteenth century that
Poe took very seriously – helps account for Poe’s signature enhancement of
the sonic properties of language to the point that it may even become diicult
to focus on the meaning of the words. Words are too much of the earth; they
are designed for human communication about earthly matters. Poe seeks to
force words to communicate unearthly intimations, and he simultaneously
dramatizes the impossibility of that task in his poetry.
Poe’s theory of death and the afterlife might seem somewhat idiosyncratic,
particularly his understanding of an immaterial material – “unparticled mat-
ter” – as God, creativity, action, and spirit. But Victorians were fascinated with
identifying the precise boundaries between life, death, and the afterlife, and
Poe’s formulations resonate with many contemporary related ideas – about
metempsychosis and mesmerism, for example, both of which interested him,
as we can see from such short stories as “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”
“Mesmeric Revelation,” and “Ligeia.” This culture-wide interest in posthu-
mous states of consciousness suggests that Poe’s poems are not simply expres-
sions of a dark and peculiar mind that registered only emptiness, dissatisfac-
tion, negation, and despair; rather, they are attempts at generating spiritual
“efects” in his readers that ofer an intimation of the collective experience of
divine beauty that death will bring.

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For Poe, poetic composition is motivated not by an urgent need to express

one’s self – he dismisses the “ine frenzy” and “ecstatic intuition” of other
poets (surely Emerson is implicated in this criticism) as an emotional hoax (ER,
p. 14) – but by a desire to generate emotional efects in readers. His consummate
expression of this goal can be found in “The Philosophy of Composition,” in
which he tells the story of how he wrote “The Raven,” his most famous poem
about seeking knowledge of the dead:

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an efect. Keeping originality

always in view – for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so
obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest – I say to myself, in the
irst place, “Of the innumerable efects, or impressions, of which the heart,
the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on
the present occasion, select?” (ER, p. 11)

Poe aims not only to generate an efect in a reader but to generate the same
efect in all readers: “My next thought concerned the choice of an impression,
or efect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the
construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work univer-
sally appreciable” (ER, p. 16). Because “the province of the poem” is beauty,
which only can be experienced in its absence or imperfect evocation, “mel-
ancholy is . . . the most legitimate of all the poetical tones” (ER, p. 17). “The
death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in
the world,” especially on the lips of “a bereaved lover,” because the scenario
instantiates a universal, futile desire to reach and hold beauty that lies beyond
the grave (ER, p. 19).
It is no coincidence that Poe performed his poetic experiments in generat-
ing common feelings in periodicals during an age in which the whole trend of
publication was “Magazine-ward,” in his coinage (ER, p. 1414). Fewer people
could aford books, which took longer to publish and did not promote the
same sense of a collective reading experience as newspapers and magazines.
Imagining thousands of people reading the same poem at the same time and
receiving the same impression can itself be understood as a spiritual expe-
rience, one that bridges the gap between individual and mass, creating the
impression of a group consciousness that mimics or foreshadows the transi-
tion from particled to unparticled matter, Poe’s vision of divine union after
death. “The Raven” was particularly suited to circulating through mass com-
munication networks, and Poe insisted in a letter to a friend a few months
after its initial publication that he devised it with that intent: “ ‘The Raven’ has
had a great ‘run.’. . . I wrote it for the express purpose of running – just as I did

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the “Gold-Bug,” you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.”13 “The
Raven” simply could not have created a public sensation if it had been irst
published in book form. A cultural phenomenon almost from the day of its
irst publication in February 1845, the poem was quickly and widely reprinted,
reviewed, and imitated. According to Walter Benjamin, the purpose of “art in
the age of its technological reproducibility” is “to train human beings in the
apperceptions and vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost
daily.” For this reason, “to an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced
becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.”14 This tau-
tological formulation suggests that the survival and dissemination of the liter-
ary object is its primary instructive function, and indeed, Poe’s most famous
poem was broadly reprinted and imitated, in part because it was designed
for reproducibility; these reproductive labors arguably instruct readers (some
of whom become writers in turn) in ways of engaging and harnessing the
expressive powers of mass print culture’s “vast apparatus.”
That design is irst of all evident in the ways that the poem foregrounds its
own acts of mimicry. More explicitly, perhaps, than other poems, “The Raven”
recombines highly recognizable elements of existing poetic culture, generat-
ing an uncanny efect of recognition in readers who encounter the poem for the
irst time. The words “no more,” “nevermore” and “evermore” are ubiquitous
in the poetry of the early nineteenth century, and “The Raven” summons the
echoic force of those poems in the insistent repetition of its refrain. Many of
Poe’s contemporaries noted the poem’s uncanny similarity to a myriad of pre-
cursor poems; some went so far as to claim that Poe stole the poem, in whole
or in parts, from them, or that they helped him write it.15 Critics have identiied
sources for the rhythm, the story line, the refrain, the word “nevermore,” and
the raven (P, pp. 353–59).16 Earlier poems that bear distinct resemblances include
Thomas Holley Chivers’s “To Allegra Florence in Heaven” (which shares with
“The Raven” trochaic disyllabic ing end rhymes: “Holy angels now are bending
/ To receive thy soul ascending”), Albert Pike’s “Isadore” (in which a bereaved
lover tells about the death of a beautiful woman whose name rhymes with
Lenore’s), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”
(which features trochaic octameter lines and deinite verbal and imagistic ech-
oes: the poems share a stirring “purple curtain,” for example). Poe advertised
the poem’s derivative qualities rather than repudiating them. Weeks before
he published “The Raven,” he reviewed Elizabeth Browning’s poems, draw-
ing special attention to “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” In “The Philosophy of
Composition” he refers to “an examination I once made of the mechanism of
‘Barnaby Rudge,’ ” encouraging readers to discover an earlier version of Poe’s

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black bird (ER, p. 13). While he demotes originality to the uninspired and tech-
nical exercise of recombination, he celebrates what is most tried as most true.
He explains, for example, his choice of a ready-made refrain as the “pivot upon
which the whole structure might turn” in terms of its eiciency and function-
ality, both proven by long-standing use: “The universality of its employment
suiced to assure me of its intrinsic value” (ER, p. 17).
Internally as well, “The Raven” foregrounds its reproductive logics. The
poem opens with the speaker reading “many a quaint and curious volume
of forgotten lore”; steeped in twice-told tales, he assumes their antiquated
diction to describe his encounter with the raven. The bird himself seems to
have stepped out of such lore and planted himself within the poem, a familiar
igure from a collective repertoire of inherited myths and stories: “In there
stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.” Barbara Johnson has said
that “it would be hard to ind a poem . . . which is packed with more clichés
than ‘The Raven’: ember, remember, December, midnight, darkness, marble
busts – all the bric-a-brac of poetic language is set out in jangling, alliterative
trochees to hammer out a kind of ur-background of the gothic encounter.”
The igure par excellence of this bric-a-brac, for Johnson, is “the word ‘never-
more,’ ” which “stands in Poe as a igure for poetic language as such.”17 Because
birds, especially in the Romantic period, inevitably serve as the poet’s surro-
gate, by selecting a highly limited mimic as his double, Poe suggests (not with-
out humor) that writing poetry may be as simple as repeating what one hears
most frequently. Duplicates proliferate, as if every aspect of the poem were
prone to reproduction: “each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon
the loor,” the speaker’s call in the dark for Lenore summons an echo, and the
raven casts his shadow over the speaker, imprisoning him eternally within the
contours of a copy. The poem is saturated with sonic repetition, from its per-
fect trochaic octameter lines to its assonance, consonance, regular rhythms,
and insistent rhymes. Each line contains a perfect, often identical, internal
rhyme, and most of the lines also have end rhymes. The speaker is prone to
repeating the same word multiple times. Sonic repetition serves as a mne-
monic device, making the poem easily, and even inadvertently, memorizable.
Editor N. P. Willis recognized this quality; he prefaced the irst publication of
the poem with the comment: “It will stick in the memory of everybody who
reads it” (PL, p. 496). Indeed, the poem not only stuck in everybody’s memo-
ries but also stimulated many people to write their own versions. Myriads of
variations on “The Raven” were published in the weeks, months, and years fol-
lowing its appearance, from tributes to Poe, to advertising jingles, to political
commentaries, and to Christian allegories. As editor of the Broadway Journal,

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Poe himself published and commented approvingly on more than one rewrit-
ing of “The Raven.” Made to be remade, the poem trains readers in mass
media functions and encourages them to put their knowledge to use.
Poe’s contemporaries celebrated the collective feeling of creepiness evoked
by the poem. Elizabeth Barrett Browning told Poe that it had “produced a it
horror” throughout England (PL, p. 631). Another reviewer noted the appropri-
ateness of the tone of “settled despair” as a means of ministering to “the sense
of the beautiful” (P, p. 363). Reviewing The Raven and Other Poems, George P.
Morris said that “tall shadows and a sighing silence seem to close around us
as we read. We feel dream land to be more real and more touching than the
actual life we have left” (PL, p. 592). Although Morris found the experience fas-
cinating and welcome in a world of “merely – lowers,” that did not prevent
him from recognizing that Poe’s writing was part of a Romantic tradition. For
those who have diiculties appreciating Poe’s work, “we recommend to him
a year’s regimen of monkish legends, and chronicles with which Warton and
Scott fed the poetic ire” (PL, p. 592). Marked as a vehicle for the transmission
and circulation of common feelings, “The Raven” exposes the complex rela-
tion between igures of sufering interiority and their reception. Readers may
experience vicariously the claustrophobic mental state of the mournful lover,
but they also take pleasure in the poem as a novel experiment in thought and
feeling in which they may share. “The Raven” ofers a commoditized image
of private melancholy that readers can hold in common as a universally legi-
ble sign of supernal beauty. While the poem may be training its readers in the
operations of print culture by reproducing reproducibility, it does so to infuse
that apparatus with human impressions of the supernatural, to populate the
machinery with ghosts of beauty and despair, of “Mournful and Never-ending
Remembrance” that might otherwise be lost, buried in an unread book (ER,
p. 25). The poem’s unnerving propensity to reproduction allows it to serve
as a vehicle for a range of common feelings to the present day – think of the
1990 rendition of “The Raven” in The Simpsons episode “The Treehouse of
Horror,” Lou Reed’s 2003 album The Raven, or the 2012 ilm entitled The Raven,
starring John Cusack, Alice Eve, and Luke Evans, for example.
Many of Poe’s poems fall into two categories: there are the apocalyptic
landscapes, like “Dream-Land,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the
Sea,” and, perhaps more familiarly, there are the meditations on lost love,
like “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Ulalume.” Both are characterized by
Poe’s particular brand of late Romantic questing, which many readers of the
time recognized as a way of preserving a shared reservoir of feelings – par-
ticularly spiritual and mystical feelings – infringed on by the rise of science

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and industrial capitalism. The apparently distinct diference between apoc-

alyptic scenes that suggest the destruction of mankind and personal scenes
that suggest the destruction of an individual man blurs if we understand that
Poe believed in a communal experience of what might be called the beauty
of despair. His poetic evocations of this beauty preserve feelings and values
potentially lost – the fallibility of human beings, the irrational love for another
person, the dream of a fulilling spiritual experience, the dissolution of the
boundaries of the isolated self, and union with a higher consciousness – all the
impractical emotions and desires that make us human.
One of the most astute contemporary critics of Poe, who was largely
responsible for defending and promoting his reputation after his death and
for securing his place in literary history (she was also, briely, Poe’s iancée),
Sarah Helen Whitman, ofers a detailed analysis of Poe’s place in a tradition of
Romantic questing. In one of the earliest and most efective defenses of Poe,
she arrives at a conclusion that Raymond Williams might have endorsed:
Goethe had made his great dramatic poem an expression of the soul’s craving
for a knowledge of spiritual existence. . . . Wordsworth, in his inest imagi-
native poem, “Laodamia,” represents and half reproves this longing. Byron
iterates it with a proud and passionate vehemence in “Manfred.” Shelley’s sad
heart of unbelief, inding refuge in a despair too deep for aspiration, stands
apart . . . while Keats lies sleeping, like his own Endymion, lost in dreams of
the “dead Past.” Then, sadder, and lonelier, and more unbelieving than any
of these, Edgar Poe came to sound the very abyss. The unrest and faithless-
ness of the age culminated in him. Nothing so solitary, nothing so hopeless,
nothing so desolate as his spirit in its darker moods has been instanced in the
literary history of the nineteenth century.18
Williams attributes the rise of the romantic artist to an attempt to shore up
aspects of the human experience threatened by the rise of industrial capi-
talism; in this passage Whitman charts the trajectory of such attempts. She
attributes the despair in Poe’s poems not, or not only, to an individual experi-
ence of personal loss but to a spiritual crisis of his age. That very hopelessness,
however, contains a promise for Whitman, one that might not be immediately
obvious for current readers of Poe, but that many of his contemporaries rec-
ognized, and that resonates with Poe’s own theory of the afterlife, delineated
in his letter to Lowell and in Eureka, as well as in his poems:
Is there no evidence of a wise purpose, an epochal itness, in the appearance,
at this precise era, of a mind so rarely gifted, and accessible from peculiarities
of psychal and physical organization to the subtle vibrations of an ethereal
medium conveying but feeble impressions to the senses of ordinary persons;

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a mind which, “following darkness like a dream,” wandered forever with insa-
tiate curiosity on the conines of that “ – wild weird clime, that lieth sublime
/ Out of Space, out of Time! . . .” seeking to solve the problem of that phan-
tasmal Shadow-Land, which, through a class of phenomena unprecedented
in the world’s history, was about to attest itself as an actual plane of conscious
and progressive life, the mode and measure of whose relations with our own
are already recognized as legitimate objects of scientiic research by the most
candid and competent thinkers of our time?19
Whitman lived longer than Poe, long enough to witness the advent of the
Spiritualist Movement, to which she alludes here, and in which she took part.
She, along with other mediums, claimed to receive poetic messages from
Poe’s spirit, usually in the highly recognizable, otherworldly meters of “The
Raven,” or “Ulalume,” or “The Bells.” Most prominently, mediums Thomas
Lake Harris and Lizzie Doten channeled Poe’s communications, conirming
not only that he was “seeking to solve the problem of the phantasmal Shadow-
Land,” as he had done in his poetry while living, but also that he was still seek-
ing to communicate his discoveries to those left behind. Although Whitman’s
theory might seem like a fringe response to Poe’s work, Spiritualism was a
mainstream religious movement in the mid-nineteenth century with profound
cultural inl uence. Spiritualists recognized both the communicative structure
of Poe’s work and a hopefulness that paradoxically emerges from his insis-
tence on despair: after the death worm comes the butterly, in Poe’s formula-
tion. Dying is only the farthest point in human consciousness, the verge that
we can travel to before receiving knowledge of the other side. The solipsistic,
melancholy despair generated by this tendency to “follow darkness” intimates
by contrast the “actual plane of consciousness” that lies on the other side of
death. Emily Dickinson, among other nineteenth-century poets, shares this
fascination, and her own experiments with dramatizing approaches to that
brink may well be inl uenced by Poe’s earlier work.
Although “The Raven” is unsurpassed in its ability to forge relations
between individual interiority and mass consumption, many of his poems
share this aim, and readers recognized the strange balancing act that permit-
ted the circulation and internalization of poetic feeling and that allowed it
to become an experience held in common. “Ulalume,” written after “The
Raven” and often identiied as one of Poe’s best poems, also tells the story of
the eruption of repressed mourning over a lost, loved woman, a private expe-
rience that Poe makes into a public, shared icon of the poetic ideal: a bereaved
lover’s tale of the death of a beautiful woman. This compressed paradox, of
publicized privacy, or private publicity, is contained within the full title of the

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poem: “Ulalume: A Ballad.” Tagging a poem as a ballad insists on its status as

common property by invoking an anonymous broadside tradition. (“Annabel
Lee” also advertises its status as a ballad through its close adherence to ballad
meter and refrain.) In “Ulalume,” the speaker walks through a weird land-
scape on a “sere” October evening with Psyche, his soul. He is unaware that
he is propelled unconsciously to the destination of his lover’s grave, on the
anniversary of the day he buried her there, until they arrive on the spot:
And I said – “What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied – “Ulalume – Ulalume! –
’T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crispéd and sere –
As the leaves that were withering and sere –
And I cried – “It was surely October,
On this very night of last year,
That I journeyed – I journeyed down here! –
That I brought a dread burden down here –
On this night, of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber –
This misty mid region of Weir: –
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber –
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.” (P, p. 418)

Preiguring Freud’s theory of melancholia, Poe presents us with a speaker

who has repressed his loss so profoundly that it utterly controls his actions.
Trying to wander freely, imagining that he is carefree, he is brought face-
to-face with the evidence of the sorrow he is trying to escape. The poem is
remarkable for the way it emblematizes personal feeling: the speaker’s jour-
ney is recognizable as an icon of a particular state of mind. It thus deperson-
alizes or detaches the feelings from individual experience and renders them
circulatable and shareable.
It is this quality Sarah Helen Whitman recognizes when she character-
izes “Ulalume” as both an abstract depiction of an amorphous world and
a highly personal “strange threnody” for Poe’s wife, who had died a few
months before he wrote the poem: “This poem, perhaps the most original and
weirdly suggestive of all his poems, resembles at irst sight some of Turner’s
landscapes, being apparently ‘without form and void, and having darkness
on the face of it.’ It is, nevertheless, in its basis, although not in the precise

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correspondence of time, simply historical.” Comparing the poem to a paint-

ing by Turner, which she understands as a representation of undiferentiated
matter before creation – she cites Genesis to describe the efect of Turner’s
painting – Whitman recognizes the poem as a cultural artifact in an aesthetic
tradition. Simultaneously and without a sense of contradiction, she identiies
an autobiographical component. Revelations of self and of universal efects
are not understood as conl icting or even separate. This is even clearer in the
comments of a writer in the London Critic, who says of “Ulalume”:
What wondrous words! What a spell they wield! What a withering unity
there is in them! The instant they are uttered a misty picture with a tarn, dark
as a murderer’s eye, below, and the thin yellow leaves of October l uttering
above – exponents of a misery which scorns the name of sorrow – is hung up
in the chambers of your soul forever.20
The critic celebrates the dismal, despairing aspects of the poem in a tone that
borders on glee, and he does not understand this tone as inappropriate. The
poem at once ofers a portrait of “a misery which scorns the name of sorrow”
and does so in a highly pleasurable, entertaining way. “Ulalume” ofers read-
ers a circulatable and transportable emblem of misery that may be “hung up
in the chambers of your soul forever.” Many of Poe’s poems allow readers to
compose the author’s sufering in a way that makes it available for their own
emotional purposes; it is a structure that persists, enabling Poe’s poems to
continue circulating and captivating readers everywhere.

Notes
1. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 1, Poetry, ed. Thomas
Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1969), p. 344. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as P.
2. Eric W. Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 45.
3. Quoted in Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941;
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 428.
4. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), p. 36.
5. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 36.
6. Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thompson (New York:
Library of America, 1984), p. 24. Hereafter cited within the text as ER.
7. Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Rinehart,
1934).

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8. Harold Bloom, “Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Harold Bloom

(ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton,
1970), p. 5.
9. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Jerome J. McGann
(ed.), The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 24.
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Sharon B. Powers and Donald
H. Reiman (eds.), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (New
York: Norton, 1977), p. 166.
11. Quoted in Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 428–29.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of
America, 1983), p. 462.
13. Dwight Thomas, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849,
ed. David Kelly Jackson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 530–31. Hereafter cited
within the text as PL.
14. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty,
and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility and Other Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–74, 26.
15. For examples and a discussion of these “thefts,” see Eliza Richards,
“Outsourcing ‘The Raven’: Retroactive Origins,” Victorian Poetry 43:2 (2005),
pp. 205–21.
16. John Ingram (ed.), The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe; with Literary and Historical
Commentary (London: George Redway, 1885), pp. 1–16.
17. Barbara Johnson, “Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic
Language,” in A World of Diference (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), pp. 89–99, 98.
18. Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics, ed. Oral Sumner Coad (1860;
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949), p. 75.
19. Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics, p. 81.
20. Quoted in Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics, p. 45.

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 Chapter 11
Longfellow in His Time
V i rg in i a Jac k s on

When in 1882 Walt Whitman learned of the death of fellow poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, he took the occasion “for want of anything better,”
to “twine a sprig of sweet ground-ivy trailing so plentifully through the dead
leaves” and metaphorically “lay it as [his] contribution on the dead bard’s
grave.” That late prose ivy “sprig” was a far cry from the stunningly beautiful
lilac verse “sprig” Whitman had laid at Lincoln’s grave seventeen years (and
a lifetime) earlier. If Lincoln became for Whitman the exemplary instance
of earlier nineteenth-century American poetic ideals imagined and lost,
Longfellow became the exemplary instance of bygone nineteenth-century
American poetic ideals that refused to go away:
Longfellow seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of
poetical expression that mark the present age (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sick-
ness, of verbal melody), but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the
general human heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of
things. He is certainly the kind of bard and counteractant most needed for
our materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races, and
especially for the present age in America – an age tyrannically regulated with
reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the inancier, the politician and
the day workman – for whom and among whom he comes as the poet of
melody, courtesy, deference – poet of the mellow twilight of the past in Italy,
Germany, Spain, and in Northern Europe – poet of all sympathetic gentle-
ness – and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think
long if I were ask’d to name the man who has done more, in more valuable
directions, for America.1
We should have to think long if we were asked to name a more damning
instance of faint praise than “universal poet of women and young people,”
unless it is “poet of the mellow twilight of the past” or poet adept at what
amounts to “an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness of verbal melody.” Those com-
pliments certainly diminish his contemporary, whose 1855 The Song of Hiawatha

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outsold Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass by far, but Whitman’s Longfellow sprig
is not all diminution: “What is always dearest as poetry to the general human
heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things” may be
something for the elder Whitman to regret, but he also has to admit that such
feminized, infantilized, outdated, and sugar-coated poetry was better than
what the “present age in America” would imagine on its own. Perhaps a “poet
of melody, courtesy, deference” was just the thing to counteract the emerging
American century, to resist the “Anglo-Saxon” version of New World ambi-
tion that had begun to make of antebellum modernity something even more
frightening. By not having been Whitman, in other words – or, in the younger
Whitman’s words, not having been the poet able to “lood himself with the
immediate age as with vast oceanic tides” – Longfellow may not have realized
Whitman’s dream of making a better world through (of all things) poetry, but
he did leave behind an Old World charm as a token of the nineteenth century’s
vanishing “sympathetic gentleness.” It is not surprising that the Good Gray
Poet ofered such a condescending portrait of the most inl uential American
poet of the nineteenth century, but it is somewhat surprising that Whitman’s
characterization of Longfellow’s place in literary and cultural history seems
to be the one that has stuck.
Say the words “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most inl uential
American poet of the nineteenth century” today and you are likely to hear
distant if twisted echoes of Whitman’s gentle elegiac acknowledgment and
condescension. More than a century after Longfellow’s death and Whitman’s
idiosyncratic evaluation, Angus Fletcher compared the two and lamented that
“as a poet, competing for attention in our modern age of anxiety and irony,
Longfellow has fallen from his great height.”2 Dana Gioia (later chair of the
National Endowment of the Arts) went further, complaining that “when a
literary culture loses its ability to recognize and appreciate genuine poems
like ‘My Lost Youth’ because they are too simple, it has surely traded too
much of its innocence and openness for a shallow sophistication.”3 In the last
decades of the nineteenth century, Whitman invoked Longfellow as an anti-
dote to a “materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping” American culture;
in the last decade of the twentieth century, literary critics began to invoke
Longfellow as an antidote to an American literary culture that no longer takes
poetry to heart, in which poetry has ceased, in Gioia’s words, to exercise “a
broad cultural inl uence that today seems more typical of movies or popu-
lar music than anything we might imagine possible for poetry.”4 In the irst
decade of the twenty-irst century, Christoph Irmscher argued that we would
all “beneit . . . from including Longfellow in the perennial debate about the

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death (or the survival) of poetry. His example will not only help us clarify
what is really at stake . . . it will also give us a better understanding of the hier-
archies that still afect us and our thinking about literature and the arts today.”5
But as Whitman saw clearly, Longfellow was already central to such debates
in the nineteenth century; furthermore, as Whitman may not yet have seen,
it was Longfellow who forged the modern literary critical version of such
debates, who made the disappearance of poetry the subject of his poems, and
who gave professional readers the power to bring poetry back from the brink
of extinction. Whitman’s somewhat grudging nostalgia for Old World inno-
cence was Longfellow’s constant theme. If for contemporary literary critics
the most popular American poet in history seems to have come to represent
nothing less than the disappearance of poetry, or the vanishing of a popular
poetry that all Americans could understand and read without “anxiety and
irony,” free of the “shallow sophistication” that has come to characterize “the
hierarchies” of reading that separate scholars and general readers, the poet
and his public, that may be because Longfellow so efectively created so many
versions of just such scenes of vanishing and recovery. For late twentieth- and
early twenty-irst-century professional readers, Longfellow has come to stand
for a poetry that was not the property of professional readers but instead
belonged to everyone, to the nation, to the world. The bygone ideal that
Whitman attached to “the universal poet of women and young people” has
become the bygone ideal that literary critics now attach to Longfellow. What
Longfellow now represents for literary criticism is a vision of American poetry
before poetry was ruined by literary criticism. Yet as it happens, Longfellow
was himself the literary igure who helped to deine American poetry as a
common language always already lost to the very American readers who loved
him most, a common language it took a professional scholar to restore.
What Whitman’s version of Longfellow’s comparative historical inno-
cence and recent versions of Longfellow’s “innocence and openness” share
is the view that American readers cannot properly appreciate American
poetry. For Whitman, that failing was evident in readers’ universal embrace
of Longfellow; for recent literary critics, that failing is evident in Longfellow’s
(and poetry’s) universal disappearance. These laments are really two sides of
the same coin, and both sides have Longfellow’s picture on them. The truth
is that Longfellow – Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres
at Harvard, inventor of the American version of comparative literature, and
best-selling American poet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries –
was instrumental in the construction of the very hierarchies of reading later
critics mistakenly believe have eclipsed him. So much of what Longfellow

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wrote thematized both the disappearance of cultures and the importance

of turning the traces of those vanished cultures into modern poetry. It was
in all ways a winning formula: in his Harvard pedagogy, the notion of the
Weltliteratur, or concert of world literatures – a term that Longfellow bor-
rowed from Goethe – encouraged the study of a wide variety of cultures
with a view toward their progress in forming the synthetic world literature
of modern America. In his popular verse, the nostalgic evocation of vanished
poetries – Acadian, Ojibwe, local, rural, infantile, ancient, Semitic, colonial,
Revolutionary, classical Greek, medieval, German, Norse, Spanish, Moorish,
Italian, Celtic, Gaelic, French – made the poet into an expressive antiquarian,
a collector of ancient lore given back to the people, whose own poetry (in the
form of the poems Longfellow wrote) was in danger of becoming part of a
later Americanizing and modernizing collection (as indeed it has). As my par-
tial and haphazard list indicates, Longfellow’s adoption of the umbrella trope
of the Weltliteratur served to turn modern European nations and ancient (even
mythical) cultures into a blurred verse genre in which geography and history
could be confused with each other, in which the Old World was capacious
indeed. That broad, multiethnic, multinational, multicultural tributary fed a
much more ambitious project than either Whitman or Longfellow’s recent
critical champions recognized. Longfellow plundered world literary history
for the materials for his immensely popular poems in order to make old lit-
eratures into modern literary currency. As the echoes between Whitman
and recent defenders of Longfellow attest, it is Longfellow’s currency we still
exchange when we write about American poetry today.
This is to say that although Longfellow has come to represent a time gone
by in which Americans loved poetry, his popularity and inl uence may actually
be efects of the ways in which his enormous body of work lamented the pass-
ing of old worlds, old cultures, and old poetries people could love. While we
tend to follow Whitman in thinking of Longfellow as representative of a more
innocent poetic age, Longfellow thought of himself as a modern poet, and
what marked his modernity was his distance from the distant poetic lands and
ages that were his subjects. His irst books emerged from the European tours
on which Bowdoin and then Harvard sent the young professor in order to edu-
cate him in a new curriculum of modern languages. Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage
Beyond the Sea (1835) begins by invoking “the wild and romantic tales of regions
so far of as to be regarded as almost a fairy land.” Those tales, Longfellow tells
us, “were well suited to the childish credulity of an age in which what is now
called the Old World was in its childhood. Those times have passed away. The
world has grown wiser and less credulous. . . . But man has not changed his

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nature.”6 That humanist appeal informed Longfellow’s version of compara-

tive literature at Harvard, in which literary works of various traditions could
carry the freight of human progress, and it also informed all of his many publi-
cations, which increasingly took the form of single books of poetry that could
make money for the irst author to own his own electroplates.7 By 1854, even
before The Song of Hiawatha was published, Longfellow was earning enough
to retire from his job at Harvard. Although everything about Longfellow’s
career had an enormous inl uence on the ways in which poetry was read
and written in the United States ever after Longfellow, it is almost impossi-
ble for us to imagine that career today. His more than thirty books, ranging
from early translations to the great translation of Dante’s Commedia (1871),
from the mildly abolitionist Poems of Slavery (1842) to ambitious anthologies
like The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), and from his hugely popular The
Golden Legend (1851) to the Native exoticism of Evangeline (1847) and The Song
of Hiawatha (1855), as well as the apparently homespun New England nar-
rative poems “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1859) and The Courtship of Miles Standish
(1858), represent such a capacious range of subjects and styles that it is dii-
cult to believe that they were all written by the same person. It is even more
diicult to believe that that person was not only America’s best-selling poet
but also the poet Queen Victoria once observed was admired by her palace
servants. Longfellow remains one of the very few American poets to be com-
memorated in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that
his contemporaries in the nineteenth century did wonder whether all of the
work printed as authored by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (often in gold on
the spine of fancy editions and in thousands of less fancy reprints) could actu-
ally have been written by one person; they noticed that there was something
disturbing about the range of Longfellow’s sources and perhaps something
suspicious about the work’s popular humanist assurance.
Consider Margaret Fuller’s famously cutting remarks in the New-York Daily
Tribune in 1845:
We must confess to a coolness toward Mr. Longfellow, in consequence of
the exaggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a
person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the
highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown
which should be reserved for grander brows. . . . Mr. Longfellow has been
accused of plagiarism. We have been surprised that any one should have been
anxious to fasten special charges of this kind upon him, when we supposed
it so obvious that the greater part of his mental stores were derived from the
work of others. He has no style of his own growing out of his own experience

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and observation of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is

always seen through the windows of literature.8
Fuller’s condescension not only preceded Whitman’s by almost forty years
but also tells us something more about nineteenth-century perceptions of
Longfellow: by 1845 (before the wild success of either Evangeline in 1847 or the
even wilder success of The Song of Hiawatha in 1855), Longfellow was regarded
as a crown prince of American poetry. That eminence accounts for some
of his contemporaries’ competitive rhetoric, but what is remarkable is how
early that rhetoric escalated beyond the value attached to Mr. Longfellow to
become the value attached to poetry. For Fuller, Longfellow’s dependence
on the history of world literature meant that he didn’t write “out of his own
experience,” and although of course Fuller herself always saw “through the
windows of literature,” there could be no more damning charge. But as Fuller
indicates, the more damning charges had already been iled in print before
Fuller alluded to them as “special charges.” Beginning in 1839 and continuing
through most of 1845, Edgar Allan Poe staged a heated defense against the
inl ux of Longfellow’s scholarly poetic currency, as he saw early and often that
Longfellow’s Weltliteratur project was not just “in the modes of what is called
the old school,” as Whitman put it, or an attempt to see “through the windows
of literature,” as Fuller put it, but was instead aimed at building a new school
with a new set of windows ofering a diferent view altogether.
If for us Poe’s somewhat hysterical protests (which Poe himself dubbed
“the Little Longfellow War”) have a certain authority granted by Poe’s
unlikely survival in the canon (just as Whitman’s judgment on Longfellow
lingers in Whitman’s unlikely elevation in the canon, and Fuller’s dismissal
carries the Transcendentalist seal of approval), readers of Poe’s 1839 review
of Longfellow’s Hyperion: A Romance (another of the books to emerge from
Longfellow’s early European tours) probably wondered why the stakes of
Poe’s disagreement climbed so high – and certainly wondered why such
a minor literary igure as Poe would shake his tiny ist at the great Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow over the course of a dozen increasingly manic reviews
throughout six years. In the Hyperion review, Poe’s main objection was that
Longfellow included so many translations and so much material from the
history of European (and especially German) poetry. When Poe reviewed
the irst book that was not entirely a work of translation that Longfellow had
published since taking up his post at Harvard four years earlier, he began with
a bang: “Works like this of Professor Longfellow, are the triumphs of Tom
O’Bedlam, and the grief of all true criticism.”9 That may seem condemnation

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enough, but it was only the beginning. It is worth considering the remainder
of that irst, relatively tame review in order to appreciate how much (as Poe
immediately apprehended) rode on Poe’s attempt to stop Longfellow (almost
a decade before he became the best-selling poet in American history) in his well-
heeled tracks. In what would prove to be a self-defeating efort, Poe warned
of “works like this of Professor Longfellow” (and Poe almost always used the
academic honoriic, often capitalizing it), saying that
they are potent in unsettling the popular faith in Art – a faith which, at no day
more than the present, needed the support of men of letters. That such things
succeed at all, is attributable to the sad fact that there exist men of genius
who, now and then, unmindful of duty, indite them – that men of genius ever
indite them is attributable to the fact that these are often the most indolent of
human beings. A man of true talent who would demur at the great labor req-
uisite for the stern demands of high art – at the unremitting toil and patient
elaboration which, when soul-guided, result in the beauty of Unity, Totality,
and Truth – men, we say, who would demur at such labor, make no secret of
scattering at random a profusion of rich thought in the pages of such farra-
gos as “Hyperion.” Here, indeed, there is little trouble – but even that little it
unproitably lost. To the writers of these things we say – all Ethics lie, and all
History lies, or the world shall forget ye and your works. We have no design
of commenting, at any length, upon what Professor Longfellow has written.
We are indignant that he too has been recreant to the good cause. We, there-
fore, dismiss his “Hyperion” in brief. We grant him high qualities, but deny
him the Future.10
From our contemporary perspective on Longfellow, it is hard to imagine what
Poe had in mind when he accused the American people’s poet of “unset-
tling the popular faith in Art.” What the accusation turns out to mean is that
Longfellow did not undertake “the stern demands of high art” and thus did
not produce poetry. It was a rather brilliant performative statement on Poe’s
part: Longfellow has not produced what everyone acknowledges as poetry,
and therefore everyone will forget that he ever pretended to write poetry.
What was at stake for Poe – like Fuller and Whitman after him – was noth-
ing less than the deinition of poetry; he denied Longfellow “the Future” on
the basis that “Ethics” and “History” would prove his claim that whatever
it was that Longfellow was so successful at writing, poetry wasn’t the name
for it. By the end of the Little Longfellow War, Poe would bring Longfellow
up on the “special charges” of plagiarism, even plagiarism of Poe himself.
According to those charges, Longfellow did not write poetry, because he stole
everyone else’s poetry. While Poe’s accusations seemed to his contemporaries
increasingly crazy, we may be tempted to think that history has indeed proven

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Poe right: almost two centuries later, it is Poe’s (and Fuller’s and Whitman’s)
deinition of poetry as “the beauty of Unity, Totality, and Truth” that most
readers wish they could embrace. If we cannot do so, it is because we have
lost the Romantic ideals of the nineteenth century – or because Poe and the
Transcendentalists and Whitman transformed nineteenth-century American
Romantic poetics into modern American poetics. Or so the story goes. But
what deinition of poetry did Longfellow represent? Did the most popular and
(if his somewhat resentful contemporaries are to be believed) eminent poet of
the nineteenth century not believe in the Romantic ideal and not lead the way
into modernism? Most readers and critics today would agree that Longfellow
was indeed left behind on both fronts, but as Poe presciently apprehended, the
question of Longfellow’s deinition of poetry was not so easily settled as we
have come to believe.
Perhaps Poe was right about Longfellow, not because Longfellow wrote
inferior poetry (or because he stole everyone else’s work, although he cer-
tainly borrowed liberally) but because Poe apprehended something crucial
about Longfellow’s literary success. Poe understood not only that Longfellow
was a threat to other, less successful writers (like Poe) but that the popularity
of Longfellow’s work threatened to introduce a new poetic economy, a sys-
tem of exchange in which what counted as poetry would be changed forever.
Poe was right that Longfellow’s work did help to usher in a new way of read-
ing poetry, although the reasons for that newness were perhaps more tangible
than Poe supposed. With the beneit of hindsight, we can see what Poe could
not: what the tremendous transatlantic success of Longfellow’s work signaled
was not (as Whitman suggested) that nineteenth-century readers were overly
fond of “verbal melody,” or (as Fuller suggested) that nineteenth-century
readers did not appreciate originality, or (as Poe suggested) that nineteenth-
century readers mistook poems for poetry, imitations for the real thing, but
that nineteenth-century readers were becoming more interested in the ways
to read poems than they were in the poems themselves. As Leah Price has
argued, in the nineteenth century, “how one reads became more important
than what,” as “the conservative hierarchy of genres gave way to a reactionary
hierarchy of readers.”11 What Poe was right about was that Longfellow was
abstracting or blurring verse genres in ways that made it diicult for readers to
tell what kind of poems they were reading. Why would readers like not know-
ing whether the poem they were reading was an ode or an elegy or a hymn or
an epic or an epistle – or even if it was made up of other poets’ poems? Poe,
at least, was afraid that readers’ embrace of Longfellow meant that people
wanted to read poetry without worrying what that poetry was made of. What

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Poe was identifying in Longfellow’s work (without knowing it) was a symp-
tom of the lyricization of poetry in the nineteenth century (to which Poe’s
own poetics also contributed).
Lyricization was basically a process that began in the late eighteenth cen-
tury as the conservative hierarchy of verse genres began to dissolve and those
genres began to blend into one another (think Lyrical Ballads); just as Bakhtin
attributed the rise of the novel in this period to what he called “the noveliza-
tion of genre,” we might think of the rise of modern poetics as the efect of
the lyricization of genre. As I have argued elsewhere, the notion that poetry
is or ever was one genre is the primary symptom of that lyricization: the
songs, riddles, epigrams, sonnets, epitaphs, blasons, lieder, elegies, marches,
dialogues, conceits, ballads, epistles, hymns, odes, eclogues, and monodramas
considered lyric in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century
were not lyric in the same sense as the poetry we now think of as lyric. The
fact that after the nineteenth century we came to think of almost all poetry as
lyric is the secondary symptom of lyricization. As we have progressively ide-
alized poetry-as-lyric and lyric-as-poetry (an idealization that especially char-
acterizes avant-garde poetry communities that deine themselves as post- or
antilyrical), the fewer actual verse genres have addressed readers in speciic
ways. The nineteenth century was the period in which the shift from many
verse cultures articulated through various social relations gave way to an idea
of poetry devoted to the transcendence of those relations. For Poe, that tran-
scendence took the form of “the beauty of Unity, Totality, and Truth” that he
claimed Longfellow’s verse lacked; for Longfellow, that transcendence took
another form that Poe was right to perceive but that neither he nor later critics
have found a way to describe. Although most of the poetry that Longfellow
wrote was in genres we would not today call “lyric,” his blurring of Old World
cultures and verse genres into modern American forms resulted in a generic
poetry that was the efect of the historical process of lyricization. The stipula-
tive function of the hymn or the elegy or the ode or the epistle or even the
satire tends to dissolve when we think of all of these genres as “poetry,” which
by deinition cannot have a pragmatic cultural function but must represent
the receding horizon of an ideal. In all of Longfellow’s work, that ideal was
bound to a progressive humanism. Readers came to enjoy the pursuit of that
ideal, which allowed them to feel liberated from the conservative hierarchy of
genres (and, not incidentally, from hierarchies of social relations) at the same
time that it did not commit them to any particular way of reading (or any
particular social relations). The brilliant and tremendously inl uential turn in
Longfellow’s work was to make such an ideal the theme of his poems at the

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same time that he made the genres of those poems the abstract remains of the
cultures that made the verse genres his modern poems blurred possible in the
irst place. Virtually all of Longfellow’s poems – and especially the poems that
made his reputation as “the irst of America’s poets” – abstract a traditional
verse genre or lament the vanishing of a traditional culture. His most pop-
ular long poems – especially Evangeline (1847) and Hiawatha (1855) – do both
at once.
In 1840 (or about the time that Poe was becoming increasingly disturbed
by Longfellow’s publications), Longfellow inished “The Wreck of the
Hesperus” and wrote to a friend in Rome that “the National Ballad is a virgin
soil here in New England; and there are good materials. Beside[s] I have a
great notion of working on people’s feelings. I am going to have it printed on a
sheet, and sold like Varses, with a coarse picture on it.”12 Although published
in fancy magazines and a fancy edition of Ballads and Other Poems and never
on a cheap broadside, the poem did indeed work on people’s feelings, not
only as an immediate popular favorite but as a standard text for memori-
zation and required inclusion in anthologies of American poetry well into
the twentieth century. As an editor at Harper and Brothers wrote during
the compilation of The Home Book of Verse in 1959, a “few poems like The
Wreck of the Hesperus . . . familiar to librarians, teachers and parents from
their own childhoods – seem to us really essential: as sugar to catch l ies.”13
The poem that Longfellow joked might be marketed as a broadside ballad
did come to be marketed more than a century later as a national ballad, as
a poem all Americans had in common by the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. The irony of this history is that the ballad was not “virgin soil” in New
England in 1840. Whittier had been printing literary versions of ballads for
more than a decade in New England newspapers by the time Longfellow
wrote his poem, and of course, broadside ballads had circulated widely in
early America since the late seventeenth century, becoming the most pop-
ular print genre in the Republic of Letters by the late eighteenth century.
Longfellow was not, then, just expressing his “gusto at the prospect of send-
ing his poetry further down the social ladder,” as one of his twentieth-cen-
tury editors has commented but was expressing his desire to have his poem
received as if it were one of the people’s “Varses” rather than as a poem by
Harvard’s Professor Longfellow.14 Longfellow’s strategy was to make that as
if make all the diference, because everyone knew it was a poem by Professor
Longfellow that looked like a broadside ballad. Longfellow’s readers knew
how to read ballads but also felt as if they had special skills in recognizing
that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was not just any broadside ballad. As

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Poe foresaw, Longfellow’s strategy worked. His faux broadside ballad came
to be treated as a popular ballad by popular demand, and his imitation of a
genre that had long done many kinds of work across many early American
verse cultures came to replace the genre it imitated in exactly the way that
Poe feared it would.
If Longfellow’s lyricization of the broadside ballad in “The Wreck of the
Hesperus” was exemplary of his ability to adapt a traditional verse genre for
his own purposes, it was just a detail in the much larger picture of Longfellow’s
Weltliteratur and lyricization projects. “A Psalm of Life,” the poem Longfellow
irst published in 1838 that became what one scholar calls “the most popu-
lar poem ever written in English,” bore the subtitle “What the Heart of the
Young Man Said to the Psalmist.”15 If twentieth- and twenty-irst-century
American readers have tended to forget that broadside ballads were the com-
mon national American reading matter of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, they have also forgotten that psalm translation, imitation, adapta-
tion, and recitation was a national pastime during most of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Longfellow’s “young man” begins
the now-famous lines (currently reprinted on boxes of Celestial Seasonings
herbal tea),
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is just an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
(WL, vol. I, p. 20)
What his heart is responding to is what everyone in the nineteenth century
would have recognized as not just theological doxa but generic verse doxa:
rather than, as in “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” imitating a popular verse
genre, in “A Psalm of Life” Longfellow framed a generic alternative to a pop-
ular verse genre. The “mournful numbers” of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book,
for example, were strictly 8-6 quatrains; Longfellow’s numbers are the only
slightly diferent 8-7 quatrains, extending the hymnal pattern by just one beat
in the alternating trimeter lines. The efect of that single beat is to modern-
ize traditional American psalm meter, thus literalizing in the structure of the
poem the injunction of the sixth and seventh stanzas:
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, – act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

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Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
(WL, vol. I, p. 21)

The call to secular action ictively addressed to “the Psalmist” was directly
addressed to readers who had learned to read and write by imitating and trans-
lating psalms. “The Wreck of the Hesperus” imitated and ultimately took
the place of the broadside ballad in popular American reading culture, but “A
Psalm of Life” explicitly posed as the alternative that culture should pursue.
By reading the modern verse genre of “A Psalm of Life” rather than reading
the common verse genres of popular psalms, Longfellow’s American public
was invited to imagine itself on the brink of a new and giddy literary practice
that would transform everyday life – or would make everyday life make his-
tory. At the same time, the modern literary genre of Longfellow’s “Psalm”
reassured its public that it would do what psalms do, providing advice for
living that could be taken away from its context and made portable and adapt-
able. In fact, Longfellow’s “Psalm” takes the portability of its content as its
subject, encouraging its readers to “be up and doing / With a heart for any
fate” – quite literally any fate, because what readers are encouraged to do is
left open, a blank order the reader is invited to ill (WL, vol. I, p. 22). If psalms
were used for many diferent purposes in early America, Longfellow’s “Psalm”
was made for all possible purposes, because it could be adapted to “any fate”
at will. Longfellow’s irst hit single not only was framed as a secular alternative
to devotional reading but was itself the best possible example of such reading,
because the reader could choose what sort of devotion to pursue. No wonder
it is the most popular poem not translated from the Bible ever circulated in
English.
“A Psalm of Life” was included in Longfellow’s irst book of poetry in 1839,
and its generic success perhaps accounts for the generic title of his second
book of poetry in 1841, Ballads and Other Poems. That second volume took its
title from “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and from the irst poem in the col-
lection, “The Skeleton in Armor,” which Longfellow’s readers would have
recognized as a ballad that difered from the “coarse” broadside genre of “The
Wreck of the Hesperus.” In his diary for January 13, 1840, Longfellow wrote
that “Prescott seems to doubt whether I can imitate the Old English ballad”;
for the original publication of the poem in the Knickerbocker in January 1841, the
text was accompanied by copious marginal notes testifying to its authenticity,
although as Longfellow wrote to his father, “of course I make the tradition

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myself ” (WL, vol. 12, pp. 356, 379). In addition to the faux broadside ballad and
faux psalm, then, Longfellow also tried his hand in this period at the faux “Old
English ballad,” a genre that has not translated quite so well (in spite of its
debts to Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”) across the centuries (although it
would be the template for Longfellow’s successor at Harvard, Francis Child,
when he collected the volume English and Scottish Popular Ballads and founded
the irst Department of English in the United States later in the nineteenth
century).
But two poems in Ballads and Other Poems have indeed become modern
generic examples of Longfellow’s persistence in popular American culture:
“The Village Blacksmith” and “Excelsior.” In fact, I was walking down a street
in downtown Manhattan recently and mentioned “The Village Blacksmith” to
a friend and then a moment later heard a man pipe up behind me, “Under a
spreading chestnut-tree / The village smithy stands.” There is a plaque (now
next door to an expensive chocolate shop, on the street where Longfellow’s
grand house still stands in Cambridge) commemorating the tree, which was
cut down in 1876; the “children of Cambridge” gave Longfellow a chair made
out of wood from the tree in 1879. “The Village Blacksmith” was literally taken
from Longfellow’s cultural landscape and remains part of our cultural land-
scape, but what accounts for its staying power is not its realism but its generic
inclusiveness. In his diary for October 5, 1839, Longfellow noted, “Wrote
another Psalm of Life. It is The Village Blacksmith” (WL, vol. 12, p. 345). Does
the note mean that Longfellow was thinking of “The Village Blacksmith” as
another meta-psalm, or that he was hoping that it would equal “A Psalm of
Life” as a popular success? A year later, he described the poem as “a kind of
ballad on a Blacksmith” (WL, vol. 12, p. 374). Samuel Longfellow, the poet’s
younger brother and editor (and not incidentally, a writer and collector of
hymns), thought that the diference between these two generic descriptions
meant that “the form of the poem had been changed during the year,” but it
seems more likely that in “The Village Blacksmith” Longfellow took what he
learned in constructing his faux psalm and faux ballads and used that tech-
nique to make a lyricized hybrid of the two (WL, vol. 12, p. 345).
“The Village Blacksmith” is the story of a representative individual who has
taken the advice of “A Psalm of Life” to “be up and doing,” has learned “to
labor and to wait,” and thus whose life can be cast as a national ballad and also
as devotional example – that is, as a ballad and a psalm at once. In “The Village
Blacksmith,” the alternating tetrameter/trimeter sestets mime ballad meter
as well as the hymnal meter of popular psalms, and the discourse of the irst
lines is explicitly the discourse of the ballad, situating the tale the following

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lines will tell. But the focus of the poem on this particular smithy’s life story,
on his role as mother and father to his children after his wife’s death, shades
into the discourse of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel (“And with his
hard, rough hand he wipes / A tear out of his eyes”) and then at the end of the
poem shades unmistakably into the discourse of the secular psalm, the genre
that Longfellow had just coined, as the poem turns to directly address its own
subject:
Toiling, – rejoicing, – sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the laming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought. (WL, vol. I, p. 66)
“The Village Blacksmith” is indeed “a new Psalm of Life,” because it takes the
generic frame of the (only slightly) earlier poem and ills it with the portrait of
an individual. The smith is the ideal reader of Longfellow’s “Psalm”: he takes
its advice and lives his life accordingly, thus himself becoming the object of
a poem’s direct address. We in turn become the objects of this poem’s direct
address, learning to read the smith as he has learned to read the “Psalm,” imi-
tating his labor so that his forge becomes a metaphor for “each burning deed
and thought” of each reader’s own. In “The Village Blacksmith,” Longfellow
not only modernized popular verse genres but also began to forge (so to
speak) his own blurred genres on the basis of the verse he had taught the pub-
lic to read.
Because poems were the common reading matter of the nineteenth cen-
tury (and because illiteracy was also common), the early poems depended on
reading practices Longfellow did not need to teach (psalm and ballad reading,
in particular) in order to make his readers feel that they could read many “tra-
ditions” at once – not as if they didn’t need to study with the Smith Professor
of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard in order to read poetry
but as if by reading Longfellow’s poetry they already had attended Harvard.
The short poems in Longfellow’s irst popular volumes were accessible to
all because his readers already knew how to memorize the genres already

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incorporated into their daily lives, but they also knew that Longfellow had
abstracted those genres into something with greater cultural capital attached
to it. For the most part, Longfellow’s irst four books of poetry used the strat-
egy of attaching surplus value to common literary property with great suc-
cess, even when, in Poems on Slavery (1842), Longfellow wrote about a political
issue he refused to speak about publicly. Of the eight poems in the slim vol-
ume, four are faux ballads, two are faux psalms, and one is a faux hymn (the
other poem, to William Ellery Channing, is a poem of dedication that invokes
scriptural authority to record “This dread Apocalypse!”). As he had used com-
mon genres to make his own success, Longfellow lyricized common genres to
make (as he later wrote) “the low murmur of slaves, like the chorus in a Greek
tragedy,” audible and legible to people (WL, vol. I, p. 87). These people could
feel as if slavery had become a literary issue they inally knew how to read – as
if sympathizing with sufering slaves gave readers access to classical literacy, a
perverse version of vernacular Greek.
But Longfellow did not become the most popular American poet in history
by politicizing his audience. It was not the political aim of Poems of Slavery
that persisted in Longfellow’s success but its adaptation of popular models
to classical themes that persisted in the later work. The classical literacy that
Longfellow’s poetry made available at a discount became the subject of his
two best-selling narrative poems, Evangeline (1847) and The Song of Hiawatha
(1855). In 1845, Longfellow had edited an enormous collection entitled The
Poets and Poetry of Europe, made of English versions of poems from ten lan-
guages. In 1847, Longfellow efectively combined the lyricization of traditional
verse genres that had worked so well in his early poems with the Weltliteratur
project that eventuated in The Poets and Poetry of Europe and that guided his
creation of the irst curriculum in comparative literature in the United States,
held at Harvard during the 1840s. At Harvard, Longfellow often found himself
in conl ict with his colleagues in the Classics Department, who did not see
why modern languages should be taught at the university level (could young
men not simply travel in Europe to acquire French and Italian, as Longfellow
himself had done?). When Nathaniel Hawthorne’s friend Horace Conolly
came to Longfellow with the tale of a young woman caught in the French
Canadian diaspora, Longfellow (with Hawthorne’s permission) took the idea
and ran with it, creating Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, the irst of his long, nar-
rative, book-length poems.16 Narrative verse histories were also very familiar
genres to American readers (they were especially popular in the late eigh-
teenth century), but again Longfellow blurred the familiar genre of epic verse
narrative, quite literally novelizing it, or making it very like the emerging

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nineteenth-century sentimental women’s novels that his friend Hawthorne

complained were looding the market because of “that damned mob of scrib-
bling women.” But Longfellow also lyricized the novel: Evangeline borrowed
the name of the heroine of Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s 1842 long verse narrative,
The Sinless Child, a name readers had already learned to associate with the fem-
inized sympathetic identiication typical of Poetess verse (an association that
would be further exploited by another scribbling woman, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, just a few years later, when Little Eva made her way into the genre
of the novel itself ). The success of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie drew on the
already-established value of Longfellow’s popular generic sources, and espe-
cially on the popular igure of the Poetess and the popularizing position of
the lady novelist, but it also derived from a much less obviously popular and
apparently unlikely source: its thousands of lines were all composed in dac-
tylic hexameter, the meter of classical epic. In Evangeline, Longfellow did more
than give his readers more sophisticated versions of verse genres they already
knew how to read, giving them instead a new kind of poetry they came to
value even more: a literally novelized verse genre that ofered classical liter-
acy at a discount and that told the story of an innocent and virtuous young
woman violently expelled from an Old World whose traditions survived only
in the poem those readers received from Longfellow.
Part of the success of the new verse genre of Evangeline surely derived from
the poem’s insistence that it was not a poem written by Longfellow at all and
that the story it told in the thousands (and thousands) of copies sold could not
be found in any book:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers –
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but relecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean.
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.

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 Vi rgi ni a J ac k son

Ye who believe in afection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,

Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition, still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.
(WL, vol. 2, p. 20)

Readers did respond in unprecedented numbers to the poem directly addressed

as a iction not of reading but of hearing a “mournful tradition” sung by the
trees in six perfect three-beat feet per line. By 1847, Longfellow had already
convinced his readers that they could read modern poetry using old mod-
els; in Evangeline, Professor Longfellow began to teach readers that they no
longer needed the old models in order to read the remains only available in
the modern version. Reading Greek meter without learning to read Greek,
Longfellow’s expanding public also read that the violence of modern warfare
and genocide could be understood as natural occurrences, that a community
could be “scattered like dust and leaves” and survive only in the poem – and
in the readers – that kept the tradition alive. As Evangeline journeyed from
Acadia down the Mississippi to Louisiana and then to Philadelphia, she traced
a path from Old World social hierarchies to New World brotherly love, and
although her story is tragic, its retelling (and rereading) made it the stuf of a
new way of understanding American poetry.
The idea that an American poet in the middle of the nineteenth century
changed the way in which we would understand poetry ever after is, of course,
an idea usually attributed to Whitman rather than to Longfellow. But in 1855,
the same year in which Whitman published the irst edition of Leaves of Grass,
Longfellow published another novelized verse narrative, and this one would be
more inluential than either Evangeline or any edition of Whitman’s Leaves by a
long shot. The Song of Hiawatha took the reading practices built into Evangeline
and expanded them. Rather than drawing on the topos of the sentimental
novel, writing large a heroine associated with the igure of the Poetess, and
then combining both in the history of a displaced, vanquished population told
in the meter of classical epic, Longfellow took again (as in Poems of Slavery)
what could have been a contemporary political theme, the story of a geno-
cide closer to home than the Acadian deportation of the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury. But if the historical materials of Hiawatha may seem more pressing to
mid-nineteenth-century Americans than those of Evangeline (despite the mid-
century European violent revolutions to which Evangeline is also a response),
the generic sources for Hiawatha were hardly popular. When Longfellow read
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Concerning the
History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States in 1854, he

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 Longfellow in His Time

was reading not popular iction or Poetess verse but thousands of pages of state-
sponsored early ethnography, partially composed to justify the Indian removal
policies of the previous decades and partially part of a federal efort to passively
preserve the traces of the cultures the federal government was actively destroy-
ing. Longfellow took Schoolcraft’s material and adapted it to the frame of the
Finnish Kalevala, a cycle in trochaic tetrameter that met the chronicle by the
Indian agent and self-styled ethnographer where The Poets and Poetry of Europe
had ended: the borrowed meter allowed Longfellow to render his translation
of European folk song into the igures of an American translation of a foreign
language already present on native soil. What proved immensely popular about
Hiawatha, then, was not its reliance on already popular reading practices but its
self-presentation as an ancient American reading practice that could claim the
authority of a classical Western philological lineage and still roll of the tongue.
Like Evangeline’s dactylic hexameters, the trochaic tetrameters of Hiawatha
immediately attracted an enormous critical response and generated a long
line of (often brilliant) parodies (of which Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s
Photographing” may be the most famous, but by no means the most hilar-
ious). But whereas the controversy over the meter of Evangeline took up an
already-established debate over the very possibility of an English hexame-
ter (a debate that emerged from the conl ict over classical quantitative and
British accentual meters earlier in the nineteenth century), the furor over the
meter of Hiawatha returned to Poe’s “special charges” of plagiarism against
Longfellow, because this time Longfellow’s meter was directly lifted from a
particular (rather than generic) source (speciically, from Elias Lönnrot’s col-
lection of the songs of unlettered peasants in northern Finland). By 1923, even
the parodies of Hiawatha had become immediately recognizable objects of
parody, so much so that lines like the following could be directly addressed:
Have you ever noticed verses
Written in unrhymed trochaics
Without thinking as you read them,
This was swiped from “Hiawatha”?17

Yet as fascinating as the branching histories of parody, plagiarism, and met-

rical debate that took place over the body of Longfellow’s most successful
book are, it is important to notice that what made such immediate parody and
readerly intimacy possible was the way in which the text of Hiawatha returns
to the instructions for reading that Longfellow’s international reading public
had learned to follow, precisely because so many people had been reading so
much Longfellow:

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 Vi rgi ni a J ac k son

Ye who love a nation’s legends,

Love the ballads of a people,
That like voices from afar of
Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike,
Scarcely can the ear distinguish
Whether they are sung or spoken;
Listen to this Indian Legend!
To this Song of Hiawatha! (WL, vol. 2, p. 115)
Everyone did “listen” to “this Song of Hiawatha” in the nineteenth and well
into the twentieth centuries, but not because the most popular poem in
American literary history was really “so plain and childlike” as it pretended
to be or as innocent as later readers have continued to believe it was, and not
because everyone knew how to read Schoolcraft or the Kalevala, but because
by 1855 everyone knew how to read Longfellow. What Longfellow’s poetry
made possible was a shift in modern verse-reading practices that these lines
disguise as media shift: his most successful poems “call us to pause and listen”
to a complex literacy, to versions of the history of Western culture made into
poems that anyone can understand.
This is to say that the portrait of the popular “poet of all sympathetic gen-
tleness” that has overshadowed Longfellow’s reputation from the laments of
Poe and Fuller and Whitman to the condescending nostalgia of the new cen-
tury has always been a disguise. It is a pretense Longfellow himself fashioned
piece by piece, and it has worked so well that we have yet to look beyond the
total efect. That is a shame, not only because the illusion by which we have
been distracted has made it impossible for us to recognize Longfellow’s real
and enduring importance to literary history, but also because so much of
Longfellow’s career exceeded that caricature. “Paul Revere’s Ride,” originally
published in The Boston Evening Transcript in 1860, became such a standard for
memorization in the American school curriculum that most readers (or recit-
ers) give little thought to the fact that the poem’s Revolutionary War details
are ictionalized in order to make Revere the hero a New England on the
brink of civil war needed to imagine. Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) responded
to the national fracturing of the war by weaving stories from diferent classes
and regions into an imaginary union. But the great project that Longfellow
undertook in the war’s aftermath falls so far outside the popular myth that it
has been almost forgotten. Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy
(1867) was in part the product of his collaboration with other members of
the famous Dante Club, which began in 1865 and lasted for several years. The

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intellectual project of this group (which included Charles Eliot Norton, James
Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, and from time to time Oliver Wendell
Holmes, among occasional others) was a far cry from the “plain and childlike”
verses that made Longfellow famous. The diiculty of aligning the Longfellow
that has come down to us with the Longfellow who devoted his last years to
the best translation of Dante into English anyone had yet produced should
give us pause whenever we are tempted to think of Longfellow as the poet for
earlier readers who lacked our educated literary critical perspective. If we no
longer read Longfellow, it is not because we are more modern and sophisti-
cated than were Longfellow’s contemporaries, but because Longfellow’s def-
inition of poetry as the vehicle of old cultural models that make new worlds
possible is still very much our own. It is a testament to Longfellow’s genius
that this is true and that we still do not seem to know it.

Notes
1. Walt Whitman, “Death of Longfellow,” in Justin Kaplan (ed.), Specimen Days.
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), pp.
941–42.
2. Angus Fletcher, “Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American
Poet,” Raritan 10:4 (1991), p. 139.
3. Dana Gioia, “Longfellow and the Aftermath of Modernism,” in Jay Parini
(ed.), The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), p. 85.
4. Gioia, “Longfellow and the Aftermath of Modernism,” p. 65.
5. Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2006), pp. 5–6.
6. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
14 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mil in, 1886), pp. 19–20. This vol-
ume will be cited subsequently in the text as WL.
7. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers
of William Charvat, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1968), p. 159.
8. Reprinted in Judith Mattson and Joel Myersin (eds.), Margaret Fuller, Critic:
Writings from the New York Tribune (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000), p. 287.
9. Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library
of America, 1984), p. 670.
10. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 670.
11. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George
Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 156.

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12. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed.
Andrew Hilen, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1966–1982), vol. 2, p. 203.
13. Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 248.
14. Lawrence Buell, “Introduction,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems
(New York: Penguin, 1988), p. xviii.
15. Robert A. Gale, A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2003), p. 202.
16. Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press,
2004), p. 180.
17. “Longfellow Unsymbolized,” Literary Digest 77 (May 12, 1923), p. 29.

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 Chapter 12
Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the
New England Tradition
M ic h a e l C . C o h e n

On December 17, 1877, the Boston publisher H. O. Houghton hosted a dinner

honoring the seventieth birthday of John Greenleaf Whittier and the twentieth
anniversary of the Atlantic Monthly. With Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow, and
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., headlining, and more than sixty of the Atlantic’s
authors attending (although none of its female contributors were invited),
“certainly there has been nothing like this dinner . . . for [manifesting] the
swiftly growing power of the literary body in America,” as the New York Evening
Post wrote the next day.1 As toast followed toast that long night, however,
this literary body’s power was challenged unexpectedly when Mark Twain
tweaked Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes in a story about three hoboes
who use the poets’ names to besiege a hapless California miner.2 Although the
burlesque did not seem to ofend anyone at the dinner, newspapers quickly
criticized it as “lat, silly, coarse, rough, and unpardonable,” for Clemens, as
William Dean Howells later put it, had badly underestimated “the species of
religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them.”3
Twain’s joke refracted the veneration of the Fireside Poets by toying with
the publicness of their literary personas. Standing that evening “on the shore
of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its biggest literary billows,”
Twain thinks back to his irst attempt to “try the virtue of my nom de plume”
during “an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California.”4 The
pseudonym gains Clemens entry into “a miner’s lonely log cabin in the foot-
hills of the Sierras,” but the miner complains that Twain is “the fourth littery
man that’s been here in twenty-four hours – I’m a-going to move” (CT, p. 695).
The miner then explains how “Mr. Emerson,” “a seedy little bit of a chap,
red-headed”; “Mr. Holmes,” “as fat as a balloon” with “double chins all the
way down to his stomach”; and “Mr. Longfellow,” “built like a prizeighter,”
had invaded his home, eaten his food, gambled, fought, stolen his boots, and
demanded he “sing ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ till I dropped – at
thirteen minutes past four this morning” (CT, pp. 695–96, 698). Throughout the

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story, the hoboes quote poems by Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes – “queer
talk,” according to the miner – usually to insult him or impose further:

Mr. Emerson came and looked on a while, and then he takes me aside by the
buttonhole and says:

Give me agates for my meat;

Give me cantharides to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and latitudes.
Says I, “Mr. Emerson, if you’ll excuse me, this ain’t no hotel.” You see it sort
of riled me – I warn’t used to the ways of littery swells. (CT, p. 696)

The joke ends when Twain informs his host “these were not the gracious
singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these
were imposters,” to which the miner responds, “Ah – imposters, were they? –
are you?” (CT, p. 699). Although Twain directed the punch line against himself,
the humor of the speech (and the source of its ofense) came from the way it
split well-known poems from the genial glow of their authors: “Fancy making
Mr. Emerson, even in travesty, stand for such a vulgar little scamp, and Holmes
and Longfellow in such a guise,” one editorialist hufed.5 However digniied
Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes might be, even their best-loved poems
could become “queer talk” in the right (or wrong) circumstances. Twain’s
speech therefore makes visible a conl ict between the social lives of poems and
the construction of a literary hierarchy in the late nineteenth century. Creating
a literary elite depended on circulating certain authors and texts through sanc-
tioned institutions and media (like the Atlantic, for instance), but this same
circulation could destabilize the very sense of authorial presence on which
canonicity depended, making every nom de plume a potential “impostor.”
Twain’s speech was particularly inappropriate (or appropriately wicked) for
the anniversary dinner, which was meant to showcase the cultural splendor of
American poetry as embodied in the Fireside Poets, a group of authors that
included the guests of honor, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, and Emerson,
along with James Russell Lowell, who was serving as ambassador to Spain,
and William Cullen Bryant, who did not attend. In 1877 these poets had a
popular readership, a cultural power, and a presence in public life that later
poets (or contemporaries like Walt Whitman) could only dream of. As a
“Western” writer struggling for legitimacy “on the shores of the Atlantic,”
Twain may have wanted to poke fun at the hegemony of the “Atlantic” writ-
ers, for the Fireside Poets represented both the cultural authority of “poetry”

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in general and a speciic authority grounded in the legacy of New England.

In the 1870s a new industry of American literary history books granted an
exceptional place for New England’s writers in the development of American
literature, and the Fireside Poets frequently were identiied as the best repre-
sentatives of both New England and American writing.6 By 1877 the Fireside
Poets were presented as morally serious, domestic, and patriotic, and portraits
of them looked down serenely from the walls of many middle-class parlors
as the entire family read from any number of “Collected,” “Complete,” or
“Household” editions of their works.
But to see the Fireside Poets simply as a dull relic of the Genteel era belies
the complexity and diversity of these authors’ careers, which encompass the
full spectrum of nineteenth-century culture. Readers only gradually appreci-
ated these poets as a literary legacy, for they were often controversial igures,
writing pointedly on diicult, timely topics. The New England tradition was
contested throughout the United States, its meanings were never monolithic,
and authors like Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell are far more interesting than
literary history has remembered them to be. If Twain’s joke expresses a sub-
merged hostility toward the New England tradition felt by some writers then,
it also speaks to the nineteenth century’s uncanny familiarity with poetry, the
weird intimacy between these authors and their readers, which over time has
become hard to read in its full density and strangeness.
John Greenleaf Whittier came from the most humble circumstances of any
of the Fireside Poets: he was born on a farm near Haverhill, Massachusetts,
in 1807, to a Quaker family that had lived in the area since the seventeenth
century. His career follows a complex trajectory: in the 1830s he gained notice
as a reform writer and abolitionist, associated irst with Garrison and later
with political antislavery. Some of Whittier’s best-known antislavery poems
include “The Slave Ships,” “The Branded Hand,” and “The Farewell of a
Virginia Slave Mother,” but he wrote dozens of poems, in many genres, on
all aspects of the antislavery struggle. During the Civil War he supported
the Union (despite the Friends’ traditional paciism), and war poems like
“Barbara Frietchie,” “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” and “Ein Feste Burg
ist Unser Gott” became popular rally songs in the North. While Whittier
continued to pursue his activism, however, he also began writing legendary
songs and ballads, like “Maud Muller,” “Telling the Bees,” “The Bridal of
Pennacook,” and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” that were based on the local lore,
folkways, and history of New England. After the Civil War, and especially
after the 1866 publication of Snow-Bound, his most famous poem, this portion
of his work became much more celebrated and widely read. By his death

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in 1892, Whittier was known as the chronicler of bygone New England life,
while the antislavery poems that had once made him infamous were largely
forgotten.7
Whittier’s relation to the antislavery movement was almost entirely print
mediated, and in the vexed political climate of the 1830s his publications made
him notorious and at times the target of violence. Thus his poems are imbued
with the idiom of the era’s embattled public culture: they locate agency in
the free circulation of discourse (speciically antislavery speech and writing)
structured by the rapid temporality of immediate publication (and immediate
emancipation), in which “freedom” comes from the ability to speak and move
without restrictions. Many of Whittier’s antislavery poems are concerned
with the suppression of Yankee freedoms – freedoms of speech, association,
and conscience – and the poems exhort Yankee men to assert their rights or
risk becoming little better than slaves. Whittier wrote few poems from the
perspective or about the experiences of black slaves themselves, although one
of these, “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother,” was often recited on
the abolitionist lecture circuit (Frederick Douglass quotes the entire song in
his irst narrative). Much more typical of his antislavery work is a poem like
“Stanzas for the Times,” in which Whittier identiies those who give up their
rights with “marked and branded slaves.”
Is this the land our fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the soil whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in? . . .
And shall we crouch above these graves,
With craven soul and fettered lip?
Yoke in with marked and branded slaves,
And tremble at the driver’s whip?8
By living with “fettered lip” and trembling at “the driver’s whip,” the poem’s
addressees forfeit their Revolutionary heritage and endanger the sacred value
of New England’s land. The rhetorical questions destabilize the collective
identity constituted by a shared relation to the symbolic landscape: if “we
speak but as our masters please,” then this will no longer be “the land” and
“the graves” of “our fathers” (JGW, vol. 3, p. 35). Whittier then answers these
rhetorical questions:
No! . . . guided by our country’s laws,
For truth, and right, and sufering man,
Be ours to strive in Freedom’s cause,
As Christians may, as freemen can!

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 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the New England Tradition

Still pouring on unwilling ears

That truth oppression only fears.
(JGW, vol. 3, pp. 36–37)
By speaking out, the poem’s readers stand up to the threat of slavery and
assert themselves as the true heirs to “the memories of our dead” (JGW, vol. 3,
p. 36). The poem concludes by assuring the “brethren of the South” that “No
seal is on the Yankee’s mouth, / No fetter on the Yankee’s press! / From our
Green Mountains to the sea, / One voice shall thunder, We are free!” (JGW,
vol. 3, p. 38). Only by speaking freely (saying, “We are free!”) can Yankees claim
their rights to New England’s land and history. This poem realized its inten-
tions – free speech and circulation – by appearing in newspapers, pamphlets,
and orations across the North in 1835 (it was even reprinted in Baltimore’s pro-
slavery Niles’ Register). “Stanzas for the Times” gained persuasive force from
a context of newsworthiness, and because the local (primarily New England)
sites of its publication aligned the poem’s subject with its audience. The social
power of this kind of antislavery poem indicates its wide diference from the
later poems in Whittier’s canon with which it would be unfavorably compared
after the Civil War.
Whitman Bennett has described Whittier’s antislavery newspaper poems as
“a very special brand – for which poetry in the accepted sense may not be quite
the just word . . . these versiied outbursts of indignation, satire, reproach,
scorn, and exhortation, all mingled with speciic arguments and supplications
for divine aid, reached the ears and hearts of millions . . . who would never
have read prose pamphlets or have been inl uenced by them.”9 The special
features of the newspaper antislavery poem elicit a type of reading unique to
the newspaper context, because readers encountered the poem amid articles
and advertisements pertaining to the events the poem described. For instance,
The Liberator printed “Stanzas for the Times” next to an article by Whittier that
recounted how he had been attacked by a mob in Concord, New Hampshire;
its place on the news page (the front page, no less) provides the poem with
extratextual evidence to support its sense of urgency. In Jacksonian culture,
in which readers usually encountered poems outside of books, the political
work of Whittier’s antislavery poems can best be understood in relation to
their mobility and the uses they made of formats like the newspaper and
the broadside. After Whittier joined political abolition in the 1840s, how-
ever, he wrote fewer poems about free speech, and more poems addressed
to national audiences on national issues. These poems, such as campaign
songs for John Fremont, poems on the Kansas-Nebraska Border War (“The
Kansas Emigrants”), and poems like “Ichabod!,” written after Daniel Webster

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endorsed the Fugitive Slave Act, appeared mostly in magazines, annuals, and
books (Whittier’s irst authorized poetry book appeared in 1843). These for-
mats created new meanings for his antislavery poetry, which now spoke to a
multisectional audience.
In so doing, Whittier’s work took on a diferent kind of local coloring:
although he remained intimately involved in abolition, he increasingly wrote
about the legends of early New England, and this localism earned him much
wider admiration than the sectional partisanship of his antislavery poetry ever
could. Even while being canonized as a New England elder, Whittier became
known as the Barefoot Boy (a phrase taken from one of his most popular
poems), a poet of regionalist memory. These poems ofer a complex mixture
of sentiment, nostalgia, didacticism, humor, and realism, as in “Maud Muller”
(1854), a poem about a leeting encounter between a judge riding from town
and a barefoot girl mowing in the ields. Although the poem seems set up like
a fairy tale that will end in a cross-class marriage, the dreams of rustic simplic-
ity and urbane ease that each igure evokes for the other go unrealized, as both
marry unhappily within their class. The poem’s wistful knowledge comes too
late for either party:
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
(JGW, vol. 1, p. 153)
“Maud Muller” goes beyond evocations of barefoot boys and girls and
speaks to the poet’s power to weave present and past together (its popular-
ity seems indicated by the number of parodies it prompted). This power –
more than regional nostalgia – was at the source of Whittier’s appeal as a
New England poet. Another example is “Mabel Martin, A Harvest Idyl” (1857):
despite being published in the antislavery National Era, this ballad about the
seventeenth-century witchcraft crisis exempliies Whittier’s facility with “sim-
ple legends told . . . the beautiful and old”: “I call the old time back: I bring
my lay / In tender memory of the summer day / When, where our native
river lapsed away / We dreamed it over” (JGW, vol. 1, p. 196). Like many
of Whittier’s regionalist poems, “Mabel Martin” explicitly evokes its power
to bring back lost time and return author and reader to a richer, fuller exis-
tence. These poems emphasize their historical circulation in the oral lore of

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the region; Whittier often invokes the telling of the tale across generations
as a way to ground a poem in the deep time of its setting. “The Swan Song
of Parson Avery,” a ballad about a shipwreck, ends on such a note: “And still
the ishers outbound, or scudding from the squall, / With grave and reverent
faces, the ancient tale recall, / When they see the white waves breaking on the
Rock of Avery’s Fall!” (JGW, vol. 1, p. 192); so does “Telling the Bees,” “And the
song she was singing ever since / In my ears sounds on – ‘Stay at home, pretty
bees, ly not hence! / Mistress Mary is dead and gone!’ ” (JGW, vol. 1, p. 188).
Whittier’s legendary poems range across folklore from around the world (not
just New England), with a formal inventiveness and generic variation that
belies their simple designation as ballads. Many of those published in the 1850s
and 1860s relate instances of historical injustice, whether perpetrated against
the Irish (“Kathleen”), Acadians (“Marguerite”), Native Americans (“The
Truce of Piscataqua”), or Quakers (“Cassandra Southwick”), making them
indirectly topical to the era.
The correlation of historical incidents with contemporary events, and the
focus on legendary circulation outside of books, come together in Whittier’s
most famous work, Snow-Bound, a Winter Idyl (1866), which, more than any-
thing else, changed his persona from a sectional partisan of antislavery to a
national bard keeping alive regional traditions. Although Snow-Bound is obvi-
ously and avowedly autobiographical, readers so intensely naturalized the
relationship between the poem and the people, lore, and histories of rural
New England that they granted it unique authority as the social and cultural
record of a bygone folk life.10 Such a reading plays into the poem’s instructions,
which direct readers to take it as the last source for a certain kind of disappear-
ing history. Snow-Bound narrates the events of a blizzard during Whittier’s
childhood. Shut in on their farm, his family gathers by the ire, telling sto-
ries and reading to one another while the storm rages outside. The poem is
framed as a series of memories: Whittier remembering the events and people
of the poem, most of whom have died; family members recalling and retell-
ing events from their own lives and history as they sit by the ireside; and the
future readers of Snow-Bound, who, when they read it “with me by the home-
stead hearth,” will recall their own childhoods (JGW, vol. 2, p. 159).
In the “lonely farm-house” where Whittier grew up, “story-telling was a
necessary resource in the long winter evenings” (JGW, vol. 2, p. 134). The
retelling of tales, memories, songs, and lore, which the narrator calls “the
common unrhymed poetry / Of simple life and country ways,” makes up the
vast majority of the poem (JGW, vol. 2, p. 144). However, the stories themselves
are not retold; what gets narrated are the acts of their retelling: “Our father

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rode again his ride / On Memphremagog’s wooded side; / Sat down again to
moose and samp / In trapper’s hut and Indian camp” (JGW, vol. 2, p. 142). The
“common unrhymed poetry” includes stories of religious intolerance, Indian
removals, antislavery resistance, the Revolutionary War, and ecological his-
tory, along with popular legends, local superstitions, and accounts of daily life
and labor in a rural community. Thus although the particular record of “my
boyhood in our lonely farm-house” is compiled from the oral lore and small
library of the Whittier family, this collection details a much larger history of
New England, reaching outward from the Haverhill farmhouse and backward
to early colonial history. As members of the family circle are introduced, the
narrator reminds his readers that these folk are now dead, so that their only
access to expression can come through the narrator and his retelling of them
and their stories: “Henceforward, listen as we will, / The voices of that hearth
are still” (JGW, vol. 2, p. 141). Snow-Bound silences the orality of the hearth in a
nostalgia that is deinitively written and not heard: when “the voices of [the]
hearth are still,” only “their written words” remain, in the form of Snow-Bound
itself, which concludes by invoking the “Angel of the backward look” to:
[Clasp the] brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past . . .
Shut down and clasp the heavy lids;
I hear again the voice that bids
The dreamer leave his dream midway.
(JGW, vol. 2, pp. 141, 158)

While the folkways of New England once existed in the “common

unrhymed poetry” of the ireside, the “Angel of the backward look” now
works through the heavy materiality of the “monographs of outlived years”
read by the dreamer as he sits before the ireside of memory (JGW, vol. 2,
p. 158). In contrast to the leeting exchanges of “common unrhymed poetry”
that once made up “simple life and country ways,” Snow-Bound inalizes its
own power to circulate popular history by closing the past in the sealed pages
of a book. That book is the printed poem, and it is ofered to future generations
of readers, who, with Snow-Bound in hand, will “Sit with me by the homestead
hearth, / And stretch the hands of memory forth / To warm them at the
wood-ire’s blaze” (JGW, vol. 2, p. 159). Snow-Bound thus creates and re-creates
a material shift in the circulation of poetry, from the ephemeral exchanges of
“the common unrhymed poetry / Of simple life and country ways” to the
solid and perennial format of the printed book, ever available for rereading

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in the future. In this way Snow-Bound allegorizes Whittier’s career: his anti-
slavery poems, constituted by free circulation and temporal immediacy in a
local partisan context, were replaced by poems like Snow-Bound, which recast
him as the national arbiter of New England nostalgia.11 Reading a poem like
Snow-Bound therefore became a way to know the popular life of bygone, rural
America. The Whittier celebrated at events like his birthday dinner in 1877 was
this latter-day bard, the presiding spirit of an invented national past lovingly
recalled in books read by the ire.
In contrast to Whittier’s marginal origins, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was
born (in 1809) to a family that had been part of New England’s ruling class
since the seventeenth century. Holmes struggled with this legacy (as depicted
in his novel Elsie Venner), but he also made much of it – in fact, he coined
the term “Boston Brahmin.” Although he wrote many poems and belonged
to several literary societies while a student at Harvard in the 1820s, Holmes
trained as a doctor, a profession he pursued assiduously, garnering renown
and respect for his work, and eventually becoming dean of Harvard’s Medical
School (he also invented the word “anesthesia”). Holmes’s medical training
taught him to be “exact, methodical, and rigorous,” and never “to guess when
I can know,” qualities of precision, observation, and caution that imbue many
of his poems.12
Holmes’s literary career began in earnest in the 1850s. He wrote three nov-
els and many essays, the most famous being the Breakfast Table series that
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (a magazine he christened) and was later col-
lected in three books, beginning with The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858).
These essays are the near monologues of a Holmes-like narrator speaking to
fellow members of a boardinghouse, and they employ a loosely organized,
digressive structure. A theme that links them is their exploration of the vir-
tues of conversation, and, indeed, Holmes was famous as a wit and conversa-
tionalist.13 His poetry its into this milieu of convivial association: his poems
are playful, lighthearted, and brief, and rather than writing on imaginative
themes or in response to historical events, Holmes wrote most of them on
request for occasions (dinners, graduation ceremonies, annual club meetings),
to be read aloud to familiar audiences. These poems were published piece-
meal and were not written to be collected in books with cohesive themes.
The occasional, ephemeral origins of his poetry thus make it hard to measure
the impact of Holmes’s work, and in many ways his poems are eccentric to
the “American Renaissance” narratives of literary history that emerged in the
twentieth century.14

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One of Holmes’s most famous poems was also one of his earliest: “Old
Ironsides” was printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser in 1830, after Holmes
read an article that erroneously reported the navy’s plan to scrap the U.S.S.
Constitution, the frigate famed for its service in the War of 1812. The poem slid
into the intense partisanship of the Jacksonian era and was reprinted in oppo-
sition newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., creating
an outcry against the proposed dismantling of the ship, and eventually saving
it (the Constitution has never been retired from service). Holmes described
the poem as “an impromptu outburst of feeling,” and it deploys a rolling bal-
lad meter and bitingly ironic tone familiar to partisan poetry of the day: “Ay,
tear her tattered ensign down!” the poem begins, in mock agreement, “The
meteor of the ocean air / Shall sweep the clouds no more . . . The harpies of
the shore shall pluck / The eagle of the sea!”
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy lag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!15
Although it later became a recitation piece in schoolrooms across the
country, the poem speaks, sharply, the opinion of New England. The region’s
economy depended heavily on global trade, and the glory of Old Ironsides
had come in naval battles that protected this trade and the wealth it pro-
duced in Boston and other area ports; the decision to scrap the ship, mean-
while, came from an administration deeply unpopular there. The poem
never names its object, and thus its publication context explains its mean-
ing in ways that the form and content do not. In this way “Old Ironsides”
ably represents not just Holmes’s work but also most of the era’s poetry,
like Whittier’s antislavery poems, which often were tied to current events
and published in newspapers, in which the surrounding articles framed the
poem in more than one sense.
However popular “Old Ironsides” may have been, it was “Poetry, a Metrical
Essay,” delivered as an address to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society in 1836,
that prompted Holmes to publish his irst book. “Poetry” is Holmes’s lon-
gest poem and arguably his most ambitious, providing a sweeping overview
of history by expressing “some aspects of the ars poetica” and analyzing “the
constructive side of the poet’s function” (OWH, vol. 12, p. 35). “Poetry” brings

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together Holmes’s various interests by laying out a theory of art that is also a
theory of intellection and a brief for careful analysis and observation.
We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave,
Relect the light our common nature gave,
But every sunbeam, falling from her throne,
Wears on our hearts some coloring of our own . . .
Thus Heaven, repeating its material plan,
Arched over all the rainbow mind of man;
But he who, blind to universal laws,
Sees but efects, unconscious of their cause, –
Believes each image in itself is bright . . .
And, lost in rapture, thinks for him alone
Earth worked her wonders. (OWH, vol. 12, p. 37)
The many who cannot distinguish efects from causes never get past surface
appearances to perceive universal laws; they are “Proud of a pebble, as the
brightest gem / Whose light might crown an emperor’s diadem,” and they
mistake poetry as a divine gift that “sets the laws at naught / Which chain the
pinions of our wildest thought” (OWH, vol. 12, pp. 38, 37). Poetry, according
to Holmes, consists of intuitional inspirations – “glorious visions,” “bright
auroras,” fancies, visions, and passions – but these belong to all people (“if
these on all some transient hours bestow / Of rapture tingling with its hectic
glow / Then all are poets”), while only the poet can embody these lashes of
insight in language (OWH, vol. 12, p. 39). But because language is an imperfect
medium, and no one can “embody in a breathing word / Tones that the spirit
trembled when it heard,” those who best learn the machinery of poetry – and
Holmes was a lifelong devotee of Pope – will best express the “bright auroras
of our twilight mind” (OWH, vol. 12, p. 39). Poetry is thus deeply linked to the
material world in its content and its form, and Holmes presents inspiration as
a product of analysis: by grasping inherent causes and separating them from
perceptible efects, a would-be poet can give voice to more durable and uni-
versal expressions. To illustrate the relation between physical circumstance
and poetic form, the poem outlines poetry’s major historical epochs and con-
cludes by celebrating the unequalled vitality and permanence of true poetry:
“One thrill of earth dissolves a century’s toil / Strewed like the leaves that
vanish in the soil / . . . But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to the air, / From
shore to shore the blasts of ages bear” (OWH, vol. 12, p. 59).
The world may view poetry as “a mystery and a charm,” but this is a mis-
take; poetry endures not because it rebels against universal laws but because
it adapts so thoroughly to them, making form by learning “to measure, with

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the eye of art, / The wandering fancy or the wayward heart” (OWH, vol. 12,
pp. 37–38). Indeed, grounding the phenomena of poetics in the physical uni-
verse was a lifelong project for Holmes. In “The Physiology of Versiication”
(1883), he argues that “two great vital movements preeminently distinguished
by their rhythmical character . . . the respiration and the pulse” provide the
basis for meter (OWH, vol. 8, p. 315). “That the form of verse is conditioned
by economy of those muscular movements which insure the oxygenation of
the blood is a fact which many have acted on the strength of without knowing
why they did so” (OWH, vol. 8, p. 316). Holmes again cuts through mystiica-
tions: “The reason why eight syllable verse is so singularly easy to read aloud
is that it follows more exactly than any other measure the natural rhythm
of respiration,” while the twelve-syllable line “is almost intolerable, from its
essentially unphysiological construction” (OWH, vol. 8, pp. 316, 317). Because
he wrote nearly all his poems for oral performance, such physical consider-
ations became even more important to him.
This materialist approach to poetics clearly difers from better-known
midcentury treatises on poetry. Holmes was in many ways a late Romantic,
but he was never a Transcendentalist, and works like “Poetry” – which coin-
cided almost exactly with Nature, and preceded by one year Emerson’s far
more famous Phi Beta Kappa address, “The American Scholar” – refute
Transcendental idealism. Holmes was caustic toward anything he regarded as
quackery, whether it was phrenology, homeopathy, mesmerism, the Graham
diet, or the fuzzy thinking he saw in Emerson, Alcott, and Fuller. “An After-
Dinner Poem,” delivered at Harvard in 1843, mocks Emerson, with his “Essays
so dark Champollion might despair / To guess what mummy of a thought
was there,” and his “ ‘many-sided’ man . . . Blind as a mole and curious as a
lynx, / Who rides a beetle, which he calls a ‘Sphinx’ ” (Emerson was a soft
target at Harvard; his notorious 1838 address to the Divinity School banished
him from there until 1865) (OWH, vol. 12, pp. 136, 140). The problem was
Transcendentalism’s fondness for grand prognostications: “oh, what ques-
tions asked in clubfoot rhyme / Of Earth the tongueless and the deaf-mute
Time!”
Here babbling “Insight” shouts in Nature’s ears
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
With “Whence am I?” and “Wherefore did I come?”
Deluded infants! will they ever know
Some doubts must darken o’er the world below.
(OWH, vol. 12, p. 141)

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Holmes later wrote an appreciative memoir of Emerson, so this poem does

not completely capture their relationship, but it does measure the gap between
Holmes and the orphic style of some Transcendentalist writings. Holmes
could be just as scathing about the stubborn certitude of orthodox religion,
whose unrelenting commitment to its own logic he saw as equally impervi-
ous to the material limits of human knowledge and power. The “Wonderful
‘One-Hoss Shay’ ” described in “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (1855) represents
the deacon’s small-minded refusal to acknowledge that every human creation
must have “somewhere a weakest spot.” Such weakness is “the reason, beyond
a doubt, / That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out” (OWH, vol. 12,
p. 418). When something breaks, it can be ixed: this pragmatic approach lets
people adapt things to their conditions. But a worn-out carriage, like a worn-
out creed, is no longer any good for anyone. Thus when the venerable deacon
determines, “in such a logical way,” that he will build a carriage “that couldn’
break daown,” he sets himself up for a comeuppance that is the logical conse-
quence of the condition of things (OWH, vol. 12, pp. 417, 418). Built from “the
strongest oak, / That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke,” the carriage lasts a
hundred years, until one Sunday, just as “the parson was working his Sunday’s
text,” it collapses in a mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once –
All at once, and nothing irst –
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say. (OWH, vol. 12, p. 421)
Arrogant commitments to theories (whether grandiose or small minded)
in the face of facts always earned Holmes’s scorn. In a famous image from
the Breakfast Table series (1858), he compares the will to a “drop of water,
imprisoned in a crystal”: “the l uent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe,” delimited by “organization,
education, [and] condition,” among other things (OWH, vol. 1, pp. 86, 89).
The image is one in a series of comparisons, in a paper devoted to the powers
of comparison, for as the Autocrat says, “just according to the intensity and
extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one
in the many,” but, as another simile illustrates, the human capacity for com-
parison will never be more than “a cupful from the ininite ocean of simili-
tudes and analogies that rolls through the universe” (OWH, vol. 1, pp. 83–84).
These images of restricted creative agency allow for a limited poetic power:

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metaphor is born from “mental being” but also from the limits placed on that
being, which, like the crystal that encloses the droplet, cannot always be seen
from within. These themes reemerge in the poem that concludes this paper
of the Breakfast Table, “The Chambered Nautilus.” To defend his point about
creative agency (and, ironically, to introduce his poem), the Autocrat demurs
from quoting “Cowley, or Burns, or Wordsworth” and instead from the “ini-
nite ocean of similitudes” he pulls out the nautilus, itself a igure for simili-
tude, because it has “long been compared to a ship” – “Poets feign” when they
call it “the ship of pearl . . . [that] Sails the unshadowed main” (OWH, vol. 1,
pp. 96–97). To demystify the metaphor, he explains how the shell of the ceph-
alopod is a perfect spiral consisting of a “series of enlarging compartments
successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell”:
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
(OWH, vol. 1, pp. 97–98)
But the demystiication leads to an even greater metaphorical elaboration,
the “heavenly message” of the nautilus, which sings “through the deep caves
of thought”:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
(OWH, vol. 1, p. 98)
The Autocrat jolts his fellow boarders (and readers) by asking, to conclude
the paper, “Can you ind no lesson in this?” (OWH, vol. 1, p. 97). The lesson
is appropriately subtle and complex. Despite the exclamations, the model of
spiritual growth provided by the shell of the nautilus continues the ambiva-
lent tone of the essay: “the lustrous coil” that grows each year into ever-nobler
temples marks the limit of the nautilus (or the spirit), which shuts it from
heaven, rather than opening to it. Accordingly, the human spirit may develop
continuously as it leaves behind outworn beliefs, but it too will never grow out

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of its inite being. The shell illustrates spiritual development as a work of art
and beauty, but only in death, after the animal body is gone. Thus the symbol
of spiritual growth and development makes its metaphorical point when it
has been left behind; we read the progress of vital force in its traces. Like all
earthly forms, the chambered nautilus and “The Chambered Nautilus” create
meaning through indirection and comparison. But acknowledging this limit
is, for the Autocrat (and for Holmes), paradoxically liberating.
Like Holmes, James Russell Lowell was born (in 1819) to an elite family;
also like Holmes, he attended Harvard and was associated with Cambridge
all his life. From early in his career Lowell believed that the poet had an obli-
gation to reform society through the moral authority of his role. He sought
to realize this ideal throughout his work, which ranges from acerbic satire to
commemorative verse to relective writings on nature and art. In 1843 he and
Robert Carter founded the Pioneer, a nationalist magazine intended to elevate
American literature by publishing only “original” work (no reprints) and seri-
ous criticism (no pufery). Although it brought out now-famous tales by Poe,
Hawthorne, and others, the magazine folded after three issues – like many
of Lowell’s ventures, literary success was not matched inancially. In 1844 he
married Maria White, a well-known poet and antislavery activist; she pushed
him to assume a more critical stance toward current events, which culminated
in The Biglow Papers, a stinging indictment of the Mexican-American War.
This poem appeared in 1848, Lowell’s annus mirabilis, when he also published
A Fable for Critics, a comic survey of the era’s literary scene, and A Vision of
Sir Launfal, an instantly popular Arthurian poem whose most famous song,
“What Is So Rare as a Day in June,” remains idiomatic.
In 1855 Lowell was named the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at
Harvard, a position he inherited from Longfellow and would hold for twenty
years. His inl uence on literature and culture grew over the next decade,
when he edited the Atlantic Monthly (1857–1860) and the North American Review
(1864–1872). He used his positions to promote serious literature, criticism,
and political discussion, and also to advocate for the Union, the platform of
the Republican Party, and, after 1861, Lincoln’s policies. Although generally
a paciist, Lowell supported the Civil War and wrote a second series of The
Biglow Papers that attacked the Confederacy, copperheads, and British inter-
ference. His involvement in Republican Party politics after the war led to his
appointment as ambassador to Spain (1877–1881) and Great Britain (1881–1885).
Although his output tapered in the postbellum decades, Lowell continued
writing satirical verse that excoriated the corruption and greed of the Gilded
Age, right up until his death in 1891.16

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Lowell announced his nuanced perspective on literature in the inaugural

issue of the short-lived journal the Pioneer:
We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for –
namely, a National literature; for the same mighty lyre of the human heart
answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime. . . . But we
do long for a natural literature . . . a manly, straightforward, true literature, a
criticism which shall give more grace to beauty, and more depth to truth, by
lovingly embracing them where they may lie hidden.17

The dialectical distinction between “national” and “natural” literature char-

acterizes Lowell’s stance on literary value: literature becomes “national” as it
becomes “natural,” by growing from a global tradition; at the same time, crit-
ics (and publishers) must lovingly embrace and support this national-natural
lowering. This position on value also characterizes Lowell’s literary-political
ailiations: he rejected the Young America movement of the 1840s but pre-
sided over the American Copyright League’s eforts to establish international
copyright protections. “He loved letters for art’s sake; he used letters for art’s
sake – but also for the sake of the country,” wrote The Century after his death;
according to Henry James, Lowell wielded the “the civic lash” more efectively
than any other contemporary writer because “his satiric ardor was simply the
other side of . . . his patriotism.”18 “Tempora Mutandur,” one of Lowell’s last
poems, illustrates these characterizations. “Democracy, they say, / Rounds the
sharp knobs of character away”:
And there’s a subtle inl uence that springs
From words to modify our sense of things.
A plain distinction grows obscure of late . . .
. . . a hundred years ago,
If men were knaves, why, people called them so . . .
In those days for plain things plain words would serve . . .
But now that “Statesmanship” is just a way
To dodge the primal curse and make it pay . . .
Steal but enough, the world is unsevere –
Tweed is a statesman, Fisk a inancier.19
Gilded Age corruption springs from the decline in civic values, which are
signaled and abetted by declension in language. A hundred years ago, leaders
served “public duty” virtuously, and a strict morality enforced the law, while
now they serve their own “private good” and are rewarded for it; a hundred
years ago “plain words” described plain things, and a knave was called a knave,
while now the moral line swerves away from naming things what they are.

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Because language is both cause and victim of this decline, the poem launches a
linguistic attack to restore the linguistic virtue that must underlie civic virtue.
Lowell’s plain-spoken critique derives from his patriotism and his devotion to
language: as Henry James concluded, “it is diicult to recall a writer of our
day in whom the handling of words has been at once such an art and such
a science.”20 Lowell sharply displayed this verbal acuity in diferent contexts
across his career. A Fable for Critics, his comic cutup of American poetry, was
prompted in part by his irritation at the insipid state of midcentury criticism
(“There are something like ten thousand bards in the nation . . . whom the
Review and Magazine critics call lofty and true”) (JRL, vol. 9, p. 6). The mock
fable therefore combined lacerating portraits of contemporaries with Lowell’s
own lamboyantly bad rhymes:
So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,
Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table
(I feared me at irst that the rhyme was untwistable,
Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Christabel).
(JRL, vol. 9, p. 17)
Some of the vignettes remain well known: for instance, Poe appears “with
his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three ifths of him genius and two ifths
sheer fudge”; of Emerson, Lowell writes, “[his] prose is grand verse, while his
verse, the Lord knows, / Is some of it pr – No, ’t is not even prose / . . . In the
worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, / But thrown in a heap with a
crash and a clatter” (JRL, vol. 9, pp. 72, 38).
Lowell’s attention to the linguistic basis of satirical critique and reform
inds its most complex and wide-ranging expression in the irst series of The
Biglow Papers (1846–1848). Lowell wrote the series from his belief that “our war
with Mexico . . . [was] a war of false pretenses. . . . I hated to see a noble hope
[manifest destiny] evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of
demagogues.”21 The poem disenchants and unmasks the doublespeak of polit-
ical rhetoric through its own verbal inventiveness, primarily its use of dialect.
The Biglow Papers pioneered the extended use of dialect writing; although the
papers sometimes rely on cacography or “eye dialect” (misspellings that do not
change pronunciation) to mock the imperialist pretensions of the war, Lowell
also worked to capture the sounds, cadences, and distinctive perspectives of a
vernacular Yankee mind-set, and the success of these poems set of an explo-
sion of dialect humor in the 1850s. The Biglow Papers uses dialect to pursue sev-
eral lines of attack: while cacography mocks and undermines the pretensions
and stupidity of a grasping but bumbling class of underlings (represented by

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various apologists for the war), the “plain speech” of rural yeoman like Hosea
Biglow or Birdofredum Sawin cuts through such false rhetoric and dissem-
bling bombast. According to Homer Wilbur, the papers’ putative editor, the
truth-telling power of the Yankee dialect inheres in its history, for “Yankee” is
simply a purer form of old English, such that “it might be questioned whether
[New Englanders] could not establish a stronger title to the ownership of
the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves” (JRL, vol. 8, p. 37).
This audacious claim on the “English tongue” expresses a commitment to a
set of “Anglo-Saxon” values as the source of American greatness.22 The war’s
proslavery, imperial land-grab dilutes the English sources of American civic
virtue, and thus Yankee dialect seeks to invigorate this wellspring by cutting
through cant to return to the testamentary origins of meaning:
Ez fer war, I call it murder –
There you hev it plain an’ lat;
I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that . . .
Ef you take a sword an’ dror it,
An’ go stick a feller thru,
Guv’ment aint to answer for it,
God’ll send the bill to you. (JRL, vol. 8, p. 46)
Biglow’s Yankee commitment to “plain an’ lat” language is based on his com-
mitment to “Testyment”; verbal chicanery (justifying “murder” by calling it
“war”) cannot ultimately disguise the wrongness of an act. But these plainspoken
certainties are challenged elsewhere in the series. As Sawin graphically puts it:
Afore I come away from hum I hed a strong persuasion
Thet Mexicans worn’t human beans – an ourang outang nation,
A sort o’ folks a chap could kill an’ never dream on’t arter . . .
But wen I jined I worn’t so wise ez thet air queen o’ Sheby,
Fer, come to look at ’em, they aint much dif ’rent from wut we be,
An’ here we air ascrougin’ ’em out o’ thir own dominions,
Ashelterin’ ’em, ez Caleb sez, under our eagle’s pinions,
Wich means to take a feller up jest by the slack o’ ’s trowsis,
An’ walk him Spanish clean right out o’ all his homes an’ houses;
Wal, it doos seem a curus way, but then hooraw fer Jackson!
It must be right, fer Caleb sez it’s reg’lar Anglo-saxon.
(JRL, vol. 8, pp. 58–59)
Passages like these reveal the ideological instabilities in the iconology of mid-
century nationalism: the “eagle’s pinions,” “hooraw fer Jackson,” and “reg’lar
Anglo-saxon,” all rhetorical staples of manifest destiny, elide the brutality

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 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the New England Tradition

and violence of the war’s prosecution, and the poems expose these lies by
disenchanting the militarist rhetoric with plain speech. False speaking is rife
throughout the papers: Increase D. Ophace (here cacography masks the ver-
bal joke: a “doughface” was a Northerner with Southern sympathies), a war-
mongering congressman, tells his constituents that “I’m willin’ a man should
go tollable strong / Agin wrong in the abstract . . . / But he mus’ n’t be hard on
partickler sins, / Coz then he’ll be kickin’ the people’s own shins” (JRL, vol.
8, pp. 80–81). Elsewhere, “Cunnle” Caleb (Cushing, a Massachusetts politician
and warmonger) justiies the war to Sawin by saying, “Thet our nation’s big-
ger ’n theirn an’ so its rights air bigger, / An’ thet it’s all to make ’em free thet
we air pullin’ trigger” (JRL, vol. 8, p. 59). Such sophistries, mouthed by military
and civilian leaders, lead to Sawin’s nagging doubts about the war, which pre-
sage larger-scale anxieties about the meanings of phrases like “Anglo-Saxon”
or “manifest destiny.” The papers’ failure to resolve such anxieties produces a
fractured and ambivalent sense of nationalism, which ultimately breaks out in
corrupted language. As Wilbur says,

It is an abuse of language to call a certain portion of land, much more, cer-

tain personages, elevated for the time being to high station, our country. . . .
Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and the
west, by Justice. . . . That is a hard choice when our earthly love of country
calls upon us to tread one path and our duty points us to another. (JRL, vol.
8, pp. 68–69)

The misuses of “our country” are fundamentally abuses of language. Yet

because the notional values that deine “our country” are also embodied in
language, they too are susceptible to the misappropriations of false speaking.
The Biglow Papers seeks to correct these abuses by splitting nationalist rhetoric
from military aggression, and by realigning national value with the natural
values that inhere in the deep English origins of the Yankee tongue. Such
eforts to reestablish national values and realign them with national language
were tested even more severely by the Civil War. Three of Lowell’s nephews
were killed in the ighting, but nevertheless he vigorously supported the war
in print and defended Lincoln’s controversial prosecution of it. The inconclu-
sive outcomes of Reconstruction, however, left Lowell so ambivalent about
the war that he later equivocated even on the injustice of slavery. When he was
asked to contribute a poem to a memorial celebration for Harvard’s veterans
and war dead, he struggled to put in words his divided attitude toward the
conl ict, eventually writing most of his “Commemoration Ode” (1865) in the
forty-eight hours before the event. The poem ights to make poetry equal to

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the task of inding meaning in the war’s catastrophic violence, and it begins
by making war poetic, an equation that quickly leads Lowell to an expressive
impasse:
Weak-winged is song . . .
We seem to do them wrong,
Bringing our robin’s-leaf to deck their hearse
Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse,
Our trivial song to honor those who come
With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum,
And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire,
Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and ire.
(JRL, vol. 10, p. 17)
When warfare becomes “squadron-strophes” written in lines of “steel and
ire” with the “life-blood” of the dead, poems will only be compensatory, “A gra-
cious memory to buoy up and save / From Lethe’s dreamless ooze, the common
grave / Of the unventurous throng” who survive but who therefore, paradoxi-
cally, will be forgotten, because they leave behind no martial poetic record (JRL,
vol. 10, p. 17). Lowell wonders if earth is “too poor to give us / Something to live
for here that shall outlive us,” and his doubts mount in the face of war’s poetry:
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed
Confronts us iercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: “Was it, then, my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;
Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase.”
(JRL, vol. 10, pp. 19, 21)
War ofers the opportunity “to front a lie in arms” and thereby prove faith-
ful to “some more inspiring goal / Outside of Self ” that gives a deeper mean-
ing to existence, but this choice is presented in absolute terms: “Give me thy
life, or cower in empty phrase” (JRL, vol. 10, pp. 22, 24, 21). Because poems
remain for those left behind, poetry comes dangerously close to becoming the
“empty phrase,” the kind of moral-linguistic vacuity that Lowell elsewhere
attacks with his poems. Poetry breaks under the strain of events, as the war’s
cataclysmic violence and the magnitude of its losses exceed the poem’s expres-
sive capacity, until no amount of singing can ill either the gaps in the ranks
of men gathered to commemorate the dead or the gaps that break the poem’s
rhyme, rhythm, and structure.
As with so much Civil War poetry, the iconography of nationalism saves
this faltering song by redeeming the losses exacted in the name of the state.

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 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the New England Tradition

This ideological sleight of hand makes the united American state the ultimate
outcome and meaning of the war, as though the violent paciication of the
Confederacy somehow proved the inherent unity of the land. “ ’T is no Man
we celebrate . . . But the pith and marrow of a Nation / Drawing force from all
her men” (JRL, vol. 10, p. 29). Redemptive nationalism binds together a coun-
try made “ours once more,” saving both the living and the dead by making
war and poetry separately meaningful.
What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee,
But ask whatever else, and we will dare!
(JRL, vol. 10, p. 31)
The “Commemoration Ode” begins by imagining war – or, rather, the sac-
riice of life in war – as a kind of poetry written in “warm life-blood,” against
which “trivial song” can never measure up; it ends by aligning death and
poetry as two sacriices made on the altar of the nation, which alone makes
the violence of war meaningful while also providing a space for the com-
memorative work of poetry. The diminished sense of moral power in this
conclusion ofers a very diferent understanding of poetry’s social function,
but it accords with Lowell’s ambivalent vision of the postbellum scene: imag-
ining “our country” as a “soft Ideal” rather than “a certain portion of land [or]
certain personages, elevated for the time being to high station” corrects the
demagogic “abuse of language” and elicits both the poetic sacriice of “all
our lives to save thee” and poems like the “Commemoration Ode.” But no
temporal government, and certainly not the Radical Republican Congresses,
or the administrations of Andrew Johnson or Ulysses S. Grant, could live
up to such a standard, and thus Lowell’s ode also marks a certain endpoint
for nineteenth-century poetry. The decline of Lowell’s productivity after the
Civil War has been often noted, but the “Commemoration Ode” really com-
memorates the passing of the kind of public verse he had championed, which
once shaped the social order, but which will have a much less important place
in the new, postbellum world.

Notes
1. “Whittier Dinner,” New York Evening Post, December 18, 1877, p. 1.
2. Henry N. Smith, “That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens’s,” Harvard Library
Bulletin 9 (1955), pp. 145–80.

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3. Channing, “The Whittier Dinner,” The Independent, December 27, 1877, p. 2;

William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New
York: Harper, 1910), p. 59.
4. Mark Twain, Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890 (New York:
Library of America, 1992), p. 695. Works in this collection will be cited as CT.
5. N.P., “Boston,” Chicago Tribune, December 23, 1877, p. 16.
6. Nina Baym, “Early Histories of American Literature: A Chapter in the
Institution of New England,” American Literary History 1 (1989), pp. 459–88;
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity
from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001); Claudia Stokes, Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American
Literary History, 1875–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2006).
7. Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1894); Albert Mordell, Quaker Militant: John Greenleaf Whittier
(Boston: Houghton, 1933); Whitman Bennett, Whittier: Bard of Freedom
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Edward Wagenknecht,
John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967); Michael Cohen, “Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of
Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Arizona Quarterly 64:3 (2008), pp. 1–29.
8. John G. Whittier, The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, 7 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1892), vol. 3, p. 35. Works in this collection will be cited as JGW.
9. Bennett, Bard of Freedom, p. 85.
10. Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American
Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).
11. Cohen, “Ballad Reading.”
12. Quoted in Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes (New York: Schuman, 1947), pp. 120, 100; William C. Dowling, Oliver
Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006).
13. Peter Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
14. John T. Morse, Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1899); Tilton, Amiable Autocrat; Edwin P. Hoyt, The Improper
Bostonian: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Morrow, 1979).
15. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1892), vol. 12, p. 2. Further references to poems and essays from
this collection will be cited as OWH.
16. Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Boston: Houghton,
1899); Horace E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1901).

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 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the New England Tradition

17. Robert Carter and James R. Lowell, “Introduction,” The Pioneer, January 1843,
pp. 1–2.
18. “Topics of the Time: James Russell Lowell, Poet and Citizen,” The Century,
October 1891, p. 954; Henry James, “James Russell Lowell,” Atlantic Monthly,
January 1892, p. 42.
19. James R. Lowell, The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, 11 vols.
(Boston: Houghton, 1896), vol. 10, pp. 239–41. Works in this collection will be
cited as JRL.
20. James, “James Russell Lowell,” p. 43.
21. James R. Lowell, Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols.
(London: Osgood, 1894), vol. 1, pp. 333–34.
22. J. Javier Rodríguez, “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s The
Biglow Papers,” Arizona Quarterly 63:3 (2007), pp. 1–33.

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 Chapter 13
Other Voices, Other Verses: Cultures
of American Poetry at Midcentury
M a ry L o e ff e l h ol z

Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, like the rest of the country

only more so, was lousy with poets. At the apex of respectable high cul-
tural ambitions, the Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857 under the editorship
of James Russell Lowell and with the nods of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes among other worthies,
was publishing poetry vigorously. In the 1860s alone, Lowell’s Civil War revival
of his seriocomic The Biglow Papers series, dusted of for the purpose from
its original incarnation in the Mexican-American War of 1848, appeared in
the Atlantic from 1862 through 1866, while Longfellow and John Greenleaf
Whittier were also publishing in the Atlantic the narrative poems that would
be incorporated into Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) and Whittier’s
The Tent on the Beach (1867), sequences in their own way also marked by war-
time concerns. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” appeared
in the Atlantic in February 1862 and was answered by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
“Boston Hymn,” marking the Emancipation Proclamation, in February 1863.
Writing on subjects further aside from the great matter of the war, Harriet
Prescott added to the reputation she had established as the author of daring
tales with the 1861 poem “Pomegranate Flowers,” a dramatic monologue in
the voice of a deserted seamstress; Lucy Larcom too, assisted by Whittier,
found her way into the Atlantic in the 1860s with poems like “Skipper Ben” and
the war-themed “A Loyal Woman’s ‘No.’ ” A few notches below the Atlantic’s
cultural apex and out in the more religiously conservative townships of cen-
tral Massachusetts, Josiah Gilbert Holland paused his editorial work on the
Springield Republican long enough to write Kathrina (1868), a book-length
evangelical narrative poem whose nineteenth-century sales would ultimately
be second only to those of Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
Amid this blooming, buzzing profusion of print poetry were two other
poets writing in central Massachusetts in the 1860s. Unaware of each other, so
far as we know, both were observant amateur naturalists by disposition and,

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to some degree, by formal education, although both failed to complete their

college educations. Both had their reading and writing interrupted from time
to time by eye trouble. Both poets tracked the characteristic lora and fauna
of rural New England through the seasons and memorialized that devotion
not only in their poetry but also in herbariums that now reside at Harvard
University’s Houghton Library. Both were also of highly self-conscious lit-
erary turns, again through formal education as well as through the social
networks of their professional, prosperous families, and both followed the
Atlantic and other organs of ambitious nineteenth-century American literary
culture avidly, but from a distance. Unlike Whittier and Spoford, Larcom and
Holland, both were spared by family circumstances the necessity of earning
a living by their pens. By the mid-1860s, both poets had accumulated a signif-
icant body of written work without a corresponding contemporary reputa-
tion, despite eforts to bring their work to the attention of inl uential mem-
bers of Boston’s literary elite.
At some point in the 1860s, each poet separately (again, so far as we know)
composed a self-consciously major poem on the summer chorus of the crick-
ets. Both poems were treated with some degree of inscriptional ceremony by
their authors, who left them behind in multiple manuscript copies recording
signiicant revisions. Unpublished during their authors’ lifetimes, both poems
would become the object of contested textual reconstructions in the twenti-
eth century. Both poems also feature conspicuously high diction and formal
address, and both seem mindful of poetic antecedents – locally, in Keats’s son-
net “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” and more widely, in the tradition
of the Romantic ode. As Virginia Jackson observes, “Keats was already one ig-
ure for an idealized notion of poetry by the middle of the nineteenth century,
especially on the American side of the Atlantic,”1 and both poets seem to use
the igure of Keats as a medium for invoking and testing such idealizations.
At stake in both poems is whether an American poem can or should be high;
might an American poem start low, translating cricket song, and mount high,
as high as Keats’s nightingale?
The better-known of these two poems was written down by Emily
Dickinson in six copies of which some record survives, one of them now lost.2
The longest and apparently the earliest version, sent to her friend Gertrude
Vanderbilt around 1865, started with one of Dickinson’s typically deferred
comparative deinitions: “Further in Summer than the Birds –” and developed
through seven quatrains before naming the tuneful citizen of the opening qua-
train’s “Minor Nation” as the cricket. Dickinson rounded of this version of
the poem with the high Keatsian double airmations of stanza six, “The Earth

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has many keys –” (echoing, Joanne Feit Diehl suggests, Keats’s “The poetry of
earth is never dead”)3 and “Beauty – is Nature’s Fact” (echoing Keats’s “Beauty
is Truth,” in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”). Her closing stanza contracts these
grander harmonies to insect song: “The Cricket is Her utmost / Of Elegy, to
me”;4 unlike the poet of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Dickinson returns to
her local earth connected to, rather than fallen away from, the natural voice
of her poem’s inspiration.
In later versions of the poem (including the one sent to Thomas Wentworth
Higginson in January 1866), Dickinson muled its Keatsian echoes while still,
it seems, exploring the question of how self-consciously high poetry might
emerge from a “minor nation.” She deleted the original sixth and seventh
stanzas and revised its ifth to eliminate the grammatical igure of the poem’s
speaker (its references to “I” and “me”), the odic airmation that “Beauty – is
Nature’s Fact,” and the poem’s only direct reference to the cricket. The poet’s
marking of her individual limits as an auditor of the crickets’ song (“Nor know
I when it cease –”) disappears in later versions, replaced by the abstract, elevated
address of ritual, while the unnamed cricket migrates from the realm of nature
to the realm of the sign, where it “typif[ies]” the “Druidic – Diference” of sea-
sonal change with its “spectral Canticle.” The cricket made a surprising return,
however, in the last known version of the poem, sent to Mabel Loomis Todd
(her brother’s mistress, and later an editor of her poems) in 1883. Dickinson
this time enclosed with the poem an actual cricket, as if to restore not only the
cricket dropped in her revision of the poem but all the nightingales and skylarks
that ever lew away in the tradition of the Romantic ode.5 As Virginia Jackson
observes of another Dickinson poem, “for Keats’s lost object she substituted
a found object” – a concrete reply “too intimate for print”6 but marvelously
preserved in the Amherst College archives. “Is it dead?” we can imagine the
cricket’s recipient asking, whether or not she recognized Dickinson’s poem as
a desiccated reply to Keats’s airmation of the poetry of earth.
The lesser known of these two poems, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s
“The Cricket,” survives in ive undated manuscript copies. By contrast with
Dickinson’s “Further in Summer,” Tuckerman’s poem, in all its versions, vests
its whole faith in the form and substance of the Romantic ode as a legiti-
mate mode of American high poetic aspiration. Composed in ive irregular
stanzas reminiscent of Wordsworth’s metrical variations in his “Intimations”
ode, “The Cricket” follows closely the central movement of Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale” while also drawing on the setting and language of Keats’s “Ode:
To Autumn.”7 Setting out in a natural landscape saturated with music, the
poet picks out the “bright” note of the cricket “mid the insect crowd” for what

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he initially envisions as a compact of mutual aid: the cricket “ere day be done”
shall have “his bard” while the poet “take[s] to help me in my song / A little
cooing cricket.”8 Embowered within the afternoon’s “sleepy” warmth, where
the “dull hop” and “poppy’s dark refreshing lower” combine to “Let the dead
fragrance round our temples beat / Stunning the sense to slumber,” he inds
the power of the cricket’s song increasingly overwhelming, “louder as the day
declines,” louder than the birds: “At hand, around, illimitably / Rising and fall-
ing like the sea, / Acres of cricks!” (SP, p. 153). Lifted up, like Keats listening
to the nightingale, to follow the singing voice into a realm of inward vision,
the poet inds himself not in Keats’s “embalmèd darkness” listening to “The
murmurous haunt of l ies on summer eves” but on a harsher American shore,
where the cricket’s song
bringest to me
Always that burthen of the unresting sea,
The moaning clifs, the low rocks blackly start.
These upland inland ields no more I view
But the long lat seaside beach, the wild seamew
And the overturning wave! (SP, p. 154)
This unexpected “burthen” recalls him to the same realization Keats arrived
at in following the nightingale: for its individual human auditor, the cricket’s
poetry of earth is always also the poetry of the grave.
Where Dickinson addressed this realization by canceling the elegiac “I” and
“me” from later versions of her cricket poem, Tuckerman instead closes with
an extended irst-person meditation on alternative poetries that might emerge
in response to the cricket’s song. Could he, “Like the Enchanter old / . . . ind
thy knowledge in thy song,” leaping over the human limits of knowledge
marked by Dickinson in the irst version of her poem, he might become the
cricket’s “true interpreter,” able to hear “articulate voices . . . / In cry of beast,
or bird, or insect’s hum” (SP, p. 155). To do so, he acknowledges, would be to
relinquish his own “quest,” giving over the poet’s Shelleyan responsibilities as
the world’s unacknowledged legislator in order to translate the cricket as “lord
and lawgiver.” His gain would be a naturalized poetic voice so pervasive as to
be unheard, registered as “Naught in innumerable numerousness,” like “The
ceaseless simmer in the summer grass / To him who toileth in the windward
ield.” Falling short of this, his consolation will be, like Wordsworth’s at the
end of the “Intimations” ode, to live in a natural landscape still “dear” for its
associations if not transparent to the poet, who must “ignorantly” hear its
voices while bearing the human knowledge that as “the Autumn goes / The
shadow grows, / The moments take hold of eternity” (SP, p. 156).

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What might we learn from the remarkable consonance between Dickinson’s

and Tuckerman’s cricket poems about the “other” voices and verses of mid-
nineteenth-century American poetry? Are both of these poems “other”?
Neither? “Other” to what, exactly?
In view of their posthumous publication, both of these poems may qualify
as “other” to the mid-nineteenth-century public print sphere as their authors
knew it, although Tuckerman had earlier made his run at publicity by print-
ing his poems at his own expense in 1860 and reprinting this volume with the
well-regarded Boston irm of Ticknor and Fields in 1864. If by “other,” how-
ever, we mean not conspicuous in the critical and pedagogical canon of our
own day, then Tuckerman’s cricket, along with the rest of his verse, earns the
soft impeachment over Dickinson’s. Touted by the poet-critic Yvor Winters as
“probably the greatest single American poem” of the nineteenth century on
its irst printing in 1950 (in an essay predicting that Whitman and Poe would
“shortly disappear into the twilight of queer historical phenomena”)9 and sin-
gled out for praise by other readers on the publication of the irst comprehen-
sive edition of Tuckerman’s poetry in 1965, “The Cricket” has remained on
the subterranean side of the emergence that Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore
(1962) hopefully but, as it turned out, inaccurately forecast for Tuckerman.10
Dickinson’s “Further in Summer,” by comparison, may seem to have enjoyed
a speedy if not uncomplicated ascent into canonicity. Printed with relatively
few editorial alterations from one of the later manuscript versions in the irst
posthumous volume of Dickinson’s Poems (1891) and reconnected with its ear-
lier version, including the inal two cricket stanzas, in printings from 1945 to
1960, “Further in Summer” has been a steady citizen of pedagogical compila-
tions like the Norton Anthology of American Literature and of signiicant critical
studies of Dickinson from the 1960s forward.
If by “other,” on the other hand, we mean to designate in brief something
about the author’s social identity – if “other” verses are critical shorthand for
those authored in the United States by women, people of color, working-
class writers, and peoples new to English literacy – then Dickinson’s cricket
is, on the grounds of the gender of its author, “other,” while Tuckerman’s
cricket is not apparently “other” on any such grounds. That this designation
upends Dickinson’s and Tuckerman’s relative standing in today’s pedagogical
and scholarly canon, however, underscores the continuing pertinence of John
Guillory’s reminder that canon formation “is too complex to be reduced to
determination by the single factor of the social identity of the author.”11 An
awkward umbrella term for a variety of social identities, the binary category
of the “other” risks minimizing how much Tuckerman and Dickinson had

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in common by way of social circumstances. In addition to their shared race,

class, region, and ethnicity, they possessed similar kinds of cultural capital and
even similar modes of access to this capital: modes mediated by formal edu-
cation and robust social networks, while standing apart from a professional
relationship to the marketplace of letters. These similarities undergird the
diference-in-likeness of their crickets and of other aspects of their bodies
of work, such as their exploration of poetic sequences (Dickinson’s fascicles
and Tuckerman’s sonnet sequences), a form diicult to break into print with
unless, like Tuckerman, a poet can bear the expense of self-publication or, like
Dickinson, can wait on the judgment of posterity.
In yet another possible perspective, Tuckerman’s cricket represents an
“other” voice in the history of American poetry exactly because its form and
diction are so close to the British tradition of the Romantic ode. As Timothy
Morris explains, for the last hundred years and more the most reliable route
to an author’s “becoming canonical” in American poetry has run through
elevating an author’s formal breaks with received Anglo-European poetic tra-
ditions as evidence of his or her ambitions for an original, autochthonous
American literature. Dickinson’s strangeness – especially the “personal gram-
matical short-hand” that Yvor Winters bridled at in his otherwise laudatory
reading of “Further in Summer”12 – has been absorbed into this narrative of
canonization, whose cynosure remains Walt Whitman. No one reading “The
Cricket,” though, is ever likely to exclaim, “Here is where we [Americans]
inally broke from England/Europe/the dead weight of the past.”13 Really
“American” poetry is by this deinition other to British poetry; but are we
then to say, because most of the poetry actually written and published in
the nineteenth-century United States would not pass any litmus test of for-
mal estrangement from British verse of the same period, that most American
poetry is un-American?
Like the shorthand use of “other” to denote social identities, this construal
of what counts as the “other” voices of American poetry may blunt our capac-
ity to discern similarities in diferences among American poets, as well as our
capacity to be surprised and delighted by originality that does not conform
to the Whitmanian formalist-nationalist model. As evidence, consider still a
third cricket from Massachusetts literary culture of the mid-1860s, one in its
own way perhaps more strange and experimental than either Dickinson’s or
Tuckerman’s. And yet this cricket, unlike theirs, saw publication in its author’s
lifetime, in the lofty Atlantic Monthly of April 1866, under the title “Were They
Crickets?” Both Dickinson and Tuckerman would likely have encountered
it there, Dickinson only weeks after working through the major revisions

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to “Further in Summer.” Its unsigned author, Thomas Hill, may have been
known to Tuckerman personally: he attended Harvard’s divinity school dur-
ing Tuckerman’s time in law school and shared Tuckerman’s scientiic enthu-
siasms as well as his poetic aspirations. (Hill had self-published a book of abo-
litionist poems in college, contributed fugitive verses to periodicals including
the Atlantic in the 1850s and 1860s, and would publish a book of poems at his
parishioners’ urging in the 1880s.)14 At the time of his cricket’s publication,
Hill was Harvard’s president – an extraordinary rise for a man largely self-
educated, who had apprenticed to a New Jersey newspaper and then to an
apothecary before entering college. Two years later he would resign, having
acquired a reputation for eccentricity to which “Were They Crickets?” doubt-
less made a minor contribution.
“Were They Crickets?” is a prose fantasia fashioned, weirdly enough,
on the generic template of the Romantic ode. Along with Dickinson’s and
Tuckerman’s poems, Hill’s fantasia asks whether American song, starting low,
can mount high on the wings of cricket song. Hill’s answer is yes – very high.
Raptured out of his study by the spirit of Copernicus, the narrator of “Were
They Crickets?” comes to himself on a grassy hill on the planet Mars, whose
inhabitants, “Rational Articulates” as he eventually settles on calling them,
resemble giant black crickets and whose language is an “exquisite harmony”
of “polyphonous sound,” a merger of sound and signiication so perfect that
their poetry becomes music “in the very process of utterance.”15 The narrator
translates the crickets’ song irst in the imperfect mode of musical notation
and then by devising a set of panpipes adequate to expression as well as tran-
scription, a rudimentary poetry in which he can make himself understood
to his hosts. What inally interrupts the narrator’s idealization of the poetry
of Mars is Martian race relations: the purple-winged dominant crickets, he
learns, tolerate a “dusky” minority among them while balking at intimate
social contact. The narrator’s arrival disrupts this balance, forcing the issue
of the minority’s civil status along with his own; rather than “be the innocent
cause of a civil war,” he returns to earth.
Like Dickinson’s gift of a cricket to Mabel Loomis Todd, “Were They
Crickets?” spectacularly literalizes the pursuit of natural song in human
poetry. Like Tuckerman’s cricket ode, Hill’s fantasia is a work of vocational
doubt and exploration. The Romantic ode’s generic premise of being lofted
into and partly mastering a compelling alien music, only to fall back to earth,
clearly igures in another key the biographical facts of Hill’s own class rise, his
awkward, autodidactic relationship to polite culture (recalling that of Keats),
and his eventual l ight from Harvard’s presidency. Read with Dickinson’s and

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Tuckerman’s poems, Hill’s fantasia ampliies the latent political resonance

of Dickinson’s “minor nation” of crickets and Tuckerman’s cricket song of
“innumerable numerousness” singing in the laborer’s ear, an anonymous
democracy of collective poetic voice that Tuckerman entertains but resists
fully entering. “Were They Crickets?” also points explicitly to the racial limit
of Civil War–era American political and cultural aspirations, which can rise
to Mars, can indeed become Martial (and Hill, like Dickinson, is fully alive to
his etymological puns), without rising beyond racial division, racialized labor
exploitation, and miscegenation panic.
The other voices of mid-nineteenth-century American poetry could scarcely
be more other than Thomas Hill’s transcription of Martian verse. What’s
uncanny, though, about Hill’s American Martial poetry is its proximity to the
centers of cultural authority of its own day and to poetic voices recognized as
canonical in ours. The conjuncture of Emily Dickinson’s, Frederick Goddard
Tuckerman’s, and Thomas Hill’s crickets within the literary culture of 1860s
Massachusetts teaches us to read for likeness-in-diference among poets at var-
ious levels of canonicity while continuing to ask how diferent conditions of
access to authorship enable diferent kinds of poets and poetries. Reading for
poets’ connections – for what Pierre Bourdieu would call the cultural ield of
American poetry – also identiies where connections fail, as in the distance of
African American poets from the Atlantic’s social network. Guillory usefully
warns against the strategy of teaching and interpreting lesser-known writers
as if they were “intrinsically noncanonical, . . . unassimilable to the traditional
canon”; this version of honoring other voices hardens the very oppositions
that eforts to open the canon originally challenged.16 To label some verses
“other” is at most a contingent, roughly practical way of indicating where one
network stops and another begins, or where one syllabus stops and another
begins, or at its further boundary, where the syllabus stops and the archive
begins. Once reading begins, though, it’s crickets all the way down.
Suppose, then, that we imagine the lourishing of nineteenth-century
American poetry on the model of a naturalistically accurate Darwinian bush
or tree, dead limbs and all, rather than in the familiar image of the ascent of
man, culminating in a luxuriantly bearded Whitman. Suppose further that we
place poets genetically within this tree, connecting and contrasting them as
having experienced similar and diferent modes of access to authorship. Some
branches of the tree will feature more famous names than others, but all at
some level will connect canonical igures with less familiar authors. Some
branches will be signiicantly more hospitable than others to writers of color,
women writers, writers of limited inancial resources, and writers of limited

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formal education. Some will be distant from other branches; others adjacent
and entangled. Major divisions of such a family tree for nineteenth-century
American poetry might group together poetic careers rooted in educational
cultures and institutions; in the learned professions (law, medicine, divinity)
adjacent to higher education; in social movements; in popular journalism; or
in theater and other popular entertainments. Such a thought experiment may
help us better appreciate the blooming, buzzing profusion of nineteenth-cen-
tury American poetry by illuminating how diferent kinds of poetic accom-
plishment tended to be fostered by diferent modes of access to authorship;
how authors’ experience of overlap, mobility, and friction among diferent
modes of authorship spurred innovative or ambitious poetry; and how a more
autonomous, aesthetically oriented sphere of poetry arose in the United States
in relation to these other possibilities for authorship.
Especially prior to the Civil War, social reform movements and education
ofered two broad and overlapping pathways to poetic careers. Poetry based
in social movements, particularly in the cause of slavery’s abolition, provided
women and African Americans with some of the period’s most accessible paths
to authorship. Although higher education remained a remote world to most
Americans, the expansion of literacy and public education at the primary level
and the opening of more ambitious educational opportunities to middle- and
upper-class white women generated poetic possibilities as well. The expansion
of access to education was in itself a social cause and a dimension of many
reform movements, one with special urgency for African Americans, women,
and immigrants who yoked together “Freedom of thought, and of the pen,
/ Free schools, free speech, free soil, free men,” as the New Hampshire–born
black poet James Monroe Whitield framed these hopes in a poem celebrat-
ing the fourth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.17 Social reform
movements and education together created new publication venues, audi-
ences, and authorial identities, as well as shared thematic urgencies, for a wide
range of authors.
Education provided the medium as well as the matter for the launching of
Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s poetic career, at its height in the 1830s and 1840s.
Her irst book, Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse (1815), appeared while Sigourney
was running a school for genteel young women in Hartford, Connecticut, and
openly relected its pedagogical origins (in the words of the North American
Review’s notice) “as compositions, addressed to young ladies under the writ-
er’s charge.”18 Although she left schoolteaching behind as a profession on
her marriage in 1819, Sigourney’s subsequent poetry and prose remained
deeply rooted in antebellum American cultures of both formal schooling and

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informal domestic tutelage. “This whole life is but one great school,” she
wrote in her 1837 The Girl’s Reading-Book,19 and her poetry was frequently both
didactic in content and a celebration of the didactic routines and social rela-
tions of schooling. Sigourney memorialized her pupils and her experience
of teaching them in elegies for individual students and in strings of poems
like “Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor,” “Teacher’s Excuse,” “Exhibition of
a School of Young Ladies,” and “On Meeting Several Former Pupils at the
Communion Table.” She lauded the world-historical extension of advanced
learning to women: “Establishment of a Female College in New-Grenada,
South America” predicts that with education women’s “fragile forms, / Now
trembling in their beauty and their fear, / Shall kindle with new energies.”20
The historical bent of much of her poetry relects her republican belief that
history “imparts knowledge of human nature, and supplies lofty subjects for
contemplation” and so rightfully stands at the center of education;21 a poem
like “Rival Kings of Mohegan, Contrasted with the Rival Brothers of Persia”
advertises its origins as a pedagogical exercise in just this kind of moral his-
tory. Her many excursions into abolitionist poetry, such as “To the First Slave
Ship,” and her recognition of Native American presence and rights in poems
like “Indian Names,” “The Cherokee Mother,” and Traits of the Aborigines of
America (1822) were continuous with Sigourney’s didactic muse.
Education remained at the center of Sigourney’s project in her most aes-
thetically ambitious works, such as “Connecticut River.” Composed in heroic
couplets – modeled on the eighteenth-century Anglo-American genre of
the prospect poem that surveys a landscape from a distance – and replying
directly to important British models in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted
Village” (1770) and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
(1751), “Connecticut River” aims at writing an American poetry both lofty and
democratic, one that can compete with “classic song.” Like Tuckerman in
“The Cricket,” Sigourney challenges British poetic models in making them
American: starting lower, perhaps to mount higher. “Though broader streams
our sister realms may boast,” she concedes, the citizens of the Connecticut
River valley stand as “King, priest, and prophet ’mid the homes they love”
(Z, p. 13) in contrast with Goldsmith’s dispossessed villagers and the social
hierarchies marked by Gray’s “Elegy.” At the heart of the village prospect as
Sigourney renders it lie the school, “where village science dwells,” and the
graveyard, in which the history of the village’s making lies uneasily buried,
the dispossessed Indian in “his forfeit land” alongside the village’s “patriot
sires [who] with honour rest / . . . Unmarked, untrophied, ’mid the soil they
saved” (Z, pp. 14, 15–16). At once honored and unwritten, the condition of

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these forebears implies that nation building requires a simultaneous work of

remembrance and forgetfulness – a complex form of historical tutelage and
one enabled by distance, whether the generic distance of the prospect poem or
that of the weeping frontier mother, “cheat[ing] her rustic babes with tender
tales” of her native Connecticut (Z, p. 16), who closes the poem and in so doing
igures Sigourney’s own poetic work as a national pedagogue.
Her energetic, lifelong labors at the conjunction of poetry with the spheres
of education and social reform rewarded Lydia Sigourney with popular fame,
social position, and inancial security. The North Carolina slave poet George
Moses Horton emerged from the same conjunction, at very nearly the same
time as Sigourney – his irst book, The Hope of Liberty, appeared in 1829 – but
the story of his access to authorship is far more painful. As he recounts in
the autobiography prefacing his 1845 Poetical Works, Horton taught himself to
read; driven by “anxiety for books” while denied access to formal education,
he used “dim and promiscuous” fragments of textbooks and, like Frederick
Douglass, the unwitting assistance of white schoolchildren to teach himself
the alphabet.22 He battened on every scrap of poetry he could pick up and
began composing verses orally, a talent that brought him to the attention of
the college students at Chapel Hill, who set Horton to composing acrostic
verses on the names of women they were courting. His early poems were
transcribed for publication by the white novelist and poet Caroline Lee Hentz;
Horton himself would not learn to write until 1832. His income from poetry
written at command for students – up to three dollars a week, at the rate of
ifty to seventy-ive cents per poem – allowed him to buy out his time and
attach himself to the Chapel Hill campus, where he maintained himself in a
variety of service roles, poetry included, for students and faculty.
In contrast with Sigourney’s poems to her pupils and on education more
broadly, Horton’s poems “On the Pleasures of College Life” and “The Graduate
Leaving College” (and still more his “Billet Doux [sic],” addressed on behalf
of one of Chapel Hill’s young bloods to a woman of “vermillion cheek” and
“sapphire eye” [PW, p. 64]) memorialize vicarious experience and intimate
deprivation. For Chapel Hill’s students, Horton was one of the entitlements
of college life, while many of them too clearly deprecated their own chance,
denied Horton, to sit in “the rays of erudition’s sun” (PW, p. 76). Incompetent
to their college’s intellectual ambitions, these students may not have appreci-
ated the irony of Horton’s exhorting them, in high heroic couplets, to “imitate
[the] style” of an ideally devout “gospel prince” of graduates (PW, p. 84); if
they could imitate models more l uently, the students would not have had to
rely on Horton for their billets-doux. To the extent that Horton’s own mode

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of access to literacy could be read as an imitation of theirs, it is an imitation

that points back to its delinquent original.
Juxtaposed with Horton’s poems of “anxiety for books” are his poems
of social satire and vernacular observation, like “The Creditor to His Proud
Debtor,” addressed to a young fop whose extravagance is underwritten by
the speaker’s thrift, and “The Tipler [sic] to His Bottle,” which follows the
maudlin mental weavings of a drunk exalted and then cast down by his liquor.
These poems shift crisply between literary diction and colloquial registers.
“The Fearful Traveller in the Haunted Castle” begins as a high-lown literary
nightmare, on which Horton then lifts the domestic curtain to reveal that its
ghosts were only rats and cats and “Those creatures crumbling of the cheese
/ Which on the table lay” (PW, p. 28). In “The Fate of an Innocent Dog,” how-
ever, the nightmare is both real on its small scale and evocative of larger ter-
rors. Out hunting game, Tiger the dog comes upon a fatally wounded sheep
and slinks away in fear; bristling at the sheep’s owner, he is taken for the cul-
prit, while the real killers, a set of human dogs armed with “powder, ire and
ball” (PW, p. 54), go free. Through the protective distance of its animal protag-
onist, the poem speaks for the North Carolina countryside of Horton’s origins
against the depredations of the college town’s careless aristocracy, while on
a national scale, the fate of Horton’s innocent dog calls to mind the guilt of
those human packs that Whittier’s famous abolitionist poem of 1835 called
“The Hunters of Men.”
The freeborn African American poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also
came to authorship at the intersection of social reform movements with edu-
cation. Unlike George Moses Horton, she received a formal education, at her
uncle’s Academy for Negro Youth in Baltimore; and in the Northern states
she could participate openly, although not without personal risk, in the abo-
litionist movement and in eforts to open schooling to African Americans.
Prior to the Civil War, the young Frances Harper moved from one teaching
position to another before establishing herself as a writer and as a professional
lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society.23 Her prewar poetry, collected in
Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854; later, expanded editions added poems
through 1864), brought together the multiple causes at the heart of antebel-
lum reform, including abolition (in poems like “Bible Defence of Slavery” and
“The Fugitive’s Wife”) and temperance (“The Drunkard’s Child”). Following
the Civil War, Harper dedicated her poetry, lectures, and essays to African
American education at every level, from the establishment of primary schools
to nation building on the largest scale among the communities of former
slaves in the South. Harper’s two great poetic works of this period, the biblical

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epic Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) and the Aunt Chloe sequence in Sketches
of Southern Life (1872), both concern themselves with what Harper in an 1875
speech called “The Great Problem to Be Solved” – the problem of educating
and empowering the emancipated “four millions.” Moses and the Aunt Chloe
poems together constitute a diptych of classical and vernacular literacies, in
high blank verse and colloquial ballad stanzas respectively. Like George Moses
Horton’s achievement, Harper’s is doubled-voiced; it both narrates and per-
forms the access of the newly emancipated to forms of cultural and social
capital hitherto denied them.
Along with Lydia Sigourney, Harper yoked her advocacy for mass dem-
ocratic education to an ideal of political leadership as anonymous heroism,
implying that the achievement of literacy for the many entailed the unwrit-
ing of old forms of social preeminence. Her poem “Burial of Moses” ech-
oes Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” in celebrating its nation-founding hero’s
unmarked, untrophied “grave without a name”:
And had he not high honour?
The hill-side for his pall,
To lie in state while angels wait
With stars for tapers tall,
And the dark rock pines like tossing plumes
Over his bier to wave,
And God’s own hand in that lonely land
To lay him in the grave.
Democratic nation building, in Harper’s vision, requires leaders ready to break
the Old World molds, “with costly marble drest,” of warrior, sage, and bard
(BCD, pp. 77–78), a theme she would echo in her Reconstruction-era “Truth,”
another poem about the defacement of “haughty” social idols by humble
forces (BCD, pp. 168–69). For Harper as well as for Sigourney, the great prob-
lem to be solved by American poetry is the question of what a trustworthy
democratic elevation could look like, in poetry as well as in political leaders.
The unmarked grave of Moses is Harper’s answer, as cricket song in another
poetic idiom was for Tuckerman and Dickinson, to the question of whether
an American poetry could start low and mount high.
As the examples of Sigourney, Horton, and Harper suggest, nineteenth-
century American poets emerging from education and from social reform
movements, and from their conjunction, did not generally run to conspicuous
formal experimentation. Educational practices of memorization and recita-
tion favored predictably rhymed and metered forms, and educational routines
of imitation encouraged replying to existing poetic models – as Sigourney

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does in “Connecticut River” – in their own idiom. For social movements as

well, accessibility to broad audiences was a core value that favored broadcast-
ing social innovations in familiar formal shapes.
More distinctly literary kinds of experimentation did emerge from poets
who came to reform poetry from diferent modes of access to authorship. In
Passion-Flowers (1853), her irst collection of poems, Julia Ward Howe intro-
duced herself as a “child of Art,”24 in this way and in others laying claim to
poetic origins in an aesthetic world apart from the more instrumental realms
of schooling and reform. Where the poetry of Sigourney and Horton is overtly
rooted in “anxiety for books” and the knowledge that comes out of books,
Howe in Passion-Flowers claims the authority of direct experience of European
cultural capitals, and direct experience of artistic capital more generally. The
opening lines of “Rome,” the volume’s longest and most ambitious poem,
both establish her in this high cultural realm and assert the poem’s distance
from the poetry of domestic duties and moral tutelage:
I knew a day of glad surprise in Rome,
Free to the childish joy of wandering,
Without a “wherefore” or “to what good end?”
By querulous voice propounded, or a thought
Of punctual Duty, waiting at the door
Of home, with weapon duly poised to slay
Delight, ere it across the threshold bound.
I strayed, amassing wild lowers, ivy leaves,
Relics, and crusted marbles, gathering too
Thoughts of unending Beauty from the ields . . . (PF, p. 8)
What follows this opening, as Gary Williams observes, is a poem that “con-
nects the awakening of poetic intuition with the song of a bird and an encoun-
ter with death”25 – which is to say, still another American poem modeled at
least in part on the Romantic ode and asking how and at what risk American
poetry might become “high.”
Howe’s daring answer, in “Rome,” is to map the personal elevations of the
Romantic ode onto the political genre of the progress poem (central to earlier
history-minded poets like Lydia Sigourney), with its concern for the rise and
fall of civilizations. Howe ventures from her home into Rome not just once
but multiple times, in a dialectical process of self-revision. Her irst hearing
(in a lover’s company) of Rome’s incomparable nightingale is followed by
excursions that teach her how Rome’s soul “widely overlowed” its boundar-
ies into empire, and in doing so roused “The frost-bound vastness of barbaric
life” to “[Sweep] her back, through all her haughty ways / To her own gates,

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a piteous fugitive” (PF, p. 15). Understanding from her immersion in Roman

history that “No good survives the itness of its time,” Howe turns against
the “unending beauty” that she initially sought in Rome to address both the
fallen empire and the decadent (in her American Protestant eyes) Catholic
Church as forms of “vampire beauty,” clinging to life beyond their naturally
appointed deaths: “Yield to us,” she demands of them, “The wealth thy spec-
tral ingers cannot hold; / Bless us, and so depart” (PF, pp. 19–20). On a visit
to the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli outside Rome, Howe at last locates the
image that brings together personal passion, poetic ambition, and her peri-
patetic historical insight. Juxtaposing the “silent, awful oracle” of the Sybil to
the rainbow-decked “Iris of the Waterfall” that like “A daring Sappho leaps . . .
from the rock,” Howe declares that
the ixed Sybil sits there and decays,
While leaping, loving human life lows on,
And, plunging down to Chaos, is not lost. (PF, p. 21)

By contrast with the impersonal, universal, and pedagogically and textually

mediated authority of history in Lydia Sigourney’s poetry, the authority of
history in Howe’s poetry emerges from an antipedagogical aesthetic of self-
abandonment to experience. High American song, she proposes, will be song
that plunges deep: as the future potential of the United States is measured by
the depth of Rome’s historical fall, American poetry’s potential for elevation is
measured by the depth of its fortunate fall into the life of human passion.
Even when Howe spoke directly to contemporary American politics – and
there is a great deal of direct political statement in Passion-Flowers as well
as in her later collections – her authority remained grounded in the realm
of the high aesthetic and high dialectical critique (she was immensely taken
with Hegel), rather than in pedagogical or sentimental culture. “A Protest
from Italy,” for example, views the American struggle over slavery from the
aesthetic distance of Italy, “Where even curses fall in words / Whose beauty
heals the wounds they make.” At this remove, the speaker initially counsels
North and South “to part in peace.” On returning to her native “icy Northern
springs,” however, where “The sharp steel wind doth sunder all / My silken
armor of delight,” she awakens to slavery as an intolerable evil that “to the
social heart hath crept,” whence it must be cast out – in blood, if necessary (PF,
pp. 40–42). “A Protest from Italy” strikes martial notes that Howe would sound
again, most famously in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” By comparison
with the wartime “Battle Hymn,” though, “A Protest” gives fuller voice to the
claims of the art world and its sensuous peace before drawing those claims

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into the service of another political and historical perspective. Its image of
a silken dress disintegrating in a harsh wind is evocative on several levels,
merging women’s dress with battle-shredded pennants and metonymically
rearmoring the speaker in the steely temper of the attacking wind.
For many of Howe’s contemporaries, the dialectical aesthetic perspective
of “A Protest,” more than the univocal militancy of “Battle Hymn of the
Republic,” typiied her poetry as a whole. Bayard Taylor’s parody of Howe
in “Diversions of the Echo Club” (1872) captures the distinctive elements,
held in tension, of her poetic ambitions: “I tried to part / The petals which
compose / The azure lower of high aesthetic art,” vaunts Howe in Taylor’s
parody, while “blend[ing] our moral trigonometry / With Spheroids of the
mind” and stretching out a hand to the “coming race” of new women and
men.26 Dedication to world-historical progress, higher learning, and the high
aesthetic: for her contemporary readers, these high ambitions, coupled with
what they heard as her “audacious deiance of the wholesome precedents
of composition” (in the words of a contemporary Harper’s reviewer),27 set
Howe’s work apart from the school of Sigourney.
Howe’s tour of ruins and relics in “Rome” spares a sympathetic glance for
“the Ghetto of the hated Jew,” whose “poor synagogue’s simplicity” preserves
“the ancient venerable word” intact under persecution (PF, p. 18). “Intent on
reading as his fathers read,” the synagogue’s rabbi is both admirable for his
self-abnegating interpretive idelity and pitiable, in Howe’s eyes, for his will-
ful isolation from history. Some two decades after Howe’s emergence in the
1850s, Emma Lazarus would dedicate her poetry to restoring Howe’s rabbi to
a place in living history, and to translating for modernity the evolving com-
plexity – lost in Howe’s patronizing sketch – of Judaism’s ethical and aesthetic
traditions.
At the outset of her career, Lazarus’s poetry showcased her commitment
to a generalized ideal of high aesthetic, cosmopolitan Euro-American cul-
ture, signaled by her juxtaposition of epigraphs from Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Longfellow-style poems of the New England seashore with translations
of Goethe’s Faust. In her early poem “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport”
(1867), Lazarus represents Judaism as a “relic of the days of old,” a ruin of
immense beauty and pathos but not a living cultural presence.28 Following
Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” Lazarus sees Newport’s
Jewish community as having died to human history, its cemetery full and its
synagogue empty, exposing “lone loors where reverent feet once trod.” In
contrast with the rabbi of Howe’s “Rome,” whose crabbed and literal idelity
to the Old Testament is destitute of inspirational power, Lazarus does grant

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the rabbi of her vanished community an inspired and primary relationship to

the divine word:
A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
’Midst blinding glory and ef ulgence rare,
Unto a people prone with reverent awe.
(EL, p. 50)
But this rabbi is nowhere to be seen in Lazarus’s contemporary Newport.
Where Howe in “Rome” honors a continuing if limited (as she sees it) Jewish
exegetical tradition, the synagogue of Lazarus’s poem has lost all its living
links to the divine word – “the very prayers / Inscribed around are in a lan-
guage dead” (EL, p. 50).
In the 1870s and 1880s, however, world events and her own experience com-
bined to bring Jewish history, Jewish literature, and international crises in con-
temporary Jewish life to the forefront of Lazarus’s writing. Horriied by the
Russian pogroms of 1880–1881, she personally greeted refugees arriving at
Ward’s Island and published essays calling on American Jews to support both
the “storm-tost [sic] European outcasts” arriving in their midst and the efort
to found a Jewish homeland in Palestine (EL, p. 262). Replying to Longfellow
(and to her younger self ) in an essay published after his death, she declared
that the trials “which our brethren still consent to undergo in the name of
Judaism . . . prove them to be very warmly and thoroughly alive,”29 members
of vital present communities rather than denizens of a Romantic cemetery,
and she began to study in earnest the Hebrew that she had previously declared
“a language dead.” Lazarus’s roused sense of purpose in the 1880s energized
and reoriented, without repudiating, the cosmopolitan aesthetic sampling
characteristic of her earlier poetry, as the grand subject of her later writing
became what she called “the double cosmopolitanism of the American and
the Jew” (EL, p. 264).
Lazarus’s poem “The New Year” in her 1882 Songs of a Semite – dated “Rosh-
Hashanah, 5643” – begins with a resounding rejection of the Christian calen-
dar for the Jewish sacred calendar:
Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled,
And naked branches point to frozen skies. –
When orchards burn their lamps of iery gold,
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn
A sea of beauty and abundance lies,
Then the new year is born.
(EL, p. 175)

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Where the Christian new year, like January’s bare branches, points toward the
resurrection that will lift the “snow-shroud” from the dead, the Jewish calen-
dar by contrast begins with fruition. Its “beauty and abundance” need no res-
urrection, either from the social death imagined for the Jewish community by
Longfellow or that ofered through Christian theology. Against the privation
and wretchedness widely associated with the refugees of 1880–1881 (including
the “wretched [human] refuse” pictured in “The New Colossus,” Lazarus’s
famous sonnet on the Statue of Liberty), the poem’s most fundamental asser-
tion is that Jewish time is beautiful, that it ofers a lush and fully present aes-
thetic – as well as political and ritual – alternative to Christian eschatology.
Wresting control over time itself from Christian history, Lazarus rewrites
Longfellow’s (and her own) image of refugees helplessly driven over the sea as
a stately (in every sense of the word) and deliberate expansion of Jewish com-
munity into the globe:
In two divided streams the exiles part,
One rolling homeward to its ancient source,
One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.
By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled,
Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,
And both embrace the world.
(EL, p. 176)
Emma Lazarus’s late poems and translations repeatedly airmed Jewish cul-
ture to be authentically created in plural languages and idioms rather than
bound to a speciic language or site of origin. Her cosmopolitan appreciation
for both diasporic communities and the irst stirrings of Jewish nationalism,
and her refusal to privilege one or the other as more authentically Jewish,
might well guide us in better appreciating the many streams – none more
authentically American than another – of poetry in the United States.
On still another branch of the family tree of nineteenth-century American
poetry, Walt Whitman shares a lineage with other poets who made their
way into authorship through popular journalism. The journalistic branch
of American poetry was closely related to other modes of gaining access to
authorship: Whitman began his authorial career in social movement writing,
with a temperance novel, and John Greenleaf Whittier moved through stints
as a schoolteacher and a newspaper editor before becoming one of the major
poets of nineteenth-century social movements. The relationship of journal-
ism to poetry was much closer in the nineteenth-century United States than it
would be in the twentieth; most nineteenth-century American poets chose to
publish in, or had their work picked up by, newspapers and popular journals.

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This group of poets, however, stands out for having appeared as regular syn-
dicated reporters in popular venues – as distinct from only contributing occa-
sional poetry to them – or for having apprenticed themselves to literature
through active editorial, managerial, and production responsibilities in popu-
lar journalistic venues – as distinct from assuming editorial responsibilities in
the more rariied venues of culture and opinion, like the Atlantic Monthly, as a
complement to an already-established literary career. In addition to Whitman,
Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Eugene
Field, John James Piatt, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Bayard Taylor were a
few among many poets whose writing emerged from and retained a lavor of
the journalistic milieu.
This milieu was less notable for fostering the emergence of women poets.
Although poems by women writers were copiously picked up and published
by newspapers and popular journals, few women poets were able to mediate
their access to literary careers through these kinds of editorial, managerial,
and production positions in mass journalism – unless they managed “separate
sphere” publications aimed at a female audience, like Sarah Josepha Hale’s
Godey’s Lady’s Book. African American writers similarly found, and made, these
kinds of opportunities in their own community’s publications but seldom in
the world of mass popular journalism. The rapidly expanding sphere of popu-
lar journalism was, however, very hospitable to the emergence of poets in the
western United States, in cities and towns outside the established literary cen-
ters of the East Coast, as underlined by the midwestern orbit of Eugene Field,
who worked on papers in Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado before settling in
Chicago; the San Francisco–based career of Ambrose Bierce; and John James
Piatt’s work as an apprentice printer and, later, an editor on both the northern
and southern sides of the Ohio River, in Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky.
Poets who emerged from the sphere of nineteenth-century American pop-
ular journalism often had a freewheeling professional aesthetic, and Whitman
was neither the irst nor the last of them to understand the value of cultivating
a celebrity persona. Relatively distant from the academic authority of received
prosodic models, the journalistic sphere could be friendly to formal experi-
mentation, often of an autodidactic character; as Jerome McGann has argued
of Stephen Crane’s Black Riders, these poets could be acutely and inventively
sensitive to the modern print medium of their work as well as to the older
mnemonic technologies, of meter and rhyme, on which it traveled. The same
self-consciousness of their modern mass media location often led them to
produce serious poetic parody and to modulate journalist notices into seri-
ous reviewing and criticism, as suggested by the careers of Bayard Taylor and

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Edmund Clarence Stedman. As ambitiously practiced in Bayard Taylor’s The

Echo Club, and in Phoebe Cary’s wicked Poems and Parodies (1854), parody could
be a way of tracing poetry’s social networks in the mid-nineteenth-century
United States, a mode of popular literary historiography.
Taylor’s “Battle of the Bards” in The Echo Club, a mock newspaper account
of a ictional poetry slam among Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, John Hay, and
Joaquin Miller, draws all these aspects of the journalistic poetry sphere into
its satire. First published in the New York Tribune within days of Whitman’s
1871 public recitation of his lengthy “Song of the Exposition,” “Battle of the
Bards” exhibits each poet competing against the others, not only in the dis-
tinctive formal idiom or branding (in every sense of the word) of his poetry
but in ramping up the volume of his celebrity persona. Walt Whitman, in
this company the digniied father of the clan, has barely inished “Straddling
the Continent, gathering into my hairy bosom the growths, whatever they
were,” of his “Chant Democratique” before he is challenged to a “free ight”
by Bret Harte, the Westerner with “the face of Raphael and . . . the boots of
Cinderella” and a istful of dialect. Harte’s toast to himself as “the poet /
That’s lattened out all the rest” is instantly challenged by Hay’s melancholy,
Lincolnesque frontier mien and his claim that “the real high-pressure [poetic]
style” lies in the general direction of Peoria, Illinois. Finally Whitman, Harte,
and Hay alike are mown down by the arrival of Joaquin Miller, who reads “In
a voice loud enough to drown the whistle of ten locomotives” some galloping
Western verses “from a manuscript signed JOAQUIN , written in letters of blood
on the tanned hide of a Comanche princess” – “Take them and read them and
yield me the crown,” he yells, “And the sound of my screaming shall never
die!”30
Taylor’s appalling parody was and remains insightful about the dynamics of
the mid-nineteenth-century American poetic marketplace. As Taylor’s accu-
rate reproduction of Joaquin’s demi-epic, horsy, dactylic-trochaic Westering
verse suggests, Joaquin Miller himself was engaged not only in self-promotion
but in a kind of serious parody, a deep aggression directed more consistently
against genteel Eastern poetic models than against either ictive or histori-
cal American Indian bodies. Taylor’s hot-of-the-presses parody rifed on the
formula Miller had most recently exploited in his 1871 Songs of the Sierras and
anticipated both the meter and the romance plot of Miller’s sprawling frontier
poem of 1875, The Ship in the Desert. The Ship in the Desert, in its turn, both reca-
pitulated and reversed the plot and the metrical form of Longfellow’s mid-
century demi-epic Evangeline. Miller’s poem, like Evangeline, centers on a man
and a woman, sundered from each other in the shipwreck of a nation, who

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wander over the United States and its frontiers, linked in an apparently inex-
orable rhythm of pursuit and l ight. But where Longfellow loats Evangeline
down the Mississippi and over the American West and South only to return his
heroine to a life of service and a decorous deathbed marriage in Philadelphia,
Miller’s poem plunges up and down the Missouri, reights the Civil War to the
death beside a mysterious ghost ship marooned on the shores of Utah’s Great
Salt Lake, and inally settles his mixed-race heroine with her lover among the
Shoshone. Smackdown! The energies loosed in these journalist parodies and
counterparodies remind us that defacement is a vital part of American liter-
ary culture, including its poetic culture. Like Frances Harper’s Moses and her
shorter poem “Truth,” although in a very diferent tonal key and to very dif-
ferent political ends, The Ship in the Desert is a minor American epic of deface-
ment, an experiment in bringing high idols low.
Among the many other objects of Taylor’s parody in The Echo Club was
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. But unlike Whitman and Howe, Longfellow
and Miller, Tuckerman – so Taylor complains – “presents only proper smooth-
ness” to the satirist; his “verse moves onward with a step secure, / Nor hastes
with rapture, nor delays with dread.” At best, the Echo clubmen concur, he is “a
conservative element in literature,” useful “to keep the wild modern schools in
order.”31 If Tuckerman read this (it originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in
May 1872, months before his death), he may not have been entirely displeased;
years before, he had cut out a local newspaper parody of his sonnet “The Starry
Flower” and pasted it into his notebook (SP, p. xii), as if to acknowledge that
for poets there is no such thing as bad publicity. But he might also have felt
that the earlier parody got it more nearly right, and Taylor, wrong. The “son-
net – After F. G. T,” published in the Springield Republican (which was also
Emily Dickinson’s local newspaper), mocked Tuckerman’s “verbal mist” and
“poisonous” laurels – in other words, his aspirations to a high Romantic style;
the Echo Club parody, by contrast, complained of his “strictly classic” placidity,
reading him back into the eighteenth-century models of Pope and Gray rather
than next to his own idol, Tennyson. Tuckerman himself, though, in one of his
sonnets, had declared his preference for “rough” criticism – even
surgery rough as that,
Which, hammer and chisel in hand, at one sharp blow
Strikes out the wild tooth from a horse’s jaw! –

over “ignorant praise” and pedantic law picking. Like his critics, he too hoped
for an American poetry that would “cast out fear” and attract readers able to
“touch the quick” (SP, p. 102).

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The dialogue between this retiring and relatively little-published poet and
his parodists demonstrates the vigor and connectedness of American poetry,
including its lesser-known voices, at the mid-nineteenth century. Like the
“wayside apple” that “drops its surly fruit” in another Tuckerman sonnet (SP,
p. 130), or like the “harmless cur” paying his “surly” compliments in Horton’s
“The Innocent Dog,” the family tree of nineteenth-century American poetry
confounds dichotomies of the natural versus the cultured, the imported ver-
sus the indigenous, and formal versus free – dichotomies still deep-seated in
the canonical formation of American literature. The wayside apple tree is
no more indigenous in Tuckerman’s landscape than is the sonnet form, or
Horton’s balladry. Its surly resilience comes not from purely autochthonous
New World origins but from the incorrigible diversity of Old World genetic
information (apple trees planted from seed don’t run true to their parents) that
the apple expresses.
This is not to say that Tuckerman’s sonnet, in itself, ofers any but the most
anodyne of medicines for the questions of cultural resilience and survival it
poses. A present-day reader will know this when she comes to sonnet IV.IX’s
complacent reference to walking in the footsteps of “Sagamore George,” even
if she doesn’t know that George’s Pawtucket name was Wenepoykin; that
he ruled lands from Charlestown to Salem; that he was brutally disigured
in a smallpox epidemic that killed of most of his community; and that he
was captured and sold of into slavery on Barbados during King Philip’s War,
from which in 1684 he returned to die in Natick, Massachusetts. Horton’s
“Innocent Dog” is far more knowing than Tuckerman’s sonnet about what
happens when “surly” resilience encounters guns, germs, and steel. What I am
saying, though, is that Tuckerman’s and Horton’s poems know more together
than they do separately about what burdens Anglophone poetry bore to the
Americas and how poetry circulated in the nineteenth-century United States,
and that what these poems, together, know remains worth retracing today.

Notes
1. Virginia Jackson, “Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry,” in Martha Nell
Smith and Mary Loefelholz (eds.), A Companion to Emily Dickinson (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 205–21, 206–07.
2. For all six versions of “Further in Summer,” see R. W. Franklin (ed.), The Poems
of Emily Dickinson: Variorium Edition, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 831–36.
3. Joanne Feit Diehl, Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 97.

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4. Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 832.

5. See Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 91.
6. Jackson, “Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry,” pp. 210, 218.
7. On the British Romantic inl uences, see Eugene England, Beyond Romanticism:
Tuckerman’s Life and Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991),
pp. 197, 204–06.
8. Ben Mazer (ed.), Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Cambridge,
Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 152. Poems in
this collection will be cited in the text as SP.
9. Yvor Winters, “A Discovery,” Hudson Review 3 (1950), pp. 453, 458.
10. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (1962; New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 489–90.
11. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 17.
12. Yvor Winters, Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American
Obscurantism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), p. 159.
13. Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1995), p. 19.
14. William G. Land, Thomas Hill: Twentieth President of Harvard (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 231–37.
15. [Thomas Hill], “Were They Crickets?” Atlantic Monthly, April 1866, pp. 402,
400, 403.
16. Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 9.
17. Joan R. Sherman (ed.), African American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An
Anthology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 87.
18. “Miss Huntley’s Poems,” North American Review 1 (May 1815), p. 111.
19. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, The Girl’s Reading-Book: In Prose and Poetry, for
Schools (1837; New York: J. Orville Taylor, 1839), p. 11.
20. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, Zinzendorf, and Other Poems (New York: Leavitt,
Lord & Co., 1835), p. 102. Poems in this collection will be cited in the text as Z.
21. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1836), p. 138.
22. George Moses Horton, Poetical Works (1845), http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn
/hortonpoem/hortonpoem.html, pp. iv, vi. Poems in this collection will be
cited in the text as PW.
23. See Frances Smith Foster’s introduction to A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: The Feminist Press at the City
University of New York, 1990), p. 11 (hereafter cited in the text as BCD).
24. Julia Ward Howe, Passion-Flowers (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853), p.
2. Poems in this collection will be cited in the text as PF.
25. Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 140.

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 Other Voices, Other Verses

26. [Bayard Taylor], “Diversions of the Echo Club (Night the Seventh),” Atlantic
Monthly 30 ( July 1872), p. 78.
27. Quoted in Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 137.
28. Emma Lazarus, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” in Gregory Eiselein
(ed.), Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2002), p. 50. Works in this collection will be cited in the text
as EL.
29. Quoted in Max Cavitch, “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty,” in
Meredith L. McGill (ed.), The Traic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and
Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008),
p. 107.
30. Bayard Taylor, “The Battle of the Bards,” in The Echo Club, and Other Literary
Diversions (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876), pp. 168–74.
31. Taylor, “The Battle of the Bards,” pp. 97–98.

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 Chapter 14
American Poetry Fights the Civil War
Fa ith B a r r ett

On Decoration Day in May 1869, a journalist and Union army veteran named
George Bryant Woods stood before a soldiers’ monument in his hometown
of Barre, Massachusetts, and remembered the men he had served with in
1862, when he was just eighteen. After describing the friends he caught
glimpses of during the ighting at Antietam, Woods recalled how they had
once recited “The Charge of the Light Brigade” as schoolboys at the town
hall, never imagining that they would face the kind of combat that Tennyson’s
poem describes. In remembering the bravery of a young oicer who died at
Antietam, Woods echoed the imagery of Tennyson’s poem, underlining the
powerful inl uence this piece had over American readers. Still more impor-
tantly, echoes of Tennyson’s poem in Woods’s remarks also foreground the
centrality of poetry to the American Civil War. When Edmund Wilson dis-
missed Civil War poetry as “versiied journalism,” he misunderstood the cru-
cial role that poetry played in nineteenth-century culture: in the Civil War era,
Americans believed that poetry could make vital contributions to the ongoing
debate about the meaning of national identity.1 Northerners and Southerners
alike believed that poetry could not only relect but also shape events that took
place on battleields.
Woods’s reference to Tennyson’s poem reminds us that in mid-nineteenth-
century America poetry was ubiquitous. Central to schoolroom pedagogy,
poetry was also read at recruitment events, in military camps and hospitals,
and at memorials for fallen soldiers. It was printed in newspapers and maga-
zines, in which it served not only as iller but also as a powerful intervention
into conversations both literary and political. Americans encountered poetry
in the form of broadsides, songsters, self-published collections, paper-bound
books, and hard-bound volumes. Many Americans kept albums of favorite
poems, and many would also try their hand at penning a few lines of verse.
During the war years, reports abound of soldiers reading or singing poetry
not only in camp but also as they marched into battle; newspapers ofered

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frequent accounts of soldiers dying with poems in their pockets. Many sol-
diers on both sides of the conl ict wrote poetry. The Civil War witnessed an
extraordinary outpouring of poetry by men and women from all walks of life.
In the poetry of this era, both amateur and professional writers confronted
a crisis of representation, as they sought to deine the changing meanings of
family, home, and nation in wartime. While canonical writers like Whitman,
Dickinson, and Melville might address this crisis more explicitly, studying the
full spectrum of poetry from this period makes clear that popular writers,
women poets, and African Americans also grappled with important represen-
tational and aesthetic challenges in their poems. This chapter, then, considers
that full spectrum, ultimately arguing that Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville
all responded dialogically to the work of their poetic contemporaries. Reading
across the spectrum of this work underlines as well the extraordinary richness
and variety of Civil War poetry.2
Central to poetry’s remarkably broad range in this era were developments
in printing and transportation technologies: poetry could now be printed and
circulated quickly and cheaply. In the Northern states, magazines that printed
poetry saw explosive growth during the war years; Southern publications also
saw growth in their subscriptions, although shortages of paper and printing
equipment ultimately proved limiting. Historians frequently note that the
Civil War was one of the irst wars to be shaped by the telegraph and the rail-
road. Because of the speed with which it could be written, printed, and distrib-
uted, poetry was a literary genre that was uniquely poised to keep pace with
events taking place on battleields, in Richmond, and in Washington.
Moreover, in both the North and the South, the avid readership for poetry
worked hand in glove with interest in popular song; the boundary between
these two genres would become particularly permeable during the war.
Middle-class Americans with pianos in their parlors wanted sheet music; sol-
diers in camp sang the latest patriotic songs. Composers thus quickly set newly
written poems to music, and publishers rushed to get sheet music to musicians.
Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a representative instance:
although the poem irst appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862, it
was also distributed as a song sheet and quickly became a favorite with Union
troops. During the war years, the close relationship between poetry and song
allowed poets access to new audiences; women and African American writers
would be particular beneiciaries of this development.
The Civil War and the years immediately preceding it proved to be a time
of extraordinary variety in the range of techniques African American poets
employed in support of abolition. Born a free man in Ohio, Joshua McCarter

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Simpson was initially self-educated but would go on to study for four years at
Oberlin. In the song-poems that he wrote in the antebellum era, Simpson uses
biting satire to deride white Americans for the contradictions inherent in their
vision of the nation. Writing new lyrics for the anthem “America,” Simpson
angrily denounces slavery:
My country, ’tis of thee,
Dark land of Slavery,
In thee we groan.
Long have our chains been worn –
Long has our grief been borne –
Our lesh has long been torn,
E’en from our bones.3
Published under the pseudonym “Ella” and often attributed to Sarah Mapps
Douglass, the poem “The Mother and Her Captive Boy” ofers an equally
angry denunciation of slavery. Yet while Simpson relies on Americans’ famil-
iarity with the anthem “America” to emphasize the satire of his biting lyr-
ics, Ella uses a high-literary stance to heighten the bitter tone of her poem:
the poem’s literary sophistication strengthens the moral authority of its
speaker and demonstrates deinitively that black people given the advantage
of education could meet or exceed the literary achievements of their white
contemporaries.
Douglass’s contemporary Frances Harper used both popular and high-lit-
erary stances to argue for African American rights. Born in Maryland to free
parents, Harper would become one of the most successful speakers on the
abolitionist lecture circuit as well as one of the most widely published black
writers of her day. In “To the Cleveland Union-Savers,” written in February
1861, Harper angrily denounces the Cleveland Republicans who returned a
female fugitive slave to Virginia on the eve of the war. Harper uses the word
“Union” to indict the white politicians for their cowardice, insistently reiterat-
ing “Union” to heighten the poem’s accusatory “you.” The poem concludes:
And your guilty, sin-cursed Union
Shall be shaken to its base,
Till ye learn that simple justice
Is the right of every race.4
Harper would frequently perform her poems from the lecture platform, and
it is easy to imagine this poem’s simple but powerful meter and rhyme stirring
a crowd to anger.

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Even as black poets were calling for emancipation, white Southern poets
were laying the foundations for the Southern homeland. In the period pre-
ceding the war, the growing tension between North and South could be mea-
sured by the swelling number of white-authored paeans to an Edenic South.
Emphasizing the warmth of the climate, such paeans relied on the Romantic
trope of the solitary speaker who contemplates an abundant natural world.
In “I Sigh for the Land of the Cypress and the Pine,” Samuel Henry Dickson
rhapsodizes about his Southern homeland. The poem begins:
I sigh for the land of the cypress and the pine,
Where the jessamine blooms and the gay woodbine;
Where the moss droops low from the green oak tree, –
Oh that sun bright land is the land for me! (WH, p. 32)
Relying on Romantic conventions to represent a harmonious natural world,
Dickson erases both the violence of slavery – essential to the agricultural pro-
ductivity of the South – and the rise of industrialization throughout the nation
at midcentury. Southern Romanticism thus looks back with longing to a pas-
toral ideal that had already been lost, that had never really existed. One of the
most proliic and patriotic of white Southern poets, William Gilmore Simms,
added crucial layers of political argument to the trope of the Southern para-
dise. In “Song of the South,” Simms represents the Southern natural world as
a female beloved for whom the speaker is willing to ight and die:
She feels no tremors when the Danger’s nigh;
But the ight over, and the victory won,
How, with strange fondness, turns her loving eye,
In tearful welcome, on each gallant son! (WH, p. 36)
Well before the outbreak of hostilities, white Southern writers were already
representing the Southern homeland as a beloved woman threatened by a hos-
tile North; in wartime, this trope would serve as the foundation for the white
Southern code of masculine heroism.
The violence of the ideological collision to come could thus be read in the
distance between white paeans to the Southern homeland and the stances of
African American abolitionist poetry. In the last few years before the outbreak
of hostilities, white audiences in both North and South laughed uproariously
at the racist humor of blackface minstrelsy, which served as a kind of release
valve for the escalating tension. With its catchy tune and its mock-tragic lyrics,
Dan Emmett’s 1859 song “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” was a particular favor-
ite with white audiences. In “Dixie,” the high-literary stance of the solitary

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Romantic speaker is seamlessly fused with the popular racist stances of black-
face. The song gives voice to the homesickness of the black speaker, who has
been exiled from his Southern home:
I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
Old times dar am not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.
(WH, p. 40)
Born in Ohio, Emmett was a white performer who made his name with Dan
Bryant’s Minstrels in New York. With their multilayered mix of antiblack rac-
ism and nostalgia for the lost Southern homeland, Emmett’s lyrics suggest
that he had his inger on the political pulse of the soon-to-be-divided nation.
The song’s chorus points implicitly toward the Southern regional pride that
would soon be sending young white men of to enlist: “In Dixie Land, I’ll took
my stand, / To lib an die in Dixie” (WH, p. 40). Although popular with whites
in both North and South on the eve of the war, “Dixie” was quickly taken up
as an anthem by the newly founded Confederacy, prompting a proliferation
of alternate versions. Elevating the language to standard white English, an
Arkansas journalist named Albert Pike gave his version the lofty title “Southrons,
Hear Your Country Call You!” He also changed the singular “I” of the chorus
to the crucial collective “we” of white supporters of the Confederacy: “For
Dixie’s land we’ll take our stand, / And live or die for Dixie!”5
Like Albert Pike, Julia Ward Howe sought to improve on the lyrics of a pop-
ular song when she wrote her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In her memoirs
Howe tells how, on a visit to Washington, D.C., she and some friends sang
“John Brown’s Body” with the soldiers who marched beside them. Urged by
one of her companions to write better words for the tune, Howe wrote out
her own version in the predawn hours the next morning. Although “John
Brown’s Body” was often understood by Northerners to be a song that cel-
ebrated the martyrdom of the radical abolitionist, music historians suggest
that it was originally written as a mocking comparison of the great fame of
the radical abolitionist and the relative anonymity of a Massachusetts soldier
who shared the same common name, John Brown.6 This account of the song’s
origins makes sense of its morbid humor: even as the song insists that the
radical abolitionist has ascended to heaven (“His soul is marching on”), it also
suggests that the foot soldier of the same common name who dies on the ield
of battle may receive no recognition (“John Brown’s body lies a’mouldering in
the grave”).7 In revising the lyrics, Howe removed any direct reference to the
radical abolitionist or to decaying bodies; she retained, however, the crucial

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argument that God supports the Union. Such theological arguments would
abound in both North and South throughout the war. By writing her lyrics
to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” Howe skillfully layers the genteel white
female voice of her own authorship with the voice of abolitionists and the
Union soldiers’ collective voice to create a still broader collective of Union
supporters. The poem comes to a dramatic climax in its fourth stanza, when
this collective “we” is successfully forged: “As he died to make men holy, let us
die to make men free” (WH, p. 75). With its central image of a vengeful God
endorsing the American nation, Howe’s “Battle Hymn” would continue to
have enduring power into the twenty-irst century.
As the example of Pike’s and Howe’s song-poems suggests, the early
years of the war witnessed an outpouring of calls to arms from both North
and South. Both Northern and Southern poets called on young men to join
the armies so that the freedoms established by the American Revolution
could be preserved; both sides called on mothers, wives, and sisters to sac-
riice young men for the good of the nation. Relying on Romantic stances
to represent the human connection to nature, poets from both North and
South igured the battleield as the site of sacriice and regeneration. With its
image of sacriicial bloodshed, Howe’s “Battle Hymn” was one of the most
successful Northern examples of this redemptive vision of a battleield. In
“Ethnogenesis” (1861), Henry Timrod, later called the poet laureate of the
Confederacy, ofers a high-literary vision of the Southern nation, founded
on the richness of its agricultural heritage. “Ethnogenesis” argues that the
South can rely on its benevolent climate and its abundant cotton crop – “THE
SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS!” – in order to establish its supremacy
(WH, p. 313). Moving adroitly between formal complexity and direct call to
arms, the poem declares that Southern men are willing to ight for this great
nation.
While Southern calls to arms frequently foregrounded the Southern
homeland, Northern recruitment poems often focused on Lincoln, empha-
sizing his strong ties to the natural world of the West. In “Three Hundred
Thousand More,” James Sloan Gibbons imagines generations of young
men answering Lincoln’s call, in July 1862, for a new round of enlist-
ments. Positioning Lincoln as a igure of biblical and patriarchal authority,
the poem opens with the soldiers’ collective cry: “We are coming, Father
Abraham, three hundred thousand more” (WH, p. 92). In stanzas 2 and 3,
newly recruited men spring up bodily from the land: “If you look all up our
valleys where the growing harvests shine, / You may see our sturdy farmer
boys fast forming into line” (WH, pp. 92–93). The redemptive work done on

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 Fai t h B ar rett

battleields is likened to the redemptive work of farming; Gibbons imagines

a bountiful American landscape ofering up a generation of young men will-
ing to die for the nation.
Although the call to arms became one of the dominant genres of the irst
years of the war, other patriotic stances also played a prominent role. Another
important category was that of poems praising women’s contributions.
Popular in both North and South and authored by both men and women,
such poems represented not only women’s bravery in sending their sons and
husbands of to war but also their work as nurses, seamstresses, and orga-
nizers of relief eforts. The anonymously published Union poem “Soldiers’
Aid Societies” represents women as taking up the “weapons” of needle and
scissors to make uniforms: the women gather “To ight for their native land,
/ With womanly weapons girt, / For dagger a needle, scissors for brand, /
While they sing the song of the shirt” (WH, p. 67). Confederate poet Henry
Timrod makes a similar argument in his 1863 poem “Two Armies,” suggest-
ing that the gentler sex “by a thousand peaceful deeds, / Supplies a struggling
nation’s needs” (WH, p. 324). Echoing William Gilmore Simms’s antebellum
“Song of the South,” with its depiction of a woman who urges her beloved to
defend her, Timrod suggests that white Southern women give “new courage”
to Confederate soldiers (WH, p. 324).
Still another dominant category in the war’s early years was that of poems
in praise of the leadership of generals or presidents. Celebrated by both
Southern and Northern writers for his piety and his military skill, Confederate
general Stonewall Jackson was a particularly popular subject. In “Stonewall
Jackson’s Way,” Confederate loyalist John Williamson Palmer imagines “Old
Blue-Light” leading his men in prayer prior to battle. A wave of Northern-
authored poems lionizing Lincoln began as early as 1862. While Gibbons’s
“Three Hundred Thousand More” ofered a popularly inlected picture of
Lincoln as the father of the nation, John James Piatt’s “To Abraham Lincoln”
used the long literary history of the sonnet to suggest that Lincoln’s leader-
ship during the war would earn both for him and for the nation a prominent
position in world history. Still other poems memorialized speciic battles. In
the 1861 poem “Manassas,” the Mississippi writer Catherine Warield notes
with pride the shock that Northerners felt when the irst major conl ict, called
Manassas in the South and Bull Run in the North, resulted in an embarrassing
and costly Union defeat. As Warield’s poem makes clear, both sides initially
felt that the war would be quickly won; only as the war dragged on into its
second and third years would the broader public begin to realize how long and
costly the conl ict might be.

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As the war moved into its second and third years, poems mourning the
deaths of soldiers became more prominent. First appearing in Harper’s Weekly
late in 1861, Ethelinda Beers’s “The Picket-Guard” was one of the earliest and
most successful examples of a poem about the death of an individual foot
soldier. Contrasting the headlines from a newspaper – “All quiet along the
Potomac” – with the story of a solitary picket who is shot as he walks his
rounds, Beers’s poem ofers no consoling pieties about the soldier’s martyr-
dom for the good of the nation: rather, the poem uses an understated descrip-
tion of his death to emphasize that although it may receive little mention in
the newspaper, it will have a devastating impact on his family (WH, p. 65). In
a similarly plainspoken fashion, Confederate oicer S. A. Jonas gave voice in
“Only a Soldier’s Grave” to the deeply rooted fear of families in both North
and South that soldiers who were buried in anonymous graves could not be
properly mourned. Jonas’s poem begins:

Only a soldier’s grave! Pass by,

For soldiers, like other mortals, die.
Parents he had – they are far away;
No sister weeps o’er the soldier’s clay;
No brother comes, with a tearful eye:
It’s only a soldier’s grave – pass by. (WH, p. 109)

The poem concludes with the tersely worded plea that graves must be marked
so that loved ones can later ind them.
While Beers and Jonas relied on spare language to acknowledge the individ-
ual soldier’s death, still other writers relied on the more heightened emotions
of sentimentalism, a dominant literary stance in mid-nineteenth-century
America. Unsettling twenty-irst-century expectations about gender roles in
wartime, sentimental postures were adopted by both male and female writ-
ers: just as women wrote many strident calls to arms, so too did many male
writers write poems that encouraged the tearful mourning of gentle boy-
soldiers. Songs mourning the deaths of soldier-boys were frequently best sell-
ers. Written by the Kentuckian Will Hays, “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh”
was one of the most popular songs – in both North and South – of the Civil
War era. As Alice Fahs argues in her study of the popular literature of the war,
sentimental elegies reconirmed the worth of the individual in the face of the
vast numbers of the dead; at the same time, sentimental poems of mourn-
ing represented the fallen boy-soldier as a type of martyred innocence, often
reairming the nationalist cause for which he died.8 While “The Drummer
Boy of Shiloh” ends by evoking the vast numbers killed in the war, the middle

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of the song ofers mourners a redemptive vision of a young man who died
because he loved his country: “ ‘I’ve loved my country as my God; / To serve
them both I’ve tried,’ / He smiled, shook hands – death seized the boy / Who
prayed before he died.”9
Confederate writer Caroline Ball’s “The Jacket of Gray” is another senti-
mental poem of mourning. The poem does not shy away from graphic depic-
tion of death: “the life-blood ooze[s] out on the jacket of gray” (WH, p. 125).
In its insistent repetition of the refrain “the jacket of gray,” however, Ball
reminds her readers of the worthy nation-building cause for which the young
soldier died. The poem concludes:
Then fold it up carefully, lay it aside,
Tenderly touch it, look on it with pride;
For dear it must be to our hearts evermore,
The jacket of gray our loved soldier-boy wore.
(WH, p. 125)
Sentimental poems like “The Drummer Boy” and “The Jacket of Gray”
ofered models for the expression of intense grief even as they also suggested
that mourners might achieve emotional closure by remembering the nation
for which their loved one died.
In his 1864 poem “In the Wilderness,” Northerner George Boker responded
more ambivalently to sentimental conventions. “In the Wilderness” describes
a badly wounded soldier who crawls across a battleield, gathering violets:
So, lost in thought, scarce conscious of the deed,
Culling the violets, here and there he crept
Slowly – ah! Slowly, – for his wound would bleed;
And the sweet lowers themselves half smiled, half wept,
To be thus gathered in
By hands so pale and thin. (WH, p. 143)
Boker reminds his readers of the youthful innocence of the soldier by imag-
ining his search for the lowers; yet the violet gathering also has a maca-
bre undercurrent, as the lowers are described as “dripping” and weeping.
Moreover, the reiterated word “violets” suggests its near homophone “vio-
lence”; the “culling” of the “violets” points toward the “culling” of men in
battle. The poem ends ambiguously: the wounded boy is carried from the
ield, but it is not clear whether he will live or die. Boker thus draws on
the conventions of sentimentality but lets the image of the bleeding sol-
dier-boy hover without narrative or ideological resolution. This refusal to
ix the meaning of the image relects the relatively late date of the poem’s

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composition and implicitly registers Boker’s horror at the staggering loss of

life in the Battle of the Wilderness, which marked the start of Grant’s bloody
Overland Campaign.
The middle years of the war saw an increase not only in poems mourning
individual soldiers but also in poems recognizing the achievements of black
soldiers in the Union army. Black men were not authorized to serve in combat
positions in the Union army until January 1863; while many Northern whites
were initially skeptical of Lincoln’s decision to allow black men to ight, by the
summer of 1863, the tide of white opinion had begun to shift, thanks to reports
of the bravery of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, among other examples of
black courage under ire. Published in May 1863 in a pamphlet designed to
encourage black men to enlist, George Boker’s “The Black Regiment” argues
that black men are well suited to the task of ighting for the Union because
they have a vested interest in the word “freedom”:

“Freedom!” their battle-cry –

“Freedom! or leave to die!”
Ah! And they meant the word,
Not as with us ’tis heard,
Not a mere party shout (WH, p. 113)

Boker uses a long, narrow column of short lines down the page, the familiar
meter of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and an abundance of
trochees to evoke the sound of drums and the maneuvering of columns of
troops in combat. The poem ends with a plea to white soldiers to recognize
black men as their comrades-in-arms: “Never, in ield or tent, / Scorn the
Black Regiment” (WH, p. 114).
More ambivalent in its recognition of black soldiers’ achievements, Charles
Graham Halpine’s “Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt” ofers a working-class Irish
speaker, Private Miles O’Reilly, who observes satirically that he would be
happy to let “Sambo” be “murthered” in his stead. Writing in Irish American
dialect, Halpine here represents the often virulent antiblack racism of the
working-class Irish immigrants who were conscripted into the army. While
Halpine’s speaker perpetuates racist stereotypes, the poem also expresses a
grudging admiration for the black soldiers’ courage, noting that Sambo’s “eye
runs straight on the barrel-sights / From undher his thatch of wool” (WH,
p. 139). Frances Harper ofers an angry rebuttal to Halpine in her “Lines to
Miles O’Reiley.” Dropping Halpine’s satirical stance and his use of dialect,
Harper uses a collective “we” and standard English to emphasize the dignity
and bravery of black soldiers.

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Following Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination, the nationalist impulses

that shaped the poetry of the North and South reached a climax of ideologi-
cal intensity: in the South, that crescendo took the form of poems celebrating
the Lost Cause of the Confederacy; in the North, that crescendo became an
outpouring of elegies for the president. George Moses Horton was just one
of many African American poets who wrote a Lincoln elegy. Many Northern
writers turned to the sonnet form for this task, inscribing Lincoln’s name into
the long literary history of the form. William Cullen Bryant’s April 1865 son-
net opens by reminding Northerners that Lincoln had advocated for reconcil-
iation with the South:
Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!
Who, in the fear of God, didst bear
The sword of power, a nation’s trust! (WH, p. 171)
In the sonnet “The Martyr,” however, Christopher Pearse Cranch argues that
the spilling of Lincoln’s blood eliminates the possibility of the nation recon-
ciling peacefully:
Rise, then, O countrymen!
Scatter these marsh-light hopes of union won
Through pardoning clemency. Strike, strike again!
Draw closer round the foe a girdling lame!
We are stabbed whene’er we spare. Strike, in God’s name!
(WH, p. 173)
Calls for vengeance from the North were met with poems praising the once
and future glory of the Confederacy, although calls for the South to rise again
were necessarily somewhat muted in published media. Contemplating his
ruined plantation, William Gilmore Simms wrote a lament that expresses both
the despair and the resolve of white Southerners in the aftermath of the war:
Tender and True, my Dixie Land!
Though faint and few, my Dixie Land!
We keep the Faith our Fathers knew,
For which they bled, in which we grew,
And at their graves our vows renew, –
For nought is lost of truth, where Faith keeps true,
Oh! Dixie Land! O! Dixie Land. (WH, p. 189)
Not surprisingly, Simms opted to publish the piece anonymously in January
1867. In the summer of 1867, a twenty-ive-year-old Confederate veteran
named Sidney Lanier wrote a paean to the lost Southern homeland, iguring

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it as a beloved maternal body: in the poem’s grotesque exaggeration of high

Romantic imagery, Lanier registers the shame felt by Southerners at the
devastation of the South, a devastation the poem implicitly represents as
a rape:

But, Mother Earth

Of giant birth,
Thy mother milk comes curdled thick with woe.
Friends, blood is in the milk whereby we grow,
And life is heavy and death is marvelous slow. (WH, p. 189)

Lanier’s postwar lament would not appear in print until 1916.

If the ideology of the Lost Cause was dominant among white Southerners,
it was nonetheless still possible to ind dissenting Southern voices – usually
either white Southerners who had earlier led the South or formerly enslaved
African Americans, many of whom would also head North at the war’s end.
Born into a wealthy slaveholding family in Kentucky, Sarah Piatt moved to
Washington, D.C., with her husband in June 1861. A keen observer of relation-
ships in the Victorian domestic circle, Piatt was particularly successful at plac-
ing her work with prestigious Northern presses and magazines. Moreover,
as Paula Bennett notes, Piatt tended to group poems about motherhood,
children, and domestic themes in her published collections, reserving her
explicitly political poems for the more ephemeral media of magazines and
newspapers.10 Only when we read the full spectrum of Piatt’s work does her
subversive use of irony become apparent.
In “Hearing the Battle, July 21, 1861,” Piatt imagines a husband and wife sit-
ting in their garden, listening to noises from a nearby battleield and trying to
imagine “the worlds unknown” of combat (PB, p. 4). As the poem concludes,
the woman urges her beloved to join the conl ict: “I shall never know / How
the hearts in the land are breaking, / My dearest, unless you go.” On its sur-
face, the poem is a fairly conventional, if somewhat detached, call to arms. On
closer examination, however, the poem underlines not only the detachment
of the husband and wife from the sufering soldiers but also the detachment
of the wife from her husband and the detachment of the wife from the sufer-
ings of other women. The contrast between the tranquil Victorian garden and
the gory scene of the nearby battle implicates both husband and wife in the
hypocrisy of their genteel disengagement – a disengagement that is in strik-
ing contrast to the “passion and moan” on the battleield (PB, p. 4). In “Mock
Diamonds,” irst published in 1872, Piatt again took aim at the gender roles
of the Civil War era, this time ofering a withering critique of the Southern

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code of masculine heroism, a code sustained through the complex rituals of

romantic desire between white Southern men and women.
Like his contemporary and fellow Southerner Sarah Piatt, during the
postwar era, the black poet George Moses Horton ofered an incisive cri-
tique of the Confederate ideology of the lost Southern homeland. Born
into slavery in North Carolina at the very end of the eighteenth century,
Horton published two collections of poetry while still enslaved and a third
immediately following the war’s end. As a young man, Horton taught him-
self irst to read and then to write; he also persuaded his master to let
him hire his own time so that he could work as a jack-of-all-trades on the
University of North Carolina campus. He was particularly successful at
writing love poems made to order for young white male students.11 When
the Union army arrived in North Carolina in April 1865, Horton – by now
in his late sixties – inally gained freedom. For three months he traveled
with the Ninth Michigan Cavalry, once again supporting himself by writ-
ing love poems made to order, this time for young white Northern soldiers
for their wives and sweethearts back home. During this time, Horton also
completed a third collection of poems; some time later, he moved north to
Philadelphia. In “The Southern Refugee,” Horton relies on a conventional
Romantic stance to express the longings of many displaced Southerners –
both black and white – in the aftermath of the war. On its surface, the poem
reads like a fairly conventional Romantic meditation on the speaker’s immi-
nent departure from his beloved home:
What sudden ill the world await,
From my dear residence I roam;
I must deplore the bitter fate,
To straggle from my native home. (BB, p. 124)
Just beneath that surface, however, lies Horton’s subtle critique of the
Confederate ideology of the Southern paradise. Noting that “Eden’s garden”
has been “left in gloom,” Horton does not make clear whether it is the vio-
lence of slavery or the violence of war that has spoiled Eden. And while the
speaker’s race is never made explicit, the poem’s inal stanza argues unequiv-
ocally that the speaker has come to terms with the necessity of his departure
from the South:
I trust I soon shall dry the tear
And leave forever hence to roam,
Far from a residence so dear,
The place of beauty – my native home. (BB, p. 124)

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Horton here ofers a pointed rejoinder to the nostalgia of the blackface speaker
in Dan Emmett’s “Dixie” and also to William Gilmore Simms’s lament for a
fallen “Dixie Land.” For a freed slave, there can be no indulgence in a utopian
nostalgia for a paradise that never was.
In tracing trends in the poetry of the Civil War era, this chapter has thus far
focused on poets whose pieces were well known in their time but who have
received little attention since the start of the twentieth century. There are,
however, three writers whose position is irmly established in the canon of
nineteenth-century American literature and who ofer important interven-
tions into Civil War poetry. Walt Whitman’s contribution to Civil War liter-
ature was recognized relatively early in twentieth-century criticism; only in
recent decades, however, have scholars begun to attend to the Civil War poetry
of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. So powerful was the inl uence of
New Criticism that Dickinson was for decades seen as a poet who had little
interest in contemporary events in spite of the fact that dozens of her poems
focus on military tropes. Dickinson’s sex no doubt also encouraged scholars
to neglect the war-related arguments in her poetry. It is otherwise diicult to
imagine how her extraordinary productivity during the war years could have
been overlooked: Franklin’s dating of Dickinson’s manuscripts suggests that
she wrote more than 900 poems between 1861 and 1865.
In the case of Melville’s Battle-Pieces, the volume’s improbable mix of con-
ventional nationalism, old-fashioned Romanticism, regular meter and rhyme,
densely layered allusions, and spare imagistic compression baled twentieth-
century critics almost to the same extent that it baled nineteenth-century
reviewers. In a damning Atlantic Monthly review in February 1867, William
Dean Howells accused Melville of emotional “remoteness,” of represent-
ing only his own inner “phantasms,” rather than representing the war itself.12
For many twentieth-century critics, Melville’s poetry was too “remote” from
modernist sensibilities in its strong attachment not only to rhyme and meter
but also to nationalist ideologies. Twentieth-century scholars who admired
the radicalism and innovation of Melville’s novels often found little to admire
in the more conservative political and aesthetic commitments of Battle-Pieces.
If we reposition Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville in the context of the
Civil War poetry written by their contemporaries, however, this approach illu-
minates the extent to which all three responded to their peers. Such a strategy
underlines the extraordinary range of aesthetic and political commitments
in the poetry of writers now largely forgotten; it also underlines the extent
to which innovations in the work of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville have
their sources in the rich and varied ield of nineteenth-century poetry.

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Whitman’s position as the leading poet of the Civil War is well deserved
not only because of the importance of Drum-Taps but also because he is one
of the most important theorists of Civil War writing. As he made plain in his
autobiographical poem “The Wound Dresser,” his extensive service as an aid
in the military hospitals gave him a wealth of material to relect on. Drawn
from Whitman’s notebooks, Memoranda during the War (1875) ofers incisive
commentary not only on how the war changed American society but also
on how it changed American writing. “The real war,” Whitman famously
suggests, “will never get into books.”13 As Timothy Sweet argues, Whitman
addressed explicitly the crisis of representation that the war presented to
American writers, as they grappled with the challenges of responding to the
war’s staggering scale of sufering and death. Sweet suggests that Whitman’s
most perceptive discussion of that crisis took place in the prose relections
of Memoranda; in Drum-Taps and its sequel, by contrast, Whitman relied on
the rhetorical power of the pastoral to redeem the war’s bloodshed and to
reunite the divided nation.14 Whitman’s war poetry was admired by twentieth-
century critics both for its innovative free verse form and for its plainspoken
language. Yet if we read Whitman in relation to the dominant categories of
Civil War–era poetry, his ainities with his contemporaries come clearly into
focus. Whitman responded to four dominant trends in Civil War–era poetry,
including the call to arms, the focus on landscapes, the soldier elegy, and the
Lincoln elegy.
In editing Drum-Taps and its sequel, Whitman chose to order the poems in a
way that re-created the war’s chronology. In “Eighteen Sixty-One” and “Beat!
Beat! Drums!” he reminds readers of the momentum of the war’s irst year,
as young men joined the Union army and whole communities were swept up
in the excitement. Like James Sloan Gibbons’s “Three Hundred Thousand
More,” Whitman’s “Eighteen Sixty-One” imagines male bodies springing
from a generative landscape. With its dramatic imperatives and its driving
rhythm, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” moves even closer to the genre of the call to
arms (WH, p. 232). Yet both “Eighteen Sixty-One” and “Beat! Beat! Drums!”
depart from the conventional call to arms in signiicant ways. Tellingly, nei-
ther poem uses the collective “we” for soldiers or Union supporters. Thus,
rather than forging a collective “we,” both of these poems instead describe the
nationalist fervor that was in the air when calls to arms abounded.
Whitman’s commitment to representing the American landscape is evi-
dent in the majority of his Civil War poems. In “Bivouac on a Mountain
Side,” he ofers a description of setting up camp for the night. The poem’s
language is relatively detached and spare, relecting perhaps contemporary

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photographic images or journalistic descriptions of military camps. In rep-

resenting the relationship between the valley, the campires, and the stars
above – “far out of reach, studded, breaking out” – the poem clearly responds
to Romanticism, all the while propelling that tradition forward into a new,
more ambivalent poetics (WH, p. 234). The speaker neither endorses nor cri-
tiques the military undertaking; nor does the poem take a stand on whether
or not nature endorses the war. The poem thus leaves the reader to decide
how to understand the relationship between nature and human beings. It is
easy to imagine why twentieth-century scholars admired the innovation of
poems like this one.
It is also easy to imagine the pleasures that nineteenth-century readers took
in Whitman’s poems. In “Come Up from the Fields Father,” Whitman draws
a contrast between the plenitude of the family farm – “all calm, all vital and
beautiful” – and the emotional devastation sufered by the mother when she
intuits her only son’s impending death in the war (WH, p. 235). The words of
comfort the daughter ofers gently echo the language of sentimental stances:
“Grieve not so, dear mother.” In ofering an extended representation of the
family’s sorrow, the poem tips slightly toward the sentimental stances of Ball’s
“Jacket of Gray.” Yet in its acknowledgment of the mother’s profound depres-
sion – “O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and
withdraw” – and in its refusal to ofer its readers any solace for the mother’s
sufering, the poem aligns itself far more strongly with Ethelinda Beers’s “The
Picket-Guard,” a poem that refuses to use nationalist pieties to justify war-
time deaths (WH, p. 235). In “Come Up from the Fields,” all the prosperous
abundance of “teeming and wealthy Ohio” can ofer little comfort to a griev-
ing mother. Here Whitman points toward the limits of Romanticism as a
means of responding to war: the natural and human worlds are painfully out
of joint.
In still other poems, however, Whitman ofers a redemptive vision of the
relationship between human-authored warfare and the natural world. In
“Pensive on her Dead Gazing,” a maternal igure enjoins the land to absorb
the blood shed by soldiers that new life may spring forth: “My dead absorb or
South or North – my young men’s bodies absorb, and their precious precious
blood” (WH, p. 248). In the lush imagery of the Lincoln elegies, Whitman
again emphasizes the redemptive powers of nature. In “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the bird’s song of grief and the painful abundance of
spring lowers become a source of comfort for the grieving speaker; a speaker
who initially mourns his painful disconnection from spring’s plenitude is even-
tually able to accept that plenitude as consolation.

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Like Whitman, Dickinson made Romantic stances central to her war poetry.
The two dominant trends that Dickinson responded to from the spectrum of
Civil War poetry are representations of battleield landscapes and soldier ele-
gies. Moreover, Dickinson also ofered an oblique but powerful relection on
race relations in the Union army. If the irst generation of Dickinson scholars
overlooked her interest in the war, a second group of scholars has tended to
emphasize Dickinson’s radical skepticism in relation to wartime ideologies.
Yet because Dickinson chose not to publish via conventional print means, she
had the freedom to take a range of contradictory stances in her poems. One
of the most surprising results of resituating Dickinson’s war poetry in the con-
text of work by her contemporaries is that we can see that Dickinson some-
times endorsed conventional patriotic arguments about soldiers’ deaths. Like
Whitman, then, Dickinson employed both skeptical and patriotic stances.
Dickinson’s battleield landscapes are among her most remarkable war
poems. On the surface, these are genteel painterly representations of New
England vistas; just beneath this surface, however, the poems grapple with
the challenges of representing modern warfare with the imagistic repertoire
of Romanticism. In “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ –” (F, no. 465), Dickinson
ofers a description of an autumnal landscape, tracing the movement of scar-
let leaves. Already in its second line, however, the poem takes a macabre turn:
the leaves are the color of “blood,” and they move in patterns that resem-
ble “an artery” and “a vein.”15 Dickinson here echoes the imagery of Howe’s
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” by describing a blood-drenched ield, but
while the dead bodies in Howe’s poem are assigned a redemptive meaning
(“let us die to make men free”), no particular meaning is ascribed to the car-
nage in Dickinson’s poem. By the second stanza, the patterns of leaves have
become “globules,” a metaphor that makes explicit that it is a battleield, not
an autumn ield, that the poem represents; the collision of the medical with
the Romantic diction signals the inadequacy of Romanticism for represent-
ing war. Like George Boker’s “In the Wilderness,” Dickinson’s poem swerves
from the picturesque into the grotesque. In “Hearing the Battle,” Sarah Piatt
contrasts the genteel Victorian garden with a scene of nearby carnage in order
to underline ironically middle-class women’s separation from the ield of
combat. In analogous fashion, Dickinson here uses a genteel painterly stance
as a veneer of irony that only half-conceals a key argument in the poem:
ultimately Dickinson’s poem suggests that women writers can and should
respond to war.
In another of her landscape poems, however, Dickinson seems to incline
toward patriotic pieties in assigning meaning to soldiers’ deaths. “They

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dropped like Flakes –” (F, no. 545) uses a list of picturesque nature images to
describe soldiers dying:
They dropped like Flakes –
They dropped like Stars –
Like Petals from a Rose –
The pairing of nature images with falling bodies is somewhat jarring, but
the total efect is nonetheless one of distancing aestheticization. The second
stanza takes up the question of how the vast numbers of dead soldiers will be
identiied. So great are the numbers of the fallen, the speaker declares, that
“No eye could ind the place –.” The poem concludes, however, with the insis-
tent declaration that “God can summon every face / On his Repealless – List,”
a claim that seems to support the widely held belief that dying in battle was a
sure path toward God.
In “When I was small, a Woman died –” (F, no. 518), Dickinson meditates
on the reunion in heaven of a long-deceased mother and her son, who has
recently died in battle. Dickinson here strongly echoes the sentimental focus
on mothers’ mourning. Moreover, the poem’s conclusion again argues that
dying in battle is a form of Christian martyrdom. The speaker declares:
I’m conident that Bravoes –
Perpetual break abroad
For Braveries, remote as this
In yonder Maryland –
Dickinson echoes this same argument in another poem composed at about
the same time (spring 1863): “It may be – a Renown to live – / I think the Men
who die –, / Those unsustained – Saviors – /Present Divinity –” (F, no. 524).
The number of poems in which Dickinson responds to the deaths of sol-
diers makes clear that she was deeply engaged in responding to the war; these
poems also suggest that she sometimes turned to conventional patriotic ide-
ologies in trying to make sense of those deaths.
In still other poems that respond to soldiers’ experience, however, Dickinson
takes more radical positions. For example, it is possible to read “My Life had
stood – a Loaded Gun –” (F, no. 764) as a meditation on the new identity a
young man gains in joining the military and the adrenaline rush of opening
ire on the enemy:
And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow –
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through –.

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Moreover, in “Color – Caste – Denomination –” (F, no. 836), Dickinson seems

to ofer a response to the tensions that result from racial mixing in the Union
army. Probably written in early 1864 – several months after black soldiers
had begun to receive positive newspaper coverage for their courage under
ire – “Color – Caste – Denomination –” argues that death erases all marks of
racial and class diference: “Death’s diviner Classifying / Does not know they
are –.” When Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white leader of the all-black
Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth regiment, was buried in a mass grave with his
fallen soldiers behind enemy lines in July 1863, the Confederate army’s refusal
to return his body was widely reported in Northern newspapers, including the
Springield Republican. It is possible that the circumstances of Shaw’s burial may
have shaped Dickinson’s arguments in “Color – Caste – Denomination –”; read
in relation to newspaper accounts of the military service of African Americans
and their treatment in the Union army, the poem’s critique of racial and class
categories underlines that Dickinson was intensively engaged in responding
to wartime ideologies.
Like Dickinson, Herman Melville alternates in Battle-Pieces between articu-
lating skepticism about wartime policies and turning toward the consolations
that nationalist ideologies ofer. Torn between his desire to critique the ide-
ologies that fueled the war and to ofer comfort to a grieving nation, Melville
experiments with many diferent stances in Battle-Pieces: the diverse collection
includes poems that lament the carnage of war, high-literary stances that cel-
ebrate military heroism, echoes of popular patriotic songs that both endorse
and critique the war’s violence, and a prose supplement that exhorts Northern
readers to reconcile with the South. Organized chronologically in relation to
the war’s events, the collection does not begin with conventional nationalist
stances and move toward more radical or skeptical ones; rather, it oscillates
between these positions throughout.
In “The Portent,” Melville responds to popular Civil War literature on mul-
tiple levels. Working with incantatory repetition of names, he echoes poems
like Gibbons’s “Three Hundred Thousand More” and Palmer’s “Stonewall
Jackson’s Way,” each of which uses a hero’s name to celebrate the power of
an army. But while Gibbons and Palmer repeat Lincoln’s and Jackson’s names
to urge men to join the army and to urge those armies on to valor, Melville’s
repetition of John Brown’s name works to foreground its divisive power. The
poem begins with a description of Brown’s body after his execution: “Hanging
from the beam, / Slowly swaying (such the law).”16 As Melville’s poem makes clear,
the swinging of Brown’s body symbolizes the dividing of the nation: Brown’s
name would become a rallying cry for both armies, as Southerners rebelled

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against Northern interference, and as Northerners – many of whom were

ambivalent about abolition – joined in the collective singing of “John Brown’s
Body.” While the popular song insists on a narrative of Christian martyrdom
for the abolitionist (“His soul is marching on”), Melville’s poem refuses the
consolations of that nationalist paradigm, insisting instead that Brown’s ulti-
mate fate – like the fate of the nation – cannot be known: “Hidden in the cap
/ Is the anguish none can draw; / So your future veils its face, / Shenandoah!” (BP,
p. 11).
In “The Cumberland,” Melville again works with incantatory repetition of
names, this time repeating a frigate’s name to commemorate its defeat. The
poem opens with a meditation on the power of names:
Some names there are of telling sound,
Whose voweled syllables free
Are pledge that they shall ever live renowned. (BP, p. 53)

Melville here describes how an act of commemoration – the reiteration of a

name – can recall the bravery of men and the glory of a sunken ship, allowing
both to live on in an eternal literary present. Yet in this poem, as in most Battle-
Pieces poems, Melville carefully sidesteps the stance of the call to arms, avoids
use of the collective “we,” and refuses to describe the events of the battle in
the present tense. The future tense he uses here is the future of commemo-
ration, and although the poem draws from a celebratory nationalist rhetoric,
what is being commemorated is not the glory of the nation as a whole but
rather the glory of the men and the ship in one speciic battle.
In “Donelson,” Melville examines the ways that journalism and, by impli-
cation, poetry work to fan the lames of nationalism in wartime. The frame
story is set in a Northern town where telegraphed bulletins about a battle
are being read aloud outside a newspaper oice; the poem moves back and
forth between the scene of combat being described by the journalists and the
town square, where the crowd reacts to each day’s developments. Following
the announcement of a successful round of ighting, a subsequent bulletin
revises the initial impression that the battle is nearly over, making explicit the
possibility for error in delivery of the news: “(Our own reporter a dispatch com-
piles, / As best he may from varied sources.)” (BP, p. 41). The couplet suggests that
journalism, like poetry, can only approximate the events of the war: it cannot
hope to represent them fully or accurately. When the inal announcement of
victory is read, there is a collective celebratory cheer from the listeners, who
are constituted in the poem as a uniied bloc of Union supporters. The poem
concludes, however, by describing the list of the dead posted the next day, a

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list that will be read silently by “wife and maid”; they will weep in response to
it, enduring a private sufering that will divide them from the joyous crowd of
the night before (BP, p. 52).
While “Donelson” responds to the medium of journalism, suggesting that
it will both unite and ultimately divide Northerners, “Shiloh” responds to
the genre of popular song, ofering a critique of the interlinked ideologies of
Christian martyrdom and nationalism. Echoing the strong cultural interest
in landscape depiction, “Shiloh” opens with a panoramic view of the battle-
ield long after combat has ended. The poem then goes on to acknowledge
the “parting groan” and “natural prayer” of the dying – echoing the words
of “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” who “prayed before he died” (BP, p. 62).17
At the same time, however, Melville quietly unravels the consolations of the
Drummer Boy, who declares, “I’ve loved my country as my God.” Melville’s
“Shiloh” argues that “fame” and “country” become irrelevant to the dying:
“(What like a bullet can undeceive!).” Appearing four times in the poem, the
word “Shiloh” acoustically urges the living to hush as they contemplate battle-
ields where men died.
Melville makes this injunction to silence explicit in “An Uninscribed
Monument on One of the Battle-Fields of the Wilderness,” a poem that ech-
oes S. A. Jonas’s “Only a Soldier’s Grave” in its concern with unmarked graves.
While Jonas worries that unmarked graves will mean unmourned soldiers,
Melville insists on an uninscribed monument for an unnamed soldier, suggest-
ing that no inscriptions and no graveside speeches can be adequate for the task
of mourning the vast numbers of dead. S. A. Jonas’s poem ofers three stanzas
of lament for anonymous graves followed by a closing stanza that enjoins the
living to mark each grave; the poem thus achieves ideological closure by call-
ing on the living to commemorate the dead both through gravestone inscrip-
tions and – implicitly – through poems of mourning. Melville, however, talks
back to the custom of graveside speechmaking and the poetry of mourning.
Ultimately “An Uninscribed Monument” suggests that no text or speech can
reunite a grieving nation in the aftermath of war; indeed, the poem suggests
that silent and solitary mourning is the only possible response to war. The
poem’s speaker declares: “Thou who beholdest, if thy thought, / Not nar-
rowed down to personal cheer, / Take in the import of the quiet here – / The
after-quiet – the calm full fraught; / Thou too wilt silent stand – / Silent as I,
and lonesome as the land” (BP, p. 173).
Battle-Pieces reveals Melville’s keen awareness of the ethical challenges that
a writer faces in trying to respond to a long and costly civil war. In the war-
time writings of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, a reader inds perhaps a

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more fully articulated understanding of the crisis of representation posed by

the war; yet in poems by Joshua McCarter Simpson, Ethelinda Beers, George
Boker, and Sidney Lanier, among many others, a reader also inds an aware-
ness that the Civil War must necessarily change the way writers respond to
war’s violence and the ways that they deine the nation. Sarah Piatt describes
overhearing the Battle of Bull Run as overhearing “the irst ierce words of
war” (PB, p. 2). What Piatt’s phrase makes clear is that these writers under-
stood their poetry as a means of intervening in the war’s events. “To ight
aloud, is very brave –” (F, no. 138), Dickinson writes in 1860, ofering a similar
claim. As the proliferation of voices and stances in Civil War–era poetry makes
plain, poetry worked both to build and to divide constituencies among difer-
ent audience communities. The poetry of the American Civil War shaped
the rise and fall of the Confederacy, the successful ight for abolition, and the
constitution of the Union as a political and military force. In the aftermath
of the war, poetry would be one of the central discursive sites for grieving
the war’s losses; it would also be one of the central discursive sites for the-
orizing the reuniting of North and South. Yet the intensity and diversity of
poetic voices the war produced makes clear how very diicult that work of
reuniication would prove to be. In American poetry, the challenges of politi-
cal reuniication would be signaled in part by the postbellum turn away from
nationalist paeans and formal regularity, toward realism, fragmentation, and
imagistic compression – the hallmarks of a modernist poetics. While these are
features we recognize as characteristic in the work of Whitman, Dickinson,
and Melville, they also have their roots in the extraordinarily rich body of
work produced by the broader spectrum of Civil War poets.

Notes
1. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil
War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 479.
2. For a fuller discussion of this body of work, see Faith Barrett, To Fight Aloud
Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2012).
3. Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller (eds.), Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of
American Civil War Poetry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005),
p. 27. Hereafter all citations from Words for the Hour will be quoted in the text
as WH.
4. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press at the City
University of New York, 1990), p. 94.

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 Fai t h B ar rett

5. William Shepperson (ed.), War Songs of the South (Richmond, Va.: West and
Johnston, 1862), pp. 17–19.
6. See C. A. Browne, The Story of Our National Ballads (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1919), pp. 181–99, and also Boyd Sutler, “John Brown’s Body,” Civil
War History 4 (1958), pp. 251–61.
7. “John Brown’s Body” (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1861), n.p.
8. See Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South,
1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. chap-
ter 3, “The Sentimental Soldier.”
9. Will S. Hays, “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” (Louisville: D. P. Faulds,
1863), n.p.
10. See Paula Bennett’s introduction to Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Palace-Burner:
The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed. Paula Bernat Bennett (Carbondale:
University of Illinois Press, 2001). This volume will be cited subsequently in
the text as PB.
11. For a detailed account of Horton’s life and writing career, see Joan Sherman’s
“Introduction,” in George Moses Horton, The Black Bard of North Carolina:
George Moses Horton and His Poetry, ed. Joan Sherman (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997). References to Horton’s work are cited from
this edition and are hereafter cited in the text with the abbreviation BB.
12. William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly 29 (February 1867), p. 252.
13. Walt Whitman, Prose Works, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University
Press, 1963), vol. 1, p. 115.
14. See Timothy Sweet’s incisive analysis in Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and
the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
15. Dickinson’s poems are cited from R. W. Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily
Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
These are hereafter cited in the text using the initial “F” and the numbers
assigned by Franklin to the poems (not page numbers).
16. Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper, 1866),
p. 11. This volume will be cited subsequently in the text as BP.
17. Hays, “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” n.p.

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 Chapter 15
Walt Whitman’s Invention of a
Democratic Poetry
E d F o ls o m

The place to begin with Walt Whitman is not at the beginning, with the
poet’s origins and the origins of his work, but rather at the ongoing end,
with the remarkable response to his poetry that started during the poet’s
own lifetime and has grown ever since. Whitman devoted his career to dein-
ing and enacting a new poetics that would be distinctive to the American
nation and its democratic aspirations. His genius was to invent a new kind of
poetic address – a conversation with his reader, whom he named “you” – and
to cast that “you” into the future, years or centuries beyond the poet’s death,
so that his poetry seems always to be intimately yet publicly addressing us as
a voice from our past, speaking from his present to his future, our present.
The poetry thus enacts, in an unsettlingly self-conscious way, a conversation
literally across time, in which dead poet and living reader – or living poet
and unborn reader – ind union in the here and now of Whitman’s poem,
which has a palpable existence across time, allowing for the living to com-
municate with the dead (or the dead with the living) through the medium
of poetry.
Not only has Whitman’s poetic invention worked to form a vast and loyal
community of readers over the many decades since its appearance, it has gen-
erated a remarkable ongoing conversation with what he called the “poets to
come”:
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look
upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and deine it,
Expecting the main things from you.1
His impact has been such that virtually all American poets after him have in
some way had to engage him – to build on his ideas of what an American poet
should be, or to argue against those ideas and forge a diferent direction. Often

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their responses to him involve a direct address right back to Whitman, revers-
ing his “I” and “you”: “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman,” wrote Ezra
Pound in “A Pact” (1913), noting that “It was you that broke the new wood, /
Now is a time for carving.”2 Twentieth- and twenty-irst-century poets have
carved the wood Whitman broke into a dizzying variety of shapes, but, as
Pound grudgingly admitted, it was usually Whitman’s original material with
which these poets to come would work. His l uid address to his reader, to
the promiscuous “you” that he invented (teasing out all the implications of
how the second-person pronoun in English signals at once the intimacy of a
lover and the distance of a stranger, how it signals at once only you, a “sim-
ple separate person,” and also you, the “en masse,” the world of potentially
intimate strangers who always hover around us), would entice generations
of poets – from Hart Crane to Langston Hughes, from Muriel Rukeyser to
Robert Creeley, from William Carlos Williams to Allen Ginsberg to June
Jordan, and from Federico García Lorca to Jorge Luis Borges to Cesare Pavese
to Czeslaw Milosz – to respond, to talk back to him, and his inl uence would
extend far and wide, across race and social class and ethnicity and poetic style
and nationality.3
Whitman’s inl uence has extended well beyond poetry. He has been exam-
ined seriously by political scientists and cultural theorists as a philosopher of
democracy,4 and he has been a central igure in gay history and queer studies,
often credited with inventing the language of homosexual love.5 His work has
been set to music more often than that of any other American poet: more than
ive hundred composers – from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Paul Hindemith to
Ned Rorem – have composed pieces using his work.6 He has been the subject
of and inspiration for innumerable songs over the past century, by songwrit-
ers from Woody Guthrie to Tom Russell to Bibi Tanga. He has been the sub-
ject of, and inspiration for, paintings and sculptures by American artists from
Thomas Eakins to Ben Shahn; he has inspired the architects Louis Sullivan and
Frank Lloyd Wright, photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston,
and ilmmakers from D. W. Griith to Jim Jarmusch.7 More than any other
American poet, his presence has continued to radiate throughout the culture,
and he reemerges in advertisements (most recently a television commercial
for Levi’s jeans that showed images of a decayed but still resilient America
as the wax-cylinder recording of Whitman reading his 1888 poem “America”
served as the voice-over), in politics (from Theodore Roosevelt’s equating of
Whitman’s urban poetics to Dante’s Inferno, to John Kennedy’s decision to
have Edward G. Robinson read a section of “Thou Mother with Thy Equal
Brood” as the introduction to his 1960 acceptance speech at the Democratic

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National Convention, and to Bill Clinton’s gift of Leaves of Grass to his former
intern, Monica Lewinsky), and in social commentary (which tends to selec-
tively cite Whitman in support of both progressive and conservative causes,
emphasizing either his radical boundary-breaking passages or his passages cel-
ebrating America as a nation destined for greatness).8
Such an outpouring of response from across the literary, artistic, cultural,
and even political spectrum did not happen by accident. Even though his ideas
and schemes could easily have failed, Whitman nonetheless set out to con-
struct a poetry and a poetic persona that would speak to, inspire, and teach his
nation – and ultimately the world – how to think democratically, in a nondis-
criminating or even indiscriminate way, and how to articulate such thought in
a new form that would help deine an evolving democratic poetry.
Although our literary histories have tended to categorize Whitman as a
poet and to focus on his shape-shifting thirty-seven-year-long book project
that he named Leaves of Grass, it is important at the outset to keep in mind
that he wrote more prose than he did poetry, and that, while he was publish-
ing a few remarkably conventional (in both form and sentiment) poems in
the 1840s, he was at that time better known for his iction, a series of moral-
ity tales, several of which appeared in the respected United States Magazine
and Democratic Review and a number of which were reprinted in newspapers
across the country. In 1841, he published his temperance novel, Franklin Evans,
as a supplement in the New World newspaper. Long dismissed as embarrassing
juvenilia, several of these ictional works have in recent decades been read by
critics as ofering insights into Whitman’s early struggles to articulate what
would become key issues in Leaves of Grass.9 A number of the stories, like the
novel, deal with the abuse of alcohol and focus on the barroom as a place of
violation and a site for new possibilities of afection. The 1841 story “The Child
and the Prol igate,” for example, represents a symbolic homosexual rape fol-
lowed by a comforting image of a night of male-male love shared between a
reformed drunkard and the boy who had alcohol forced down his throat by
a one-eyed sailor.10 Franklin Evans is an episodic adventure following the title
character as he leaves his rural life to go to New York to be seduced by the plea-
sures of alcohol. In the course of his wavering resolve to reform, during which
he succumbs to his “fatal pleasure”11 again and again only to reform again and
again, he inds himself on a Southern plantation, where, drunk, he marries a
mixed-blood slave woman.12 Other tales have to do with violent death. We can
discern in these early tales a kind of mixed brew of ideas and incidents that,
over the course of his career, Whitman would develop into Leaves of Grass, in
which death, a commitment to an ever-renewing open road that allows for

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one’s identity to be l uid and unburdened by the past, a bravery about violat-
ing societal conventions and taboos – sexual, racial, or social – in a desire to
experience the fullness and diversity of life, and a irm belief that love itself
will be redeined and broadened by the experience of living in an evolving
democratic society all come together in an explosive new kind of writing, a
long-lined poetry that absorbs the world detail by detail, erasing the memory
of what came before so as to devote the open senses to what comes now.
While he was writing his early, mostly conventional poetry and his often
unconventional iction, Whitman was also developing a career as a journalist.
At twelve, he began his career as a newspaper worker, learning typesetting as
an apprentice at the Long Island Patriot under the tutelage of master printer
William Hartshorne. Late in his life, Whitman wrote a poem called “A Font
of Type,” in which he imagines all the “unlauch’d voices – passionate pow-
ers, / Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout” that lie
“within the pallid slivers slumbering” in “This latent mine” of the type box
(LG, p. 509). That poem harkens back to the poet’s experiences as a boy in
Hartshorne’s Brooklyn printing oice, where he learned “the awkward hold-
ing of the stick” and “the pleasing mystery of the diferent letters” in the huge
type cases in front of him.13 Whitman probably never composed a line of
poetry without, in his mind’s eye, putting it on a composing stick. Eventually,
typesetting the words of others led him to want to see his own words in print;
his irst signed piece appeared in the fashionable New York Mirror when he
was ifteen. Called “The Olden Time,” Whitman’s little article begins by talk-
ing about how “vastly strange” it is to be told that, as “old” and “civilized” as
New York City felt in the 1830s, there were still people alive who “conversed
with men who once saw the present great metropolitan city as a little dorp or
village.” Whitman goes on to tell how, in 1758, a “Negro Harry,” “aged at least
one hundred and twenty years,” had died on Long Island. He had been a slave
in the same family for a hundred years. This “old oracle” carried the history
of the community in a way no one else could, and he remembered New York
when “there were but three houses in it.”14 The young Whitman had talked to
people who knew Negro Harry and heard his amazing tales.
Whitman always carried with him this little bit of history he had picked up
in his childhood and used it again, thirty years later, at the end of the Civil War,
in his poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” as he imagined a Union soldier on
General Sherman’s march through the South confronting a newly freed hun-
dred-plus-year-old slave woman. The bemused soldier can only wonder what
she must have seen during her century’s journey through America, one that
began with white men enslaving her and now ends with white men freeing

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her: “Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?” (LG,
p. 319). From early on, Whitman knew that the best chroniclers of America’s
past were often those who were themselves written out of the oicial histories
of the nation: he built a writing career, an aesthetic, on the principle of giving
voice to the individuals in the society who otherwise had no public voice – the
worker, the prostitute, the slave, the venerealee. As he put it in the poem that
he would eventually entitle “Song of Myself ”:

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no diference between them and the rest. (LG, p. 46)

Over the years, working for and editing nearly a dozen newspapers in and
around New York, Whitman produced a massive amount of journalism, writ-
ing commentary on virtually every major social issue of his day, from the
need for urban green space, to the need for clean water, to the need to care
for prostitutes, to the controversy over capital punishment, to the costs of
war, and to the problems that the expansion of slavery into new territories
would cause for white workers moving west. He went to New Orleans to edit
the Daily Crescent for a few months in 1848, where he experienced the South’s
peculiar institution irsthand and saw the slave auctions that would haunt him
from then on; he would take on the persona of the auctioneer and conduct
a bitterly ironic inventory and valuing of the commodiied human body in “I
Sing the Body Electric.”
He returned to Brooklyn to start a free-soil newspaper, the Freeman, but
then, in the early 1850s, he took a break from editing and turned to the writ-
ing of Leaves of Grass. He gave himself time to read, and he wrote incessantly
in the small notebooks he always carried with him, allowing his roiling ideas
to evolve and discover a form of expression. In a burst of creative energy, still
discernible in the notebooks he left behind, he discovered his revolutionary
new vehicle, a long-lined free verse organized by a vast and absorptive “I” who
would speak for all of America in a brash and nondiscriminating voice.
Whitman’s notebooks and surviving manuscripts reveal the intensity and
luidity of the development of his poetic style. Images, phrases, and whole lines
of what would become Leaves of Grass can be found in his prose jottings, and
only a year or two before Leaves appeared, Whitman was unclear what shape –
even what genre – his new expression would take: in one notebook from the

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early 1850s, in which prose lines appear that would later take their place in the
poetry of Leaves, Whitman writes, “Novel? Work of some sort / Play? . . . Plot
for a Poem or other work . . . A spiritual novel?”15 Still thinking of himself as a
iction writer, Whitman initially assumed his new work might take that form.
Some of his other notes indicate he thought his ideas would best emerge as
speeches, and he imagined going on the lecture circuit. Only gradually do the
notebooks edge toward his discovery of his poetic line, but once that discovery
comes, he moves quickly toward his inished book. What is clear is that Leaves
of Grass emerges from his early prose and has its roots there.
Whitman’s thousands of poetry manuscripts have, remarkably, never
been edited and are only now appearing for the irst time in the online Walt
Whitman Archive. The earliest of these manuscripts reveal how Whitman
scoured his prose notebooks, in which he had jotted down ideas and recorded
impressions of his walks through New York and Brooklyn, and began culling
those descriptions for phrases that would become the core of his poetic lines.
Once he discovered his line – a portable unit of perception usually generated
by a irst-person speaker in the present tense, with the syntax extended by
the repeated use of participles – he could quickly build poems.16 The line
remained his basic building unit. Once he had a line, he tended to keep it and
then move it around, testing it in diferent juxtapositions with other lines. As
a professional typesetter, he was used to thinking of lines of type as move-
able units, and, as a poet, he tended to revise by rearranging lines. Some early
manuscripts are composed of lines that would later appear in Leaves, but that
are arranged in an entirely diferent order. Throughout his career, he would
continue to revise by literally cutting and pasting lines in new arrangements;
a number of his surviving poetry manuscripts are in fact strips of paper,
each containing a line of poetry, pasted together in the order he had inally
shuled the lines into. In his idiosyncratic poetic catalogues, each line adds
another moment of perception without altering or modifying the previous
line, both accreting detail and shifting the reader’s moment of perception so
that the cumulative efect is of an ever-renewing present erasing a quickly
fading past. He created a syntax of continual restarting, of not letting the past
accumulate and weigh down the fresh perception that was always available
in the now.17
In July 1855, Whitman took his still-in-l ux manuscript to his friend Andrew
Rome, who ran a small print shop in Brooklyn and specialized in printing
legal documents. Leaves of Grass would be the irst book Rome ever printed.
Setting some of the type himself, Whitman quickly altered his original plans
for the book when he realized he would have to use the large, legal-sized page

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that the Rome shop was set up to handle; thus the irst edition of Leaves, with
its bold typeface and rough inish, looks like what it in fact is: a declaration
of literary independence, a proclamation of a new kind of literature it for a
new democracy, printed words that look like they were made to be posted.18
Omitting his name from the title page, he intensiied the sense of the book as
a public document. He included as a frontispiece an engraving of himself in
laborer’s garb, with his hat on, ixing the reader with a challenging look. The
portrait is unlike any previous frontispiece representation of an author: the
full-body pose, with the torso as the center of focus, suggests that this poetry
emerges not just from the intellect but from the experience of a body at work
in the world, hat on, shirt open, ready to be inspired and ready also to perspire.
Blithely conident that even death will not stop him, the brash poetic “I” of the
long opening poem in the 1855 edition turns these legal-form-sized pages into
a last will and testament, transferring the energy of the speaker over to the
reader, who is charged with carrying on the journey that he or she has, at the
poem’s end, literally inherited: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the
grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. / . . . /
I stop some where waiting for you.”19
At the last minute, Whitman added a prose preface to his book, deining
the new American poet. He composed the preface by culling from his note-
books passages in which he had theorized about the nature of a new American
poetry, and he connected these statements with his idiosyncratic ellipses,
avoiding standard punctuation for a looser and more l uid syntax controlled
by a variable number of dots, the same idiosyncratic punctuation he would
use in the poetry itself. In the preface, he issued commandments for both poet
and reader, building a catalogue of imperative behaviors that culminate in a
physically transformed body:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise
riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning
God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take of your hat to
nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with
powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of
families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your
life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very lesh shall be a great
poem and have the richest l uency not only in its words but in the silent lines
of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion
and joint of your body. (LG 1855, pp. v–vi)

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These biblical-sounding injunctions are energized by Whitman’s democratic

pride and by his insistence that we know only through the body: whatever
good his poetry will do, he indicates, will be manifest by its transforming
efects on the lesh itself. The lines of his poetry, when read by the reader’s
lips, will form the “silent lines” of those lips, and its rhythms will be evi-
dent in “every motion and joint” of the reader’s body. His commandments –
“what you shall do” – are always, ironically, anticommandments, instructions
to undermine commandment, to “hate tyrants,” to “argue not concerning
God,” and to show subservience to no one, including, presumably, this poet
who is commanding us to “re-examine all [we] have been told,” including the
very instructions we are reading.
Following the preface were twelve poems, the irst six all called “Leaves of
Grass,” the last six untitled. Because Whitman was paying for the publication,
he had the typesetters squeeze the last six poems tightly onto the pages so
that he would not have to pay for an extra signature. He printed 795 copies,
stopping the press a couple of times to correct errors and once to change an
entire line, and then he had the pages bound on three diferent occasions in
progressively cheaper bindings. It is ironic that the 1855 Leaves has become the
most valorized of all the editions, a kind of talisman of American literature
(with recently sold copies going for as much as $200,000), because it is the edi-
tion that Whitman valued the least as a piece of bookmaking: “I can’t imagine
why anyone would want that book,” Whitman said late in his life when told
that collectors were seeking it out.20 Even the printer of the book, Andrew
Rome, in 1890 would recall “the diiculties” he encountered in printing the
1855 Leaves, speaking of his “old press . . . and of the poor job they were able
to do.”21 Everything suggests that Whitman was disappointed in how that irst
edition looked. And it is also ironic that it became the most valorized edition
because it is the one edition for which there were no plates. Rome printed the
book from set type, which slipped and moved a good deal as the book was
being printed; some type even broke of or fell out, notably the inal period
in “Song of Myself,” following the last line of the poem, “I stop somewhere
waiting for you.” Many critics have seen the absence of that period as a signii-
cant and radical gesture on Whitman’s part, indicating that his poem does not
really end when the words do but passes on to the reader, who must now carry
on with the journey. Compelling as this interpretation is, the recent census of
all the known copies of the 1855 edition reveals that in fact seven of the nearly
two hundred extant copies do have that inal period, and clearly it was there
when Whitman proofed the irst sheets of the press.22 The period fell of early
in the printing, and Whitman added the period back when the 1856 edition

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was published. As soon as the 1855 edition was printed, the type was distrib-
uted and immediately used again for legal forms. The makeshift volume could
never be reprinted.
The 1855 edition of Leaves, then, demonstrates the striking combination of
pragmatic thinking, supple improvisation, continual reconstructing, obsessive
concern for detail, and random chance that would mark all of Whitman’s
poetic output. He was a speculator in houses during the years he was writing
Leaves, and he oversaw the building of new homes into which he would move
his family, only to begin the building of yet another home, which he would
then move his family into when he sold the previous one.23 The building and
rebuilding, the sense of never settling in one place, the experience of tran-
sience, and the l uctuation of risk, luck, and the unpredictable market all fed
into a poetry that celebrated l uidity, incessant change, and open roads, and
that rejected domestic stability as a condition to be valued or sought.
Whitman’s addition of the prose preface to his 1855 Leaves marks the begin-
ning of his career-long fascination with mixing prose and poetry, with framing
and contextualizing his poetry with prose ruminations that served variously
as a gloss on the poems, a counterpoint to the poetry, and often a historical
contextualization of the poems. He would append to his 1856 second edition
of Leaves, for example, a prose section called “Leaves-Droppings,” contain-
ing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brief personal letter to Whitman after reading
Leaves (in which he greets Whitman “at the beginning of a great career”),24
Whitman’s own very public and extended letter in response to Emerson, and
a selection of reviews – positive and negative – of the irst edition. This prose
paratext put the poetry into a social debate and framed the way readers would
interpret the work. Twenty years later, in his 1876 two-volume centennial
edition of his writings, he experimented in one of the volumes, called Two
Rivulets, with two separate lows of language on the same page, one poetry
and one prose, inviting the reader to experiment with how to navigate two
seemingly unrelated texts, in two diferent genres, that shared the same page.
Throughout his career, Whitman was comfortable, as a journalist and news-
paper editor, with a page that contained jarring juxtapositions of material,
just as a newspaper page ofered the reader’s eye an energetic clashing ield
of news stories, poems, advertisements, and special interest items, each vying
for a moment of the reader’s attention. Genre for Whitman was a l uid con-
cept, and he was a pioneer in testing generic boundaries, writing a poetry that
many early readers perceived to be prosaic, and creating books that mixed
poetry and prose in ways that anticipate the experiments of modern poets,
like William Carlos Williams in Spring and All.

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The opening poem of the irst edition took up forty-three pages, begin-
ning with “I” (“I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume”)
and ending its long transference of energy to the reader with “you” (“I stop
some where waiting for you”). This long poem, which Whitman would title
“Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in 1856, “Walt Whitman” in 1860,
and inally “Song of Myself ” in 1881, became his best-known work, an epic of
American individualism, setting out to expand the boundaries of the self to
include all of one’s fellow Americans, then the entire world, and ultimately
the cosmos. In this poem, Whitman keeps probing the question of how large
the self can become before it dissipates into contradiction and fragmentation,
and each time he seems to reach the limit, he dilates even more: “My ties and
ballasts leave me . . . . I travel . . . . I sail . . . . my elbows rest in the sea-gaps, / I
skirt sierras . . . . my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision” (LG
1855, p. 35). Cataloguing a huge array of urban and country scenes, portray-
ing people at work in myriad occupations, incorporating vast geographical
stretches, redeining life and death as one continuous and evolving dynamic
process, Whitman’s “I” takes the reader on a staggering journey through reli-
gions, American history, and geological and biological evolution, absorbing
everything and rejecting nothing. His plea is for his readers to learn to accept
and live in plurality, diference, and contradiction, which he deines as the nec-
essary democratic condition: “Do I contradict myself ? / Very well then . . . . I
contradict myself; / I am large . . . . I contain multitudes” (LG 1855, p. 55).
The journey in this poem is one of liberation, and Whitman’s concern with
slavery, the burning issue in the United States during the years he wrote the
poem, is everywhere evident in this irst edition, from the way the “I” identiies
with a captured slave (“I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs”
[LG 1855, p. 39]) to the highly charged moment in the poem he would later
call “The Sleepers” when the “I” turns the narration of the poem over to an
incensed slave whose wife and children have just been sold down the river (“I
hate him that oppresses me, / I will either destroy him, or he shall release me
/ Damn him! how he does deile me” [LG 1855, p. 74]). The whole book plays on
chattel slavery as a cultural metaphor for the various kinds of enslavement –
religious, economic, moral – from which all readers must craft an escape. The
slave-escape core of the poem can be traced back to Whitman’s notebooks,
where, in the “Talbot Wilson” notebook, we ind some of Whitman’s earliest
proto-lines, lines that led to “Song of Myself ”:
I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves
I am the poet of the body

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And I am
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
I am the poet of Strength and Hope25
From the beginning, Whitman was busy embedding deep in his poem
impossible contradictions, and he always wedded opposites with his omni-
present “and.” He would not be the poet of slaves nor the poet of masters
but rather only the poet of slaves and masters. Whatever democratic voice
he invented would have to speak for both, or it was doomed to be partial and
thus not representative. And to stand between masters and slaves, of course,
was to stand in a politically and sexually charged space, historically a place of
rape and torture, but a place also where mixing and hybridity began. There is
no easy space to inhabit in American history, and Whitman was courageous
enough to insist on speaking for the full range of American identities, from
the most powerful to the powerless, and to recognize that there are no slaves
without slave masters, no slave masters without slaves, and that only when
every individual begins to recognize the slave and the slave master within him-
self or herself could a democratic voice begin to merge and emerge.
It was, inally, nothing less than the creation of a previously unheard dem-
ocratic voice that Whitman was after; he sought in “Song of Myself ” to voice
an “I” that would for the irst time articulate just what a nonhierarchical and
nondiscriminating sensibility would sound like. He was not speaking in his
poem as the Walt Whitman of the mid-1850s, a man who shared many of the
biases of his time, but rather as a Whitman projected far into a more perfectly
realized democratic future. He was teaching Americans how to begin to think
and speak democratically, in a freer and looser idiom, in a more conversational
and less formal tone, in an absorptive and indiscriminate way. He achieved
an uncanny combination of oratory, journalism, and the Bible – haranguing,
mundane, and prophetic – all in the service of identifying a new American
democratic attitude, an accepting voice that would catalogue the diversity of
the country and manage to hold it all in a vast, single, uniied identity. This
new voice spoke conidently of union at a time of deep division and tension in
the culture, only ive years short of the outbreak of the Civil War, and it spoke
with the assurance of one for whom everything, no matter how degraded,
could be celebrated as part of itself: “What is commonest and cheapest and
nearest and easiest is Me” (LG 1855, p. 21). His work echoed the lingo of the

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American urban working class and mixed it with the diction of the rising
middle-class newspaper editor, who took pride in an American language that
was forming as a tongue distinct from British English.26
Part of that new American speech involved a much more open acknowl-
edgment of sexuality and the body than the culture was accustomed to. “Song
of Myself ” was fueled by erotic energy – “Urge and urge and urge, / Always
the procreant urge of the world” (LG 1855, p. 14) – and the narrator initiates his
absorptive democratic journey with a bizarre sex act:

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my
barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
(LG 1855, p. 15)

The physical encounter here has been variously read as a homosexual union,
a heterosexual intercourse, or a kind of igurative charging up of the body
by the soul. Whitman is sometimes categorized as a Transcendentalist, but
his beliefs are more descendentalist, the soul entering the body to energize
the senses instead of the soul transcending the physical world. For Whitman,
soul without body was unthinkable, and in this generative scene, the tongue
is plunged into the heart, initiating a union of physical voice with the heart –
both the seat of love and emotion and the organ of life, pumping blood to
the head and hands and genitals. In “Song of Myself,” the narrator’s body
speaks and sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, absorbing the
world through heightened senses: “Welcome is every organ and attribute of
me, . . . / Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile” (LG 1855, p. 14). This
erotic drive would urge the democratic self to cross boundaries of race and
gender and class: “Who need be afraid of the merge? / Undrape . . . . you are
not guilty to me” (LG 1855, p. 17). All humans inhabit bodies, and democracy
starts, Whitman believed, with a full and open acknowledgment of the body’s
desires and drives: they are what unify us.
Once the irst edition of Leaves was printed, Whitman immediately began
a thirty-ive-year process of rethinking and revising his book: “As long as I live
the Leaves must go on,” he once said (WWWC, vol. 1, p. 270). The result is a
textual nightmare for anyone studying the evolution of Leaves from 1855 to
Whitman’s inal deathbed edition. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is not a single
object but a bewildering array of changing book objects with the same title,
in which poems are added, deleted, shuled, and arranged in new clusters,

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and in which size and binding and typeface change in signiicant ways, until
we begin to realize that what we call Leaves of Grass is as much a dynamic pro-
cess as it is a “book” or a “text.” And because the process is dynamic over four
decades, Whitman’s Leaves becomes thoroughly entwined with Whitman’s
life in a way that no other book by any other major American author does. As
Whitman said in “So Long!,” the poem he placed at the end of his book from
1860 on, “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”27 His
book is at once a single evolving text and a shifting set of wildly various book
objects. When Whitman, late in his life, was once looking through the bewil-
dering array of photographs of himself that had been taken from the time he
was in his late twenties, he found himself confused by the series of images he
saw.28 This was a common feeling among that irst generation of people who
had the opportunity to examine photographic traces of themselves aging over
decades. “I meet new Walt Whitmans every day,” the poet told friends as he
stumbled on old photographs of himself; “I don’t know which Walt Whitman
I am.” He began to wonder whether the sequence of photos inally demon-
strated that his life was “evolutional or episodical”: “Taking them in their
periods is there a visible bridge from one to the other or is there a break?”
(WWWC, vol. 4, p. 425). The same question can be asked about his book: was
it a series of separate books, each formed by and responsive to particular his-
torical and biographical moments, or was it in fact one evolving book, accret-
ing new experiences while maintaining not only the same name but the same
identity?
The various editions of Leaves of Grass each went through multiple issues,
often with diferent bindings, diferent paper size, diferent cover designs, dif-
ferent typefaces, and diferent conigurations of contents (to this day, no one is
precisely sure just how many variants there are). Whitman was always experi-
menting with the physical appearance of his book, and his changes relect his
evolving notions of what role his writing would play in the emerging American
democracy. Major historical events like the Civil War and Reconstruction had
a palpable efect on the physical makeup of his books. When he published
his Civil War poems in a separate book called Drum-Taps, for example, he
constructed that book during a time of paper shortage, and the very com-
position of the pages relects his desire to use every inch of space, leading to
an arrangement of poems that has often been read thematically but was in
fact coerced spatially, a book of war poems rationed so as to conserve paper
and space.29 After the war, as Whitman tried to igure out how to absorb his
Civil War poems into Leaves of Grass, he began by constructing an edition in
1867 in which he had the pages of the unbound copies of Drum-Taps sewn

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into the back of the newly printed Leaves, a kind of bibliographical suturing
that represented a irst attempt to heal the vast national wound of the war.
This was the beginning of a long process of postwar reconstruction of Leaves
that mirrors the Reconstruction of the nation that was occurring at the same
time. Some of the copies of the 1867 edition contain Drum-Taps, while others
do not; the bindings change, too, and this l uidity relects his indecision over
whether Leaves of Grass, which originally set out to celebrate the unity of
the United States, could properly contain poems chronicling the divisive war
between the states. By the 1870 edition, Whitman had begun to scatter the
Civil War poems throughout Leaves of Grass and construct a cluster of poems
called “Drum-Taps” that difered signiicantly from the original book of that
name; this process continued in the 1881 edition, in which he added poems
to the “Drum-Taps” cluster (including “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” which
became the sole acknowledgment of race and slavery as an issue in the war)
and moved others to new places in Leaves. By the inal edition, the Civil War
was fully woven into the book.
This is just one example of the hundreds of changes Whitman made to his
books as he designed and redesigned them, each change responding to a par-
ticular biographical and cultural moment. Three of the editions (1855, 1856,
and 1860) are antebellum, and three (1867, 1871–1872, and 1881) postbellum. The
three editions after the Civil War struggle with absorbing Whitman’s haunted
war writings while retaining the celebratory sense of the irst three editions,
which set out to absorb and embrace the nation’s diferences. This episodic
evolution of one of the most important texts in American literature has never
been examined in detail, and there is no time to do it here, but we can indicate
a few of the episodes in the evolution of the text.
Thinking back over all his editions, Whitman said late in his life,

What a sweat I used to be in all the time over getting my damned books pub-
lished! When I look back on it I wonder I didn’t somewhere or other on the
road chuck the whole business into oblivion. Editions! Editions! Editions! like
the last extra of a newspaper: an extra after an extra: one issue after another:
ifty-ive, ifty-six, sixty-one, sixty-seven – oh! edition after edition. Yes, I won-
der I never did anything violent with the book, it has so victimized me!

The friend to whom Whitman said this laughed and noted “how the poor
victim is still making edition after edition: now, even, in eighty-eight – thirty-
three years after ifty-ive.” Whitman answered, “We can’t help ourselves: we
are in a web – we are moths in lames” (WWWC, vol. 3, p. 562). By this time,
Whitman had begun to think of the diferent editions almost as individual

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children: “They all count,” he said, “I don’t know that I like one better than any
other” (WWWC, vol. 1, p. 280).
The irst edition of Leaves had not sold more than a handful of copies, and
Whitman probably gave more copies to potential reviewers than he sold. But
his largesse paid of in that the book did get reviewed. Whitman wrote three
anonymous, not entirely positive, reviews of it himself, and he collected all the
reviews and had many of them printed up for insertion in the inal issue of the
1855 edition. Meanwhile, Emerson, to whom he had sent a copy, lent the book
to many friends, and the Transcendentalist grapevine worked quickly to make
Leaves and the mysterious poet himself the topic of a number of heated con-
versations among igures in the Emerson circle, including Theodore Parker,
Henry David Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, and Franklin Sanborn. The census of extant copies of
the 1855 Leaves of Grass reveals, in fact, that the identiiable original owners of
the irst edition can largely be traced back to Emerson and his recommenda-
tions of the book to his Transcendental literary circle. Without this group of
purchasers, Whitman’s claim late in his life that the irst edition did not sell
any copies – “None of them were sold – practically none – perhaps one or
two, perhaps not even that many” (WWWC, vol. 2, p. 472) – might in fact have
been true. So, even though the meager sales did not drive a second edition,
Whitman’s adept manipulation of the critical response managed to put Leaves
at the center of a heated debate about what American poetry was becoming.
Anxious to move ahead with his project while the reviews of the irst edition
were still appearing, he quickly prepared a second edition.
Whitman had become friendly in the 1850s with the publisher, social
reformer, and phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler, who gave Whitman’s skull
bumps a generous reading, inding him a man of large appetites.30 Fowler’s
irm, Fowler and Wells, had distributed the irst edition, and in 1856 they took
on the publication of Whitman’s second edition, although they withheld their
name from the title page. This aggressive phrenological publishing irm pro-
duced endless self-help manuals, including phrenological guides on how to
manipulate your own skull to discover which qualities you needed to improve.
Whitman illed Leaves with phrenological terms like “adhesiveness” (afection
between people of the same sex) and “amativeness” (afection between peo-
ple of the opposite sex), as well as ofering a memorable image of a kind of
continental phrenological exam, as the poet examined the geological bumps
around the skull of the earth in order to read each country’s character: “my
palms cover continents,” as he put it in “Song of Myself ” (LG, p. 61). Fowler and
Wells produced many books with frank discussions of sex, and they produced

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guides to republican etiquette, all things Whitman included in Leaves and that
conceivably made his book a good it for the publishers, although inally it was
too much even for this radical house, and the irm quietly backed out of reissu-
ing it, concerned that they already were facing enough criticism from the con-
servative establishment for their radical list. But Fowler and Wells owned the
electroplates of the book, and that was a problem for Whitman, who canvassed
friends for money to see if he could raise the $200 necessary to buy them. Had
he been able to raise the funds, the history of Leaves would likely have been
much diferent, because plates were the key: in the second half of the nine-
teenth century, stereotype and electrotype plates were the spinal, enduring
identity of a book. Type was set, a mold was made of the type, molten metal
was poured into the mold, and permanent metal plates then emerged, with
the book type permanently there, ready for printing and reprinting. Whitman
would likely have begun adding supplements to this edition if he owned the
plates, and Leaves might well have been a more stagnant and less interesting
production than it turned out to be in the following years.
For the 1856 edition, Whitman added twenty new poems to the original
twelve. But as the book grew in number of poems, it shrank in page size; the
paper for this edition was less than half the size of that of the irst edition. The
new size was actually closer to the dimensions Whitman had originally had in
mind for his irst edition. Although critics over the years have expressed a pref-
erence for the large, legal-sized pages of the irst edition, in which Whitman’s
lines had room to move unbroken across the page, Whitman preferred what
he thought of as a “pocket-size” volume (and he never returned to the large,
legal sheets of the original Leaves), and so the second edition is something
more akin to a devotional book than a proclamation. His dream now was to
have working people carry his poetry with them to read it during breaks in
their workday. About a thousand copies of this edition were printed.
It is in this edition that we most clearly see Emerson’s inl uence on Whitman.
Whitman owed a great deal to Emerson, whose essay “The Poet” seemed in
many ways to prophesy the poet Whitman became (some critics have argued
that Whitman simply modeled himself on Emerson’s essay). Whitman report-
edly said that by the mid-1850s he was “simmering, simmering, simmering;
Emerson brought me to a boil,”31 and this edition represents the most furi-
ous roiling of the waters. In addition to printing the supportive letter that
Emerson had sent him after reading the 1855 Leaves and his own twelve-page
response to Emerson (addressing him as “Master”), Whitman brazenly fea-
tured Emerson’s name and endorsement – “I greet you at the beginning of a
great career” – on the spine of the book. In his letter to Whitman, Emerson

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had praised Leaves for its “wit and wisdom” but neglected to refer to the work
as poetry, and, as if to set the record straight, Whitman now underscored
the genre that he had decided to claim for himself: he titled every one of his
thirty-two pieces in the new edition “Poem” (“Poem of Women,” “Sun-Down
Poem,” “Poem of the Road,” etc.), and he began his open letter to Emerson by
referring to his work as “poems” seven times in the irst paragraph.32
Two of Whitman’s greatest poems irst appeared in this edition – “Poem of
Wonder at the Resurrection of the Wheat” (later titled “This Compost”) and
“Sun-Down Poem” (later called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). The irst poem
explores the poet’s deep faith in the process of composting, the idea that all of
life is a resurrection out of death, an unending cycle of things breaking down
to their elements, out of which new creations are made. What was true of
the earth’s elements was true of language, too, and the word “compost” has
the same roots as “composition”: Whitman, who loved the quickly expanding
dictionaries of the English language that were appearing at this time, realized
that every poem was a kind of composted composition, something new made
up entirely of elements that were continually recirculating through the lan-
guage. A dictionary, for Whitman, was the compost heap of all past and future
poems. The speaker of this poem worries about how the earth can absorb so
much death and not become poisonous, but the poem comes to celebrate the
“chemistry” that turns that death back into life, that “grows such sweet things
out of such corruptions” (LG 1856, p. 205). Here is the ecological mystery that
lies behind Leaves of Grass and explains the book’s title: the leaves of grass
are the irst sign of new life emerging from the graves of the dead, the proof
that there is no such thing as death. The process of composting, Whitman
knows, is the great democratic principle: everything – from plants to people to
poetry – has to be broken down into its elements for new plants or people or
poems to emerge. So all the insistent “I’s” of the irst section of the poem give
way to the “the’s” and “that’s” and “it’s” of the second section, as the self ima-
gines its release back into the things, the thingness, of the world – an ecstasy
of dif usion instead of a protective recoil. The earth “grows such sweet things
out of such corruptions,” and it “gives us such divine materials,” and it accepts
our “leavings” at the last (LG 1856, p. 205).
Here it is: Whitman’s faith – spirituality as a compost heap, the soul as
endlessly recycling material. He was quickly picking up the lessons of the
scientists of the time whose work was expanding the concepts of time and
space and eternity. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (LG,
p. 28): these spinning atoms that make up each of us were here at the origin
of the cosmos and will be here as long as matter exists. And from some distant

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point in the universe, a telescope powerful enough to see this dust mote we
call Earth would see this world before any of us were born, our present and
our past translated into their future. Whitman would often address his poems
to readers who would be living decades or centuries after he was dead, and his
faith was that his own Leaves of Grass would be, like the organic leaves, the sign
of ongoing identity after his physical demise.
“Sun-Down Poem” would be his great testament to the power of his poetry
to transcend time and space, to allow the poet, living in his present when the
poem was written, to communicate with a reader who was not yet born when
the poem was written: “We understand, then, do we not? / What I promised
without mentioning it, have you not accepted? / What the study could not
teach – what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not?”
(LG 1856, p. 219). All the preaching about the afterlife could not be as efec-
tive as this poem’s actual demonstration of an afterlife, as the living poet talks
intimately to the unborn reader, as the living reader is invited to respond to
the dead poet.
In the years following the 1856 edition, Whitman continued his sporadic
work with Brooklyn newspapers and began frequenting Pfaf ’s beer hall, a
Bohemian hangout on Broadway, where he socialized with Henry Clapp, edi-
tor of the Saturday Press, who became a great supporter of the poet, and
other radical writers and artists. Since Whitman did not control the plates
of the 1856 edition, he reconceived the entire project and worked hard on
revising and vastly expanding Leaves.33 He wrote one particularly haunting
poem, called “A Child’s Reminiscence,” and published it in Clapp’s Saturday
Press in 1859, where it served as a controversial preview and teaser for all the
recent poems he was gathering for a new edition. Retitled “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking,” this poem became Whitman’s Künstlergedicht: with ech-
oes of Edgar Allan Poe and many other poets resonating throughout, the
poem evokes a child listening to the sad song of a mockingbird who has lost
his mate, but in learning to translate that wordless song (made up of bits
of other birds’ songs), the emerging poet now comes to understand what
“The sea whisper’d me”: “Death, death, death, death, death.” Like Poe’s
hearing a dark response from a bird that visited him, Whitman knows that
“Never more shall [he] escape” the “solitary singer” who has taught him
how to hear that “strong and delicious word” – the very word of compost-
ing, the endless rocking of life and death – that would echo more and more
for Whitman in the following few years, as he became surrounded and con-
sumed by “the million dead”34 and had to learn to build a future on them (LG,
pp. 252–53).

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In 1860, with the country heading inexorably toward war, Whitman’s poetic
fortunes took a sudden positive turn. He received a letter from the Boston
publishers and militant abolitionists William Thayer and Charles Eldridge,
whose aggressive new publishing house specialized in antislavery literature;
they wanted to become the publishers of the new edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman, feeling conirmed as an authentic poet now that he had been,
for the irst time, ofered royalties, readily agreed, and Thayer and Eldridge
invested heavily in the stereotype plates for Whitman’s idiosyncratic book –
more than 450 pages of varied typeface and odd decorative motifs, a visually
chaotic volume all carefully tended to by Whitman, who traveled to Boston to
spend his days with the typesetters and oversee the printing. Emerson came in
from Concord to see Whitman and tried to talk him out of including his new
“Enfans d’Adam” cluster of poems (later “Children of Adam”), which cele-
brated sex in remarkably direct terms (“O hymen! O hymenee! Why do you
tantalize me thus?”; “It is I, you women, I make my way, / . . . I pour the stuf
to start sons and daughters it for these States – I press with slow rude muscle”)
(LG 1860, pp. 313, 303). Emerson worried that the poems would sensationalize
the book and blind readers to the wisdom there, but Whitman argued that
sex was central to his vision and that to cut the sex out of Leaves would be to
destroy it.
And sex was exuded everywhere in this edition of Leaves. While the 1855
edition had featured a cover with the title in loriated letters, with roots and
leaves growing out of the type and forming a lush and fertile foliage, and with
the period at the end of the title transformed into a germinating seed, his third
edition clearly upped the ante. On the cover and spine, instead of loriated let-
ters, we ind letters that sport spiraling tails, as if they are wriggling and swim-
ming and have been momentarily captured in some tentative arrangement.
When we open the book to the title page, the letters now sport spermatozoa
tails, and the period at the end of the title is no longer the germinating seed
of the 1855 cover but rather another kind of seed: a clear representation of a
sperm cell, swimming from beneath the inal “S” to take its place at the con-
clusion of the title. With the word “GRASS,” Whitman creates what we might
call a spermatoid typeface; instead of the letters actually being the spiraling
creatures themselves, here the sperm have swum onto the letters.35
This striking visual introduction to his book underscores Whitman’s radical
concept of democratic reading. His sexual imagery was integral to the act of
reading he was proposing. He believed his words were the seeds for new ideas,
a new nation, and a new conception of democracy, but, to have an efect,
his words would need to penetrate readers and fertilize their imaginations.

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Whitman worked with the typesetters to get those curling tails and tendrils to
extend from the letters on his cover and title page to suggest how the words
would move, attach, and cling, ind nurturant ground so they could fertilize
and grow into something new. Whitman imaged, then, the act of reading
as a sexual act, an act of fertilizing, inseminating. The “process of reading,”
Whitman would write in Democratic Vistas (1871), is “an exercise, a gymnast’s
struggle,” and the democratic reader “must himself or herself construct
indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnish-
ing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work,” because what is needed for
democracy to lourish is “a nation of supple and athletic minds” (PW, vol. 2,
pp. 424–25). His words were the seeds, but the womb in which the seed would
grow and form was the reader’s mind, and the ovum belonged to the reader
too: the poet’s job was to cajole, seduce the reader until the seminal ideas
could low into a receptive mind and join with the reader to construct a future
unexpected and strong, deriving its strength and character from the reader as
much as from the poet. When he wrote poems evoking the sexual joining of
the poet with the female reader, then, or the afectionate physical contact of
the poet to the male reader, his explicit imagery was always in the service of
an erotics of reading. He evoked the process in “Calamus 13,”
Love-buds, put before you and within you, whoever you are,
Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,
If you bring the warmth of the sun to them, they will open, and bring form,
color, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet, they will become lowers, fruits, tall
branches and trees,
...
They have come slowly up out of the earth and me, and are to come slowly
up out of you.
(LG 1860, pp. 359–60)
This was part of the physicality of the book for Whitman: it had a body, a
spine, a face, and folds, and it received a reader’s actual physical touch, just as
the reader was touched by the book (in physical and emotional ways). “O how
your ingers drowse me” (LG 1860, p. 455): Whitman’s words speak from the
face of the page into the reader’s face, as the reader’s ingers trace the lines,
caressing the face, perhaps mouthing the words. Whether he imagined the
book astride the reader’s hips or nestled against the reader’s breast (“thrusting
me beneath your clothing, / Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or
rest upon your hip” [LG 1860, p. 346]), Whitman wanted his reader to be aware
that he (and, metonymically, his book) was intimately close to “whoever you

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 Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

are, holding me now in hand” (LG 1860, p. 344). There’s an anonymous inti-
macy, a democratic, ever-shifting intimacy, as one reader puts the book down
and another picks it up, a cruising intimacy that makes readers keenly aware
that the “you” Whitman so privately addresses is at once no one but you and
yet also everyone who has ever read or is now reading or will read his book.
The book is inexhaustible in its potential for intimacy, and its seminal l uid is
there on the title page of the 1860 edition for every reader to see as the book
waits patiently yet urgently to plant its seed.
The new cluster of poems in the 1860 edition that would alter Whitman’s
book more than any other is one that Emerson did not comment on:
“Calamus,” a group of poems that explored male-male afection. Deriving
from a sonnet-like sequence of poems that Whitman uncharacteristically left
only in manuscript, called “Live Oak, with Moss,” these poems seem to trace
a love afair between the poet and a young man, identiied in recent years
as Fred Vaughan, a friend of Whitman’s in the 1850s.36 In order to create his
“Calamus” cluster, Whitman rearranged the “Live Oak” poems and supple-
mented them with other new poems; the sequence caused little reaction at
the time, although toward the end of Whitman’s life and throughout the
twentieth century these poems would come to be read as Whitman’s admis-
sion of or endorsement of homosexuality; in recent decades, they have been
read as a courageous early articulation of gay identity and as Whitman’s brave
new vision of a transformed America, in which same-sex afection would
be openly expressed and publicly recognized. Whitman described these
poems as his most political; in an age of advancing U.S. capitalism, he real-
ized that something would have to ofset the ierce competition that males
were increasingly taught was crucial to their success. Whitman’s solution
was what he called “camaraderie,” an intense afection between men that
would temper competition and bind the nation through love. Democracy
could not thrive, he believed, in a brutal competitive economic environment:
men needed to learn to love one another for the republic to endure.
The 1860 Leaves, carrying this innovative message of men loving men,
appeared in May 1860, less than a year before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Whitman had put the date “1860–61” on the title page of this edition of Leaves,
and the broken date proved prophetic, because it marked the transition
between a troubled but still uniied nation and a nation fractured. Suddenly,
Whitman’s “Calamus” poems took on a greater urgency, as American men
began killing other American men: fathers killing sons; sons, fathers; broth-
ers, brothers. And the war had another immediate impact on Leaves: after
a promising start of sales for the 1860 edition, Thayer and Eldridge, like so

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many publishers after the beginning of the Civil War, went out of business by
the end of the year. Once again, the all-important plates of the book slipped
from Whitman’s control: Thayer and Eldridge sold the electrotyped plates at
auction. The publisher Richard Worthington bought the plates for the 1860
edition in 1879 (after they had passed through a number of other hands), and
he began in 1880 to reissue the book, much to Whitman’s dismay, because it
appeared just as Whitman was preparing his inal authorized edition of Leaves
and would for many years appear on bookshelves as a cheaper competitor.
Whitman stayed in New York until the end of 1862, continuing to go to
Pfaf ’s, but also visiting hospitals where wounded soldiers were already being
brought from the battleields. When he learned that his brother George had
been wounded in the battle of Fredericksburg, he went to Virginia to check on
him, and, in another characteristically impulsive move, he simply abandoned
New York and settled in Washington, D.C., so that he could be at the politi-
cal heart of the war. During the next two years, Whitman lived in a series of
rooming houses, worked as a clerk in the army paymaster’s oice, served as
a correspondent for New York newspapers, and almost daily visited the ubiq-
uitous war hospitals that illed the nation’s capital. He once estimated that he
visited up to 100,000 wounded soldiers, for whom he would write letters, run
errands, provide treats, and ofer comfort.
Still keeping notebooks, he jotted down the battleield stories the young
soldiers told him. Out of those notes emerged a series of poems about the
Civil War, unlike any poems he had written before – quieter, more somber,
with a more subdued “I” who now witnessed and observed and nursed and
listened. Often, the “I” of some of the poems shifts from his usual absorptive
poetic “I” to speciic personae, sometimes particular soldiers, as in “A Sight in
Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” which captures the thoughts of a sol-
dier as he lifts the blankets of the faces of three dead comrades, coming inally
to the last one: “I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, / Dead and
divine and brother of all, and here again he lies” (LG, p. 307). The soldier voices
a Christian realization, but the point is not that this dead soldier is unique
and Christlike but rather that every one of the deaths is as signiicant as the
Cruciixion, is in its own way the Cruciixion enacted again and thousands of
times again; each dead soldier on the battleield is a lost piece of the divine,
and this young soldier’s death is as equally signiicant as any in history.
Whitman had written some early Civil War poems when he was still in
New York, but these had been boisterous recruitment poems – like “Beat!
Beat! Drums!” – almost giddy in their excitement over the impending war.
After he had seen the battleield at Fredericksburg and a pile of amputated

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limbs outside the battleield hospital there, his tone changed, and poems like
“The Wound-Dresser” (originally called simply “The Dresser”) turned the
war inside out, shifting our attention from the battleield to the hospital, from
heroic deeds in battle to the horriic afterefects of those battles: “The crush’d
head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,) / . . . (Come sweet
death! Be persuaded O beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly.)” (LG, p. 310).
Death, cast in the earlier Leaves as a vital part of the composting process,
churning up new life, was now putting Whitman’s compost-faith to its stern-
est test, as hundreds of thousands of young Americans decomposed in the soil,
rivers, and seas of the North and South. Out of this vast compost, Whitman
realized, America would have to grow its future. As he put it in one of the lon-
gest sentences he ever wrote, a four-hundred-plus-word sentence that appears
in his prose Memoranda During the War but that began in manuscript as a poem,
the “ininite dead” of the war now left “the land entire saturated, perfumed
with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and
shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every
lower that grows, and every breath we draw” (PW, vol. 1, p. 115). We can feel
in such passages how Whitman created a syntax of mass death: he entitled
this section of his Memoranda “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” using his
characteristic contraction-apostrophe, which here creates a haunting ambigu-
ity, because the sentence – with all its embedded statistics, its death data – does
give us the Civil War dead summed up, but the contraction also invites us to
ill in a few more letters, as we realize this death sentence literally summons up
the dead, reminding us of their actual physical presence throughout the land-
scape, north and south, and insisting on their physical emergence in every-
thing that grows from the soil they dissolved into. It is a vast national compost.
It is the million dead summoned up. Whitman’s catalogue is a summing and
a summoning, and the summons is not just of the dead but also of the living,
who are being summoned to witness this mass death and, grotesque as it may
seem, ingest it, take communion with it, live of of it, make a future out of it.
His extraordinary hospital service took a toll on Whitman’s own health. He
took sick leave for the last half of 1864 and returned to his mother’s house in
Brooklyn, where he continued to write short war poems, some of them based
on newspaper accounts of battles. He returned to Washington in early 1865,
in time for Lincoln’s second inauguration, and took a new job as a clerk in the
Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. He now turned his attention
to Drum-Taps, his book of poems about the war. This book, another self-pub-
lished work, had been almost entirely set in type by the time that Lincoln was
assassinated. Whitman quickly added a brief poem, “Hush’d Be the Camps

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To-Day,” acknowledging the assassination and had a few copies bound before
deciding to put the publication on hold so that he could absorb the ending of
the war and the momentous events surrounding it.
That summer he wrote two of his best-known poems, “O Captain! My
Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” both elegies to
Lincoln. The irst was written in conventional meters and rhymes, perhaps
capturing the voice of a sailor imagining the loss of Lincoln in terms of a
ship losing its captain. The second poem is one of the greatest elegies in the
language, beginning with a complex evocation of the moment the poet irst
heard of the assassination: Whitman was with his mother in Brooklyn and
went outside to her dooryard, where the early lilacs were in bloom; inhaling
deeply out of his grief, his senses registered the smell of lilacs and forever
bound that aroma with Lincoln’s death and the deaths of all the soldiers of the
war. The poem – with its talismanic images of the drooping evening star and
the hidden thrush that sings, from deep in the swamp, a death carol the poet
must translate into lasting language – became Whitman’s great statement of
faith in the composting process. Following Lincoln’s death train across the
blooming spring landscape of America, the poem is inally drawn deep into
the swamp, the very site of composting, and the poet inds there “retrieve-
ments out of the night” (LG, p. 337), fragments on which he will build a future,
based on the natural fact that the lilacs will continue to bloom in the annual
cycle of renewal, carrying in their aroma the memory of death bound always
to the hope of a fresh beginning. He would even go back to his 1856 compost
poem, which he named “This Compost” in 1867, and poignantly add a half line
to his long catalogue of nature growing out of death: “the lilacs bloom in the
door-yards” (LG, p. 369).
Whitman printed a sequel to “Drum-Taps,” containing these two ele-
gies along with other late Civil War poems, including his powerful call for a
national healing, “Reconciliation,” in which he (or a soldier persona) kisses
the corpse of his enemy, trusting again in the powerful process of compost:
“Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; /
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again,
and ever again, this soil’d world” (LG, p. 321). On the title page, he dated the
sequel “1865–6,” marking another transitional moment in American his-
tory, the break between the last year of the Civil War and the irst year of
reconciliation.
“Sequel to Drum-Taps” marks the end of Whitman’s great poetic output.
He would continue to write for the next twenty-ive years, and he would
produce a few memorable poems, like “Passage to India” (1871), with its

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increasingly global concerns, along with innovative and important prose

works like Democratic Vistas (1871), his meditation on the failures of and
hopes for American democracy, and his analysis of how democracy would
have to expand from a form of government to a way of life, penetrating
every aspect of Americans’ behavior, habits, and ways of thinking. He also
wrote Specimen Days (1882), his self-described “wayward, spontaneous, frag-
mentary book” (PW, vol. 1, p. 1), which contained his previously published
Memoranda During the War (1875–1876), the prose account of his encounters
with soldiers during the last years of the conl ict. But his major poetry was
now behind him.
In 1865, Interior Secretary James Harlan dismissed Whitman from his job,
and, although Whitman was quickly hired in the attorney general’s oice, the
iring became a national scandal thanks to Whitman’s passionate friend and
supporter, William Douglas O’Connor. O’Connor, a government worker and
writer, was outraged at Harlan’s actions and was sure Whitman was the victim
of Harlan’s conventional and cramped morality. Harlan had found Whitman’s
working copy of the 1860 Leaves in his desk and had been shocked at some of
the language. O’Connor wrote a diatribe against Harlan and called it The Good
Gray Poet: A Vindication (1866), portraying Whitman as a kind of saint because
of his service in the Civil War hospitals and extolling the “intellectual and
moral grandeur of this work.”37 Whitman soon became the Good Gray Poet,
less and less the radical and outrageous artist and more and more the sage
old prophet. His poetic diction changed from a journalistic idiom and edged
toward a more Latinate and even biblical vocabulary. He devoted most of his
creativity to rearranging and revising what he had already written. Where
earlier he had viewed his poetic line as a moveable unit, cutting and pasting
poems in diferent arrangements of the same lines, he now viewed individual
poems themselves as portable units, and he experimented with new clusters
of poems, new arrangements of previous clusters, and new juxtapositions of
clusters and poems. Even as he continued to write new poems, his real imag-
inative energy was focused on the larger arrangements and rearrangements
of Leaves of Grass.
He had hoped to attract a commercial publisher for his postwar arrange-
ment of Leaves, but the publishing world was still shaken by the afterefects
of the war, and many publishers were put of by Whitman’s raw descriptions
of sexuality. One friend, trying to convince publishers to take on Whitman’s
book, wrote that “the chief objection raised by everyone I talked with was
on account of the too seminal element everywhere jetting out from the
‘Leaves.’ ”38 Whitman ended up self-publishing the 1867 edition, and he had

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it set in the same type that Drum-Taps had appeared in, so that he could sew
the Civil War poems into the volume as a kind of appendix. By 1870, he had
hooked up with J. S. Redield, whom Whitman had encountered back in the
1840s and 1850s, when Redield was the well-known publisher of Edgar Allan
Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Redield, like Thayer and Eldridge, had
gone out of business just before the war began in 1860, but he reentered the
publishing world in the very late 1860s and agreed to publish three Whitman
books in order to generate some controversy about his new publishing ven-
ture – the new edition of Leaves (with Drum-Taps now fully absorbed into the
revised arrangement of poems), a new book Whitman called Passage to India
(which he thought of as a book of the soul to balance the emphasis on the
body in Leaves), and Democratic Vistas. These were published in a matching
paperback edition; Redield’s arrangement with Whitman gave the author
control of the plates, and so Whitman quickly combined Leaves with Passage
to India, once again deciding that Leaves was large enough to absorb it all. But,
because he inally owned the plates, he simply bound the Passage book in as
an annex to Leaves. In 1876, when he issued a centennial edition of Leaves, he
separated out Passage once again and bound it into a separate volume called
Two Rivulets, which also contained Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the
War, and other material, new and reprinted. As long as he had usable plates of
Leaves, his impulse was to add on, supplement, and annex material instead of
resetting the type and making expensive new plates.
The year 1873 was Whitman’s worst. He sufered a stroke, followed quickly
by the death of his mother, and he went to Camden, New Jersey, where his
brother George lived. As abruptly as he had left New York for D.C., he now left
Washington behind and took up residence in Camden, irst with his brother
and then in a small house of his own. It was in Camden that he worked on
Specimen Days and his 1881 edition of Leaves, in which he achieved the inal
ordering of his poems and created the version of Leaves that most readers
after his death would come to know. After 1881 he would again add poems to
Leaves, but, harkening back to his house-building days, only as what he called
“annexes”; he would never again rearrange the poems of the main book nor
have them reset in type. The 1881 edition was published in Boston by the
prestigious irm of James R. Osgood, but the book was immediately attacked
by moral reformers in the city and was ruled obscene and banned from the
mails. Osgood tried to get Whitman to expurgate the book, and, when the
poet refused, Osgood transferred the plates to Whitman, who had the book
printed in Philadelphia, which became his publishing home for the rest of his
life. Fueled by the banned-in-Boston scandal, sales of Leaves were more robust

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 Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

than ever before. The plates were now everything, and he used these Osgood
plates to print a dizzying array of issues of Leaves of Grass, from a cheap paper-
back version to a monumental merging of his poetry and prose in a volume
entitled Complete Poems and Prose.
Living in very modest surroundings in a dirty industrial city, visited by a
growing number of admirers and disciples from the United States and abroad,
and steadily declining in health, Whitman continued appending poems to
Leaves up to his death in 1892, including some moving brief poems on his aging
body. These late annex poems have generally been dismissed as the tired last
vestiges of a poetic career, but in recent years they have been read as power-
fully evocative articulations of old age and impending death. The poet Robert
Creeley’s inal published essay before his own death was about Whitman’s last
poems: “The common sense is that Whitman’s poems faded as he grew older,
that their art grew more mechanical and that the poems themselves had rarely
the power of his more youthful writing. The life, however, is inally the poetry,
the issue and manifest of its existence – . . . literally so.” These poems, Creeley
argues, teach us “that age itself is a body, not a measure of time or record of
how much one has grown.”39 In these last poems, Whitman records unl inch-
ingly how his aged body, with its “Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, consti-
pation, whimpering ennui, / May ilter in my daily songs” (LG, p. 510). Facing
death and dissolution in “Song of Myself ” had seemed exhilarating – “I depart
as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, / I ef use my lesh in eddies,
and drift it in lacy jags” (LG, p. 89) – but now, while recognizing death’s inevi-
tability, the poet wants to linger in the “twilight,” the “opiate shades”: “(I too
will soon be gone, dispell’d,) / A haze – nirwana – rest and night – oblivion”
(LG, p. 532)
What is most striking about these last poems is the gradual disappearance
of the “I” on the page, as in the poem that concludes the irst annex, “After
the Supper and Talk,” in which Whitman sets up what promises to be a sim-
ile: the poet’s departure from his readers is “As a friend from friends his inal
withdrawal prolonging.” The simile, however, never materializes, and the “I”
we expect to enter into the poem never appears except as it is buried in the
homophonic “aye”: “Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness – loth, O so loth to
depart! / Garrulous to the very last” (LG, p. 536). The “I” is already forever lost
in the darkness, dif used and no longer able to materialize as it speaks its inal
garrulous word. To the very end, Whitman maintained his faith in compost-
ing and dissolution, although the tonality and register of his voice faltered and
altered as he revised and added to Leaves in the months before he died. Asked
how the 1892 last issue of Leaves of Grass would difer from the earlier ones,

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Whitman, on his deathbed, answered, “Why, in being complete – which is difer-

ence enough” (WWWC, vol. 9, p. 546).

Notes
1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W.
Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p.
14. This volume will be cited subsequently in the text as LG.
2. For a gathering of poets talking back to Whitman, see Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom,
and Dan Campion (eds.), Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Duluth,
Minn.: Holy Cow!, 1998). Pound’s “The Pact” can be found on p. 111.
3. For a gathering of international writers talking back to Whitman, see Gay
Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom (eds.), Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1995).
4. For a recent collection of essays on Whitman by political scientists, see John
E. Seery (ed.), A Political Companion to Walt Whitman (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2011).
5. See, for example, Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
6. For a collection of essays on Whitman’s inl uence on music, see Lawrence
Kramer (ed.), Walt Whitman and Modern Music (New York: Garland, 2000).
7. The most extensive examination of Whitman’s relationship to painters is
Ruth L. Bohan, Looking into Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); for Whitman and archi-
tects, see John F. Roche, “Democratic Space: The Ecstatic Geography of
Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 6
(1988), pp. 16–32, and Kevin Murphy, “Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The
Aesthetics of Egalitarianism,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 6 (1988), pp.
1–15; for Whitman and ilm, see Kenneth M. Price, To Walt Whitman, America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), chapter 6 (“Whitman
at the Movies”).
8. See Ed Folsom, “‘What a Filthy Presidentiad!’: Clinton’s Whitman, Bush’s
Whitman, and Whitman’s America,” Virginia Quarterly Review 81:2 (2005), pp.
96–113.
9. See, for example, Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and
Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1991), chapter 1 (“Rendering the Text and the Body Fluid: The Cases of ‘The
Child’s Champion’ and the 1855 Leaves of Grass”).
10. Walt Whitman, The Early Poems and Fiction, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York:
New York University Press, 1963), pp. 68–79.
11. Whitman, Early Poems and Fiction, p. 153.

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 Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

12. For an exploration of the novel in relation to “fatal pleasure,” see Michael
Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” in Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman (eds.), Breaking
Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), pp. 30–43; see also Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the
Emergence of Leaves of Grass (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995), chapter 1 (“The Construction of a Pro-Slavery Apology”).
13. Walt Whitman, “Brooklyniana,” in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt
Whitman, ed. Emory Holloway, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1921), vol. 2,
p. 247.
14. Walt Whitman, The Journalism, ed. Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and
Edward J. Recchia, 2 vols. (New York: Peter Lang, 1998–2003), vol. 1, p. 3.
15. Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White, 3 vols. (New York:
New York University Press, 1977), vol. 3, p. 775.
16. The best examination of Whitman’s discovery of his line is Matt Miller, Collage
of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2010).
17. See Wai Chee Dimock, “Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory,” in Erkkila
and Grossman (eds.), Breaking Bounds, pp. 62–79, for an analysis of how
Whitman’s language demonstrates “the renewability of syntax but not the
sedimentation of meanings” (p. 75).
18. See Ed Folsom, “What We’re Still Learning about the 1855 Leaves of Grass 150
Years Later,” in Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price (eds.), Leaves
of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2007), pp. 1–32.
19. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, New York, 1855), pp. v–vi. Available
on the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org). This volume will be
cited subsequently in the text as LG 1855.
20. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 vols. (Various publishers,
1906–1996), vol. 9, p. 174. Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (whit-
manarchive.org). These volumes will be cited subsequently in the text
as WWWC.
21. J. Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 (London:
George Allen, 1917), p. 138.
22. See Ed Folsom, “The Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary
Report,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24 (2006–2007), pp. 71–84.
23. For an investigation of how Whitman’s real estate activities afected his writ-
ing, see Peter J. L. Riley, “Leaves of Grass and Real Estate,” Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 28 (2011), pp. 163–87.
24. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, New York, 1856), p. 345. Available on
the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org). This volume will be cited
subsequently in the text as LG 1856.

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 Ed Fols o m

25. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F.
Grier, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 67.
26. For a detailed study of Whitman’s class-inlected diction, see Andrew Lawson,
Walt Whitman and the Class Strugle (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2006).
27. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), p. 455.
Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org). This volume
will be cited subsequently in the text as LG 1860.
28. For Whitman’s ideas about photography and his views about photographs of
himself, see Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapters 4 and 5.
29. For a detailed examination of the economics of printing and arranging Drum-
Taps, see Ted Genoways, “The Disorder of Drum-Taps,” Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 24 (2006–2007), pp. 98–116.
30. The best discussion of Whitman’s relationship to Fowler and Wells, and to
phrenology in general, remains Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The
Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
31. John Townsend Trowbridge, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” in Joel
Myerson (ed.), Whitman in His Own Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2000), p. 173.
32. For a provocative discussion of the tense messaging going on between
Emerson and Whitman, see Jay Grossman, “Rereading Emerson/Whitman,”
in Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (eds.), Reciprocal Inluences: Literary
Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1999), pp. 75–97, and Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American
Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
33. For detailed work on Pfaf ’s beer hall, see Christine Stansell, “Whitman at
Pfaf ’s: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-
Century,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993), pp. 107–26; Mark A.
Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians (Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 2010); and Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010).
34. Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New
York University Press, 1963–1964), vol. 1, p. 114. These volumes will be cited
subsequently in the text as PW.
35. See Ed Folsom, “‘A spirt of my own seminal wet’: Spermatoid Design in Walt
Whitman’s 1860 Leaves of Grass,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010), pp.
585–600.
36. On Whitman’s relationship to Fred Vaughan, see Robert Roper, Now the Drum
of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (New York: Walker,

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 Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

2008), pp. 111–16, and Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York:
Dutton, 1997), pp. 193–98.
37. Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion: William Douglas O’Connor (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978), p. 172.
38. Rufus A. Coleman, “Trowbridge and O’Connor: Unpublished Correspon-
dence, with Special Reference to Walt Whitman,” American Literature 23 (1951),
p. 326.
39. Robert Creeley, “Relections on Whitman in Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review
81:2 (2005), p. 262.

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 Chapter 16
Emily Dickinson: The Poetics and
Practice of Autonomy
W e n dy M a rti n

Although Emily Dickinson published only a few poems in her lifetime, she
has since emerged as one of the two most important nineteenth-century
American poets, along with Walt Whitman. Dickinson was a reclusive poet
who has been the focus of much mythologizing over the years. In addition to
being described as “a partially cracked poetess,” she has been portrayed as a
neurasthenic invalid; as an agoraphobic or, at best, neurotically shy; as mor-
bidly death obsessed; and as a lovelorn spinster who dressed in white and iso-
lated herself from the world to mourn unrequited love.1 Since the emergence
of feminist criticism in the 1970s, Dickinson’s work and life have been reexam-
ined. We now understand that Dickinson was a lively and iercely independent
woman with a loving family and a deeply loyal community of lifelong friends.
We also know that she dedicated her life almost entirely to her family, friends,
and poetry, which she wrote with passionate commitment. Although she has
been portrayed as someone who was removed from the world, we now under-
stand that Dickinson was immersed in the world to an unusual extent.
Emily Dickinson seems to stand alone, yet she was someone we might have
known as a friend, classmate, or neighbor. She loved to cook, and her recipe
for gingerbread is famous; even more, she loved to garden and was an expert
horticulturalist (her much-admired herbarium, a collection of plant speci-
mens, has been published by Harvard University Press). She was a steadfast
friend, and her emotional wisdom, empathic understanding, and humorous
quips were appreciated by all who knew her. Finally, she was a loyal daughter
and sister and a beloved aunt to her nephews and nieces. Although she knew
“the shore is safer,” Dickinson loved to “bufet the sea,” as she wrote to her
childhood friend Abiah Root (EDL, p. 104). She devoted her life to the explora-
tion of even the most intimidating aspects of the world around her, including
love, religious doctrines and the existence of God, nature, the meaning of
war, and perhaps most famously, death and the afterlife. Dickinson was stub-
born, rebellious, and utterly committed to being a poet. As a young woman,

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she conided in a friend that she wanted to achieve greatness, and she did just
that. She has had a profound inl uence on many poets who followed and on
American poetry as a whole.
Born in 1830, Emily Dickinson was the second child and eldest daughter
of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross, who were married and settled in
Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1828. Dickinson’s elder brother, Austin, was born
in 1829, and her younger sister, Lavinia, was born in 1833. Edward Dickinson
was a respected lawyer, acted as treasurer of Amherst College, served in the
Massachusetts House of Representatives and the U.S. Congress, and repre-
sented Amherst in the General Court of Massachusetts. Early in the Dickinson
marriage there were inancial hardships, which eventually led to the sale of the
family home, called the Homestead, when Emily was nine. The Dickinsons
lived in a house on West Street for several years, but in 1855, when Emily was
twenty-ive, her father was able to buy back the Homestead property and to
build the Evergreens, a house for Austin and his wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson,
on the same lot. The Homestead was a large, stately house with enough pri-
vate bedrooms for all of the Dickinson children, as well as separate servants’
quarters, and it represented the increasing wealth of the upper middle and
professional classes in nineteenth-century New England. The Homestead’s
library, garden, and grounds relected the growing leisure of the women who
inhabited them and the inancial success of their husbands and fathers.
In many respects, the senior Dickinsons were a conventional Victorian cou-
ple. Edward Dickinson was the strict head of his household; he issued edicts
about domestic order and child-rearing practices, while his wife submitted to
his authority. Indeed, Emily Norcross Dickinson languished in the conine-
ment of her home and spent much of her adult life as an invalid, reclining on a
sofa, as did many al uent Victorian women. This extreme passivity might be
seen as a physical acting out of the Victorian adage to women to “sufer and
be still”; this was an ironic embodiment of the invalid status of the Victorian
housewife, whose life was limited to the domestic realm. It may well be that
this was Emily Norcross Dickinson’s way of resisting and even subverting her
husband’s authority, but her languor and inattention alienated her daughter,
Emily, who declared that she “never had a mother” (EDL, p. 342b). When Mrs.
Dickinson’s health declined in the mid-1850s, Emily and Lavinia had to bear the
burdens of both caring for their mother and running the household, includ-
ing cooking, cleaning, managing household staf, and entertaining Edward
Dickinson’s frequent guests.
The concept of separate spheres for men and women was codiied in
Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House (1854), which was published in England

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 W e ndy Ma rt in

and widely read in the United States. In Patmore’s view, the wife and mother in
the Victorian household should aspire to angelic, self-sacriicing behavior. Her
irst priority was to nurture her husband and children and to create a home
that was a haven from the cares of the world. Even though Dickinson had
a copy of Patmore’s book on her bookshelf, she clearly did not subscribe to
his prescriptions. As Adrienne Rich observes, “Dickinson’s life was organized
on her own terms”;2 even in her youth, years before her famous seclusion,
Dickinson demonstrated a resolve to obey the dictates of her spirit rather than
Victorian society.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident in her young life than in Dickinson’s
resistance to conversion and the strong Puritan religious inl uence in Amherst,
which began in her school years. Beginning at age nine, Dickinson attended
Amherst Academy, where she was an outstanding student with many friends.
In that same year, a religious revival passed through Amherst; seven more
would follow in the next twenty-two years, including major revivals in 1845 and
1850, when Dickinson was a teenager. Amherst caught the fervor, and numer-
ous citizens, including Edward and Lavinia Dickinson, made public profes-
sions of faith as a sign of their being “chosen” by God – but Emily did not. In
spite of intense social pressure and many letters from concerned friends and
relatives with well-meaning but patronizing fear for the fate of Emily’s soul,
she held out. The pressure to publicly acknowledge Christian faith increased
when, at sixteen, Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which
emphasized religious training in its curriculum. It was a matter of deep self-
examination for Dickinson, one over which she agonized – the social and
familial pull of the church was so strong that she continued to attend the First
Church in Amherst until her late twenties – but she ultimately came down on
the side of uncertainty. “You may be surprised,” she wrote to Abiah, “but I am
not happy, . . . that I did not give up and become a Christian. It is not now too
late, so my friends tell me, so my ofended conscience whispers, but it is hard
for me to give up the world” (EDL, p. 67). For Dickinson, conversion meant
relinquishing the joys of this life, which she treasured; for her classmates,
teachers, and society, her refusal meant Dickinson was “one of the lost ones.”
But in spite of her fear of alienation from God and her peers, she could not
accept the conventional notions of sin, salvation, and eternity.
Dickinson’s poetry addresses the social ostracism she experienced as a reli-
gious skeptic. With the full understanding that her decision made her a kind
of outcast at school and in the Amherst community, Dickinson accepted the
consequences of her decision and explored them carefully in verse. “What is –
‘Paradise’ ” asks whether she can expect social interactions in heaven to be as

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unkind as those in Amherst and suggests that if there is a “ ‘a Father’ – in the

sky –” perhaps in heaven “Ransomed folks – won’t laugh at me – / Maybe –
‘Eden’ a’n’t so lonesome / As New England used to be!”3 The possibility that
the mere absence of mocking laughter in “Eden” will make it less “lonesome”
than New England demonstrates how socially isolated Dickinson felt. In
another poem, she describes the afterefects of her decision in starker terms:
I’m banished – now . . .
How foreign can that be –
You’ll know – Sir – when the Savior’s face
Turns so – away from you –
(EDP, p. 117, no. 256)
Dickinson feels not only exiled but abandoned, so distant from God that even
“the Savior’s face” has turned away. Dickinson’s remarkable commitment to
her own personal convictions and experience in the face of this hard treatment
reveals her determination to be true to herself and her understanding of the
world, no matter what the cost.
Dickinson’s later poetry increasingly relects her religious skepticism. In
some poems, she uses religious and biblical language but undercuts it by using
punctuation and physical format to emphasize its dubious qualities. Some
boys “believe,” but “Other Boys are ‘lost’ –” one poem remarks doubtfully
(EDP, p. 644, no. 1545). In another poem, she says that following death
there’s Heaven –
The Good Man’s – “Dividend” –
And Bad Men – “go to Jail” –
I guess –
(EDP, p. 107, no. 234)
Dickinson’s quotation marks question the rewards and punishments asso-
ciated with the Christian afterlife; she also capitalizes and italicizes “Good”
and “Bad” men, as if to mock the distinction between the two. Further, she
employs the language of commerce to equate going to heaven with a proit-
able and possibly questionable business transaction – one that could just as
easily land someone in “Jail.” And the inal line, with its lack of conviction and
abrupt ending, implies not just skepticism but lat disbelief.
The fact that Dickinson did not embrace organized religion does not mean
she had no faith, only that the doctrines of the churches she had attended
throughout her life did not adequately encompass her beliefs. As an adult,
she essentially created her own religion, one that combined elements of her
Calvinist upbringing with beliefs based on her own experience. Instead of

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anticipating an afterlife in heaven, Dickinson celebrated the joy of the moment,

particularly as found in the company of her friends. In her letters, she often
expressed this feeling using biblical imagery and language, inverted in poten-
tially blasphemous ways. “If prayers had any answers to them, you were all
here to-night, but I seek and I don’t ind, and knock and it is not opened,” she
wrote to her close friends the Hollands, playing with the language of Matthew
7:7 and suggesting that its promise of answered prayers is a false one (EDL,
pp. 263–64). In another letter to Susan Gilbert, who would become her sister-
in-law, Dickinson describes not God but “Susie” as her “sweet shelter [and]
covert from the storm” (EDL, p. 181). And in one poem, she reproaches a friend
who “forgot – and I – remembered,” comparing this lapse to Christ’s betrayal
by Peter (EDP, p. 95, no. 203). As can be seen in these examples, Dickinson
relied on her friends for comfort and protection, sought their presence, and
loved them fervently. Her dedication to her friends represented a transfer of
the idea of devotion from God to the men and women she loved, those capa-
ble of making a heaven of her earth.
Dickinson’s day-to-day experiences in nature also brought this divine joy
and sense of the eternal. She spent hours outside, particularly in her gar-
den, and she meticulously recorded her experiences. In numerous letters and
poems, she elevates the natural world to a religious, transcendental level. “Oh,
Matchless Earth –,” she wrote in one letter, “We underrate the chance to
dwell in Thee” (EDL, p. 478). A later poem airms that “Earth is Heaven – /
Whether Heaven is Heaven or not” (EDP, p. 602, no. 1408). She cannot envision
a heaven more glorious than the earth, which is full of “Awe” and “Rapture”
(EDP, pp. 280–81, no. 575). In her worship of nature, Dickinson invests even
tiny details with divine signiicance. She closes one poem by praying, “In the
name of the Bee – / And of the Butterly – / And of the Breeze – Amen!”
(EDP, p. 14, no. 18), replacing the members of the Christian trinity. Hers is not
the Romantic love of nature that seeks overwhelming grandeur but an adora-
tion that inds beauty in its subtle processes and intricacy. To Dickinson, these
minute revelatory elements are worthy of careful attention and veneration.
They take the place of scripture, and they place the divine squarely on earth.
For all her appreciation, Dickinson was no naïve worshiper of nature. She
saw its beauty, but she also saw its potential for cruelty, its darker rhythms.
The details in which she often experienced the divine could just as easily
prove grimly dangerous. One poem describes a “certain Slant of light” in
the winter that “oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes,” causing a
“Heavenly Hurt” in the observer (EDP, pp. 118–19, no. 258). In the language of
this poem, nature brings sorrow, despair, and a heaviness comparable to the

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religious rituals Dickinson has sought to escape. Elsewhere, she describes how
“Nature – sometimes sears a Sapling – / Sometimes – scalps a Tree,” highlight-
ing the potential for destructive power that coexists with natural beauty (EDP,
p. 148, no. 314). Importantly, Dickinson does not shy away from depicting these
aspects of nature, even though they in some ways contradict her other repre-
sentations of it; she does not “repress the darker aspects of her vision in order
to create the illusion of control.”4 Instead, she allows herself the freedom to
see all parts of the natural world. In other poems, such as “The Sky is low – the
Clouds are mean,” she explores the mean, petulant side of nature, character-
ized by “A Narrow Wind” that “complains all Day.” Like us, Dickinson tells
her reader, Nature “is sometimes caught / Without her Diadem” (EDP, p. 488,
no. 1075). Her willingness to record the unpleasant as well as the uplifting
aspects of nature shows Dickinson’s ability to embrace each moment for itself
and to accept contradictions as an inescapable part of experience.
Dickinson has often been portrayed as a victim of Victorian social con-
ventions, but her life, like her poetry, was a declaration of independence
from the limitations of prescribed behavior. Just as her poetic style rebufed
Victorian aesthetic practices and her religious beliefs rejected Puritan theol-
ogy, Dickinson’s life choices represented an ironic protest against the con-
straints of “true womanhood” – purity, piety, and passivity. Victorian society
dictated that women should be dutiful caretakers of the home, models of
decorum and propriety, and above all, devoted wives and mothers. They were
not expected to be creative, productive, innovative, or intellectual. Dickinson
consciously adopted a subversive approach to these limitations, using the
resources of her family, home, and network of friends and relatives to carve
out a space of personal, spiritual, and artistic rebellion and gaining the time
and the space to write.
Perhaps the most important – and most famous – element of this sub-
version was Dickinson’s gradually increasing separation from outside society.
This separation began with her deliberate choice to become “a woman in
white,” wearing the color exclusively from the 1860s onward. There are many
possible reasons she made this choice, such as the practicality of white for
laundering, its symbolic resonances suggesting mourning or virginity, and
its use as a kind of uniform; in any case, it was unusual and excited a great
deal of comment. Her unorthodox behavior suggests that Dickinson was not
submitting to domestic coninement; instead, this choice signaled a commit-
ment to independence with regard to both her personal relationships and her
poetry. So great was this desire for independence and the chance to “make a
little destiny” of her own that she could not accept the idea of marriage, even

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though it was the primary expectation for women of her time; she could not
bear the thought of being “yielded up” to the will of another person (EDL,
pp. 144, 210). She had suitors, and even a late romance with Judge Otis Lord,
but her overwhelming desire even then was for independence and control of
her self hood.
Around 1869, when Dickinson was thirty-nine, she began to stay at home
more and more, which seems to have been a conscious decision. As her seclu-
sion became complete, she observed, “I do not go away, but the Grounds are
ample – almost travel – to me” (EDL, p. 349). A year later, she wrote, “I cannot
tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea while I do my work”
(EDL, p. 86). Dickinson’s isolation may have been partially motivated by a
decline in health, including trouble with her eyesight and perhaps the irst
symptoms of Bright’s disease, the kidney disorder that was the eventual cause
of her death. However, it seems in large part to have been related to her quest
for greater personal and artistic autonomy, perhaps a transformation of the
Victorian custom of “coninement” from a patriarchal mandate that shut out
pregnant women from society to an expression of individual freedom through
which Dickinson could give birth to her poetry without the hindrances and
distractions of social interaction. Whatever the reasoning, whether Dickinson
made a virtue of a health-related necessity or willfully chose seclusion, what is
clear is that she embraced her coninement and devoted herself to her poetry,
thereby subverting the patriarchal order that kept women at home and away
from intellectual and creative endeavors. “The Soul selects her own Society,”
which describes the soul as a zealous guardian, reveals Dickinson’s impulses
for isolation as a means of gaining control over her time:
I’ve known her – from an ample nation –
Choose one –
Then – close the Valves of her attention –
Like Stone – (EDP, p. 143, no. 303)
In this depiction, Dickinson’s self-imposed isolation can be seen as obedience
to the dictates of her soul, a particular entity to which she gives complete
allegiance. In this withdrawal from the world, behind “Valves” closed “Like
Stone,” the soul has the privacy to do what it pleases. It is invisible to society,
free from its demands and dictates. The poem is an imaginative illustration of
the personal liberty for which Emily Dickinson longed.
These choices would not have been possible had Dickinson not had the
support of her family. Although as a teenager Emily was afraid of her dom-
ineering father, with his strict views of femininity, as she grew older they

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seemed to develop a more complex relationship characterized by Edward’s

greater understanding of his talented, unusual daughter. As an adult, Emily
won some concessions from him that allowed her to devote herself to her
writing, including the use of the best bedroom in the house and the ability to
retreat from society as she saw necessary. Lavinia, too, lent essential support,
overseeing the household staf of servants (including a cook, maid, and gar-
dener) and running interference between Emily and various visitors. In gen-
eral, the family seemed to agree that Emily was gifted and should be able to
deine her own schedule in the service of her work.
The clearest symbol of this tacit family agreement was Emily’s bedroom,
the largest and most private bedroom in the Homestead. Located in the front
corner of the second loor, it was relatively protected from the sounds of house-
hold activities. Two of the three windows looked over the lawn to the south
and had a view of Main Street in Amherst.5 The other window faced west,
toward the Evergreens, the home of her brother and sister-in-law. The room
was Dickinson’s retreat. She spent many hours there writing poetry, as well
as letters to friends and relatives. On the walls she hung portraits of Thomas
Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot. It was her sanctuary as
well as her writing studio; it allowed Dickinson to have her energy and power
under her control rather than in service as a wife and mother. As she once said
to her niece Martha upon entering her room, “Matty: here’s freedom.”6
Although the image of Emily Dickinson as a spinster recluse has taken
more than a century to dissipate, it was always at odds with her actual life.
Dickinson had warm and afectionate relationships with her family members,
particularly with her sister, Lavinia; her sister-in-law, Susan; and her niece and
nephews, and she was very much in touch with political and economic events.
Her appetite for news was immense, even in her youth. While away at Mount
Holyoke when she was sixteen, she wrote to her brother, Austin, begging
for information about the presidential candidate and the Mexican-American
War, humorously complaining that at school “I dont know anything more
about afairs in the world, than if I was in a trance” (EDL, p. 49). In 1852, while
her father was at a national Whig convention, Dickinson wondered, “Why
cant I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention? – dont I know all about
Daniel Webster, and the Tarif, and the Law?” (EDL, p. 212). This ardent desire
for knowledge continued throughout her adult life. Her family subscribed to
many newspapers and magazines, which she read on a daily basis, and the
language and tropes of contemporary political and economic culture found
their way into her writing as frequently as natural and domestic images did.
One poem imagines “Revolution” as a pod whose seeds are scattered by the

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“Winds of Will” (EDP, p. 490, no. 1082); another addresses industrialization

and declares a preference for “A Letter chief to me” over news of “The Stock’s
advance and Retrograde / And what the Markets say” (EDP, p. 493, no. 1089).
Although Dickinson may have physically withdrawn from the social world,
intellectually and creatively she remained very much engaged.
The Civil War in particular became both a focus and impetus for much
of Dickinson’s poetry. She followed the war battle by battle and was deeply
distressed by the senseless loss of life and the widespread tragedy of war.
Signiicantly, the years of the Civil War (1861–1865) were Dickinson’s most
productive years for her poetry and are often referred to as her “lood years.”
At her peak in 1862, when she was thirty-two, she averaged a poem a day.
Many poems use explicit battle images and were written in response to spe-
ciic Civil War campaigns, as Alfred Habegger, Shira Wolosky, and others have
noted.7 In one famous poem, the speaker imagines her life as a “Loaded Gun”
with the potential to be a “deadly foe” having “the power to kill” enemies
(EDP, pp. 369–70, no. 754); in another, she ponders the nature of “Victory”
and observes that defeat is “populous with Bone and stain – / . . . And Chips
of Blank – in Boyish Eyes – / And scraps of Prayer – / And Death’s sur-
prise” (EDP, p. 316, no. 639). One of the most searching of Dickinson’s Civil
War poems was written after the 1862 death of Frazer Stearns, the son of the
president of Amherst College and a good friend of Austin Dickinson. A dev-
astated Emily wrote to her cousins that “Brave Frazer” had been “killed at
Newbern. . . . His big heart shot away by a ‘minnie ball.’ I had read of those – I
didn’t think that Frazer would carry one to Eden with him” (EDL, pp. 397–98).
Dickinson’s deep knowledge of world afairs, including advances in military
technology, gave an excruciating edge to the details of Stearns’s death and
surely prompted her questioning of progress and the purpose of war in the
elegy she wrote for him. In it, Dickinson despairs at the tragic loss of life and
wonders whether any war is worth the cost. “It feels a shame to be Alive – /
When Men so brave – are dead –” she laments, asking:

Are we that wait – suicient worth –

That such Enormous Pearl
As life – dissolved be – for Us –
In Battle’s horrid Bowl? (EDP, p. 213, no. 444)

Although Dickinson doesn’t diminish the valor of the dying men, she ques-
tions whether the objectives and outcomes of war are worth the sacriice of
the “Enormous Pearl” of life. Does society – those who “wait” while the war
is waged – deserve its liberty at this cost? In an antebellum poem Dickinson

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had asserted that only the “defeated – dying –” could truly understand the
meaning of victory (EDP, p. 35, no. 67); here, she suggests that death and defeat
reveal that the value of victory is insigniicant compared to its price, and she
deplores the waste of life that produces such an ugly and painful knowledge.
For Dickinson, then, physical isolation did not keep her from being profoundly
changed by the war. As with so many of her generation, the Civil War afected
her not only in deeply personal ways as she dealt with the loss of loved ones
but also intellectually, imaginatively, and philosophically as she grappled with
the larger issues of life, death, and liberty it raised.
Although not a political activist, Dickinson followed the women’s rights
movement as closely as she did the war. The Seneca Falls Convention for
women’s rights was held in 1848, when Dickinson was seventeen. Although it
is doubtful that Dickinson would have drawn a connection between herself
and the Seneca Falls women at that age, she was already forming strong views
about independence and female education. As a teenager, she keenly felt the
diference in her father’s treatment of his son and daughters. While Edward
encouraged Austin to read voraciously, he monitored Emily and Lavinia’s read-
ing material; as a result, Emily sometimes had to read in secret. “[Father] buys
me many Books –” Emily wrote to a friend, “but begs me not to read them –
because he fears they joggle the Mind” – likely a reference to the Victorian
belief that the womb and the brain were inversely related, so that if a woman
read or wrote too much, her brain would impair her fertility by consuming
the vital energy necessary for the womb to bear children (EDL, p. 404). Given
this understanding, Dickinson’s father was clearly conl icted about whether
his daughter should be allowed to read or write poetry with such passionate
energy. And unlike her brother Austin, who was pushed to pursue a law career,
Emily and her sister were allowed only one year at college, after which they
were expected to take up household duties in preparation for marriage. Even
Emily’s year at college was marred by an illness. She was determined to hide
it from her family so she could stay in school; however, on being informed
of the sickness by a family friend, Edward Dickinson dispatched Austin, who
“arrived in full sail, with orders from head-quarters to bring me home at all
events,” in spite of Emily’s “desperate battle” to stay (EDL, p. 65). This thwart-
ing of her desire for independence and autonomy rankled for young Emily,
even as she obeyed her father’s wishes. As she grew older she was frequently
exposed to the views of the closely aligned abolitionist and sufragist move-
ments through her father’s political connections and the hospitality of Austin
and Sue, who hosted such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell
Phillips. In addition, many of the close friendships Dickinson developed later

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in life were with ardent advocates for increased civil rights and liberties, includ-
ing Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Bowles, and Helen Hunt Jackson.
Abolition and women’s rights were causes to which the Dickinson family was
committed, and Emily Dickinson was well aware of the issues at stake.
In addition to her engagement with local, national, and international
events, Dickinson had a wide circle of beloved friends and relatives. As a young
woman, Emily Dickinson was especially passionate about her relationships.
She was ferociously possessive of her friendships and romantic love inter-
ests and expected similar devotion from her intimate friends. Susan Gilbert
Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law, was an extremely close friend (and, some
have argued, a lover).8 Cousins Louise and Emily Norcross, early friends like
Abiah Root and Jane Humphrey, and later Mary Bowles and Elizabeth Holland
were also among her dearest friends.
Dickinson corresponded regularly with this circle of friends via letter, the
primary form of keeping in touch with family and friends in her lifetime.
There were strict rules governing the decorum of epistolary exchanges, but
rather than being discreetly polite as was the order of the day, Dickinson was
frequently direct, candid, and intimate in her observations. She was in touch
with her circle of friends often several times a week. There were multiple mail
deliveries every day in Amherst and frequent train service from Amherst to
Boston, so Dickinson could send lowers from her garden along with her let-
ters and poems, in which she shared her deepest thoughts. Many of her letters
include lines that later were incorporated into her poetry, and her lines from
her poems often became part of her letters – so much so that her letters often
seem like poems, and vice versa. “The Frogs sing sweet – today – They have
such pretty – lazy – times –” she wrote on one occasion; in another letter, she
describes her beloved natural world: “The Violets are by my side, the Robin
very near, and ‘Spring’ – they say, Who is she – going by the door –” (EDL,
pp. 406, 333). Eminent Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson and others have
determined that she circulated about ive hundred of her poems in her let-
ters to more than forty correspondents, and some poems were sent to more
than one person at a time. With her voluminous correspondence, Dickinson
created a lively personal, intellectual, and artistic community for herself that
persisted long after her seclusion.
An important part of this community for Dickinson was the group of men
she called her “Preceptors.” From childhood on, she searched for mentors.
Her irst was Benjamin Franklin Newton, who was nine years older than
Dickinson and studied with her father. They had long conversations about
poetry, and he gave her a book of Emerson’s 1847 poems. The Reverend Charles

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Wadsworth was another important preceptor, with whom Dickinson car-

ried on an extended correspondence after meeting him in Philadelphia while
traveling with her father. Samuel Bowles, editor and owner of the Springield
Republican, was also an extremely important mentor, and they shared a long
and intimate correspondence, one that was suiciently intimate for some
critics to speculate that Bowles was the recipient of Dickinson’s anonymous,
impassioned Master Letters. Finally, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writer,
abolitionist, and supporter of women’s rights, and the editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, became a lifelong friend and mentor as well. Dickinson irst wrote
to Higginson in response to his essay of advice to young writers in the April
1862 Atlantic Monthly. She asked him very directly, “Is my Verse Alive?” and she
enclosed four poems: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (EDP, p. 100, no. 216);
“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose” (EDP, p. 150, no. 318); “The nearest Dream
recedes – unrealized” (EDP, pp. 150–51, no. 319); and “We play at Paste” (EDP,
p. 151, no. 320). Dickinson goes on to explain that “The Mind is so near itself –
it cannot see, distinctly – and I have None to ask –” (EDL, p. 403). Higginson
responded ten days later, and their lifelong correspondence began.
In writing to Higginson, Dickinson was looking for guidance from a male
authority regarding the value of her poetry. Unfortunately, she did not get a
very encouraging response from Higginson, who advised that she “delay”
publication; this must have been extremely disappointing – even devastating –
to the young poet. After all, two editors had asked her for poems for publica-
tion, and writing poetry was at the core of Dickinson’s being. But instead of
expressing her sadness, Dickinson developed an elaborately defensive posture
in an efort to save her pride, writing back to say that the idea of publication
was “as foreign to my thought as Firmament to Fin.” She claimed that she was
not even interested in public recognition, protesting that “If Fame belonged
to me / I could not escape her –” (EDL, p. 408). At the same time, she gently
mocks Higginson’s criticism that her work is unruly and rough – “wayward” –
in her now-famous quip, “You think my gait spasmodic: – I am in danger –
Sir –” (EDL, p. 409). Indeed, Dickinson was in danger – after Higginson’s crit-
icism she never attempted to publish her poems. She wrote more proliically
than ever, but she developed her own private method of preparation and com-
pilation. As has been documented by major biographer Ralph W. Franklin and
scholar Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Dickinson carefully copied her poems in
ink on folded stationery and sewed them by hand into fascicles (a small bundle
of clustered pages), which she placed in a drawer in a chest in her bedroom
and never circulated.9 And yet despite Higginson’s distressing criticism of her
work, she continued to send him her poetry and to conide in him, and he was

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one of the few visitors she saw after her seclusion. The relationship was clearly
a valuable and important one to Dickinson; they remained friends until she
died, and he gave a eulogy at her funeral.
From the perspective of the twenty-irst century, the fact that Dickinson
accepted Higginson’s judgment of her poems, even though other editors had
praised her work, is deeply disturbing. However, it is important to under-
stand Emily Dickinson as a Victorian woman subject to the customs and con-
straints of her society. At the same time, it is necessary to locate Dickinson
in American literary history, in which she takes her place in a long line of
intensely independent nineteenth-century American writers, including Henry
David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Herman Melville,
and Walt Whitman. Like them, Dickinson was a highly original artist who
departed from nineteenth-century social and artistic conventions. By taking
into account this historical trajectory, it is easier to understand why Dickinson
might have withdrawn from public consideration and competition: the anxi-
ety of the necessary self-assertion in the public sphere in a time when women
were expected to remain in the private sphere was too daunting for Dickinson
to manage.
While it is true that many women activists and writers of her era entered the
public realm in spite of intimidating public exposure and criticism, Dickinson
was not among them. Even though Dickinson knew very well that women
sufragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and
many others were a vibrant part of American politics, she did not follow their
lead. Similarly, there were a substantial number of American women writers,
like Susanna Rowson, Judith Sargent Murray, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May
Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, Lydia Sigourney, Harriet Prescott Spoford, Fanny
Fern, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Helen Hunt Jackson, who were well known
or were gaining widespread recognition, demonstrating that women could
achieve literary success. In fact, Helen Hunt Jackson was persistent in urging
Dickinson to give her poems to publish, but Dickinson wasn’t willing to put
herself forward.
Given the traditional values of the Dickinson household with regard to
gender roles and the immense emphasis placed on feminine gentility and
decorum, Dickinson’s reluctance to seek public attention and approval is
understandable. It would have been acceptable if an esteemed male authority
like Higginson had taken her under his wing and protected her from criticism
by presenting her as his protégée. It would have been quite another matter
for a woman to seek attention for herself. There was no inancial necessity
for Dickinson to publish, as there was for Louisa May Alcott, who desperately

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needed the money from her writing to buy food and clothing for her family, so
it was much easier for Dickinson to demur and remain in the private sphere.
Instead of publishing in local newspapers and magazines in the hope of gain-
ing wider recognition for national publication, Dickinson sent her poems pri-
vately to her friends. In many respects, one might say this was a high price to
pay for gentility, but the imperative of piety, passivity, and passionlessness as
the core elements of womanhood was deeply internalized by most women in
the nineteenth century.
Higginson’s criticism, and Dickinson’s subsequent unwillingness to publish,
were inl uenced by another consideration too: her commitment to her artistic
vision. Emily Dickinson’s poetry broke the mold of nineteenth-century aes-
thetic conventions; instead of heavily rhymed long lines of poetry, she wrote
in short, syncopated, sometimes abrupt, and often enigmatic stanzas that
often omitted rhyme. Some poems were only two or three lines long. Many
words within the poems were capitalized irregularly. Numerous poems ended
not with periods but with dashes, or with no punctuation at all. In thus aban-
doning the poetic traditions of her time, Dickinson in her poetry paralleled
the movement of Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Whitman away
from received traditions both poetic and spiritual. Indeed, this poetic depar-
ture mirrored Dickinson’s personal movement toward Transcendentalist ide-
als and away from received traditions, as has been observed by Karl Keller.10
To Higginson she suggested that the received structures of poetry disguised
and constricted her ideas like too-conining clothing: “While my thought is
undressed – I can make the distinction,” she told him, “but when I put them
in the Gown” of conventional language and structure, “they look alike, and
numb” (EDL, p. 404). Numbness was the opposite of what she believed poetry
should induce in its reader. According to Higginson, Dickinson deined poetry
in a vivid, visceral way: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold
no ire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top
of my head were taken of, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know
it. Is there any other way” (EDL, pp. 473–74). These were the feelings Dickinson
wanted to convey in her writing – an almost physical sensation, and the awak-
ening of speciic emotions tied to the moment described. Her unusual choices
in syntax, structure, and punctuation were attempts to do just this.
Dickinson’s poetry was powerfully original. She rebelled against the rules
of Victorian poetics that required heavily rhymed and metered lines. Instead,
Dickinson’s poems capture a thought in motion that anticipated the stream
of consciousness that would arise in the early twentieth century. Dickinson’s
poetry is now understood to be avant-garde; she was a modernist poet decades

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before modernism became a literary movement. Her signature style, full of

slant rhymes, colloquial language, staccato phrasing, and what often seems
like jumbled syntax punctuated by dashes, captures the multivalent vibrancy
of each speciic moment and deies the reductive efect of social and artistic
practices that insisted on predictability and regularized order. This deiance
in the service of creative freedom was extremely important to Dickinson.
Higginson’s criticism had been preceded by a few early, unpleasant brushes
with publication, in which she saw her punctuation, capitalization, and
stanza structure standardized; her slant rhymes regularized; and her mean-
ings altered by the addition of titles and other editorial choices. Her decision
to circulate her poems only privately among her friends, then, left her with
the freedom to write to her own aesthetic standards. She came to view formal
publication as an unacceptable moral and artistic compromise, describing it
in one poem as “the Auction / of the Mind of Man” and suggesting that it
might be better to endure “Poverty” rather than “reduce” the “Human Spirit
/ To Disgrace of Price –” (EDP, pp. 348–49, no. 709). Creativity and thought,
Dickinson felt, were the expressions of the individual soul, and to assign a
monetary value to it was to engage in an immoral trade. It should be noted
that it was Dickinson’s status as a secure member of the middle class that
allowed her to maintain this position without compromise, unencumbered
as she was by the necessity of having to support herself through her work.
Nevertheless, in standing against contemporary social and artistic practices,
Dickinson also saw herself as standing against the increasingly mercenary
values of the world around her.
Looking back, it seems clear that Dickinson was convinced that if her
poems were indeed worthy of publication, her sister, Lavinia, and her sister-in-
law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, as well as the friends with whom she shared her
poems, would make certain that they were published. The fact that the poems
were so carefully sewn into fascicles and stored neatly in piles in a drawer to be
discovered by Lavinia after Dickinson’s death was no accident. It was a great
risk to take, a gamble on the willingness of her loved ones to tend to and pre-
serve her work – and yet it speaks to her intense craving for artistic autonomy
that she was willing to leave her poetic legacy to chance in this way. This com-
mitment to autonomy both artistic and personal was not easy for Dickinson,
and her poetry reveals that she had to irst wage a personal civil war to resolve
the conl ict between the cultural edict of female submission and her desire to
be an autonomous, thinking woman and poet. The famed Master Letters, and
the poetry she wrote contemporaneously, ofer one of the clearest demonstra-
tions of this internal battle.

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 Emily Dickinson

After Dickinson’s death, three drafts of letters to someone identiied only

as “Master” were found among her correspondence. No other records of her
letters to the Master survive, but the language of the three drafts suggests an
ongoing relationship. The last of these drafts is dated 1861, at the beginning of
Dickinson’s “lood years.” The letters clearly show her wrestling with a pas-
sionate but unrequited love that dominates her will, in spite of her desire to
remain independent. They are a portrait of overwhelming and self-abnegating
love: “I used to think that when I died – I could see you – so I died as fast as I
could,” she wrote in one (EDL, p. 374). The theme of sacriicial love is reiter-
ated over and over to the point of obsession; it is as though in writing these
letters Dickinson has to experience the eclipse of self in its most extreme form
before she can ind herself again. In her inal Master letter, Dickinson begs for
recognition again and again in the language of self-abasement. Describing a
“love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart – pushing aside the
blood and leaving her faint and white in the gust’s arm,” she begs for some
acknowledgment: “Oh, did I ofend it . . . who bends her smaller life to his,
meeker every day – who only asks – a task – something to do for the love of it –
some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad” (EDL, p. 391). She
repeatedly declares her smallness and desire to serve and suggests that even
the most meager response will satisfy “all she asks” or needs. Dickinson then
begs for forgiveness for an unknown ofense and asks the Master to “teach
her, preceptor grace – teach her majesty” (EDL, p. 391). She submits herself
completely to the Master’s instruction and guidance, asking him to reshape
her, to remake her in his image. She continues to grovel, asking that he “pun-
ish dont banish her – shut her in prison, Sir – only pledge that you will forgive
sometime – before the grave” (EDL, p. 391). This willingness to accept so little
in return for her whole self is both an act of self-humiliation and a cry for love
and acceptance.
The extraordinary emotional intensity and self-abnegation of Dickinson’s
Master Letters has been a topic of critical debate for many decades, and there
has been much speculation about the identity of the recipient of these letters.
Samuel Bowles, Thomas Higginson, and Susan Gilbert Dickinson have all
been suggested as the person to whom Dickinson wrote these letters. More
important than the identity of the Master is the fact that Dickinson experi-
ences such intense agony in this relationship. For example, she writes in the
closing lines of one letter, “I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that don’t
hurt me much [If you] Her master stabs her more” (EDL, p. 391). It is an image
of helpless vulnerability to great wounding. The Master’s failure to return
her love hurts her almost to the point of destruction. In the letters we see

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Dickinson in the throes of despair and misery, with almost no will or strength
of her own, and it is a disheartening sight.
But the Master Letters reveal much more than this. In them, Dickinson
shrinks almost to invisibility, but she survives. She does not “extinguish her-
self ” but inds within herself the strength to reclaim her will from the Master’s
power; the letters record the grief and rage of a painful rejection, but as can
be seen in the poems written during this period, her sense of self survives.11
There is some scholarly disagreement about the dating of some of Dickinson’s
poetry;12 however, if we follow Johnson’s dating, the poems that were written
during this time demonstrate that Dickinson in fact emerged from the struggle
a stronger, more self-possessed person. “Title divine – is mine!” she proclaims
in one poem, identifying herself as the “Empress of Calvary! / Royal – all but
the Crown!” Dickinson inds in herself the authority and power of royalty,
even if it has come at the cost of sufering as the “Empress of Calvary.” She
rejoices that she is not “Born – Bridalled – Shrouded – / In a Day” as married
women are (EDP, p. 487, no. 1072). “I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –”
is in efect her declaration of independence, in which she rejects “The name
They dropped upon my face – / With water” and asserts that she has received
a new baptism, “this time, consciously, of Grace – / Unto supremest name –
Called to my Full” (EDP, p. 247, no. 508). And in “To be alive – is – Power,”
Dickinson takes control of her life and claims her ontological energy for her-
self, describing “Existence” as “Omnipotence – Enough” and arguing that
To be alive – and Will!
’Tis able as a God –
The Maker – of Ourselves – be what –
Such Being Finitude! (EDP, p. 335–36, no. 677)

In these poems, Dickinson claims complete autonomy. She casts of the con-
straints of patriarchy, including the names conferred on her by her father, the
church, and society; rejects marriage as the only way for women to achieve
a measure of power; and even arrogates to herself the divine power of self-
creation. Her assertions of personal liberty and authority in these poems are
a far cry from the self-abnegation of the letters; they are pervaded by a sense
of triumph and freedom.
As evidenced by her experience with the Master, Dickinson was deeply
committed to confronting the full range of her emotions, however fright-
ening the experience. She devoted herself both in her personal life and in
her poetry to exploring what she called “Circumference,” not just the cen-
ter of life but all of its edges; she wanted to experience all that she could

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 Emily Dickinson

of each moment, whether pleasurable or painful (EDL, p. 412; EDP, p. 313,

no. 633). This willingness to approach life with a wide perspective allowed her
to accept the inevitable coexistence of grief and joy, of despair and hope, and
of the potential for danger and the possibility of great power. She described
this process of abandonment to the emotion of each moment as a careful
balancing act:
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea. (EDP, pp. 416–17, no. 875)
This poem evinces Dickinson’s simultaneous commitment to exploration of
each moment and her awareness of how this commitment imperils her and
puts her at the risk of descent into chaos and destruction. While she gazes
with wonder at the beauties of the night sky, she can feel the pull of the sea at
her feet. And yet Dickinson remains open. She moves forward inch by inch on
unknown terrain, ready to encounter both agony and ecstasy in her determi-
nation to ind out the fullness of experience the world ofers. Her awareness
of these tensions and her willingness to risk everything in order to feel each
moment gives her poems an authenticity that rings true to contemporary
readers.
Emily Dickinson’s poems explore a wide range of emotions ranging from
fury to ecstasy; much of her poetry focuses on love, autonomy, nature, and
death. To the contemporary reader, it might seem as though Emily Dickinson
was death obsessed, but we have to keep in mind that the mortality rate was
much higher in her lifetime than it is now. Her bedroom in the family home on
West Street overlooked a church graveyard, and Dickinson had ample oppor-
tunity to observe the patterns and rituals of death. Later in her life, in 1874,
when Edward Dickinson collapsed while giving a speech in Boston and died
soon afterward, Emily began to confront the brevity of life in very concrete
ways. In the ten years immediately following, many of her family members
and closest friends died, including Samuel Bowles in 1878; Reverend Charles
Wadsworth in 1879; and Dickinson’s mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, in
1882. Soon after, Judge Otis Lord, with whom Dickinson had a very intimate
relationship, died, as did the poet Helen Hunt Jackson, who had remained a
close friend from their school days. When her eight-year-old nephew, Gib,
died of typhoid fever in October 1883, Dickinson became despondent. With so
much death in her immediate circle, it is no wonder that relections on the end
of life took up a large part of her work.

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As in her work on other subjects, in her poetry Dickinson subverted

Victorian sentimental norms about death as a passage to the afterlife. Rather
than depicting death as a gentle lover or angel escorting the faithful to heaven,
as was common in Victorian poetry and iction, Dickinson emphasizes that
death is a “Riddle, at the last,” making it clear that death is decidedly unroman-
tic, and that what happens after death is inherently unknowable and mysteri-
ous (EDP, p. 243, no. 501). In a letter after the death of Judge Lord, she remarked
that his death was “a Sleep that ended with a smile, so his Nieces tell us, he
hastened away, ‘seen,’ we trust, ‘of Angels’ – ‘Who knows that secret deep’ –
‘Alas, not I –’ ” (EDL, p. 816). And one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “I
heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” interrupts the “Stillness” and solemnity of the
deathbed room to follow a common ly and ends not with a vision of heaven
or the afterlife but with a refusal of vision altogether: “And then the Windows
failed – and then / I could not see to see –” (EDP, pp. 223–24, no. 465). The pres-
ence of the ly undercuts any sentimentality in the moment and suggests the
anticlimactic nature of death, and the abruptness of this ending underscores
death’s inscrutability.
Dickinson’s poetry explores the experience of death not only for the dying
but for those left behind to mourn the dead, and her purpose is not to sani-
tize or sentimentalize it but to record it. She was committed to describing the
experience of mourning with all its variations, no matter how unpleasant.
In one poem she describes the physical sensations of grief, including “great
pain,” followed by a “formal feeling” in which the “Nerves sit ceremonious”
and the “stif Heart questions” while the “Feet, mechanical, go round”; it is,
for the mourner,
. . . the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
(EDP, p. 162, no. 341)

In this description, those who “outlive” their loved ones move through the
world empty and numb, scarcely feeling at all after the initial pain. Grief steals
over them like cold, gradually and inevitably, and the emptiness it leaves behind
is a kind of death of the soul that hints at the ends that await the mourners too.
But pain is not the only emotion Dickinson explores; she also examines the
anger and guilt that come with death. “How dare the robins sing,” she asks,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account

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 Emily Dickinson

Have settled with the year! –

Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial. (EDP, p. 700, no. 1724)

That robins can continue to sing when the dead can no longer hear them is
an insult to their memory, and a source of bitter guilt for their loved ones.
The dead have paid the “consummate bill” for life, but it is the living who are
allowed to hear and enjoy the beauty of nature. In these poems, Dickinson
acknowledges the variety of emotions that accompany death for both the
dying and their mourners. She does not attempt to soften death; she experi-
ences it – both imaginatively and, as a mourner, literally – and presents it in
all its complexity.
Dickinson accepted the inevitability of death, and her poems celebrate her
deepest convictions that life should take on intense meaning in the context of
mortality. In one such poem, she describes her irst outing after a long illness
and concludes,
My loss, by sickness – Was it Loss?
Or that Ethereal Gain
One earns by measuring the Grave –
Then – measuring the Sun –
(EDP, pp. 279–80, no. 574)

Consistent with her belief that the heaven promised in the Christian afterlife
can be found in the joys of earthly life, Dickinson suggests that paradise can
be hastened if one faces the possibility of death and accepts that it will come,
if one “[measures] the Sun” with the perspective gained by irst measuring the
“Grave.” In this respect, the “loss” of time spent in nature is not a loss but an
“Ethereal Gain,” a way of bringing heaven-on-earth closer. For Dickinson, the
seeming omnipresence of death and the impossibility of knowing what fol-
lowed it served to make life ininitely dear.
In the mid-1880s, when Dickinson was in her early ifties, her life was seri-
ously circumscribed by increasingly serious health problems, including an eye
condition that brought increasing light sensitivity and Bright’s disease, a kid-
ney ailment that was associated with l uid retention, incontinence, and even-
tual kidney failure. When she lost consciousness for the irst time in August
1884, Dickinson described it as a “revenge of the nerves,” a diagnosis applied to
many ailments in the nineteenth century, and she was told to rest. This treat-
ment was consistent with the commonly prescribed “Rest Cure” treatment

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for “nervous diseases of women” made famous by prominent neurologist S.

Weir Mitchell; the cure involved seclusion and bed rest, minimal social and
intellectual engagement, and a mild diet of warm milk and bread. In a letter
to Helen Hunt Jackson, Dickinson recounted that she “took [her] summer in a
Chair” and optimistically announced that she had since “taken [her] Nerve by
the Bridle” (EDL, p. 937). Dickinson’s recovery was short lived; a year later she
was conined to her bed. In the spring of 1886, she wrote to Higginson, “I have
been very ill, Dear friend, since November [1885], bereft of Book and Thought,
by the Doctor’s reproof, but begun to roam in my Room now” (EDL, p. 1042).
This setback was the beginning of a serious decline in Dickinson’s health that
ended with her death in 1886.
Throughout her life, Dickinson rejected social convention and the comforts
of religion. This commitment to self-reliance meant that she had to explore
uncharted emotional terrain, which involved confronting fears of rejection
on all fronts – family, friends, love interests, teachers, editors, readers, and reli-
gious and community leaders – as well as the ultimate fear of death. In under-
taking this courageous journey, Dickinson left behind traditional comforts
and assurances, perhaps most powerful among them the promise of salvation
and eternal life, to navigate choppy existential waters alone. Relinquishing the
comforting assurances provided by ilial piety, traditional marriage, or faith in
an afterlife, Emily Dickinson struggled with the complexities and contradic-
tions of her emotions. Finally, she rejected all patriarchal authorities – her
father, potential husbands, literary mentors, and an all-powerful God. Her
poetry and letters form a chronicle of her challenging, and often dramatic,
adventure.
Ultimately, Emily Dickinson spurned a cosmology deined by absolute and
authoritarian certainties and instead created a personal vision in which con-
sciousness itself was a gift, ecstasy was the joy of being alive, human love was
a form of grace, nature was heaven, home was paradise, and art created eter-
nal life. As a young girl, Emily Dickinson proclaimed that she was not afraid
to pick “Satan’s lowers,” to explore and know the intimate nature of things
others considered dangerous. Her determination to live her life in this way,
without the traditional comforts of marriage and certainties of religion, gave
her the understanding necessary to write powerful and timeless poetry.

Notes
1. Thomas Higginson, quoted in Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson,
ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986),

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p. 570. Letters in this collection will subsequently be cited in the text as EDL
followed by the page number.
2. Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,”
Parnassus: Poetry in Review 5:1 (1976), reprinted in Adrienne Rich, Selected Prose,
1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 161.
3. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H.
Johnson (New York: Little, Brown, 1960) p. 99. Poems in this collection will
subsequently be cited as EDP followed by the page number and poem num-
ber (e.g., EDP, p. 99, no. 215). Johnson and R. W. Franklin are considered the
two major scholars in the editing and publication of Dickinson’s poetry and
letters. Johnson’s three-volume edition of Dickinson’s poetry (1951) was a
landmark publication in that it was the irst major collection of Dickinson’s
work that attempted to present her poems in their original formatting and
style, with minimal editorial intervention in punctuation, capitalization, and
ordering. He also published a variorum edition in 1955 and a single-volume
reading edition in 1960. Franklin later built on Johnson’s work and in various
editions (beginning in 1981) has attempted to make the published texts resem-
ble Dickinson’s manuscripts as closely as possible. There is some variation in
dating and order between Johnson and Franklin; Johnson’s 1960 reading edi-
tion is cited here for ease of reference.
4. Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne
Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 121.
5. Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped
Them (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55–56.
6. Quoted in Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” p. 158.
7. See Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily
Dickinson (New York: Modern Library, 2002) and Shira Wolosky, Emily
Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).
8. See John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (New York:
Belknap, 1971) and Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s
Correspondence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
9. See Ralph W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967) and Eleanor Elson
Heginbotham, Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).
10. See Karl Keller, The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and
America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
11. Martin, An American Triptych, p. 102.
12. The poetry is diicult to date because of the nature in which it was stored,
and the way the materials were handled following Dickinson’s death. Some
poems were bound into fascicles; many were written on a wide variety of
scrap papers and materials; for many, it was diicult to tell whether the poems

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were drafts or inal versions; almost all were undated. Some poems could
be dated based on their inclusion in letters, but for the most part they were
in no discernible order. To add to the confusion, after Dickinson’s death the
fascicles were unbound and separated by well-meaning relatives attempting
to order the poems, further obscuring any organization Dickinson might have
intended.

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 Chapter 17
The South in Reconstruction: White
and Black Voices
J o h n D. K e r k e r i ng

“Reconstruction” is the term traditionally used to designate the period and

process by which the defeated Southern states were reintegrated into the
United States after the U.S. Civil War. The period typically extends from the
close of hostilities in April 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops from the
South in 1877. The process included two major plans for reintegration, irst
that of the president (Andrew Johnson) and second that of the Republican
Senate, and it produced such major legislation as several civil rights acts and
three amendments to the Constitution – the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments.1 The social and political turmoil of the Civil War and
Reconstruction periods could not help but be evident to poets writing during
this time, and their responses to this turmoil took a variety of forms, but the
overall shape of this period witnesses a shift by poets away from a focus on
regional ailiation to an increasingly strong confrontation with the issues of
race. In other words, the conl icts between North and South come to have less
centrality than those between black and white people.
The Southern poet Henry Timrod was briely enlisted in service of the
Confederacy before poor health dictated that he turn his activities in a more
literary direction, which he pursued as assistant editor of the Charleston
Mercury in 1863. During the early years of the Civil War he wrote poems like
“Carolina” (now the state’s oicial song) that championed his native state and
relected the commitment to states’ rights associated with the Southern cause:
“They shall not touch thy noble heart, / Carolina!”2 As the war waged on,
however, his poems referenced the conl ict but tended not to champion one
side over another; thus, Timrod’s concern with regional divisions between
North and South ultimately relects a studious avoidance of drawing poetry
into the fray.3 For instance, in “Spring” he laments the coming of that sea-
son – normally a welcome event – because it will bring with it a resumption of
military hostilities: “Yet not more surely shall the Spring awake / The voice of
wood and brake / Than she shall rouse, for all her tranquil charms, / A million

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men to arms” (CPT, p. 124). In the poem “Christmas” he asks, “How shall we
grace the day? / Ah! Let the thought that on this holy morn / The Prince of
Peace – the Prince of Peace was born, / Employ us, while we pray!” (CPT,
p. 117), suggesting a shared religious sentiment uniting both sides. In “The
Two Armies” the conceit portrays a single army of men doing the ighting
and a single army of women supporting them and waiting for the ighting to
end, so he divides the opponents by sex rather than by region. Insofar as they
look toward reconciliation, these sentiments anticipate the values necessary
for Reconstruction to succeed.
An exception to Timrod’s martial restraint is the exhilaration inspired by
Confederate victories that led to the poem “Carmen Triumphale”: “Our foes
are fallen! Flash, ye wires!” (CPT, p. 128). The South would soon, however, suf-
fer military setbacks at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and Timrod’s poems often
express the mourning that goes along with such losses. This proves especially
true of his poems in the early days of Reconstruction. For instance, in 1866 he
wrote an occasional poem for the dedication of the Charleston cemetery for
Confederate dead, a poem that takes a universalist rather than regionalist tone:
“Stoop, angels, higher from the skies! / There is no holier spot of ground, /
Than where defeated valor lies / By mourning beauty crowned” (CPT, p. 130).
Here “defeated valor” is a description that could apply as well to combatants
on either side of the Civil War. Timrod’s view of Reconstruction is partial,
because he only lived a couple of years into the process (he died in 1867), but
one of his latest poems registers – albeit obliquely – a fear common among
the former Confederates, a fear that the defeated South would be at the mercy
of the triumphant North. Thus the poem “Storm and Calm” expresses the
following concern: “Awake, thou stormy North, and blast / The subtle spells
around us cast; / Beat from our limbs these lowery chains / With the sharp
scourges of thy rains!” (CPT, p. 139). Here the “calm” South is harassed by
the stormy North in an allegory in which the contrasting seasons stand in for
political diferences, with Northern storms threatening Southern tranquility.
Timrod died too soon, however, to have the experiences of Reconstruction
that would lead him to write more poems in this register of complaint. What
we primarily see from Timrod, then, is a profound awareness of the losses of
the war and a tendency to use poetry not as a means of fomenting the conl ict
but instead as a way of mourning those losses.
A desire to preserve Timrod’s name and reputation motivated Paul Hamilton
Hayne, himself a Southern poet, to produce an edition of Timrod’s writings
in 1873, with a biographical sketch that remains an important resource. Like
Timrod, Hayne was also a poet of wartime, and several of his works express

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 The South in Reconstruction

sentiments associated with the experiences of both victory and defeat,4 but
Hayne, in living and continuing to write until his death in 1886, had greater
opportunity to write about Reconstruction.
Some of his poems complain about the way the defeated South was being
treated by the victorious North. “South Carolina to the States of the North”
has an opening footnote that reads: “This Poem was composed at a period
when it seemed as if all the horrors of misgovernment . . . would be per-
petuated in South Carolina. It was a signiicant and terrible epoch; a time
American statesmen would do well to remember occasionally as a warning
against patchwork political re-constructions” (PH, p. 297n). In the poem itself
Hayne mixes strategies of personalization and personiication: to personalize,
the speaker complains of “these hands with iron fetters banded” and “Your
tyrant’s sword [that] shone glittering at my throat!”; to personify, the speaker
refers to the abstract concept of “Freedom” as a “sweet goddess” whose “out-
raged form [is] receding” (PH, pp. 297–98). To close the poem, the speaker
threatens a reversal of fortunes at the time of divine judgment, when he “May
mock your ruin, as ye mocked at mine!” (PH, p. 299).
If this poem envisions an ultimate and divinely sanctioned revenge, other
Hayne poems took a softer tone, seeking reconciliation with the North rather
than vengeance. For instance, “The Stricken South to the North” acknowl-
edges the goodwill of particular Northern friends like Oliver Wendell Holmes
(to whom the poem is dedicated) so that, even as it complains of wrongs
(“Behold her now – the scourged and sufering South!”), the poem envisions
“A voice of manful cheer and heavenly trust / A hand redeeming breaks the
frozen starkness” (PH, p. 299). This redemption is, as in the earlier poem, asso-
ciated with divine judgment – “Ah! Still beyond the tempest smiles the Christ!”
(PH, p. 300) – but here the redemption is to be attained in this world rather than
the world to come: “Whose voice? Whose hand? Oh, thanks, divinest Master,
/ Thanks for those grand emotions which impart / Grace to the North to
feel the South’s disaster, / The South to bow with touched and cordial heart!”
(PH, p. 300). Here it is a sentimental reconciliation, or “emotions” and “feel-
ing,” based on religious humility and “love,” that Hayne envisions as allowing
the two sections to reunite: “Now, now at last the magic words are spoken
/ Which blend in one two long-divided lands!” (PH, p. 300). These “magic
words,” from Holmes to Hayne, are quoted from a private letter excerpted
at the beginning of the poem (“We are thinking a great deal about the poor
fever-stricken cities of the South, and all contributing according to our means
for their relief ” [PH, p. 299]). In other poems Hayne envisions reconciliation
in other terms than religious feeling. For instance, “The King of the Plow”

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 Jo h n D. K er k e rin g

foresees a time after the war when “The war-cloud has hurled its last light-
ning” and there rules, instead, the monarch of agriculture: “What monarch
rules blissfully now? / Oh! Crown him with bays that are bloodless, / The
king, the brave king of the plow!” (PH, p. 311). The geographic sections are
thus uniied here by their shared subservience (“All climes to his prowess must
bow”) to this “homely, but bountiful God” (PH, p. 311) of agricultural pro-
duction who rules over North and South alike. In yet another poem, “On the
Death of President Garield,” Hayne expresses a shared sorrow that joins both
North and South as one nation: “North,” “West,” and “South” are “Thus by
the spell of one vast grief united” (PH, p. 313).
Reconciliation of North and South would eventually become the explicit
goal of another Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, who was chosen to partici-
pate in the 1876 centennial celebration in Philadelphia by writing the lyrics to
a work composed jointly by a Southerner and a Northerner: Lanier would
write the words, and a Northerner, Dudley Buck of Boston, would write the
music, with the conjunction of music and words in a harmonious whole rep-
resenting reunion. This disposition toward reconciliation, however, did not
come easily to Lanier, who took until 1876 to reach this view. Lanier, who had
been a Confederate soldier, had similar views to Hayne about the abuses of
the North against the South. Thus in an 1868 poem called “Laughter in the
Senate” Lanier responds to the shift from a presidential to a congressional plan
of reconstruction, complaining that the new plan makes light of the South’s
ills: “The tyrants sit in a stately hall; / They jibe at a wretched people’s fall.”5
More sinister is Lanier’s 1870–1871 poem “Them Ku Klux,” in which a conver-
sation between a Southerner and a “Yankee” leads to oblique praise of the ter-
rorist conspiracy that this group perpetrated against Southern black people.
In this poem, Ulysses S. Grant is imagined as the “leader” and “breeder” of the
Klan insofar as he set up the postwar conditions that prompted Klan violence
(PPO, p. 193). In the 1874 poem “Civil Rights,” a dialect speaker complains of
the equality envisioned for African Americans in the proposed Civil Rights Act
(enacted in 1875). “Them Yanks had throwed us overboard from of the Ship
of State. / Yes, throwed us both – both black and white – into the ragin’ sea /
With but one rotten plank to hold,” and the speaker warns, “I’ll push the niger
in” (PPO, pp. 41–42), making explicit reference to rising racial conl ict in the
postwar South. As this hostile language demonstrates, Lanier was quite will-
ing to use poetry to express his pain and anger at the way the white South was
being treated in Reconstruction.
But if Hayne was interested in reconciliation by the means we’ve seen –
via Christian love, the common harvest, or shared grief – then Lanier was

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interested in reconciliation of the warring sections by a diferent means, that

of racial identity. Hayne, for his part, used the word “race” to mean genera-
tion – thus he referred to someone as belonging to a “time and race gone by”
(“To Alexander H. Stephens” [PH, p. 293]). But Lanier saw “race” as a term
expressing the persistence through time of a particular people – in his case,
Anglo-Saxons. Lanier thus looked further backward – to the Anglo-Saxon
past – in order to look further forward – toward an ultimate resolution of
sectional conl ict on the grounds of racial unity. African Americans would be
excluded from Lanier’s vision of a reunited United States.
Lanier’s views about the shared Anglo-Saxonness of the North and South
are evident in his extensive prose writings about poetry. Lanier’s racial logic
begins by establishing that poetry is to be understood as music rather than
language. In his view, music and language are two distinct phenomena, the
one (language) concerning itself with conveying meanings, or the contents
of individual consciousness, and the other (music) evoking emotion without
communicating any conscious ideas whatsoever. Here is Lanier’s emphatic
declaration of the point in a fragment of writing on Wagner:
Wagner is again wrong in his fundamental assertion that music “speaks a lan-
guage intelligible by all.” The truth is that as language (i.e. as that which con-
veys the contents of one consciousness into another consciousness; or that
which makes you aware pro tanto of me) [music] is not intelligible to any save
in the most limited degree. If you shall play me your improvisation, I can tell
whether you mean a funeral dirge, or dance music, I can apprehend to some
degree the state of your soul: but within these widely separated extremes lies
a vast domain of tone which when I come within its inl uence does not bring
me the least intelligible report of your consciousness: and you shall play to
me by the hour without increasing my deinite accessions of matters drawn
from your consciousness however thoroughly your music may penetrate my
heart.6
Lanier’s next logical step argues that poetry is not just music but racial music.
He does this by asserting that Anglo-Saxon poetry from the eighth century to
the present has employed the same rhythmic basis, what Lanier calls three-
rhythm. Thus, in his The Science of English Verse (1880), Lanier writes, “we
ind the English love for 3-rhythm not only unabating after more than twelve
hundred years’ use of it, but the most modern English verse tending into the
very speciic forms of 3-rhythm used by our earliest ancestral poets.”7 Lanier
identiies this as “the typic rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry” (SEV, p. 120) and
asserts that it “never varies from the beginning to the end of what we may call
Anglo-Saxon poetry” (SEV, p. 120). According to Lanier, Anglo-Saxon poets

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have been making the same music for more than a thousand years; the fact
that poets make this same rhythmic music – and not whether they follow the
rules of language (which have changed over time) – is what makes them count
as Anglo-Saxon. Even such radical formal experiments as those produced by
Walt Whitman can, according to Lanier, be subsumed under the banner of
Anglo-Saxon music.8
This point about U.S. racial unity achieved via poetry-as-music gives us
an insight into Lanier’s 1876 centennial cantata, mentioned previously. In a
letter to the editors of the New York Times in which Lanier defends his can-
tata text against widespread criticism, he writes that he deliberately chose
“abrupt vocables” of “short, sharp, vigorous Saxon words” for his poem’s
lines, thus making his poetry – that is, his music – Anglo-Saxon.9 There is
a tension between the racial music of the poem and its national text: the
cantata text is entitled “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia”; thus its
overt reference is 1776 and the New World goddess – Columbia – who pre-
sides over the new nation, but the form that the poem embodies – because
it is not language but music – is not national but racial, and the race it
embodies is the Old World race of Anglo-Saxons, the race the poem imag-
ines as colonizing the New World at Plymouth and Jamestown. Understood
in this way, the performance of this text at the 1876 centennial celebration
in Philadelphia efectively endorsed Lanier’s vision for Reconstruction, a
solution to the sectional conl ict that uniied whites to the exclusion of
African Americans.
This commitment to Anglo-Saxon racial identity provides the background
for many other poems whose themes are not ostensibly political or racial. An
example is Lanier’s Christian poem “A Ballad of Trees and the Master” (1880),
which uses Lanier’s characteristically Anglo-Saxon three-rhythm to depict
the sympathy of woodland nature as Christ spends time in the wilderness
and, subsequently, is cruciied on a tree: “From under the trees they drew
Him last: / ’Twas on a tree they slew Him – last / When out of the woods he
came” (PPO, p. 144). The longer poems for which Lanier is best known include
“Corn” (1874), “The Symphony” (1875), and “The Marshes of Glynn” (1878).
The irst of these articulates a tension between cotton, which is presented as
a mere commodity in the ickle marketplace, and corn, which is presented as
a steadfast companion and counterpart to the poet-speaker: “Thou lustrous
stalk, that ne’er mayst walk nor talk, / Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sub-
lime” (PPO, p. 36), and “Fitly thou playest out thy poet’s part” (PPO, p. 37).
In this way corn, although just as much a commodity as cotton, becomes
an extension of Romantic nature – an eternal resource for the foundation

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of human dignity. “The Symphony” further develops the critique of a com-

mercial culture that reduces life to mere commodities: “ ‘O Trade! O Trade!
would that thou wert dead! / The Time needs heart – ’tis tired of head: /
We’re all for love,’ the violins said” (PPO, p. 46). With a series of orchestral
instruments serving as speakers, the poem makes its case for an elevation of
loving heart over trading head: “ ‘Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead? / And
hast thou nothing but a head? / I’m all for heart,’ the l ute-voice said” (PPO,
pp. 51–52). The poem concludes that “Music is Love in search of a word”
(PPO, p. 56). Lanier’s emphasis on poetry as music recognizes that words are
capable of serving either head or heart and insists that words must become
musical in order to achieve the status of “Art” (PPO, p. 51) and overcome vile
trade. This theme of commerce is also present in “The Marshes of Glynn,”
in which “the trowel of trade is low” (PPO, p. 119) and, by contrast, the maj-
esty of nature is wholly present to a speaker who watches a day unfold in
the marshland: “Oh, like the greatness of God is the greatness within / The
range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn” (PPO, p. 121). In addition
to tracing the passage of noon to night, the poem’s speaker stands watch as
the high tide arrives: “The tide is at his highest height: / And it is night” (PPO,
p. 122). Here the land and sea unite in a full measure of divine creation. What
unfolds in these lines is a drama of rapt spectatorship as the marsh is invested
with all the grandeur of natural divinity: “I will ly in the greatness of God as
the marsh-hen l ies / In the freedom that ills all the space ’twixt the marsh
and the skies” (PPO, p. 121). Throughout this poem Lanier experiments with
the musicality of an anapestic line, one fully in keeping with his notion of an
ancestral Anglo-Saxon three-rhythm.
In his approach to poetry – treating it as music, and treating that music as
inherently racial – Lanier efectively closes out the representation of African
Americans from his vision of postwar national unity. By contrast, an explicit
efort to represent black people in poetry is exempliied by Walt Whitman’s
1871 poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” in which Whitman embeds a black
speaker who suggests the relationship that “Ethiopia” – an aged “dusky”
woman who stands in for all black people – bears to “the Colors,” or the lag
of the federal union. The poem begins,
Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,
With your wooly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?
Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
(’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines,
Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me,
As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

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Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d,

A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.10
Here a remnant from the other Old World – Africa – is presented as an embed-
ded speaker in the poem, so a black voice is mediated by Whitman’s white
one. There is thus an efort here to envision someone speaking on behalf
of black people, much as Lanier sought a voice speaking on behalf of white
people (or Anglo-Saxons). This efort to articulate a racialized poetic voice for
black people would be taken up more extensively by the poets Frances Ellen
Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Albery Allson Whitman.
Harper’s efort to speak on behalf of black people extended back before the
Civil War, when she agitated in favor of freedom for African American slaves.
This agitation found voice in her prose writings as well as her poetry. In the
poem “To the Cleveland Union-Savers: An Appeal from One of the Fugitive’s
Own Race” (1861), for instance, Harper chastises those who, for the sake of
saving the federal union, would call for returning Southern fugitive slaves
to their masters, calling instead on these Union advocates to give freedom
to black people: “And your guilty, sin-cursed Union / Shall be shaken to its
base, / Till ye learn that simple justice / Is the right of every race.”11 A similar
viewpoint motivates Harper’s longer narrative poem Moses: A Story of the Nile
(1869). Writing in 1859, Harper had asserted, “I like the character of Moses. He
is the irst disunionist we read of in the Jewish Scriptures” (BCD, p. 103). But in
this postwar poem Harper focuses more on devotion to one’s race than on the
drama of freedom obtained, for the Jews can be freed only if Moses – who is of
a diferent class than the slaves of his race – chooses to breach class distinctions
and identify with the lowly slaves. Near the end of Moses, Harper writes, “His
life had been a lengthened sacriice, / A thing of deep devotion to his race”
(BCD, p. 163). Harper’s Reconstruction poetry often advocates the identiica-
tion of upper-class black people with lower-class black people, a goal that also
takes center stage in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy.
What we’ve seen, then, is that following the Civil War and the freedoms
won for African Americans, Harper shifted her focus from freedom for slaves
to civil rights and uplift for black citizens. During a tour of what she calls “the
unreconstructed states” in July 1867 Harper writes, “so far as the colored man is
concerned, I do not feel particularly uneasy about his future. With his breadth
of physical organization, his fund of mental endurance, and his former disci-
pline in the school of toil and privation, I think he will be able to force his way
upward and win his recognition even in the South” (BCD, p. 124).

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Her collection Poems (1871) set out to be a spur to this kind of uplift. In
“Lines to Hon. Thaddeus Stevens,” a prominent congressional advocate of
black civil rights, she writes, “There is hope in God’s great justice, / And the
negro’s rising brain” (BCD, p. 167). The threat to this hope was to be found
in the ambitions of the former “traitor” to the nation, the Southern white,
and the proof against this threat was to be the solidarity of the rest of the
nation with black people, who, during the war, “were faithful to the end” (“An
Appeal to the American People” [BCD, p. 167]). Harper put her hopes in those
“Americans” to whom she appeals, but she also took solace from legal mile-
stones, as indicated by her poem “Fifteenth Amendment”: “With freedom’s
chrism upon thy head, / Her precious ensign in thy hand, / Go place thy once
despised name / Amid the noblest of the land” (BCD, pp. 189–90).
Harper presented speakers in her 1872 collection Sketches of Southern Life
who were both regional and racial: black Southerners. This was a pioneering
foray into racial representation in poetry. Central to this collection is the ener-
getic voice of a frame narrator, Aunt Chloe, in a series of impressive poems:
“Aunt Chloe,” “The Deliverance,” “Aunt Chloe’s Politics, “Learning to Read,”
“Church Building,” and “The Reunion.” Frances Smith Foster describes Aunt
Chloe as a folk character who speaks in dialect and thus represents a contribu-
tion to the literature of local color, but it is striking how standard the English
is in the Aunt Chloe poems, especially when compared to the dramatically
nonstandard dialect rendered in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which
would be published three decades later (BCD, p. 137). An example is “The
Deliverance,” which depicts the divergence of views on the Civil War between
the slave quarters and the master’s house: “Mistus prayed up in the parlor /
That the Secesh all might win; / We were praying in the cabins, / Wanting free-
dom to begin” (BCD, p. 200). The poem goes on to discuss the slave quarters’
reaction to the death of Lincoln (“we had one awful sorrow”) and its hopes
for the new president: “I’d vote for him for breaking up / The wicked Ku-Klux
Klan” (BCD, p. 202). The subject of voting leads Aunt Chloe to address the cir-
cumstance of some former slaves selling their votes and the negative reactions
of their wives to this practice: “You’d laughed to seen Lucinda Grange / Upon
her husband’s track; / When he sold his vote for rations / She made him take
’em back” (BCD, p. 204). African Americans were widely criticized for selling
their votes (which was taken as a sign that they did not appreciate their newly
won liberty), and Aunt Chloe ends “The Deliverance” with reassurances that
most former slaves refused to sell their votes and properly valued the right to
vote; they “know their freedom cost too much / Of blood and pain and trea-

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sure, / For them to fool away their votes / For proit or for pleasure” (BCD,
p. 204).
Other Aunt Chloe poems include “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” and “Learning
to Read.” The former laments the “mighty ugly tricks” perpetrated by those
who “talk so awful sweet,” concluding level-headedly that political corrup-
tion is a “loss we all must share” (BCD, pp. 204–05). The latter addresses an
important aspect of Reconstruction’s racial uplift project, the dissemination
of education to the former slave population. “Well, the Northern folks kept
sending / The Yankee teachers down; / And they stood right up and helped
us, / Though Rebs did sneer and frown” (BCD, p. 206). Despite her age (“ris-
ing sixty” [BCD, p. 206]), Aunt Chloe insists on learning to read her Bible, and
this quest for intellectual independence is paralleled by independent living in a
room of her own: “Then I got a little cabin – / A place to call my own – / And
I felt as independent / As the queen upon her throne” (BCD, p. 206). The poem
“Church Building” underscores another important aspect of Reconstruction
for African Americans, the construction of independent churches as institu-
tions of stability within the community. Aunt Chloe relates, “Uncle Jacob often
told us, / Since freedom blessed our race / We ought all to come together /
And build a meeting place” (BCD, p. 206), and Uncle Jacob goes on to “the
promised land” – which, here, is not freedom (as it was often described prior
to Reconstruction) but a Christian heaven. The inal poem in the Aunt Chloe
sequence is “The Reunion,” which represents the efort to reconstitute African
American families that had been torn apart by slavery – particularly, by the
separation of slave mothers from their children. Thus Aunt Chloe says to her
newly discovered son, whose search for her has inally succeeded, “Old Mistus
got no power now / To tear us both apart” (BCD, p. 208). This ambition to
reconstitute families during Reconstruction would be a prominent part of the
plot of Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy, but the Aunt Chloe sequence is diferent
and distinctive insofar as it gives a central role as speaker to a former slave and
resident of the slave quarters.
In her speeches from this period Harper continued to underscore the notion
of racial uplift, a concept that would gain its greatest notoriety through the
writings of Booker T. Washington, particularly his autobiography, Up from
Slavery (1895). Harper states in an 1866 speech that “Society cannot aford to
neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members” (BCD, p. 217), suggest-
ing that racial classiications should not be a basis for diferential treatment of
black and white people. She continues, “This grand and glorious revolution
which has commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success, until through-
out the length and brea[d]th of the American Republic, the nation shall be

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so color-blind, as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of

his hair” (BCD, p. 218). This ambition for an absence of racial distinctiveness
within the U.S. nation would prompt criticism from later writers who sought
an autonomous racial identity, setting black people apart from white interfer-
ence. Such later writers – notably, W. E. B. Du Bois – resisted the idea that the
African American, or “Negro,” was a “problem” to be solved. This, however,
is how Harper phrases the situation in her speech “The Great Problem to be
Solved”:
The great problem to be solved by the American people, if I understand it, is
this – whether or not there is strength enough in democracy, virtue enough
in our civilization, and power enough in our religion to have mercy and deal
justly with four millions of people but lately translated from the old oligarchy
of slavery to the new commonwealth of freedom: and upon the right solution
of this question depends in a large measure the future strength, progress, and
durability of our nation. (BCD, p. 219)
According to Harper, race, as an operative distinction between black and white
peoples, should give way to a shared American national identity. Ironically,
Harper often wrote from a racially distinct voice in order to advocate the
vanishing of that racial distinctiveness. Harper envisioned racial uplift – and in
particular the assistance of white toward black people – as suicient to bring
justice in this earthly world.
The earthly world coexists, for Harper, with a sacred world beyond it, and
Christian themes are prominent in Harper’s poetry. In “Jesus,” which appeared
in Harper’s 1871 collection Poems, Harper’s speaker states, “I need the grand
attraction / That centres ’round the cross, / To change the gilded things of
earth / To emptiness and dross” (BCD, p. 189). Harper was known, however,
to mix her notions of divinity with this world; thus, the Civil War could be
seen as divine retribution for the worldly sins of slavery, and the end of slavery
could be a worldly manifestation of arriving at the promised land. We see the
former notion in the poem “Retribution” (from Poems [1871]): “As a warning to
the nations, / Bathed in blood and swathed in ire, / Lay the once oppressing
nation, / Smitten by God’s fearful ire” (BCD, p. 190). Here the aftermath of
divine judgment isn’t the kingdom of heaven but the worldly hell of punish-
ment for slavery’s evil ways. Another example sees the end of slavery as itself
the promised land: “O ransomed race! Give God the praise, / Who led thee
through a crimson sea” (“Fifteenth Amendment” [BCD, p. 190]). But Harper’s
eschatology was also geared toward setting aside the earthly world – whether
it be a site of divine punishment or a site of divine reward – in favor of a dis-
tant heaven to be sought after in spite of this world’s successes or failures.

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Thus in the poem “Light in Darkness,” the speaker states, “And we thanked
the chastening angel / Who shaded our earthly light, / For the light and beau-
tiful visions / That broke on our clearer sight” (BCD, p. 195). In “I Thirst,”
this divinity, although remote from worldly concerns, is made proximate to
one’s inmost heart: “Within, in thee is the living fount, / Fed from the springs
above” (BCD, p. 209). The poem “A Dialogue” draws an “Inquirer” away from
“Wealth,” “Fame,” and “Pleasure” and toward “Religion . . . As the guide and
the solace of man” (BCD, p. 215). And the speaker of “Saved at Last” rejoices
that “Behind me were life’s fetters, / Its conl ict and unrest; / Before me were
the pearly gates, / And mansions of the blest” (BCD, p. 215).
Christianity would be a far less explicit theme in the poetry of Paul
Laurence Dunbar, whose collection Complete Poems of 1913 uses special cate-
gories to describe his poetry – thus he includes poetry “of lowly life,” “of the
hearthside,” “humour and dialect,” “of love and sorrow,” and “of sunshine
and shadow” – but who did not include among these a category of poetry of
religion. Although Dunbar lists “humour and dialect” as the focus of a sin-
gle section in Complete Poems, he in fact included humor and dialect poetry
together in his earlier collections, which included eleven volumes between
1893 and 1905. As Martin Griin notes, Dunbar is often remembered for his
dialect poetry alone, but it should be noted that, at least in terms of gather-
ing his poems for publication, he did not distinguish the one group from the
other, the dialect from the standard.12 As already noted, Dunbar’s dialect is
much more pronounced than that of Frances Harper’s speaker, Aunt Chloe.
Harper has Chloe use abbreviations such as “agin’ ” (for “against”) or contrac-
tions such as “ ’Twould” (for “It would”) (BCD, p. 205), but these are few and
far between; Dunbar, by contrast, makes much more pervasive use of these
devices in his dialect poetry. An example is a line in “Accountability” in which
nearly every word is modiied (and all of the lines of the poem show similar
dialect alteration): “Nuthin’s done er evah happens, ’dout hit’s somein’ dat’s
intended.”13 In an early review of Dunbar’s poetry, the inl uential novelist and
literary critic William Dean Howells singled out his dialect poems for special
praise, and an emphasis on this aspect of his work has continued in subse-
quent treatments of his poetry.14
Dunbar’s eleven collections of poetry appeared in the period that also saw
the rise of Jim Crow segregation, which became the law of the land when
the Plessey v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1896 enshrined “sep-
arate but equal” as federally sanctioned practice. Dunbar protested against
the racial prejudice of his time in his magazine and newspaper writings.
In an 1898 newspaper article entitled “The Race Question Discussed” (an

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article prompted by the Wilmington race riots of that year) Dunbar writes
the following:
Thirty years ago the American people told the Negro that he was a man with
a man’s full power. They deemed it that important they did what they have
done few times in the history of the country – they wrote it down in their con-
stitution. And now they come with the shot gun in the South and sophistry in
the North to prove to him that it was all wrong.15
Dunbar would be even more caustic in his tone in an essay published on July 10,
1903, in the New York Times, entitled “The Fourth of July and Race Outrages.”
There he writes,
The papers are full of the reports of peonage in Alabama. A new and more
dastardly slavery there has arisen to replace the old. For the sake of reenslav-
ing the Negro, the Constitution has been trampled under feet, the rights of
man have been laughed out of court, and the justice of God has been made a
jest and we celebrate. (SG, p. 293)
This phrase, “and we celebrate,” becomes a refrain for this newspaper piece,
which chastises all parties involved for complacency on the matter of “race
outrages.”
Dunbar resists this complacency not only through his journalistic essays
but also through several of his “protest poems.”16 Perhaps the best known
of these is the poem “We Wear the Mask,” in which the speaker antici-
pates W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” suggesting that
life for the “we” of the poem – African Americans – involves a duplicitous
concealment of their struggles with racial segregation. The mask is worn
in the presence of whites, but its “grins and lies” conceal the human hurt
that segregation brings: “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries / To thee
from tortured souls arise. . . . But let the world dream otherwise, / We wear
the mask!” (CPD, p. 71). Another example of Dunbar’s protest poetry is the
poem “Ode to Ethiopia,” which opens his irst collection of poems (Oak and
Ivy [1893]) but sets out a very diferent tone from the one we saw previously
in Whitman’s “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.” Although she is represented,
as in Whitman’s poem, as a female igure, Ethiopia, in Dunbar’s poem, is
not an ancient relic but a vital maternal force: “O Mother Race! To thee I
bring / This pledge of faith unwavering, / This tribute to thy glory” (CPD,
p. 15). The inal stanza of the poem looks to the future less with an inter-
est in racial uplift (which we saw in Harper, and which emphasizes moving
from lowly status to that of dignity) than with an interest in racial prowess
and triumph:

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Go on and up! Our souls and eyes

Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia’s glory. (CPD, p. 16)
The kind of triumph that Dunbar attributes to African Americans here is
made concrete in his poem “The Colored Soldiers,” which celebrates the role
played by black soldiers in the Civil War. “So when War, in savage triumph,
/ Spread abroad his funeral pall – / Then you called the colored soldiers, /
And they answered to your call” (CPD, p. 50). “And their deeds,” the poem
continues, “shall ind a record, / In the registry of Fame; / For their blood has
cleansed completely / Every blot of Slavery’s shame” (CPD, p. 52).
But this tone of triumph is less common in Dunbar’s protest poems than
a tone of chastisement and reproach. The latter is evident in Dunbar’s “The
Haunted Oak,” in which the speaker is an oak tree whose branches were used
to lynch a black man accused of, but never tried for or convicted of, rape.
Lynching was on the rise in the post-Reconstruction United States, particu-
larly in the South, and Dunbar’s speaker – the oak tree – becomes, in its death,
a reproach to those who participated in the lynching:
I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel the throe of his inal woe
The touch of my own last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On a bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man. (CPD, p. 220)

Dunbar brings his tone of reproach directly to bear on the South in “To the
South; On Its New Slavery.” Here Dunbar’s target is debt peonage, a legal and
economic condition that held African Americans tied to the soil as workers in
a manner that resembled slavery because, as they fell further and further into
debt, black farmers became chained to the land by these inancial obligations –
obligations typically owed to white owners of the land. Dunbar’s speaker asks,
“Did Sanctioned Slavery bow its conquered head / That this unsanctioned
crime might rise instead?” (CPD, p. 218)
But part of Dunbar’s technique in “To the South” seems to run counter to
his protest message, for he uses the poem to praise the Southern past – the

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past of sanctioned slavery – by contrast to the Southern present: “Oh, Mother

South, hast thou forgot thy ways, / Forgot the glory of thine ancient days, /
Forgot the honor that once made thee great, / And stooped to this unhallowed
estate?” (CPD, p. 218). This tactic of praise for a prior South involves Dunbar
in a nostalgic invocation of the condition of slavery, a nostalgia he envisions
even for slaves: “For him no more the cabin’s quiet rest, / The homely joys that
gave to labor zest; / No more for him the merry banjo’s sound, / Nor trip of
lightsome dances footing round” (CPD, p. 218). And it is this nostalgic stance
toward the slave past that Dunbar is often criticized for depicting. As Joanne
M. Braxton puts it, “Dunbar’s work began to decline in popularity during the
1920s after New Negro critics accused him of accommodating negative stereo-
types of life in order to sell his poems to white readers.”17 Dunbar’s accommo-
dationist stance is most often associated with his dialect poetry, in which the
use of dialect is seen as participating in stereotypes about African Americans’
uneducated speech and thus in denigrating African Americans generally.
Dunbar’s dialect poetry nevertheless seeks to capture the moments of pos-
itive emotion shared among African Americans under conditions of enslave-
ment. These moments, few and far between as they may have been, might well
be considered as genre scenes, in which – as in European styles of painting –
domestic life is placed on display. Dunbar’s purposes in this display were varied
and may include a desire to express nostalgia for the antebellum past, a wish
to refute such nostalgia, or a broader attempt to airm the beauty of black
experience under slavery; see, for instance, his poems “A Banjo Song,” “An
Ante-bellum Sermon,” “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot,” “A Plantation Portrait,”
“Noddin’ by de Fire,” “When Sam’l Sings,” “When Malindy Sings,” “Scamp,”
and “The Old Homestead.” Dunbar writes in his journalistic prose that he is
enamored of the life of the middle classes in England, and he wishes this kind
of life for African Americans:
Our peasantry, if such the laboring blacks may be called, in condition is much
like that of England; but in realization and acceptance of their lot, how difer-
ent. The novel message of freedom has been blown into their ears with such
a ringing blast that the din has for the moment confused them. Every man
reads his own destiny in the stars, and sees only greatness there. (SG, p. 255)
Here the personal ambitions to “greatness” of newly freed African Americans
seem to be questioned in comparison to an “acceptance of their lot,” a lot
Dunbar nevertheless knew to be quite painful for many black Southerners
(SG, pp. 268–70). Dunbar continues, relecting on his own travels to England,
“The beauty and perfection of a pure family life is one thing which, say what

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we will, the Negro needs greatly to learn. I must confess that no phase of
English social observance struck me more forcibly than this” (SG, p. 253). It
is this “pure family life” that Dunbar attributes to African Americans in his
dialect poetry, in which genre scenes display less an individuality than a com-
munal set of relations.
The notion of communal life has the efect, in Dunbar’s poem “Chrismus
on the Plantation,” of casting black and white people as one big family, and
the question the poem raises is whether the former slaves, now being paid
for their labors, will stay on and work once their former master runs out of
money to pay them. The dilemma is summarized in the voice of a slave named
“ol’ Ben”:
Look hyeah, Mastah, I’s been servin’ you’ fu’ lo! dese many yeahs,
An’ now, sence we’s got freedom an’ you’s kind o’ po’, hit ’pears
Dat you want us all to leave you ’cause you don’t t’ink you can pay.
Ef my membry has n’t fooled me, seems dat whut I hyead you say.
Er in othah wo’ds, you wants us to fu’git dat you’s been kin’,
An’ ez soon ez you is he’pless, we’s to leave you hyeah behin’.
Well, ef dat’s de way dis freedom ac’s on people, white er black,
You kin jes’ tell Mistah Lincum fu’ to tek his freedom back.
(CPD, p. 137–38)

This notion that “white” and “black” are in something other than a wage rela-
tion rehearses an idealized Southern white view of the slave past: instead of
acting out of market-based self-interest, the laborers that ol’ Ben envisions are
motivated by loyalty prompted by demonstrations of their master’s kindness.
This is one example of the favoring of a set of emotional over commercial
interests, which runs throughout much Southern writing in the late nine-
teenth century. Much of Dunbar’s dialect poetry is accommodationist in this
sense, relecting a nostalgic projection of emotional reciprocity on the ante-
bellum past of slavery. Additional examples of this dynamic include the poems
“The Deserted Plantation,” “The Party,” “Lullaby,” “Chrismus is a-Comin’,”
“A Cabin Tale,” “To the Eastern Shore,” and “The Old Cabin.”
Not all of Dunbar’s dialect poetry employs Southern “Negro” dialect; he
experiments with other regional speech as well, as is evident in poems like
“Possum Trot” and “James Whitcomb Riley.” Indeed, formal experimentation
is a salient feature of Dunbar’s poetry, a quality that is particularly apparent
in his numerous explorations of the dramatic monologue. Also a hallmark of
Dunbar’s verse is technical experimentation. For instance, he uses a variety
of stanza forms and a variety of rhyme schemes (using rhyming couplets at
times [aabbcc] and at times an alternation of rhyming lines [abab]). Dunbar’s

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line forms are, by contrast to Harper’s, quite various, including blank verse,
iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, and anapestic pentameter, tetrame-
ter, and dimeter. He even experiments with quadruple meter in his lines (as in
“A Back-Log Song”). For additional musical efect, he makes frequent use of
a refrain (as in the line “I know why the caged bird sings” in “Sympathy”) and
even repeats lines (as in “A Song”). In one poem, “Whistling Sam,” Dunbar
embeds musical notation at intervals over the course of the poem, thus allow-
ing the interjection of purely musical intervals in the poem’s presentation.
Although Dunbar did not share Lanier’s strong view that poetry is itself indis-
tinguishable from music, he felt a strong enough kinship between the two that
he made frequent use of musical poetic efects.
Somewhat surprisingly, Dunbar’s poems almost never invoke the musical
form we now call “spirituals” – what he called “old plantation music” in his
1899 essay “Negro Music” (SG, pp. 271–73). There he writes, “The strange,
fantastic melody of the old plantation music has always possessed a deep fasci-
nation for me. There is an indescribable charm in it – a certain poetic sadness
that appeals strongly to the artistic in one’s nature” (SG, p. 271). Although he
associates this music with the “old plantation,” Dunbar has a theory about its
origins that traces it back even before the rise of the plantation; according to
his view, this music is a remnant of the imported slaves’ African past: “If my
hypothesis be correct, the man who asks where the negro got all those strange
tunes of his songs is answered. They have been handed down to him from the
matted jungles and sunburned deserts of Africa, from the reed huts of the
Nile” (SG, p. 272). This is a view shared by W. E. B. Du Bois, who popularized
the notion that African American spirituals – what he called “sorrow songs” –
are remnants of African cultural practice. In his 1903 collection of essays The
Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois devotes the inal chapter to a treatment of the
sorrow songs, and he uses sorrow songs as epigraphs to each of his chapters.
Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk would become an important document for
writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who increasingly looked to Africa as a
repository of cultural resources for bolstering their notion of what it means
to be a “New Negro.” While Dunbar and Harper were commonly viewed by
those of the Harlem Renaissance as examples of an “Old Negro” (Harper for
her ambition of color-blind uplift and Dunbar for his use of nostalgic dialect
poetry), Dunbar at least was clearly thinking about the spirituals in ways that
were to become commonplace in African American thought. Dunbar writes,
“Let black composers – and there are such – weave those [old plantation] mel-
odies into their compositions” (SG, p. 272), a view set out prominently by the
Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson in his Autobiography of an

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Ex-Colored Man (1912, 1927), in which composing music based on songs includ-
ing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (the very same spiritual invoked at the end
of Dunbar’s poem “When Malindy Sings”) becomes the central character’s
main ambition as a way of contributing to the good not of his region but of
his race.
Current scholarship continues to emphasize the role of race in nineteenth-
century American literary culture and to seek for previously neglected voices.
One of the recent rediscoveries is Albery Allson Whitman, who was born
a slave in Kentucky in 1851 and who, following emancipation, received suf-
icient education to inspire him to pursue poetic composition. Whitman’s
numerous works, published between 1871 and 1901, are proving to be of inter-
est to scholars for a variety of reasons. For instance, like Lanier and Dunbar,
Whitman was – as Ivy G. Wilson has recently asserted – “consumed with
the aesthetics of sound,” a fact made evident through his use of a variety of
line and stanza forms, often in imitation of British poetic models.18 In addi-
tion to his musical forms, Whitman’s social and historical themes have also
prompted the interest of recent scholars. Whitman’s long narrative poems
Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), for instance,
portray the complex dynamics of race relations on the U.S. frontier, a topic of
increasing importance to scholars studying transnational borderlands. And
Whitman’s inal long narrative poem, An Idyl of the South (1901), aspires, as
he asserts in the poem’s preface, to shed light on “the sociological conditions
suggested by the narrative,” which features “the story of an Octoroon,” the
term used at the time for a person with one-eighth “black blood.”19 Like
Whitman’s exploration of geographical borderlands in his earlier works, this
poem’s examination of corporeal racial boundaries within hybrid persons
and between interracial lovers promises to expand our growing understand-
ing of how citizenship and personhood were conigured in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, scholarly attention to Whitman
promises to restore to prominence the individual who was featured along
with Fredrick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar during the designated
“Colored American Day” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago.20 There Whitman recited his poem “The Freedman’s Triumphant
Song,” which references wartime heroism as a basis for inclusion of African
Americans within a single national narrative:
Hurrah for him! Let caste’s old mouth
Keep still about a “North and South”
The Negro’s dark intrepid brow
Shall wear the hero’s laurels now.21

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Whitman’s desire here to push beyond ailiations with the North or South
exempliies, as we have now seen, the efort of poets during and after
Reconstruction to replace regional with racial solidarities, thus setting the
stage for the problem of the color line that, as W. E. B. Du Bois famously
asserted, would dominate the century to come.

Notes
1. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Uninished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988).
2. Henry Timrod, The Collected Poems of Henry Timrod; A Variorum Edition, ed. Edd
Winield Parks and Aileen Wells Parks (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1965), p. 111. This collection will be cited subsequently in the text as CPT.
3. See Edd Winield Parks and Aileen Wells Parks, “Introduction,” in Timrod,
The Collected Poems of Henry Timrod, p. 9.
4. See the section “Poems of the War, 1861–1865” in Hayne’s 1882 collection Poems
of Paul Hamilton Hayne (New York: AMS Press, 1970), pp. 65–86. This collection
will be cited subsequently in the text as PH.
5. Sidney Lanier, “Laughter in the Senate,” in Charles R. Anderson (ed.), The
Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier. Vol. 1, Poems and Poem Outlines
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), p. 14. This collection
will be cited subsequently in the text as PPO.
6. Sidney Lanier, “Appendix: Wagner’s Beethoven,” in Paull Franklin Baum (ed.),
The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier. Vol. 2, The Science of English
Verse and Essays on Music (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1945), pp. 338–39.
7. Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse, in Baum (ed.), The Centennial Edition
of the Works of Sidney Lanier, vol. 2, p. 137. This collection will be cited subse-
quently in the text as SEV.
8. See Sidney Lanier, The English Novel, in Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone
(eds.), The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier. Vol. 4, The English
Novel and Essays on Literature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1945), p. 54.
9. Sidney Lanier, “The Centennial Cantata,” in Baum (ed.), The Centennial Edition
of the Works of Sidney Lanier, vol. 2, pp. 272–73.
10. Walt Whitman, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” in Michael Moon (ed.), Leaves
of Grass and Other Writings (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 267–68.
11. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), p.
94. This edition will be cited subsequently in the text as BCD.
12. Martin Griin, Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–
1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), p. 176.

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 Jo h n D. K er k e rin g

13. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne
M. Braxton (1913; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 6. This
edition will be cited subsequently in the text as CPD.
14. Joanne M. Braxton, “Introduction: The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar,” in
Dunbar, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, pp. xvi–xvii.
15. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Race Question Discussed,” in Shelley Fisher
Fishkin and David Bradley (eds.), The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential
Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2005), p. 263. This edition will be cited
subsequently in the text as SG.
16. See Braxton, “Introduction,” p. xviii.
17. Braxton, “Introduction,” p. xxix.
18. Ivy G. Wilson, “Introduction: Reconstructing Albery Allson Whitman,” in Ivy
G. Wilson (ed.), At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson
Whitman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2009), p. 6.
19. Albery Allson Whitman, “Preface to An Idyl of the South (1901),” in Wilson
(ed.), At the Dusk of Dawn, p. 309.
20. See Wilson, “Introduction,” pp. 1, 13–14.
21. Albery Allson Whitman, “The Freedman’s Triumphant Song,” in Wilson
(ed.), At the Dusk of Dawn, p. 295.

402
 Chapter 18
The “Genteel Tradition” and Its Discontents
E l iza b eth R e n k e r

The terms “genteel,” “genteel poetry,” and “genteel tradition” appear fre-
quently in American literary histories and criticism, typically as rhetorically
negative terms indicating conventional forms of literature that respect, and
adhere to, the cultural, social, and economic status quo. To call poetry “gen-
teel” is to imply that it is safe, traditional art, ideologically suspect because
it airms cultural hegemony. My concern in the pages that follow is not
this more generic designation of gentility but instead the historically speciic
place and time to which George Santayana (1863–1952) was responding when
he coined the inl uential phrase “the genteel tradition” in 1911.1 For him,
the term described the dominant American cultural formation at the close
of the nineteenth century, a vague and intellectually weak form of ideal-
ism that he scorned. Santayana’s “genteel tradition” had a powerful legacy.
His formulation came to stand as a negative emblem of nineteenth-century
American culture’s complacency and intellectual vapidity. In such accounts,
modernism became the triumphant and long-awaited new movement in art
that would inally kill of the genteel, renewing poetry at last from stale
convention. The inverse relation between conventionality and greatness
that both Santayana and then the modernists articulated (as in Ezra Pound’s
famous dictum “make it new”) was only to grow more central in twentieth-
century aesthetics, particularly with the emergence and increasing institu-
tional power of New Criticism. The allegedly genteel poets receded farther
and farther into the background of poetry studies as embarrassing grand-
parents. Santayana’s formulation and the generalizations it fed inaccurately
simpliied the poetic practices of the latter half of the nineteenth century for
much of the twentieth.
Although it has long been standard to portray American verse between
Whitman and Dickinson and the modernists as a wasteland, the historical
record presents a substantially distinct picture. Scores of poets published dur-
ing this era, in a broad array of styles, genres, and venues. The poetry of the

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period is not uniformly “genteel” but replete with conl icting impulses about
what Edmund Clarence Stedman would call (in his 1892 volume by the same
title) “the nature and elements of poetry.” Such impulses are legible not only
from poet to poet but sometimes within the careers of individual poets or
even within a single poem. In sum, rather than a monolithic era of bland gen-
tility awaiting redemption by the modernists, “the genteel tradition” warrants
redeinition as a thriving index to the changing cultural meaning of poetry
actively transpiring all around it.
One particular group of poets that literary history has long identiied as
emblematic of the genteel tradition is the New York School. (Like the poets them-
selves, the term “the New York School” is now mostly archaic. The twentieth
century gave the same label to a group of its own poets, including Frank O’Hara,
John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, and the former designation mostly vanished.)
Core members of the group included George H. Boker (1823–1890), Bayard Taylor
(1825–1878), Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903), Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907). One index to their gentility
is their self-conscious attachment, as possible heirs, to the cultural throne of the
New England poets, including (at that time) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
and the so-called Fireside Poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), John
Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), and James
Russell Lowell (1819–1891). Note that the oldest New York poet (Boker) was only
four years younger than the youngest of the New England poets (Lowell). The
New York poets talked a good bit among themselves about these national igures
and about their aspirations for their own poetry in the wake of these towering,
iconic forebears.2 Although their desire for national acclaim kept them mindful of
the Fireside Poets, they were aesthetically most devoted to the British Romantics
and their Victorian successors. Stedman described his “lyrics and idylls” as “keyed
to the note, and reminiscent of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and above all,
Tennyson, my master who had drawn the best from all,” an apt general descrip-
tion of the New York School overall.3
Taylor, Boker, and Stoddard initially met as young men in the thrilling
atmosphere of Manhattan in 1848, soon adding Aldrich and Stedman to their
circle. They saw New York as the literary future, overtaking in primacy the
long-standing rank of Boston as the center of American letters.4 (Not all were
to stay in New York; Aldrich, for example, left for Boston in 1865, and Boker
built an estate outside Philadelphia.) All used their contacts and inl uence to
place one another’s poems and collections with publishers and magazines,
wrote positive reviews of one another’s work, and, in general, did one another
literary favors.5

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They wrote prodigiously in a broad array of genres, including poetry of many

kinds, newspaper journalism, travel narrative, drama, prose iction, criticism,
translation, correspondence, and lectures. Taylor in particular produced what
Richard Cary calls “staggering” amounts of writing, including travel books
and encyclopedias, novels, poetry, poetical drama, literary histories, transla-
tions, histories, short stories, critical essays, and parodies. His early travel nar-
ratives (especially Views A-Foot [1846]) were widely popular. Also generically
versatile, Boker gained particular distinction in Romantic blank verse tragedy,
such as his Francesca da Rimini (1855; revived in 1885), based on the story of
Paolo and Francesca. Stoddard was best known for his critical essays and his
poetry, particularly his lyric poems – whose temper was indebted to Keats –
in such volumes as Songs of Summer (1857), but his range encompassed such
works as Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode (1865) and eighteen “translations”
of Chinese poems published between 1850 and 1880, including The Book of the
East (1871). Translation was a routine and highly esteemed poetic practice dur-
ing this era, construed to be a vital source for the development of poetry in the
English tongue. The term was used elastically, relecting a case-by-case mix of
strict translation, work with other translations, interpretation, and origina-
tion; Stoddard, for example, did not work from any original Chinese sources.6
His active work in this poetic genre, with its complex layers of translation
and allusion to other languages and cultures, is only one of many examples
of “genteel” precedent for allegedly modernist practice. Stoddard was also
husband to novelist and poet Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823–1902),
whose intense work exploring subjectivity, sensuality, gender, and domestic-
ity included the searing and experimental realist novel The Morgesons (1862) as
well as poems published in highly regarded periodicals (such as “Mercedes,”
in The Atlantic Monthly [1858], and “Before the Mirror,” in Harper’s [1860]) and
later in book form (Poems [1895]). Elizabeth Stoddard’s razor-sharp critique
of the poetry by her husband and his friends as inadequate to their time left
them all reeling and provides another solid indication that poetry of the age
contained its own crosscurrents and self-critique.7
The New York group revered poetry as a sacred oice. Still at the top of
the literary hierarchy of prestige, poetry was nevertheless under increasing
pressure from the novel, which (as poets were nervously aware) seemed only
to accrue power in the form of mass readership. As Dino Franco Felluga has
argued of nineteenth-century Britain, as the novel claimed a large popular
market, and as a (threatening) lower-class readership grew, Victorian culture
carved out a more restricted, elite space for a “pure” poetry predicated on
its otherworldliness from the contaminations of mundane, market-driven

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reality.8 By embracing a highbrow arena, poets could validate their distance

from the masses as a sign of aesthetic ineness, rather than accepting it as a
simple sociological loss of market share. Feelings of uncertainty run as a ine
thread through the New York poets’ correspondence and published writing.
While emotionally attached to the most elevated poetry they could imagine,
their own practical generic versatility, including popular work they devalued,
is certainly part of the transatlantic history of the stratiications of genre.
Their privileged aesthetic was mostly what the era itself called “ideality” or
“idealism,” a conception that poetry’s proper domain was the higher sphere
of the soul and of transcendent beauty. As Aldrich put it in his 1907 poem
“Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme,” the poet is a “worker in sublime / And
heaven-sent dreams.”9 The words “romantic” and “romance,” also common
in literary debates of the era, designated a realm, often associated with divin-
ity (“heaven-sent dreams”), beyond or better than the actual world of material
fact. Forms of the words “ideality” and “romance” are often synonymous in
discourse of the time. Literary history’s current consensus declares that this
commitment to Romanticism in art left them out of step with the energies of
their own day. Such energies included, most pressingly, science and realism
in particular, to which the New York poets reacted with distress and disgust.
Stedman in particular repeatedly relected on the scientiic temper of the age
as a devastating threat to poetry. Within the domain of literature, they also
fought realism as a vulgar abdication of art’s highest charge: to elevate the
soul of mankind to its highest aspirations.10 The conventional account of the
school is that its death grip on the waning aesthetic power of Romanticism
was so repressive, and so institutionally powerful in the literary magazines and
publishing houses in which they were well connected, that they inadvertently
gave birth to the modernist revolt.
A fuller picture of the complex currents of poetic history must address the
ways in which these poets were not merely forces of stodgy conservatism. For
example, they passionately advocated the value of art amid a postbellum soci-
ety aggressively invested in the ideology of “practical work” or “the world’s
work” (two terms that circulated widely in public discourse). In addition,
Stedman’s inl uential criticism was instrumental in carving out a new poetic
canon even as he remained allied with a passing aesthetic mode. His 1900 An
American Anthology 1787–1900 includes many poets of great interest to scholars
today, such as Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Rose
Terry Cooke, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Piatt. Even
Harriet Monroe, whom Stedman befriended when she was a young poet,
appears; in 1912, she would found the revolutionary little magazine Poetry,

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typically hailed as an origin of modernism. Stedman devotedly advocated the

work of Poe and Whitman at a time when both were disreputable igures in
American letters.11 His 1885 volume Poets of America, for example, insisted on
their importance to the development of the art of poetry, beyond the issues
of personal titillation or moral outrage that both tended to attract. We might
remember, with due irony, that it was Santayana who disliked Whitman, while
Stedman defended him. Stedman was also foundational to recasting Emerson’s
reputation, moving him from his cultural association with the Fireside group
into alignment with the poetic energies of Whitman instead.12
However distressed (Stedman) or oicious (Aldrich) they were by the pros-
pect, the New York poets saw that their own poetic mode was expiring, and
they marked it.13 Given their cultural stature, their elegiac mode was crucial
to how their era thought about the status of poetry, and this elegiac mode is
in fact one of their most inl uential legacies; it created a climate that opened
doors to change. In Victorian Poets, Stedman wrote, “At present, skepticism,
analysis, scientiic conquest, realism, scornful unrest. Apollo has left the heav-
ens.” Nevertheless, he insisted that the era of “scientiic iconoclasm” was
simply a transitional period on the way to better things for poetry.14 Indeed,
the modernist poets who were little boys as Stedman’s ideas were circulating
would have been familiar both with his laments and with his call for a new
poetry. As one of the most famous men of letters of the day, Stedman was in a
position to make pronouncements that readers would heed. His critical works
Victorian Poets (1875) and Poets of America (1885); his 1885 essay “The Twilight
of the Poets” (Century Illustrated Magazine); his Turnbull Memorial Lectures,
which inaugurated that series, at Johns Hopkins University in 1891 (collected
as The Nature and Elements of Poetry); and his An American Anthology were all
widely reviewed and cited as authoritative in his own time. Michael Cohen
forcefully traces Stedman’s inl uence in conceptualizing a “Victorian” period
and a “transatlantic” ield of poetics, new frameworks that contested the
increasingly philological models for literary study deining the higher study
of poetry in the new university culture.15
Indeed, the single concept for which Stedman remains best known is his
characterization of the poetic era as an “interregnum” or “twilight.” His
1885 title phrase “the twilight of the poets” became a catchphrase of the late
nineteenth century. Poets and reviewers immediately picked it up, circulat-
ing it widely as an accurate description.16 Although Stedman likely picked up
the speciic word “twilight” from Whitman’s 1881 essay “The Poetry of the
Future,” it was Stedman’s use of the term that caught on. Even poets like
Edwin Arlington Robinson, whom literary history has loved to position in

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opposition to Stedman and his “genteel” ilk, used Stedman’s twilight aura in
his own poem, “Sonnet”: “Oh for a poet – for a beacon bright / To rift this
changeless glimmer of dead gray.” Robinson sounds an awful lot like Stedman
here, rather than like his antithesis. Stedman was not simply a igure to be sur-
passed by new poets. He was cultivating terms they would embrace.
A rigid concept of the genteel tradition has prevented us from seeing a more
complex matrix of related poetic practices, both across the era more gener-
ally and within the careers of individual poets. For example, the poems that
brought Stedman his fame were not genteel at all: they were sensational news-
paper verses about current events and politics. He published “The Diamond
Wedding,” a 218-line verse satire, in the New York Tribune in 1859. In a to-the-
minute social commentary about the garish, mercenary wedding of a young
blond New York belle to a Cuban slave-holding “foreigner” three times her
age, Stedman delated the wedding, whose lavish expenditures the New York
press had tracked with gossipy fascination. Composed, by Stedman’s own
description, in one night, it caused an instant sensation, leading to the threat
of a libel suit. Stedman himself called the poem “a metrical screed” (LL, vol.
1, pp. 186, 188). A friend in Italy reported that she had shared the poem with
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, she reported,
“have expressed the highest admiration” (LL, vol. 1, p. 198). The Tribune also
published Stedman’s political, eighteen-stanza narrative poem “John Brown’s
Invasion” (November 12, 1859; later retitled “How Old Brown Took Harper’s
Ferry”), hardly a poem of ideal beauty (“I tell you that the lagon, / Filled with
blood of Old Brown’s ofspring, was irst poured by Southern hands”).17
Some of his other popular poems poked fun at idealist impulses. “Pan in
Wall Street,” published in the Atlantic Monthly ( January 1867), depicts a street
musician whom Stedman called “the man who plays the real Pan’s pipe around
the Wall Street district.” (Stedman was, by profession, a broker and member
of the New York Stock Exchange.) Here Stedman creates a pastoral demi-
god visiting the modern scene. The title points to his playful combination of
romantic and realistic worlds. In this urban recasting of a conventional pasto-
ral, modern “bulls and bears” stand mesmerized by Pan’s music, until a police
oicer shoos him away as a “vagrant.”18 Another popular comic work, “The
Ballad of Lager Bier,” extols in twenty-one stanzas the fun of drinking “Glass
after glass in due succession” (PW, p. 60). It ends with a similar ironic delation
of the romantic imagination. He and his drinking buddy soar into the empy-
rean realm that he spoke of elsewhere, with reverence, as poetry’s domain,
but his drinking ballad ironizes its own terms. Once drunk, each becomes
“a priest and seer” undergoing a “misty change” in which “Things look, as

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in a moonlight dream” (PW, pp. 60–61). Finally, his inebriated buddy soars so
high – “higher yet, in middle Heaven, / Your steed seems taking l ight, my
friend” – that he leaves the beer hall without paying, and the speaker is stuck
with the bill (PW, p. 63).
At the age of twenty-six, Stedman was surprised and uncertain about how to
handle his sudden fame. He wondered whether his “lyrics and idylls” modeled
on Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, written “in the realms of high
art,” should “be subordinate to the mere notoriety so strikingly aroused by
the production of a newspaper skit, so easy for me to write, and so utterly out
of my desire?” (LL, vol. 1, p. 188). Stedman himself saw that the cultural life of
poetry entailed various readerships, venues of publication, and social spheres
of taste. As Virginia Jackson has trenchantly argued, among the powerful lega-
cies of New Criticism, the “lyricization” of poetry – that is, reducing the genre
to the lyric, itself an elastic term but often deined as a self-contained poem in
which a speaker meditates on a matter of the interior life – pushes into obliv-
ion the vast scope of poetry’s actual historical forms.19 When Stedman pitted
his “lyrics and idylls” against the prospect of what he called “popular work,”
he called the former “high art” in contradistinction to his writing as a satirist
and public sensation. Satire was, in his words, “a poetic heresy” opposed to
“my graver, more aesthetic work” (LL, vol. 1, p. 197–98). Taylor, too, after win-
ning an 1850 songwriting contest sponsored by P. T. Barnum, wrote to Boker
that he had “deiled the temple of divine Poetry” and would never do so again
(BT, pp. 82–85). Even Aldrich made his early career at age nineteen on a popu-
lar smash, the ballad of Baby Bell.
Preoccupied with poetry’s sacred sphere and their own reputations, the
New York poets only nervously comprehended that the social status of poems
and poets were moving targets in this era of profound change. In 1894, relect-
ing at age sixty-one on the breakout sensation of his career as poet thirty-ive
years prior, Stedman saw the sphere of popular poetry in a more appealing
light: “If I had been wise in my generation, and more a man of the world, I
would have pushed my luck, as my friend Bret Harte did with his ‘Chinese
cheap labor’ and would have accepted some of the ofers for ‘popular’ work
which ‘The Diamond Wedding’ brought me” (LL, vol. 1, p. 198). Stedman
imag ines his road not taken as that of Bret Harte (1836–1902), journalist, editor,
and author of what was then and is now called “local color” poetry and iction,
that is, a form of realism treating speciic locales, their dialects, and their ways
of life. Harte was well known for his work on California and the gold mines.
His most famous comic ballad, initially published as “Plain Language from
Truthful James” (1870), portrays a conniving game of euchre among mutual

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cheats. It suited the era’s attraction to (often racist) depictions of populations

it construed as ethnic others, in this case, the Chinese. In the many pirated
republished versions that swept American culture, it was popularly christened
“The Heathen Chinee” (1870).
One of Harte’s achievements was to step out of the poetic diction and ide-
alist orientation of the New York poets, and into the world as it was changing
in the tumultuous postwar decades. Norman Foerster aptly calls the ide-
alist poetic mode of the New York poets the “poetry of beauty,” a mode
that contrasted starkly with the work of Harte and other dialect poets, like
fellow “Westerners” James Whitcomb Riley and Joaquin Miller as well as
Paul Laurence Dunbar, known for his “Negro” dialect poems. Taylor and
Aldrich excoriated dialect poetry as the hated opposite of their literary ideal.
Its aggressively unlovely language – and its popularity on that vernacular
account – drew only their scorn.20 Although Stedman believed that realism’s
greatest threat to poetry arose from prose iction, dialect poetry posed that
threat from within the genre of poetry itself. When Stedman described the
twilight interval, he failed to comprehend that his own fellow poets were
already leveling a foundational challenge to “the nature and elements of
poetry” as he deined them. Whitman’s diagnosis in 1881 was, unsurprisingly,
spot on: the “fatal defect” hampering “our American singers,” he said, was
“the beauty disease.”21
An array of Stedman’s contemporary poets in fact wrote in, or shifted to,
poetic practices that challenged the “poetry of beauty” in the decades follow-
ing the Civil War, poems often aligned with the antigenteel aesthetics of real-
ism and naturalism. One of our most profound realist poets is the Kentucky-
born Sarah Piatt, born Sarah Morgan Bryan and married into the Ohio Piatt
family. Her status as spouse to one of the era’s genteel poets – her husband, J.J.
Piatt, co-authored Poems of Two Friends with William Dean Howells in 1860 –
had the efect until the mid-1990s of obscuring her own poetic achievement,
and of lumping her into the genteel group, where she in fact belongs only as a
voice of complex interlocution. Widely known in postbellum literary circles,
Sarah and J.J. both actively published and appeared routinely in anthologies of
the era. Both mostly vanished from twentieth-century literary history. Paula
Bernat Bennett’s 2001 Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt sets out
to “put Piatt’s reputation as a genteel poet (and nothing more) permanently
to rest.”22 She argues that Piatt’s vast body of poems includes very successful
genteel-style lyrics (Piatt published thirty poems in the Atlantic Monthly, for
example, which John Timberman Newcomb calls “the institutional epicenter
of genteel culture”)23 as well as poems that challenge the genteel ethos. These

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poems plunge into what Bennett calls “the real,” the “everyday dramas of fam-
ily and social life and the life of the nation” (PB, pp. xxviii, xxxiii). Piatt wrote
in and out of the genteel tradition.24
Inspired by the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, Piatt pushed
the form in new directions, experimenting with multiple speakers, shifts in
perspective, fragmented speech, evasions and omissions, and an often bewil-
dering array of juxtapositions, not only between two or more speaking voices
but also between what one speaker says and another thinks, or what a single
speaker says out loud and then thinks to herself – sometimes all in a single
poem. The efects of simultaneous multiplicity and fragmentation, innova-
tive and complex, left many readers baled. Taylor’s comical volume The Echo
Club (1876), in which the New York poets, under fantasy names, amuse them-
selves by writing parodies of their contemporaries, includes a parody of “Mrs.
Piatt,” to whom the group jokingly (and revealingly) refers simply as “The
‘Woman,’ ” an allusion to her 1871 volume A Woman’s Poems.25 Utterly miss-
ing the point, Taylor’s parodist (ittingly named with the romance moniker
“Galahad”) describes her poems as “dreams” whose fault is that they lack “a
distinct reality.”26 Given the literary climate in which Piatt worked, it makes
sense that, among her complex experiments with competing perspectives, she
frequently explored the gaps between idealist and realist perspectives, gaps
that sometimes play themselves out in dialogues between persons who don’t
understand each other. The fact that she often depicted mothers and children
or husbands and wives in these roles of misperception led readers to see her as
a “domestic poet” or a “Woman” rather than a poet who ironizes (as Bennett
has powerfully argued) her own immediate poetic culture of gentility.27 The
New-York-School Galahad, complete with his fantasy name, simply can’t see
the “distinct reality” she ofers.
One of four poems Piatt herself chose to represent her work for an 1886
collection was “A Prettier Book,” nine stanzas of iambic tetrameter in her sig-
nature form, the dramatic dialogue. In some ways, it resembles the poem for
which she is currently most famous, “The Palace-Burner,” in which a mother
and son look at illustrations from what the poem’s subtitle calls the “newspa-
per,” including one of a Frenchwoman on her way to execution for her role in
the Paris Commune in 1871. Like “The Palace-Burner,” “A Prettier Book” also
opens with unidentiied voices:
“He has a prettier book than this,”
With many a sob between, he said;
Then left untouched the night’s last kiss,
And, sweet with sorrow, went to bed.

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A prettier book his brother had? –

Yet wonder-pictures were in each.
The diferent colors made him sad;
The equal value – could I teach?28
Piatt, in a way utterly typical of her poems, puts her reader in the uncertain
position of iguring out who the unidentiied speakers are. Her poems some-
times provide adequate internal evidence for doing so, and sometimes don’t.
Here, we can identify the speaker as the boy’s mother. Before a reader might
decide to dive into the poem’s complex terrain, he or she could just as easily
stop at the surface level, with prettiness, kisses, family relationships, and sweet
sorrow, and conclude that this is a conventional domestic poem. Indeed, the
poem works well as a domestic poem in which a mother struggles to teach her
child how to understand his own pain in a world that, seemingly capriciously,
favors some and not others.
Closer inspection yields an additional, metapoetic poem about two “books.”
Both books contain “wonder-pictures,” but only one of them is “pretty.” Here
she juxtaposes their respective contents:
A peasant, seeking bitter bread
From the unwilling earth to wring,
Is in my book; the wine is red,
There in my brother’s, for the king. (RP, p. 508)
Like “The Palace-Burner,” this poem depicts an ostensibly domestic scene
in which a mother and son look at printed material, among other things,
together; poverty and starvation stand alongside material wealth; and a moth-
er’s initial instinct to dismiss the child’s concerns fails, and she ends up con-
fronting threatening, unwelcomed, dark knowledge.
Only two lines in this poem appear in quotation marks: the opening line,
introducing the stanza that sounds conventionally domestic, and the pen-
ultimate line, “My brother has a prettier book” (RP, p. 508). While at irst
glance these similar lines look like a simple near repetition, in part serving to
round out a formal symmetry, in fact something very important has changed.
The boy’s opening question has led his mother to meditate on the “value” of
the respective books. Although she initially plans to teach that their value is
“equal,” by the last stanza, she has come over to her boy’s position.
Put out the lights. We will not look
At pictures any more. We weep,
“My brother has a prettier book,”
And, after tears, we go to sleep. (RP, p. 508)

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The quoted line is no longer her son’s alone: she weeps it with him. It’s
initially odd that line 1, “He has a prettier book than this,” is more pronom-
inally elastic than the penultimate line. That is, while either a mother or
brother could refer to another child as “he” (as in stanza 1), the penultimate
line speciies the referent as “my brother,” appearing to clarify the speaker
as a sibling and not a parent. Yet it is at this point that, with apparent illogic,
the mother and her son become a plural irst person: “We will not look / At
pictures any more.” We must wonder who is “brother” to the mother, and
here we can hear the echo of the second tale Piatt tells in this poem, about
the adult speaker’s relationship to her own “brother”-poets with their “pret-
tier” books.
The intervening stanzas, which juxtapose scenes from each of the two
books, in fact read as an image-by-image catalogue of Piatt’s own poems
alongside images from her genteel peers. For example:

I see, through ierce and feverish tears,

Only a darkened hut in mine;
Yet in my brother’s book appears
A palace where the torches shine. (RP, p. 508)

Piatt depicts the “darkened huts” of poverty in poems like “The House Below
the Hill” (1877) and “From North and South” (1878). Indeed, in “A Prettier
Book,” her own poems are, polemically, not the ones the title names; they
stand against poems like Stedman’s 1869 “The Blameless Prince,” with its pal-
aces, consorts, and, as Stedman himself puts it in the prelude to the poem,
“Old romance . . . / Ancient names of King and Queen, / Knightly men and
maidens fair” (PW, p. 187).
Another realist poet whose poems are mostly unknown is the dean of real-
ism himself, William Dean Howells. Although central to literary history pri-
marily for his realist iction and his editorial crusade on its behalf, Howells
was also an active poet, with poetic works dating back to Poems of Two Friends
(1860). His early poems are mostly sentimental and romantic treatments
of conventional subjects such as death, passion, love, and nostalgia. By the
1890s, Howells’s poetry had changed substantially in attitude. He published
thirty-nine poems in Harper’s Monthly between 1889 and 1895. He then added
four and published them in the dark, ironic, and despairing 1895 volume Stops
of Various Quills.29 Abandoning the late-romantic ethos of his early poems,
Howells, as Edwin H. Cady puts it, “joined poetry now to his realistic posi-
tions.” He also pushed poetic form onto a spectrum of experimentation from
“lawful to outlaw.”30

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As a way into Howells’s poetry of 1895, let’s return to Aldrich, who pub-
lished a new volume of poems the same year, titled The Unguarded Gates.
While the title speaks to Aldrich’s broader sense at this time of poetry under
attack by mongrel forces, the title poem more explicitly addresses his horror
over the unclean races entering the United States. Unsurprisingly, his poem
is full of romantic igures of Arabs and Norsemen, standard igures in which
Taylor’s travel writing in particular had specialized.31 Nevertheless, the poem
pushes aside the romantic exotics abroad and turns to fear about the inl ux
of “tiger passions” brought by “a wild motley throng” onto the terrain of the
homeland. The speaker inally bursts out: “O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
/ To leave the gates unguarded?”32 Aldrich’s stance of highbrow retrenchment
deplores changes in American society and their relation to the genre of poetry.
In this sense, the title trope of unguarded gates applies not only to immigra-
tion but also to the function of literary gatekeepers like himself. (He was the
editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890.)
The Unguarded Gates also included one of Aldrich’s disgusted commentaries
on the state of poetry, this one called “Pessimistic Poets”:
I little read those poets who have made
A noble art a pessimistic trade,
And trained their Pegasus to draw a hearse
Through endless avenues of drooping verse.33
The accusations here about “pessimism” are standard in the antirealist dia-
tribes of the era. For Aldrich, a technical perfectionist and exquisitely skilled
craftsman (ironic given his jibe at poetry as “trade”), “drooping” means
declining, weakening, and dispirited. It implies dejection of mood and lan-
guishing physical condition as well as limping or hampered gait, of great
consequence to Aldrich in light of his pristine sense of the poetic foot. The
empyrean l ight of Pegasus pulled down and chained to the realities of earth
is a itting image indeed for Aldrich’s rejection of new directions in poetry.
Meanwhile, Whitman, Howells, Crane, Sarah Piatt, Melville, and other gen-
teel discontents were pushing against the restricting gates (and gaits) of for-
mal convention.
For an example of a “drooping” poem directly contemporary to “Pessimistic
Poets,” let’s consider Howells’s “The King Dines” from Stops of Various Quills
(1895). Howells leads with a hyper-romantic image, the world of (British) roy-
alty, which runs throughout genteel verse of the period as one of the primary
fantasy locales for American anglophilia. Moving from the title to the irst
line, “Two people on a bench in Boston Common,” we ind a gap: a quick,

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surprising shift of locale. Although the title momentarily promises a genteel

verse of lordly fantasy, in line 1 we ind ourselves, instead, at home. Still –
there’s a moment of hope for the Aldrich set – Boston Common was a locale
with cultural shine: Boston was the traditional center of efete New England
culture (and home to Aldrich), and Boston Common was the site of Emerson’s
“transparent eyeball” vision, an idealist l ight into the spiritual world. When
we hit line 2, though, all hope is lost:
An ordinary laboring man and woman,
Seated together,
In the November weather
Slit with a thin, keen rain;
The woman’s mouth purple with cold and pain . . .34

The poem thus tactically scatters the two layers of illusion with which it
deliberately led: irst, the fantasy world of romantic verse as Howells’s poetic
contemporaries still purveyed it and, second, the fantasy world of upper-class
Boston. Part of the artistic polemic of “The King Dines” inheres in its bifur-
cation of perspective. As in Piatt’s “A Prettier Book,” Howells works with
a bifurcation of perspective speciically between a genteel and a realist aes-
thetic. (Howells knew Sarah Piatt’s poems. Because she has been invisible in
American literary history, her possible inl uence on such a towering igure has
remained unexplored.) Howells lags, and rejects, the stock genteel tropes of
the fantasy king.
His laboring man “gnaw[s] at a bent bone like a dog, / Following its curve
hungrily with his teeth, / And his head twisted sidewise.”35 Here Aldrich’s
vision of the poet’s lordly control of “his” Pegasus devolves into an uncertain
distinction between human and animal, the human naturalistically meeting
animal instincts in a way that genteel writers deplored as vulgar, atheistic sci-
entism. Formally, we ind that Howells has pushed conventional poetic forms,
the sonnet in particular, into more limber gaits. A single stanza of eighteen
lines, “The King Dines” is composed of six couplets followed by a sestet rhym-
ing abbacc. The rhymes are sometimes perfect (rain/pain) and sometimes slant
(newspaper/brought with her). The meter ranges from dimeter to pentam-
eter, hovering in particular around iambic pentameter, to which it alludes
without regularity. In Aldrich’s terms, this poem would be a crippled, modern
“poem of pessimism” or, as he put it in his equally disgusted poem “Realism,”
“To-day we breathe a commonplace, / Polemic, scientiic air” (PTB, p. 273),
vivisecting the nightingale and leaving the Muse to wander “in alien ways
remote” (PTB, p. 274).

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As in the case of Howells, the poetry of Rose Terry Cooke (1827–1892) has
mostly been overshadowed by her iction, although she, too, wrote actively in
both genres. She published more than two hundred periodical poems and two
volumes of poetry (1861, 1888), but her recovery after the canon wars focused
on her realist, local-color tales, often about the narrow lives of New England
women. Her poetry has been largely dismissed as “romantic” and conven-
tional, an assessment fed by her use of traditional poetic forms. A handful
of critics have called bracing corrective attention to her poetry’s phantasma-
goric, violent, gothic, and sensual currents, pointing out that its “romance”
elements are profoundly tied to the actual conditions of women’s lives.36 In
“Arachne,” a spider who spins in her corner evokes woman the housekeeper;
in “Bluebeard’s Closet,” the domestic realm is a “red” chamber where “Silence
and horror / Brood on the walls.”37 In “Fantasia” (in her irst volume, Poems
[1861], which she published under the name Rose Terry), a supericially roman-
tic veneer belies a scene of horror that the speaker relishes and aestheticizes
(RT, pp. 78–79). The poem appears to be an imaginative l ight in which the
speaker enjoys fantasizing that she is a sea lower, in stanza 1; a sea bird, in
stanza 2; and a sea wind, in stanza 3. The word “fantasia” connotes musical
performance, fancy, and passion. The tone and diction create an atmosphere
of freedom and loveliness, exploring wish fulillment, cool green tides, rock-
ing billows, merriment, and singing.
Yet, as the inhuman speaker soars in unfettered fashion from sea to sky –
dreaming of freedom from human form – her subtext is an accelerating and
increasingly disturbing picture of human, speciically male, trauma. The surf
rushing on black rocks in stanza 1 becomes “lee-shore’s thunder / Mocking
the mariner’s cry” (RT, p. 78) in stanza 2. In stanza 3, we face the crying mari-
ners, while the speaker blows merrily through “the sails and rigging” (RT,
pp. 78–79).
The crew shall be like dead men
White with horror and woe;
Then I’ll sing like a spirit,
And let the good ship go. (RT, p. 79)
Cooke stages her spree of mirth and simultaneous horror in the realm of the
familiar. Fantasies are psychically particular, and this speaker tells us the precise
terms of her fantasy: “When I am a sea-wind, / I’ll watch for a ship I know”
(RT, p. 78). She then delights in the horror she can create in this “known” male
world. She is now inhuman and, signiicantly, immaterial and beyond touch.
Her power to threaten and terrify is implicitly greater in fantasy than what she

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possesses in real life. The source of her song is a revenge delirium of escape
from the domestic world on shore and from her own female body.
Cooke’s deceptive aestheticization of the sea provides a bridge to a related
poetic experiment of the era, Melville’s deceptive aestheticization of lowers.
Although Melville wrote and published novels for only a little more than a
decade (1846–1857), he wrote and published poems for more than thirty years.
His irst volume failed to ind a publisher in 1860; he then published four vol-
umes, left one volume in manuscript, and produced a substantial body of
unpublished poems that are mostly still unknown to both readers and schol-
ars. Standard accounts of his career mistakenly construe the three decades
during which he wrote poetry to be an unfortunate dark period during which
he lost touch with his real talent, writing iction.
His irst published volume, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866),
relected on the Civil War in seventy-two formally and conceptually complex
and oblique poems. Moving from a national to a transnational sphere, Clarel:
A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), a Victorian long narrative poem
of faith and doubt, follows an American divinity student as he grapples with
the crumbling legacy of Western Christianity in the aftermath of theories
of evolution and the Higher Criticism. Neither book fared well in the mar-
ketplace, and Melville published his next two volumes privately, in editions
of twenty-ive copies: John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888)
and Timoleon, Etc. (1891). Both continued his signiicant experimentation with
poetic occasion, form, diction, and voice but were now circulated by him only
to a hand-picked audience.
The volume of poems he left unpublished at his death, Weeds and Wildings
Chiely: With a Rose or Two, is Melville’s response to the poetry of beauty. Its
title depicts his poems as “weeds and wildings chiely,” explicitly contrasted
with “a rose or two.” While weeds and wildings are both uncultivated, wild
plants, for both nineteenth-century gardeners and genteel poets the rose
emblematized high cultivation. Cooke is a worthy compatriot on this point,
speciically working from the domain of gender: she opens her poem “Truths”
this way: “I wear a rose in my hair, / Because I feel like a weed; / Who knows
that the rose is thorny / And makes my temples bleed?” (RT, p. 86). Poetic
value (to return to Piatt’s term in “A Prettier Book”) is indeed the subject that
Melville encodes in this entire volume’s insistent roster of botanical poems.
It is in these terms that we can understand his repeated depictions of recep-
tion scenarios, in which viewers reject or otherwise somehow fail to “see” the
botanical specimens right in front of them (for example, “Field Asters,” “The
American Aloe on Exhibition,” and “A Way-Side Weed”).

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Melville’s formal strike against the poetry of beauty and the way it deliv-
ered meaning was to cultivate, through exacting art, something that looks
like a poem of beauty, but whose alluring surface then turns out to be nearly
opaque. This opacity, in turn, foregrounds the relation between viewer and
page, because the former seeks recognizable meaning in the latter, but the
poem counters that expectation. In Melville’s metapoetics, this scenario
becomes a drama of engagement in which the reader hits the wall. The poetry
of beauty implodes. Only a complete recasting of one’s expectations from
poetry can avert that fate. His common-looking specimens, if assessed by con-
ventional standards of poetic value, truly can’t be seen at all. His ield asters
in the poem by that title are “Wild ones every autumn seen – / Seen of all,
arresting few.” The next stanza begins: “Seen indeed.”38
Weeds and Wildings takes the idea of the rose in particular and estranges it
from the poetic matrix that had cultivated it to the point of collapse. In this
sense, Melville concurs with Whitman’s diagnosis of “the beauty disease.”
Let’s consider an emblematic (and, emblematically, a highly resistant and of-
putting) poem, “A Ground-Vine Intercedes with the Queen of Flowers for the
Merited Recognition of Clover.” The title stages an aesthetic debate as an issue
of botanical hierarchy. A literally lowly plant, “a ground-vine,” approaches the
high-born rose (the “Queen of Flowers”) on behalf of a third party, Clover.
The title summarizes the polemic: that Clover deserves but does not receive
“recognition,” certainly not from the Queen.
The poem opens with a stance of apparent obsequiousness directed at both
the Queen and the poetic tradition:
Hymned down the years from ages far,
The theme of lover, seer, and king,
Reign endless, Rose! for fair you are,
Nor heaven reserves a fairer thing. (WW, p. 22)
The age-old “theme” of roses provides the occasion for the speaker’s own
hymn. The vine dares to speak his case before the Queen, despite his sta-
tus as “a groundling” (WW, p. 22). The political edge in this self-description
becomes more palpable when we note that, for Melville, the word “ground-
ling” invokes his beloved Shakespeare. Although the opening stanza associ-
ates the Rose with “heaven” – a common genteel trope for the world of airy,
idealist, romantic perfection, as in Aldrich’s “heaven-sent dreams,” discussed
earlier – the ground-vine wants to bring her down to earth:
O Rose, we plants are all akin.
Our roots enlock; each strives to win

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The ampler space, the balmier air.

But beauty, plainness, shade and sun –
Here share-and-share-alike is none! (WW, p. 22)
What started out as obsequiousness in the pretty world of gardens turns into a
dog-eat-dog scene of survival. Although the ground-vine leads his appeal with
what sounds like an egalitarian plea based on common interests, it quickly
turns into a blunt description of the battle for resources. His initial posture of
petition to a botanical better thus gives way to a warning to the Queen about
her tentative status. Because “plants are all akin,” she had best not simply
assume the necessity of her own exalted position.
The penultimate stanza evens out the terrain between Rose and Clover:
And, ranked with grass, a lower may dwell,
Cheerful, if never high in feather,
With pastoral sisters thriving well
In bloom that shares the broader weather;
Charmful, mayhap, in simple grace,
A lowlier Eden mantling in her face. (WW, p. 22)
The ambiguity of the phrase “a lower” is stark in a poem obsessed with partic-
ular, named plants and their “rank” relative to one another. The tactical ambi-
guity of “a lower” sustains two possible referents, part of the poem’s larger
challenge to categories of botanical and poetical value. The irst is Clover;
indeed, Clover already dwells amid the lowlier botanical ranks “with grass.”
But just as the previous stanza has imagined a world in which plants are “all
akin,” we also ind implicit in this stanza a notional space in which the “Queen
of Flowers” has been demoted to the status of “a lower,” imaginatively trans-
planted over the garden wall into the broader world of plants with “enlocked”
roots. Thus running through the ostensible hymn to the “endless” reign of
the Queen of Flowers is a fantasy – and a threat – that she will lose her place.
(Recall Cooke’s fantasia of power.) The ground-vine confronts the Queen
of Flowers to “recognize” that she may be brought down to his level with
the other groundlings, such that she is no longer “high in feather,” but just
another “lower,” “ranked with grass” and subject to the ight for “the ampler
space, the balmier air” (WW, p. 22).
Just as its surface conceit challenges botanical hierarchies, the poem simul-
taneously troubles its own ostensible genre as a hymn or song of praise. The
verbal undercutting becomes most overt in the last stanza:
My Queen, so all along I lie,
But creep I can, scarce win your eye.

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 E l izab et h R e nke r

But, O, your garden-wall peer over,

And, if you blush, ’twill hardly be
At owning kin with Cousin Clover
Who winsome makes the low degree. (WW, p. 23)
The ground-vine “lies” and “creeps” along the ground, as ground-vines do; but
both of these words also suggest a position of duplicity – of verbally lying “all
along” as part of a stealthy attack. Lyon Evans has persuasively traced duplic-
ity as a mode in other sections of Weeds and Wildings, and Vernon Shetley inci-
sively calls Melville’s ironic use of familiar nature tropes “negative pastoral.”39
We have seen that the dynamic in the title, which promised a plot in which the
vine appeals to the Queen to raise Clover up in status, turned out to be a false
lead. At the same time, the poem’s ostensible genre, a hymn to the Rose in an
“endless” tradition handed down by the ages, is a generic false lead as well.
We saw in “The King Dines” that Howells created a bifurcation of perspective
between the generic genteel promise of regal fantasy in his title and his polem-
ical form and content. Melville leads as if writing a hymn to ideal beauty and
then overturns, from within, the entire aesthetic of the poem.
The proper place for this poem in the standard categories of American lit-
erary history is in fact naturalism, typically deined as a second-generation,
darker wave of realism focused on evolutionary struggles and biological
drives, competition for resources, and an evisceration of human agency. Here
we can turn to another of the era’s hidden poets, someone whose career is
rarely placed alongside Melville’s: Theodore Dreiser, whom conventional
literary history has identiied almost completely with prose iction, natural-
ism in particular. Dreiser, too, was an active poet, publishing many period-
ical poems in the 1890s up through a book of poems, Moods: Cadenced and
Declaimed, in 1926. One of the challenges to recovering Dreiser as poet has
been that he often published his periodical poems anonymously or pseu-
donymously.40 Nancy Warner Barrineau points out that his pseudonyms in
Ev’ry Month, a magazine he ran and for which he did almost all the writing,
allowed him to experiment “with a series of narrative voices”; the same is
certainly true of the poems he published there as well, under names such as
“S. J. White,” “Theodore Dreiser,” and “The Poet.”41 Judgments of his late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poems as “done in the manner of the
‘genteel tradition’ ”42 remain automatic and uninterrogated.
In Ainslee’s Magazine (1899), for example, we ind the twelve-line poem
“Bondage,” which, although written in rhymed iambic pentameter, is hardly
genteel; it’s a naturalist poem about enslavement to desire. It concludes: “Its
slave you are. Denying is so vain. / Someone hath touched you saying: ‘Feel

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desire.’ / His will you do – you run, you run, aspire!”43 Although the male
pronoun in the inal line indicates a male person, importantly a nearly anony-
mous “someone” who has the power to call up your biological sexual instincts
regardless of your choice, your individuality, or your human connections, it
also refers to “desire” itself as a more general human drive. The word “desire”
in fact sets the poem in motion in the irst two lines: “We only know we’re
caught within the stream, / And feel the ceaseless drag of all desire” (AM,
p. 26). But “His” in the inal line has a third meaning that is the most radical
of all. It refers back to a completely unidentiied male pronoun in line 4: “We
only know of toil food [sic], sleep and dream, / And as we bow, so we escape
His ire” (AM, p. 26). The capitalized “His” here connotes the Christian God,
but the actual referent for this pronoun is desire itself, Dreiser’s polemical
replacement. Desire is true lord and master. Only by bowing to “His” dictates,
by following the lead of your drives, can you escape desire’s insistent wrath.
The fact that this poem appeared a year before the irst edition of Sister Carrie
(1900) only dramatizes the fact that Dreiser’s naturalism was not transpiring
exclusively, or even irst, in the genre of prose iction. We thus ind another
dramatic indication that the genteel tradition narrative is an ideology that has
been mistaken for a history. The era was not a barren one, awaiting later mod-
ernist redemption. An imprecise generalization even when Santayana coined
the term, its repeated invocation has served to obscure the complexity of
actual poetic practices during the decades in question.

Notes
1. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” University
of California Chronicle 12:4 (1911), pp. 357–80; George Santayana, The Genteel
Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (1915;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 72–76.
2. John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the
Crisis of Modernity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 14–15.
3. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence
Stedman, 2 vols. (New York: Mofat, Yard, 1910), vol. 1, p. 188 (hereafter cited in
the text as LL).
4. Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1896), p. 63 (hereaf-
ter cited in the text as BT).
5. Richmond Croom Beatty, “Bayard Taylor and George H. Boker,” American
Literature 6:3 (1934), pp. 316–27; John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American
Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1971), pp. 9, 120; Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia, “Prologue,” in

421
 E l izab et h R e nke r

Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5,

Poetry and Criticism 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 11–14, 11.
6. William Purviance Fenn, “Richard Henry Stoddard’s Chinese Poems,”
American Literature 11:4 (1940), pp. 417–38.
7. Beatty, “Bayard Taylor and George H. Boker,” pp. 325–26.
8. Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular
Male Poet of Genius (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2005),
p. 143.
9. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme,” in The Poems
of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1858; Boston: Houghton, Mil in, 1885), p. 207. Poems
in this collection will be cited in the text as PTB.
10. Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience
1865–1915 (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 238.
11. G. E. DeMille, “Stedman, Arbiter of the Eighties,” PMLA 41:3 (1926), p. 766;
Willard Thorp, “Defenders of Ideality,” in Robert E. Spiller et al. (eds.), Literary
History of the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 815; Martha
Edelsberg Passe, “Criticism of Poetry in America During the Nineties” (doc-
toral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957), pp. 67–80.
12. Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear?, p. 112.
13. DeMille, “Stedman, Arbiter of the Eighties,” p. 762.
14. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Victorian Poets (1875; Boston: Houghton, Mil in,
1889), pp. 14–15.
15. Michael Cohen, “E.C. Stedman and the Invention of Victorian Poetry,”
Victorian Poetry 43:2 (2005), pp. 166, 168–69.
16. Edmund Clarence Stedman, “The Twilight of the Poets,” Century Illustrated
Magazine, September 1, 1885, American Periodicals Series Online, ProQuest;
Elizabeth Renker, “The ‘Twilight of the Poets’ in the Era of American Realism,
1875–1900,” in Kerry Larson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century
American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135–53.
17. Edmund Clarence Stedman, “How Old Brown Took Harper’s Ferry,” in Burton
Egbert Stevenson (ed.), Poems of American History (New York: Houghton
Mil in, 1908), p. 393.
18. Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Pan in Wall Street,” in The Poetical Works of
Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1884), pp. 250–52. Poems
in this collection will be cited in the text as PW.
19. Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
20. Richard Cary, The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His New York Friends (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952), p. 27; Norman Foerster, “Later Poets,”
in William Peterield Trent et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of American
Literature, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1946), vol. 3, pp. 37, 41, 31.

422
 The “Genteel Tradition” and Its Discontents

21. Walt Whitman, “The Poetry of the Future,” The North American Review,
February 1881, p. 195.
22. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt,
ed. Paula Bernat Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. xxxiii
(hereafter cited in the notes as PB).
23. Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear?, p. 7.
24. My formulation that Piatt wrote “in and out of ” the genteel tradition is
indebted to Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s important formulation about Maria Gowen
Brooks, in Gruesz, “Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle,” ESQ:
A Journal of the American Renaissance 54 (2008), pp. 75–109.
25. Bayard Taylor, The Echo Club, and Other Literary Diversions (Boston: James R.
Osgood, 1876), p. 136.
26. Taylor, The Echo Club, p. 147.
27. Paula Bernat Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of
American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
28. Sarah Piatt, “A Prettier Book,” in Jeannette Leonard Gilder (ed.), Representative
Poems of Living Poets, American and English, Selected by the Poets Themselves (New
York: Cassell, 1886), pp. 507–08. This collection will be cited in the text as RP.
29. Julie Bates Dock, “William Dean Howells,” in Eric L. Haralson (ed.),
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 1998), pp. 226–27.
30. William Dean Howells, Pebbles, Monochromes, and Other Modern Poems, 1891–
1916, ed. Edwin H. Cady (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. xxvii, xxix.
31. See Bayard Taylor, “El Khalil,” in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1854;
Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1875), pp. 61–62; Bayard Taylor, “The Norseman’s
Ride,” in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor, p. 17; Aldrich, The Poems of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich, pp. 17–18.
32. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Unguarded Gates,” in Unguarded Gates (Boston:
Houghton Mil in, 1895), pp. 15–17.
33. Aldrich, Unguarded Gates, p. 119.
34. William Dean Howells, “The King Dines,” in Stops of Various Quills (New
York: Harper, 1895), n.p.
35. Howells, Stops of Various Quills, n.p.
36. Paula Bernat Bennett (ed.), Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An
Anthology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998); Karen Kilcup, “Rose Terry
Cooke,” in Haralson (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Poetry. Cheryl Walker
(ed.), American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
37. Rose Terry Cooke, Poems (New York: Geo. Gottesberger Peck, 1881), pp.
101–03; Rose Terry, Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), pp. 20–23. Poems
in the 1861 collection will be cited in the text as RT.

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38. Herman Melville, Weeds and Wildings Chiely: With a Rose or Two, in Robert C.
Ryan (ed.), “Weeds and Wildings Chiely: With a Rose or Two. By Herman
Melville. Reading Text and Genetic Text, Edited from the Manuscripts, with
Introduction and Notes” (doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University,
Evanston, 1967), p. 14. Poems in this collection will be cited in the text
as WW.
39. Vernon Lionel Shetley, “A Private Art: Melville’s Poetry of Negation” (doc-
toral dissertation, Columbia University, 1986), p. 150.
40. Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch, Theodore Dreiser: A
Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), p. 29.
41. Nancy Warner Barrineau (ed.), Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. xx, 25, 98.
42. Robert Palmer Saalbach (ed.), Selected Poems (from Moods) by Theodore Dreiser
(New York: Exposition Press, 1969), p. 6.
43. Theodore Dreiser, “Bondage,” Ainslee’s Magazine, April 1899, p. 293 (hereafter
cited in the text as AM).

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 Chapter 19
Disciplined Play: American Children’s
Poetry to 1920
A n g e la S o r b y

“Can children’s poetry matter?” When Richard Flynn posed this question in
1993, he was paraphrasing Dana Gioia’s famous challenge to readers of poetry
in general, but he was also upping the ante.1 Children’s poetry is often seen as
a marginal subield within the already-somewhat-marginal ield of poetry. It
is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in
colleges of education. And yet, ironically, nineteenth-century verses for chil-
dren (“A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “Mary’s Lamb”) are among the best-known
and most culturally inl uential texts in American literary history. To examine
the popular success of such texts, it is necessary to ask not whether children’s
poetry can matter but how and why it has continued to matter so much, for so
long, to so many readers.
What, exactly, is children’s poetry? The idea of childhood is notoriously
malleable, as many historians have pointed out. In Huck’s Raft, Steven Mintz
argues that although contemporary childhood is deined by ixed stages
(start school at ive, drive at sixteen, etc.), pre-twentieth-century lives were
“far less regularized or uniform. Unpredictability was the hallmark of grow-
ing up, even for the children of professionals and merchants.”2 Certainly in
America, and especially before the Civil War, the line between childhood
and adulthood was blurry and heavily dependent on class, race, religion,
and personal circumstance. Very young children were ofered alphabets and
nursery rhymes, often drawn from the oral tradition. But just as older chil-
dren shared adult responsibilities, so too did they share adult reading mate-
rials; this is evident, for instance, in the proliferating “household” editions
of poets such as Lydia Sigourney and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The
idea of household or mixed-age readership had a profound inl uence on pre-
twentieth-century American poets, from Sigourney to Emily Dickinson to
Paul Laurence Dunbar. It is necessary to understand children’s literature and
children’s reading, not because it was a separate sphere but because it was so

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thoroughly integrated into the commercial and literary life of pre-twentieth-

century America. In other words, it may be deceptive to say that children
read adult poetry or vice versa; instead, one could argue that most pre-twen-
tieth-century popular poetry was not age graded; it was instead intergener-
ational in ways that afected its composition, circulation, and horizons of
interpretation.
In early Puritan communities, older children read poems written for a broad
readership, such as Michael Wigglesworth’s spine-tingling “Day of Doom”
(1662), which much later would serve as a model for Clement Clark Moore’s
“A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823). However, Puritans were also among the
irst to produce rhymes aimed at young children, because they believed that
they must learn to read as soon as possible to gain direct access to biblical sal-
vation. Beginning readers were given rhymed, illustrated alphabets such as
those in the New England Primer. Indeed, the Primer alphabet, beginning “In
Adam’s fall / We sinn’d all,” is probably one of the earliest English-language
American poems, although its precise origins are murky. The Boston-based
printer Benjamin Harris likely derived the irst New England Primer (1686) from
an ABC book, The Protestant Tutor, which he had published in England in
1679. Although the Primer was the most widely distributed American-authored
book throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries,
few editions survive, not because they were unpopular but because they were
overused; even Emily Dickinson scissored her copy to pieces when she wanted
to illustrate her verses with woodcuts.
As a poem, the Primer’s alphabet evolved, like folk material, in response
to changing cultural conditions. For instance, as Clifton Johnson notes, the
rhyme for K (“King Charles the good, / No Man of blood”) became, by the
later eighteenth century, “Queens and Kings / Are gaudy things.”3 Patricia
Crain’s The Story of A describes how the Primer contributed to the “alphabet-
ization” of America: “The verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet
cloak the fact that the unit of textual meaning – the letter – lacks meaning itself.
The alphabet represents a threat to orthodoxy, for into this space competing
meanings may rush.”4 Although the image/text combination of the alphabet
is theologically Calvinist, it also draws on competing discourses, from tavern
signs to Renaissance emblems to nursery rhymes. Moreover, unlike the Bay
Psalm Book, with its strict hymnal meter, the Primer’s prosody is ragged and
changeable, without a uniform meter to make the letters cohere. Ironically,
the hybrid New England Primer is aesthetically compelling precisely because it
fails at orthodoxy; it relects, as Crain notes, an emerging mercantile economy
in which lexibility is key.

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Beyond the Primer, few inl uential American children’s poems appeared in
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, although the rap-
idly expanding printing trade looded the market with tiny children’s chap-
books that were hawked as toys. Poems in such volumes were often nursery
or street rhymes (Tommy Thumb’s Song-Book; Melodies of Mother Goose), copied
from John Newbery and other Britons. Such secular materials supplemented
soberer works like the Primer, initiating tensions between oral and written
texts, and between didacticism and entertainment, that would enliven chil-
dren’s poetry through the nineteenth century and beyond.
American children’s poetry, like American literature more generally, took
on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and
published (as opposed to pirated) by Americans. The reasons for this are man-
ifold: the demand for consumer goods rose; holiday traditions were codiied;
magazines and newspapers proliferated; romantic and sentimental discourses
venerated childhood; middle-class mothers had the leisure to be readers and
even writers of poetry; and public schools became common and eventually
mandatory. Social and material conditions favored the circulation of senti-
mental or didactic poems that could be read aloud, memorized, and repeated
by children in the company of adults.
Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823) was the earliest
secular children’s poem to achieve mass-cultural popularity, and it is a bit of
an outlier: its author was not a professional writer, and it is neither sentimen-
tal nor didactic, although it does lend itself to oral reading. Moore, an aca-
demic specializing in Hebrew, drew on Dutch folklore (including Washington
Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York) to write perhaps the most famous
opening couplet in American history: “ ’Twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”5
In The Battle for Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum argues that Moore’s poem
draws on, and contributes to, an invented tradition only tangentially related
to its European sources. Nissenbaum suggests that “A Visit from St. Nicholas”
adjudicates between carnivalesque working-class Christmas bacchanals and
the more staid traditions of upper-class New Yorkers. St. Nicholas himself is
transformed from a patrician bishop to a “pedlar / just opening his pack,” but
as a benevolent elf he sheds the illicit connotations of itinerancy and works to
contain class tensions that elites like Moore found threatening.
Although Nissenbaum’s analysis is meticulous, it is perhaps too localized
to account for the poem’s uncannily wide circulation. Structurally, the work
parallels Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom,” while ofering domestic, material-
istic pleasures in place of the old Puritan apocalypse. Moore’s jarringly secular

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vision of Christmas is thus couched in a reassuringly established frame; like

much successful popular culture, it makes something new feel natural. The
poem was irst published in the (Troy, New York) Sentinel in 1823 but was
widely copied in other newspapers. In 1848 it made its début as a stand-alone
picture book, with woodcuts by Theodore Boyd; at this point, it was explicitly
identiied as “a present for good little boys and girls.” Indeed, gift-giving prac-
tices (rather than the containment of class tensions) seem key to this poem’s
popularity: it both celebrates gifts and can also serve as a gift. In the poem, as
at Christmastime, gifts from an adult authority to a child stress the intergener-
ational bonds that poems can build, and that are central to sentimental domes-
tic ideology. In Revolution and the Word, Cathy Davidson emphasizes that “every
work of art operates both within a market economy and a gift economy,” and
even when readers buy books, they experience them, to some degree, as gifts.6
Although Davidson is arguing for the importance of the novel, a poem like “A
Visit from St. Nicholas” proves her point even more directly, because poems
(like St. Nicholas in his sleigh) are remarkably mobile and were often packaged
as giftbooks. And indeed, if memorized, they did not even require a print text
in order to be transmitted from household to household.
The gradual shift from church-based to home-based holidays also spurred
the popularity of Lydia Maria Child’s “The New-England Boy’s Song About
Thanksgiving Day,” which irst appeared in Child’s commercial giftbook
Flowers for Children, in 1844:
Over the river and through the wood
To grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way,
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow. (OB, p. 38)
Like “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “The New-England Boy’s Song” is ultimately
about consuming desires: “Hooray for the fun! / Is the pudding done? /
Hooray for the pumpkin pie!” (OB, p. 39). In both poems, desires are framed
as fulilled in domestic space; the whole thrust of “The New-England Boy’s
Song” emphasizes that the sleigh should rush as quickly as possible toward
the gratiications of the warm house and kitchen. As versions of Child’s
poem were reprinted very widely in giftbooks and school readers, stanzas and
phrases appeared and disappeared, mimicking the dynamic of an oral tradi-
tion. This is one quality speciic to children’s poetry, seen much less often in
elite “adult” poems: the verses tend not to be stable or sacralized, but rather
open to playful modiication as they are repeated in daily life. For example, The

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Mary Dawson Game Book (1916) proposes a game of “Hooray for the Pumpkin
Pie!” that uses Child’s poem as a jumping-of point.7 Not surprisingly, given
the powerful cult of domestic motherhood, “grandfather’s house” gradually
became “grandmother’s house,” and by the mid-twentieth century this matri-
archal substitution seems to have become the dominant variant.
The household unit was also celebrated in the output of the so-called sen-
timental women poets, whose work has been recovered in the late twentieth
century by scholars including Paula Bennett, Cheryl Walker, Elizabeth Petrino,
and Karen Kilcup. Because recovery work is aimed at taking women writers seri-
ously – and because children’s literature is often not taken seriously – the inter-
generational quality of this oeuvre has generally been downplayed so that other
qualities, such as subversiveness or eroticism, can be highlighted. And yet, nine-
teenth-century women poets, including Lydia Sigourney, Hannah Flagg Gould,
Emily Dickinson, Lucy Larcom, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Sarah Piatt, and most
others, published volumes that mix juvenile and adult work indiscriminately,
making these categories themselves seem irrelevant or inadequate. For instance,
in Select Poems (1841), Lydia Sigourney juxtaposes “Birthday Verses to a Little Girl”
with “Farewell to the Aged,” as if to stress – in typically market-savvy Sigourney
style – the range of her reach. This very luidity of voice and of audience is a pro-
ductive force within the poems and within nineteenth-century poetry writ large.
Hannah Flagg Gould was probably the most proliic antebellum producer
of poems aimed partly (although not exclusively) at children. One poem, “The
Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” seems to muse on the issue of
audience:
And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found
By the world, that has long done without you,
In your snug little hiding-place far under ground –
Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around,
And let us hear something about you!
The child puzzles over the mummy and her history, inally concluding:
Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight
The musical trinket found nigh you?
And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight
Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red or white,)
Tricked out in the jewels kept by you?8
Janet Gray’s recent close reading of Gould’s poem supports a thesis about
veiled abolitionism, but Gray’s observations can also work as a comment on
the tensions within nineteenth-century children’s verse:

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Adopting the persona of a child boldly trying to initiate a public discussion,

she looks back at an estranged version of herself – a woman buried with a
musical instrument, an oral performer from an alien culture – and exposes the
incoherence of her relationship with her audience. . . . A igure over six feet
tall folded into fetal position, the mummy would have conveyed to viewers
both largeness and smallness, the forms of adult and child bound together in
death’s imitation of birth.9
Just as the adult and child are bound together in “The Child’s Address,” so too
are “the forms of adult and child bound together” in Gould’s Poems, generat-
ing fertile instances of heteroglossia as she code-switches between younger
and older voices.
The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of
poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more
common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the childlike
qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent,
it is “really” an adult voice making an adult point. In her groundbreaking
introduction to The Palace-Burner, Paula Bennett underscores the serious-
ness of Sarah Piatt, a mid- to late nineteenth-century writer: “Very much like
Fanny Osgood and Emily Dickinson . . . Piatt uses ‘naïve’ speakers to make
‘sensitive’ adult points.”10 Bennett’s emphasis on Piatt’s fundamental adult-
hood makes sense in the context of a twenty-irst-century critical environ-
ment that continues to marginalize children’s literature; after all, Bennett is
rescuing Piatt from the margins. However, a close reading of Piatt suggests
that her engagement with childhood is not a strategic mask but is in fact inte-
gral to her literary agenda and to her voice. Like many other poets of the era,
if she is not merely a children’s poet, she is just as assuredly not simply a poet
for adults. “Trumpet-Flowers,” for instance, appeared in the family paper the
Youth’s Companion in 1883:
They light the green dusk with their ire-like glow,
And the brown barefoot boys laugh out below.
The wind wakes in the grass and climbs the tree,
The wind – ah, what a trumpeter is he:
He blows them in the leaves above my head
So low, so long, that he might wake the dead.
He blows them, till a child they cannot see
Hears them, and plays with that brown company. (PB, p. 111)

This poem is free of the entertainment-versus-didacticism battle that dogs

some nineteenth-century children’s verse, because it aspires to be neither

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funny nor preachy. Instead, it uses its own playfulness, and the playfulness of
the “barefoot boys” (a trope that would be familiar to readers of Whittier) to
meditate on the relationship between death and play: Can the dead awaken?
Are children closer to the spirit world? The poem does not answer its own
questions, except by imagining that a child who can be neither seen nor heard
might be stirred from death by the trumpet lowers. Piatt, at her best, neither
excludes children nor condescends to them, and in “Trumpet-Flowers” chil-
dren are aligned with the wind that climbs a tree (like a child) and that acts as
the animating agent of the poem.
Emily Dickinson’s child voice has generated discussion about the extent to
which she can or should be read as a children’s poet – again, partly because
twenty-irst-century readers are used to drawing boundaries around children’s
literature. Elizabeth Philips, for instance, notes that “Some of the poems,
about triles and ‘little things,’ suggest that Dickinson, like Swift, Twain, and
a number of women contemporary with her, had an interest in writing for
children as well as adults.”11 Philips believes that Dickinson’s juvenile verse
is “not always among the best poetry she wrote,” and that it only sometimes
rises to the level of “superior light verse.”12 The trouble, here, is one of genre:
What is an “adult” poem? Must it exclude the child’s perspective? Must it
eschew playfulness? Or is adulthood in poetry simply a matter of complexity?
And if so, what counts as a trile or little thing? The few poems that Dickinson
published in her lifetime appeared mostly in intergenerational venues, like the
Springield Republican, that routinely published poems for a child/adult mixed
readership. And posthumously, although some of her work appeared in the
Atlantic, it was also deemed appropriate for the Youth’s Companion. A case can
be made that Dickinson’s power derives in part from her intergenerational
voice and the tensions it produces, and that this intergenerational perspec-
tive pervades many if not most of her poems. Paul Crumbley, for instance,
advances a subtle analysis in Inlections of the Pen, arguing that “I’m Ceded – I’ve
stopped being Theirs” “demonstrates that the child’s voice must be thought of
in dialogue with other voices. To hear the child is also to hear the voices that
instruct, curse, comfort, and punish an innocent, unformed consciousness.”13
In other words, the discursive condition of intergenerational dialogue satu-
rates Dickinson’s poems, just as the poems themselves were “addressed” (lit-
erally, in letters) to correspondents of all ages, and just as they continue to
address adults and children today – like Piatt, without condescension.
The male Fireside or Schoolroom Poets, most prominently Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, achieved iconic celebrity
status in ways that would have been unthinkable for women poets. Ultimately,

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however, they too functioned as intergenerational poets, and much of their

fame rested on their ubiquity in schoolrooms. As I argue in Schoolroom Poets,
the growth of a public education system based on rote recitation meant that
virtually all children educated in the United States learned the same popu-
lar canon of poems, including, for instance, Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,”
“The Village Blacksmith,” and “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Whittier’s “Barefoot
Boy.” Children learned these poems in school, and adults recalled them with
nostalgia. Like popular songs, schoolroom poems became repositories of per-
sonal memories even as they also served to bind schoolchildren into imagined
communities:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
On the eighteenth of April in seventy-ive,
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year. (OB, p. 45)
All children, in this poem, are posited as Longfellow’s children, gathered close
enough to hear his voice even as they are widely dispersed across the nation.
Public school classrooms often displayed busts or portraits of Longfellow
beside George Washington, cementing the nationalist aims of public school
educators. Especially in their dotage, Longfellow and Whittier were hailed,
in countless articles, as children’s poets and above all as children’s paternal
friends. Both increasingly addressed themselves directly to this constituency,
and when Whittier edited a commercial volume of Child-Life: Poetry (1871),
Longfellow and the other Fireside Poets featured prominently.
Within an ambiguously intergenerational milieu, anthologies helpfully
identify what literary qualities – including frankness, humor, and colloquial
speech – were considered childlike. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A Fable,” for
instance, appeared in Child-Life and in many other children’s anthologies:
The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter “Little Prig.”
Bun replied,
“You are doubtless very big;
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together,
To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.

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If I’m not so large as you,

You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.
I’ll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents difer; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.” (OB, p. 39)

In his 1872 study Americanisms, Maximillian DeVere notes that “Bun” is New
England slang for “squirrel.”14 Although Emerson pushed for American col-
loquialisms – stumps and boasts – in his essay “The Poet” (1840), his own verse
often resorts to elite literary language. The squirrel’s boasting brings “A Fable”
closer to the oral tradition than most of Emerson’s work, making it a popular
children’s recitation piece. Moreover, its humor and colloquialisms also bring
it closer to Emerson’s own stated literary ideals, suggesting that perhaps inter-
generational audiences helped nudge American poetry away from archaism
and artiice.
Child-Life was meant for household use, but the most inl uential dissemi-
nators of poetry – not just children’s poetry but any poetry – throughout
the nineteenth century were school anthologies, particularly the McGufey’s
Reader series. These graded American schoolbooks, beginning with the
Primer and ending with the Sixth Reader, draw as often from the annals of adult
poetry as from the archive of speciically children’s verse, again establishing
crossover hits that were quickly naturalized as part of a popular intergener-
ational canon that “everyone” supposedly knew. A list of McGufey’s selec-
tions includes most of the poems now understood to be nineteenth-century
children’s classics, including, for example, Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,”
Celia Thaxter’s “The Sandpiper,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Bryant’s
“Lines to a Waterfowl.” It also includes memorable poems by less remem-
bered authors, such as Sarah Roberts’s “The Voice of the Grass,” which pre-
dates Whitman’s grass:
Here I come, creeping, creeping everywhere;
By the dusty roadside,
On the sunny hillside,
Close by the noisy brook,
In every shady nook,
I come creeping, creeping everywhere.15
As “The Voice of the Grass” (and the locks of ravens, sandpipers, and water-
fowl) suggests, McGufey’s reigning aesthetic was overwhelmingly pastoral,

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relecting romantic assumptions about youth and nature that steered the
course of much children’s poetry throughout the nineteenth century.
If a handful of textbook poems were frequently repeated in schools and
parlors, American magazines and newspapers took the opposite tack, trum-
peting new poems in every issue. Antebellum American children’s magazines
that published poems aimed speciically at young readers included, inter alia,
the Juvenile Miscellany (edited by Lydia Maria Child and later Sarah Josepha
Hale), Parley’s Magazine (edited by Samuel Goodrich), the Fireside Miscellany
(edited by Hannah Flagg Gould and Darius Mead), the Southern Rose Bud
(edited by Caroline Gilman), and many others, although adult magazines,
such as Godey’s, also published children’s verses. This list of editors reads as
a who’s who of children’s poetry – perhaps in part because the editors were
compelled to ill gaps with poems they wrote themselves.
The most famous children’s poem to emerge from antebellum magazine
culture was Sarah Josepha Hale’s “Mary’s Lamb,” which, with its leece “white
as snow,” remains so familiar that it barely needs quoting. “Mary’s Lamb” irst
appeared in the Juvenile Miscellany in 1830, when Lydia Maria Child was still
the editor. It was widely reprinted in newspapers, and its fame was cemented
when McGufey’s included it in the 1836 First Reader, ensuring that it was
among the very irst poems that young children memorized. Elsewhere, I have
read “Mary’s Lamb” as an animal rights poem, because kindness to animals
was a constant refrain in children’s magazines, relecting a sentimental/polit-
ical imaginary that aligned children, animals, slaves, and women. However,
and perhaps even more importantly, “Mary’s Lamb” registers Hale’s strong
commitment to female education. Mary, after all, takes her lamb to school,
and although this violates pedagogical norms, it results in a useful lesson:
“What makes the lamb love Mary so?”
The little children cry;
“Oh, Mary loves the lamb you know,”
The teacher did reply.
“And you each gentle animal
In conidence may bind,
And make it follow at your call,
If you are only kind.” (OB, p. 19)
Without Mary’s female inl uence, the school would be a more orderly but less
gentle place. As Mary Kelly put it in her classic study of literary domesticity,
many antebellum women asked that women be educated, not because they
were like men but “because they set ‘a purer, higher, more excellent exam-
ple,’ as Sarah Josepha Hale told the readers of the American Ladies Magazine

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in 1835.”16 As a girl venturing into the public sphere of the public schoolroom,
Hale’s Mary is precisely such an exemplar: “purer, higher, and more excel-
lent” because of her feminine capacity for empathy. Indeed, Mary represents
the ideology of many antebellum children’s poems (by poets of both sexes),
which were steeped in the politics and sensibilities of sentimental culture.
After the Civil War, children’s poetry became relatively less concerned with
useful lessons and more concerned with sales. This trend was energized by the
expanding ields of age-graded commercial marketing, nature study, illustra-
tion and photography, “nonsense” literature, and folklore studies. Although
intergenerational poetry was still being written, it was increasingly rivaled
by poetry and giftbooks aimed at speciic demographics. The circulation
and inl uence of children’s magazines, particularly Youth’s Companion and St.
Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, grew, but so did the market for individual
books, particularly at Christmastime. Poetry for children became less didactic
and more ludic as play came to be seen as both a marketable commodity and
a developmentally productive activity. In contrast to most antebellum texts,
children’s poetry of the post–Civil War era increasingly explores, and even
fetishizes, the material culture(s) of childhood. Toys and dolls take center
stage and literally come alive, as in “The Duel” by the hugely popular poet
Eugene Field. “The Duel” begins:
The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the mantle sat;
’Twas half-past twelve and – what do you think?
Nor one nor t’other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I wasn’t there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!) (OB, p. 161)

This uneasy scene, with its mix of imperial imports and homespun animals,
plays (like many Field poems) with boundaries: between the bought and the
made, between objects and people, between children and adults. There is no
moral at the end of the poem; instead, the two stufed animals simply devour
each other in an entertaining example of consuming appetites run amok.
As a counterweight to Gilded Age consumerism, some educators pro-
moted “nature study” as a way for youngsters to escape the efects of industri-
alization. This dovetailed with the work of women regionalist writers (Celia
Thaxter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others) who –
when they wrote children’s poems – tended to focus on the lora and fauna of

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their environs. Most nature-study poetry is reverent, encouraging close obser-

vation, as in Clara Doty Bates’s poem “Grass Gypsies,” about spiders:
Why, here is a camp in the wayside grass!
Let’s look at the tents before we pass.
Beaded with dew is every one –
Ah, ’tis only webs the spiders have spun.17
Discussing this poem, the Kindergarten-Primary Magazine suggested that it be
taught as children observe real spiders through a microscope, and, more gen-
erally, nature poems were recruited to teach scientiic observation skills.
Because children’s poetry was so market driven, however, it is deceptive to
link poets too closely with speciic styles: Eugene Field wrote material cul-
ture poems, but he also wrote poems derived from folklore and anachronistic
sentimental-mourning poems. Clara Doty Bates wrote nature-study poems,
but she also churned out faux fairy-tale epics. And Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
was neither regionalist nor scientiic in her treatment of the ostrich:
The ostrich is a silly bird,
With scarcely any mind.
He often runs so very fast,
He leaves himself behind.
And when he gets there, he has to stand
And hang about all night,
Without a blessed thing to do
Until he comes in sight. (OB, p. 173)

The vastly expanding children’s marketplace of the later nineteenth century

sparked a kind of stylistic anarchy: poets wrote what children would read, or
what their parents would buy, rather than focusing on developing a uniied
voice.
The market, combined with emerging print technologies, also spurred
new text/image combinations. Illustrated rhymes had been a staple in chil-
dren’s poetry since the woodcuts in the New England Primer, but after the
Civil War, illustrators began to make art central to children’s poetry – paving
the way for twentieth-century comic strips and picture books. For instance,
Peter Newell’s Topsys and Turvys (1893) depends on pictures and rhymes that
reinforce one another. Accompanied by an illustration of an African horned
animal, one verse begins, “The koodoo stays alone and dreams of loved ones
far away”; then line 2, printed upside down, concludes: “The Seal invites
two lovely snakes to come and spend the day.”18 The koodoo’s horns have
turned into snakes, and his head is now a seal’s. Like the duck/rabbit illusion

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described at length by Newell’s exact contemporary, the American psycholo-

gist Joseph Jastrow (and later appropriated by Wittgenstein), Newell’s verse/
picture combinations play on the ways that language puts pressure on visual
perception.
Newell saw his illustrations and his physical books as extensions of his
verses; registering one of several patents for oddly shaped books, he wrote:
I, Peter S. Newell of Leonia, in the State of New Jersey, have invented certain
new and useful Improvements in Illustrated Books and Pamphlets. . . . As such
books have been heretofore made it has been usual to form or shape them in
rectangular coniguration, with the result that no, or but little, variety in the
form of the books could be obtained, and the constant uniformity of such
books in such forms, fails to meet the desire for change and variety which is
strong in many persons, especially in children and young people.19
The Slant Book is thus a parallelogram, down which a child’s runaway go-cart
can careen, accompanied by anarchic verses as the cart hits an oompah band,
an egg peddler, and even a policeman: “But down the go-cart swiftly sped /
And smashed that cop completely / And as he sailed o’er Bobby’s head / Bob
snipped a button, neatly!”20
The Slant Book also relects a newly irreverent or even subversive tone in
children’s poetry – suddenly, after the Civil War, books and magazines were
full of bad boys and even the odd bad girl. Naughtiness was a gold mine, and a
number of poet/illustrators cashed in, creating serial works like Palmer Cox’s
Brownies and Gelett Burgess’s Goops. The Goops series was a mass-cultural
phenomenon that poked fun at conduct manuals. The Goops had a long run:
they appeared irst in Burgess’s San Francisco–based magazine, the Lark, and
then in the Burgess Nonsense Book (1901), in St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and
Girls, and as a stand-alone series of books, the latest of which was released
in 1951, ive decades after the original. Goops and How to Be Them (1900) bills
itself as “A Manual for Polite Infants Inculcating many Juvenile Virtues both
by Precept and Example, with 90 illustrations.” The Goops are grotesquely
baby-faced characters who wreak havoc in poem after poem:
The Goops they lick their ingers,
And the Goops, they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth,
Oh! They lead disgusting lives.21

The Goops’ “sins” are always secular, and their punishments progressive: they
are sent to bed, not to hell. Burgess’s didacticism is self-relexive: it is present,
but it is also ironic.

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Burgess’s most viral contribution to American poetry, “The Purple Cow,”

appeared in the irst issue of the Lark, in 1895: “I never saw a purple cow /
I never hope to see one . . .” (OB, p. 209). The Lark was the locus of a new
American interest in nonsense. Other practitioners included Oliver Hereford,
Carolyn Wells, and Laura Richards. Wells, in the introduction to her ground-
breaking Nonsense Anthology (1902), attempts a taxonomy of nonsense: it is not
just silly or meaningless verse but a speciically “pure” kind of absurd poetry,
practiced most perfectly by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. To be nonsense,
she argues, language must not be teleological; it must have no purpose apart
from its own play. In Wells’s opinion, no American rose to the standards of
Lear and Carroll, although she and her contemporaries made forays into non-
sense. Laura Richards, for instance, seems to both mark and parody imperial
expansion in “Harriet Hutch”:
Harriet Hutch, her conduct was such,
Her uncle remarked it would conquer the Dutch.
She boiled her bonnet, and she breakfasted on it,
Then she rode to the moon on her grandmother’s crutch!
(Oh, she rode to the moon, yes she rode to the moon, and she rode to the
moon on her grandmother’s crutch.)22
However, “Harriet Hutch,” like “The Purple Cow,” is more broadly humor-
ous than properly absurd. Both Richards and Burgess place their “nonsensical”
characters in commonsense contexts, rather than in the anarchic parallel lin-
guistic universe of, say, “Jabberwocky.”
If the age of American pragmatism did not lend itself to nonsense, it did sup-
port the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore, and many of the
most powerful nineteenth-century children’s poems draw on these discourses.
For instance, Olive A. Wadsworth’s work is mostly mired in nineteenth-cen-
tury conventions (Heavenward Bound: Words of Help for Young Christians), but
she had one bona ide hit when she transcribed and standardized a southern
Appalachian counting-out rhyme:
Over in the meadow
In the sand, in the sun
Lived an old mother toadie
And her little toadie one.
“Wink!” said the mother,
“I wink!” said the one,
So they winked and they blinked
In the sand, in the sun.

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Over in the meadow

Where the stream runs blue
Lived an old mother ish
And her little ishes two.
“Swim!” said the mother,
“We swim!” said the two,
So they swam and they leapt
Where the stream runs blue.23

This poem is full of unadorned action, eschewing the arch romanticism of

so much nineteenth-century nature writing. Number ten is a mother spider
(“ ‘Spin!’ Said the mother / ‘We spin!’ said the ten . . .”), and the rhyme implic-
itly encourages children to use their ingers or toes to keep track. Thus it not
only mimics an oral tradition but also invites, through its infectious rhymes,
readers to speak the poem aloud and to perpetuate the tradition.
The American ethnographic imagination also inspired dialect humorists,
such as Will Carleton, Artemis Ward, and Whitcomb Riley, who performed
their work on live tours. Riley, in particular, embraced the cult of the child
while appealing to intergenerational crowds. His most famous poem, “Little
Orphant Annie,” recounts the arrival of a spooky native informant into a
Hoosier household:
Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups and saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away.
An’ shoo the chickens of the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the ire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other children, when the supper things is done,
We set around the kitchen ire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch tales ’at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!24
Like much dialect literature, “Little Orphant Annie” marks the authenticity
of the story by ventriloquizing a lower-class regional speaker. Riley articulates
this reality efect more plainly in a prose defense of dialectal literature for
children, which concludes, “All other real people are getting into literature:
and without some real children along will they not soon be getting lonesome,
too?” To “sound real,” to Riley, is to speak in dialect.

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Riley also understood children’s speech to be its own dialect, as in “The

Bear Story,” which has a three-year-old speaker:
W’y, wunst they wuz a Little Boy went out
In the woods to shoot a Bear. So, he went out
’Way in the grea’-big woods – he did. – An’ he
Wuz goin’ along – an’ goin’ along, you know,
An’ purty soon he heerd somepin’ go “Wooh!” –
Ist thataway – “Woo-ooh!” An’ he wuz skeered,
He wuz. An’ so he runned an’ clumbed a tree –
A grea’-big tree, he did, – a sicka-more tree. (CR, p. 179)
In some ways, “The Bear Story” tips Riley’s political hand by showing the
ways that children were bundled together with regional others such as African
Americans, “Hoosiers,” and Irish immigrants. The child is charming, but his
speech also makes him an “other” whose cuteness stems partly from his cul-
tural and linguistic incompetence. This bundling is also evident in the bur-
geoning toy industry, which made heavy use of ethnic types, especially Native
Americans and African Americans, on the assumption that they were childlike
and comical.
Riley’s friend and admirer Paul Laurence Dunbar worked within and
against dialectal conventions. His many poems for children (and their parents)
perpetuated oral, intergenerational traditions but also raised issues of rep-
resentation and “reality” that were heightened by American racial politics.
As Kate Capshaw Smith has noted, Dunbar’s use of dialect was criticized by
some Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, but he inspired afectionate readings
and performances in ordinary African American communities. Thus Arna
Bontemps recalls his own childhood circa 1910:
The name of Paul Laurence Dunbar was in every sense a household word in
the black communities around Los Angeles when I was growing up there. It
was not, however, a bookish word. It was a spoken word. And in those days
it was associated with recitations that never failed to delight when we heard
them or said them at parties or on programs for the entertainment of church-
folks and their guests.25
Dunbar, then, did not just depict an oral tradition but to some degree melted
into it. For instance, as Henry Louis Gates points out, the opening lines from
“Sunday Morning” (“Lias! Lias! Bless de Lawd!”) became a playful way for
parents to rouse children from bed.26
As Dunbar and Riley were composing literary renditions of oral traditions,
folklorists were documenting them directly. William Wells Newell’s Games

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and Songs of American Children (1883) is a landmark volume recording what

Joseph Thomas has called the “playground” tradition of American poetry:
that aspect of children’s verse that is embedded in their jump rope rhymes,
their counting-out rituals, and even their taunts. Rhymes that early American
chapbooks had simply transcribed were now “folklore” to be classiied and
compared to other national traditions. Newell’s introduction describes both
his methodology and his conviction that children’s folk poetry, like other prim-
itive arts, is disappearing: “A majority of the games of children are played with
rhymed formulas, which have been handed down from generation to genera-
tion. These we have collected in part from the children themselves, in greater
part from persons of mature age who remember the usages of their youth; for
this collection represents an expiring custom.”27 Newell hypothesizes that the
most nonsensical counting-out rhymes are the oldest, which have been “cor-
rupted” beyond recognition from European sources:
Onery, unery, ickery, a,
Hallibone, crackabone, ninery-lay,
Whisko, bango, poker my stick,
Mejoliky one leg! (Massachusetts; GS, p. 200)
Despite its antiquity, “Onery, unery” points children’s poetry in a bracing new
direction: away from sentimentalism and didacticism, but also away from
commercialism. It implies that the best poems are not just oral but participa-
tory and subject to spontaneous revision. Many violate spelling or grammat-
ical rules:
Monkey, monkey, bottle of beer,
How many monkeys are there here?
One, two, three,
You be he (she)!
(Massachusetts to Georgia; GS, p. 202)
This poem takes pleasure in the internal rhyme (“You-be-he”) and privileges
play over sense. And despite Newell’s social Darwinian pessimism, playground
rhymes remained among the most adaptable forms of American poetry
through the twentieth century because they were enmeshed in daily-life activ-
ities such as choosing who will be “it” in a game of tag.
In Games and Songs, Newell focuses heavily on rhymes that originated in
England and the Continent. In 1922, the African American folklorist Thomas
Talley broadened the picture with his Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise.
Like Newell, Talley relied mainly on adults’ recollections of their post–Civil
War Southern childhoods. Along with work and dance songs, he gathered a

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substantial collection of children’s poems, including some that he traces to

African origins, such as “Tree Frogs”:
Shool! Shool! Shool!
I rule!
Shool! Shool! Shool!
I rule!
Shool! Shacker-rack.
I shool bubba cool.
Seller! Beller eel!
Fust to tree’l!
Just came er bubba.
Buska! Buska-reel!28
Talley’s collection owes debts to the minstrel and plantation traditions, as well
as to Africa, and was seen as problematic even in the 1920s. But through Talley
and other folklorists, poets such as Langston Hughes gained access to an oral
heritage that was lively, lexible, and intergenerational. Hughes himself wrote
poems for children, as have many – if not most – prominent twentieth-century
African American poets, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Elizabeth Alexander to
Kwame Dawes. Indeed, African American poets have remained attuned to the
needs of young readers and of broad community audiences even as poets in
general have narrowed their focus to address adults within the academy.
Early twentieth-century modernism, as epitomized by Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot, did not so much squelch children’s poetry as banish it to a separate sphere,
as evidenced by the radically diferent voices that Eliot uses when writing The
Waste Land (for adults) and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (for children). It
can be argued that while twentieth-century adult poetry became increasingly
invisible to readers outside the academy, American children’s poetry stayed vis-
ible and audible, in the classroom, on the playground, and at home. This was
due partly to its embeddedness in oral and playground traditions and partly to
the lively multimedia mixes of text and image that had been pioneered by poet/
illustrators like Peter Newell. As the twentieth century progressed, American
poetry found a secure popular niche in the children’s picture book format. Poet/
illustrators such as Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Shel Silverstein extended the
Newell tradition, while author/illustrator teams such as Margaret Wise Brown
and Clement Hurd created memorable images: “In the great, green room, /
there was a telephone, / and a red balloon . . .”29 Goodnight Moon is certainly
a playful lyric rather than a prose narrative – and it should not be surprising
that Clement Hurd also illustrated Gertrude Stein’s sole children’s book, The
World Is Round. Goodnight Moon, like a Gertrude Stein poem, enacts repetitive

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linguistic rituals that readers are invited to share, both metaphorically and liter-
ally. It ofers, through words and images, an accessible context for poetry – a way
to make it part of daily life without diluting its play value. The best American
children’s poetry has always worked this way, and its survival and popularity can
perhaps serve as an object lesson for “adult” poets who struggle to ind readers.
Children’s literature can be innovative, but it is also conservative, because
adults control what is purchased – if not what is read – and are inclined to
perpetuate what they themselves enjoyed as children. As new forms of poetry
such as picture books emerged, old favorites like “A Visit from St. Nicholas”
continued to circulate. And even today, many children know a (British Puritan)
Isaac Watts prayer (“Now I lay me down to sleep . . .”) that was included in
the New England Primer. Perhaps more than other subgenres, then, children’s
poetry must be seen not as a time line in which one movement supersedes
another but rather as an expanding circle of coexisting texts that are simulta-
neously vital, playful, and memorable.

Notes
1. Richard Flynn, “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?,” The Lion and the Unicorn: A
Critical Journal of Children’s Literature 17:1 ( June 1993), p. 37.
2. Stephen Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 75.
3. Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books (New York: Macmillan,
1904), p. 82.
4. Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New
England Primer to the Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2003), p. 18.
5. Donald Hall (ed.), Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 15. Poems in this collection will be cited as OB. On the
role of Christmas in poetry, see Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A
Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1997).
6. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 72.
7. Mary Dawson, The Mary Dawson Game Book (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1916),
p. 794.
8. Hannah Flagg Gould, Poems (Boston: Hilliard and Gray, 1836), vol. 2, p. 172.
9. Janet Gray, Race and Time: American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial
Modernity (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), p. 88.
10. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed.
Paula Bernat Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. xliv. Poems
in this collection will be cited as PB.

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 Ange la So r by

11. Elizabeth Philips, Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (State College:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 159.
12. Philips, Emily Dickinson, p. 159.
13. Paul Crumbley, Inlections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 98.
14. Maximillian DeVere, Americanisms (New York: Scribner, 1872), p. 448.
15. William Holmes McGufey (ed.), McGufey’s Eclectic Reader, 6 vols. (1879;
Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley and Sons, 1997), vol. 6, p. 83.
16. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-
Century America (1984; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002),
p. xiii.
17. Clara Doty Bates, From Heart’s Content (Chicago: Morrill, Higgins, 1892),
p. 88.
18. Peter Newell, Topsys and Turvys (New York: Century, 1893), n.p.
19. Peter Newell, “Illustrated Book and Pamphlet,” U.S. Patent 970, 943, September
20, 1910.
20. Peter Newell, The Slant Book (New York: Harper Brothers, 1910), n.p.
21. Gellet Burgess, Goops and How to Be Them (New York: Stokes, 1900), n.p.
22. Laura Richards, In My Nursery (New York: Little, Brown, 1892), p. 88.
23. John Greenleaf Whittier, Child-Life: A Collection of Poems (Boston: Houghton
Mil in, 1871), pp. 51–52.
24. James Whitcomb Riley, Child-Rhymes (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1905), p.
23. Poems in this collection will be cited as CR.
25. Kate Capshaw Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 123.
26. Mark C. Carnes (ed.), Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but
Missed the History Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 67.
27. William Wells Newell, Games and Songs of American Children (New York:
Harper Brothers, 1884), p. 1. Poems in this collection will be cited as GS.
28. Thomas Washington Talley, Negro Folk-Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise (New York:
Macmillan, 1922), p. 168.
29. Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (New York: Harper Collins,
1947), n.p.

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 Chapter 20
Dialect, Doggerel, and Local Color: Comic
Traditions and the Rise of Realism in
Popular Poetry
D av id E . E . S loa n e

American poetry served a host of diverse functions throughout the nineteenth

century. Poetry could provide a way of coping with grief and loss and personal
pain, or a means of appreciating the glories of the natural world, or a mode
for political expression. For some it was a way of expressing the noblest emo-
tions and attaining a higher truth about the transcendent place of humanity
in God’s universe. Often, poetry was regarded as the highest of the literary
arts, a form to be composed by the educated and reined for the educated and
reined. But there was also another strain of popular American poetry that
performed cultural work of a very diferent kind. Much of the most interest-
ing comic poetry relied on dialect and doggerel to delate the pretensions of
those who failed to value the egalitarian nature of democratic life. These poets
wrote in opposition to those who thought that meaning lay in philosophi-
cal abstractions instead of the physical details of the real world. America’s
comic tradition in poetry was fundamentally skeptical of abstractions, suspi-
cious of all pretense, open to linguistic experimentation, and inclined to both
irreverence and nostalgia in its treatment of everyday life. The subject mat-
ter of these poems was “low,” and their style frequently forced or awkward.
Sentiment predominated over the sublime, but the insistence on the value
of lesh-and-blood individuals and the social circumstances of the American
democratic experience made the writing of comic poets popular for genera-
tions. This poetry rarely won acclaim from critics or genteel academics, but it
earned a substantial place in the newspapers and popular publications of the
time and did much to both express and shape the American literary imagina-
tion, particularly in its embrace of forms of realism.
American popular poetry often fuses local color with dialect and doggerel.
It is marked by several distinguishing characteristics. The authors address a
popular audience, focusing their work on unique characters, local scenes,

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speciic events, and social issues, sometimes with an emphasis on social or

political satire. Their poetry sought to be consciously “American” in voice,
setting, and style, featuring “American” stories, often of the frontier but also
from villages; or regions of the North American continent, including Canada
and Alaska; or the new urban frontiers populated by immigrant speakers,
slums, and the marketplace. They often see their function as partly historical:
to capture and represent the egalitarian experience, whether present or past.
The egalitarian mood causes them to emphasize individual actions portraying
human connectedness, many times leading to openly sentimental portrayals.
Alternatively, they burlesque, caricature, or humble the inancially well-to-do,
parvenus, politicians, and capitalists, who often appear innately opposed to
common human sympathy. Finally, they write downward to the mud in the
streets rather than upward to some higher transcendent reality in the clouds,
and they are more likely to deal with the local poor and working classes than
with some abstract symbol that unites the soul with nature. In short, popular
poetry often exempliies the qualities associated with literary realism.
The new popular tradition was born in the common regions of American
life, both agrarian and urban, using language and images that were simple,
earthy, local, and comic. It was democratic in nature and skeptical of formal
art, manners, or beliefs. It was openly vulgar, vernacular, or plainspoken, as
the subject dictated to the individual author. Its practitioners came from every
corner of life, from those employed in the ields of mining, engineering, and
newspaper writing to prison convicts, ploughmen, and cart drivers. An unti-
tled eight-line doggerel verse from George Helmbold’s Philadelphia Tickler in
1811 displays some of these characteristics:
I am a merchant bold,
On South Wharves is my store,
Hard times like these for honest folks,
None can too much deplore.
With Tongue as smooth as oil,
Each day untruths I tell,
Look sharp for fools to take them in,
Charge twice for mackerell.1
The merchant’s gleeful avarice is happily hypocritical. The language is plain.
The verse scheme is efective and appropriate in its rhyme and brevity, and the
end word – a smelly “mackerell” ish – lowers and degrades the mood.
The symbolic mackerel reappears as the heroine’s married name in Mrs.
M. V. Victor’s social caricature, “The Stilts of Gold,” in the January 1867 Beadle’s
Monthly.2 The heroine, sitting in the back of her husband’s grocery, with the

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smell of ish and other goods, learns from her near-hysterical husband that
they have become rich by inheritance: “A million pounds of solid gold / One
would have thought would have crushed them dead; / But, dear, they bobbed,
and courtesied, [sic] and rolled / Like a couple of corks to a plummet of lead. /
’Twas enough the soberest fancy to tickle / To see the two mackerels in such
a pickle!” Mrs. Mackeral, like the character speaking Helmbold’s doggerel,
is the perfect symbol for parvenu greed and ostentation, and she soon stands
higher in society by acquiring, as her most outlandish trapping of wealth, a
pair of golden stilts to further elevate her social position. Throwing a grand
ball for herself, Mrs. Mackeral suddenly begins pirouetting out of control as
her stilts take on supernatural characteristics. Finally, as she whirls above the
crowd, her stilts take on a bluish light and carry her, like a witch on a broom,
out of the hall to an unknown destination. Her fellow parvenus are left to
the realization that they must better use “their dollars and sense” to chasten
their social pretension. Lawless in its comic action, the doggerel verse shows
hostility toward those who detach themselves from the working classes. The
poem revels in its subject’s degradation by ostentation. The popular poets
who wrote dialect, doggerel, and local color comic verse are well represented
by this rejection of tawdry show.
A rich potential for comic poetry, whether doggerel, dialect, or local color,
had early on been identiied in new American artifacts, which readily lent
themselves to genre pictures. Joel Barlow’s “The Hasty-Pudding” (1793) builds
on the details of cooking and eating cornmeal mush to create a comic genre
painting of the most egalitarian of Yankee foods, elevated by his skilled mock-
heroic rhetoric into a Yankee icon. American words are notable at crucial
comic moments. American language from the new continent’s word-stock
included “squaw,” “Indian corn,” “mush,” “succotash,” “maize,” “raccoon,”
and “skunk,” among others. Barlow’s mock-heroic comedy derives from play-
ing Romantic terms against these more common terms of factual, local real-
ity. Barlow rhapsodizes over an Indian maid, some “tawny Ceres,” but she
is also comically degraded to a “squaw” who “cracks the maize.”3 Barlow
even turns the satire on himself; he is pleased when milk cools the mush,
for it “saves the pains of blowing while I eat,” a provocative statement for a
poet. Other acclaimed American poets also participated in this movement
with more serious poetry. John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound (1866) dem-
onstrates how homespun elements could depict in simple language an imagi-
nary world contained within the glow of ireside family experience. The poem
enfolds both success – the bells of the oxen and plows – and failure – in the
life of the maiden aunt and in Whittier’s painful closing nostalgia over the

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loss of all of the beloved actors but the inal two. Its language is plain, but
a wide gap of time is evoked. Descriptions are rooted in the pictorial, as in
the ireside scene, the boy’s impressions as his father reads, and the snow
plowing. The world is densely populated by sympathetic igures, farmers and
schoolteachers from farm and village experience, not kings. The aunt and the
schoolmaster are vignettes of New England igures in photographic detail,
captured in retrospective objectivity. Few poems in American literature can
match Whittier’s simple portraiture and sense of place and pride. As a repre-
sentative of American historical vision, Snow-Bound was taught in American
school editions for a hundred years after its composition, testimony to the
force of its tradition. Throughout the continental United States and Canada,
a vast number of popular writers attempted to capture and interpret, as did
Whittier, the precious moments of common experience, and the credos and
beliefs at their foundation. Their works appeared in newspapers, periodicals,
and homegrown volumes of poetry whose publication was urged by friends.
The Fireside Poets were notable for, and are now somewhat undervalued for,
their ability to give poetic meaning to the apparently ordinary details of daily
life by fusing wit, irony, and metrical skill with a simple everyday language that
conveyed the distinctive quality of speciic American scenes. In Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s “The Deacon’s Wonderful One-Horse Shay,” the sudden dissolution
of a wagon provides a satirical picture of the failings of Puritan theology. The
local, the intellectual, and the ironic assume new dimensions in the verses of
dialect humor produced by James Russell Lowell, especially the political satire
of The Biglow Papers. Lowell’s “The Courtin’,” in which “Zekel crep’ up, quite
unbeknown, / An’ peeked in thru the winder,” soon capturing the kiss that
led to the marriage bans being read next Sunday, gently burlesques the social
habits of subliterary Yankees in a way that was humorously sympathetic even
while deining its author’s patrician distance. In their experimentations with
the vernacular, the comic, and the portrayal of everyday life, the Fireside Poets
created a highly respectable and imitable model for American popular poetry.
The dialect, doggerel, and local verse writers sometimes openly declared
that they did not write poetry at all. They intended a far more comprehensive
cultural statement that contradicted the sublime ideals and eloquent style of
the “poets” whom they felt were “above” them in terms of literary pretension.
Foreword after foreword in their published volumes declare that they present
these “verses” humbly with only the claim of the approbation of authorial
friends or local readers. “Poetry” to them is a stilted thing of artiicial language
and bloodless abstractions. John Byers Wilson, in his preface to Reminiscent
Rhymes and Other Verse, writes that his “untrained ingers” had swept the lyre

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to produce notes that were inspiring, no matter how “inharmonious.” His

poems were gathered from a life of labor, often hard and barren – not intended
to conceal thought in artistic mysticism but rather to ofer simplicity and true
poetry from the heart of the common man, whom Byers claims, is indepen-
dent and iconoclastic.4 Ellen P. Allerton, the very popular midwestern author
of Walls of Corn and Other Poems (1894), ofers “My Ambition”: “– it is not / To
mount on eagle wings and soar away/ . . . Scorning the griefs and joys of every
day; / I would be human – toiling like the rest / With tender human heartbeats
in my breast.”5 She was largely successful in writing placid verses expressing
the God-given beauty of the plains states, and her signature poem “Walls of
Corn” concludes that industry has made the desert fertile and brought wealth
to rich and poor alike through the rippling breezes brushing the “walls of
corn.” The tercet that concludes her twenty-two couplets notes that the wise
men would have laughed in scorn at prophets who foresaw this vaguely patri-
otic richness in the rippling “banners” of corn.6 Will Carleton, in the opening
preface to his six-volume chronicle of American farm and urban experience
stretching from 1870 to 1900, apologizes for his “crude and uninished” poems,
noting that “he has often wandered . . . from the established rules of rhythm,
. . . but he believes The People are, after all, the true critics.”7 The people
approved, and Will Carleton’s rural Michigan verses became some of the most
popular of the post–Civil War era. The “Peasant Bard” ( Josiah D. Canning)
prefaces The Harp and Plow with the humble statement, “Content will he be
should his readers discover a vein of homely but honest COMMON SENSE.”
God and “PATRIOTISM” cause him to write, even though the roughness of
his farm life does not admit, nor incline, him to aspire to be “the exquisite
poet,” or to reach for “the unintelligible profoundness of the laureate bard.”8
The literary comedian Doesticks (Mortimer Thomson), according to his verse
preface, found his epic satire Pluri-bus-tah (1856) in a coat pocket of his “uncle,”
slang for a pawnbroker. Its low origin leads to even lower doggerel, satirizing a
national hypocrisy driving the country toward disaster. Each of these authors
knew that conventional poetry lay in the realm of the ideal, sublime, and tran-
scendent, but the “humbler poets”9 were democratic revolutionaries, empow-
ered by identiication with the American egalitarian vision. Walt Whitman
understood his “barbaric yawp” similarly.
A drive to express America’s distinctive places, people, ideals, and, most of
all, achievements dominated much of this poetry. Many poems identiied the
importance of steam, machines, and electricity as uniquely expressive of indus-
trial America and democratic strength. Heroic stagecoach drivers brought
their wagons through Indians, robbers, and storms. Breakdowns in marital

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relations and family life came out in the numerous ballads and drunken irst-
person narratives of tramps and derelicts. Instead of subtle wit, these poems
ofered slapstick burlesque or depicted scenes of barroom vulgarity; for their
subjects, they looked not to the lost Lenore but rather to the starving prosti-
tute and the frontier wife. Drunks, crooked politicians, burlesque abstractions
of gods and inancial manipulators, inventors, technical entrepreneurs, steam-
boat pilots, slaves and freedmen, and wily Chinamen populated their works.
Dialect was a dominant medium. Their milieu ranged from mountains and
seashore to small towns and agrarian life, and even into the technical and the
urban. If sentimentalism overreaches what later readers ind comfortable, it
was to them an acceptable mood, and perhaps even a preferred mood, for it
relected a wide social sympathy in opposition to the greedy landowners, the
political manipulators, and the socially mobile, elites from which they were
barred. Formal dignity represented not just pomposity but also hypocrisy,
greed, insincerity, and, sometimes, outright egocentric viciousness and disre-
gard for the common claims of humanity. The inhabitants of popular poetry
did not sufer from moral pretension: Their language was coarse; their profes-
sions were dirty and low; their hands were covered with dust and sweat; and
their hearts and eyes were unashamed to cry real tears of sympathy.
Their poetry, however, often made real and uncomfortable demands on
middle- and upper-class readers. Not all readers welcomed the scribblers of
Pike County as their moral arbiters. Many of the localist writings burlesqued
social customs that were widespread, although fair game for literary comedi-
ans like William Allan Butler in “Nothing to Wear” (1857), a satire on wom-
en’s frivolity over fashion. However, Butler’s satire bred other satires on itself,
such as one by “Doesticks” (Mortimer Thomson), “Nothing to Say,” which
asserted that the fashionable would ind plenty to do if they nursed the sufer-
ing victims of the Yellow Fever epidemic in Charleston, South Carolina. The
message was an attack on upper-crust critics who already found their educa-
tional goals devalued, or so they thought, by the irrepressible slang and bad
grammar of the lower-caste personae inhabiting this poetic realm.
When the furious battle over dialect poetry broke out, it seemed to be over
language and its social implications as much as about patriotism or ownership
of the American ethical vision. The great argument of 1871 was a supericial
controversy over the primacy of Bret Harte’s “Heathen Chinee” or John Hay’s
“Jim Bludso of the Prairie Bell” as the “irst inventions” of Pike County dialect
poetry. The two authors together, in only a handful of poems, brought the
American dialect poem into the center of literary life. Both Hay’s and Harte’s
poems featured dialect speech as their mode of discourse. Both maintained

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a pious skepticism, but both also took their subjects on their own terms, and
the Pike dialect they employed was symbolic language to assert that fact. The
characters were models of a very special kind. Jim Bludso of the steamboat
Prairie Belle “were n’t no saint, – them engineers / Is all pretty much alike, – /
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill / And another one here in Pike.” The
Natchez area referred to was notorious for its brothels and gambling. Jim
is a “low” character; he is careless in his talk, handy in a ight, “But he never
l unked, and he never lied.” “And if ever the Prairie Belle took ire, – A thou-
sand times he swore, / He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank / Till the last soul
got ashore.” When the ship does burst into lame, Jim Bludso turns her toward
the bank and yells out through the cursing and running that he will hold her
nozzle against the bank “Till the last galoot’s ashore.” When the smokestacks
fall, after Jim, through sheer dedication to his role, has saved every passenger,
his “ghost went up alone / In the smoke of the Prairie Belle”:
He warn’t no saint, – but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That would n’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, –
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.10
Hay is deft at foreshadowing. The word “soul” is transformed to “galoot” to
involve the spiritual and the vulgar in Jim’s signature phrase. The closing octet
expands on the theme of the rough man with a human heart devoted to oth-
ers. Hay’s verse boldly airms working men who serve as clear alternatives
to the reined members of higher classes. Hay’s religion is subversive to the
standard culture, including the readers who represent the very group Hay is
targeting. The last line of the octet – the climax of Hay’s message – is the only
line completely without a trace of dialect, assuring its impact.
In “Banty Tim,” Sgt. Tilman Joy confronts the white bigots of Spunky
Point, Illinois, who want a Black veteran known as Banty Tim run out of
town. Sgt. Joy counters with historical fact, noting that Tim had rescued him
from the frightful rebel crossire at Vicksburg: “That nigger . . . was crawlin’
to me / through that ire-proof, gilt-edged hell.” Tilman Joy tells them they
may “rezoloot” all they want at their meeting, but if one of them touches the
boy, “He’ll wrastle his hash to-night in hell.” The use of the racist language is
purposeful throughout, emphasizing that behavior, not color or status, deter-
mines rights. The mob’s principles, such as they are, crumble in the face of

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heroism, no matter how low the hero’s status. Hay’s poem is one of many
such democratic verses in this tradition that masquerades as a merely colorful
incident. Mark Twain’s portrayal of Huck Finn coming to grips with Jim as a
human being follows this theme to its logical conclusion.
Bret Harte’s poems show local characters engaged in trivial cheating, card
playing, or aping their betters. His treatment of “Truthful James” and the
“Heathen Chinee” is slightly more satirical than Hay’s style. The narrator, like
others in the poem, is a poser, opportunist, and hypocrite, but his stories are
engaging. Comic types and stereotypes abound, speaking in their Western
argot, free from cultural censorship. The efect, as in Hay’s verse, is realistic
comedy with an outcome that rewards readers with a new idea of what “suc-
cess” includes. If the Chinaman is a cheater at cards, the only way he is discov-
ered is by the other Anglo-Saxon players holding copies of the same cards to
cheat him. Racial prejudices are satirized, itted to San Francisco rather than
Pike County. Harte ofered a wider range of poems than Hay in this medium,
but the “In Dialect” section of his collection Poems in 1871 still amounted to
a mere forty pages, including some tall tales, light irony, and narratives of
school scenes and spelling bees. He also composed more formal verses, a few
of which paint interesting portraits of the western regions and California, but
“Plain Language from Truthful James” and “The Society Upon the Stanislaus,”
the most famous of his vernacular poems, helped revolutionize the poetry of
the time. Contained in their own milieu without any outside moral context
or lesson, cheaters are cheated, sharpers are comically dull, and would-be sci-
entists are defeated by their own ignorance and small-time competitiveness.
The battle between Harte’s paleontologists ofers a slapstick travesty of more
educated brawls held at the higher levels of American social, economic, and
academic life.11
The Harte-Hay controversy followed the actual initiation of dialect poetry
by Charles G. Leland of Philadelphia with Hans Breitmann’s Ballads. Leland
published his irst Hans Breitmann poem as a prose paragraph in 1857 to ill
space in a journal he was editing, but more poems began appearing in verse
during the Civil War, and James R. Lowell, among others, urged Leland to
publish them as a book as early as 1866.12 “Hans Breitmann’s Party” displays
the mix of vulgarity and sentimentalism that ixed the German immigrant
personality as a comic type:
Hans Breitmann gife a barty
We all cot troonk ash bigs.
I poot mine mout to a parrel of bier
Und emptied it oop mit a schwigs.

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Und denn I gissed Madilda Yane

Und she shlog me on de kop,
Und de gompany ited mit daple-lecks
Dill de coonshtable made oos shtop.
Hans Breitmann gife a barty –
Where ish dat barty now!
Where ish de lofely golden cloud
Dat loat on de moundain’s prow?
Where ish de himmelstrahlende Stern –
De shtar of de shpirit’s light?
All goned afay mit de Lager Beer –
Afay in de ewigkeit!13
The action is vulgar and unregulated by the standards of the Victorian American
parlor. Hans’s party is a drunken beer brawl with a slight suggestion of sex to
top it of. The language is uneducated dialect, but the sentiments are quite
educated, and the German dialect is sophisticated in the shades of meaning it
supplies, including the Romantic appeal to lost times past. Leland had called
for a literature to match our “steam-engine whirling realism” in a little book
titled Sunshine in Thought in 1862;14 Hans was his own bluf answer, hijacking
the nostalgic theme of Romantic loss in favor of a descent to drunken sexual
behavior. Leland was later recognized as one of the founders of modern soci-
ology with his studies of the Romany (Gypsy) people. More serious obser-
vation lies behind these supposedly comic studies than their titles and comic
illustrations suggested, further evidence of the underlying urge toward realist
portraiture.
Many critical writers expressed disgust at the dialect poem almost from its
“invention.” “P. R. S.” (Peter Remsen Strong) was one of the most detailed in
raging against the genre in “AWFUL,” and Other Jingles. Strong inadvertently
provides a comprehensive deinition of the genre in his diatribe against it in “A
Recipe for a Poem ‘in Dialect’ ”:
I.
Take, for your hero, some thorough-bred scamp,
Miner, or pilot, or jockey, or tramp –
Gambler (of course), drunkard, bully, and cheat,
“Facile princeps” in ways of deceit;
So fond of ladies, he’s given to bigamy,
(Better, perhaps, if you make it polygamy);
Pepper his talk with the raciest slang,
Culled from the haunts of his pestilent gang;
Season with blasphemy, lard him with curses,

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Serve him up hot in your “dialect” verses.

Properly dished, he’ll excite a sensation,
And tickle the taste of our delicate nation.
II.
Old Mother English has twaddled enough:
Give us a language that’s ready and rough!
Who cares, just now, for a subject Miltonian?
Who isn’t bored by a style Addisonian?
Popular heroes must wear shabby clothes!
What if their diction is cumbered with oaths?
That’s but a feature of life Occidental,
Really, at heart, they are pious and gentle.
Think, for example, how solemn and rich is
The sermon we gather from dear “Little Breeches”!
Isn’t it charming – that sweet baby-talk,
Of the urchin who “chawed” ere he fairly could walk?
Sure ’tis no wonder bright spirits above
Singled him out for their errand of love!
III.
I suppose I’m a “fogy” – not up to the age –
When a real inspiration (divinus alatus)
Could be printed without any saving hiatus;
When humor was decently shrouded in rhyme,
As suited the primitive ways of the time;
And we all would have blushed, had we dreamed of the rules,
Which are taught us to-day in our “Dialect” schools.
IV.
It may be all right, though I ind it all wrong,
This queer prostitution of talent in song;
Perhaps, in our market, gold sells at a loss,
And the public will pay better prices for dross –
Well! ’twere folly to row ’gainst a tide that has turned,
And the lesson that’s set us has got to be learned;
But I’ll make one more desperate pull to be free
Ere I swallow the brood of that “Heathen Chinee.”15
Sam W. Smith’s Gems from the Tailings, in “The Judge’s Poetic Venture,” took
the same ground as Strong in “AWFUL” but reversed the conclusion, making a
positive assertion for roughness and reality in poetry, even though he suggests
that Harte had lost his touch by the mid-1870s. Smith’s Judge goes to “the city”
one summer to write and sell poetry but becomes “blue” when hearing a lec-
turer pontiicate: “But a miner, could not be a poet; / Their thoughts ar’ too
low and grov’lling, / For truth of the point, he could show it, / In dirt they ar’

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always shov’lling.” But the Judge chanced to meet “Mr. Hart [sic]” and thought
he played cards (an allusion to his most widely read poem, “The Heathen
Chinee”), and the Judge called him “one o’ my pards.” Before he gives up on
poetry and the sublime to return to the mines, the Judge learns Hart’s secret:
“We dickered, I sold him my trash, / To most any terms would agree; / I asked
him: ‘Whar’d you get all that cash?’ / He whispered, a ‘Heathen Chinee.’ ”16
Harte was the center of the storm over dialect, in which a rather simple sur-
face argument about language and class sometimes reveals a deeper concern
with character and ethical behavior. The democratic foundation underlying
much popular verse is well established by the wide variety of references to the
fact that the roughhouse style and characters, despite their low status, were
moneymakers for the authors who employed them.
P. R. S. would have been even less pleased by stronger portraits yet to come.
Rustic Rhymes and Ballads by Mrs. E. T. Corbett ofers, among other varied
topics, “The Deacon’s Lament” and “The Village Sewing Society,” the lat-
ter illed with venomous small-town gossip in ignorant dialect. “What Biddy
Said in Police Court” appears in thick Irish brogue from Biddy’s mouth. The
cause: Tim came home drunk, broke up the furniture, and scared his daugh-
ters screaming into the halls, all in response to his wife asking him for the rent
money. Biddy is a battered woman, and for relief from domestic violence she
has had her husband arrested. An urban low-class igure, she exhibits her real-
ity without any authorial framing:
Yis, luk at me now, if ye can, Tim:
Luk in me face if you dare!
It’s bruised an’ it’s ugly – I know it –
But sorra a bit do ye care,
Ye dhrunken – I’m ready, yer Honor;
I’ll show ye’s the mark of Tim’s ist,
An’ the black an’ the blue bruise on me shoulder
Where he pushed me agin the ould chist.
When the judge ines Tim ten dollars, battered Biddy pays his fee with her
cash from “washin’ an’ clanin’.”17 We know her name only from Corbett’s title:
“What Biddy Said in the Police Court.” The battered wife syndrome raises its
ugly head in comic guise. This verse is close enough to prose realism to stand
with it. Other poems in urban slum dialect appeared in volumes by various
authors, in addition to the comic Irish dialect satirizing the reverse logic of this
paradoxical social tragedy.
Corbett’s “The Foreclosure of the Mortgage” lays out a widow’s convinc-
ing lament in New England dialect over her hard and thankless work, her

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ingrate children, and her husband Caleb’s death. Finally, in a reversal, Caleb’s
old friend, “the Deacon,” appears, buying up the mortgage so that she can stay
in her battered and poorly maintained farmhouse, which is better than being
thrown into the street.18 If the escape from poverty seems sentimentalized,
however, the recognition and acceptance of poverty is not. The irst-person
conversation ofers appropriate language and regional diction as it goes on to
critique urban wealth and absentee capitalist ownership. Corbett’s “Old Abel’s
Experience” narrates how Abel’s tragic, pointless, and dreary life resulted
from a failing marriage, bad choices, and his wife’s death in childbirth.19 The
lengthy narrative lines, primarily iambic hexameter, are end-stopped, rhymed
couplets. No sense of lyric joy or freedom intrudes on the matter-of-factness
in Abel’s delivery of his narrative to a young man who ironically is about to
be wed. Corbett’s world is a stark one, despite its comic devices and sentiment,
providing a sharp contrast to what might be expected from the conventional
hackneyed image of the nineteenth-century female poet.
In spite of powerful work by authors like Corbett, female poets were
often burlesqued for mawkish sentiment and inept technical skills, perhaps
most notably in the ghastly ef usions of Emmaline Grangerford in Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Marietta Holley, writing satirically as “Josiah
Allen’s Wife” between 1870 and 1910, made her poetaster, Betsy Bobbett,
appropriately addlebrained. Although there is a clear foundation for these
satiric portrayals in the work of some sentimental poets, there is an alterna-
tive tradition that relies on sharp wit and pointed satire. For example, Sarah
M. B. Piatt’s sardonic reinterpretations of domesticity have sharp edges. Her
poetic images are twisted into the relections of a woman’s psychological pain.
“That New World,” the title poem of her 1877 collection, doubts the existence
of any heaven and skeptically asks for a whif of a heavenly lower or the echo
of a heavenly seashore to prove it, blunt atheism for that period.20 “If I Had
Made the World” allows that she would make Washington, Columbus, and
Shakespeare but concludes by saying she would not have made the world at
all if she had her way.21 It was another twenty-ive years before even such a
personage as Mark Twain dared put such nihilism in print. Poem after poem
twists mundane, sentimental topics to reject the premises of conventional
middle-class life. “The Sad Story of a Little Girl” suggests a psychological pro-
gression as arresting as Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in its treatment of
a girl distancing herself from her mother and the mother’s unhappiness and
sense of loss.22 “A Tragedy in Western Woods” is a Poesque poem located in
frontier experience but progressing psychologically.23 As a psychological real-
ist, Mrs. Piatt has few, if any, equals, but others of less power could be cited.

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For instance, Mrs. S. L. Oberholtzer’s Daisies of Verse (1886) explores poverty in

“The Coal-Pickers,” among other poems with social content in a volume with
a misleading title.24
First among all equals, male and female, however, is Will Carleton, now
ignored but arguably the most notable American poet in the early 1870s, with the
publication of “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,” which permanently embed-
ded the title phrase in the American imagination. Carleton (1845–1912) covered
the wide spectrum of American democratic aspirations and sympathies in local
settings and plain colloquial speech. The preface to the sixth volume of his
Farm and City series of books on agrarian and urban American life laid out his
philosophy explicitly. His motive was to make people better, and he vowed to
reach this end by writing in a spirit that was deep and sincere. His realist ori-
entation appears in his commitment to speech that is plain, direct, and simple
and has no more errors than uneducated people make naturally. His egalitarian
stance requires characters who must be accessible to general readers.25
The poems that launched his national reputation are “Betsy and I Are Out”
and “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,” which appeared in the popular Harper’s
Magazine in 1871 and 1872, respectively, and then in Carleton’s irst major vol-
ume, Farm Ballads.26 In each, a folksy dialect speaker is drawn from Michigan
farm or village experience. In “Betsy and I Are Out,” a garrulous old farmer
explains how he and his wife continuously ight over religious doctrine: “Draw
up the papers, lawyer, and make ’em good and stout; / For things at home are
crossways, and Betsy and I are out.” His quatrains, varying iambic and anapes-
tic feet in aa/bb rhymes, and his lengthy lines, allowing for a conversational
narrative, develop the scenes of farm life and household quarreling as the
farmer’s monologue. In “How Betsy and I Made Up,” the tone is sustained; the
colloquial language continues. He feels “blue” going home; his “hosses” pull
steadily as he reminisces over scenes of his past farm life. When Betsy realizes
that the divorce agreement gives her everything, she kisses her husband for the
irst time in twenty years. In another poem, a widow who is sent over the hill
to the poorhouse has a sharp tongue, which she vents on her snobbish son and
daughter-in-law until they put her on the town. In the sequel, her scapegrace
horse-thief son returns from somewhere out west to join with her happily in
a little cottage of their own. Readers adored his poems. Carleton’s biographer,
A. Elwood Corning, reports that William Dean Howells was impressed by
Carleton’s “homely realism,” but when he requested a poem, Howells found
the work he supplied too sentimental and artiicial to print.27
Carleton understood the changing American experience and thought early
on of combining his style and characters with the images and events of cities.

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In a number of poems spread over several volumes, “Farmer Stebbins” sup-

plies country-style skepticism as he comments on the pretensions and social,
economic, and practical frauds that he inds in the urban environment. “Arthur
Selwyn” is his invented educated spokesman – a young poet seeking his sub-
ject matter in the urban world. By this device Carleton allows harsh subjects
to be framed by the sensibility of his persona, as in the boxing poem, “The
‘Slugging’-Match”: “Hands gloved – to comply with the law; / Gloves hard –
to comply with the crowd; / Fists savage as murder could draw; / Cheers
heavy and fervent and loud.” Selwyn’s voice can ascend the scale of diction
and historical references while maintaining his character, and so Carleton
allows his pictorial impressionism to draw in Rome through a reference to the
Tiber and even discovers that the “glittering spoil” was more than a teacher or
preacher “could earn / In years of the hardest of toil.”28 Elsewhere in Selwyn’s
“Note-book” interludes, voices of the city, factories, and even walls and roads
call out, “What did we cost?” The answer is toil; labor; machines run by poor,
pale-faced children; and prostitution, all that labor for the sake of wages that
disappear – “Where do your earnings go?” The implied answer is to capitalist
exploiters representing all the forces that the local color and dialect writers
frequently battle with their genre painting and sentimental conventions of
human interaction.
Carleton wrote directly to plain folk, lower-class and middle-class readers,
and small-town locals. Farm Festivals (1881), the third book in his six-volume
cycle, ofers titles for local experience treated as populist festivals, including
the festival of melody (the singing school), the festival of industry (the county
fair), the festival of injustice (the lawsuit), and the festival of dis-reason (the
debate). Carleton’s strength lay in his ability to start with a local premise;
generalize it, as these titles suggest; and then return to local description and
language to present it as a genre painting of the American spirit. “The Festival
of Reminiscence; or, The Pioneer Meeting,” a poem written in four segments,
begins with “Song of the Axe,” which claims to “strike the key-note of the
national song . . . For I am the pioneer of pioneers.” “The First Settler’s Story,”
Carleton’s own favorite, begins, “It ain’t the funniest thing a man can do – /
Existing in a country when it’s new.”29 With an ill-considered rebuke, the pio-
neer husband says unkind words that lead to his innocent and grief-stricken
wife’s death. He becomes an isolated hermit in an unforgiving wilderness – a
far cry from earlier happy endings. “The Second Settler’s Story,” placed in the
winter of 1843, involves a sleigh ride home after dark with an attack by fam-
ished wolves. The drama of the chase and inal victory by the settler is sheer
action in iambic trimeter and tetrameter. The farmer kills the lead wolf with

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an axe and sees him devoured by his own pack, gaining the riders the few extra
seconds they need to reach their cabin, where the storyteller chases the ani-
mals of with laming brands snatched from his own hearth and clutched in his
blistered hands. The story has another story wrapped inside it, as the farmer
reveals that the wife he won from her favored suitor had treated him civilly but
not lovingly: “A woman half-won is worse than none, / . . . It’s nothin’ to gain
her body and brain, / If she can’t throw in her heart.”30 The farmer now wins
her heart and provides his listeners with an interpretation in plain language of
the personal involvement of local experience with history, noting that a man
will “go far to plant a star” but further to hear a woman say she loves him for
her own.31 The cycle Carleton created is close to an American epic, only dimin-
ished by its lack of Whitman’s bardic power and euphoric vision.
An epic impulse is at the foundation of much American writing, both seri-
ous and comic. Native Americans played an important role in the develop-
ment of poems with characteristically American themes. Indian maidens at
the falls, best if they were the Niagara Falls – an obvious natural symbol – and
Indian tribal history in the face of change ofered wide scope for romantic
imagery, nostalgia, and adventure plots in extended narrative poems. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha in 1855 was based on Henry Schoolcraft’s
serious research into the sociology of American Indians, and his choice
of the metric scheme of the Finnish Kalevala provided a bardic style that
gripped both American readers and American satirists. In a diferent vein,
Pope’s exclamation, “Lo, the poor Indian,” from “Essay on Man,” was easy
fodder for the sarcastic Bohemian wits of Pfaf ’s Cellar in New York, who
sometimes converted him into a wretched drunken victim, renamed “Lo,” a
degraded caricature of the noble stature of Romantic beliefs. Other authors
took the opposite side and satirized his vicious treatment at the hands of
greedy Christian whites who covet his land and deny him civil rights, as
Peter Peppercorn (Emanuel Price) satirized the case in 1884 in “Mr. Lo!”: “As
Congress does not seem to know / How to dispose of Mr. Lo, / It may, if he
don’t choose to go – / Kill him of !”32 As for Longfellow’s serious epic, it was
immediately the center of a irestorm of doggerel burlesques from all cor-
ners of the country, including political satire, social burlesque, commentar-
ies on local events, and sheer nonsense; abroad, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
even took a crack at him. Longfellow’s Indian epic also inspired one of the
two greatest of the American doggerel epics, Pluri-bus-tah (1856), a sarcastic
burlesque of American “progress” up to the events leading to the Civil War,
by Mortimer Thomson, better known as Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B. The
other signiicant doggerel epic, The New Yankee Doodle (1868), by E. Jane Gay,

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writing under the male pseudonym “Truman Trumbull, A. M.,” describes the
horrors of the Civil War.
Pluri-bus-tah is an eight-hundred-line doggerel verse narrative of the his-
tory of America from the arrival of the irst Puritan settlers to the apocalyptic
destruction of white America in the battle over “Cufee,” the condescending
name for the character representing American slavery in Thomson’s allegory.
Pluri-bus-tah, the central igure, is depicted as an ugly Puritan entrepreneur,
cavorting with Mistress Liberty to rape the new continent. Every aspect of the
mock-heroic epic shows degradation. Doesticks even claims to have found the
manuscript history in the pocket of a coat left by a starving writer in the care
of his “uncle,” slang for pawnbroker. The poet then invokes the cast of charac-
ters by vulgarizing juxtapositions: “Ye, who want to see policemen, / Roman
heroes, modern Bloomers, / Heathen gods of every gender, / News-boys,
generals, apple-peddlers, / Modern ghosts of ancient worthies, / Editors, and
Congress members / With their bowie knives and horsewhips, / Saints and
scoundrels, Jews and Gentiles.”33
The story is that Jupiter, sitting on a slop-pail smoking, cross-legged, like
Mrs. Bloomer at the women’s rights convention, snuggles with the Yankee
goddess America and sends Pluri-bus-tah to her for a mate. Pluri-bus-tah
promptly ambushes the Indians, who drink his whiskey, roast his women, and
kill and scalp his children, but he reshapes their land to his Yankee notions:
“On the mountain streams built sawmills, / Then he dragged the lofty pine-
trees, . . . / Dragged them to his cruel sawmills, / Sawed their heads of, sawed
their hearts out. / Sawed them into slabs and scantling, / To make wigwams
for his people.” After dispatching “Johnny Taurus,” he admires his iron steam-
ers, monster post roads, matchless clippers, northern cornields, and southern
rice ields.34 His greatest love, however, is not for his free-love wife and part-
ner Liberty but for the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR, so he combines her face with
his idol:

Potent and ALMIGHTY DOLLAR,

Dirty, ilthy, greasy DOLLAR!
And he would have loved as truly,
Hugged as closely, kissed as fondly,
Had the female image on it
Been a dog or been a jackass.35

His son Younga-Merrikah unfortunately decides to enslave Black “Cufee.”

Why? Because “I am white and I am stronger.” At this, the allegorical Miss
Liberty and her sister Thrift depart in a huf. An apocalyptic war breaks out as

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Liberty, swindled and betrayed by the Yengah nation, marches out for good,
wringing the neck of her eagle as she goes. Younga-Merrikah is inally crushed
under a gigantic replica of his father’s idol, the Yankee dollar, and Cufee
lies down in the ashes and sings his death song, accompanied by the tune of
“Yankee Doodle” on the banjo. Doesticks writes imagistically and in the law-
less argot and Bohemian images of the New York Bowery. His irony is raucous,
and his mock-heroic allegorization of events is outrageously clever. Predicting
the Civil War ive years before its outbreak, Doesticks identiies the causes and
the outcome without seeming ponderous or bardic. As American doggerel
poetry, the work is a classic that shows the characteristics of American self-
critical skepticism at its best.
E. Jane Gay’s The New Yankee Doodle36 is a 341-page history of the American
Civil War in “Yankee Doodle” verse. Gay had been a Yankee schoolmarm in the
South before leaving hurriedly for Washington, D.C., in 1856. During the war
she nursed the wounded and became the secretary-amanuensis for Dorothea
Dix. As a governess to the children of major Washington igures, Gay held an
insider’s perspective on the events she laid out in fascinating detail, recount-
ing the emotional agony of Northerners, but in reportorial language, which
makes her angry irony even more compelling. Old Abe and Yankee farmers
are plainspoken igures drawn in the comic mode, and the Southern politi-
cians play their foils. Necessarily, the poem’s details include battle-maimed sol-
diers at the most catastrophic battle scenes; the l ight of slaves from the South,
and Northern generals turning them back; Andersonville; political conniving
by rebels and patriots alike; and the multitude of bloody battles on land and
sea – all in the staccato “Yankee Doodle” verse, with its brief lines and hurried
metric. Unfortunately, the texture of her poem does not lend itself to the cita-
tion of extracts, and it is diicult to capture the intense vitality, satiric energy,
and appropriateness of her chosen voice for the events she records. Francis
Hopkinson used the “Yankee Doodle” tune in “The Battle of the Kegs” (1778)
and Ebenezer Cooke caught the sarcastic spirit in “The Sot-Weed Factor”
(1708), but Gay’s sustained fusion of irony, historical events, representative
local and historical igures, satire, and parody is unique in our literary history.
Her accomplishments as a comic poet merit more attention.
Writers of the second rank also achieved a great deal in capturing the
American experience, although none rise to the level of the two epics just
discussed. In “The Emigrant’s Story,” James T. Trowbridge provides a well-
executed narrative about a farmer’s survival of a natural catastrophe; the work
has elements of sympathy and humor. His “The Vagabonds” is a sentimental
poem about the lost love of a drunken iddle player, mostly told in irst-person

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voice; it was often published as a stand-alone gift volume. Trowbridge’s char-

acters use dialect cleverly, and the poem’s counterpart, “Old Simon Dole,” is
a similarly realistic narrative of the unsatisfying marriages of a brother and a
sister who like each other better than their spouses. It is worthy of Edward
Arlington Robinson’s Tilbury Town residents, but without their desperation.
Trowbridge’s burlesque of Yankee ingenuity and invention, “Darius Green
and His Flying-Machine,” remained a comic recitation classic for a century
after its composition.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Sam Walter Foss, a librarian liv-
ing in Somerville, Massachusetts, brought out several series of poems of vil-
lage life and vernacular experience. The two poems most often cited are “The
Calf Path” – a poem about following trails of thought that might have trig-
gered Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – and “The House by the Side of
the Road,” where the poem’s speaker would be a friend to man. Neither poem
is particularly representative of his creation of local characters and situations.
His volumes, Whifs from Wild Meadows, Dreams in Homespun, and Back Country
Poems, include varied local characters and scenes, usually with a moral, as
exempliied by the speaker in “Chet Golder and His Whale.”37 Chet is backed
into realizing his own tall ish tale is a hoax. He sadly concludes, “This unbe-
livin’ age, yer see, / So loves to poke an’ pry, / ’Twon’t let a poor ol’ man like
me / Believe in his own lie.” The poem is comic dialect; the outcome is more
world-aware realism. Foss’s work as a representation of popular experience
and American egalitarian ambition has been undervalued, but together with
Trowbridge, he did as much to document New England experience as Carleton
did for the Midwest. Sidney Lanier’s economic poems, such as “Thar’s More in
the Man than Thar Is in the Land” and “Jones’s Private Argyment,” gave the
southern farmer acknowledgment for practical intelligence, or its lack, but his
“Farmer Jones” poems “Corn” and “The Symphony” are too few in number
to depict the South as well.
African American poetry provides another pool of materials, authors,
and viewpoints with a variety of critical complications. The origins of the
“Minstrel Show” supposedly date from the appearance of various forms of
“Etheopean” singers in the 1830s, often in “black-face,” although the tradition
of “blacking up” appeared on the London stage well before 1800; but the lit-
erary dialect poetry and the Minstrel Show are not identical. Slave songs and
African-derived materials were noticed early, not as literature but as a more
direct product of experience. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy
and the American Working Class provides authoritative coverage of the subject
as a complex American social phenomenon. Some later Black dialect verse

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was created by white writers, who also produced dialect verse in German,
Italian, Hebrew, Chinese, and any other language that was easily adapted to
comic stereotyping. Post–Civil War Black verse often aimed to capture the
sentimentalism of the “Lost Cause” by picturing innocent and happy slaves
“befo’ de Waw,” or by providing condescendingly cute doggerel on “pickanin-
nies.” Such genre portraits appear in the poems of A. C. Gordon and Thomas
Nelson Page’s Befo’ de War (1888), Ruth McEnery Stuart’s Daddy Do-Funny’s
Wisdom Jingles (1913), and Mary Fairbanks Childs’s De Namin’ ob de Twins (1908),
and into the 1920s in Benjamin Batchelder Valentine’s Ole Marster and Other
Verses (1921) and well beyond. Unhappily, readers’ predilection for the folksy
racism of the Negro stereotype made it diicult for African American writers
to gain serious attention for any other form of work through the 1950s.
Distinguishing artiicial poetry from “real” expressions of dialectal local
poetry is no simpler in African American experience than elsewhere. One
certainty is that astute critics often found Black dialect song to be uniquely
American. For instance, “A Talk about Popular Songs” from Putnam’s Monthly
Magazine expresses the mixed qualities of a national poetry derived from a
working man’s democracy: “We are a timber-tuned people. We are not given
to trilling and quavering. The pioneer in the forest wont sing the song made
for him by a young lady; he speculates with his axe, on the constitution for
the territory and the new governor. . . . It is the same all round.”38 Dismissing
Whittier and the “White lyrists of the North,” the Putnam critic turned to “a
poetry, really indigenous, and, in a certain degree, racy of the soil,” derived
from the “poor serfs” of the African race. Passing the racks of printed bal-
lads for sale weekly on Broadway by St. Paul’s Churchyard, the writer took
home three hundred and found “about one third of them were negro melo-
dies, either in their lingo, or on ‘darkey’ subjects . . . another third were in the
American style,” with a remainder composed of thirty British works, forty
Irish works, and half a dozen works that put moral or religious themes to pro-
fane tunes.39 The subject of African American dialect remains controversial,
because it is enmeshed in all the complications of racial portrayal that mark
much of American writing, but it is important to remember that some major
writers, perhaps most notably Langston Hughes, used dialect with great efect
in both poetry and prose as a realistic tool for projecting the experience of
African American life.
The dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the most notable of a num-
ber of Black dialect writers in the 1870–1920 period, was once severely crit-
icized for its apparently nostalgic portrayal of happy darkies on the planta-
tion. Recent critics, however, have emphasized both the vitality of African

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American experience that is represented in many of the plantation poems

and the clear political and social messages of other powerful poems. Perhaps
the most intriguing of these dialect poems is “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” in
which a minister’s references to the Old Testament repeatedly raise the issues
of freedom and slavery. The poem ironically interprets history in terms of the
egalitarian message associated with other dialect writers:
So you see de Lawd’s intention,
Evah sence de worl’ began,
Was dat his almighty freedom
Should belong to evah man,
But I think it would be battah,
Ef I’d pause agin to say,
Dat I’m talkin’ ‘bout ouah freedom
In a Bibleistic way.
The irony of the poem is posed elsewhere in plain, nondialectal verse in “We
Wear the Mask,” in which the emotional pain of the African American’s per-
sonal invisibility is expressed in lyric form. As elsewhere in the dialect and local
color tradition, Dunbar’s work can serve the uses of history, social observation,
nostalgia, and protest – the oices of American literary realism, generally.
The South is also represented by one of the best of the local, dialect, and genre
poets, Frank L. Stanton, the Georgian author of Songs of the Soil (1894), whose
work relects his newspaper background. Most signiicant in Stanton’s work is
his successful solution, lying somewhere between dialect and poetic diction, of a
means to elevate localist themes and enhance their seriousness. Diction and inver-
sion that make other poets seem stilted and artiicial are controlled in Stanton’s
relatively short lines and plain words. As with many dialect poets, his “Mighty
Lak a Rose,” advocating its readers to “Keep A-Goin!” despite life’s thorns, was
a hit when put to music. It typiies his optimism, but it is otherwise unrepresen-
tative of his better dialect poems, which ofer efective depictions of southern
Black people and white farmers, even when sentimentalized. “Lynched” is a brief
example of the powerful images Stanton at his best could capture:
The tramp of horse adown a sullen glen;
Dark forms of stern, unmerciful masked men:
A clash of arms, a cloven prison door,
And a man’s cry for mercy! . . . Then high o’er
The barren ields, dim outlined in the storm,
The swaying of a lifeless human form.
And close beside, in horror and afright,
A widowed woman wailing to the night.40

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The power of the subject matter, the stark couplets, and the prevailing mood
of color and image subsume the one or two less natural word choices that
maintain the metric scheme and imagery. In other poems, Stanton combines
this skill with a mastery of comic narrative, producing efective genre paint-
ings in verse. “The Feast at Waycross” describes in dialect a successful camp
meeting in a Georgia town.41 The caricature of the inept inventor-farmer in
“Jones’s Cotton Planter” focuses on the mechanical components, bellows, and
mechanical devices in relation to Jones’s frustrated wife and starving children;
the dialect enhances the scene’s comic realism.42 The portrait of the individual,
both in himself and as a type, is the fusion of voice and vision that many local
color writers sought as the alternative to elevated poetry. Another lynching
poem, “At Devil’s Lake,” in Comes One with a Song (1899), holds a similar power;
the mists at the site of the lynching are “crawling o’er the pines,” loading the
fog image with the sinister word.43 A few of the poems in Comes One with a
Song are in the voice of Negro children “before the war,” but Stanton created
mostly plainspoken genre scenes of personal experience, varied with nature
lyrics, or poems in what was then called (without malice) “cracker” dialect.
The middle of the continent ofers its own style, often from popular poets
of their time who are remembered more for their children’s poems or pop-
ular lyrics than their serious writing. Eugene Field, author of Hoosier Lyrics,
is commonly cited for his children’s poetry, but like other versiiers from the
newspaper world, he was often devoted to political events and urban experi-
ence. His poem “Hoosier Lyrics Paraphrased” goes directly to the political:
“We’ve come from Indiany, ive hundred miles or more, / Supposin’ we was
goin’ to get the nominashin, shore; / For Col. New assured us (in that noospa-
per o’ his) / That we could hev the airth, if we’d only tend to biz.”44 The vul-
gar voice and egocentric ideology from “Indiany” show low-life gullibility not
childish purity. “The Color That Suits Me Best” openly rejects “acres and acres
of Art” in Italy, Germany, and France: “Marines I hate, madonnas and / Those
Dutch freaks I detest! / But the peerless daubs of my native land – / They’re
red, and I like them best!” To cover the ground of “culture,” he continues, “we
can’t abide / The tastes that obtain down east,” either, in favor of the “criti-
cal west.”45 Field rejects formal culture, burlesques the political, and depicts a
deeper layer of midwestern life than children’s poems would suggest.
When Hamlin Garland interviewed Eugene Field for McClure’s Magazine in
1893, Garland praised the “boy life” poems, which he placed in the realm of
“Veritism,” his own homegrown form of realism. Field evaded the label. As
with other writers in this tradition, he insisted that he did not write poetry, but
rather “verses,” and he skirted Garland’s appreciation of his reminiscences of

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boy life to contend that satire was where he had done his best work, “illustrat-
ing the foolery of these society folks.” Although his stories were invented, he
said latly, “I like the probable. I like the near at hand.”46 A Little Book of Western
Verse included plenty of sentimental poems of home and hearth. However,
the sprinkling of Colorado dialect verse is based in the mining country of
“Red Hoss Mountain,” featuring a modiied cowboy Pike dialect. The values
are “Western,” describing the country of “Casey’s Table D’Hote” as a place
and time “When the money lowed like likker, ’nd the folks was brave ’nd
true!”47 Another poem, “Prof. Vere De Blaw,” takes up a Western event – the
coming of a “steenway gran’ piannyfort” to a mining camp – that was a pop-
ular frontier theme, playing working-class people against high culture. The
coming of pianos was a major Western theme, relecting, perhaps, the West’s
yearning for cultural acceptance reinvented in local color caricature. About
the same time, William DeVere, “Tramp Poet of the West,” titled his 1897
volume Jim Marshall’s New Pianner and Other Western Stories and played up the
clash between high and low culture similarly.48 In Field’s poem, the Eastern
tenderfoot musician plays the songs of “Home, Sweet Home” to excite the
appropriate responses in the rough miners: “The homestead in the States ’nd
all its memories seemed to come / A-loatin’ round about me with that magic
lunty-tum.” An unknown, hollow-eyed stranger, who had not found surcease
“from sorrer in a fur, seclooded spot,” waltzes up to the bar “an’ demand[s]
whiskey straight”; the stranger then gets “outside” the whiskey, and the door
holding back a freezing storm, into which he disappears. What is left of him
is found a few months later, “associated with a tree, some distance from the
ground”: “And Husky Sam, the coroner, that set upon him, said / That two
things wuz apparent, namely: irst, deceast wuz dead; / And, second, previ-
ously had got involved beyond all hope / In a knotty complication with a yard
or two of rope!”49 Despite ending on a laugh line, the local color dialogue
makes a realist point; the event stands on its own as unsentimentalized fact.
These poems may be about social and economic status as much as regional
culture; Sam Walter Foss ofered a more sentimentalized version of the out-
cast musician in “The Volunteer Organist.” Foss’s New England derelict also
leaves the hall to freeze to death in a snowstorm after wringing the hearts of
his audience with his playing. The poems together might be taken as a relec-
tion of local color and dialect poetry itself as an outcast form of expression.
Like Carleton, Field was also able to take up the urban scene and include
realistic artifacts within the poetic framework. Field’s mock-pastoral “April”
illustrates again the ability of local color and dialect poetry to include the low
and the ugly, create a social message, and relect a “real” environment. April

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with its sweet showers rouses last summer’s vigorous breath, while “The rau-
cous-throated frog ayont the sty / Sends forth, as erst, his amerous vermal
croak” [sic]; in the second quatrain, only the word “sty” drops unnoticeably
out of place, along with “vermal,” which the reader likely retranslates as a
typographical blunder for “vernal,” rather than attaching it to the cerebellar
vermal region of the brain. The quatrain also lumps in “pots and pails” in
place of streams and ields. The third quatrain then delivers us into the world
of Goose Island, with its yowling dogs and cats, where “John Murphy’s wife
outpours her slop”:
With gurgling glee the gutter gushes by,
Fraught all with ilth, unknown and nameless dirt –
A dead green goose, an o’er-ripe rat I spy;
Head of a cat, tail of a lannel shirt.
...
So in Goose Island cometh April round;
Full eagerly we watch the month’s approach –
The season of sweet sight and pleasant sound,
The season of the bedbug and the roach.50
Field did not reinvent the mock-pastoral, but he captures urban argot and
twists it together with pastoral language to envision a disgusting place: an
artiicially created industrial island in a notoriously polluted river in Chicago,
occupied by tanneries, breweries, and soap factories. “Amerous,” yet another
word that is likely to be thoughtlessly converted (to “amorous”), signiied
a person who lies about another, although it also appears in the opening of
the 1532 English translation from Boccacio of “Guystarde and Sygysmonde,”
two lovers put to death by the lady’s father. From its opening until its perfect
emphatic closure on the sound-word “roach” in the last, slightly halting line,
the poem is dense, clever with misdirection, and unl inchingly urban, the per-
fect example of realism in comic doggerel poetry.
James Whitcomb Riley remains one of the most widely remembered of
the dialect and local color poets, but his poetry lacks the bite of Field’s best
poems. Neighborly poems and dialect sketches were his hallmark, and Hoosier
Indiana his heritage, but the strand of sentimentalism in his work overpowers
the folksy stories, genre painting, and local dialect of such poems as “The Old
Swimmin’-Hole,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “Little Orphant Annie,” and “When the
Frost Is on the Punkin’.” Although his satire of Whittier’s “Maud Muller” rivals
one by Bret Harte, the closing couplet is cute rather than blunt. He tried for, but
missed, satiric formulation, making his works vulnerable to clever burlesques.
In his time, though, as his critical biographer Elizabeth J. Van Allen notes, he

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was a very efective performer on the lecture circuit who also produced one of
the most successful books for children, Rhymes of Childhood (1891).51
The movement of dialect, doggerel, and local color poetry stretches from
at least the early 1800s, reaches its culmination in the late nineteenth century,
and continues up to the present in various folk verse writers and the cowboy
poetry movement.52 New England poetry is represented by Holman F. Day,
Sam Walter Foss, Joseph C. Lincoln, and others preceding Edwin Arlington
Robinson. From the urban slums comes Charles Follen Adams’s Leedle Yawcub
Strauss, Henry Blake Fuller’s Lines Long and Short, David L. Proudit’s Love
Among the Gamins, and Other Poems, and Wallace Irwin’s Chinatown Ballads. In
the Midwest, Ben King’s Verse was popular. Edgar Guest and James Whitcomb
Riley still maintain a regional, and national, readership, but Will Carleton’s
more concrete and pictorial narrative poems are largely forgotten. “Black”
dialect poetry is readily found in volumes such as Valentine’s Ole Marster and
Other Verses and A. C. Gordon and Thomas Nelson Page’s Befo’ De War, Echoes
in Negro Dialect, and in many of the best poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Joaquin Miller practically invented the wild Western cowboy poet and turned
his frontier persona into a traveling road show to England and the Continent,
but a host of rougher versions followed him. Representing the West among
cowboy poets are titles like Elva Irene McMillan’s Lyrics of the West, James W.
Foley’s Tales of the Trail, and Sam W. Smith’s Gems from the Tailings. Typical
titles of other works from across America include John H. Flagg’s Lyrics of
New England, Charles P. Green’s Ballads of the Black Hills, Edward McQueen
Gray’s Alamo and Other Verses, and Dr. L. C. Hiegel’s Rhymes from a Hill Billy.
Literary comedians writing in this genre range from William Allen Butler,
John G. Saxe, Benjamin P. Shillaber, and Charles G. Halpine; through Charles
Francis Adams, Benj. F. Taylor, and Bert Leston Taylor; and past the turn of
the century, when Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon published volumes
of “hooligan” dialect verse. Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin cynicism provides a
female counterpart.
As the Fireside Poets, one by one, disappeared from the American literary
scene, the plaint was often heard that their like would never be seen again.
It may be, however, that popular American and Canadian poets had already
taken over many aspects of their work to express their broadly egalitarian
ethic. The poets of the popular traditions produced gritty realist verse, por-
traits of “real life,” political histories and political satire in vulgar and vernacu-
lar voices, and efective natural lyrics, as well as comic narratives with unique
regional lavors, aspiring in some cases to the status of vulgar doggerel epics,
both during their time and after. William Dean Howells addressed the issue

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of the disappearance of such poetry in a 1912 speech. Speaking of the great

American poets he had known, Howells said,
Longfellow and Bryant and Emerson and Whittier and Lowell and Holmes
. . . belonged to an idealistic period when man dreamed of human perfect-
ability through one mighty reform. Their dream was that if the slaves were
freed there could hardly be sorrow on the earth which our good-will could
not easily assuage. Now long ago the slaves were freed, but through the rift
of the poets’ broken dream the faces of underwaged women and overworked
children stare at us. . . . Has the real frightened the ideal from us? Is poetry so
essentially of the ideal that it must go into exile with it? . . . I am ready, almost
ready, to say that as much good poetry is written in this time as in the time
that is past; but it is not the poetry of the few, it is the poetry of the many.
We no longer have supremacies, we no longer have primacies; the gods, the
half-gods, the heroes are gone, I hope not to return; and it is the high average
which reigns in this as in all American things. Amidst the misgivings of our
excellence in poetry, we may console ourselves with the fact that the average
in it is higher than ever before.53
Howells’s observation applies to the poets under consideration here. Not
all succeeded in transmuting bombast into meaningful verse. An impressive
number nevertheless turned native materials into comic and serious verse that
was readable and absorbing. They merged American voices, dialects, settings,
and characters into a vast national kaleidoscope that included both sentiment
and satire, often illuminating social issues and historical realities, and some-
times successfully bringing forward dramatic moments of realistic intensity
and enriching our literary history.

Notes
1. The (Philadelphia) Tickler, September 4, 1811.
2. Mrs. M. V. Victor, “The Stilts of Gold,” Beadle’s Monthly III ( January 1867), pp.
60–64.
3. Joel Barlow, esq., The Hasty-Pudding, a Poem, in Three Cantos (New Haven, Conn.:
William Storer, 1838), p. 2.
4. John Byers Wilson, Reminiscent Rhymes and Other Verse (Cincinnati, Ohio: Press
of Jennings & Graham, 1911), pp. 5–6.
5. Ellen P. Allerton, Walls of Corn and Other Poems, ed. and with memorial sketch
by Eva Ryan (Hiawatha, Kans.: Press of the Harrington Printing Co., 1894),
pp. 5–6.
6. Allerton, Walls of Corn, pp. 2–3.
7. Will Carleton, “Preface,” in Farm Ballads (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1873), n.p.

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8. [Josiah D. Canning], The Harp and the Plow (Greenield, Mass.: M. H. Tyler,
1852), pp. iii–iv.
9. The phrase “humbler poets” was used by Slason Thompson in 1885 for his
anthology The Humbler Poets: A Collection of Newspaper and Periodical Verse. The
publisher, A. C. McClurg and Company, published at least seven editions in
the irst year, and many more later revised editions.
10. John Hay, “The Pike County Ballads,” in Poems by John Hay (Boston: James R.
Osgood, 1871), pp. 13–28.
11. Bret Harte, Poems (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1871), pp. 47–88.
12. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Charles Godfrey Leland, a Biography (Boston:
Houghton Mil in, 1906), vol. 1, pp. 285–300.
13. Charles G. Leland, Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson &
Brothers, 1869), pp. 5–6.
14. Charles G. Leland, Sunshine in Thought (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1862),
p. 4.
15. P. R. S. [Peter Remsen Strong], “AWFUL” and Other Jingles (New York: G. P.
Putnam & Sons, 1871), pp. 14–17.
16. Sam W. Smith, Gems from the Tailings (San Francisco: C. W. Gordon, 1875), pp.
21–23.
17. Mrs. E. T. Corbett, Rustic Rhymes and Ballads (New York: Gillis Brothers, 1883),
pp. 49–51.
18. Corbett, Rustic Rhymes, pp. 9–13.
19. Corbett, Rustic Rhymes, pp. 14–17.
20. Mrs. S[arah] M[organ] B[ryan] Piatt, That New World and Other Poems (Boston:
James R. Osgood, 1877), pp. 13–15.
21. Piatt, That New World, pp. 111–14.
22. Piatt, That New World, pp. 119–21.
23. Sarah M. B. Piatt, Palace-Burner, the Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed. Paula
Bernat Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 90–91.
24. Mrs. S. L. Oberholtzer, Daisies of Verse (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1886),
pp. 14–19
25. Will Carleton, “Preface,” in City Festivals (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1892), pp. vii–viii.
26. Will Carleton, Farm Ballads (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), pp. 17–26,
51–62.
27. A. Elwood Corning, Will Carleton, a Biographical Study (New York: Lanmere,
1917), p. 35.
28. Will Carleton, City Ballads (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), pp. 130–31.
29. Will Carleton, Farm Festivals (New York: Harper & Bros., 1881), pp. 16–17.
30. Carleton, Farm Festivals, p. 33.
31. Carleton, Farm Festivals, p. 40.

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 Dialect, Doggerel, and Local Color

32. Peter Peppercorn [Emanuel Price], “Mr. Lo!,” in The Poetical Works of Peter
Peppercorn (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1884), pp. 224–25.
33. Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B. [Mortimer Thomson], Pluri-bus-tah (New
York: Rudd and Carleton, 1856), pp. xxii–xxiii.
34. [Thomson], Pluri-bus-tah, pp. 110–12.
35. [Thomson], Pluri-bus-tah, pp. 120–21.
36. Truman Trumbull, A. M. [E. Jane Gay], The New Yankee Doodle (New York:
Wm. Oland Bourne, 1868).
37. Sam Walter Foss, Dreams in Homespun (Boston: Lothrup, Lee & Shephard,
1897), pp. 100–02.
38. “A Talk about Popular Songs,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine VII:4 (April 1856),
pp. 401–15, 411.
39. “A Talk About Popular Songs,” p. 411.
40. Frank L. Stanton, Songs of the Soil (New York: D. Appleton, 1894), p. 7.
41. Stanton, Songs of the Soil, pp. 154–56.
42. Stanton, Songs of the Soil, pp. 189–91.
43. Frank L. Stanton, Comes One with a Song (Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bowen Merrill
Co., 1899), pp. 186–87.
44. Eugene Field, Hoosier Lyrics (Chicago: M. A. Donohue, 1905), p. 9.
45. Field, Hoosier Lyrics, pp. 106–07.
46. Hamlin Garland, “Interview with Eugene Field,” McClure’s Magazine 1:3
(August 1893), pp. 195–204.
47. Eugene Field, A Little Book of Western Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1893 [1890]), pp. 1–7.
48. William DeVere, Jim Marshall’s New Pianner and Other Western Stories (New
York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1897). Also worth noting is another poem in this
volume, “Jef and Joe. A True Incident of Creede Camp, Colorado,” which
describes the friendship of two cowboys over thirty years. One critic, Paul
Constant, has labeled this as a portrait of homosexuality, although various
respondents to his assertion demur (see http://www.thestranger.com/slog
/archives/2010/04/13/brokeback-mountain-the-prequel and http://soapy
smith.net).
49. Field, A Little Book of Western Verse, pp. 161–70.
50. Field, Hoosier Lyrics, pp. 116–17.
51. Elizabeth J. Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), pp. 216, 268–69.
52. David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher (eds.), Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
53. William Dean Howells, “Mr. Howells’s Speech,” in Rudolf and Clara Marburg
Kirk (eds.), Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York
University Press, 1959), pp. 371–72.

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 Chapter 21
Political Poets and Naturalism
T yl e r H o f f m a n

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, following the lead of the
French novelist Émile Zola and in the face of perceived mounting social injus-
tices in the United States, some American poets began to write according to
a theory known as “naturalism,” a deterministic philosophy that holds that
man is subject to universal forces that are wholly indiferent to his survival.
It is a bleak world that they depict, one Darwinian in nature, with the fate
of man determined by social and biological factors beyond his control. As
free market capitalism expanded in America in the Gilded Age, and the coun-
try experienced a growing disparity between rich and poor, many of these
naturalists became politically engaged, looking to forms of socialism for relief
while speaking out against the systematic degradation of fellow humans and
advocating for reform.
Although a great deal of critical attention has been paid to naturalism in ic-
tion, not as much has been paid to the movement’s impact on poetry, perhaps
in part because naturalist poets themselves appeared most successful in other
genres, especially iction and social science. In fact, though, a signiicant strand
of American verse written around the turn of the twentieth century expresses
the tensions or contradictions within naturalism that the critic Donald Pizer
identiied as occurring in iction, namely, although the world of the natural-
ist is that of “the commonplace and unheroic,” she nonetheless “discovers
in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or
adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion”; and, although the natu-
ralist “describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled
by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance[,] . . . he also suggests a com-
pensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which airms the
signiicance of the individual and of his [or her] life.”1 In this way, life is given
some meaning notwithstanding the harsh and oppressive forces that impinge
on men, women, and children in an increasingly complex, dehumanizing, and
strictly regulated American cultural milieu.

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Several of the most important and inl uential American naturalist poets –
Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, Edwin Markham, and Stephen Crane –
were writing for a popular press, with the line between muckraking journalism
and poetry at times signiicantly blurred. Occasionally, their work was criti-
cized for being unartful, for being too didactic, or too ideologically freighted.
In some cases, these writers do not even refer to themselves as poets or to what
they write as poetry, preferring to think of themselves as political activists irst
and foremost, or somehow as outliers, rather than as artists committed to a
traditional ideal of Beauty. Just as they espoused political causes that were rad-
ical in their day, so too did the performance of their work strike the world as
daring and subversive. Their often sharp-tongued verse protests the brutality
of both the natural and the civilized worlds and our lack of control over the
course of our lives in them, at least if the status quo were to prevail.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman irst broke into print as an author (under her mar-
ried name of Stetson) with her book of poems, In This Our World (published
in four editions between 1893 and 1898). She published more than ive hundred
poems in her lifetime, some of which appeared in her self-published magazine
the Forerunner (1909–1916), in which she also wrote columns on the pressing
political issues of the day from a socialist and feminist perspective; the sufrage
weekly Woman’s Journal; and Cosmopolitan. Her socialism was inl uenced in
part by Edward Bellamy’s enormously popular utopian science iction novel
Looking Backward (1888), and her own 1915 utopian novel Herland (also set in
America in the year 2000) is indebted to it. Gilman took a decidedly feminist
perspective on science and socialism and exposed what she regarded as the
economic dependence of women on men, arguing that women should sup-
port themselves economically and ind worth outside of the menial, unre-
munerated labors of the home. Despite her sense of the debilitating efects
of patriarchy, she voiced great conidence in social progress, in our collective
ability to improve conditions not only for women but for others who are
downtrodden and oppressed by custom and law.
The sectional organization of In This Our World speaks to Gilman’s wide-
ranging social conscience and activist agenda: “The World”; “Woman”;
and “The March” (originally “Our Human Kind”). In her poems she works
through a variety of ixed poetic forms and uses these traditional structures
(limericks, ballads, rondeaux, heroic couplets, and blank verse, to name a few)
to interrogate in very untraditional ways the paradigms of the dominant cul-
ture. Gilman was well known in her day for her lampoons in particular, with
an early supporter, the realist writer William Dean Howells, hailing her for
her civic satire in support of radical social reform: “You speak with a tongue

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like a two edged sword,” he told her.2 In This Our World was praised by Horace
Traubel, a committed socialist and friend of Walt Whitman, who played down
her art and trumped up her politics: “She is neither past nor present master
of phrases and verbal dress suitings. But the efect she achieves is wonder-
ful. . . . In This Our World touches at some point every problem of our time.”3
Gilman herself was pleased to be regarded primarily as an activist in her verse,
going so far as to say of In This Our World, “I don’t call it a book of poems. I
call it a tool box. It was written to drive nails with”; as she elsewhere insisted,
“I am not a poet. I’m only a preacher whether on the platform or in print.”4
Her deinition of herself makes clear the public stance that she assumes as a
writer, someone performing on the stage and on the page in an efort to reach
audiences with her revolutionary gospel. When some try to rescue her from
the charge of not being literary or artistic enough, they tend to turn to her
nonpolitical lyrics – her nature and city poems – which stand squarely in the
Romantic tradition. In fact, though, there is a high degree of artfulness in her
most politically charged poems, and although she might distract from her own
aesthetics, many of her poems turn on her careful use of forms with particular
historical generic associations.
In “Homes,” subtitled “A Sestina,” in In This Our World Gilman ironically
comments on both male and female entrapment: while the homes that couples
work to maintain are deceptively “smiling” and “comfortable,” they severely
curtail personal freedom. When they ask “Are we not homes? And is not all
therein?” we know what the answer is, because we have seen in the poem that
men learn to worship homes instead of God and women do not in fact ind
there the “perfect world” that fulills all their natural desires.5 Gilman’s deci-
sion to write in the highly prescriptive form of the sestina, and to foreground
that fact, is meant to igure the condition of being tightly bound by bourgeois
convention. Gilman’s feminism is pronounced throughout the book, but espe-
cially so in the second section, in which she asserts the need for women to
develop an independent economic identity from men, to reinvent the delimit-
ing roles of wife, housekeeper, and mother. In “In Duty Bound” the speaker
viscerally feels the trap shutting on her, with

No chance of breaking out, except by sin;

Not even room to shirk –
Simply to live, and work.
An obligation pre-imposed, unsought,
Yet binding with the force of natural law.
(ITOW, pp. 33–34)

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 Political Poets and Naturalism

Gilman puts her inger on the “wasting power” of the imprisoned, domesti-
cated woman and seeks to break with the patriarchal ideology that produces
it (ITOW, p. 34). The metrical break in the poem (with iambic pentameter
suddenly giving way to a trimeter couplet) symbolizes the break (or “breaking
out”) that she seeks; the reimposition of iambic expresses the iron “law” that
is so hard to undermine or escape.
In poem after poem Gilman takes to the barricades, asserting her sense of
the injustices that rule the world but also her conviction that that rule can be
challenged and changed. In the tripping meters of light verse, Gilman mocks
women who ind comfort and security in the domestic sphere, as in “The
Housewife”:
Here is the House to hold me – cradle of all the race;
Here is my lord and my love, here are my children dear –
Here is the House enclosing, the dear-loved dwelling place;
Why should I ever weary for aught that I ind not here?6
Her feminism is again in bloom in “Six Hours a Day,” in which she portrays the
degradation of women in the kitchen, women who must spend six hours a day
cooking for their family, “Struggling with laws she does not understand / Of
chemistry and physics, and the weight / Of poverty and ignorance besides.”
Women, she sees, are “Toiling without release, no hope ahead,” and “to refuse
to cook is held the same / As to refuse her wife and motherhood.” Her fate is
predestined, as “the slow inger of Heredity / Writes on the forehead of each
living man, / Strive as he may, ‘His mother was a cook!’ ” (ITOW, pp. 136–37). It
is this determinism that she seeks to interrupt.
Gilman was not content to allow anyone to choose not to become involved
in political protest; according to her, all people, but especially fellow women,
were responsible for helping in the ight for change. In “To the Indiferent
Women,” another sestina whose title seeks to activate politically all mothers
of the world, she states forthrightly that “The one irst duty of all human life
/ Is to promote the progress of the world.” The speaker tells her audience,
who are happy in their bourgeois trappings, that they cannot rest content
in their “domestic peace,” that “the neglected, starved, unmothered world”
needs them to add their “power of love” to man’s in order “to care for all the
world” (LP, pp. 114–15). “The Anti-Sufragists” more harshly criticizes the var-
ious types of women who are content with what they have, and who keep up
an ignorance of the world, unmotivated to ight for female enfranchisement.
She ends the poem by calling out these women who have turned against their
sex: “who shall measure the historic shame / Of these poor traitors – traitors

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are they all – / To great Democracy and Womanhood!” (ITOW, p. 154). Gilman
did not pull her punches, and sometimes, as here, she embarrasses people into
doing the progressive thing. When sufrage inally is won, she pens “A Chant
Royal,” hailing that political triumph in a form associated with heroic subject
matter since Chaucer, and in the envoi the speaker addresses her “Sisters”
thus: “To make a better world and hold it so / Women are free at last in all the
land” (LP, p. 110).
The poem that Gilman became best known for in her lifetime was the 120-
line “Similar Cases,” dubbed a “great campaign document” for the social-
ist movement of Nationalism by her uncle, the Unitarian minister Edward
Everett Hale (LP, p. 28). The satiric verse was published in the April 1890 issue
of the Nationalist and was reprinted in newspapers and magazines all across
the country. In the poem she jabs at conservatives who believe that man’s
nature is ixed for all time, and she retraces the stages of evolutionary history,
demonstrating that change is fully part of our nature, not inimical to it. We
irst meet Eohippus, who is small in size and proclaims he is going to become
a great big horse; his peers laugh at him, mocking, “Why! You’d have to change
your nature!” Next is Anthropoidal Ape, who is “Far smarter than the rest” and
says he is going to be a man, for which he, too, is jeered and mocked. Finally,
Neolithic Man is upbraided for his vision of modern humanity (“We shall be
civilized! We are going to live in cities!”):
Said One, “This is chimerical!
Utopian! Absurd!”
Said another, “What a stupid life!
Too dull, upon my word!”
Cried all, “Before such things can come,
You idiotic child,
You must alter human nature!”
And they all sat back and smiled.
Thought they, “An answer to that last
It will be hard to ind!”
It was a clinching argument
To the Neolithic Mind! (ITOW, pp. 95–100)
Gilman satirizes the conception that change is unnatural, charging that we
indeed are capable of progress, as proved already by the evolution of man,
and her position is perfectly in line with Nationalism’s sense of the need for
the slow evolution of economic, social, and political reforms in the efort to
efect social change.

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Often in her verse Gilman wryly places the human order against the ani-
mal and thereby shows that what is deemed “natural” in patriarchy is not in
fact. In “Females,” for example, she states that in the animal world the male
and female are equally “representative of race”: one is deemed as capable as
the other. The only female occupying “a parasitic place / Dependent on the
male” is, Gilman argues, the human female. Imagining the retort of her crit-
ics that she simply is slandering mothers and wives, who “earn their living” in
such occupation, she parries, “A Human Creature is your state, / And to be
human is more great / Than even womanhood!” (ITOW, pp. 169–71). Gilman
also invokes the animal kingdom when she trains her sights on the social ill of
child labor; in a poem entitled “Child Labor [No. 2]” she makes her appeal to
her audience with ironic incisiveness:
Only the human mother,
Degraded helpless being
Will make her little children work
And live on what they bring.
No ledgling feeds the father-bird,
No chicken feeds the hen,
No kitten mouses for the cat,
This glory is for men.

She ends the poem on an optimistic note, fully believing that it is possible
for Americans to “awake, rebuild, remake, / And let our children grow” (LP,
p. 43).
Although Gilman can be very pessimistic at times in her poems, as in “The
Mother’s Charge,” which closes in the ironic heroic couplet “She died, as all
her mothers died before. / Her daughter died in turn, and made one more,”
she often turns a degrading, controlling environment into a political oppor-
tunity, pointing up the ways in which some progressive action could change
the world and make it less oppressive an environment for all (ITOW, p. 161).
In “One Girl of Many,” she treats the problem of the female prostitute, who
is “Hungry from her birth / Half-fed. Half-clothed. / Untaught of woman’s
worth.” Her heart feels pain “as keenly as your own,” Gilman’s speaker tells us;
she has human worth but ignorantly chooses to sell her body because it seems
to promise a better life: “She had no knowledge of our nature’s laws.” Her fate
is to descend, in shame, to death, but her very existence is a “Social necessity”:
“Men cannot live / Without what these disgraceful creatures give.” When at
one point in the poem the speaker states, “And so she – sinned. I think we call

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it sin,” she reveals the sanctimony that dooms the girl to a living hell, exposing
the destructiveness and falsity of our moral codes (LP, pp. 115–16).
Gilman framed life as a Darwinian struggle, and she paints a grim picture of
the eforts of the working class, regardless of gender, to endure. In “The Wolf
at the Door,” that title igure relentlessly threatens the hopeless inhabitants
of a home with extinction unless they get out of bed, “To work! To work!”
(ITOW, p. 177). In “The Survival of the Fittest,” she represents the growing
disparity between rich and poor, describing the way the polar bear adapted
to survive in cold climes by growing fat and how the modern millionaire has
done much the same: “Where Poverty and Hunger are, / He counts his bul-
lion by the car. / Where thousands sufer, still he thrives, / And after death
his will survives.” But in the end, the speaker notes, man slays the bear for
his fat and fur, and so too will the millionaire meet his demise, as the “simple
common Human Race,” “so wise, so strong, so many,” asserts itself (ITOW,
p. 209). Gilman is not shy about stoking class warfare, urging average citizens
to seize their own rightful inheritance, and in her poem “Work and Wages”
she protests in satirical tones the poor pay of the worker, whose hard labor
simply allows the rich to get richer: “It does not seem exactly straight / That
he who serves so well the state / Should just be kept alive”; she goes on to
ask pointedly, “why should one man feed the earth, / Enriching it by all he’s
worth, / If Rockefeller eats it?” (ITOW, p. 176). Gilman raised concern about
urban workers denied the right to strike and saw the American labor scene
degenerating into European conditions, with increasing distance between the
haves and have-nots; in her opinion, no one had the right to sit idly by: “We
have no place for lookers on / When all the world’s at war!” (ITOW, p. 184).
And her call “To Labor” is clarion:
Then rise as you never rose before!
Nor hoped before!
Nor dared before!
And show as was never shown before,
The power that lies in you!
Stand all as one!
See justice done!
Believe, and Dare, and Do! (ITOW, p. 194)
In “A Hope,” she looks forward to the creation of the fraternal state that the
uprising of labor will secure: “Be of good cheer the end is near / You have not
worked alone!” (ITOW, p. 90). It is, Gilman insists, through such solidarity that
the world’s woes will be remedied, if ever.

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In the scope of her career, Gilman satirically addressed a range of speciic

social problems in her verse that stem from an industrial capitalism run amok,
and she sometimes assumed in her poetry the role of consumer protector. In
several poems about the meat-packing industry, she exposes its corruption
and the crimes that are being committed by it against humanity, with no one
ultimately held accountable. A poem that alludes to fellow muckraker Upton
Sinclair, “How About the Man?,” accuses:
Somebody did it. Somebody knew –
Somebody excellent proits drew
From this public poisoning plan;
They are pushing a Bill to inish the fun, –
But think of the mischief that has been done! –
Is there no blame coming to any one? (LP, p. 49)
In her sonnet “To the Packer” she concludes her diatribe against this type with
the couplet, “His hands with gold uncounted we have illed / While he, safe,
secret, subtle, killed and killed” (LP, p. 51). “I Would Fain Die a Dry Death,”
composed in anapestic lines ironically recalling the light verse tradition, com-
plains of the American public’s willingness to accept oppression and manipu-
lation by big corporations: “We submit to be killed by our railroads, / We sub-
mit to be fooled by our press, / We can stand as much government scandal /
As any folks going, I guess” (LP, p. 48). But the line must be drawn, she insists,
at tolerating the poisoning of our food supply. As for being “fooled by our
press,” in her poem “Hyenas” she lambastes yellow journalism, decrying the
increasing tabloidization of newspaper reportage, which, for proit, greedily
digs up the bodies of dead heroes to drag them through the mud.
Gilman’s politics build on a foundational naturalism: while individuals are
controlled by their environment, she also believes that that environment is
susceptible to change. In the irst of three scenes in “Nature’s Answer,” a man
who has built a house in an idyllic setting suddenly is beset by fever and dies:
“how could I know
That death was lurking under this fair show?”
And answered Nature, merciful, and stern,
“I teach by killing; let the others learn!”

The same brutal lesson is taught to a maid in the poem’s inal tableau, a maid
who thinks that, “in the holy name of wife,” she will ind “greater joy”; what
she inds, though, is unremitting pain – “work as brainless slaves might do, /
By day and night, long labor, never through.” When she dies, Nature’s refrain

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remains the same: “I teach by killing; let the others learn!” (ITOW, pp. 3–4).
This hostile universe also bares its teeth in her poem “The Rock and the Sea,”
in which those two contending forces show no concern at all for the plight of
man: “What is the folly of man to me? / I am the Sea!” (ITOW, p. 11). It is in
this context that Gilman’s socialism operates, as she searches for ways to over-
come the crushing circumstances of “Nature,” especially the foolish “Nature”
of our own making.
Similarly progressive in spirit, Edwin Markham knew Gilman well, and he
was part of her California literary salon. The poets shared a commitment to
political reform and concentrated their artistic eforts on seeking remedy for
the downtrodden, both of them looking to a future when social justice would
be served. Also like Gilman, Markham became widely famous for a single
blockbuster poem. He read it on New Year’s Eve 1898 to the editor of the San
Francisco Examiner and on January 18, 1899, “The Man with the Hoe” was pub-
lished on the front page of that newspaper; it became one of the most talked-
about poems of the nineteenth century and was republished in more than
ten thousand newspapers and magazines and translated into more than forty
languages. Inspired by Jean-François Millet’s painting Man with a Hoe, which
depicts a French peasant in a ield bent over the harvest, the poem spurred a
broad debate about not only agrarian reform but also labor conditions in all
segments of American society.
In the poem Markham uses blank verse, a form associated with the epic
by way of Milton, to petition on behalf of his title igure, one “Bowed by the
weight of centuries,” wearing “The emptiness of ages in his face, / And on his
back the burden of the world.” The farmer is “dead to rapture and despair /
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, / Stolid and stunned, a brother
to the ox.” The responsibility for the perversion of man is laid at the feet of
the world: this “Slave of the wheel of labor” has been stripped of all dreams,
hopes, and aspirations, brutalized by “masters, lords and rulers in all lands.”
As Markham contends, the hoe man will come back to haunt capitalists and
politicians, posing a revolutionary danger to the world:
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings –
With those who shaped him to the thing he is –
When this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?7
Markham himself sought to explain the intended purpose and efect of his
poem in later years, stating that Millet’s toiler “is the type of industrial oppres-
sion in all lands and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a New York

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sweat-shop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia coal-mine. . . . The Hoeman

is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the Toiler ground down through ages
of oppression, through ages of social injustice.” The igure represented “the
slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless and joyless
labor.” Markham himself saw “The Man with the Hoe” as a poem of hope, a
call to the conscience of the ruling class, even as it refuses to turn away from
“rugged and savage reality.”8
But if Markham’s poem is without irony, its rhetorical strategy of
dehumanizing the worker is not. As Cary Nelson points out, Markham takes
it on himself to speak for the hoe man, thereby forgetting the history of labor
protest and song in workers’ own voices, and it is the “relentless othering of
the worker” that gave his poem such “remarkable cultural warrant”: the
mute suferer was acceptable to the tastes of the dominant culture.9 William
Dean Howells referred to the poem in a letter to the author as “great and
noble.”10 It was a favorite poem of the labor leader Eugene V. Debs as well.
Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor was strongly enough
impressed by the image to comment on it in a formal report, stating that he
was looking forward to the day of “the intelligent worker, standing erect,
looking his fellow man in the face, demanding for himself, and according to
all, the full rights of disenthralled manhood.”11
Markham’s poem did not sit well, though, with the well-known satirist
Ambrose Bierce. In San Francisco in 1893, Markham made his way into Bierce’s
circle and became his protégé. Bierce was supportive of Markham early on but
turned against him when “The Man with the Hoe” appeared. In the pages of
the Examiner, the same newspaper that irst ran the poem, Bierce called it “in
structure, stif, inelastic, monotonous,” comparing the execution of the blank
verse unfavorably to Milton’s; he especially objected to “the thought that the
work carries,” that is, its socialist strain:
The thought is that of the labor union – even to the workworn threat of rising
against the wicked well-to-do and taking it out of their hides. . . . The notion
that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selishness of the great is “natu-
ral,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a literary conception it has not
the vitality of a sick ish.12
In a private letter to Markham, Bierce accused him of propounding “a doc-
trine of hate.” Markham replied, “I believe in sympathy. . . . I believe also in
the practice of the Golden Rule as the supreme law in all human afairs. . . .
I wish to arouse but one hatred – the hatred of injustice.” Bierce was far
from satisied and in another column in the Examiner charged his former

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friend with attacking the principles of capitalism and latly stated that “the
stuf ” Markham was writing and publishing “is not poetry,” but rather
“demagogy.”13
Markham was undeterred. He kept writing verse in form and theme sim-
ilar to “The Man with the Hoe,” appeared in public in support of labor, and
began writing articles for the Examiner on related social issues (for instance, in
August 1899 he published “The Epidemic of Strikes and the Remedy,” in which
he argues for government ownership and worker solidarity). His poem “The
Man under the Stone” irst appeared at the top of the irst page of the oicial
American Federation of Labor monthly magazine, the American Federationist,
for July 1899. In this poem the poet’s class sympathies are again front and cen-
ter in his portrait of a benighted igure, stripped of his very humanity:
When I see a workingman with mouths to feed,
Up, day after day, in the dark before the dawn,
And coming home, night after night, through the dusk,
Swinging forward like some ierce silent animal,
I see a man doomed to roll a huge stone up an endless steep.
The toiler in the shadow of the rock is perceived as “twisted, cramped, mis-
shapen,” physically and spiritually distorted by the work he must perform to
eke out an existence.14 The speaker of the poem does not let us know whether
or not the worker will be ultimately crushed by the rock. In “A Harvest Song”
Markham again paints a bleak picture of the situation of American laborers,
who have illed up the granaries, but who then are deprived of the fruits of the
harvest: “And now the idle reapers lounge against the bolted doors: / Without
are hungry harvesters, within enchanted stores.” The laborers are reduced
to “strolling beggars”; out of season, they are out of work, with the harvest
being but “A little while their hope on earth, then evermore their tomb” (P,
p. 36).
In his pessimistic lyric “The Rock-Breaker,” also in The Man with the Hoe and
Other Poems (1899), Markham likens the “labor-blasted toiler” not to a crouch-
ing animal this time but to a tree, isolate and vulnerable:
So have I seen, on Shasta’s top, a pine
Stand silent on a clif,
Stript of its glory of green leaves and boughs,
Its great trunk split by ire,
Its gray bark blackened by the thunder smoke,
Its life a sacriice
To some blind purpose of the Destinies. (P, p. 34)

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The pine tree stands (barely), a victim of fate. The lyric immediately following
“The Rock-Breaker” in the book (and the last of the poems) is “These Songs
Will Perish,” in which Markham makes the case that art and the artist will
not endure, but the broader socialist message of both will: poetry, he asserts,
stands in service of “Truth,” who “cried to man of old / To build the endur-
ing, glad Fraternal State,” and it is that cry that cannot be silenced (P, p. 164).
The tenor of the poet, then, is key, and in “The Toilers,” in which the laborers’
“blind feet drift in the darkness, and no one is leading,” Markham conjures the
Romantic poet Percy Shelley’s ideal of the poet-legislator from “A Defence of
Poetry” as he insists on the artist’s involvement in the conduct of the state,
his public charge, as a way to break from the unjust feudal arrangements that
somehow seem to persist in an industrialized economy: “Shelley, where are
you – where are you? our hearts are a-breaking!” (MHOP, pp. 112–13).
In Lincoln and Other Poems (1901) Markham continues to dwell on these issues,
exposing the corrupting force of greed in “The Wall Street Pit” and singing
again the praises of “The Muse of Labor,” that is, “The Muse of the Fraternal
State,” in bathetic lines: “the builders have no part – / No share in all the glory
of their hands.”15 In his blank verse poem “Lincoln, the Man of the People,”
which he read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
in 1922, he extols the slain president for his commitment to social justice, draw-
ing a direct line between his farm labor and his statesmanship: “The grip that
swung the ax in Illinois / Was on the pen that set a people free” (P, p. 82). In
“The Angelus,” a poem suggested by another Millet painting, Markham simi-
larly ennobles the work of men’s hands in the ield – “their day-long sacrament
of toil” – and in closed heroic couplets exalts their “comrade kindness” and
their service to God, who “inds no labor mean”: “More than white incense cir-
cling to the dome / Is a ield well furrowed or a nail sent home” (P, p. 38).
Markham felt the plight not only of the man in the ield but of female
workers. In his Petrarchan sonnet “A Leaf from the Devil’s Jest-Book,” which
also harks back to Milton and his turning of that form to political subjects,
he shines a light on the seamstress “bowed” over her stitching, “chained and
bent,” toiling for a woman of means: “They stitch for the lady, tyrannous and
proud / For her a wedding-gown, for them a shroud” (MHOP, p. 44). Another
poem about women laborers was intended speciically to help inance a polit-
ical cause: “The Friendly Door” was “Written at the request of the New York
women struggling to raise $3,000,000 to erect Y. W. C. A. buildings as homes
for working girls.” In the poem these struggling women are said to be “on the
battle-line early and late,” women who “take their chance in the ight with
Fate.”16 They are victims of the forces of nature and man, but the very act of

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writing the poem serves as an attempt to ameliorate their conditions, to pro-

vide them respite.
Throughout his life, Markham took aim at laws and codes that he believed
undercut the rights and freedoms of the working class, and he actively lent his
support to trade unions and other progressive causes in an efort to relieve the
sufering of the common man. He published journalistic essays in such maga-
zines as Cosmopolitan on the horror of child labor and co-wrote a book-length
exposé of child labor in America titled Children of Bondage that was published
in 1914. Later on, Markham wrote “The Ballad of the Gallows Bird,” a long
dramatic narrative poem published in 1926 that is narrated by a man who
is hanged to death for his crimes. Conceptually indebted to Bierce’s short
story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), it stands as an expansion
of Markham’s relections on social justice, staging as it does an existentialist
conl ict between right and wrong in rather gruesome imagery. In the words
of the poet George Sterling, who extolled Markham in an anthology of verse
in tribute to him on his seventieth birthday, Markham possessed “Homer’s
head and Milton’s art / Shelley’s soul and Lincoln’s heart!”17 As with Gilman,
his naturalism did not rule out but rather set the groundwork for a utopian
vision.
When Stephen Crane learned of the proposed American Academy of Arts
and Letters, he chose Markham as the leading candidate to become its irst
member, because that poet was “of that virile manhood which expresses itself
by appearing in public in its shirt sleeves; a strong man, mark ye; no apish child
of fashion; a veritable eagle of freedom, and, withal, kindly, tender to the little
lame lamb – aye, bold, yet gentle, deiant of all convention, and yet simple in
his manner even to kings.”18 Clearly, he recognized Markham’s twin streaks of
unconventionality and progressivism. Like Markham, Crane wrote according
to a theory of naturalistic determinism, exposing the corrupted institutions
and false morality of the world, but through a diferent rhetorical technique:
whereas Markham ills his poetry with pathos, Crane bites with irony and so
sounds more like Gilman or Bierce, who irst praised Crane before turning
against him (just as he had done with Markham). Crane’s usual sidestepping
of speciic social issues and problems in his verse, in favor of a general con-
demnation of sin and hypocrisy, also sets him apart from both Gilman and
Markham, whose political reference points usually are much more deinite.
His humorous statement of his political philosophy also is at an angle to theirs;
as Crane put it, “I was a Socialist for two weeks but when a couple of Socialists
assured me I had no right to think diferently from any other Socialist and then
quarrelled with each other about what Socialism meant, I ran away.”19 This

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comment highlights his aversion to institutional thought and predicts some of

the strong countercurrents running through his poetic lines.
Despite this disavowal, Crane’s iction, especially Magie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), represents a decidedly progressivist point of view. He worked as a jour-
nalist as well, and in his 1894 article “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” in McClure’s
he announces his sympathy for miners and the brutal conditions they face
daily in a way that points to both leftist politics and naturalistic philosophy:
“Man is in the implacable grasp of nature. It has only to tighten slightly, and
he is crushed like a bug. His loudest shriek of agony would be as impotent as
his inal moan to bring help from that fair land that lies, like Heaven, over his
head.” It is the “sinister struggle far below” that these workers enjoin, lorded
over by the coal-breaking machine, an “imperturbably cruel and insatiate,
black emblem of greed, and of the gods of this labor” that constitutes, for
Crane, a “grim, strange war.”20 These symbols show up again in his poetry,
which created quite a stir when it was published.
Crane’s irst book of verse, Black Riders and Other Lines (1895), contains sixty-
eight short poems in free verse, each set high up on its own page in capital
letters and identiied not by titles but only by Roman numerals. Its strange
formatting drew critical complaint and certainly contributed to the riddling,
or orphic, quality of the lines, which resembled on the page the script of a tele-
gram or newspaper headline. The poet claimed to like the book better than his
own novel The Red Badge of Courage, published earlier that year, but he often
hedged away from calling its contents “poems,” preferring instead “pills” or
“lines,” as if to suggest that they were so unconventional as to demand generic
reclassiication. One reviewer wondered whether the lines in Black Riders were
in fact “poetry,” and William Dean Howells pronounced that Crane had “done
the most striking thing of the year” in Black Riders; however, he took exception
to Crane’s refusal of traditional poetic form, asking how his “fresh” thought
“would have been any less so if it had been cast in the mould which need not
have been broken to secure them [the poems] the stamp of novelty.”21 As the
story, perhaps apocryphal, goes, Crane started writing his verse after Howells
read some of Emily Dickinson’s gnomic verse to him. Certainly, the brevity
of his poems – their epigrammatic terseness – resonates with Dickinson’s
lyrics.22 A review in the Nation similarly noted the unruliness of Crane’s verse,
stating that the book “is an attraction which makes young people learn it by
heart, carry it into the woods with them, sleep with it under their pillows, and
perhaps suggest that it should be buried with them in their early graves.” It
goes on to claim that in “its rhymelessness and covert rhythm” it appears as “a
condensed Whitman or an ampliied Emily Dickinson.”23 To invoke these two

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poets – and lodge Crane between them – suggests something of the perceived
eccentricity of his art.
Generally, reviewers found the book to be “rebellious,” “modern in the
extreme,” “blasphemous,” or “satiric.” In a letter to his editor, who wanted
to cut out several poems from the book, especially those calling into question
the existence or goodness of God, Crane argued that “the ethical sense” of
Black Riders, which is grounded in its “anarchy,” that is, his open deiance of
cultural norms, would be spoiled.24 In the poems of Black Riders, we encounter
a dark world pervaded by sin and faithlessness; the landscape that man walks
through proves a vacant desert. He is lost in darkness, and, when there is any
lash of color, it is a Darwinian phantasmagoria, “red in tooth and claw,” as
Tennyson imagined it. The titular black riders come charging out of the sea
in the irst poem, with “clang” and “clash,” armed to do battle with “sin.”25 In
poem 3 of the book the monstrous aspect of nature comes into full focus: “a
creature, naked, bestial” is discovered eating his own heart (SCP, p. 4). Crane’s
naturalism is on full display here, as his speaker inds himself in a world where
man is beast, caught in a jungle that allows for no hope and no comfort in any
guiding light.
Despite (or perhaps because of ) the fact that Crane was a Methodist minis-
ter’s son, he attacked religiosity with fervor, and his early Bohemianism – and
the rhetoric of rebellion that is part and parcel of it – lows out of his involve-
ment in the New York Art Students’ League beginning in 1888, when he irst
started writing verse. In the nihilistic poem 6, “God fashioned the ship of the
world carefully,” God is depicted as having built that vessel only to turn away
from it “at fateful time”: when he does so, it “slipped slyly” away, “forever
rudderless,”
Going ridiculous voyages,
Making quaint progress,
Turning as with serious purpose
Before stupid winds.
And there were many in the sky
Who laughed at this thing. (SCP, p. 5)
As Crane’s speaker perceives, God leaves man to his own devices, totally
uncaring and even derisive of man’s mistaken sense that he has a purpose.
The speaker’s animus toward God becomes more palpable in poem 12, where
he spits,
Well, then, I hate Thee, unrighteous picture;
Wicked image, I hate thee;

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So, strike with Thy vengeance

The heads of those little men
Who come blindly.
It will be a brave thing. (SCP, p. 8)
Crane’s blasphemy continues unabated in later poems in the sequence, in
which we encounter a “Blustering god” who is a “Liar!” and “Fat with rage”
(SCP, pp. 33, 35, 31). In poem 32, “Two or three angels,” his attack is not so much
on God as it is on institutionalized religion. When the angels came to earth, he
writes, “They saw a fat church,” and the “Little black streams of people” going
in to worship perplex the angels, who cannot igure out “why the people went
thus, / And why they stayed so long within” (SCP, p. 19).
Throughout these poems, Crane posits that we inhabit a universe that we
cannot hope to control, one that is at best indiferent to our fate. In poem 22
demonic nature rears its head, and man’s chances for survival are uncertain:
Once I saw the mountains angry,
And ranged in battle-front.
Against them stood a little man;
Aye, he was no bigger than my inger.
I laughed, and spoke to one near me,
“Will he prevail?” (SCP, p. 13)
In poem 37 we ind another mountain ominously bearing down on insig-
niicant man, with “the peaks assembled” against him (SCP, p. 21). In poem
66 the sky is seen as “a vast blue, / Echoless, ignorant”; there is no divinity,
only emptiness. The very next poem, “God lay dead in Heaven,” underlines
that absence: angels’ wings are “drip-dripping / With blood,” and the earth a
“groaning thing.” Monsters, “livid with desire,” appear as part of this apoca-
lyptic landscape, and man is about to go down to “the jaws of the inal beast”
(SCP, p. 41). In the poems “Should the wide world roll away” and “If I should
cast of this tattered coat,” God also is igured as wholly absent or indiferent.
In the inal poem of Black Riders, the speaker implores God, but to no avail,
and is forced to conclude, “Ah, there is no God!” at which “A swift hand, / A
sword from the sky, / Smote him, / And he was dead” (SCP, p. 42). The speak-
er’s faithlessness is promptly rewarded with God’s wrath.
The closest Crane comes to tackling a speciic social problem is in his poem
on the plague of yellow journalism, which Gilman also addresses. As he writes
in poem 11,
In a lonely place,
I encountered a sage

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Who sat, all still,

Regarding a newspaper.
He accosted me:
“Sir, what is this?”
Then I saw that I was greater,
Aye, greater than this sage.
I answered him at once,
“Old, old man, it is the wisdom of the age.”
The sage looked upon me with admiration. (SCP, p. 8)
These lines resonate with a poem in his next book that begins baldly “A news-
paper is a collection of half-injustices,” and goes on to state with irony that “A
newspaper is a court / Where everyone is kindly and unfairly tried,” that
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is fetless life’s chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world. (SCP, p. 52)
For Crane, the newspaper is illed with sensational stories and thus has no
legitimacy. It features a lurid and irresponsible journalism that is meant to
make proit but has nothing to do with fact and contributes nothing to man’s
wisdom of the world.
In Crane’s second and inal volume of verse, War Is Kind and Other Lines
(1899), there are twenty-seven untitled poems. Here he begins to use refrain
and rhyme for the irst time, but the poems remain short and often cryp-
tic. The critical appraisal of the book was mixed. One reviewer insisted, as
Howells had done, on treating the pieces as prose. Willa Cather, who said she
found Black Riders “a casket of polished masterpieces when compared with
War Is Kind,” argued against its darkly militaristic stance. At least one critic
found the irony of the title all too obvious, but that irony is a primary trope in
the book, weaving through many of its lyrics, is not in doubt.
The irst poem features the short-lined refrain: “Do not weep. / War is
kind.” It rings with irony in the context of surrounding scenes of horror and
despair: “Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, / Raged at his
breast, gulped and died.” Under the pageantry of the “Swift, blazing lag of
the regiment, / Eagle with crest of red and gold,” we hear of “the virtue
of slaughter,” “the excellence of killing,” against a corpse-strewn battleield
(SCP, p. 45). We are made to experience the romantic inlation of war and its
discrepancy with the reality of death through the speaker’s detached point

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of view. In a later poem, “To the Maiden,” Crane articulates the notion that
an individual’s feelings about the universe depend largely on his or her point
of view; to the maiden, “The sea was blue meadow, / Alive with little froth-
people / Singing,” but
To the sailor, wrecked,
The sea was dead grey walls
Superlative in vacancy
Upon which nevertheless at fateful time,
Was written
The grim hatred of nature. (SCP, p. 47)
Which view is accurate? Which is the Truth? Both and neither. Through the
maiden’s joyful eyes, the world is joyful; to the shipwrecked sailor, who is ight-
ing for his life, the world presents as malevolent. We ultimately are captive to
our own circumstance. In another poem from War Is Kind, Crane returns to
the cynical questioning of Black Riders:
What?
You deine me God with these trinkets?
Can my misery meal on an ordered walking
Of surpliced numbskulls?
And a fanfare of lights?
Or even upon the measured pulpiting
Of the familiar false and true?
Is this God?
Where, then, is hell?
Show me some bastard mushroom
Sprung from a pollution of blood.
It is better.
Where is god? (SCP, p. 47)
As John Blair argues, this is not a poem that denies God or religion; rather, it
rejects the customs of worship, or the institutions of religion, that intervene
in our experience of God.26
We ind a similar indictment in Crane’s poem “A man adrift on a slim spar,”
which was not published until after his death. The sea surrounding this ship-
wrecked sailor is hostile, too, with “waves rearing lashy dark points” and
“growl after growl of crest.” The stark, three-word refrain, “God is cold,” is
repeated four times (SCP, p. 83). In critical commentary on the poem, there
is some disagreement as to whether God is culpable, refusing to intervene to
help man, or merely leaving man room to exercise his free will, making him
accept responsibility for his own fate. Is the poem a damning of God, then,

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or simply an expression of the pathos of man against an indiferent nature?

From the shipwrecked sailor’s perspective, God is at fault, but his vision is not
necessarily reliable.27
In another posthumously published poem, the question of man’s ability to
recognize good and evil is brought into question:
The patent of a lord
And the bangle of a bandit
Make argument
Which God solves
Only after lighting more candles. (SCP, p. 90)
Here Crane’s Christian belief would seem intact, as we sense from these lines
that God will enlighten us in death, and that we must have faith in God, not
question divine will. Clearly, he is no longer simply denying God, as he does
in his early verse. Crane also expresses his belief in God in “When a people
reach the top of a hill” (uncollected in his lifetime) and “Each small gleam was
a voice” (in War Is Kind):
Small glowing pebbles
Thrown on the dark plane of evening
Sing good ballads of God
And eternity, with soul’s rest. (SCP, p. 60)
Even so, man is not able necessarily to count on any succor in life but instead
is consigned to uncertainty and seemingly random chance. Crane’s pessimis-
tic determinism is probably best and most succinctly exempliied by a squib
in War Is Kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.” (SCP, p. 57)

This terse dialogue stands as the very sign and symbol of naturalism, serv-
ing as the deinitive statement of man’s total insigniicance and nature’s utter
disregard.
Together, these three naturalist poets helped set the tone for a number of
American poets to come, their legacy of rebellion in politics and art mak-
ing an indelible cultural impression. Edgar Lee Masters’s book of epitaphic
poem-portraits, Spoon River Anthology (1915), represents a range of men and
women who in life were trapped in a narrow social environment and whose

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fates were determined for them. Sarah N. Cleghorn, in poems such as “The
Golf Links” and “The Survival of the Fittest,” along with other largely for-
gotten leftist poets of the early twentieth century, also follows in the wake
of the probing of social injustice in Gilman, Markham, and Crane. Upton
Sinclair’s The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, irst
published in 1915, rounds up the work of many of these poets, from Morris
Rosenfeld’s “A Cry from the Ghetto” (“I do not ask, or know. I only toil”) to
Florence Wilkinson Evans’s “The Flower Factory,” a poem that describes the
struggle of child laborers, who “will dream of cotton petals, endless crimson,
sufocating, / Never of a wild rose thicket or the singing of a cricket, / But
the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, / And their
tired lids will l utter with the street’s hysteric screams.”28 In addition, Carl
Sandburg, in poems like “Mamie” and “Muckers” in Chicago Poems (1916),
paints a picture of the circumscribed lives of workers, trapped in dehuman-
izing economic and social conditions, even as he writes verse that suggests
the ability of man to retain his essential dignity in the face of brute labor (as
in the case of Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe”). Theodore Dreiser, best
known for his stirring naturalist novels, also wrote in that vein in his poetry.
“The Factory,” for instance, takes a fatalistic view of inequality, with the
laborers’ “deepest, darkest moods repressed”; when the speaker inds “one
who dreams a dream,” that dream quickly dissipates (“trembling, leeing
thoughts!”) at the sound of the shoe factory whistle.29 Other of Dreiser’s
poems, however, seem to suggest the opportunity of man to rise above his
conditions through spiritual belief. In all of these naturalist poets, we sense
the tension between the airmation and denial of the self interlacing their
political and cultural critiques.

Notes
1. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(1966; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 11. In his two-
pronged understanding of naturalism, Pizer follows Charles C. Walcutt’s
American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (1956).
2. Quoted in Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 130.
3. Horace Traubel, review of In This Our World, Conservator 9 (September 1898),
p. 109.
4. Quoted in Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman], The Later Poetry of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1996), p. 28.

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 T yl e r H of f m an

5. Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman], In This Our World (1893; New York:
Arno Press, 1974), pp. 7–8. This volume will be cited subsequently in the text
as ITOW.
6. Stetson [Gilman], The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 73 (hereafter
cited parenthetically in the text as LP).
7. Edwin Markham, Poems of Edwin Markham, ed. Charles L. Wallis (New
York: Harper, 1950), pp. 30–31. This volume will be cited subsequently in the
text as P.
8. Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe (New York: Doubleday and McClure,
1900), p. 23. This book comes with an extensive note by Markham on the cir-
cumstances surrounding the writing of the poem.
9. Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left
(New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 17.
10. William Dean Howells, Selected Letters, ed. George Warren Arms (Boston:
Twayne, 1979), vol. 1, p. 202.
11. Quoted in Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie, Studies in American Culture:
Dominant Ideas and Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960),
p. 66.
12. Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Neale, 1911),
vol. 10, pp. 141, 142, 143.
13. Quoted in Jesse Sidney Goldstein, “Edwin Markham, Ambrose Bierce, and
‘The Man with the Hoe,’ ” Modern Language Notes 58:3 (March 1943), p. 174.
14. Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (New York: Doubleday
and McClure, 1899), p. 119. This volume will be cited subsequently in the text
as MHOP.
15. Edwin Markham, Lincoln and Other Poems (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901),
p. 60.
16. Markham, The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems (New York: Doubleday,
1919), p. 164.
17. A Wreath for Edwin Markham: Tributes from the Poets of America on His Seventieth
Birthday April 23, 1922 (Chicago: Bookfellows, 1922), p. 16.
18. Stephen Crane, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane,
ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973), vol. 8,
p. 759.
19. Quoted in John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York: William Sloane, 1950),
p. 141.
20. Crane, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, vol. 8,
pp. 599, 600, 591.
21. George Monteiro (ed.), Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 18.
22. Richard M. Weatherford (ed.), Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1973 [1997]), p. 81.

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 Political Poets and Naturalism

23. Monteiro (ed.), Stephen Crane, p. 16.

24. Quoted in Berryman, Stephen Crane, p. 92.
25. Stephen Crane, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane,
ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1975), vol.
10, p. 3. This volume of the edition will be cited subsequently in the text
as SCP.
26. John Blair, “The Posture of a Bohemian in the Poetry of Stephen Crane,”
American Literature 61 (1989), pp. 215–29.
27. In his study The Poetry of Stephen Crane (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957), Daniel Hofman observes that “this poem is Crane’s most com-
plete denial of God – not only of the God of vengeance, but, worse, of the
God of mercy” (p. 96); this view of an uncaring deity stands against Patrick
K. Dooley’s sense of Crane’s construction of a “inite God, a quiet, caring
father” in the poem – one who “sometimes does not intervene” because he is
not omnipotent (Patrick K. Dooley, The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane
[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993], p. 127).
28. Upton Sinclair (ed.), The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social
Protest (1915; New York: Lyle Stuart, 1963), pp. 43, 419. Markham’s “The Man
with the Hoe” and “The Man Under the Stone,” Gilman’s “Child Labor,” and
Crane’s “Have you ever made a just man?” from War Is Kind also make appear-
ances in this anthology.
29. Theodore Dreiser, Moods, Philosophic and Emotional Cadenced and Declaimed
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), pp. 234, 235.

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*
FORMS OF MODERNISM,
1900–1950
 Chapter 22
The Twentieth Century Begins
Jo h n Ti m b e r m a n N e wco mb

Soon after 1890, poetry in the United States entered a period of serious crisis
in which commentators routinely doubted its continued survival, presuming
it destined to become a pathetic orphan in modern cultural economies dom-
inated by mass-marketed ephemera such as popular songs and dime novels.
This decline in status had been precipitous. As late as 1875, poetry was with-
out question the central genre of American literary culture. Its foremost liv-
ing practitioners, the “Fireside Poets” Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Bryant,
Holmes, and Whittier, were lionized as the nation’s greatest creative spirits. But
by the time the last member of this canon died in 1894, it was evident to most
that they had few if any worthy successors. Measured against these “tremen-
dous Absences,” as William Dean Howells put it in 1899, contemporary poets
amounted to little more than dilettantes and feeble imitators.1 Meanwhile,
the genteel custodians of the nation’s elite literary institutions, deploring the
unpoetic times, clung to the formal and tonal conventions of decades or even
centuries earlier, insisting on portrayals of American life couched in nostalgic
pastoral imagery – as if keeping urban-industrial modernity out of poetry
could nullify its destabilizing force on the world. Poetry had come to function
as an anticommodity, the genre most antithetical to modernized conditions
that threatened to reduce all works of art to an endless parade of ephem-
eral commodities. These circumstances generated fervent idealization of past
genius but virtually precluded any institutional or economic support for living
writers. Anything that smacked of bureaucratic organization, career planning,
or worldly reward was likely to be condemned as a corruption of poetry’s
pure nature. Given the burgeoning support for civic artistic institutions in the
United States during these same years, this refusal to support poetry was not
the sign of a populace with no money or goodwill to spare for the ine arts, but
a psychic and ideological imperative, an expression of resistance to the com-
mercializing and professionalizing forces transforming American culture.

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By 1900, these circumstances had thrown American poetry’s discursive

infrastructure into desperate disarray. In contrast to the intensive institutional
organization taking place in other cultural genres and professional disciplines,
no one took sustained responsibility for the publicizing and reviewing of new
books of verse, the identiication of emerging authors and trends, or the pres-
ervation of periodical verses past their immediate moment of publication.
No serial publications were devoted to the work of living American poets. No
ongoing national contests or awards remunerated them. In the twelve years
following the publication of Edmund Clarence Stedman’s American Anthology
in 1900 – years in which the overall number of books published in America
exploded – not a single anthology of serious literary verse by living Americans
appeared.2 Support was especially lacking for younger or lesser-known writ-
ers, who had little hope of seeing a volume of their work unless they inanced
it themselves. The nascent discipline of academic literary scholarship, seeking
institutional legitimacy from the quasi-scientiic methods of historical philol-
ogy, ignored the words of living writers. Not only was the writing of poetry
not taught in institutional contexts, as architecture and painting and music
now were, but an entrenched account of poetic genius insisted that it could
not be taught at all, that poets were not made but born.
Far from professing regret at the plight of the contemporary poet, many
turn-of-the-century commentators demanded that poets embrace poverty
and neglect as character-building virtues, claiming that they could not real-
ize their full potential without being unhappy and ignored. Thus an 1893 piece
in Poet-Lore described the poet’s lot as to “be silent and quietly . . . wait in the
calm assurance that any word with truth and beauty in it will always ind its
audience, ‘it though few,’ ”3 while another in The Forum hoped that “there will
never be a society for the prevention of cruelty to poets,” because “the specta-
cle of a snug, self-suicing existence can be no inspiration to him who yearns
for greatness and for glory.”4 Those who complained were met by a rhetoric of
canonical plenitude that held that all the great poems had been written already,
that the productions of contemporary poets were merely so much waste
paper. As late as February 1911, The Dial, not yet the champion of modernism
it would become in the 1920s but still a vocal defender of the genteel tradition,
insisted that American poets were provided not too little opportunity but too
much, because it seemed that every speaker at ceremonial public occasions
summoned forth execrable ef usions in rhyming couplets or blank verse.5 The
Dial concluded by ridiculing the notion that these “Misguided Poets” should
be supported or even encouraged, suggesting sardonically that most should
be rewarded only for promising not to write anything more.6 If, as The Dial

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opined in a similar editorial of 1914, “the tendency after one has waxed fat is to
turn unto false gods,”7 then conditions keeping poets on the edge of starvation
could be seen as enhancements to the nation’s cultural life.
The Dial’s position turned on a familiar modern paradox in which improv-
ing levels of education and inancial security in the overall population even-
tually generate so much artistic aspiration that the value of all works seems
diminished – at least from elite perspectives. This same irony deined the sit-
uation of poetry in the dramatic expansion of the American book publishing
industry after 1902. Annual compilations by Publishers’ Weekly of the number
of books published in America suggest that even during the worst of poetry’s
crisis between 1900 and 1910, more books of verse were being issued each year.
And yet this increase in the sheer number of volumes clearly did not signal a
more hospitable publishing climate for poetry. Indeed, in January 1911, sur-
veying a year in which the number of volumes Publishers’ Weekly classiied as
“poetry and drama” leaped to the highest level yet,8 the editors were moved to
complain that “pure literature perhaps never made a poorer showing than this
year, poetry of promise being especially lacking.”9 During these years even
the most respected and high-toned irms routinely demanded subventions for
volumes of verse, a practice that likely became a self-fulilling circuit in which
publishers, having guaranteed themselves a break-even result or small proit
from the author’s contribution, felt little impetus to market volumes of verse
energetically, which merely reinforced their assumption that poetry had no
market potential. Just two years before she issued the irst number of Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse, Harriet Monroe had written to Houghton Mil in about
issuing a book of her verse, which they irmly declined on “any other basis
than the commission one,” citing “the present state of public inattention to
anything in verse form,” which they stated as “a condition, not a theory.”10 The
complacent certainty of these phrasings suggests that publishers had thor-
oughly internalized poetry’s economic unviability as an iron law of the mod-
ern literary marketplace.
These converging forces created an impasse in which contemporary
poems were routinely derided as stale imitations of revered igures and forms
of the past, yet nearly all attempts at innovation in form or subject matter
were greeted with corrosive skepticism. The young American poets writing
between 1890 and 1910, doubting that their work would be appreciated or
even seen, produced self-relexive verse poignantly marked by a sense of belat-
edness and dispossession. And yet this phase of anxiety and apparent futil-
ity made poetry in the United States modern. After 1912 the participants in
the explosion of creative and institutional activity that they called the “New

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Poetry” or the “New Verse” would rediscover an ebullient conviction in the

vocation of poetry. But it was their “lost” predecessors of the previous two
decades who irst broke modern ground, articulating a poetics of skepticism
toward received ideas and conventional expressive strategies, making such
“modernist” qualities as ambiguity, marginality, and irony central to their aspi-
rations as artists. Underneath the conventional surfaces and archaic imagery
of much turn-of-the-century poetry, moments of violent rebellion simmer,
anticipating the ferocious iconoclasm of Ezra Pound and other avant-gardists
of the post-1912 renaissance. In “Les Bourgeois” (1902), for example, George
Cabot Lodge (1873–1909) portrays the American middle classes as ruled by fear,
weakness, and hypocritical desire, living lives no more signiicant than those
of “gaudy l ies that play and perish” in a single day, who are, “Once vanished,
like a stupid dream / That never was.” Lodge ends by urging his bourgeoisie
to “Be something, good or bad! Be real!,”11 embracing the modernist ideal of
authenticity at any transgressive cost.
The continuity between the young American poets of the 1890s and the
most prominent igures of the 1910s comes into clearer focus when we see
both as comprising a single generation born between the end of the Civil War
and the mid-1880s. Richard Hovey, Francis Brooks, William Vaughn Moody,
Stephen Crane, George Cabot Lodge, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ellen Glasgow,
Trumbull Stickney, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born between 1864 and 1875,
were essentially chronological contemporaries of Edgar Lee Masters, Amy
Lowell, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Wallace Stevens,
born between 1868 and 1879. Yet with just one exception, the irst group, pub-
lishing actively in the 1890s and 1900s, had either died prematurely or given
up writing verse by 1910. The second group published almost nothing of note
before 1910, becoming signiicant forces in the New Poetry only in their late
thirties and forties. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) is the only poet to
overlap substantially between the two groups. The middle-aged avant-gardists
of the 1910s were more oriented toward the exploration of new forms than
were their turn-of-the-century predecessors, but both groups exhibit qualities
that mark them as modern in outlook: sardonic, sometimes furious antago-
nism toward traditions and predecessors; an ainity for irony, historical ref-
erence, and self-relexivity; a persistent interest in placing poetry into formal
and thematic dialogue with other literary genres and art forms; and a growing
sense of engagement with the material conditions and psychological dynam-
ics of twentieth-century urban experience.
The exclusion and purposelessness felt by younger American poets between
1890 and 1910 became a primary subject of their work, which often poignantly

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reveals how they had themselves internalized the prevailing philistine stereo-
type of verse writers as idlers and parasites. “A Common Plaint” by Alice
Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), written around 1900 but ironically not published
until 1988, announces in its title her generation’s shared sense of dispossession
and futility. Worrying that she should be attempting some saleable potboiler
in prose, “A tale of thrilling things,” the speaker complains with some disgust
“And here, I scribble rhymes” instead.12 Yet despite her real need (“A check
looms large into my sight”), she “cannot write” because she knows “No edi-
tor will heed my plight, / I’ve proved that scores of times” (PD, p. 76). The
speaker sticks with poetry not because it alone can express her feelings but
because its derided status best symbolizes her belief that she will be rejected
and ignored no matter what she writes: “I’d rather dream than work; / Then
what’s the use, let’s take to-night / For luxury of shirk. / Those editors would
send it back, / I cannot write, ah, well, alack” (PD, p. 76). Another verse of
1900, “Play Up, Piper!” by Josephine Preston Peabody (1874–1922), articulates
the plight of the turn-of-the-century poet by asking sardonically why anyone
still bothers to write verse in the absence of any purpose or reward: “But tell
us of the wage, man, / You had for this hard day; / Play up, play up, dear Piper,
/ And tell us why you play!”13 The demand “tell us why you play,” implying
that poetry’s existence must now be continually justiied even or especially by
those who ought to value it most fervently, became the overriding concern of
American verse during these two decades.
These concerns were often articulated through self-relexive personae that
positioned the modern poet as a vagabond wandering through landscapes
that have lost all comprehensible markers of coherence, tradition, or ethics.
The imagery used by Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935) in 1909 to charac-
terize her speaker-poet – “A wayfarer blown to and fro”14 – echoed through a vast
number of turn-of-the-century poems. Perhaps the most widely popular poets
of the American 1890s were the “Vagabondians”– Richard Hovey (1864–1900)
and the Canadian native Bliss Carman (1861–1929) – who took this persona as
their entire identity and credo. The untitled envoi on the inner cover of their
volume More Songs from Vagabondia (1896) evokes such predecessor works as
Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1860–1873), but the Vagabondians insist
that now everyone – and particularly the modern poet – is “an alien and a
vagabond,” merely “a lodger for the night / In this old wayside inn of earth.”
Some, including the most important African American poet before 1910, Paul
Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), sought to emphasize the more sanguine aspects
of the vagabond topos. In “Morning” (1905), for example, Dunbar portrays his
“wanderer” as a “careless-free” igure who “fares right jauntily, / For towns

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and houses are, thinks he, / For scorning, for scorning.”15 But young turn-of-
the-century poets found expressing scorn for the domestic and conventional
much easier than articulating viable alternatives. The often aimless charac-
ter of their rebellion was expressed most directly by William Vaughn Moody
(1869–1910) in “Road-Hymn for the Start” (1901), which begins with a seem-
ingly unequivocal repudiation of American genteel poetry – “Leave the early
bells at chime, / Leave the kindled hearth to blaze”16 – but then sets its wander-
ing personae adrift on the road with no clear object or destination: “We have
heard a voice cry ‘Wander!’ / That was all we heard it say.”17
The trope of modern poet as wanderer or exile reached its ironic apogee
in the work and lives of a group of ill-fated young writers, including Moody,
Lodge, Robinson, Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904), Francis Brooks (1867–1898),
Philip Henry Savage (1868–1899), and Hugh McCulloch (1869–1902), who
matriculated at Harvard University between 1889 and 1895, most of them
gravitating toward a charismatic young instructor, George Santayana (1863–
1952, class of 1886). Although these “Harvard poets” seemed to have suicient
talent, ambition, and pedigree to claim leading roles in the American literary
world, they were hampered in varying degrees not only by the inhospitable
conditions in contemporary poetry described previously, but also by their own
obsessive quest for some form of “spiritual idealism” intransigently opposed
to the despoiling materialism of urban-industrial modernity. The opening
image of one of Santayana’s 1894 sonnets evokes this urgent desire for insu-
lar self-exile: “A wall, a wall around my garden rear, / And hedge me in from
the disconsolate hills.”18 Idealizing the elite college as a quasi-monastic space,
this enclosure serves to protect the speaker from the contaminating force of
a modern mass man.19 Such urgent need for self-quarantine against moder-
nity tempted the Harvard poets to wander through fetishized fantasy versions
of biblical, classical, or medieval cultures, while restiveness with the stil ing
canonical traditions of American poetry led them to agonistic identiication
with monumental mythic igures who struggle nobly against an insurmount-
able force: Prometheus (Stickney, Moody), Heracles (Lodge, McCulloch),
Cain (Lodge), and Julian the Apostate (Stickney).
The most consistently successful poets who emerged from this “exile” cul-
ture of 1890s Harvard were Brooks, Moody, and Robinson, who in their stron-
ger moments found that dispossession might lead not only to frustration and
self-pity but to the freedom to explore new forms and subject matter. Their
most fully modern poems discard overheated rhetoric and bookish nostalgia,
working instead toward a poetics of close observation of the phenomenal,
material, or social world. Francis Brooks died before he could publish even a

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second volume, but in the title and themes of Margins (1896), he addressed the
exile of the contemporary poet, revealing a capacity for striking natural imag-
ery and phenomenological complexity that went well beyond the conventions
of that moment. “Titular,” the work that best embodies his distinctive poetics,
begins with an elegant mosaic of visual images, spatial relationships, and emo-
tional impressions – “Margins of the mere and moor, / Margins of the sea by
shell / Convoluted, many-hued, / Mosses manifold, deined; / Margins of the
furrowed ields, / Daisy-decked, and aster-starred” – that portrays the poet’s
marginality as a liminal state ofering access to “untraveled worlds.”20
William Vaughn Moody, unlike Brooks and Robinson, was an insider in
literary Harvard, remaining a lifelong friend of the New England Brahmins
George Cabot Lodge and Trumbull Stickney. Yet he had grown up an orphan
in small-town Indiana and in 1895 would relocate to the new University of
Chicago, joining the socially progressive upper-middle-class milieu from
which came the editorial staf and many of the inancial guarantors for Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse. Although Moody would write widely, from the obliga-
tory verse closet drama on classical themes (The Fire Bringer [1904]) to a prose
“Western” play that enjoyed notable success on Broadway and the London
stage (The Great Divide [1906]), he found his strongest voice as a dissident
social critic in two major poems condemning the American occupation of
the Philippines, “Ode in a Time of Hesitation” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the
Philippines.”
The ode was irst published in the Atlantic Monthly in May 1900 after months
of debate concerning the authenticity and propriety of newspaper stories
publishing clandestine letters from soldiers recounting atrocities by American
forces on the Filipinos. It quickly became the best-known American poem on
the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, quoted widely by anti-imperi-
alist speakers, editors, and congressmen. The poem is cast as a fall into dis-
illusioned understanding, from naive pride at America’s stated commitment
to Cuban freedom in 1898 to bitter awareness that the subsequent occupa-
tion of the Philippines was nothing but imperialist oppression, “pure con-
quest put to hire.”21 Moody inds an inspired symbolic locus for this critique:
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze bas-relief on the Boston Common honor-
ing the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth regiment, the irst African American com-
bat troops in the American military, and their young abolitionist commander,
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who were devastated in a near-suicidal attack on
a Confederate fort in 1863. As it would for Robert Lowell sixty years later in
“For the Union Dead,” the statue becomes for Moody a symbol of American
idealism undermined by ongoing selishness and injustice, the African

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American soldiers representing the foreign non-Caucasian peoples who had

sought America’s aid toward their own self-rule but were instead subjected to
its imperial ambitions. Measuring himself against a dissident poetic tradition
personiied by Whittier and Whitman, the speaker confesses he has “striven
to evade” the moral imperative to create a “swift and angry stave” indicting
the nation’s drift into imperialist mendacity. Although he still shrinks from the
task (“Too sorely heavy is the debt they lay / On me”), the “resolute ghosts” on
the statue and in the news haunt his escapist desires as they reveal the nation’s
shame, and inally he gathers his moral indignation into forceful lines that
evoke Whittier’s abolitionist jeremiads: “For save we let the island men go
free, / Those baled and dislaureled ghosts / Will curse us from the lamenta-
ble coasts / Where walk the frustrate dead.”22 Just as in 1860, America’s moral
crucible in 1900 concerns the bondage or self-determination of a racial other.
“On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” written later the same year and
published in The Atlantic in February 1901, converts another traditional poetic
form, the eulogy, into an incisive analysis of the dishonorable realities under-
neath the idealistic rhetoric the United States had used to justify its takeover of
the islands. As its dead native son is returned, the soldier’s hometown barely
pauses from the endless “roar” of commerce to honor him. Yet the iction
that his sacriice was made for a worthy cause must be maintained even in
death (“never a whispered hint but the ight he fought was good”), because
now the soldier, embalmed in the trappings of honor, has become part of the
“grists of trade,” a multilayered phrase that suggests the booming demand
for military commodities enriching American industry, the imperialist goal
of opening vast new markets for American goods, and the operation of the
war-propaganda mills of the new century, trading in human bodies as patriotic
symbols. The poem ends with bitter prophecies of “evil days” ahead, when
“the nation, robed in gloom,” will rue its imperial misdeeds.23 Moody’s two
great anti-imperialist poems ofer a model of the modern poet as a dissident
patriot, expressing love of country by decrying the damage done to its ideals
by the ominous convergence of expansionist capitalism and nationalist ideolo-
gies. They are among the earliest manifestations of a deining tendency of
twentieth-century American poetry, away from long-standing homiletic and
patriotic traditions celebrating normative social values, and toward the elabo-
ration of oppositional subject positions.
E. A. Robinson (as he preferred to be known), the product of a desper-
ately unhappy middle-class family of Gardiner, Maine, could muster the funds
for only a two-year sojourn as a “special student” at Harvard (1891–1892) and
never felt entirely comfortable in that rareied milieu, although exposure to

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its literary circles aforded early publishing opportunity and helped him to
imagine himself as a serious poet. Typical of his Harvard roots, Robinson
was mesmerized by medievalism throughout his career, as such voluminous
narrative works as Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927) attest; but
his comic-melancholy self-portrait “Miniver Cheevy” (1910), about a dreamer
who “eyed a khaki suit with loathing” and “missed the medieval grace / Of
iron clothing,”24 shows he also maintained some sardonic distance from these
potentially disabling obsessions. His saving grace as a poet was his deeply felt,
if often morose, response to a speciic sociomaterial milieu, the chronically
declining villages of northern New England, to which his strongest poems
returned well after he had permanently departed Maine for New York City in
the late 1890s. Although he published nearly thirty books of poetry, the most
admired of his works are the earlier Tilbury Town verses in The Children of the
Night (1897) and The Town Down the River (1910), which, although composed
in graceful metrical and rhyming forms, brought into American poetry the
inl uence of realist iction, particularly the strain of New England regionalism
exempliied by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. In lyrics such as
“The Clerks” and “The House on the Hill” (both published in 1897), Robinson’s
vivid portrayals of the village’s dusty surfaces, decaying structures, and ossi-
ied social relations anticipated the close observation and precise description
that would be emphasized by the Imagists, and the investment in the local
espoused by such modernists as William Carlos Williams.
Robinson’s Tilbury Town poems also evoke the contemporary realist novel
in their emphasis on complex characterization, at times anticipating Edgar
Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) by extending intersecting biogra-
phies across multiple poems. Balancing narrative and meditation, such char-
acter poems as “Reuben Bright” (1897), “Flammonde” (1915), and “Mr. Flood’s
Party” (1921) emphasize ironic reversals, lost connections, and unfulilled
hopes within a modernizing social milieu of eroding communitarian values.
Although a lifelong bachelor, Robinson was also capable of great insight into
the complexity of intimate relationships; in “Eros Turannos” (1914) he sketched
with economy and empathy the shifting power dynamics and the underlying
desperation shaping the lives of an unnamed married couple. Many Tilbury
poems are narrated by a collective persona (“We”) that articulates a choral
perspective of the village on the particular characters and situations being
portrayed, but these references often seem calculated to emphasize a mod-
ernist distance between the community’s imperfect knowledge and the cryp-
tic or unfathomable truths known only to the individuals involved: why the
outwardly fortunate subject of “Richard Cory” (1897) was miserable enough

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to “put a bullet through his head,”25 or how to measure the private visions
of bliss experienced by the woman of “Eros Turannos” against her apparent
marital misery.
At a moment when most poets, even those who yearned to be “modern,”
remained ensnared by the assumption that poetry gained in power and nobil-
ity as it increased in rhetorical intensity, Robinson rediscovered the great
potential of understatement. Even where he comes closest to the declamatory
lyric mode predominant in American verse before 1910, Robinson maintains a
delicate tonal restraint, as in “Luke Havergal” (1897), a poem that suggests the
inl uence of Yeats’s “twilight” work of the 1890s as translated into a distinctive
American vernacular, understated yet emotionally intense: “Go to the west-
ern gate, Luke Havergal, / There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, /
And in the twilight wait for what will come. / The leaves will whisper there of
her, and some, / Like lying words, will strike you as they fall; / But go, and if
you listen she will call.”26 Despite its limited range of moods, Robinson’s work
demonstrated how traditional forms could be reoriented away from the con-
ventions of exalted sentiment and poetic diction, toward a poetry expressive
of the voices, hopes, and disappointments of everyday life. In that sense, much
as Whitman can be considered the progenitor of modern free verse, Robinson
stands behind all twentieth-century American formal poets, most immedi-
ately Robert Frost, but thereafter Millay, Ransom, Bishop, Jarrell, Wilbur, and
Justice, among many others.
Although the climate of crisis and anxiety in American poetry would not
ease substantially until 1912, some attempt to renew interest in contemporary
verse can be detected from the middle of the irst decade of the century. These
early initiatives sought to assuage crippling absences of access to print, to time
and money, to readers and peers, or to a viable national poetic tradition. In 1905
in the Boston Evening Transcript, a young African American poet and journalist,
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (1878–1962), began publishing summa-
ries of the thousands of verses appearing in American periodicals. He contin-
ued these annually through 1912, and then from 1913 published an expanded
version in book form as the Anthology of Magazine Verse (yearly through 1929,
with occasional volumes thereafter). Although Braithwaite’s own tastes ran
to elevated tonalities and fairly traditional forms, his earnest efort to read
and evaluate all the nation’s magazine verse reasserted the premise that con-
temporary poems might be worth preserving as more than ephemeral page
illers. In late 1909 a group based in New York led by Jessie B. Rittenhouse
and Edward J. Wheeler sought to organize poets into an institutional entity
analogous to the quasi-oicial bodies recently created to support and regulate

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nearly every intellectual and artistic discipline. The result of their eforts, the
Poetry Society of America, would be dominated by a group of pedestrian East
Coast versiiers who would play little role in the New Verse movement, but its
model of a national network of poets, emulated over the next twenty years by
ailiated societies in nearly every state, helped to establish modern poetry’s
place in a professionalized disciplinary culture.
In early 1912, Braithwaite and Wheeler agreed to serve as judges in another
institutional innovation, a contest and anthology featuring one poem each by
one hundred poets. The Lyric Year failed to become an annual ongoing project
as originally planned, yet the single volume published in late 1912 was still
something of a landmark, the irst signiicant contest for American poetry in
decades, and the irst anthology of serious contemporary verse since Stedman’s
volume of 1900. By the standards of a few years later, its verses show little evi-
dence of stylistic experiment, but several poems portraying the material and
experiential textures of urban-industrial modernity, including the irst-prize
winner, “Second Avenue” by Orrick Johns, anticipated the embrace of modern
subject matter that would characterize the New Verse movement. The Lyric
Year also gave early support to several younger writers who would become
important in the New Verse, such as Witter Bynner, Sara Teasdale, Arthur
Davison Ficke, Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, James Oppenheim, and
the sensational twenty-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose “Renascence”
narrowly missed winning a prize, creating the controversy that launched her
meteoric career and earned her a private scholarship to Vassar College.
Although these early initiatives have been largely obscured by the transfor-
mative events of the following decade, they were signiicant challenges to the
dominant view of modern poets as preposterous dilettantes, and they were
arguments for imagining them instead as productive twentieth-century art-
ists. The editor of The Lyric Year, Ferdinand Earle, closed his preface by noting
the staggering fact that ten thousand verses by almost two thousand writers
had been submitted to the contest.27 If nothing else, this enormous response
belied complacent assumptions that poetry in America was silently withering
away. Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), who began issuing her magazine Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse in October, two months before The Lyric Year appeared,
remarked that the contest showed “how eager is the hitherto unfriended
American muse to seize any helping hand.”28 She must have been greatly
encouraged by this conirmation of her belief that American poetry would
grow in volume and quality if poets were ofered some hope of recognition
and inancial support. As she prepared the irst issues of Poetry in mid-1912,
neither Monroe nor anyone else could have conidently predicted the boom

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times just ahead for poetry in the United States. Yet barely a year later, she
had irmly established something American poets and poetry lovers had long
assumed to be impossible: a stable and vigorous space that publicized virtually
all the signiicant books of American and British verse, defended experiments
in both versiication and subject matter, and even insisted on paying poets for
their work. Poetry’s immediate and lasting success vindicated the motivating
premise of Monroe’s work – that to immerse American poetry in the discur-
sive practices and economies of the modern metropolis would not ruin but
energize it. The astonishing period of rejuvenation that began in October
1912 indicates that the conditions of crisis described previously had decisively
debilitated previous norms of poetic practice – that American verse in the old
nineteenth-century sense was indeed dead.
After October 1912, American poetry’s reversal of fortune was remarkably
swift. By Christmas, The Lyric Year and the irst three issues of Poetry were
being perused on the shelves of bookstores and discussed in the pages of mag-
azines. A poem in Poetry’s January 1913 issue, “General William Booth Enters
into Heaven” by Vachel Lindsay, created a sensation like no American poem
since Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” in 1899 and was quickly
reprinted in multiple venues sensitive to popular demand, including the
March issues of Current Opinion and The Literary Digest, and The Independent
for March 13. Meanwhile, scandalous verses by Ezra Pound in early issues of
Poetry were beginning to galvanize the rebellious energies of young American
poets who had long chafed against the genteel-middlebrow American reader-
ship that Pound disparaged as a “mass of dolts” in “To Whistler, American.”29
By July 1913, The Literary Digest had begun to speak of “a boom in poetry,” sin-
gling out the reception of Lindsay’s “General Booth” and citing “periodicals
devoted exclusively to poetry, an increasing popular demand for volumes of
verse, more and more space given up to poems in the popular magazines, and
an improvement in the economic conditions of the poets themselves.”30 By
year’s end, Braithwaite had stepped into the void left by the disappearance of
The Lyric Year and published his irst yearly Anthology of Magazine Verse, while
Houghton Mil in had brought out an anthology of American poetry since
1900 edited by Rittenhouse, The Little Book of Modern Verse, which sold beyond
anyone’s expectations.
The momentum accelerated further throughout 1914. In The Literary Digest
for April, in a piece called “Poets Again Best Sellers,” the president of Macmillan,
George P. Brett, remarked on a notable “change in the public’s attitude toward
literature” that had produced such surprises as Rabindrinath Tagore’s 1913
volume of verse The Gardener, whose U.S. sales of more than 100,000 had not

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been seen “since the heyday of Tennyson.”31 These changes in the market
for poetry had come, according to Brett, “with disconcerting suddenness.”32
The following month, short free verse poems by the pseudonymous “Webster
Ford” about the lives and deaths of small-town Midwesterners began appear-
ing in the St. Louis magazine Reedy’s Mirror, to immediate national acclaim.
When these verses were collected into a Macmillan volume issued in April
1915, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology became that rarest of things,
a poetry best seller. A new publishing economy for modern American poetry
had begun to emerge that would have seemed an impossible dream to the
morose commentators of just a decade earlier. Over the next ive years, many
volumes, including Lindsay’s The Congo and Other Poems (1914), Amy Lowell’s
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Robert Frost’s North of Boston (1915), Carl
Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916), and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence and
Other Poems (1917) – all issued by prominent commercial presses without sub-
vention – would ind sizable markets and help to make their authors full-scale
literary celebrities.
In its heyday between 1913 and 1919, the New Verse was published and
publicized and attacked, defended, and wondered at across a wide range
of sites, including mass-marketed general magazines (such as Munsey’s and
The American Magazine), monthlies and bimonthlies oriented toward the lit-
erary culture (The Bookman, The Dial, Reedy’s Mirror, The Forum, and The
Independent), certain academic journals (Yale Review and Sewanee Review),
publications of cultural reportage (Current Opinion and The Literary Digest),
urban-chic magazines (The Smart Set and Vanity Fair), and even the old “qual-
ity magazines” that had borne the standard of genteel culture (particularly
The Atlantic and The Century). Important volumes of poems were issued by
many diferent publishers, both younger irms such as Mitchell Kennerley,
Alfred A. Knopf, Boni & Liveright, and B. W. Huebsch and old-guard houses
such as Houghton Mil in, Macmillan, Harper’s, Henry Holt, and Scribner’s.
But above all, the creative energies of the New Verse were catalyzed in
the “little magazine,” a distinctively modern publishing format made possi-
ble by the convergence of falling production costs and emerging practices
of niche marketing. A little magazine required minimal capital outlay and
could be advertised and distributed relatively easily, if not widely, through
distinctive subcultural venues such as the “advanced” literary bookstores
then found in nearly every major American city. An individual publication
might be read by very few people and might last for only a few numbers,
but after 1912 the little magazine remained vigorous and stable as a ield of
literary production.

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Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published in Chicago by Harriet Monroe and

her successors since 1912, was not only the irst little magazine in the United
States devoted to contemporary poetry but the irst successful manifestation
of a modern American avant-garde. Redeining poetic “genius” from some
vague mystical alatus into an exhilarating interchange between experiment-
ing authors and open-minded audiences, Poetry challenged the authority of
established cultural institutions and sponsored verse in experimental styles
and modern subject matter. It was quickly joined by a scrappy group of other
magazines featuring contemporary verse, all of them in diferent ways and
proportions both socially engaged and aesthetically experimental. The most
important of these included The Masses (1911–1917), a New York–based organ
of revolutionary socialism that published more than four hundred verses in an
eclectic mix of styles, mingling avant-garde ironies with the most urgent polit-
ical issues of the day. Although its circulation was much greater than that of
a little magazine, the NAACP-sponsored periodical The Crisis (1910–present)
published verse by contemporary African American poets and began to play
a major role in the Harlem Renaissance after Jessie Fauset became its literary
editor in 1919. The Little Review (1914–1929), begun in Chicago by Margaret
Anderson, moved to New York and inally to Paris, becoming a key impresario
of European experimental modernism, lionizing the work of Eliot, Pound,
and Joyce, among many others. Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (1915–1919) passion-
ately pursued new styles of free verse expressive of the unprecedented mate-
rial and social landscapes of the twentieth-century city, achieving a canonical
impact drastically disproportionate to its tiny circulation. The ive issues of
Robert Coady’s The Soil (1917) marshaled verse by Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy,
Maxwell Bodenheim, and others into an intriguing synthesis of experimental
artsiness and open-hearted enthusiasm for modern mass culture. The Seven
Arts (1916–1917), a magazine poised between avant-garde and mainstream,
began by proposing a utopian synthesis of modernist aesthetics and American
progressivism but after April 1917 undertook an all-consuming and coura-
geous opposition to the nation’s war policy, demonstrating how poetry could
be used as a powerful vehicle of dissent in a time of world-historical crisis.
The variety of these initiatives and the common ground among them sug-
gests the remarkable synergy between the New Poetry and the little magazine
format. Some publications, notably Poetry and Others, took verse as their pri-
mary object of attention, while others set verse alongside material from a wide
range of genres. Both approaches contributed to the dramatic rejuvenation
of American poetry during the 1910s. The former challenged the long-stand-
ing and damaging assumption that publications founded on contemporary

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American verse were economically impossible dreams, insisting on poetry’s

self-suicient identity in the modern literary scene. The latter treated poetry
not as some aestheticist backwater but as an integral part of their ambitious
syntheses of modern culture and politics.
The New Verse movement has often been treated as a revolution in form,
but of equal importance was its radical expansion of poetic subject matter. In
the early 1910s, poets writing in a wide variety of forms rejected stil ing gen-
teel prohibitions against topical entanglement and delved enthusiastically into
the distinctive technologies, spaces, social dynamics, and political problems of
twentieth-century life. Finding few useful poetic predecessors in this efort,
they drew instead from contemporary developments in iction, painting, pho-
tography, cinema, advertising, and other forms of material culture. By embrac-
ing the modern and urban conditions that genteel orthodoxy had condemned
as incorrigibly unpoetic, these writers showed that poetry could still speak not
only to rareied emotions and private fantasies but to the public, the profane,
the political – to every aspect of twentieth-century experience. Dozens if not
hundreds of Americans contributed to this new poetics of modern life – many
of them now quite deserving of scholarly recovery – but the most immediate
to the transformative impact of the New Verse were the poets sometimes
called “popular modernists,” including Masters, Lindsay, Lowell, Sandburg,
Frost, and Millay. Although their work varied widely in tone, form, and theme,
all worked to pare away genteel poeticisms from American verse. They drew
on regional and colloquial diction, conversational syntax, and realist modes
of verbal representation to generate a poetry of everyday experience that was
widely accessible to nonspecialists yet still complex and nuanced enough to
attract the admiration of connoisseurs and professionals.
The earliest of these poets to achieve this wide impact were two who used
the places and voices of their downstate Illinois upbringing to create a mod-
ern verse vernacular of the American Midwest, Edgar Lee Masters (1868–
1950) and Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931). Working as a lawyer in Chicago from
the 1890s, Masters had self-published verse and plays extensively before 1912,
but not until he went back imaginatively to the place of his origin – north-
west of Springield near the village of Lewistown – did he ind an individual
poetic voice. Spoon River Anthology, consisting of irst-person commentaries
by the residents of a small-town cemetery on their lives and times, evoked the
classical epitaph at the level of the individual poem, while in overall structure
resembling the Greek Anthology. This quasi-classical structure, combined with
Masters’s command of laconic midwestern accents, colloquial diction, and
conversational free verse rhythms, created an efect of sensational iconoclasm

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for readers of 1914–1915, who devoured the poems in Reedy’s Mirror, and then
in the Macmillan volume, as they would such sardonic portrayals of bourgeois
American life in iction as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street a few years later.
Although each Spoon River poem is designed to create its own self-con-
tained efect, Masters cross-references the stories of more than two hundred
residents, allowing readers to build from the book a comprehensive picture of
the history and character of a representative American town. Employing an
ironic mode more cutting and iconoclastic than Robinson’s, Masters empa-
thizes with those nonconformists destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of
small-town life, such as the title character of the poem “Margaret Fuller Slack,”
whose novelistic ambitions were thwarted by the old untenable choice forced
on women: “celibacy, matrimony, or unchastity.”33 And he celebrates those
few who withstood these pressures and lived rich lives, including the subject
of the poem “Lucinda Matlock” (based on his own grandmother), who raised
twelve children, all the while “shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the
green valleys.”34 Although he published proliically for three decades thereaf-
ter, Masters never again approached the popular or artistic success of Spoon
River Anthology. Some of his later work, such as The New Spoon River (1924), was
taken as transparently imitative of the original, while his more ambitious proj-
ects such as The Domesday Book (1920) and The New World (1937) tended to drift
back toward the lumbering rhetorical modes of the pre-1910 era, suggesting
that in his heart Masters had never fully accepted the formal and tonal break-
throughs of 1913–1916, despite having been one of their main instigators.
Younger than Masters by a decade, Vachel Lindsay, based mostly in his home-
town of Springield, also served an extensive apprenticeship of self-publishing
during the 1900s, illustrating his rhapsodic verse with mystical-primitive art-
work somewhat in the manner of Blake. After 1905 he converted his vision-
ary aspirations for realizing the social value of poetry into action, repeatedly
walking hundreds of miles across the countryside – the last time from Illinois
to New Mexico – as a modern vagabond-troubadour, bartering his poems for
food and lodging. Despite these strenuous eforts, Lindsay was still virtually
unknown until he broke through to a new vernacular energy in “General
William Booth Enters into Heaven,” an idiosyncratic synthesis of the vigorous
vocal rhythms of the Christian camp meeting with a social-democratic gospel
celebrating the outcasts who populate a raucous Salvation Army parade into
paradise led by its founding “General,” the crusading British clergyman who
had died in 1912. The poem’s form is equally idiosyncratic, so closely follow-
ing the strong regular rhythms and rhymes of the marching song that Lindsay
even inserts instrumental cues and sound-efect words into section headings

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and margins, advising readers to sing the poem to the tune of the well-known
spiritual “The Blood of the Lamb.” As with Masters’s use of the epitaph, these
formal adaptations made the poem seem boldly modern to its early readers.
Lindsay’s emphasis on poetry as oral declamation and singing, complete with
lailing gesticulations and sound efects belted out at full volume, became cen-
tral tenets of a poetics he termed the “Higher Vaudeville.”
Lindsay followed his sensational début with exuberant public recitations
that supported several inancially successful volumes, but after touring almost
continuously for nearly a decade, he collapsed from exhaustion in early 1923.
Thenceforth his life was shadowed by inancial anxieties, a diicult marriage
to a much younger woman, psychological breakdowns, and declining literary
reputation, all of which contributed to his suicide in 1931. Unquestionably,
Lindsay played an important role in the revival of American poetry’s energies
in the mid-1910s, but his extremely mannered style of writing and performance,
once established, became a straitjacket preventing him from developing as an
artist. Compared to the other popular modernists, all of them in their own
ways notably thoughtful, even calculating, Lindsay sufered from severe dei-
ciencies of intellect and self-possession that were exempliied by perhaps his
most popular poem and certainly his most controversial, “The Congo” (1914),
which (although it was probably intended to express sympathy and support
for “the Negro”) employed wholesale racial stereotyping in its portrayal of
black races as irredeemably other, even savage. Although much of the poem’s
imagery and characterization resembles that used by other white poets and
even some African American writers of the period, the contemporary critical
consensus is that Lindsay failed more thoroughly than most to comprehend
the pitfalls and responsibilities of representing other races in poetry.
The Bostonian Amy Lowell (1874–1925), the deeply unconventional daugh-
ter of a famous American family (and cousin to a revered poet of the pre-
vious century, James Russell Lowell), was prevented by inhibiting parental
circumstances and adverse cultural conditions from establishing herself as
a poet until she was nearly forty. But once embarked on a literary career,
she made the most of the dozen years left to her, beneited greatly by the
emotional and practical support she received from the actress Ada Dwyer
Russell, her lover and domestic partner from 1914. Often unfairly resented by
Ezra Pound and others for her inherited wealth, forceful personality, and lair
for self-promotion, Lowell exerted herself as tirelessly as anyone on behalf
of the New Verse. She published her own verse proliically, reviewed the
work of others generously, sponsored and edited the annual anthology Some
Imagist Poets (1915–1917), gave popular and controversial public lectures on the

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New Verse throughout the country, and produced the irst large-scale critical
study of the movement, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), which
devoted well-informed chapters to the work of Robinson, Frost, Masters,
and Sandburg.
In less than ifteen years, Lowell published more than six hundred poems
in an ever-changing mix of styles, many of which remain to be assimilated.
But the ongoing recovery of a substantial vein of intensely erotic lesbian love
poems written to and about her muse Russell – many grouped together in
the section entitled “Two Speak Together” in Pictures of the Floating World
(1919) – has begun to challenge long-standing assumptions of Lowell as a deco-
rative miniaturist. She often explored questions of female experience and self-
expression in ways that make her work valuable to feminist critical approaches.
“The Sisters” (1922), for example, addresses the relation of the modern indi-
vidual talent to a tradition of female poetic artistry extending back to Sappho,
while “The Captured Goddess” (1914) considers the ambivalent desire to be an
artist in a culture that forcibly elevates women into inert art objects.
Lowell’s stature as both an experimental modernist and an insightful social
poet is also growing. She irst established herself through association with
the imagiste movement of Pound, H.D., and John Gould Fletcher, becom-
ing its driving force as Pound sulked away toward Futurism and Vorticism.
By 1914, in collaboration with Fletcher, she had developed an experimental
mode called “polyphonic prose,” which they saw as a modern form for epic
poetry that would counterpoint the smaller scale of most Imagist verse. She
used polyphonic prose to explore a variety of themes, including the impres-
sionistic textures of the modern city in “Spring Day” and “Towns in Colour,”
both published in 1916. And in Can Grande’s Castle (1918), she presented four
long historical narratives that preigure or allegorize aspects of twentieth-
century life, most notably the challenging “Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate
Swings,” which examines Western imperial ambitions in Asia by portraying
the forcible “opening” of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853–1854.
Although never expressing public doubt over the Allied cause in the Great
War, Lowell also produced a thoughtful body of allegorical antiwar verse,
including “Flotsam” (1916) and “Orange of Midsummer” (1917), both of which
portray the forces drawing America into the war as seductive but destructive
objects of erotic desire. Perhaps her best-known single poem is the allegorical
narrative “Patterns” (1915), which condemns the rigid conventions of class and
gender that lead a passionately loving aristocratic couple to follow their tragic
duty – he to fall in battle “in Flanders,” and she to mourn and wander through
her mazelike gardens, forever encased in whalebone corsets that constrict and

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contort the natural contours of her body.35 Lowell departs from her charac-
teristic allegorical mode for more direct statement in the moving free verse
lyric “September 1918” (1919), which presents a perfect late summer day of
apparent serenity but then darkens as the image of boys lying prone on the
ground, gathering bright red berries into a box, becomes a visual trace of the
torn and bloody male bodies on the western front, a turn that Lowell conirms
by shattering the poem’s imagistic poise with the line “Some day there will
be no war.” She hopes that on that day she will remember the peace of this
afternoon, but right now, even harmless play signiies only what the war has
destroyed, such that “I have time for nothing / But the endeavour to balance
myself / Upon a broken world.”36
Like Lowell’s, the verse of Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) ofers a great deal more
variety and artistry than it has been given credit for. Another early discovery
of Harriet Monroe’s, Sandburg advanced a forceful working-class perspective
on twentieth-century city life in well-wrought free verse cadences that spoke
to avant-garde poets and popular audiences alike. His earliest important pub-
lication was the sensational series Chicago Poems in Poetry for March 1914, the
irst poem of which became a self-deining editorial statement for that proudly
Chicagoan magazine and supplied the city with two memorable nicknames,
“Hog Butcher for the World” and “City of the Big Shoulders.”37 Introducing
into American poetry a new note, perhaps more aggressively modern and
urban than anything that had preceded it, “Chicago” was condemned by gen-
teel gatekeepers who found it an “impudent afront to the poetry-loving pub-
lic,” in the outraged words of The Dial.38
As Robinson and Masters built a modern poetics through an intense focus on
the American small town, Sandburg built his from the industrialized metropo-
lis. The verse collected in three vital volumes, Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers
(1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920), chronicles Chicago as a distinctive geograph-
ical, material, and social terrain using methods akin to those of the realist
photographer. This realist methodology is elaborated in “Halsted Street Car”
(1916), an empathetic portrayal of the spatially segregated working-class expe-
rience that begins by urging artists who seek to capture the modern city to
“Hang on a strap with me here / At seven o’clock in the morning / On a
Halsted Street car” and “Find for your pencils / A way to mark your memory”
of the visages of surrounding riders, who even at “cool daybreak” are “Tired
of wishes, / Empty of dreams.”39 The “way” that Sandburg’s artist-poet seeks,
the method of portrayal, comes not through adherence to any particular style
but through a willingness to inhabit the same physical spaces as those he writes
about. In poem after poem from this period, Sandburg recorded the efects of

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the industrial city on its populace as honestly and intensely as any American
poet ever has. In “Clean Curtains” (1920), for example, he dramatizes the sti-
l ing efects of the densely built metropolis on class aspiration, describing how
the new occupants of a house at the corner of Congress and Green streets
(in the working-class district southwest of the downtown Loop) place pris-
tine curtains like “white prayers” in their windows. But in this intersection
the impulses toward hygiene and genteel domesticity are ill starred, because
“One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way
paper boxes, strawboard cartons,” and all types of “wheels whirled dust” con-
stantly on the windows (CP, pp. 167–68). The poet’s reference to “the winds
that circled at midnights and noon listening to no prayers” (CP, p. 168) portrays
industrial capitalism as so all-encompassing that it may as well constitute the
very air the working class breathes, threatening to blunt its self-ameliorating
eforts. The white curtains last all of “ive weeks or six” (CP, p. 168).
However bleak such city verses may sometimes seem, in their forceful
articulation of the problems of working-class metropolitan life they serve an
activist purpose for Sandburg, as necessary steps toward any sort of progres-
sive change. Much like his idol and formal model Walt Whitman, Sandburg
sustained a balance between gritty, often harshly critical realism and a fun-
damental optimism for the possibilities of modern life throughout a long,
varied, and celebrated career as poet, journalist, folksinger, biographer (of
Abraham Lincoln), and populist cultural icon. The literary reputation of all
the popular modernist poets, Sandburg’s in particular, was eroded, especially
in the academy, by the ascendancy of New Criticism and high modernism
from the 1930s. Even now, after the canonical expansion in American poetry
of the past two decades, these poets are in the paradoxical position of being at
once overly familiar in broad outline and inadequately known in the details of
their poetic output. But no one did more during the 1910s to demonstrate that
contemporary poetry was no longer merely a pastime for an idle evening or
a iller for a half-empty magazine page, practiced and appreciated by leisured
idlers detached from the lives of ordinary people.
In Poetry for April 1916, looking back on just three and a half years of her
magazine, Harriet Monroe described a startling change in American poetry’s
fortunes, “as though some magician had waved his wand – presto, the beggar
is robed in scarlet.”40 The change had been so abrupt that she fretted it was
merely a fad, but despite the moderating reputation of some of the decade’s
poetic stars and the constricted economic and political climate after America’s
entry into the Great War, by 1920 poetry in America had been thoroughly reju-
venated. Poets were inding publishers for their work, making money from

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public readings, competing for a growing number of prizes, and assuming

posts at periodicals, publishing companies, and universities. A sizable core of
men and women fervently committed to contemporary verse presided over a
group of stable institutional sites that would provide continuity and renewal
for several subsequent generations of writers and readers. In one remark-
able decade, the participants in the New Verse Movement had transformed
a mawkish refuge for dilettantes into a vital, expressive form of twentieth-
century life.

Notes
1. William Dean Howells, “The New Poetry,” North American Review 168 (1899),
p. 591.
2. John Timberman Newcomb, How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern
American Verse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 264–65.
3. Francis B. Hornbrooke, “What Should Be the Poet’s Attitude Toward His
Critics?,” Poet-Lore 5 (1893), p. 140.
4. Charles Leonard Moore, “The Future of Poetry,” Forum 14 (1893), p. 776.
5. “Misguided Poets,” Dial 50 (1911), pp. 113–14.
6. “Misguided Poets,” p. 114.
7. “Poetry and Prosperity,” Dial 57 (1914), p. 329.
8. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York:
R. R. Bowker, 1975), vol. 2, p. 721.
9. Quoted in Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, vol. 2, p. 700.
10. Harriet Monroe, letter of March 8, 1910, Personal Papers, Regenstein Library,
University of Chicago.
11. George Cabot Lodge, Poems and Dramas, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mil in,
1911), vol. 1, p. 134.
12. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), vol. 1, p. 75. Poems in this collection
will be cited as PD.
13. Josephine Preston Peabody, Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1900; Boston: Houghton
Mil in, 1911), p. 98.
14. Lizette Woodworth Reese, A Wayside Lute (Portland, Maine: Thomas Mosher,
1909), p. 44. Italics in original.
15. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1905), p. 51.
16. William Vaughn Moody, Poems (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1901), p. 9.
17. Moody, Poems, p. 10.
18. George Santayana, Sonnets and Other Verses (New York: Duield, 1894), p. 17.
19. Santayana, Sonnets, p. 17.

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20. Francis Brooks, Margins and Other Poems (Chicago: Searle & Gorton, 1896),
pp. 5–6.
21. William Vaughn Moody, “An Ode in Time of Hesitation,” Atlantic Monthly 85
(1900), p. 598.
22. Moody, “An Ode,” p. 598.
23. William Vaughn Moody, “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” Atlantic
Monthly 87 (1901), p. 288.
24. Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Town Down the River (New York: Scribner’s,
1910), pp. 97–98.
25. Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Children of the Night (1897; New York:
Scribner’s, 1905), p. 35.
26. Robinson, The Children of the Night, p. 22.
27. Ferdinand Earle (ed.), The Lyric Year (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912),
p. viii.
28. Harriet Monroe, review of The Lyric Year, ed. Ferdinand Earle, Poetry 1 (1913),
p. 130.
29. Ezra Pound, “To Whistler, American,” Poetry 1 (1912), p. 7.
30. “A Boom in Poetry,” Literary Digest, July 5, 1913, p. 19.
31. “Poets Again ‘Best Sellers,’ ” Literary Digest, April 25, 1914, p. 987.
32. “Poets Again ‘Best Sellers,’ ” p. 987.
33. Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1915; New York: Macmillan, 1944),
p. 48.
34. Masters, Spoon River Anthology, p. 229.
35. Amy Lowell, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1955), p. 75.
36. Lowell, Complete Poetical Works, p. 75.
37. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago Poems,” Poetry 3 (1914), p. 191.
38. “New Lamps for Old,” Dial 56 (1914), p. 231.
39. Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 6. This
volume will be cited subsequently in the text as CP.
40. Harriet Monroe, “Down East,” Poetry 8 (1916), p. 85.

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 Chapter 23
Robert Frost and Tradition
S i o b h a n Ph il l i p s

Robert Frost seems like a traditional poet. Robert Frost thus seems like a liter-
ary anomaly. Born three years after Marcel Proust, one before Thomas Mann,
and two before F. T. Marinetti, Frost appears to stand apart from the modern-
ist ranks that these and other writers constitute. Ezra Pound urged poets to
“make it new,” but Frost distrusted an age that “ran wild in the quest of new
ways to be new.”1 While William Carlos Williams broke from iambic pentam-
eter to explore free verse, Frost composed in metered lines and found new
uses for the sonnet; while Wallace Stevens wrote philosophical tercets about a
“supreme iction,” Frost wrote poetic narratives about witches and hired men;
while T. S. Eliot moved to London to analyze urban malaise through verse that
quotes great European literature, and Langston Hughes moved to Harlem to
write of African American experience in poems adapting jazz and blues, Frost
settled in New England to write about rural couples in lines using their own
colloquialisms. While Eliot insisted that poetry of his time “must be diicult,”
Frost wrote verse that was lucid.2
That verse was widely read, moreover, refuting a modernist division
between high art and mass culture. Many writers of the era spurned middle-
brow success for the approval of little magazines and limited editions, but
Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the
most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century. He adver-
tised himself as common rather than avant-garde, claiming that his “inspira-
tion” came from the “wholesome life of the ordinary man,” in a tactic that
divided him from literary peers and estranged him from academic critics
as it endeared him to a general readership.3 Frost’s choice was deliberate.
“There is a kind of success called ‘of esteem,’ ” he wrote in a letter early in
his career, “and it butters no parsnips” (FCP, p. 667). It was also deliberately
anachronistic. Frost took much from a nineteenth-century heritage of pop-
ular, often feminine or feminized poetry, as Karen L. Kilcup has shown, and
he admired Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a best-selling anthology of

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the late 1800s. His irst volume, A Boy’s Will, takes its title from Longfellow,
and its opening work, called “Into My Own,” presents a speaker who would
be “only more sure of all I thought was true” (FCP, p. 15). In this and other
instances, Frost seems to be content with the familiar rather than ambitious
for the novel.
Oppositions of tradition and modernity crumble quickly, however, when
considering Frost. The categories mixed in his own time: that debut volume
looking back to Longfellow was promoted by Pound himself. The categories
are even more intertwined now, when modernism has become a contradic-
tory tradition and when Frost’s Fireside forebears are no longer dismissed as
merely sentimental.4 Frost’s verse may be featured on samplers and quoted
in self-help columns, but that does not preclude its depth or reach. His tra-
ditional themes use common settings to debate humanity’s place in a world
of natural alterity – an inquiry as contemporary as other poets’ questions.
And his traditional forms use rhyme and meter to demonstrate the power
in ordinary conversation – a strategy as daring as free verse imagism or
bricolage quotation. Frost tests or estranges the customary as much as he
endorses it. He aims to “suggest formulae,” as he wrote in one early letter,
“that almost but don’t quite formulate” (FCP, p. 692). He adds that he would
“like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether
obvious.”
That subtlety makes Frost’s work both inviting and tricky. In “Mending
Wall,” for example, the oft-cited formula that “good fences make good neigh-
bors” comes as the questionable opinion of the speaker’s own neighbor (FCP,
pp. 39–40). The speaker is unconvinced, concluding that
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know,
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give ofense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped irmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of the woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
(FCP, p. 40)

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An enduring human practice of boundary building, passed from father to

son, meets an even more intractable natural force that upsets stability: the
opposition touches on the authority of divisions, meanings of property, and
persistence of monuments or covenants. Yet the poem does not settle these
questions with a simple refutation of the neighbor’s maxim. “Mending Wall”
manifests a practice of wisdom getting as much as the substance of wisdom
gotten, and the neighbor must say “for himself ” any new truth. Practice, in
turn, keeps any new truth perpetually indeinite. After all, the speaker cannot
“exactly” formulate “for himself ” what brings down a wall, and despite his
questions, he may be as much invested in fences as his neighbor (it is he who
initiates repair).5 He seems less interested in refuting his neighbor’s beliefs
than in engaging them.
Frost’s poem aspires to similar engagement with the reader through its con-
versational register. This tone is vital to Frost, even in works that do not dra-
matize people talking to each other. He believed that good writing captures
the “sentence-sounds” in ordinary speech (FCP, p. 675). One could perceive this
“sound of sense,” Frost explains in letters, when listening to “voices behind a
door that cuts of the words,” and the recognizable music, “gathered by the
ear from the vernacular,” can be “brought into books” by skillful writers (FCP,
pp. 664, 675). The skillful poet, in particular, will set colloquial rhythms against
the standard patterns of metered verse, “breaking the sounds of sense with all
their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre” (FCP, p. 665).
The resulting “strained relation” is Frost’s signature delight: “I like to drag
and break the intonation across the metre as waves irst comb and then break
stumbling on the shingle,” he writes (FCP, p. 680). One can see the result in
“Mending Wall,” in which phrases like “Spring is the mischief in me,” or “In
each hand, like an old-stone savage armed,” or “He is all pine and I am apple
orchard” each ind a diferent pattern of stressed syllables and diferent afect
of common speech within lines that are steadily, poetically iambic. Frost’s ver-
siication uses consistency to reveal inconsistency – the wall, perhaps, to reveal
a force that tumbles it.
This strategy is central to Frost’s work in general, proving the concept of
tradition to be useful to analysis of that work even after one recognizes his
innovations. From “Into My Own” forward, Frost emphasizes self-deinition,
yet he inds that the strongest individual freedom comes through an individ-
ual’s management of constriction. Frost’s best critics describe versions of this
animating tension, as Frank Lentricchia, Richard Poirier, Katherine Kearns,
Mark Richardson, Elisa New, and others chart the varying interdependence
of what Frost called “formity and conformity” (FCP, p. 735).6 Trusting in this

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vital combination, Frost would neither discard nor submit to any established
rule, whether that rule be natural, artistic, or cultural. Nor would he endorse
the catalytic, impersonal approach of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” although Frost’s practice is closer to Eliot’s than might at irst appear.7
To Frost, traditions and conventions are useful means for deining oneself as
an independent voice and a viable will, allowing demonstrations of “prowess”
in a world that could easily make human “achievement” seem negligible (FCP,
p. 890). When Frost dismisses free verse as “tennis with the net down,” there-
fore, the analogy is not l ippant (FCP, pp. 735, 809). Only a game with rules lets
players prove their skill.
The outcome is more than a tennis score, just as “Mending Wall” is more
than “just another kind of outdoor game.” As “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
explains with unfortunate didacticism, Frost aims for a state in which “work
is play for mortal stakes” (FCP, p. 252). These stakes acknowledge a nihilism
present in Frost, as in others of his era: “The background is hugeness and
confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos,”
he writes in his “Letter to The Amherst Student” (FCP, p. 740). Frost goes on to
say, however, that humans can resist confusion through creation, because the
world “admits,” even “calls for,” the “making of form.” “When in doubt there
is always form for us to go on with,” he writes. Rather than Eliot’s dubiously
reassuring fragments, then, Frost conidently cites “any small man-made ig-
ure of order and concentration.” A poem is one such igure. In “Desert Places,”
for example, when a snowy night threatens to subsume the “absent-spirited”
speaker into a state of “nothing to express,” expression of this very “nothing”
resists the waste lands around him (FCP, p. 269). “Empty spaces” cannot over-
whelm him, he concludes: “I have it in me so much nearer home, / To scare
myself with my own desert places.” A now-perilous game of frightening one-
self efects the self-assertion manifest in the poem’s formal achievement, and a
inal, feminine rhyme of spaces/places can claim what was, in the title phrase,
an external reality – now deinitively, if just as terrifyingly, “my own.” Writerly
craft domesticates chaos without denying its power.
This craft is detailed in Frost’s great prose meditations, “Education by
Poetry,” “The Figure a Poem Makes,” and “The Constant Symbol.” Here he
explains that “every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a igure of
the will braving alien entanglements,” and here he describes how each poem
creates a “momentary stay against confusion” (FCP, pp. 787, 777). The best
and bravest stay, he believes, comes through the literary habit of saying one
thing in terms of another, confronting material with “a gathering metaphor
to throw it into shape and order” (FCP, p. 724). To Frost, therefore, all poetry is

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“simply made of metaphor” (FCP, p. 786). Indeed, all thinking is metaphoric,

its product less units of perception than “feats of association” (FCP, p. 892).
Cognition does not apprehend the world so much as work on and in it, Frost
believes, through the efortful links by which one turns the alien and unknown
into the signiicant and owned. This process, as Frost describes it, not only
blurs the divide between poetry and other language use; it also conlates the
lessons of verse with the lessons of general meaning-making.8 “The person
who gets close enough to poetry,” Frost asserts, “is going to know more about
the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays” (FCP,
p. 726). Frost’s feats of metaphor are also acts of faith.
Frost’s modernist skepticism cautions this faith when he explains that meta-
phors are forever “break[ing] down” (FCP, p. 723). Achieved meaning is a brief
reprieve in an ongoing process, and “the igure a poem makes” is a moving ig-
ure: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” Frost describes, just like “love”;
“it begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the
irst line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clariication
of life” (FCP, p. 777). The contingency of the lucky clariication, however, is
not entirely regrettable. It makes the achieved poem a new experience for
each reader: “Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a
metal keeps its fragrance” (FCP, p. 778). Moreover, contingency assigns ongo-
ing work to each writer.9 The activity is as important as any result, for a poet
who believes that “there is nothing more composing than composition,” and
Frost’s relish for this process nourished his sense of pleasure in his occupation
(FCP, p. 808). It also bolstered his belief that pleasurable, composing compo-
sition could be “everybody’s sanity,” because “no forms are more engrossing,
gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones that we throw of . . . our
individual enterprise”; these include “a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an
idea, a picture, a poem” (FCP, p. 740). Frost practiced poetry as one instance of
a general and continual human endeavor.10
This conviction ofers an explanation of his poems’ appeal that does not
rely on their simplicity. It may suggest, too, why Frost persisted in his vocation
through years of little encouragement: he was a popular writer who did not
publish a book until he was nearly forty. He was also a New England igure born
in California, a rural sage who grew up in a city, a campus eminence who had
little patience with his own schooling, and a farmer-poet who mostly failed at
farming. Frost lived in San Francisco for the irst eleven years of his life, during
which time his father tried to work as a reporter and politician before dying
of tuberculosis. Nearly penniless, Frost’s mother then took him and his sis-
ter to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost’s grandparents lived, and where

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Frost attended school regularly for the irst time. By the time he graduated,
he shared valedictory honors with Elinor White, to whom he would soon be
engaged, but he left college after less than a term at Dartmouth, troubled over
Elinor’s refusal to marry immediately. Depression even drove him to a possibly
suicidal sojourn in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp. He returned north and worked
while waiting for his bride. He also wrote poems and saw his irst professional
publications. After marrying, he entered Harvard, although he did not inish a
degree there either, leaving after two years to take up poultry farming with his
wife and two children. When the eldest died from cholera in 1900, the tragedy
plunged both parents into depression, and Frost soon moved again, to a farm
in Derry that his grandfather bought. It was perhaps the most stable home he
would ever have, and there he wrote much of the poetry in his irst two books
as he also farmed desultorily and taught school. By 1912, however, discouraged
at his lack of literary success, he decided to move to England and write full
time while he lived on his grandfather’s legacy. He settled with his family in
Buckinghamshire, later in Gloucestershire, where he enjoyed the company of
other “Dymock poets” and a deep friendship with Edward Thomas.
In London, Frost also met Pound, among other writers, and found a pub-
lisher. When Frost returned to America in 1915, his irst two volumes had
found an American publisher, too, and favorable reviews of North of Boston
were already swelling the poet’s reputation. Frost’s most important book,
this collection assembles the narratives of New England life that deine his
aesthetic and includes the masterpieces “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” “A
Servant to Servants,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Wood-Pile.” His next
book, Mountain Interval, appeared in 1916, its poems more varied in type but
almost as uniformly high in quality. From this point on, Frost lived on several
farms in New Hampshire and Vermont while reading, teaching, and serving as
poet in residence at diferent institutions, among them Amherst College, the
University of Michigan, Dartmouth, and the Bread Loaf School of English.
Collections called New Hampshire, West-Running Brook, and A Further Range
followed in the 1920s and 1930s, during which time Frost’s sales, honors, and
salaries steadily increased. When he lectured at Harvard in 1936, more than a
thousand attended. Yet even as Frost managed this successful career, he came
to rue the efects of his public life on his family relationships, which presented
a series of tragedies in later life. His daughter Marjorie died of puerperal fever
in 1934, his wife from heart failure in 1938, and his son Carol by suicide in 1940.
In 1947, his daughter Irma entered a mental hospital. Frost continued to write,
however, and A Witness Tree, published in 1942, is perhaps his best collection
since Mountain Interval. It won the last of Frost’s record-setting four Pulitzer

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Prizes. Frost also continued to speak and teach, maintaining his schedule and
stature unremittingly until he died in 1963.
During his last decades, Frost often used that stature to press his conser-
vative, nationalist political views: after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1962, for
example, Frost invented a comment by Khrushchev that described Americans
as “too liberal to ight” (FCP, p. 954). A similar pugilism is evident even in his
famous appearance at the Kennedy inauguration. His poem for the occasion
hails a “golden age of poetry and power” (FCP, p. 437). Prevented by the sun
from reading this piece, Frost instead recited “The Gift Outright,” a better,
older poem that nonetheless suggests its own troubling politics; it chronicles
America’s manifest destiny without concern for the imperialist presupposi-
tions of expansion – or for the efect on native peoples (FCP, p. 316). In the con-
text of politics, Frost’s focus on form-making prowess can overlook the self-
questioning doubt and interpersonal awareness so vital to his earlier works.
These are present in the two-sided fence tending in “Mending Wall,” for exam-
ple, or the two-sided debate in “The Death of the Hired Man,” both of which
Frost later describes as political (FCP, p. 885).11 The strengths of these and other
poems explain why Frost’s work continues to sway writers and readers whose
views and backgrounds difer greatly from his.
To understand those strengths further, however, and to appreciate Frost’s
ongoing presence in various poetic traditions, it may be helpful to look
more closely at some of the traditions that inl uenced Frost, among them a
poetic lineage of classical and romantic pastoralism and a philosophical her-
itage of Darwinism, Transcendentalism, and pragmatism. Frost’s engage-
ment with these strains deepens the thoughts and feelings in seemingly
straightforward work.
“Mowing,” an important poem from Frost’s irst collection, makes the
question of work central when it sets the labor of farming against the dreams
of literature:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound –
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

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Not without feeble-pointed spikes of lowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
(FCP, p. 26)

Frost was deeply read in English-language poetry and knew classical literature
in the original; his uniquely rhymed sonnet recalls a Virgilian georgic tradition
manifest also in Marvell’s and Wordsworth’s verse. “Mowing” invokes this
strain, it seems, to challenge a common comparison of poetic and agricultural
production: the scythe’s whispering is not a dreamy lyricism. The strength
of actual eforts forbids the weakness of literary fancy. Yet the speaker of
“Mowing” knows the value of what he excludes, which is “anything more”
and not “anything less” than the truth, and he inds, perhaps, a way to include
it. When the “fact” of actuality is professed to be the “sweetest dream that
labor knows,” the formula blends truth and untruth even as it cautions the
latter. Poetry must yield to labor, but that labor might become poetry; in the
very refusal of imaginative indulgence, empiricism includes the sweetness of
the unreal. It also includes the sweetness of love, as mowing’s connotations
of mortality, emphasized by the Shakespearean “heat of the sun,” accommo-
date hints of sexuality, emphasized by “orchises” and “snake.” The creativity
promised in the poem’s conclusion seems literary, corporeal, and agricultural
at once, its “making” manifest in careful, generative rows of verse as well
as earnest, harvesting rows of the scythe. Frost emphasizes that earnestness
with a inal two lines, each containing one declarative sentence. Through their
respect for a factual dream, these lines join the poet-farmer’s labor to more
natural endeavors, so that he can leave the hay, and perhaps his poem, to inish
without him.
This poem could thus counter worries that a twentieth-century worker
lacks the inspiration of poetic predecessors in pastoral, georgic, and Romantic
traditions. At times, Frost implies that the source of verse may be as obscure as
the spring on top of “The Mountain,” which reigures Parnassus as a Vermont
peak, or as dry as “Hyla Brook,” which is “run out of song and speed” by
June of each year (FCP, pp. 47–48, 115–16).12 When Frost describes the brook’s
“faded paper sheet / Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat,” the desiccated
page of once-lowing music suggests a withered lyricism (FCP, p. 116). Frost’s
response holds to the truth that “Mowing” champions, using that facticity to
continue nature poetry even when one is uncertain about the inherent poetry
of nature.13 The speaker of “Hyla Brook,” for example, turns away from the
literary dreaming of “brooks taken otherwhere in song” to accept the actuality

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of the brook before him, and he concludes that “we love the things we love
for what they are.” As in “Mowing,” though, regard for fact includes some
admission of fancy. Loving the water in its real absence depends on maintain-
ing the water as a mental presence: “Hyla Brook” is a “brook to none but who
remember long.”14 The “song” of this poem could therefore compare to the
song of “The Oven Bird,” in which the titular artist-igure continues his task
through a dry season (FCP, p. 116). “The question that he frames in all but
words,” Frost concludes here, “is what to make of a diminished thing.” Like
the scythe that knows in working not to poeticize, the oven bird “knows in
singing not to sing,” and his unaesthetic artistry creates something from his
very doubts about creation.
What to make of diminishment is one lesson that Frostian singers learn.
Another is what to make of indiference. “The Need of Being Versed in
Country Things,” for example, rebukes a desire for nature’s empathy: it
describes a burned homestead, then cites the worldly processes that continue
in spite of human sorrow (FCP, p. 223). For the birds, Frost’s speaker reminds
himself, “there was really nothing sad.” The poem concludes, however, with
the ambiguous assertion that “One had to be versed in country things / Not
to believe the phoebes wept.” Although rural truths rightly refuse to anthro-
pomorphize, and although the word “versed” locates such truths in poems
like this one, Frost uses a carefully managed rhyme scheme and contradic-
tory concluding statement to end with “the phoebes wept” – lingering, then,
on the chance or hope of sympathy.15 “The Most of It” is more severe, per-
haps, toward the hopes of a protagonist who is frustrated by “mocking” nat-
ural echoes to his cries (FCP, p. 307). The scene recalls a famous passage from
Wordsworth’s Prelude in which a boy who mimics the calls of owls begins a
happy “concourse” that ends in profound communion.16 In Frost’s poem, the
speaker wants similar evidence of “counter-love, original response.” But his
human voice is followed by “nothing.” Or rather, it is followed by something
uncertain: the poem describes a potential “embodiment” in a “great buck”
that emerges, swims across a lake, and crashes through brush out of sight.
“And that was all,” Frost ends, leaving readers to wonder what “all,” or even
“the most of it,” was. Among other things, the ambiguity seems to rebuke the
protagonist’s initial wish, and Frost may have written this poem in an estrang-
ing third person to challenge that demand. Nature does not conform to human
desires, even to human desires that nature be original. Nature instead schools
human desires, refusing direct response to provide uncertain opportunity.
The deepest human desire, perhaps, is the yearning for meaning, and the
most fervently hoped-for reply a revelation of signiicance. One possible

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obstruction of signiicance, in Frost’s time, was Darwinian evolution. Frost’s

scientiic knowledge surpassed that of most American writers in his era or
since: during high school, he studied botany and astronomy with his friend
Carl Burrell; in college, he took geology and read Darwin, Lyell, Spencer,
and Huxley, among others; in a talk, he cited Scientiic American as one of two
“great magazines” in his country.17 Frost’s interest made him acutely conscious
of what his post-Darwinian situation could present: a world governed by sur-
vival of the ittest, such that deathly competition directs universal action, and
a world barren of benevolent purpose, such that unthinking processes drive
strictly material change. The sonnet “Design” suggests the magnitude of pos-
sible horror at these conditions through its description of a miniature scene
(FCP, p. 275). As the poem’s speaker watches a spider and its prey on a “heal-all”
lower, his matter-of-fact diction reports a fatal morning routine, in which the
white color of the players ironically emphasizes their dark implications. The
poem inishes with a traditional couplet rendered untraditional by its subver-
sion of any summative point: “What but design of darkness to appall? – / If
design govern in a thing so small.” Natural malevolence appalls the viewer,
perhaps turning him as pale as the play before him. But even malevolence
may be evacuated from nature’s blank, because the universe may admit no
intentions at all.18 Any teleology one could discover, moreover, may register
on so large a scale as to be immaterial to the insects or human beings who are
equally small in evolutionary terms.19
These conclusions make belief diicult. But Frost would not always
endorse pure scientism, nor would he always employ the playfully grim tone
of “Design.” The speaker of “For Once, Then, Something,” a quasi-sonnet of
beautifully lilting hendecasyllabics, refuses to resign himself to meaningless-
ness (FCP, p. 208). Instead, he makes a habit of peering into well water, contin-
ually seeking a revelation that may never come. Although often stymied, he
reports, by the obstruction of his own surface relection, he did “once” catch
sight of a “white” hint in the depths. This alluring glint of ambiguity revises
the appalling pallor of “Design.” It may be no more than a “pebble of quartz,”
another of those quizzical facts that frustrate quests for intelligibility. Yet it
might also be “Truth,” the capitalized beginning of a poetic line suggesting
more than ordinary veracity. For Frost, this chance is belief enough, as he
relies on the possibility of “something” not quite compassed by strictly mate-
rial explanations.20 In the underappreciated “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” for exam-
ple, Frost recalls the rocks in “Mending Wall” and even predicts the pebble in
“For Once, Then, Something” when he imagines inding a fallen star among
the boulders of a fence (FCP, pp. 162–64). This meteorite is the “one thing

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palpable besides the soul / To penetrate the air in which we roll,” he writes.
Frost’s playfully audacious comparison of souls, stars, and stones would dis-
cern heavenly ethereality and human spirituality in the most seemingly inert
of earthly substances. The “worldly nature” of facts is also otherworldly.
That combination emphasizes Frost’s dualism.21 Frost criticized those
Platonists who describe anything earthly as a deicient imitation of heavenly
excellence, and in his gorgeous poem “To Earthward,” Frost welcomes the
laws of a mundane situation (FCP, pp. 209–10). But Frost’s refusal of ultimate
perfection is not a refusal of any purpose, and his refusal of pure idealism is
not an endorsement of sheer materialism. He would perceive and maintain a
dynamic balance between mind and world, idea and substance. The “height”
of metaphoric formalism, to Frost, is “the attempt to say matter in terms of
spirit and spirit in terms of matter” (FCP, pp. 723–24). His respect for both
terms fed his enthusiasm for Henri Bergson, for example, whose notion of
a “creative evolution” served Frost as an important counterargument to any
mechanical model of Darwinian development. His respect for both terms
also directed Frost’s response to an American philosophical tradition. Raised
by a Swedenborgian mother who told him that he had clairvoyant powers,
Frost appreciated the Transcendental impulses in Thoreau’s and Emerson’s
writings; both come to mystical convictions through material evidence.22 The
poet of “Mowing” would have agreed with Thoreau that a “true account of
the actual is the rarest poetry” or with Emerson that “a fact is true poetry,
and the most beautiful of fables.”23 Emerson’s “Nature,” however, holds that
facts reveal a “real higher law,” and Frost stops short of the quasi-religious
monism inherent in Emerson’s conviction.24 A “melancholy dualism is the
only soundness,” Frost cautions (FCP, p. 860). Frost’s work is less concerned
with an Emersonian “Over-Soul,” which gathers the material world into uni-
fying spirit, than with his own singular soul, which confronts the material
world with spirited individualism.
Frost’s poetic thought, then, is even more indebted to the work of Emerson’s
great philosophical heir, William James, whose books Frost read with care
and admiration. Like Frost, James would face a Darwinian universe without
yielding to its potential efacements, and, like Frost, James responds to inher-
ited dualisms by refusing to choose between the terms. With regard to the
crucial dualism of free will versus intransigent reality, both would preserve
mental independence through its accommodation of efective facts rather
than through its transcendence of an unknowable world.25 Frost shows his
faith in that shaping particularly through his Jamesian emphasis on personal
choice: in the strange, underread poem called “The Trial by Existence,” for

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example, one’s earthly life is the result of an individual decision that no human
is allowed to remember, and in the lucid, overexposed poem called “The Road
Not Taken,” one’s earthly path is the result of an individual decision that one
will someday recall (FCP, pp. 28–30, 103).26 If this latter poem seems to argue
for nonconformity, it also troubles the ease of that moral. Frost’s speaker
notes that his two routes are “really about the same” and that he wants to take
both. The ruling between them may be as much arbitrary or willful as valiant
or principled.27 The mere fact of choice seems to make the diference in the
inal lines, as the speaker foresees a retrospective signiicance to his progress.
By claiming responsibility for what has been or what must be, humans turn
universal purposelessness into unique purpose and natural inevitability into
conscious freedom.
The result can be a l uency evident in “Birches,” which presents a dualistic
game of swinging between earth and heaven (FCP, pp. 117–18).28 Frost’s speaker
wistfully imagines some boy practicing the skill: “So was I once myself a
swinger of birches,” he writes. “And so I dream of going back to be.” He adds
that he would
. . . like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
The boy of this poem, swinging on “his father’s trees,” replaces the command-
ments of divine paternalism with the lessons of a created world. These teach a
vital balance, an escape from earthly “considerations” that never leaves those
concerns altogether and an aspiration “toward heaven” that prompts the very
force setting one down again. Such paradoxically driven alternation is both
means and end; to “subdue” trees inally, or to be subdued by them, is to pre-
vent the fun of further swinging.29 Frost would inhabit a practice that sees
good in, and performs well at, both “going and coming back.” His game there-
fore revises the Dantean ascent to paradise that allusion to a “pathless wood”
suggests. Yet in the “poise” of Frost’s process is the grace of his own religious

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feeling, which discovers transcendence through the superl uities of immanent

phenomena – through a water-glass meniscus, for example. Frost’s earth may
be suiciently heavenly merely by allowing this kind of sensing.
“Birches,” however, prizes earth for its allowance of “love,” and this empha-
sis distinguishes Frost’s thought from James’s as it deepens the implications
of Frost’s many poems about couples. To Frost, eros is the most important
manifestation of a spiritualized materialism. “To Earthward,” for example,
considers the pain of love speciically, and “Bond and Free” describes a divide
between earthly “love” and ethereal “thought” before deciding that mun-
dane afection has all the “beauty” of transcendent cognition (FCP, pp. 116–
17). In other poems, love discovers this beauty through a creativity akin to
worldly generation: as Poirier emphasizes, romantic union can set the Frost
speaker in a harmonious ainity with material process.30 The sonnet “Putting
in the Seed,” for example, describes a couple whose “springtime passion for
the earth” makes agricultural work a fellowship with the soil as well as each
other (FCP, p. 120). A similar accord pervades “Two Look at Two,” in which
paired conidence counters the solitary despair of “The Most of It”: the hero
of the latter poem lacks “someone else,” and the “great buck” embodiment
could even serve to question a masculine arrogance that keeps “the universe
alone,” but the couple of “Two Look at Two” come upon a doe and buck for
a moment of serene, if still ambiguous, interaction (FCP, pp. 211–12). When
they conclude that “this must be all,” the phrase seems far from “that was all”
in “The Most of It.” The “Two” feel “as if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.” To be part of a pair is to
be at home in a universe of pairings.
Yet Frost’s homes and marriages are not always communions with natu-
ral creativity. They are often defenses against natural chaos, as “Storm Fear,”
among other works, demonstrates (FCP, p. 19). Homes and marriages, more-
over, can corrode from within through that very resistance.31 In Frost’s work,
domestic neurosis presents the underside of domestic generativity, hardening
households into deathly stasis rather than sustaining them through vital mak-
ing. In the quietly terrifying “A Servant to Servants,” for example, a wife tells
two visitors how desperately tired she is of “doing / Things over and over
that just won’t stay done,” although her husband merely responds that “the
best way out is always through” (FCP, pp. 65–69). Their grim symbiosis of
determination and compliance shows human work devolved from high-stakes
play into futile compulsion. The imagination denied by that automatism then
sours into insanity: when the servant describes her threatening tendency to
“have . . . fancies,” she compares herself to a mad uncle who was locked up for

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years in the family attic. He raved about lost love, the servant recalls, and “just
when he was at the height,”
Father and mother married, and mother came,
A bride, to help take care of such a creature,
And accommodate her young life to his.
That was what marrying father meant to her.

The “meaning” underlines the impossible choices of this poem: a dangerous

wildness or a drudging domesticity, the madness of thwarted emotion or the
monotony of unfeeling marriage. The two terms turn into each other, and
while the servant is “glad to get away” from the space of her uncle’s impris-
onment, the space of her own relationship seems to foster the lunacy she
escaped. Home becomes asylum, and security becomes insanity, its hysteria
staved of incompletely only by a routine “over and over.”
Frost’s dualism opposes an abstract, masculine control and a material,
feminine disorder.32 But (as Katherine Kearns has shown) Frost seems most
interested in showing the diicult relation of these opposed qualities within
a person or couple.33 Relations are never more diicult than in the marriage
of “Home Burial,” probably Frost’s greatest poem, which reports the conver-
sation of a husband and wife whose child has recently died (FCP, pp. 55–58).
With its reference to a humble interment, the title also comes to imply the
destruction of home that results, even the destruction implicit in homemak-
ing itself, by which a “momentary stay against confusion” could become
the permanent stay of death. Creativity and mortality mingle in any earthly
work. Frost suggests this as early as “Mowing,” and when the husband of
“Home Burial” notices that his family graveyard is “not so much larger than
a bedroom,” his of hand comparison presses a pervasive link of generation
and destruction. To the pair of “Home Burial,” however, destruction seems
inal and divisive, because the two difer on how to respond to loss: the wife
wishes to perpetuate mourning, the husband to inish it. The diference is
most stark, perhaps, when she remembers his comment just after digging his
child’s grave:
“I can repeat the very words you were saying.
‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor.
You couldn’t care! . . .”

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She inishes with a refusal to abandon grief and go “back to life,” a position
that seems almost neurotically melancholic. Yet the husband, by contrast, can
seem almost unfeelingly sane; he follows the above speech, for example, with
“There, you have said it all and you feel better.” With this, his insensitivity and
her intractability not only forbid better feelings but also preclude an answer to
the wife’s question about the relationship of rotting wood and human death.
As failed love hinders connections between humanity and nature, the collapse
also seems to render futile all one’s endeavors, from building a fence to con-
ceiving a child.
“Home Burial” shows this futility through inefectual speech: as many critics
have noticed, the poem emphasizes the diiculty of the talk it records. Indeed
the husband seems correct when he states that his “words are nearly always
an ofense.” His wife tells him latly that he doesn’t “know how to speak,” and
the husband is even driven to propose “some arrangement / By which I’d bind
myself to keep hands of / Anything special you’re a-mind to name.” When
he adds, however, that this would make married life impossible, he diagnoses
an underlying problem. His marriage may be failing less by its disagreements
than by its refusals to let disagreements converse: although the wife of “Home
Burial” scorns the notion that “talk is all,” her poet knows talk to be quite a bit.
The emphasis goes further even than Frost’s afection for “sentence sounds,”
although “Home Burial” provides many instances of spoken and poetic rhythms
in productive relation: the husband’s “you must tell me, dear,” in which metrical
arrangement points out an awkward endearment, or the wife’s “Don’t, don’t,
don’t, don’t,” in which a contrast of bifurcated iambic foot and single repeated
imperative manifests intransigence. Frost’s focus on verbal exchange also reveals
his general preference for double-minded “repartee” over single-minded argu-
ment.34 This predilection links his thought to some indings of ordinary-lan-
guage philosophy, as Walter Jost and Christopher Benfey show, and especially
to the work of Stanley Cavell, who uses elements of Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s
theories to describe a salutary ordinariness that is dependent on conversation
and manifest in marriage.35 The beneicial matrimonial talk of “West-Running
Brook,” for example, contrasts with that of “Home Burial” when it allows a
couple to “go by contraries” harmoniously (FCP, pp. 236–38). The pair thereby
mimics the forward-and-backward progress of a stream, human relationship
again securing an accord with worldly movements – and securing a resistance, as
well, to deathly lux. When the wife ends “West-Running Brook” by predicting
that “today will be the day of what we both said,” she institutes an anniversary
that may foresee renewal in saying itself.

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The question of this renewal marks one inal philosophical theme that per-
vades Frost’s poetry and deepens particularly his poems of marriage. When
considering time, his work often sympathizes with the “backward motion” of
the west-running brook or the “standing still” of “The Master Speed,” another
matrimonial poem that opposes temporal advance (FCP, p. 273). In “Spring
Pools,” for example, a speaker cautions oncoming foliage not to “blot out”
the relective waters of an early season, perhaps worried that progression
will erase the relections of human consciousness as well (FCP, p. 224). Yet
Frost also acknowledges the appeal of oncoming insentience: in “Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for example, the speaker nearly yields to the
“lovely” darkness of winter (FCP, p. 207). “After Apple-Picking” extends Frost’s
ambivalence through an equally hypnotic poem of human and earthly falls;
here, a speaker tired of harvesting looks ahead to a “winter sleep” that seems
at once his day’s rest, year’s hibernation, and life’s end (FCP, pp. 70–71). In
lines and rhymes both unexpected and regular, dreams and facts mix like the
metaphoricity or dualism of the poem’s “two-pointed ladder,” as the protago-
nist considers loads of apples and accumulations of experience. The working
dreams of “Mowing,” however, become troubled recollections of labor in
“After Apple-Picking,” and when the speaker holds up a “pane of glass” that
he “skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the
world of hoary grass,” he invokes Corinthians while questioning the biblical
implication of a more beneicent vision to come. Our “afters,” even our “after-
life,” may be human rather than heavenly in their remembrance of lawed
efort, and the poem foresees their foreboding inevitability.
Yet retrospection need not always be inal. As Frost himself asserts in his
high school graduation speech, the “after-thought of one action is the fore-
thought of the next” (FCP, p. 637). The formulation suggests new beginnings,
and Bonnie Costello has shown that Frost opposes “evolutionary” advance not
just with a “lyric time” of arrest or resistance but also with a “pastoral time”
of cycles and continuance.36 In “The Onset,” for example, a speaker refuses the
despair of a snowy landscape with his knowledge that spring will return (FCP,
p. 209). Similar assurance imbues the matrimonial “day” concluding “West-
Running Brook” and the coupled “round” of “In the Home Stretch” (FCP,
p. 114). The ongoing life of natural-human eforts, moreover, seems especially
potent in another poem uniting marriage, voice, time, and possible falls: the
great sonnet “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same.” Here an Adam-
like igure lovingly airms his wife’s “inl uence on birds” when he remembers
how Eve’s “call[s]” and laughs added an “oversound” to the songs of Eden
(FCP, p. 308). Mixed with indigenous voicings, Eve’s tones form an enduring

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poetry, its permanence guaranteed by an evolving artistry of voices “crossed”

with each other. Such combination lets human making join a natural making
that extends agency beyond temporal limits. “He would declare and could
himself believe,” the poem begins, and it ends by rounding on itself to declare
and believe the title: “Never again would birds’ song be the same. / And to do
that to birds was why she came.”
Not the least important function of these “woulds” is their perpetual
rewriting of Eve’s purpose, as she who once efected a descent into sin and
death instead perpetuates an ascent into communion and creativity. Trust in
ongoing time seems to forbid any deinite fall. Frost scorned those writers, in
fact, who saw their eras as postlapsarian: “You will often hear it said that the
age of the world we live in is particularly bad,” he writes in his “Letter to The
Amherst Student,” whereas he believes that “it will always be about equally hard
to save your soul” (FCP, p. 739). It will always be equally possible, too, through
the form making dramatized by his poems.
Frost’s insistence on the historical uniformity of soul saving, however, tends
toward an apolitical disregard for particular souls’ situations, and his insistence
on the individual duty of salvation supports a conservative aversion to col-
lective remedies.37 These leanings are evident in Frost’s poetry, especially his
later poetry. “Provide, Provide,” for example, argues against New Deal poli-
cies that in his view vitiated free will and personal responsibility. The poem
describes a typical fall from fame to obscurity and urges one’s own preventive
steps: “Better to go down digniied,” it ends, “With boughten friendship at
your side / Than none at all. Provide, provide!” (FCP, p. 280) The voice is tri-
umphant in its very bitterness. Yet while its harsh individualism recommends
self-help, the poem does not reject the diicult need for others’ regard, even
if it is “boughten.” Viewed this way, “Provide, Provide” suggests a politics
more general and subtle than any response to Depression-era legislation.38
Marit J. MacArthur uncovers a related ambiguity in “The Gift Outright,” cit-
ing its wary assessment of both American citizens, “such as we were,” and the
American land, “such as she was.”39 Written originally during the Depression,
this poem may celebrate Kennedy’s inauguration by suspecting its historical
premises.
Ambivalence also marks Frost’s most inl uential public role, as teacher and
speaker in American universities. Frost’s talks on campus were a new genre,
a partly spontaneous mixture of linked thoughts and poetic recitation, and
criticism has only begun to mine these productions as both a source for Frost’s
theories on various topics and a manifestation of his ideas on conversation
and performance. Frost’s teaching methods were even more unconventional,

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favoring education “by presence” rather than formal instruction, and criticism
has only begun to describe his complicated example for the increasing number
of writers on campus during the post–World War II era.40 It is clear, however,
that Frost’s stints as resident poet demonstrate the inescapable tensions of
institutionalizing a creativity that is valued precisely for its anti-institutional
proclivities.41 Frost’s case shows that if the problem cannot be solved, it can
nonetheless be productive. His distrust of academia seemed only to augment
his popularity as an academic. Resistance to professional deinition helped to
consolidate his fame.
That fame, meanwhile, shaped the academic and critical reception of
Frost’s work, letting early reviewers scorn or ignore what they found to be
its easy and airmative tendencies. Malcolm Cowley, for example, wrote two
1944 essays that explain “the case against Mr. Frost” by disparaging the Frost
partisans who want an “optimistic, uncritical” national literature.42 Exceptions
to this attitude, however, were notable and catalytic. In essays of 1947 and 1952,
Randall Jarrell describes the “other Frost,” a great modernist writer whose
wisdom is misrepresented by anthology pieces and conservative bromides.43
A later tribute by Lionel Trilling similarly dismantles the popular image with
descriptions of a “terrifying poet.”44 This darker side of Frost gained detail
from Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography, published from 1966
to 1976; although Frost had appointed him, Thompson grew more and more
disillusioned during research, and the resulting chronicle emphasizes Frost’s
personal failings. It also draws further attention to the contradictions of his
poetry, and later, better biographies by William H. Pritchard and Jay Parini
present a more balanced assessment without erasing the troubling and trou-
bled elements of Frost’s life and work – adding to a literary criticism that has
increasingly considered Frost’s depth.45
Twentieth-century American poetry, meanwhile, shows Frost’s continuing
and various importance to other writers. Poets as diferent as Gwendolyn
Brooks, Robert Lowell, and Muriel Rukeyser wrote poems about him, and a
panoply of others’ work bears signs of his inl uence. For many of the generation
born in or just before the 1920s, Frost’s verse modeled forms and themes that
other modernists pass by, and verse by William Meredith, Howard Nemerov,
James Wright, and Richard Wilbur, among others, capitalizes on the example.
Several noteworthy poets of the 1920s generation, moreover, extend Frost’s
poetics with work less obviously similar in style: with poems like “The Yucca
Moth,” A. R. Ammons reverses the terrifying implications of “Design” into a
celebration of humanity’s involvement in nature.46 In poems like “Clearing the
Title,” James Merrill’s deployment of conversation and cliché recalls Frost’s

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 Robert Frost and Tradition

“sentence sounds” while also rewriting his marriage poems in descriptions

of homosexual partnership.47 In his pivotal Three Poems, John Ashbery uses
the paradigmatic situation of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to question the
capacity for choice in a game of postmodern uncertainty.48 The work of youn-
ger American poets continues to recall Frost’s legacy in lines that may diverge
from his forms and diction. With the “opposite / directions” of “Salmon,” for
example, Jorie Graham turns the “contraries” of “West-Running Brook” into
a meditation on human sexuality and natural process during an era of ecolog-
ical endangerment.49 With “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost,” Thylias Moss
revisits the familiar scene of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” with
a “young black girl” as protagonist.50 In “Winter Fear” and other works, Kay
Ryan extends Frost’s themes into reticent meditations on the paradoxes of
common sayings. Ryan’s selected poems, The Best of It, even nods to Frost in
its half-resigned, half-assertive title.51
Unexpected ailiations map Frost’s presence in world literature, too, which
seems increasingly important to his legacy as American literary criticism looks
beyond established borders. Although Frost was a regional poet with national-
ist politics, his poems have proven useful to writers far from New England set-
tings and distanced from American values, as appreciations by Derek Walcott
and Joseph Brodsky demonstrate.52 These and other poets locate Frost’s self-
questioning of conservative assumptions in the conversing, contradictory
voices of his verse.53 The Irish poets Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and Paul
Muldoon have all taken Frost as an important forebear in their negotiations
of key paradoxes – a globally relevant regionalism, a written speech, and a
responsible freedom.54 In addition, both Heaney and Muldoon use Frost’s
poetic “game” to mitigate the potential burden of a social role or literary her-
itage, as Heaney’s treatment of “Directive” suggests.55
“Directive” also shows, once more, the possibilities in Frost’s sense of tra-
dition. Frost’s last great poem, this work was written in the 1940s yet seems to
refuse its moment. Its speaker leads the reader on a walk toward a deserted
farm at the location of two former villages (FCP, p. 341). The traveler must
make himself “at home” in this abandoned scene, passing the site of children’s
make-believe and the spot of a vanished house “in earnest,” before inally com-
ing to a “lofty and original” brook. There, one can ill a cup that has been hid-
den in a nearby tree. “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion,” the poem
concludes. “Directive” thus inscribes a characteristic temporal pattern, as the
narrative charts a “backward motion” of resistance that becomes a forward
quest for renewal, as well as a characteristic tonal register, as Frost’s version
of The Waste Land transforms the literary-religious allusions of its modernist

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 Si ob h an Ph i ll i ps

predicament into familiar and factual terms.56 Moving from the complications
of a world that is “now too much for us,” a plain-speaking voice provides
purifying waters from a genuine stream and a holy “grail” from the objects of
childhood play. Yet the ambiguities within wholeness remain: this comforting
escort “only has at heart your getting lost,” this consolation is under a spell “so
the wrong ones can’t ind it,” and this salvation comes from a broken cup at a
no-longer-inhabited imaginary home. Attenuation emphasizes the provision-
ality and uncertainty of Frost’s place “beyond confusion.” The challenges of
achieving a “momentary stay” are as perennial as the need for such assurance,
and throughout, Frost’s poetry is more powerful for including both.

Notes
1. Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark
Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 741. This collection will be
cited subsequently in the text as FCP.
2. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Houghton,
1975), p. 65.
3. Edward Connery Lathem (ed.), Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, 1966), p. 47; Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 106–07; Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of
Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997),
pp. 19–22.
4. Karen L. Kilcup, Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 22, 243; John Timberman Newcomb,
How Did Poetry Survive? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), p. 5.
5. Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), pp. 105–06; Richard Poirier,
Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1990), pp. 104–05.
6. Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. xii; Poirier, Robert Frost, pp. 52–53, 97, 258; Katherine
Kearns, Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 1–2; Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, pp. 2–15, 67, 174–80,
213–22; Elisa New, The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 24–25.
7. Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, pp. 186–87.
8. Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Attention (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 242; Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. 128; Guy
Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens,
Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1991), p. 62.

538
 Robert Frost and Tradition

9. Poirier, Robert Frost, p. 258.

10. Poirier, Robert Frost, p. 24.
11. Tyler Hofman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover, N.H.:
Middlebury College Press, 2001), p. 76.
12. Helen Bacon, “Frost and the Ancient Muses,” in Robert Faggen (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), pp. 75–100, 80–81.
13. Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature, pp. 71–72.
14. On “Hyla Brook,” see especially Brower, Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 83; Judith
Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1991), p. 174; Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature, pp. 76–78.
15. William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984), p. 168.
16. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 172.
17. Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 69. Robert Faggen and Robert Bernard Hass
have detailed the consequences of this avidity: see Robert Faggen, Robert Frost
and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997);
Robert Bernard Hass, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conl ict with Science
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002).
18. Brower, Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 107.
19. Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, pp. 85–88; Randall Jarrell,
Poetry and the Age (1953; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp.
46–49.
20. Hass, Going by Contraries, p. 20.
21. On Frost’s dualism, see especially Peter J. Stanlis, Robert Frost: The Poet as
Philosopher (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2007).
22. Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), p. 15.
23. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden; Or,
Life in the Woods, the Maine Woods, Cape Cod (New York: Library of America,
1985), p. 266; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of
America, 1983), p. 48.
24. Brower, Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 86.
25. Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. 8.
26. Poirier, Robert Frost, pp. 150–52; Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, p. 215.
27. Pritchard, Frost, p. 127; Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, pp. 182–83.
28. New, The Line’s Eye, pp. 24–25.
29. Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. 112.
30. Poirier, Robert Frost, pp. 62–72, 176, 206, 222.
31. Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. 60; Poirier, Robert Frost, p. 123; Kearns, Robert Frost,
p. 87.

539
 Si ob h an Ph i ll i ps

32. Kearns, Robert Frost, pp. 1–31, 112, 188.

33. Kearns, Robert Frost, p. 97.
34. Robert Frost, The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 45, 48.
35. Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); Christopher Benfey, “Dark
Darker Darkest: Frost in His Notebooks,” The New Republic 236:4 (2007), pp.
24–28, 26.
36. Bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American
Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 38–40.
37. Poirier, Robert Frost, p. 233.
38. Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, pp. 2–15, 136–37; Mark Richardson,
“Frost and the Cold War: A Look at the Later Poetry,” in Earl J. Wilcox and
Jonathan N. Barron (eds.), Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 55–77, 67–72.
39. Marit J. MacArthur, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and
Ashbery: The House Abandoned (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp.
62–70.
40. Lathem, Interviews with Robert Frost, p. 67.
41. Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost, pp. 90–95.
42. Malcolm Cowley, “Frost: A Dissenting Opinion,” The New Republic 110
(September 11, 1944), pp. 312–13, 312.
43. Jarrell, Poetry and the Age, pp. 28–69.
44. Lionel Trilling, “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,” Partisan
Review 26 (1959), pp. 445–52, 451.
45. For inl uential work on Frost not discussed elsewhere in this chapter, see espe-
cially Donald G. Sheehy, “(Re)Figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–1942,”
New England Quarterly 63:2 (1990), pp. 179–231; James Sitar, “Selected Lectures
of Robert Frost” (dissertation, Boston University, 2008).
46. A. R. Ammons, Corsons Inlet (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965),
p. 41.
47. James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New
York: Knopf, 2001), pp. 406–10.
48. John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956–1987 (New York: Library of America, 2008),
p. 306.
49. Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Uniied Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994 (Hopewell,
N.J.: Ecco, 1995), pp. 38–39.
50. Thylias Moss, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (New York: Persea,
1991), p. 44.
51. Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (New York: Grove, 2010),
p. 165.

540
 Robert Frost and Tradition

52. Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996).
53. Hofman, Robert Frost, pp. 204–220.
54. Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
55. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1995), pp. xiv–xv. Paul Muldoon’s lecture on “The Mountain” also analyzes
Frost’s verbal legerdemain; see The End of the Poem (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006), pp. 53–81.
56. Costello, Shifting Ground, p. 49.

541
 Chapter 24
T. S. Eliot
C h a r l e s A lt ie r i

T. S. Eliot was the igure who deined modernist poetry for educated Americans.
He refused pastoral settings for urban realities, replaced rhetoric and orna-
ment by precise diction like “measured out my life with cofee spoons,”1 trans-
formed regular rhythms into an elaborate musicality composed by phrasal
relationships, and replaced on a large scale coherent argument and narrative
by the application of montage principles. Building poems by juxtaposition, he
foregrounded how indeinable meanings could provide textures of echoes and
implications that could only be completed by a reader’s emotional commit-
ments to the rendered situations. Then Eliot was to deine modernist poetry
again to a generation of post–World War II poets weary of his authority and
trying to produce a postmodernism free of what, through Eliot, had become
critical demands for a poetry that cultivated complex acts of mind abstracted
from common life and bound to a social conservatism that ironically pro-
vided a mirror for the age that it refused to confront directly. In 1930 it seemed
every ambitious poet had to either imitate Eliot or rage about his dominance
(as William Carlos Williams did); in 1970 it seemed that being contemporary
required rejecting everything Eliot stood for.
Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis to an old New England
family displaced by his father’s career as an industrialist. Eliot’s childhood
seemed a contented one but must have been diicult psychologically. He was
the youngest of seven children, ive of them female, and sufered from a con-
genital double hernia that kept him from sports and caused him to spend
much of his time reading. Worse, his mother had all sorts of ambitions for
him, and his father had the immense task of living up to a legendary father of
his own, William Greenleaf Eliot, who combined New England exemplary
righteousness with tremendous entrepreneurial inventiveness. In 1932–1933,
Eliot gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, named for one of his
ancestors. But the young man who went to England for graduate study in phi-
losophy in 1914 felt “immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced.”2

542
 T. S. Eliot

His isolated childhood had produced considerable alienation from quotidian

society, making it necessary for him ultimately to ind a sense of belonging
only in a relation to transcendental domain.
If we rely on the evidence of the poetry Eliot wrote at Harvard – from
which he graduated in 1910, after only three years (and where in his irst year
he was put on probation for poor grades) – his childhood taught him two
things that he would put to excellent use as a writer. One was to protect his
many vulnerabilities by cultivating masks through which he could protect
himself from judgment while achieving a distanced critical consciousness that
could roam freely within the domain of social appearances. The other was a
capacity from the start to see through the limitations of those appearances to
justify something like a constant stance of ininite longing. In “Opera,” writ-
ten in 1909,

Life departs with a feeble smile

Into the indiferent.
These emotional experiences
Do not hold good at all,
And I feel like the ghost of youth
At the undertaker’s ball.3

Inspired by Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Eliot

in 1908 had started to read modern French poetry. This poem ofers explicit
homage to Jules Laforgue, with its distanced perspective on the action, its
shifts of levels of experience in the second stanza, and above all its critical
self-consciousness, which will not allow the self-ennoblement of identifying
with tragic seriousness. For Laforgue, as for Eliot in this poem, humans lead
lives of quiet desperation, barely holding of “the indiferent” that establishes
man’s metaphysical condition. But even as a junior at Harvard, Eliot’s writ-
ing showed considerable promise that he would distinguish himself. The leap
from the labor of the instruments to “love torturing itself ” would become
characteristic of his imaginative mobility. And he was already a master of
pacing, moving elegantly from the Laforguian “feeble smile” to the strong,
lat statement, “These emotional experiences / do not hold good at all.” The
inal image is even more striking: lesser poets might come up with the igure
of the ghost of youth or attendance at the undertaker’s ball, but both together
betoken a great deal of promise, and a great deal of pain, for this twenty-year-
old writer.
Despite its borrowing from Laforgue’s hypersophisticated poses, Eliot’s
Harvard poetry lacked substance – both in philosophical heft and in the

543
 C h ar l es A lt ie ri

imaginative l uidity to expand and combine the states of feeling he could

already name so witheringly. At least subliminally aware of what his poetry
still lacked, Eliot felt he needed experience that would excite and extend his
imagination, and he decided to spend a year in Paris, at a time when the
American dollar could go a very long way in Europe. Paris did little for Eliot’s
tendencies to withdraw into isolated distances from what he felt was a tawdry,
mechanical world. But he did make one very close friend, Jean Verdenal, who
was to die in World War I and be memorialized in the dedication to Prufrock
and Other Observations (1917). His year in Paris also allowed Eliot to pursue two
sharply conl icting philosophical interests – in the vitalist thought of Henri
Bergson, whose lectures Eliot attended, and in the reactionary writings of
the Catholic monarchist Charles Maurras. One might think of Eliot’s passion
for Bergson as fostering his acute attention to the dynamics of sensation in
his poetry, and his passion for Maurras as cultivating his critical distance from
those very sensations as he interpreted what experience ofered against the
backdrop of a belief in the decline of Western civilization.
Bergson’s vitalism stressed the low of duration in which experiences fused
together into dynamic complexes that could not be pieced out by the spatializ-
ing mind or, implicitly, grasped by the synthetic ironic attitudes that Laforgue
exempliied. With this in mind, compare “Opera” to the opening of “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient, etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . (ECP, p. 3)
Most striking is the new l uidity of mind and of verse. The opening is dra-
matic, shaped more by Donne’s aggressive overtures than Laforgue’s laconic
evasiveness. But the deliberate vagueness of this “you” puts that assertiveness
within Laforgue’s indeinite social space. The poem will have to deine its pos-
sible audience by coming to terms with the contradictory desires its speaker
cannot escape. Then there is a new concern for the texture of sensation,
which gets converted into metaphorical intensity. Modern American poetry
can almost be said to be born in the expansion from the bland descriptive

544
 T. S. Eliot

metaphor of the evening “spread out against the sky” to the igure based on
this patient “etherized upon a table.” It is as if the imagination took the liberty
to interpret the full range of the initial igure by hearing what “spread out”
implied, in order to follow an order sponsored more by imaginative ainities
than by any accuracy to the particular scene. This poem deinitively makes
the night far more frightening psychologically than was the custom in the
pastoral poetry dominant in Eliot’s literary culture. Now night is inseparable
from a decaying urban environment that in its turn is inseparable from an
imaginative atmosphere which acknowledges responsibility only to the intri-
cacies of the psyche. Formally, this freedom is registered by breaking from the
equal weights of the lines in “Opera” to a much more l uid sense of the line
as inding its own rhythm and playing with strange rhyming possibilities (even
posing the question of whether “table” rhymes with anything at all). This is
free verse in the full sense, in that it claims the capacity to build on its own
gathering energies rather than following a prescribed form.
Eliot’s poem goes on also to adapt principles of juxtaposition and montage
that were just emerging in the visual arts as overt conditions of a modernist
spirit unwilling to be bound to the continuities of logical space. Juxtaposition
builds a marvelous cross between physical and psychological qualities. The
yellow fog that “curled once about the house, and fell asleep” (ECP, p. 3) mixes
the alienating industrial gloom of London evenings with the igure of a cat,
expressing Prufrock’s fantasies that he might ind some secure and loving place
for rest. And the poem’s structure treats time itself as the condition wherein
the psyche stands exposed by having its fantasies laid bare and, worse, by hav-
ing to confront its own impotence:
Would it have been worth while, . . .
If one, settling a pillow or throwing of a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.” (ECP, pp. 6–7)

Yet there is no moralizing. Eliot shows that poetry can simply render com-
plex psychological states that seem beyond judgment because they capture
the speaker’s essential characteristics. Art claims the privileges held by moral
judgment.
But, as his capacity to so fully imagine Prufrock indicates, Eliot was not
one to leap into the profession of poet. He lacked self-conidence and feared
that his work would not be accepted by a world for which he had little respect.
How could the son of a New England industrialist take up so indulgent a

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 C h ar l es A lt ie ri

profession? He returned to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, the

one profession that might it his interests in self-relection and still be sui-
ciently respectable for his father and for what Eliot still internalized as the kind
of work displaced aristocrats like the Eliots might profess. In his three years
of study at Harvard he pursued two interests that would shape the course of
twentieth-century American poetry. First, he let himself explore his passion-
ate curiosity about what William James called “the varieties of religious expe-
rience.” Eliot even studied Sanskrit and took a special interest in Hindu and
Buddhist texts. No longer would Eliot’s imagination be trapped within the
alienated psychodramas of Laforguian individual self-consciousness. Instead,
the alienation could turn metaphysical and become not just a mark of social
failure but a means for exploring the possible religious signiicance of both
private and public experience. Second, he chose to do a dissertation on F. H.
Bradley, in part because Bradley tried to work out how the intricacy of indi-
vidual self-conscious states could take on a public dimension. Bradley envi-
sioned an absolute in which consciousness could assign a signiicant place for
the varieties of individual experience. Eliot rejected that claim to an absolute
because it seemed to rely only on an idealist faith in spirit. But he developed
from Bradley a related synthetic idea of “degrees of reality,” which for him
provided a continuum between his fascination with solipsistic hallucination
and aspects of objectivity provided by the fact that many subjectivities had to
attribute signiicance to given objects. The garden in a dream only matters as a
sign of individual obsession; the garden that people talk about takes on reality
because of its place in a shared life, where it might also become an efective
symbol of further possibilities for sharing ideal worlds.
The academic year 1914–1915 saw an even more propitious series of events,
at least for Eliot, and for the course of modern poetry. He was awarded a trav-
eling fellowship to study philosophy in Germany and then could not return
to the United States because war had broken out. Instead he went to Oxford,
where he began a close friendship with Ezra Pound that was to have enor-
mous efects on his future. Pound worked on Eliot’s self-conidence by trying
to convince him that he could and should make a living as a poet. It was typical
of Pound that once he was convinced of Eliot’s talent, he worked tirelessly to
convince others. Pound’s enthusiasm eventually persuaded Harriet Monroe
to publish “Prufrock” in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: that was also the month
when Eliot married a young English woman, Vivien Haigh-Wood. The deci-
sion to marry in England enabled Eliot to stand up to his parents’ requests
that he return home to take up the career of philosopher. And when Eliot did
decide to return, at least to defend his thesis on Bradley in 1916, the voyage had

546
 T. S. Eliot

to be canceled because of fears of German submarines. Meanwhile, Eliot had

taken a position as a teacher, had begun to lecture for money, and eventually
settled in a position with Lloyd’s Bank in London, where he stayed eight years,
achieving considerable success in their international inance department.
Curiously, the years after Eliot decided to make his living as a poet were not
very good years for his poetry. Instead, his most efective creative labors were
in developing a distinctive style as a critic-essayist and a body of general ideas
about what a modern poetry might look like. Prufrock and Other Observations
was published in 1917, but the book’s best poems had for the most part been
written close to the time of “Prufrock” and share its cross of a laconic sense
of reality with a disturbing lushness of sensual imaginings. The ending of
“Preludes” ofers one of the richest moments in Eliot’s work, literally produc-
ing the “I” as a source of hopeless lyricism that will inevitably invite its dialec-
tical other, the mind’s harsh lucidity about its own imaginary investments:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some ininitely gentle
Ininitely sufering thing.
Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots. (ECP, pp. 14–15)

The poems to be collected in Eliot’s second volume, Ara vos Prec (1920),
extended that lucidity but had little imaginative sympathy to mollify the sat-
ires on everything that might tempt belief. Notice the keen intellect and grasp
of the expressive power of syntax in this passage from “Gerontion,” which is
limited only by the fact that the intricate syntax has to expel any lyrical possi-
bilities for imaginative caring, leaving only its analytic intensity as the locus of
lyric emotion:

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by our vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. (ECP, p. 30)

One might argue that this is cultural criticism attempting to be raised to

the level of poetry. And one would be right, at least to the extent that the

547
 C h ar l es A lt ie ri

powers Eliot gained in his early London years were primarily powers to deploy
distanced critical stances with a suppleness that would make this work inl u-
ential in shaping an ideology for a modernist revolution. Eliot needed the
money he could make from lecture courses for working people, so he devel-
oped a style that could make complex and intense thinking available with-
out patronizing that audience. He became an exemplar of a new sensibility,
shaped by four fundamental critical ideas. If we treat these ideas as a logical
thematic set, we have to begin with Eliot’s claim that the mind of Europe in
the mid-seventeenth century, not coincidentally the time of the lourishing of
Protestantism, experienced a dissociation of sensibility in which writing could
no longer feel thought as a direct experience but broke down into periods of
thinking and periods of feeling, with precious little fusion of those capacities.4
With a single stroke, Eliot seems to have clariied why eighteenth-century
poetry ofered masterpieces distinguished by their ainities for prose reason-
ing, while the nineteenth century seemed increasingly to rely on mawkish
sentiment without much thinking that could hold up in a prose world now
dominated by empiricist methods.
No wonder, then, that Eliot’s three other basic concepts came to dominate
critical accounts of modernist values, in part because Pound was developing
somewhat analogous concepts in very diferent tonal situations. Eliot’s call for
the importance of tradition promised to resist the dissociation of sensibility
by attacking its therapeutic core – the idea that value is primarily a construct
based on individual sensibilities and interests. An ideal of tradition ofers writ-
ers “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and
within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order” (SE, p. 4). The fullest measure
of the writer’s signiicance for the present is his or her capacity to modify our
sense of the past so that it now has to include this imaginative act if witnesses
are to make sense of the whole history for which the text takes responsibility.
For if there are degrees of reality, tradition helps make sure that the poet is
engaging what has occupied many other literate minds and so is worthy of
being taken seriously.
The essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” realizes that if writers are
to submit to tradition as a test of originality, there must also be a very diferent
model of what poets try to accomplish in their texts. In its second part it pro-
poses moving from Romantic expressivist models stressing the concerns of
the poet to stressing the manifest qualities of the work considered as an imper-
sonal composition organizing disparate energies. To exemplify this shift, Eliot
makes a simple gesture with enormous consequences. He turns to science for

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an analogy with the life of spirit and in efect aligns art with science in terms
of the pursuit of objectivity. Poetry need not ofer opinions or emotional reac-
tions to historical circumstances. Rather, poetry can actually make history by
fusing emotions and feelings together under pressure so that they can take
new and unpredictable forms – look again at how “Prufrock” irst presents a
metaphor of the evening being “spread out against the sky,” then fuses that
metaphor into the more radical igure of “the patient etherized upon a table,”
and then fuses this with the street that leads to a tedious argument. Eliot
would have called this the logic of the metaphysical conceit, the last style in
Europe that successfully challenged the dissociation of sensibility. Here “a
degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation
of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in the poetry[:] . . . idea and simile become
one” (SE, p. 243):

In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought,

or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we ind in
Donne. . . . Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not
feel their thought immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne
was an experience; it modiied his sensibility. (SE, pp. 246–47)

An ideal of impersonality pervades all three arguments I have been develop-

ing, because Eliot saw that European culture was doomed to embrace thera-
peutic values that would substantially change its moral ideas by embracing the
primacy of subjective needs over objective values. But it was only in “Hamlet
and His Problems” that Eliot developed a powerful igure for his own conser-
vative morality. That igure was the “objective correlative.” In art, as in life,
there can be felt an imperative to make the object of expression adequate
to the feeling. That means there is no residue, no claims about a needy sub-
ject that demands sympathy for a “personality” that can claim importance
for the self even though it cannot quite take the forms of responsibility that
involve making that self fully articulate: “Hamlet’s balement at the absence
of an objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the balement
of his creator in the face of his artistic problem” (SE, p. 125). The measure of
Hamlet’s sickness is his inability to articulate feelings for his mother that in the
play she is too weak a character to compel. So we get only his subjectivity on
display in a desperate search for something inexpressible that might give relief.
The play fails to transcend its fascination with subjectivity. And Eliot shows by
his critical sympathy that, in the words of another essay, “only those who have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those
things” (SE, p. 11). St. Louis continues to take its toll.

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 C h ar l es A lt ie ri

All these essays cultivate an intimate relation to art crossed with a sense of
frightening distance from the society that art addresses. In this context Eliot’s
interest in foreign and ancient religions should not be surprising. But all Eliot
could do with this concern for religious traditions was to use it as a context
enabling an impersonal stance toward what he had come to see as the spiritual
vacuousness of his contemporary society. He had to stop writing the satires
that came so naturally to him and begin articulating in poetry a collective
sense of the sufering that this world, so easy to satirize, produced. And he had
to do that without turning to Hamlet’s replacement of the objective world
with igures of his personal pain. He had to be objective and critical, yet also
sympathetic with the deepest levels of his culture’s sufering.
It was those qualities, mixed with residues of Eliot’s smug ironies, that Ezra
Pound encountered late in 1921 when he was given some drafts of passages
that would eventually take form as The Waste Land (1922). Pound cut most
of the satiric ugliness and the adolescent attitudinizing to produce intricately
woven textures combining several levels of scenic objectiication, from the
visionary to the domestic. There are numerous useful critical accounts that
use the footnotes added to the poem for book publication to establish how the
plot of this poem embodies elaborate allegorical structures. The footnotes
identify allusions and indicate a level of action that echoes the structure of
primitive fertility myths, especially the story of the isher king, recently stud-
ied by the anthropologist Sir James Frazier in The Golden Bough (1890–1915).
The poem begins with a society wounded and cut of from life-giving waters
and then explores possibilities that this culture can ind some equivalent of the
isher king’s struggles to restore a spiritual life to this wasteland. In the poem,
however, that renewal cannot occur: the patterns of allusion dramatize how
far the West has strayed from the times when imagination could permeate
the facts of experience. Now renewal depends on the non-Western religions
that fascinated Eliot, especially in fragments from the Upanishads. Most crit-
ics agree that the desired renewal does not take place in the poem. But they
also agree that the spiritual terrors rendered by this poem ultimately proved
fundamental for the conversion in 1927 that led Eliot to be baptized into the
Church of England.
Here I can only outline one path through the allegory while concentrating
on how the poetry develops suicient concrete power to compel our attention
to the allegorical level. Notice irst how the opening of the poem preserves the
lush, imaginative mobility of “Prufrock” while projecting a spiritual crisis far
more deep and pervasive than Prufrock’s psychological problems. The Waste
Land renders an entire culture coming to self-consciousness of the historical

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forces shaping its deiciencies and its painfully reduced range of available
voices:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. . . .
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbeergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten
And drank cofee, and talked for an hour. . . .
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read much of the night, and go south in the winter.
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 . . . (ECP, p. 53)

There is immense scope, because the season afects everyone and indicates
a collective malaise. And the allusion to the hopeful opening of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales becomes here a profound mistrust of instinct, because the
spring that should bring hope brings only awareness of a despair that cannot
make human consciousness resonate with seasonal forces. There is no person-
ality to blame or to shield by imaginary projection from these bare facts of the
human condition; there is only the impersonal measure of change from condi-
tions the culture could once celebrate. But Eliot is also careful to register par-
ticular intimate qualities of that malaise, especially in how the rain is used, in
the cadence that makes us feel drums beating into our heads, and in the lovely
suspended participles that produce ive of the opening six line endings. These
participles make syntax a vital expressive feature of the poem by suspending
the mind in a present tense abstracted from the physical scene and by creating
a space hovering about the scene that will soon be illed by echoes of religious
values. It is as if syntax could capture a sense of physical process and transi-
tion between states that contrasts sharply with the trapped defensiveness that
permeates the human interactions.
I use ellipses in citing the opening passage so that I can illustrate how the
poem moves quickly from the season to how representative human agents
respond to their situation. The quiet passage about summer introduces human
speaking, crucially in the irst-person plural, which the author’s impersonality
can bring into focus. Here we enter a domain of lyrical possibility within the
casual world that anticipates the more elaborate memories of the hyacinth

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garden soon to come. There is rain, although the protagonists do not yet know
how much they will need it, and there is sunlit peacefulness. But the agents see
neither the intensity possible in those physical states nor the symbolic dimen-
sion making them valuable. So they consume the time (rather than redeem it)
in casual talk. Then the casual talk seems largely a defensive shield, as the next
passage presents particular voices pervaded by a fearfulness and evasiveness
that can only understand freedom as the capacity to read much of the night
and go south in the winter.
I add the opening of the second stanza of the poem’s irst section to indicate
the shock Eliot wants to create as we move from “civilized” and repressed eva-
siveness to the competing voice of the prophet, demanding that the citizens
take stock of the lives that work so hard to evade lucid self-consciousness.
Now the world of broken images has to be seen in relation to the possibility of
accounting for our lives in relation to the symbolic and transcendental orders
that they represent, and that they violate. The prophet demands responses
that engage all that “Son of man” has come to mean in Christianity. (The heap
of broken images may be read as a mark of how far this poem is from Pound’s
Imagism, which was all the rage only a decade before; and so the broken
images demand a very diferent kind of poetry.) Now we experience the need
to work out how the overall plot will interpret the contrasts of the intimate
versus the public, the image versus the symbol, and acts of attention versus
acts of protective denial.
The Waste Land has ive sections (beautifully correlated with the move-
ments of Beethoven’s quartets). Each builds on juxtapositions and allusions to
relect a diferent aspect of spiritual crisis. The irst section maps the distance
between the ordinary life of citizens and what has become symbolic detritus
(like tarot packs, churches, intense personal memories, and spring itself ). Here
the poem creates an imperative for consciousness to be open to the symbolic
realm even while it has to distrust the culture’s use of those symbols. A heap
of broken images cannot be ixed by building another heap: there must be a
diference in reading that allows us to hear the prophet and recognize “fear in
a handful of dust” (ECP, p. 54). In contrast to the multiple worlds of the irst
section, the second concentrates on developing the sterility that pervades all
classes of London life, which prove utterly unalike, except in this shared sense
of distance from any vital principle. Eliot is especially playful and pervasively
ironic in this section because he wants his language and his allusions to mime
that sterility. The more we capture the allusions, the more we feel the useless-
ness of this knowledge, just as the portrayal of rape on the aristocratic lady’s
mantle has none of the urgency or impact of what it represents.

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 T. S. Eliot

The third section of The Waste Land turns from psychology to the landscape
of broken images, insisting now that we ind psychology echoed there as well.
It is entitled “The Fire Sermon” to emphasize the dry thirst that water can
bring when it cannot bring life. The central section has seven units. It begins
with an empty landscape echoing biblical psalms of desperation; builds to a
central unit staging a complete failure of sexual connection as the bored typist
submits without receiving, or giving, anything but her consent; and reaches a
climax in a conjunction of Saint Augustine with Buddha’s ire sermon. At the
igurative core of this wasteland is an internal hell. But this hell can be experi-
enced in two somewhat diferent ways: one can simply register or defend the
self from despair, and one can try to read the situation in purgatorial terms as
a call for eforts at puriication by coming to terms with the text’s allusions and
realizing what we have lost as we adapt to secularity. These options are inten-
siied in the poem’s short fourth section, which displays the sea’s picking the
bones of Phlebas the sailor in whispers, far from the sounds of lamentation or
the traces of redeeming prayer.
The poem asks whether there is an alternative to this death by water, and
so whether there is any possibility of reading water as baptismal. Because
there might be that possibility, we have to go through another dimension of
purgatory, presented by a visionary confrontation with the symbolic implica-
tions of the landscape in the inal section, as if the isher king had to surmount
this inal – here impossible – challenge before bringing the kind of water that
could bring life to the wasteland.
At the dramatic center of this section there is an echo of Christ’s journey
to Emmaus, during which he speaks with two disciples who do not recognize
him until he reveals himself:

Who is this 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 . . .
(ECP, p. 67)

For Eliot this is the ultimate test of faith. It ofers itself not in visionary splen-
dor but in the casual processes of living, in which spiritual truth seems just
the other side of appearances. But how do we get to the other side when our
relation to appearance is simultaneously so needy and so insensitive? How do
we not conirm the wasteland by repeating its empiricist mantras, suspicious
of all belief ? The one hope seems to be to ind possibilities of belief in the
spiritual world by turning to speciic passages in religious texts that have yet

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to be distorted and travestied by believers and unbelievers alike. So the poem

turns to three commands from the Upanishads – “Dattta,” “Dayadhvam,” and
“Damyata.” The text, mired in modernity, still has the power in the footnotes
to give these terms literal translations – “Give,” “Sympathize,” and “Control.”
But moral imperatives have to be translated into possibilities for practice. And
in this respect the poem can only respond with memories. There is no way to
make the imperatives present and operable:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each conirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus (ECP, p. 69)

After engaging the three imperatives, the poem shatters into fragments, con-
cluding with the mad Hieronymo’s cry in the Renaissance poet Thomas Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy, “Why then Ile it you” (ECP, p. 69). In Kyd’s play, Hieronymo is
pretending madness and promises to write a play accommodating the desires
of those who murdered his son, a play in which he writes himself a part that
allows him to take revenge. But these lines in Eliot’s poem mark the madden-
ing frustration that there is no it for this age that does not become an aspect of
its spiritual vacuity: to attempt to change the culture is to be co-opted by it on
the deepest psychological levels. So Eliot’s poem can end only with what most
critics think is an echo of a formal ending to an Upanishad, “Shantih, Shantih,
Shantih,” now reduced to a ritual promise of peace that covers over but does
not resolve the spiritual turmoil.
After The Waste Land Eliot was done with trying by secular poetry to estab-
lish a spiritual core for his culture. Indeed he was done with a distinctive mod-
ernist poetics. He devoted his secular energies to founding and editing the
review The Criterion, which from 1922 to 1939 tried to represent the best writing
in Europe about its cultural dilemmas. (For Eliot, Marxism and Christianity
were the only fully serious discourses because they both took seriously the
plight of European culture.) But his imaginative energies were devoted pri-
marily to looking toward his own salvation, which included freeing himself
of his wife, from whom he separated in 1932, and whom he put into a mental
hospital in 1938. (The movie Tom and Viv gives a sensitive picture of their hopes
and their conl icts.) Eliot had a distinctive view of his conversion – that it was
the result not of faith but of the surrender to a humility and a sense of need
that could take a path on which faith might ultimately be found. That need

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was for him deined against humanism, as he made clear in the powerful essay
“Second Thoughts about Humanism” (1928). There he criticized humanism
both because it could not produce an ethics and because it had to make eth-
ics the ultimate value in how we judge human lives. Humanism could not
produce an ethics because it was committed to honoring all imaginatively
rich human products. It had an aesthetics, but it had far too much diversity
to provide any strict principles or even fealties to speciic cultural traditions.
The lesson of humanism in this regard was that one could not idealize expe-
rience in itself or pursue universals based on abstractions from the variety of
human practices. One had to determine what in experience mattered most to
a given individual and to ind ultimate values that one could commit to as this
individual. And one had to recognize that morality could never reach much
further than a highly civilized aesthetics based on distaste for evil rather than
confrontation with sinfulness:
Mr Foerster’s Humanism, in fact, is too ethical to be true. Where do all those
morals come from? One advantage of an orthodox religion, to my mind, is
that it puts morals in their proper place. I cannot understand a system of mor-
als which seems to be founded on nothing but itself – which exists, I suspect,
only by illicit relations with either psychology or religion or both, according
to the bias of the mind of the individual humanist. . . . Mr. Foerster is more
likely to end in respectability than in perfection. (SE, pp. 32–33, 35)
Eliot’s deining Christianity against humanism shaped his literary career
after 1927. While he became a more generous literary critic, even inding ways
to praise Milton, most of his criticism, like After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea
of a Christian Society (1940), and Notes Towards a Deinition of Culture (1948), was
devoted to somewhat strange and chilling speculations on what it might take
to revive a distinctive Christian culture. He turned to the theater as a test of
whether spirituality could still play a part on the modern stage, in plays like
Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), and The Cocktail Party
(1949). And he continued to write noteworthy poetry. “Ash Wednesday” (1930)
maps a meditative path to possible salvation. And Four Quartets (1935–1942)
develops a marvelous rewriting of The Waste Land: its engagement in the cul-
ture becomes a tale of England subject to German bombing, and its allusive
complexity centers on the evocation of Christian mystical writing as the tra-
dition ofering a discipline of the spirit that can show an individual the way of
salvation:
The dove descending breaks the air
With lame of incandescent terror

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 C h ar l es A lt ie ri

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from ire by ire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shift of lame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either ire or ire. (ECP, p. 207)
Conversion is elemental and total, allowing the mind to see all four of the
elements – earth, water, ire, and air – as redemptive reversals of the alienat-
ing resistance to spirit they embodied in The Waste Land. And, above all, Four
Quartets transforms the tormenting gap between the present and the allusions
it evokes into the capacity completely to accept the present and to speak decid-
edly Christian sentences that believers can ofer to a secular world without
either embarrassment or righteousness.
The earthly aspect of Eliot’s torment ended on January 4, 1965.

Notes
1. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), p. 3. This
collection will be cited subsequently in the text as ECP.
2. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922, ed. Hugh Haughton and
Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. xvii.
3. T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks
(London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 17.
4. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 247. This collec-
tion will be cited subsequently in the text as SE.

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 Chapter 25
William Carlos Williams: The Shock
of the Familiar
Bob Perelman

“But that sounds just like my husband! . . . You mean to stand there and tell
me that that’s a poem?” – a teacher enrolled in a poetry workshop in the 1970s
has just been introduced to what many readers will recognize as the erstwhile
kitchen table note William Carlos Williams scrawled to his wife, Flossie. It has
become one of Williams’s most familiar poems. First, the confession:
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
The second stanza displays a bit of sympathy for the wronged party, who was
“probably / saving” the plums “for breakfast.” The inal stanza starts with a
bare-bones apology – “Forgive me” – but then shifts to a recollection of the
guilty pleasure: “they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.”1
The teacher’s reaction to the poem is a small moment situated well out-
side the circles of critical expertise, but it makes a telling emblem of the cur-
rent situation of Williams in the twenty-irst century. The anecdote appears
in an essay concerned with teaching poetry in schools;2 it involves a reader
who is neither poet nor critic, and her reaction is out of sync with the stan-
dard critical histories. But this is appropriate for Williams, who himself was
out of sync with the reigning paradigms of his day. He remains anomalous
with regard to contemporary poetic expectations of our day, although this is
masked by his ubiquitous inl uence on poets and his presence in anthologies
and on syllabi. In accounts of American poetry, Williams is a basic marker of
the development of modernism, of the avant-garde, and of a democratic art
of everyday speech.3 However, although he has become important to these
literary chronologies, he its awkwardly into them all. The imagery from one

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of his own typically of-the-cuf critical remarks can be applied to his current
reception: “Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet – gosh, how I
hate sonnets – is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs
of to make him it.”4
This is not to say that attaching any literary label to Williams’s work is
some kind of mutilation. He is a crucial American modernist who developed
a stripped-down, lexible language that has been more inl uential than that
of any other twentieth-century American poet; he experimented tirelessly
with formal dimensions of poems – lineation, punctuation (or lack thereof ),
incorporation of everyday speech and visual icons, and mixing of passages of
syntactic continuity with disjunctive moments; and he wrote a major mod-
ernist epic, Paterson (1946–1958). Given his lifelong attack on received poetic
convention and his insistence on the new, it seems wrong not to associate
him with the avant-garde. His prose-poetry hybrids Spring and All (1923) and
The Descent of Winter (1928) as well as the unconventional prose of Kora in
Hell (1920) and The Great American Novel (1923) show him as an excited exper-
imenter; lines like the following are clearly addressed to avant-garde arenas:
“where bridge stanchions / rest / certainly / piercing / left ventricles / with
long / sunburnt ingers” (WCPI, p. 212). But, to move to the third category,
much of Williams’s writing is inescapably democratic in vocabulary, in subject
matter, and in immediacy of address. The prose of his ifty-plus short stories,
four novels, ive plays, and Autobiography (1951) is conventional: for example,
“In half an hour I was back at the house again, as agreed. There was an old
black-and-white cat lying in the sunny doorway who literally had to be lifted
and pushed away before I could enter” (FD, p. 326). However, such everyday
texture is rarely placed in the service of narrative tension. Then again, pas-
sages of the most ordinary language appear throughout his most experimen-
tal work – all of which is to say that basic categorical separations have been,
and continue to be, diicult to maintain when reading Williams’s work. His
attack on the sonnet is modernist – compare it with Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted
line “(to break the pentameter, that was the irst heave)” – and his defense of
the crab is Romantic, a version of Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect.”5 Is
the poem a made thing that must relect the latest poetic advances, or is it a
natural outgrowth that must not be deformed?
The teacher in our opening anecdote is not thinking in terms of literary his-
torical categories, but she is, in a way, reinventing them, reinscribed in a demo-
cratic (unprofessional) context: to her, the poem seems scandalously unpoetic,
simply a scrap of real life masquerading as art. Such a reaction could put us in
mind of earlier, more notable shocks occasioned by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

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(1922) or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). Time magazine, reviewing Eliot’s

poem in its initial issue, quoted the last eight lines of Eliot’s poem as if they
were self-evident nonsense and concluded, “It is rumored that The Waste Land
was written as a hoax.”6 If we emphasize the origin of “This Is Just to Say” as
a kitchen table note, the closer parallel might be a Duchamp readymade, in
which a snow shovel, bottle rack, or, most famously and provocatively in the
case of Fountain, an upside-down urinal was exhibited as art.
A strict chronological perspective would disallow such comparisons. By
1970, the era of modernist and avant-garde shocks was long past, and the
poem that shocked the teacher had become something of a literary chestnut.7
Kenneth Koch’s afectionate parody “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos
Williams,” published ten years before in The New American Poetry, assumes the
Williams poem as an obvious reference; otherwise Koch’s violent humor loses
much of its bite: “We laughed at the hollyhocks together / and then I sprayed
them with lye. / Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.”8
The minimalism and undisguised everydayness of “This Is Just to Say”
might, in 1970, have surprised a neophyte like the teacher, but even at its publi-
cation in 1934 it would have looked, to a knowledgeable reader, merely “mod-
ern” (unrhymed, vers libre, no punctuation). The stripped-down, quasi-regular
quatrains are a far cry from the daunting literary reach and cultural range
of The Waste Land; nor are the poem’s communicativeness and domesticity
avant-garde in the slightest. In fact, the poem is currently being used as a writ-
ing prompt for eighth graders.9 As with The Rite of Spring going from scandal
at its 1913 Paris premiere to Disney soundtrack in 1940, here is an example of
how quickly the shocks of artistic advance, whether large or small, are neu-
tralized and repurposed for domestic use.
However, such knowledgeable divisions between new and belated make
only partial sense of Williams. Naïve as the teacher’s reaction must seem
from informed perspectives, it shows us a quality of Williams’s work that has
afected its reception for many decades: its unstable mix of the ordinary and
the new. If we attend carefully to what she says – and Williams is the poet who
has been crucial in showing how everyday speech can be a primary material
for poetry – we will ind more than some dim echo of avant-garde or modern-
ist impacts. In fact, what irst strikes her about the poem is its utter familiarity:
“But that sounds just like my husband!” For her, the shock of the new arises
relexively from what we might term the shock of the familiar.
In the pedagogical context in which the anecdote appears, the teacher is
no longer a half century behind the times; rather, she becomes a igure of the
expansive future of Williams’s work: her reaction in the 1970 workshop remains

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a teachable moment on the twenty-irst-century website of the Academy of

American Poets. A myriad of similar events have enabled Williams to outlank
the larger reputations that, during his writing life, were well ahead of him.
A laggard according to the modernist calendar, Williams’s staying power is
better measured in terms of social breadth rather than via tropes of aesthetic
advance. It participates in dissynchronous chronologies, making its relation to
literary history labile.
This does not mean the work is, in any sense, timeless. Often the ever-
widening gap of actual years is quite clear, as in the widely taught “The Young
Housewife” (1916). The questions the poem raises about male voyeurism are
vivid to twenty-irst-century readers, but the following lines, which present
the object of the doctor’s fantasy coming into actual view, also present a puz-
zle to the contemporary reader: “Then again she comes to the curb / to call
the ice-man, ish-man, and stands / shy, uncorseted” (WCPI, p. 57). What were
corsets, ice-men, and ish-men at the moment the doctor-poet was driving
by? Many things, clearly; but few contemporary readers will have any sense
of them. Williams’s success in addressing his present with appropriate poetic
quickness remains apparent, but it is also clear that the poem is a century old.
The poetic horizon that Williams often evokes – a primal opposition
between a young United States and an adult Europe, pitting a jejune chaos
against a culture of varied sophistication – is a phenomenon from the irst half
of the twentieth century. Williams voices the conl ict loudly:
God I would like to see some man, some one of the singers step out in the
midst of some one of Aida’s songs and scream like a puma. . . . I am a begin-
ner. I am an American. A United Stateser. Yes, it’s ugly. . . . I hate you [Europe],
I hate your orchestras, your libraries, your sciences, your yearly salons, your
inely tuned intelligences of all sorts. (IM, pp. 174–76)
Williams’s sense of his own cultural deicit may be a constant, but even his
(rhetorical) yelling shows us that he was keeping up with the latest manifestos
from Europe.
When we think of Williams staying in New Jersey, we should remember
that for him the local included nearby New York City, where he assiduously
kept up with poets and painters. Despite his complaints about isolation in the
provinces, Williams interacted with many signiicant artists, writers (Pound,
H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert McAlmon, Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven, Nathaniel West, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley,
Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg), and visual artists (Duchamp, Man Ray,
Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Alfred Stieglitz). Such a

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list only begins to suggest the range of his contacts. His poems often show the
inl uence of innovations from the visual arts, much as Gertrude Stein’s writ-
ing relects Picasso or the poetry of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery relects
the New York painting scene in the 1950s. And, it should be remembered, the
fact that he was a doctor with a full-time general practice gave him access to
more diferent people, classes, and types of event than any other American
poet. For example: “The girl who comes to me breathless, staggering into my
oice, in her underwear a still living infant, making me lock her mother out
of the room.” This is not meant as a dramatic climax; Williams introduces it
as part of his routine (A, p. 361). Williams’s combination of wide social experi-
ence and artistic sophistication is, in hindsight, remarkable.
But the narrative that mattered to Williams involved a frustrating pursuit of
those who, he felt, were ahead of him: Pound and Eliot, primarily – although
Duchamp merits mention here as well. Late in life Williams said, “Before
meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A. D.”10 From their meeting as teen-
agers, Pound, younger, conident, and knowledgeable, assumed the role of
Williams’s teacher, a pattern that was to continue for half a century. Williams
soon saw through some of Pound’s intellectual pretentions – in Kora Williams
outs Pound, so to speak, by quoting him as saying, “It is not necessary . . . to
read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell every-
one I said so” (IM, p. 10). Nevertheless Williams remained daunted. Three
decades later, in Paterson, he quotes pedagogic letters that he was still receiv-
ing from Pound: “Read all the Gk tragedies in / Loeb. – plus Frobenius, plus
Gesell” (P, p. 138). Throughout his life Williams made irregular progress toward
emancipating himself, declaring in one of his last poems, “To My Friend Ezra
Pound” (1956), “Your English / is not speciic enough / As a writer of poems
you show yourself to be inept not to say / usurious” (WCPII, p. 434) – the
last word a most knowing thrust naming the cardinal sin in Pound’s poetic
politico-theology. But such moments of conident equality are not the rule.
From our perspective it is no surprise that Williams, who associated with the
likes of Duchamp and Alfred Steiglitz, would be a more sophisticated igure
than Pound. But for Williams, Pound’s erudition was always a problem, as we
will see in the discussion of Paterson.
Williams was not a igure such as Eliot, Pound, or Duchamp who could
declare, authoritatively, what mattered and what didn’t. This authority was
brought about by their creative work but just as signiicantly by their critical
dicta: Duchamp’s rejection of what he termed “retinal art”; Pound’s division
of poetry into melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia;11 and Eliot’s pronounce-
ments that Joyce’s “mythical method” was something that “others must

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pursue after him”12 or that “poetry in our civilization, as it exists at present,

must be diicult.”13 Such statements, regardless of how accurate or prophetic
they turned out to be, were powerful in setting the terms for inexorably for-
ward-moving aesthetic chronologies.
According to such reckonings, Williams was behind the times, both in his
writing and in his situation as a full-time doctor in New Jersey. Often enough,
Williams himself shared this perception. In Spring he critiques his performance
in Kora: “Their [i.e., the Improvisations’] fault is their dislocation of sense, often
complete. But it is the best I could do under the circumstances” (WCPI, p. 203).
Decades later, at the beginning of Paterson, his deicits are emphasized:
To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means –
Sniing the trees,
just another dog
among a lot of dogs. (P, p. 3)
His despair at the publication of The Waste Land is well known: “It wiped
out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it. . . . I felt at once
that it had set me back twenty years” (A, p. 174). A less remarked encounter
with Duchamp produces a similar result. “I inally came face to face with him
as we walked about the room and I said, ‘I like your picture[.]’ . . . He looked at
me and said, ‘Do you?’ That was all. He had me beat all right, if that was the
objective. I could have sunk through the loor, ground my teeth, turned my
back on him and spat” (A, p. 137). Williams did not react to these defeats in sim-
ilar fashion. He paid the most serious attention to Duchamp, whose radically
playful senses of art stayed with Williams throughout his career.14 His aversion
to Eliot, on the other hand, was unnuanced and unchanging.
Williams assembled the manuscript of Spring and All (1923) in reaction to
The Waste Land.15 The two works are now, of course, widely considered of the
most signal importance to the history of American poetry. But at the time,
in contrast to the impact of The Waste Land, the publication of Spring was a
complete nonevent: most of the three hundred copies printed in Dijon were
destroyed by U.S. customs.16 The single meeting between the two poets, in
1948, furnishes a itting conclusion to Williams’s inverse trajectory vis-à-vis
Eliot. By this point, Eliot ruled poetry in English, stylistically, critically, and,
as senior editor at Faber and Faber, logistically; he would receive the Nobel
Prize a month later; Williams’s omission from Conrad Aiken’s 1945 anthology
of American poetry makes a suitable counter-emblem.17 Eliot’s one recorded

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remark was the following: “Williams, you’ve given us some good characters in
your work, let’s have more of them.”18 By pointedly praising the short stories
(faintly, to be sure), Eliot was conirming Williams’s status as a nonpoet.
Eliot’s triumph set the terms for Williams’s critical reception during his
lifetime and for decades afterward. To parse the battle schematically: on the
victor’s side there would be the major poem (The Waste Land, The Cantos),
authoritative criticism, and established protocols of knowledge requiring the
services of professional academics to be circulated. Eventually, Williams could
approximate these accomplishments: Paterson was crucial to his wider accep-
tance; Marjorie Perlof calls it his “major work, the poem that inally made
him famous.”19 To match the critical terms of Pound and Eliot there would
be Williams’s variable foot.20 But where Eliot and Pound had spawned critical
industries devoted to explication, Williams’s work was always open to charges
of confusion if not simplemindedness. Randall Jarrell’s rave review of the
irst book of Paterson had been most responsible for Williams’s success; but
when Williams concluded Book 2 with eight pages of a Marcia Nardi letter,
Jarrell’s reaction was incredulousness: “What has been done to them to make
it possible for us to respond to [Nardi’s letters] as art and not as raw reality?
. . . I can think of no answer except: They have been copied out on the typewriter
[emphasis in original].”21 As for the variable foot, despite some smart and gen-
erous attempts to grapple with what Williams meant,22 the term has always
been vulnerable to commonsense dismissal. If the variable foot is taken as
referring to syllables heard in real time, a skeptic would ask if the following
units from one of Williams’s stairstep lines were really intended to be similar
in duration: (1) “even” and (2) “an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places” (WCPII, p. 245).23 The editor of the current Oxford Anthology of American
Poetry writes, afectionately but dismissively, “One of the secrets of modern
American poetry is that no one knows what ‘the variable foot’ really is.”24
In a letter that Williams quotes in the preface to Kora, Pound gives Williams
the left-handed compliment of “opacity,” which Pound thinks comes from
Williams’s mixed ancestry. It is rather close to saying that Williams is dense:
“And America? What the h – l do you a blooming foreigner know about the
place. . . . You thank your bloomin gawd you’ve got enough Spanish blood to
muddy up your mind. . . . The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t
forget it” (IM, p. 11). Pound’s perception of Williams hardly changed: in a 1930
review, he praises (again) Williams’s “opacity” and the “lack of celerity of his
process”; Kora, Pound inds, is “Rimbaud forty years late.”25 Such condescen-
sion carries through to Charles Olson, who complained to Robert Creeley
that “Bill, with all due respect, don’t know fr nothing abt what a city is.”26 In a

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private letter, he was harsher: “Bill’s own lack of intellect is sabotaging . . . all
our positions.”27
One might ascribe such swipes to the contentiousness of poetic rivals. But
senses of Williams as untutored, a bit of a bumpkin, are not hard to come by:
throughout his work, one inds moments of naïveté, pugnaciousness, clown-
ing, blunt crudity, foregrounded gaps, and mistakes – all manifestations of
his aversion to authority and prestige. In Kora Williams quotes a letter from
H.D. deploring his lack of seriousness, “the hey-ding-ding touch . . . as if you
mocked at your own song” (IM, p. 13), and then seems to prove her right
by declaring, “There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from
one end to the other” (IM, p. 13). Although Book 5 of Paterson (1958) contains
much valedictory lyrical seriousness, the lines likeliest to lodge in memory
are, “Paterson, / keep your pecker up, / whatever the detail!” (P, p. 231).
Such moments can’t be separated out from what is most serious in his work.
The foregrounded silliness of the opening of Spring and the brokenness of the
prose throughout are not a turning away from the challenge that Eliot’s poet-
ics posed: they are part of Williams’s answer. However, Williams’s turn away
from cultured language does not always guarantee vivid liveliness. One of his
most famous poems, “To Elsie,”28 begins memorably – “The pure products of
America / go crazy –” (WCPI, p. 217) – but is soon full of cliché: “devil-may-
care-men who have taken / to railroading / out of sheer lust of adventure.”
This could be read as an unannounced switch into the diction of adventure
magazines; such a reading would make Williams a bit of a Joycean29 (and such
a reading could be supported by many similar moments of juxtaposed diction
in Paterson). But the lines can also be taken simply as ordinary (careless) phras-
ing. “The Black Winds” (poem V) in Spring begins with imagery that can only
be called hackneyed: “Black winds from the north / enter black hearts. Barred
from // seclusion in lilies they strike / to destroy –” (WCPI, p. 189–90). Yet
the poem ends with a crisp modernist credo: “How easy to slip / into the old
mode, how hard to / cling irmly to the advance –” (WCPI, p. 191).
Williams began by writing bad Keatsian pastiche (“For I must read a lady
poesy / The while we glide by many a leafy bay” [WCPI, p. 21]) and in a few
years had progressed into a modernist mode: free verse, no capitals at the
beginnings of lines, and everyday language and images. The seventh section
of “January Morning” reads in its entirety: “– and the worn / blue car rails
(like the sky!) / gleaming among the cobbles!” (WCPI, p. 101). But Williams’s
advance is never chronologically pure. The expressive subject from his belated
Romanticism has not disappeared into modernist objectivity: throughout his
work, Williams’s subjectivity is hard to miss. Often the poet’s enthusiasm is

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betrayed by exclamation marks, which Williams consistently uses more than

any other modernist. The end of “January Morning” makes the subjective
dimension blatant, as Williams addresses his mother: “All this – / was for you,
old woman. / I wanted to write a poem / that you would understand. / For
what good is it to me / if you don’t understand it? (WCPI, p. 103).
Another poem from this period, “Portrait of a Lady,” shows Williams’s
advancing compositional sophistication, as he conceives of the poem as an
event in its own right, free from any need for description. The opening lines
mix sarcastic imagery, distanced but genuine eroticism, and an aggressive
appropriation of art history: “Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms
touch the sky. / Which sky? The sky / where Watteau hung a lady’s / slipper.”
A few lines later Williams is playing with the conceits he has invented: “Ah,
yes – below / the knees, since the tune / drops that way, it is / one of those
white summer days, / the tall grass of your ankles / l ickers upon the shore –
/ Which shore? – / the sand clings to my lips –” (WCPI, p. 129). Such a pas-
sage, neither description nor interior monologue, illustrates a point Williams
would make later: “The poet thinks with his poem” (A, pp. 390–91). However,
the subjectivity of the poet is hardly absent here, as the poem is also an erotic
colloquy between poet and “lady.”
During the 1920s Williams began publishing substantial amounts of prose,
with In the American Grain (1925) garnering the most contemporary attention.
It is a highly personal account of American history, focusing on an archipelago
of representative igures: Columbus, De Soto, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone,
Washington, and Poe, among others. Making no attempt at an objective his-
tory, Williams writes from a quasi-identiicatory position, continually telling a
similar story: the uninished creation of an American culture, a process involv-
ing the falling away of European norms under the shock of physical con-
tact with the unknown New World. This was a scenario that applied closely
to Williams’s own attempts to fashion a modernist poetic idiom in America
while resisting European sophistication. Poe was the exemplar: “It is NOT
culture to oppress a novel environment with the stale, if symmetrical, castofs
of another battle. . . . Poe could look at France, Spain, Greece and NOT be
impelled to copy.”30 One could read “Williams” for “Poe” there without much
distortion of meaning.
Williams’s experimental prose and prose-poetry pieces of the period, Kora,
Spring, The Great American Novel, and The Descent of Winter, have, since their
republication in Imaginations (1970), been highly esteemed by generations of
innovative poets and pro-innovative critics. But their initial impact was min-
imal: in addition to their paltry circulation, Williams’s experiments blatantly

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revealed the spontaneity of their composition. As its title makes clear, the
pieces in Kora were improvised. The book was a yearlong series of daily prose
pieces, scribbled at odd hours in the midst of his medical practice. For exam-
ple: “Awake early to the white blare of a sun looding in sideways. Strip and
bathe in it. Ha, but an ache tearing at your throat – and a vague cinema lifting
its black moon blot all out. . . . There’s no dancing save in the head’s dark” (IM,
p. 66). About the preceding excerpt, Williams comments: “In the mind there is
a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their
prey seem pictures on a screen at the movies. . . . The wish would be to see
not loating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the
actual things” (IM, p. 67).
It is easy to read Williams’s best-known poetic slogan, “No ideas but in
things,” as rejecting everything save physical description. However, although
Williams almost always rejected the vague interiority of “the head’s dark,”
it was never the pure exteriority of “actual things” that his poems aimed to
reveal: it was the middle term that he valued, “the imaginative qualities” of
what he perceived. In the broken prose of Spring, a constantly occurring word
is “imagination,” which could provide “an escape from crude symbolism, the
annihilation of . . . ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from ‘real-
ity’ – such as rhyme, meter. . . . The work will be in the realm of the imagina-
tion as plain as the sky to a isherman – A very clouded sentence. The word
must be put down for itself ” (IM, p. 18). The prose of Spring is almost always
“very clouded”: Williams never settles on what he means by imagination, but
the poems, in their variousness, give a sense of its capaciousness. There is his
best-known poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” whose minimalist focus on the
physical can obscure its form (three-word / one-word stanzas) and its verbal
dexterity (breaking “wheelbarrow” into its two constituent nouns and decom-
posing rain into process, “rain,” and material, “water”). Other poems show
Williams’s interest in Cubism and Dada: “The sunlight in a / yellow plaque
upon the / varnished loor // is full of a song / inlated to / ifty pounds
pressure” (WCPI, p. 196). “Shoot It Jimmy!” lineates American speech: “Our
orchestra / is the cat’s nuts – // . . . // That sheet stuf / ’s a lot a cheese”
(WCPI, p. 216). “To Elsie” is a complex poem that, despite Williams’s anti-
Eliot stance, now can be read as an American equivalent to The Waste Land.
Here, Williams is as unhappy with modernity as Eliot is; Elsie, who surfaces
in the middle of the poem, is as bleak a igure as Eliot’s Lil or the young man
carbuncular. But where Eliot uses scorn to distance himself (and his readers)
from such unappealing personages, Williams allows Elsie to be emblematic of

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the present, which includes poet and reader: she “express[es] with broken //
brain the truth about us.” Where the end of The Waste Land gestures, however
ironically, toward some transcendent conclusion (“Shantih shantih shantih”),
“Elsie” leaves us in an open-ended present, in a moving car careening toward
an unknown future: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the
car” (WCPI, pp. 218–19).
In the teens and 1920s it was easy for modernists as diferent as Pound and
Stein to imagine that innovative writing had a real social impact. In the 1930s,
the Depression and the rise of fascism made such conidence obsolete. In the
1920s one can see Williams collaging diferent social perspectives in poems;
in the 1930s emblematic social igures appear, for instance, in “Proletarian
Portrait,” which presents a “big bareheaded woman / in an apron” – although
Williams is careful to avoid the heroism of proletarian poetry, as this woman
merely takes of her shoe and “pulls out the paper insole / to ind the nail /
That has been hurting her” (WCPI, p. 384). She has the power to improve her
own situation in this small way; improving the world is another matter. In
“The Yachts,” one of his major poems of the period, Williams maintains the
tension between the exquisite calibrations of ine art and unnuanced human
needs. At irst the yachts “appear youthful, rare // as the light of a happy eye,
live with the grace / of all that in the mind is leckless, free and / naturally to
be desired.” But in the latter half of the poem the yacht race becomes a “hor-
ror,” and our attention is turned away from the triumphal elegance of the
yachts toward the supporting medium, the water, which is seen as “an entan-
glement of watery bodies / lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold”
(WCPI, pp. 388–89). Incidentally, here is another example of Williams aiming
to register “imaginative qualities,” rather than simply “things.”
Williams’s notion of a poem as a made thing rather than a personal expres-
sion inds its most memorable expression in the introduction to The Wedge
(1944), in which we are told that a poem is a “machine made of words” (WCPII,
p. 54). However, “machine” shouldn’t be taken as implying standardization,
which Williams dismisses two paragraphs later: “all sonnets say the same
thing of no importance.” While many of his best poems of the 1940s, such as
“Burning the Christmas Greens” (WCPII, pp. 62–65) and “The Clouds” (WCPII,
pp. 171–74), hardly seem machinelike and in fact are discursive, Williams often
makes his poems meditations on what a new poetics might require: “Let the
snake wait under / his weed / and the writing / be of words, slow and quick,
sharp / to strike, quiet to wait, / sleepless.” Note that the image representing
the poem is not a machine, but a living thing:

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Compose. (No ideas

but in things.) Invent!
Saxifrage is my lower that splits
the rocks. (WCPII, p. 55)
Some of Williams’s most celebrated poems were written in the latter part
of his career. “The Desert Music” (1951) is something of an ars poetica, contain-
ing a mix of modes typical of Williams: vulgarity – “an old whore in / a cheap
Mexican joint in Juárez, her bare / can waggling crazily” (WCPII, p. 281) –
appears side by side with eloquent gratitude for the human capacity for writ-
ing: “And I could not help thinking / of the wonders of the brain that / hears
that music and of our / skill sometimes to record it” (WCPII, p. 284). A stern
sense of poetic exactitude – “Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: /
to imitate, not to copy, nature” (WCPII, p. 272) – is counterpointed by the fol-
lowing answer as to why one writes a poem: “I am that he whose brains / are
scattered / aimlessly” (WCPII, p. 282).
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1953) is Williams’s longest poem out-
side of Paterson and one of his best known, primarily due to these lines: “It
is diicult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day
/ for lack / of what is found there” (WCPII, p. 318). Originally conceived as
belonging to Book 5 of Paterson, “Asphodel” mixes direct address to Flossie
with a series of meditations on the power of poetry to confront the newly
unleashed atomic bomb. Williams’s dealings with Flossie have received a
mixed reception. Although it is touching to read what is essentially love
poetry written by a frail old man to his wife of four decades, many readers
have found Williams’s confession of his inidelities to be maudlin and self-
serving.
Williams and women is not a topic to be clariied in a few paragraphs.
Williams was terriically interested in women, and, as a son (whose mother
lived in close contact with him until her death at 102), husband (for more
than ifty years), serial philanderer, and obstetrician who delivered 2,000–3,000
babies, his experiences with them were intimate, multitudinous, and lifelong.
Given his candor and aggressive refusal of decorum, it is not surprising that
many readers have found moments, passages, and, in the case of Paterson,
whole poems to be ofensive. Moments of objectiication are everywhere: in
the often-commented-on line break in Spring – “a girl with one leg / over the
rail of a balcony” (WCPI, p. 206) – or in the more “Cubist” (in a homegrown
sense) poem that uses “the Police Sergeant wife’s perfect thighs” (WCPI, p. 154)
as a repeating compositional element. More generally, it is the undisguised
presence of Williams’s excitement that has seemed untoward: “– she / opened

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the door! nearly / six feet tall, and I . . . / wanted to found a new country –”
(WCPI, p. 331; ellipsis in original).
Debaters could trade passages and poems endlessly to convict or exon-
erate, but it should be noted that some of the most intense reactions to
Williams have come from women, starting in the 1920s with Else von Freytag-
Loringhoven’s vituperations against Williams, in which she insisted that the
experimental Kora was nothing more than the hypocritical high jinks of a sub-
urban husband, and extending to Alice Notley’s Doctor Williams’ Heiresses and
Rachel DuPlessis’s “Pater-Daughter.”31 DuPlessis and Notley praise and censor
Williams intensely. For Notley, he is the most useful poet, “How could you not
use him since he was the greatest one?”; although she is also emphatic that, at
times, his “reasoning was specious and enraging.”32 DuPlessis is also emphatic
in her praise, saying that Spring is “an amazing new document of change, of
challenge, of diference”; but she inds its conclusion, a clichéd apostrophe to
an “Arab / Indian / dark woman” who is “rich / in savagery” (WCPI, p. 236),
to be dismal: “It returns us to the ‘savagery’ of sameness. Oldness. A conven-
tional vocabulary of race and gender.”33 This critique of Spring applies on a
larger scale to Paterson.
Paterson resists summary, although Williams did present a number of simple
schemes for it – in this, contradicting a basic practice of his writing, which was
predicated on discovery rather than leshing out of prior thinking. Paterson
was to follow the course of the Passaic: “the river above the Falls, the catastro-
phe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls and the entrance at the end to
the great sea” (P, p. xiii). The roar of the falls seemed “a language which we
were and are seeking.” Another primary theme is announced in Book 1: “A
man like a city and a woman like a lower / – who are in love. Two women.
Three women. / Innumerable women, each like a lower. // But / only one
man – like a city” (P, p. 7). Williams did not stick closely to such plans – for
which many readers will be grateful. Naturalized gender roles and rivers rep-
resenting life cycles are turgid thematic notions, especially when compared
with the rapid multifariousness of Williams’s non-epic work. It seems the life-
long traumatic challenge that Williams projected onto Pound and Eliot called
for the epic, and the epic, in turn, called for such hoary props.
Each of the ive books contains three sections, some of which are focused
around speciic locales or narratives. The irst section of Book 2, “Sunday
in the Park,” is organized around the protagonist, sometimes referred to as
“Paterson,” walking amid Sunday picnickers; a large part of the second sec-
tion is given over to the futile, enthusiastic harangues of a Salvation Army
preacher. The second section of Book 3 focuses on the ire that destroyed the

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Paterson library; the opening section of Book 4, subtitled “An Idyl,” narrates,
in jumpy, intercut fashion, the relations between three igures: a New York
socialite (rather mockingly called “Corydon”) with lesbian longings toward
her working-class masseuse (“Phyllis”), who does not reciprocate but who
does appear to be having a sporadic afair with a doctor (“Paterson”). However,
such capsule summaries miss the coruscating line-by-line, page-by-page tex-
ture of the poem. Any page might interweave reference to other material
in the poem; the verse is constantly interrupted by chunks of miscellaneous
prose: bits of nineteenth-century histories of Paterson, local weather reports,
lyers, and letters from literary and nonliterary contemporaries.
At times, the prose is thematically apropos: in the midst of the “Beautiful
Thing” passage in Book 3 – a fraught, lyrical meditation on an African American
prostitute who has been beaten up at a party – Williams interposes a savagely
unfeeling colonial account of French explorers torturing Native Americans.
But often quotations will ofer no symbolic recuperation, as in the letter from
Alva N. Turner discussing family matters in minute detail (P, p. 26).
Paterson was to be “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands” (P, p. 2),
challenging Pound’s and Eliot’s conservative erudition. But the extensive col-
laged quotations in Paterson would have been unthinkable without Pound’s
example. The diference between how the two use the collaged elements
is signiicant. In The Cantos, the quoted language is always integrated into
Pound’s compositional and rhythmic purposes. Williams’s quotations, on the
other hand, have struck many as problematically long. It is as if readers are put
into the position of virtual doctors listening to patients.
The Nardi letters, which dominate Book 2, are an extreme example, as
well as being ethically controversial. Is Williams exploiting her? Is he giving
her a public platform for her eloquent and sometimes obsessive complaints
about the diiculties of getting support for writing when one is a woman?
The inclusion of so much of the letters also raises issues of authorship, as
Book 2 becomes as much Nardi’s as Williams’s. Mike Weaver takes a judicious
approach when he writes that Nardi and other igures “are not represented
in Paterson because they are neurotic, but because their veracity as thwarted
human beings – their unimpaired though distorted vigour”34 is a supreme
value for Williams.35
Throughout Book 1 the roar of the falls is apostrophized as a source of gen-
uine language that cannot be harnessed: “. . . no words. / They may look at
the torrent in / their minds / and it is foreign to them” (P, p. 12). Occasionally
the description of the falls is physical: “And the air lying over the water / . . . /
parallel but never mingling, one that whirls / backward at the brink and curls

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 William Carlos Williams

invisibly / upward, ills the hollow, whirling, / an accompaniment – but apart”

(P, pp. 24–25); more often the falls furnish a pervading metaphoric backdrop,
as in the following, in which Williams applies imagery of falling water both to
the hair of two young girls and to the air surrounding them. “Two – / dispa-
rate among the pouring / waters of their hair . . . one – / a willow twig pulled
from a low / lealess bush in full bud in her hand, . . . holds it, the gathered
spray, / upright in the air, the pouring air, / strokes the soft fur – // Ain’t they
beautiful!” (P, p. 18).
The unsophisticated aesthetic enthusiasm of the girls reads as a critique
of the excessive lyricism of the previous lines, although Williams constantly
laments the failure of language in general terms: “the language / fails them
/ They do not know the words / or have not / the courage to use them” (P,
p. 11). But when actual speech is quoted, it is unpretentious and lively, a source
of poetic energy rather than a symptom of failure: “Hi, open up a dozen,
make / it two dozen! Easy girl! / You wanna blow a fuse?” (P, p. 137). In his
Autobiography Williams is explicit about this, boasting that he got his language
“from the mouths of Polish mothers” (A, p. 311). The tacit polemic here is
directed against the reinement of Pound’s language and the traditionalism
of Eliot’s.
Paterson does not come to anything like a neat conclusion. In fact, near
the end of Book 4, Williams disparages coherence: “Waken from a dream,
this dream of / the whole poem” (P, p. 199). As it progresses, Paterson opens
up more and more to its present context; the irst section of Book 5 con-
tains a letter from the young Allen Ginsberg that comments on the preceding
parts of the poem, saying, among other things, that Williams doesn’t know
much about the actual city of Paterson in the present. The second section
ends with an excerpt from an interview in which the journalist Mike Wallace
grills Williams on the apparent eccentricities of modern poetry. The poem
becomes something of a bulletin board for younger generations – a contem-
porary instantiation might be Paterson: A Blog.
The best readers of Williams, starting with Hart Crane and Louis Zukofsky
in the 1920s, have been the subsequent generations of poets, for whom his
writing remains centrally instructive. Frank O’Hara named Williams, Crane,
and Whitman the only American poets who were “better than the movies”;
for Robert Pinsky, Williams is the poet who best “takes up [Whitman’s] vision
of poetry as a central national art.”36
Williams has been frequently invoked at the beginning of literary initiatives.
Donald Allen’s introduction to the pathbreaking anthology of nonacademic
poetic movements, The New American Poetry (1960), begins its list of notable

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modernist ancestors with Williams – Eliot is omitted. Robert Grenier’s “On

Speech” (1971) is often cited as a key opening articulation of the poetics of
Language writing, attacking the presumed naturalism of everyday language.
There, Williams is invoked as a prior limit to be superseded, with Grenier
looking for “the progression from Williams”; but Williams is also used as
the model for what is to come next. “To me, all speeches say the same thing, or:
why not exaggerate, as Williams did, for our time proclaim an abhorrence of
‘speech’ designed as was his castigation of ‘the sonnet’ ”37
Charles Bernstein’s polemic “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos
Williams Meets the MLA” (1983) makes Williams’s career emblematic of a
century-long division between innovative and conservative writing: “Williams,
more than almost any other American poet of his time, took an activist posi-
tion . . . – his work is an intervention . . . against static forms of knowledge. . . .
Oicial verse culture is no more hospitable to Williams’s literary politics now
[1983] than it was ifty years ago.”38
Ten years later, Hank Lazer gave a succinct rundown of “the two Doctor
Williamses,” posing Bernstein’s textual poet against Williams as “the poet of
common objects, immediate description, and common life.”39 This is where
things stand in the twenty-irst century, but the larger point is that Williams
doesn’t it into such a binary struggle. To give a less abstract sense of what
this means, let us list some of the diferent historical inlections and temporal
sequences that can be detected in “This Is Just to Say.”
The poem’s simple vocabulary, narrative economy, and realism – in the sense
that Williams actually ate those plums and then scrawled those lines – make it
suitable for eighth grade pedagogy. However, this referentiality was problema-
tized by deconstructive critics in the 1970s. As Jonathan Culler put it:

A note left on a kitchen table which read “This is just to say I have eaten the
plums which were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for
breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious: so sweet and so cold” would be a
nice gesture; but when it is set down on the page as a poem the convention
of signiicance comes into play. . . . The value airmed by the eating of the
plums . . . transcends language and cannot be captured . . . except negatively
(as apparent insigniicance), which is why the poem must be so sparse and
supericially banal.40

Readers with more sensitivity to nuances of erotic relations have not found
the poem to be (even supericially) banal. (In an interview in his old age,
Williams himself called it “practically a rape of the icebox!”41) But irst, note
Culler’s transcription: not his elimination of the lineation (which is his point),

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but his addition of normative punctuation. When Culler writes, “Forgive me,
they were delicious: so sweet and so cold,” the apology and the memory of
the transgression are kept punctiliously separate; the colon in “delicious: so
sweet and so cold” anatomizes the guilty pleasure into its subsidiary sensa-
tions. Williams’s quatrain, on the other hand, achieves complexity via the
absence of punctuation.
Although the scribbling of the actual note may well have taken no more
than one minute, it had taken Williams more than a decade to establish a form
that was clearly syntactic but did not use punctuation. It does not appear in his
work until the poems of Spring. In “To Elsie,” although there are no periods,
new sentences begin with capital letters:
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by ields of goldenrod in
the stil ing heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate lecks that
something
is given of
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
(WCPI, pp. 218–19)

If we read “This Is Just to Say” with this template in mind, we get the following
sentence: “Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.” This run-on
does not distinguish between the atonement and the vivid restatement of the
crime; this in turn expresses a complex of possible emotions, from narcissism
to sadism to intimacy with the addressee. Readings of such a complex will vary
widely: the fact that the poem is an artifact of address utterly embedded in real
life adds as much to the lability of poetic sense as any of the formal devices.
One more compositional element should be mentioned: the title, which
does not function as a caption but begins the syntactic statement of the poem:
that is, “This is just to say I have eaten . . .”; the title is thus both part of the poem
and outside it. Williams seems to have invented this speciic form, although he
does not use it all that often.42 But the aesthetic implications of being able to
gesture both inside and outside the frame of the poem are important through-
out his work, especially in Paterson. In regard to “This Is Just to Say,” the efect

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 B ob P er e l man

is the opposite of the run-on “Forgive me / they were delicious”: it bespeaks a

detachment on the part of the author.
If there are two Williamses currently being used as emblems for opposing
poetries, his own work, if cited judiciously, can prove him a textualist or a
realist. But, as we have seen repeatedly, Williams does not it easily into such
dichotomies. The interview with Mike Wallace in Paterson, Book 5, shows the
two approaches superimposed. Wallace, rather like our teacher in the opening
anecdote, is upset by modern poetry, which is both obscure and too close to
real life. He confronts Williams with an e. e. cummings poem as an example
of obscurity:
(im)c-a-t(mo)
b,i;l:e
FallleA
ps! . . .
The contemporary reader can strip away the typographic high jinks to pro-
duce the rather cute “I’m cat-mobile. Fall leaps!” But Williams admits to
Wallace that he can make nothing of Cummings’s lines. Wallace stays on the
attack, quoting some of Williams’s own lines – “. . . a Dungeness crab / 24
hours out / of the Paciic / and a live-frozen / trout / from Denmark . . .” –
and exclaiming, “Now, that sounds just like a fashionable grocery list!” At irst
Williams simply yields to the accusation, “It is a fashionable grocery list,” but
he then continues, “Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American
idiom. . . . [I]f you treat that rhythmically, ignoring the practical sense it forms
a jagged pattern. It is, to my mind, poetry.” But then, undoing the opposition
he has just made between linguistic pattern and practical sense, he says that
both are to be perceived: “In poetry, you’re listening to two things . . . [ellipses
in original] you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says.
But it says more” (P, p. 222).
Williams, as the writer being interviewed, ofers a synthesis of reading for
sense and attending to nonlinguistic music. But the author of Paterson’s Book 5
is posing more complex framing. We are reading, as part of Paterson, a quoted
interview, a conversation between a poet and a reader, and an example of a
poem narrating its own reception, as Mike Wallace, reporter for the New York
Post, expresses the public’s incredulity. Williams is showing himself as much
object of history as subject.
And there is one more layer: the excerpt comes from one of the most emo-
tional poems Williams ever wrote, “Two Pendants: For the Ears,” an account
of Williams tending his dying mother. One of the many strands of the poem

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involves coaxing the dying mother to eat. She has little appetite but occa-
sionally eats an eccentric assortment of items: oysters, a banana, ice cream.
Thus when Williams lists what someone brought home from the market, “2
partridges / 2 Mallard ducks . . .” it reads as a moving attempt to amuse his
mother and to pique her desire in the particulars of the world she is about to
quit (WCPII, p. 208).
When Williams irst admits to Wallace that “it is a fashionable grocery list,”
he is admitting to the basic problem that has plagued – and piqued – his read-
ers. What he allows into his poem is too obviously real. But patterning, fram-
ing, and reframing make it art. This is akin to the paradox in the Duchamp
readymade, which is how Henry M. Sayre reads “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But
Sayre wants art to be uncontaminated: “It is crucial that Williams’ material
is banal, trivial: by placing this material in the poem, Williams underscores
the distance the material has traveled, and the poem deines a radical split
between the world of art and the world of barnyards.”43
It is just such a split that Williams never accepted. For him, art could not
begin without the artist’s attentive imbrication with the matters of everyday
life. One of his short stories, “Comedy Entombed,” furnishes a inal exam-
ple.44 The story involves a woman who is having a slow-moving miscarriage.
The quotidian details – discussions with the husband and interactions with the
children – do not betoken any narrative drama. And yet at the end, when the
husband asks about the sex of the dead fetus and is told it would have been
the girl he was hoping for, his sadness and his wife’s odd callousness create a
powerful tableau.
At one nondramatic juncture (and at 4:30 in the morning), the doctor has a
revelation:
The whole place had a curious excitement about it for me. . . . There was noth-
ing properly recognizable, nothing straight. . . . Tables, chairs, worn-out shoes
piled in one corner. . . . I have seldom seen such disorder and brokenness –
such a mass of unrelated parts of things lying about. That’s it! I concluded to
myself. An unrecognizable order! Actually – the new!
And so good-natured and calm. So deinitely the thing! And so compact.
Excellent. And with such patina of use. Everything deinitely “painty.” Even
the table, pushed of from the center of the room. (FD, p. 327)
One could call this a democratic readymade, if that term be thought of as
encompassing everyday use along with its commitment to perfected abstrac-
tion. Note how Williams’s recognition of “the new!” doesn’t end things: his
aesthetic elation extends into efervescent commonalities: “So deinitely the
thing!” and so on. The room looks like an exciting painting due to its “patina

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of use” – its being lived in. It is both new and used: its use adds to its newness.
Williams is no demiurge: he didn’t make this new order; he merely recognized
it. His stock of knowledge has not been increased, just his openness. This
openness is “the new” for the doctor in the story, for Williams as he wrote the
story, and for readers today.

A Note on Gertrude Stein

It is interesting – and there is just enough room – to apply the oxymoronic
notion of a democratic readymade to the other major antischolarly and
American-identiied modernist: Gertrude Stein. This is not to say Stein wrote
readymades; there are no readymades but Duchamp’s, and the Duchamp
readymade is the opposite of democratic.45 Anyone can buy a snow shovel;
only Duchamp could buy what became In Advance of the Broken Arm. But the
democratic readymade, however incorrect the term, dramatizes an issue basic
to Stein’s work. The scandal of the readymade was to commandeer the com-
mon as a sign of the singular. Stein did something like this, deploying com-
mon words and everyday objects for highly singular ends. She repeatedly cre-
ated diference out of sameness and is today widely identiied with the trope
of using the same word diferently: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”;46 “there
is no there there.”47
But her provocation went beyond making diference palpable. Turning a
snow shovel into Broken Arm was a gesture of separation meant to shock the
bourgeoisie; Stein’s gestures were more pervasively unsettling: their singular-
ity was not in the service of separation. Stein commandeered the common
with the aim of becoming part of the everyday world – an important part, an
eminent one, but very much of that world. She may have written and acted
like a genius who was ahead of her time, but hers was an avant-garde of the
ordinary: both her early notoriety and her later popularity index this.
The scale and seriousness of her writing and the persistence with which she
addressed her work (and herself ) to the public produced complex aesthetic
and social efects. Early and late, her range was wide. Consider the stylistic dis-
tances between “Melanctha” (1909) and Tender Buttons (1914): the former with
its tortuous, not-quite-repetitive syntax and basic but ambiguous vocabulary
continually suggesting but never resolving complex emotional turmoil and the
latter a playful, at times erotically charged, venture into quasi-Cubist, polysyn-
tactic portraiture of the everyday lifeworld. Another disparate pair would be
the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the uncompromisingly
abstract Stanzas in Meditation, both written in 1932. However, a fundamental

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concern threads through her various procedures: the coincidence of the ordi-
nary and the diferent.
In “Composition as Explanation” (1926), Stein continually presents her
own genius as almost indistinguishable from everyday modernity and yet as
completely distinct. The play of sameness/diference begins with the open-
ing clause: “There is singularly nothing that makes a diference a diference
. . .” A range of detractors, from reporters to competing modernists like T. S.
Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, scorned such language, dismissing it as nonsense
or an attempt at nursery rhyme. But Stein is juxtaposing the two diferences
to compactly demonstrate a word being either charged or empty: some difer-
ences don’t make any diference. Then again, some do, and there is singularly
nothing like them.
The materials of Stein’s work are ordinary words and familiar things,
but she puts them to unfamiliar use, as when, in the next paragraph of
“Composition,” she contrasts war with genuine creativity. War is old-fash-
ioned, “prepared” beforehand, and thus academic; it is the same as bad writ-
ing and painting, which are produced by “those . . . who don’t make it as it is
made.” Counterpoised to these are the celebrated heroes: “the few who make
it as it is made.”48 We might translate Stein’s praise as promoting artistic pro-
cess over product, but she uses more elementary words (“make,” “made”) to
keep this activity both commonly available and mysterious. Bad artists fail to
unite make and made; Stein activates what is almost, but is not, a tautology.
A well-known pleasantry in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas shows more
of the complex imbrication of high art and the everyday. Toklas (that is, Stein
writing as Toklas) tells us, “You cannot tell what a picture really is . . . until you
dust it every day.”49 The lightness and paradox are blatant – how quaint to put
dusting above careful looking, especially when the objects being dusted are so
valuable. But more is implicit here. Toklas is claiming authority: she knows
what the Picassos and Cezannes really are. Then, too, note how the quintes-
sentially bourgeois activity of dusting becomes the prime aesthetic act. And,
furthermore, this bourgeois normativity presents, without disguise, the scan-
dal of Stein and Toklas’s unsanctioned but very proper lesbian marriage.50
“Scandal” will seem a dated term to many, although some have pushed for
“re-scandalization,” with Stein’s stance toward the Vichy regime as the smok-
ing gun. There’s not much smoke there, however, beyond Stein’s self-protec-
tive myopia.51 Stein’s often patrician political and historical opinions, while
part of the record of her celebrity, are epiphenomenal to her self-enabling
egotism. More remarkable is the writing that her behavior made possible. Her
work remains an exciting exemplar for contemporary poets, with Bernadette

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Mayer, Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr, and Lee Ann Brown as notable examples.
And her impact extends beyond the literary into the other arts.52 Her work is
shaping poetic and cultural history in ways that generic categories and evalu-
ative scales have not succeeded in containing. DJ Spooky’s mash-up of Stein
reciting “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” with DJ Wally makes
one striking emblem of this incomplete, open-ended condition.
But this conjunction of Stein and recombinatory turntable music can be
reconstrued to match T. S. Eliot’s nearly century-old complaint, in which we
are told that Stein’s work was neither “improving,” “amusing,” or “interest-
ing”; that it had a “kinship with the saxophone”; and that it portended a “future
. . . of the barbarians.”53 This is one of Eliot’s least prophetic pronouncements,
calling up anxious notions of Prufrock, crashing surf, and peaches. A more
apt emblem of Stein’s continuing pertinence could be brought forward by
considering her catchphrase quoted at the beginning of this note: “there is no
there there.”
Consider how widely used this Steinianism is: it is a staple of political blogs,
sports pages, and fashion shows – any context in which opinions contend. It is a
highly portable, pragmatic rhetorical tool, using language – “there there” – to
highlight the volatility of words and thus to incite linguistic vigilance against
bogus claims of presence.
The original context of the phrase does more than this. Stein describes
returning, in 1935, to the scene of her adolescence: “anyway what was the use
of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there
yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there
there.”54 Note the diferences in these “theres”: the irst is fraught (a Freudian
might even say “uncanny” – but not there!); the second is colorless, purely lin-
guistic (the “there” of “there is”); and the last two perform the basic Steinian
utopian move, in which the ordinary word becomes charismatic.

Notes
1. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), vol. I, p. 372. This collection
will be cited subsequently in the text as WCPI. Other writings by Williams
will be cited by abbreviations as follows: A = Autobiography (New York: New
Directions, 1967); WCPII = Collected Poems, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New
York: New Directions, 1988), vol. II; FD = The Farmers’ Daughters (New York:
New Directions, 1957); IM = Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New
Directions, 1970); P = Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New
Directions, 1992).

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 William Carlos Williams

2. Bill Zavatsky, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Poetry,” The
Whole Word Catalogue 2 (1977), reprinted on the Academy of American Poets
website, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16062.
3. “Modernist,” “avant-garde,” and “democratic” are used here as simpliied
markers of diferentiation: modernist indicating expertise (e.g., Joyce, Eliot);
avant-garde indicating provocation (e.g., Duchamp, Tristan Tzara); and dem-
ocratic indicating communicativeness (e.g., Frost).
4. Linda Wagner (ed.), Interviews with William Carlos Williams (New York: New
Directions, 1961), p. 30.
5. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions,
2003), p. 96; William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed.
Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 131.
6. “Books: Shantih Shantih Shantih,” Time, March 3, 1924, http://www.time
.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,881419,00.html.
7. Although Lionel Trilling “wished to emphasize the subversive power of mod-
ern literature,” he had to report the demise of such power: “When the term-
essays come in, it is plain to me that almost none of the students have been
taken aback by what they have read: they have wholly contained the attack.”
Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Neil Jumonville (ed.),
The New York Intellectuals Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 223–41, 238.
8. Kenneth Koch, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 135.
9. Writing Tutor, “Writing Test Sample: Grade 8, Narrative Writing,” http:
//written.co/2011/02/writing-test-sample-grade-8-narrative-writing.
10. William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the
Works of a Poet, ed. Edith Heal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 5.
11. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 37.
12. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), pp.
178–80.
13. Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary
Prose (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 199.
14. David E. Chinitz speaks of Williams’s “Thirty Years’ War on Eliot.” Chinitz,
T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
p. 144. On Williams’s interest in Duchamp, see Henry M. Sayre, “Ready-Mades
and Other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos
Williams,” Journal of Modern Literature 8:1 (1980), pp. 3–22.
15. Spring contains sardonic echoes of Eliot’s vocabulary in some of the poems, as
well as a prose diatribe against “THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM”
(Williams, Imaginations, p. 97).
16. See Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 209. The radical mix of poetry and often-broken prose
of Spring did not make a perceptible impact on American poetry until its
republication in 1970.

579
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17. William Rose Benet and Conrad Aiken (eds.), An Anthology of Famous English
and American Poetry (New York: Modern Library, 1945).
18. This quote is taken from Williams’s note. Quoted in Mariani, William Carlos
Williams, p. 831n7.
19. Marjorie Perlof, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1983), p. 148.
20. Williams never deined the variable foot clearly. His letter to John C. Thirlwall is
one of his most sustained discussions. He points to his own poem “The Descent”
(Williams, Collected Poems, vol. II, p. 245), mentions Gerald Manley Hopkins and
Whitman as antecedents, and speaks of Einstein’s relativity – but does not ofer
a deinition. William Carlos Williams, Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams,
ed. John Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957), pp. 334–36.
21. Charles Doyle (ed.), William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1980), p. 239. When the remarks are reprinted in Poetry and the
Age, the italics are removed: see Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (London:
Faber, 1953), p. 230. For Jarrell’s earlier rave, see Doyle, William Carlos Williams,
pp. 174–79. Williams continues to be accused of fundamentally confusing life
and art. In a current anthology, Lawrence Rainey complains of “Williams’s
truculent and dogmatic belief that poetry could ofer unmediated access to
the world”: see Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), p. 500. Williams’s use of such swathes of Nardi’s prose can
be thought of as anticipating contemporary appropriation poetry such as
Kenneth Goldsmith’s.
22. See especially Mary Ellen Solt, Toward a Theory of Concrete Poetry, ed. Antonio
Sergio Bessa (Bufalo: OEI, 2010) and also Stephen Cushman, William Carlos
Williams and the Meaning of Measure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1985).
23. In the latter stages of his career, Williams often set his lines in staggered
groups of three. For example:
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment, [Williams, Collected Poems, vol. II, p. 245]
This is often referred to as his stairstep line.
24. David Lehman (ed.), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 277.
25. Ezra Pound, “Doctor Williams’ Position,” in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of
Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), pp. 392–94. Williams, who was
echoing a Pound letter, had already made a similar observation in The Great
American Novel (Williams, Imaginations, p. 167).

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 William Carlos Williams

26. Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New
Directions, 1967), p. 84. In the Poundian shorthand Olson employs, “fr” equals
“from” and “abt” equals “about.”
27. George F. Butterick (ed.), Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete
Correspondence (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1987), vol. 7, p. 84.
28. Here I am referring to the titles Williams used later; in Spring, the poems were
merely numbered.
29. “Joycean” is used here to connote the stylistic shifts of the latter half of
Ulysses.
30. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions,
1956), p. 225.
31. Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, “Thee I Call Hamlet of Wedding-Ring,” Little
Review 7:4 and 8:1 (1914), reprinted at http://www.modjourn.org/render
.php?view=mjp_object&id=LittleReviewCollection; Alice Notley, Doctor
Williams’ Heiresses (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1980); Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The
Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990).
32. Notley, Doctor Williams’ Heiresses, n.p.
33. DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar, p. 41.
34. Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 133.
35. See also Marcia Nardi, The Last Word: Letters between Marcia Nardi and William
Carlos Williams, ed. Elizabeth Murrie O’Neil (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1994).
36. Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Knopf, 1971),
p. 498; Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco, 1988), p. 18.
37. Robert Grenier, “On Speech,” This 1 (1971), n.p. Grenier is referring to
Williams’s “To me, all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.”
38. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1983), pp. 243–
51, 244, 246.
39. Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries. Vol. 2, Readings (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1996), p. 21.
40. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1975), pp. 175–76.
41. Wagner, Interviews, p. 17.
42. Some examples are “New England” (Williams, Collected Poems, vol. I, p. 249),
“March Is a Light” (Williams, Collected Poems, vol. I, p. 266), and “The Moon –”
(Williams, Collected Poems, vol. I, p. 326). Brian Reed, in conversation, notes
that Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” has precedence.
43. Sayre, “Ready-Mades and Others,” p. 12.
44. This has already been quoted at the opening of this chapter, as an example of
ordinary prose: the “old black-and-white cat lying in the sunny doorway.”

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45. For discussion of Stein and Duchamp, see Marjorie Perlof, “Of Objects
and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp,” Forum for Modern
Language Studies 32:2 (1996), pp. 137–54.
46. Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily,” Stein: Writings 1903–1932 (New York: Library of
America, 1998), p. 395. It also appears in Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, in Stein: Writings 1903–1932, with an initial article that obscures
the proper name: “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (p. 798).
47. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change,
1993), p. 298.
48. Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Writings, p. 520.
49. Stein, Writings, p. 776.
50. Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 237: “Stein and Toklas put a
well-mannered, mature face on lesbian sexuality. . . . They embodied American
ideals of domesticity and family.”
51. See Janet Malcolm, Two Lives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2007) and Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and
the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); contra, see
Charles Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight:
A Dossier,” Jacket2, https://jacket2.org/feature/gertrude-steins-war-years-
setting-record-straight.
52. See Corn and Latimer, Seeing Gertrude Stein, chapter 5.
53. T. S. Eliot, “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” Nation and Athenaeum, January 29, 1927,
p. 595.
54. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 298.

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 Chapter 26
Finding “Only Words” Mysterious: Reading
Mina Loy (and H.D.) in America
C r i sta nn e M i l l e r

Mina Loy (1882–1966) is an anomalous addition to a history of “American”

poetry – a fact perhaps most obvious in the frequent claiming and question-
ing of Loy as American, starting with Ezra Pound’s 1918 assertion that Loy’s
verse has something “distinctly American in quality.”1 Born in England, Loy
spent only slightly more than two years in the United States until 1936, when
she was ifty-four, and only became a naturalized citizen in 1946. Most of the
early poetry by which she is best known was written in Florence, Berlin, or
Paris. U.S.-born expatriates like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and T. S.
Eliot are invariably included in American literature anthologies, despite the
fact that H.D. became a British citizen as early as 1912 and Eliot did the same
in 1927. H.D. repeatedly identiied herself as American and struggled to regain
her citizenship – successfully in 1956. Others are understood to be American
primarily because their formative years were spent in the United States. By the
latter reasoning, Loy is distinctly English, and recent work on Loy considering
her childhood or published in the United Kingdom suggests that her English
roots may soon become a more prominent aspect of Loy criticism.2
At the same time, Loy regarded herself as aesthetically and ethically aligned
with “America.” Loy turned to her American friends and editors to publish;
she was enabled by her sojourns in New York to move in new directions with
her poetry and art; her primary inl uence has been on American poets – noted
already in her warm reception by New York’s most radical writers and artists
in 1916; and she developed simultaneously a perception of American culture,
modern aesthetics, and her own life and writing as emerging from a “melting
pot” and “mongrel.” Loy wrote as an Englishwoman of Jewish/Anglican her-
itage who had studied art in Munich from 1899 to 1901, studied and painted
in Paris from 1903 until 1906, and then lived in Florence until the fall of 1916.
She spoke German, French, and Italian; may have learned Spanish during her
year with her second husband, Arthur Cravan (Fabian Lloyd), in Mexico City;
and traveled extensively in Europe after returning there (by way of Argentina)

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at the end of 1918. Yet the two major changes of direction in her work occur
around 1920 and then after 1936, in response to her experiences in New York.
First, Loy’s ties to avant-gardism end sometime between December 1917,
when she left New York City for Mexico to marry Cravan, and March 1920,
when she returned to New York. During this period, Loy left satirical auto-
mythologies behind and began to focus on aesthetics, eventually resulting in
her articulation of an aesthetic of mongrel poetry in the epic-lyric “Anglo-
Mongrels and the Rose.” This poem also marks Loy’s irst representation of
her Jewishness as signiicant to both her life and her poetry. Published in the
same year as the inal section of “Anglo-Mongrels,” Loy’s 1925 essay “Modern
Poetry” gives expository and more explicit form to some of the ideas in her
poem, while identifying the “new” verse as American in origin. Her work
written up to the mid-1920s makes Loy among the most important poets of
early modernism, although critics are also increasingly inding her late work
and her visual art, drama, and iction signiicant.
This chapter follows the trajectory of Loy’s writing life from its beginnings
in distinctly European avant-gardes through the inl uence of her early visits to
the United States to a late poem titled “America * A Miracle.” Primary charac-
teristics of Loy’s writing are shaped by her engagement in distinctly European
avant-gardes, but after 1920, I argue, the directions of her creative energy
are powerfully illuminated by being understood in an American context and
through her own mapping of the “American.” Loy’s writing moves along a
spectrum from reaction against Futurist precepts in the language and style of
European artistic movements to a late articulation of similar principles, this
time in a language of nationalism presenting the United States as an almost
Whitmanian ideal location in which feminism, passion, and art can thrive.
Although modernism is rightly understood as international, what this
meant at the beginning of the twentieth century was diferent from what it
means to readers more than a century later. When Loy irst began writing
her poetry in Florence and publishing it in New York, mass media like news-
reels and television had not been developed. Beginning in 1914, Loy mailed
handwritten poems and her “Aphorisms on Futurism” in letters that traveled
by ship from Florence to New York, asking her friends – especially Carl Van
Vechten but also Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Alfred Stieglitz – to place her
work. Loy’s poems were known as part of New York’s early modernist scene,
even though she was still in Florence.
Generally, in the early twentieth century, local communities of production
had unique identifying characteristics.3 Loy’s early poems place themselves
distinctly in such a local sphere, satirizing gender iniquity not universally but

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in response to the particular forms of misogyny and cultural restriction she

experienced and witnessed in Florence. Loy herself calls attention to their local
grounding through titles, epigraphs, or internal reference, in “Italian Pictures”;
“Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” – which begins with the epigraph “Latin
Borghese” (“bourgeois” in Italian); “At the Door of the House” – with its ref-
erence to Tuscan marble and Italian names; and “The Black Virginity.” These
poems mark themselves as written in response to gendered patterns of life in
a traditional small Italian city as witnessed by someone who is not Italian and
whose experiences in London and Paris stand in strong contrast to those of
the “Latin Borghese.”
The speciicity of the location of this critique becomes more apparent in
comparison with that of the women poets who were Loy’s most signiicant
peers: Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), and H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961). Although Loy is least often compared to H.D.,
this comparison is in fact most striking in looking at the development of both
poets’ writing in relation to their lives. None of these American poets would
imagine representing women in 1914 as housebound, requiring dowries, or
dominated by hierarchies of the Catholic Church, although there are of
course intersections among their economic, political, religious, and sexual
critiques of gendered institutions and systems. H.D.’s “Sheltered Garden,” for
example, like Loy’s “Virgins Plus Curtains” and “At the Door of the House,”
represents women through metaphor as protected, bound by borders. Rather
than describing women as ready to “scratch” from behind a “locked” door
(“Virgins Plus Curtains”), however, H.D. implicitly calls for women and men
to reconceive aesthetics and the feminine: “beauty without strength, / chokes
out life. / I want wind to break, / scatter these pink-stalks, / snap of their
spiced heads.”4 “O to blot out this [sheltered] garden,” she exclaims, and
instead “ind a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place.”5 While
the long-honored trope of women as lowers suggests H.D.’s impatience with
the “pink” loveliness of traditionally feminine women, she does not call for a
literal snapping of of women’s “spiced heads” but for eradicating the environ-
ment that produces such cultivated or artiicial weakness as beautiful.
H.D.’s poems of the early 1910s reigure the feminine through natural
landscapes that emphasize the need to alter gendered modes of perception
and value, often by praising the vegetation that thrives in or on the shores of
the rough, uncontrolled sea as her preferred model for beauty (“Sea Rose,”
“Sea Lilly,” “Sea Poppies,” “Sea Violet”). In an American city such as H.D.’s
Philadelphia, women circulated in social, educational, and other public
spheres; on public transportation; and in other ways that allowed them to be

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relatively independent of male escort or permission – at least opening the pos-

sibility of experience closer to that of a primal seascape than that of a locked
house. H.D. also, however, imagines women declaring radical independence
even from within constrained circumstances. This is most strikingly exempli-
ied in “Eurydice,” in which from the world of the dead she tells Orpheus
“Against the black / I have more fervor / than you . . . I have more light; . . . I
have the lowers of myself, / and my thoughts, no god / can take that” (HDCP,
p. 55).
Loy’s early poetry is equally marked by her location among European avant-
gardes. Épater le bourgeois was a rallying cry of French and English decadents
such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley in the late
nineteenth century, and only somewhat less explicitly of the later proponents
of Futurism and Dada. Loy’s early satires relish the shocking, in concert with
transnational avant-gardes. Similarly, her shifting devotion to various arts may
suggest her greater interest in avant-garde making than in the craft of any
single art. During her lifetime she was celebrated as both a visual artist and
a poet. Her work was accepted in the prestigious Paris Salon d’Automne in
1906. She also designed clothing; designed and made hats, lampshades, and
other decorative objects; and created three-dimensional art or junk sculptures;
in 1959 she won a Copley Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in
Art. Loy spent relatively few years writing poetry, composing almost all her
verse around 1914–1916 in Florence, between 1919 and 1925 in various places,
and in the 1940s in New York. Loy also more than once eschewed the title
“poet.” She wrote Van Vechten that “to maintain my incognito, the hazard I
chose was – poet” and decades later responded to would-be “rediscoverers”:
“I was never a poet” (LoLB, p. xii). In a late interview, Kerker Quinn reports
that “Miss Loy says she is a painter,” not a poet.6 The partial truth of these self-
representations illuminates the fragility of her earliest forays into publishing.
Although it seems probable that Loy would not have been animated to write
without her contact with Futurism, it also seems likely that she would not
have published without the encouragement and support of the Americans
she met in Florence, such as Carl Van Vechten, Mabel Dodge, and Gertrude
Stein.
In New York, modernists were less interested in outraging cultural norms
and less political in opposing speciic cultural institutions than European avant-
gardists. Rather than producing manifestos, American modernists trumpeted
their inclusivity. Their little magazines, salons, and exhibitions were organized
by individuals who could ind funding – from Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and Camera

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Work; to the 1913 Armory Show; to the Arensbergs’, Mabel Dodge’s, and other
salons; and to little magazines like Others, whose editor proclaimed that its
contributors were not “members of a group, a school” and “collectively or
separately . . . eschew everything which approximates is-mism.”7 Similarly, the
Little Review and the Dial avoided aligning themselves with speciic movements
or principles; as editor of the Dial, Marianne Moore remembers, “individual-
ity was the great thing”; “we certainly didn’t have a policy, except I remem-
ber hearing the word ‘intensity’ very often.”8 Man Ray, who famously photo-
graphed Loy and H.D., claimed “pleasure and liberty were the words I used
[in New York], as my goals” – goals Rudolf E. Kuenzli describes as evidence of
“iercely individualistic Americans’ resistance to yet another European label.”9
Alfred Kreymborg also stresses individuality in his previously quoted 1918 edi-
torial, asserting that at Others the editors ask only to “be permitted to evolve
their own individualism, if they possess any, and to allow other folk to evolve
theirs.”10 New York’s innovative individualism attempted to conceive aesthetic
and literary community free of the boundaries of gender, class, and (to a lesser
degree) race; hence it was exceptionally open to women’s leadership in liter-
ature and the arts.11 This may have been another reason for Loy’s continuing
ties to the United States. Although H.D.’s early writing gained attention in
part through Pound, H.D. was typical of American modernists in regarding
her writing as independent of all even loosely formal groups or movements,
following Imagism’s brief lare.
Much has been written about Loy’s early association with Futurism. Her
irst publication was “Aphorisms on Futurism” (Camera Work [1914]) and sev-
eral of her early poems and plays and her unpublished novel “Brontolivido”
deal with Futurists, most prominently “The Efectual Marriage,” “Sketch of
a Man on a Platform,” “Giovanni Franchi,” “Human Cylinders,” and her play
“The Sacred Prostitute.” Stylistically this early verse is equally indebted to
what Loy calls the “inimitable Explosive” of Futurism and the profuse eroti-
cism and artiice of the earlier decadent movement, which can also be seen in
Loy’s painting.12 Futurism inl uences the exaggerated pronouncements, irreg-
ular capitalization, and visual spacing of Loy’s poetry and manifestos: “THUS
shall evolve the language of the Future. / THROUGH derision of Humanity
as it appears – / TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be,” Loy writes in
“Aphorisms” (LoLB, p. 152). More signiicantly, her experimentation with the
use of white space mid-line – what Suzanne Churchill calls her “signature for-
mal device” – may develop from Futurism’s visual play with the space of the
page.13 In the 1914 “Parturition,” Loy writes:

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Locate an irritation without

It is within
Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension (LoLB, p. 4)
Similar spatial gaps occur in most of Loy’s poems written before her irst stay in
New York and in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” Such use of white space con-
tinues in a few poems of the 1920s, but after “Anglo-Mongrels,” mid-line spacing
largely disappears from her work, as does Futurist typography – with the primary
exception of “Time-Bomb,” which presents words widely spaced, as though an
explosion has blown them apart (c. 1945). Because the manuscript copies of sev-
eral poems are lost, we cannot be certain where spatial gaps have been edited out.
Marissa Januzzi notes that many spaces between words are closed or reduced in
typescripts for her 1958 Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables edition, but it is likely that
Others and the Dial published her lines as she wrote them.14
Loy’s stylistic innovation in part imitates and in part extends Futurist aes-
thetics, just as she is both inspired by Futurist practices of art and energized
to formulate her rejection of its ideas. As she writes to Mabel Dodge in 1914,
“I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism – But I shall never convince
myself – there is no hope in any system that ‘combats le mal avec le mal.’ ”15 The
same year she writes to Van Vechten, “If you like you can say that Marinetti
inl uenced me – merely by waking me up – [but] I am in no way considered a
Futurist by futurists” (LoLB, p. 188).
The Sacred Prostitute (1914) sheds some light on this initiating moment. Early
in this play, a stage direction reads: “FUTURISM arrives on the scene” (SEML,
p. 193). Futurism then functions as a character, spouting irrational sexist cli-
chés to another character, “Love.” Following the internationally popular sex-
ologist Otto Weininger, Futurism proclaims, “I shall reach your soul through
the medium of your body . . . for women are only animals, they have no souls”
(SEML, p. 199). The character Love (perhaps a igure for Loy) both humors
Futurism and is enamored of him, desiring to be “galvanized by the force
of [his] undiluted masculinity,” and claiming she can remember and realize
“nothing but you –” (SEML, pp. 212, 213). In what the Procuress (another Loy
igure) calls “the play ‘Man and Woman’ ” within Loy’s play, Futurism seems to
conquer Love, but he also disappears, and the play ends with the “Directors of
the World Brothel,” who appear to manipulate all male-female relationships
in economic ratios of “supply” and “demand” (SEML, p. 215).

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Loy was intrigued, amused, and annoyed by Futurist sexism and hypermas-
culinity, even while she seems to have enjoyed the sexual attention of particular
Futurists. Love, as romantic thralldom, however, was as dangerous to women
as any domineering man was. Women must choose “between Parasitism, &
Prostitution – or Negation,” she writes in her 1914 “Feminist Manifesto,” rep-
resenting marriage as nothing more than a legalized exchange of women’s
sexual freedom for economic support. “Leave of looking to men to ind out
what you are not – seek within yourselves to ind out what you are,” she more
mildly recommends. Yet she also adopts a Futurist outrageousness in recom-
mending “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the
female population at puberty” as a “protection against the man made bogey
of virtue” and further demands that women “must destroy in themselves, the
desire to be loved” (LoLB, pp. 154, 155).
Loy’s attraction to stylistic features of decadence may represent her desire to
construct a femininity that has the aggressive presence ascribed to masculinity
without sacriicing an aesthetics of plenitude and fanciful lair. Futurism rejects
all things feminine or foppish more than it rejects women per se, although
these categories are entangled in complex ways in all sexological tracts of the
period. The widespread inl uence of Weininger’s Sex and Character, for exam-
ple, reveals itself in proclamations like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “scorn
for women” in his 1909 manifesto but also in Dora Marsden’s controversial
promotion of some of Weininger’s ideas in The Freewoman in 1912 – a peri-
odical Loy could have seen during her fall 1912 visit to London.16 In 1916–1917,
H.D. became literary editor of this periodical, renamed The Egoist. In con-
trast to Futurism’s aggressive masculinity, in decadent art like that of Aubrey
Beardsley, Loy would have found an artiiciality so ostentatiously contrived
that it blurs natural categories of gender and sexuality while celebrating the
erotic in a way inclusive of what sexologists dismissed as “feminine” mate-
riality. Similarly, Loy’s language use is above all artiicial. Often described as
abstract, it combines various registers, favors obscure or highly specialized
vocabularies – often contrasted with slang or other colloquial usage – borrows
from Loy’s multilingualism, and manipulates alliteration and other forms of
language play at times with such exaggeration as to all but cancel its lyrical
efects.17 One hears such exaggeration in Loy’s depiction of a literally deca-
dent scene in “Café du Néant,” in which candles on its coin tables “[lean] to
the breath of baited bodies” and one woman “Prophetically blossoms in per-
fect putrefaction” (LoLB, pp. 16, 17). Similarly, in “Lunar Baedeker,” “Delirious
Avenues . . . lead / to mercurial doomsdays / Odious oasis / in furrowed phos-
phorous – – – // the eye-white sky-light / white-light district / of lunar lusts”

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(LoLB, p. 81). Although aspects of this style continue throughout her verse, it is
most pronounced in her poems of the 1910s and 1920s; the poems of the 1940s
typically have a less abstract, less recondite, less alliterative compression of
thought and syntax.
This extravagantly mannered style, rich with archaic and erudite vocabu-
lary, stands in distinct contrast to the various kinds of language play and inno-
vative aesthetics being developed simultaneously by H.D., Stein, and Moore.
Albeit in wholly distinctive ways, each of these poets developed aspects of
her style under the inl uence of American pragmatism and popular literary
traditions that eschewed both avant-gardism and mannerism for the more
direct intensity of what Moore, only in part satirically, called “plain American
which cats and dogs can read!”18 Again, a comparison with H.D. is most tell-
ing – although even Stein, whose Tender Buttons involves multilingual pun-
ning and a contrived grammar, similarly unpunctuated, maintains an edge
of plainness in her vocabulary and choice of subjects (food, objects, rooms).
In 1915, Loy infamously and alliteratively presents the “Spawn of Fantasies /
silting the appraisable / Pig Cupid his rosy snout / Rooting erotic garbage”
(LoLB, p. 53). In contrast, between 1912 and 1914, H.D. uses a condensed direct-
ness of repetition, syncopated rhyme, and a contrasting fullness of sound to
produce an intense lucidity of presence that is strikingly diferent from Loy’s
profusion of images and associations. “If I could break you [O rose] / I could
break a tree. // If I could stir / I could break a tree – / I could break you,” she
writes in “Garden” (HDCP, pp. 24–25). H.D. soon abandoned Imagism, but
she maintained the intensely compressed syntax and repetition of her early
poems just as Loy maintained most aspects of her more stylized and erudite
manner.
Given that H.D. was a devoted reader of Algernon Charles Swinburne, one
might think that her language would have taken on more of the lushness of
the decadents rather than echoing the plain style patterns of her Moravian
childhood. As Cassandra Laity points out, however, what Swinburne mod-
eled for H.D. was not the richly verbalized eroticism attractive to Loy but
the exploration of “alternate forms of desire” in a “psychic landscape” and
a “rejection of external constraints in his passionate mythology of the ele-
ments,” especially the sea.19 From the start, H.D.’s style has a stoic simplicity,
already clear in her 1912 “Hermes of the Ways,” in which “The hard sand
breaks, / and the grains of it / are clear as wine” (HDCP, p. 37). In “The Wind
Sleepers,” she writes, “Tear – / tear us an altar. . . . When the roar of a dropped
wave / breaks into it, / pour meted words / of sea-hawks and gulls / and sea-
birds that cry / discords” (HDCP, p. 15). The frequently reprinted “Sea Rose”

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begins with a light slant rhyme occurring at inconsistent intervals to represent

the stark beauty of its unloveliness:
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meager lower, thin,
sparse of leaf (HDCP, p. 5)

Like Loy, H.D. is committed to a poetics of female desire and to the nega-
tion of structures envisioning or encouraging women’s romantic thralldom
to phallic and patriarchal (and for H.D. heterosexist) norms.20 Especially in
her poems about nature, she uses the language of violence to represent the
force with which old forms must be broken (breaking, cutting, marring, rend-
ing). Her poems construct alternative visions or mythologies through the
portrayal of nature, through dramatized lyrics of soliloquy or address, and
through impassioned meditation, not through Loy’s style of satire, witness,
or automythologies.21
There are many similarities between Loy’s and H.D.’s lives and creative con-
cerns – including that both were expatriates, unconventional mothers, creative
in several ields in addition to poetry, and feminists. Like Mina Lowy/Loy, Hilda
Doolittle/H.D. published under a name independent of the patronymics of
her father and husbands. Both greatly admired Freud – although H.D. under-
went extensive analysis, and we know only that Loy sketched him in Vienna
and later described him as a “Saviour”: “When the Gentile world required
a Saviour they nailed up the Christ. When it required a second Saviour to
counteract the efects of the irst, Freud was at its service.”22 Both engaged in
religious or spiritual quests and articulated religious, sexual, and philosophical
concerns in part through the language of electromagnetism.23 Both also wrote
signiicant long poems and inl uenced the early directions of modernism, in
particular inl uencing Pound’s and Williams’s experimentation with highly
compressed language and the line.24 Pound gave high praise to both Loy’s
and H.D.’s early poetry: he included H.D. in his 1914 Des Imagistes anthology
and in 1918 wrote about Loy (and Moore) as having developed a “dance of the
intelligence among words and ideas,” or prosopoeia, which became the model
for his own later writing. H.D. inl uenced the development of Pound’s early
writing through her condensed presentational style, and Loy inl uenced him
through her satires, enabling his “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”25 Still, these two
poets could hardly be more diferent in the modes and styles of their own early
verse, and both relect their upbringing in developing that style. How then
does Loy’s aesthetic develop such that it may be understood as “American”?

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Initially, Loy appeared foreign to American readers. Alfred Kreymborg

recalls that a “curious woman, beautiful and exotic, came to New York from
foreign shores: the English Jewess, Mina Loy [whose] clinical frankness and
sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regu-
lation grammar, syntax, and punctuation, horriied our gentry and drove our
critics into furious despair.”26 During her irst year in the city, Loy’s primary
ailiation remained a transnational avant-garde, particularly the Dada artists/
performers Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Arthur Cravan. Loy collab-
orated in editing and writing articles for the Dada publications The Blind Man
and Rongwrong and participated in Dada events, but she wrote no new poems
during this period, and after 1918 she had no involvement with the avant-garde
apart from loose ties to surrealists in Paris, who heroized Cravan after his
death. Yet in the February 1917 Evening Sun interview of this “English Poetess,”
Loy is described as being “particularly proud” of having been “discovered by
America”; according to the reporter, her “last word” was, “No one who has
not lived in New York has lived in the Modern world.”27
In 1919, after returning to Europe, Loy again began writing poetry.28 In these
years she turned from writing automythological narratives or gender satire to
portraits of artists she admired and of anonymous performers. Cumulatively,
Loy’s poems written during the 1920s reveal her attempt to articulate an
aesthetic independent of any movement, perhaps in response to her strong
association with Others and the Dial or generally with New York modern-
ism. A polemic she wrote in 1918 in Buenos Aires reveals a midpoint in this
turn, in which she both outlines the “purpose” of the “International Psycho-
Democratic Party” and declares that, in contrast to “most movements,” “we
move away from all ixed concepts in order to advance” (LaLB, pp. 276, 278).
“Psycho democracy is / Democracy of The Spirit, government by creative
imagination, participation in essential wisdom – Fraternity of Intuition, the
Intellect and Mother Wit,” she writes, in Futurist capitals reminiscent of her
earlier manifestos, subtitling her essay “Mina Loy’s Tenets” to underline that
it expressed her own and not a group’s convictions (LaLB, p. 277). Loy’s poems
of the 1920s do not mention this “Party” but in efect deine the “Fraternity”
she imagined.
When writing of the “meteoric” Joyce (“James Joyce’s Ulysses”), of Stein’s
irradiate purifying of consciousness in language (“Gertrude Stein”), of the folk
arts of the circus (“Crab-Angel”) and street performers (“Der Blinde Junge”),
and of the pathetic social performance of an “abbess-prostitute” (“Lady Laura
in Bohemia”), Loy does not distinguish art from artists. Art, she thereby
suggests, blooms or radiates from the individual’s uninhibited rejection of

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standardizing, constricting, or prudish norms; the artist lives in a “lunar” rather

than daylight landscape and “crushe[s] / the tonnage / of consciousness / . . .
to extract / a radium of the word” (LoLB, p. 94). Although Loy may have seen
herself, like Lady Laura, as “Trained in a circus of swans” (LoLB, p. 98), she
rejects this bourgeois upbringing, in which a woman “learned,” as she puts it
in a draft, “Queen’s walk and courtesies” by turning to an art and to artists of
what she calls “absolute act[s]” (Ms6, box 7, folder 188; LoLB, p. 79). Such acts
are simultaneously outrageous and spiritual, or “immaculate,” because their
“Spirit” reveals itself in “Flesh” and a vitality of form (“Perlun,” “James Joyce’s
Ulysses,” LoLB, pp. 75, 88).
“Apology of Genius” describes this company of artists by mapping that
which distinguishes “we” artists from “you” – the rest of the world and specif-
ically the lawmakers, the censors, and those who see art as suspicious: “mag-
ically diseased . . . sacerdotal clowns,” “we forge the dusk of Chaos / to that
imperious jewellery of the Universe / – the Beautiful.” Although “you” may
be our spouses or parents, “we” are “beyond your laws,” the “chances of your
lesh,” and your perception of our art as ready for the “censor’s scythe” (LoLB,
pp. 77–78). This poem’s irst line – “Ostracized as we are with God” – sounds a
recurring note of the divinity of the artist – secular, sexualized, or debased as
that divinity may be. Constantin Brancusi’s “Golden Bird” is “As if ” formed by
“some patient peasant God” and an “immaculate conception”; “James Joyce’s
Ulysses” presents either the author or his creation as the “voice and ofal / of
the image of God,” “The word made lesh / and feeding upon itself / with
erudite fangs” (LoLB, pp. 79, 80, 88, 89); and Wyndham Lewis’s “The Starry
Sky” blows out “celestial conservatories” and makes “The nerves of Heaven
/ [l inch]” in the “austere theatre of the Ininite” (LoLB, p. 91). Even the blind
victim of war, “Void and extinct,” plays his harmonica in a “planet of the soul”
that “strains . . . in static l ight upslanting” (LoLB, p. 83). “The Spirit / is impaled
upon the phallus,” she writes of Ulysses (LoLB, p. 88). The body as phallic or
female, sexual, and desiring, but also as decomposing, diseased, and in pain,
constitutes Loy’s route to “the Beautiful.” Like the “Eros” of bourgeois love,
“obsolete” because it is conventional, for Loy beauty is without interest unless
it is “Pocked with personiication,” formed in “the raw caverns of the Increate”
(LoLB, pp. 82, 78). While these poems include Loy’s most intensiied allitera-
tions and juxtaposition of the erudite with slang or punning registers, they
relect the aesthetic programs of Futurism and Dada only in their continued
condemnation of middle-class normality.
Loy articulates a fully original aesthetic irst in “Anglo-Mongrels and the
Rose,” a poem inluenced in two ways by her brief years in the United States.

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First, it was not until her second trip to New York in 1920 that Loy had any expe-
rience of signiicant interaction with a large Jewish population. In England,
Loy was raised in the Anglican church and encouraged to condemn her father’s
Jewishness. In Florence, according to Carolyn Burke, Jewishness was typically
unacknowledged or approached with ambivalence within the Anglo-American
expatriate community.29 In New York City, however, during her second stay,
Loy lived in Greenwich Village, which abutted the Lower East Side, with its
dominant population of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. With her knowledge
of German, Loy would have had some understanding of spoken Yiddish, but,
more to the point, she would have rubbed elbows with Jewish artists, writers,
and playwrights. After leaving New York in the summer of 1921, Loy traveled
in the spring of 1922 to Vienna and then to Berlin, the European metropolis
whose Jewish population was most thoroughly integrated with its artistic and
cultural community. Second, Loy came to an understanding of her aesthetic as
“mongrel” through her time in New York, although she had long written in a
multilingual or hybrid style. As early as 1914, in “To You,” Loy addressed a semi-
autobiographical protagonist in New York who becomes hybrid by writing:
“Plopping inger / In Stephen’s ink / Made you hybrid-negro” (LaLB, p. 89).
The essay “Modern Poetry” implies both these inluences in its attention to
the multiple ethnicities and languages of New York’s Lower East Side. It was
in Berlin and in the context of her recent life on the Lower East Side that she
composed the irst parts of “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.”30
Before turning to the poem itself, it is useful to consider how Loy theorized
her changed ideas about hybridity in “Modern Poetry.” In 1927, Loy wrote to
Julian Levy that she “was trying to make a foreign language because English
had already been used.”31 In “Modern Poetry” she characterizes American
English in particular as a “composite language,” and therefore “a very liv-
ing language, it grows as you speak” (LoLB, p. 159); this, in other words, is
not a language “already used” but one constantly in the process of remak-
ing itself – as her own had been since 1914. In the United States, “a thousand
languages have been born,” constituting an “English enriched and variegated
with the grammatical structure and voice-inlection of many races”; “the true
American appears to be ashamed to say anything in the way it has been said
before,” instead at “every moment” “coin[ing] new words for old ideas.” This
“unclassiiable speech,” Loy asserts, arises from an American “melting-pot”
that loosens the “tongue” of “modern literature” (LoLB, pp. 158, 159). By the
terms of this description of American modernism, there is indeed no more
“true American” than Mina Loy. While Pound described Loy and Moore as
“producing something distinctly American in quality,” poetry with “the arid

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clarity, not without its own beauty, of le temperament de l’Americaine,”32

Loy identiies all of the “new poetry of the English language” as having “pro-
ceeded out of America” because of the kind of language she heard there on
the street (LoLB, p. 157).
For Loy, “the structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individ-
uality makes in expressing itself ”; in it, one hears “the evocation of speech”
(LoLB, p. 157). The particular speech that initiates modern verse, in her view,
comes from what she calls the “baser avenues” of New York – as Rachel Blau
DuPlessis points out, clearly the Lower East Side, with its large immigrant
populations.33 This linguistic l uidity comes from the “triple rhythm” of an
individual’s race, citizenship, and personality, she asserts. Both “the high brow-
est modern poets and an adolescent Slav” have had to adapt “to a country
where the mind has to put on its verbal clothes at terriic speed if it would
speak in time . . . the ear that has listened to the greatest number of sounds will
have the most to choose from when it comes to self expression, each has been
liberally educated in the lexibility of phrases” (LoLB, p. 159).
Such “lexibility” and adaptation through familiarity with “the greatest
number of sounds” was a hallmark of Loy’s verse from the start. Although
she uses few outright coinages and there is sparse evidence of the many lan-
guages she knew besides English in her earliest poems, she even so gives
birth (to use her metaphor) to a “composite” language, containing such a
high ratio of abstract, Latinate, and rarely used words that it sounds foreign.
The 1914 “Italian Pictures” provides an early example of what would be Loy’s
increasing play with mixed registers. Here she combines Latinate derivatives
with the Anglo-Saxon roots of Middle English in “Fluidic blots of sky” and
“SPLOSH / Pours something / Viscuous / Maleic / Unfamiliar” (LoLB, pp. 11,
12–13). By 1915, Loy’s language is looser in its play with forms and sounds. In
“The Efectual Marriage, or The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni,”
Gina is “more than” a “female”; she is “an incipience a correlative / an insti-
gation of the reaction of man / From the palpable to the transcendent /
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy,” lending monogamy a “changeant consis-
tency” – although we later discover that this woman “with no axis to revolve
on” other than her husband is also “mad” (LoLB, pp. 36, 38, 39). In her New
York experience of living among immigrants of several countries and lan-
guages, Loy inds a theoretical formulation for her own triple rhythm as born
of a melting pot experience that is symbolically, albeit in her case not literally,
American, or, as she comes to call it, “mongrel.”
In “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Loy traces this “lexibility of phrases” or
“changeant consistency” as it leads the toddler Ova (another Loy igure) from

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an initial understanding of sounds to a transcendent experience of language,

and through the witness and critique of various models for art. In particular,
the child Ova inds “only words / mysterious” and “nothing objective new”
(LaLB, p. 139). While Ova is not yet under the pressure of needing to “put on
[her] verbal clothes at terriic speed,” she is learning that language marks iden-
tity and that words are both given and plastic:

Sometimes a new word comes to her

she looks before her
and watches
for its materialization
...
A
lucent
iris
shifts
its
irradiate
interstice
glooms and relumes
on an orb of verdigris
An unreal
globe terrestial
of olive-jewel
dilates
evaporates
into the Increate (LaLB, pp. 139, 141–42)

Just as “we” artists in “Apology of Genius” forge chaos into “imperious jew-
elry” in “the raw caverns of the Increate” (LoLB, p. 78), Ova witnesses a “globe
. . . of olive-jewel” disappear into that “Increate” cavern of energy from which
poetry will eventually be born. That the word she hears in relation to this
creative intensity is “diarrhea” signals both the comic misunderstandings of
childhood and Loy’s conviction that spirit is always embodied.
Ova experiences the mysteriousness of language, experiments with ways
to bridge the distance between chaotic embodiment and feeling on the one
hand and articulate meaning on the other, and identiies her allies according
to their relationships with language and the “Increate,” or that source from
which individuals can give birth to their own creativity. This “mongrel-girl /
of Noman’s land,” like the “arrested artists / of the masses . . . made moon-
lowers out of muck / and things desired / out of their tenuous soul-stuf ”

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(LaLB, pp. 143, 142). In contrast, Esau – a character representing Loy’s irst hus-
band – “absorbs the erudite idea” that beauty exists only “posthumously to
itself / in the antique” (LaLB, p. 143). For him there is nothing “mysterious” in
language’s “materialization.”
Bearing no stylistic relation to Loy’s satirical narrative of familial relations
and development, and focused on spiritual and psychic being rather than lan-
guage, H.D.’s Trilogy nonetheless takes on similar questions about the gesta-
tion of art from experiences of chaos and embodiment. This three-part poem
was written and published in individual sections: “The Walls Do Not Fall”
(1944), “Tribute to the Angels” (1945), and “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946).
Susan Stanford Friedman refers to it as H.D.’s “war and peace,” a “cosmic
mythmaking” expression of her spiritual hunger to keep a dream of peace
alive in a world of chaos and violence, acknowledging that “we are voyagers”
without a map but holding out the hope that “possibly we will reach haven,
/ heaven” (HDCP, p. 543).34 In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” that which initially
has only a “small, static, limited // orbit” makes itself “indigestible” to “the
shark-jaws / of outer circumstance . . . so that, living within, / you beget,
self-out-of-self, // selless, / that pearl-of-great-price” (HDCP, p. 514). In the
bombed-out streets of London, H.D. inds a kind of “Increate” (to use Loy’s
word) or “spell” (to use her own) that both promises and grows from “Dream,
/ Vision”; through such vision, poets may also become prophets moving the
world toward spiritual rebirth (HDCP, p. 519). In words that echo Loy’s phrases
from several of her poems in the 1920s, H.D. also inds “companions / of
the lame,” or a community of artists wrapped in the same “mystery” or
“Presence . . . rare as radium” as she is, “aloof ” from conventional “good and
evil” (HDCP, pp. 521, 520). In a sequence of parables of origin and creative
regeneration and relections on World War II, H.D. gives psychic and symbolic
form to her hope that art will endure and creative forces outlive destructive
ones. In her earlier narrative of individual mythologizing, Loy expresses less
hopefulness. Even as a child, Ova receives “Illumination,” an experience of
spiritual transcendence in which she is “conscious / not through her body but
through space,” yet it results in an “indissoluble bliss / to be carried like a for-
getfulness / into the long nightmare” of the rest of her upbringing, or perhaps
human history (LaLB, p. 164).
Neither H.D. nor Loy writes a poetic of documentary or makes explicit
reference to the social and political events of the twentieth century. Their
deep concern with the “long nightmare” of life or history, however, becomes
clear during World War II. This war brings to a climax the conjunction of
H.D.’s antimilitaristic ethos and religious convictions. Witnessing the war’s

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terrors and devastation sharpens her intuitions about the integrity of spiritual
survival and the principles and strength required to enable a humane psyche
to survive. The war also brings H.D. to extraordinary productivity, which is
primarily manifest in Trilogy, one of the great modernist long poems, but also
in her verse epic Helen in Egypt, written in the early 1950s. In Helen, H.D. goes
even further in constructing a cosmic mythology that enacts the conl icts of
attempting to live embodying the forces of creative (not romantic) love and
fulillment in a world that gloriies masculine prowess and war. H.D. also turns
in her late poetry to an airmation of the duplicity or multiplicity of language
and its l uidities, moving closer to Loy’s embrace of language that reveals
itself as permeable to multiple inl uences and therefore in “movement,” “liv-
ing” (LoLB, pp. 157, 159).35
Loy, in contrast, reaches the peak of her vision for human creativity in
the 1920s in “Anglo-Mongrels.” In her late feminism, she turns to portraits of
street people, inding in them manifestations of both beauty and divinity.36
Consequently, it is unclear whether it is the war that inspires her last burst of
writing and art making or whether it is the more general conditions of aging,
dependence (on her daughters), and poverty. In this period Loy does, however,
reiterate a similarly antimilitaristic ethos and celebrate what both she and
H.D. identify in various forms as the power of love.
Nearly a quarter century after writing “Anglo-Mongrels,” Loy writes a poem
of nationalist celebration that returns full circle to her early protests against
(Futurist) masculinism, but this time she identiies a feminized “America,
Heroica” rather than the overthrow of patriarchal institutions or a language
of quick l uidity as the focus of what she there called her “magnetic horizon
of liberty” (LaLB, p. 170). Sentimental and patriotic rather than satirical and
polyglot, “America * A Miracle” both addresses and describes this idealized
new power. “America” is “a lash of lightening, / a stroke of genius” because
of its “willpower,” engineering know-how, inventions of “electric conjury,”
and “bountifulness” to the world’s suferers (LaLB, pp. 227, 229). Presenting
Abraham Lincoln’s “urgent promise” as epitomizing the country’s past, Loy
asserts that “the power of the man-of-prey, / the living robot” that “roars
abroad / wavers” in the face of the American “people” (LaLB, pp. 229, 231, my
emphasis). Americans are a “people resolute,” who “in a resurgence of ardour
/ oppose the mechanized monster” of combative military aggression or any
kind of power without spirit. With this act, “Supremacy is at last . . . an out-
come of vision”; “the mightiest” are made so, presumably, by their “ardour,”
through “keeping a pact with Deity / made in Lincolnian love of this nation.”

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This idealizing airmation echoes the optimism of Allied victory – making it

likely that this poem (irst published posthumously) was written around the
end of the war.
“America * A Miracle” has none of the poetic force of “Songs to Joannes” or
“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” and none of the brilliant satire of jingoistic
empire building of the latter, but in it Loy gives materialized form to her ear-
lier critique of both patriarchal authority and the stale purity of language she
associated with university professors. By resisting fascism, America “might,”
in Loy’s eyes, resist historical privilege, military power, secrecy, and silence:
“the echoes of your voice / are Earth’s antipodes whispering together” (LaLB,
p. 229). In 1918, Loy described “Power” as “a secret society of the minority,” or
the singular “Dominator” (LaLB, p. 280). While in art or aesthetics Loy always
favored a minority that stood above a bourgeois or common populace incapa-
ble of understanding its “imperious jewellery of the Universe,” in politics she
was democratic. “International Psycho-Democracy” calls for an “evolution”
of habits, ideas, and psychology that will overturn “the belligerent masculine
social ideal” (LaLB, p. 281). In “America * A Miracle,” Loy identiies this evo-
lutionary ideal with the United States: America’s “whispering” and echoing
voices seem to come from the “antipodes” or farthest reaches of the earth in
their multiplicity and inclusiveness.
During the 1940s, Loy wrote primarily about poverty in the Bowery, that
region “Beyond a hell-vermilion / curtain of neon” where she lived among
“the vanquished,” “faces of Inferno,” “prophet[s] of Babble-on” (LoLB, pp. 133–
35). As Linda Kinnahan argues, her whole corpus of poetry can be read as an
extended critique of gender systems in relation to economics, religion, sex,
and domestic relations, a critique made explicit in her Bowery poems.37 She
knew the problems of American society, including its class and racial preju-
dices and economic injustice. Nonetheless, Loy apparently felt more airmed
as an immigrant artist and poet in a land where she could hear at least “ech-
oes” of “Earth’s antipodes” or an “English enriched and variegated with the
grammatical structure and voice-inlection of many races” than in the other
lands of her expatriate domicile or her London home. From her earliest years
of writing, Loy objected to institutions of privilege, especially as they afected
women, and she cultivated a style of lamboyant inclusiveness, eventually
articulating this l uidity of language play in relation to peoples and ethnici-
ties rather than exclusively in relation to gender and languages. Her articula-
tion of this aesthetic, developed among international avant-gardes in England,
Germany, France, and Italy, depended on her experience of the United States.

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Notes
1. For general discussion of Loy as American, see Lara Vetter, “Theories of
Spiritual Evolution, Christian Science, and the ‘Cosmopolitan Jew’: Mina Loy
and American Identity,” Journal of Modern Literature 31:1 (2007), pp. 47–63, and
Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism and
Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pas-
sim. For Pound’s comment, see Ezra Pound, “Others,” Little Review 4:11 (1918),
p. 57.
2. Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina
Loy, and Gertrude Stein (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Rachel Potter
and Suzanne Hobson (eds.), The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Cambridge: Salt,
2010); Mina Loy, Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, ed. Sara Crangle (Champaign,
Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), cited subsequently in the text as SEML.
3. Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-
Schüler: Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005).
4. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. xii, 23; Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed.
Roger L. Conover (Highlands, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1982), p. xv. The Lost Lunar
Baedeker (1996) will be cited subsequently in the text as LoLB. The Last Lunar
Baedeker (1982) will be cited as LaLB. Loy’s unpublished manuscripts and let-
ters are quoted with the permission of Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor,
who also serves as literary executor of Loy’s estate. Unpublished material
is cited from the Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
5. Hilda Doolittle [H.D.], Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York:
New Directions, 1983), pp. 20, 21. This collection will be cited subsequently in
the text as HDCP.
6. Colby Emmerson Reid, “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws,” FACS 10 (2007–2008), pp.
109–49, 112.
7. Alfred Kreymborg, [Untitled editorial], Others 5:1 (December 1918), p. 1.
8. Marianne Moore, The Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking, 1961),
p. 266.
9. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens,
1986), p. 5.
10. Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American
Poetry (London: Ashgate, 2006).
11. Miller, Cultures of Modernism.
12. Rowan Harris, “Futurism, Fashion, and the Feminine: Forms of Repudiation
and Ailiation in the Early Writing of Mina Loy,” in Potter and Hobson (eds.),
The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, pp. 17–46, 27.

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13. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American Poetry,
p. 188.
14. Marisa Januzzi, “ ‘Reconstru[ing] Scars’: Mina Loy and the Matter of Modernist
Poetics” (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), p. 199.
15. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 157.
16. Harris, “Futurism, Fashion, and the Feminine,” p. 21.
17. Marjorie Perlof, “English as a ‘Second’ Language,” in Maeera Shreiber and
Keith Tuma (eds.), Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine: National Poetry
Foundation, 1998), pp. 131–48; Reid, “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws.”
18. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (New York: Viking, 1981), p. 46.
19. Cassandra Laity, “H.D.’s Romantic Landscapes: The Sexual Politics of the
Garden,” in Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (eds.),
Signets: Reading H.D. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 110–
28, 114, 115.
20. H.D.’s stories and novels developed a more excessive and in part more exper-
imental style than her poetry and were more explicit in their feminist cri-
tique. Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
21. Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
22. Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 313.
23. Vetter, “Theories of Spiritual Evolution.”
24. Linda Kinnahan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition
in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
25. Peter Nicholls, “‘Arid clarity’: Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Jules Laforgue,” in
Potter and Hobson (eds.), The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, pp. 129–45.
26. Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929),
pp. 488–89.
27. “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet and Playwright, Doesn’t Try to Express Her
Personality by Wearing Odd Looking Draperies – Her Clothes Suggest the
Smartest Shops but Her Poems Would Have Puzzled Granma,” Evening Sun,
February 17, 1917, n.p.
28. This observation is determined by publication dates and reference in letters;
several of Loy’s poems do not exist in manuscript and those that do are not
dated.
29. Burke, Becoming Modern, pp. 112, 131.
30. Cristanne Miller, “Feminist Location and Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and
the Rose,’ ” Paideuma 32:1–3 (2003), pp. 75–94; Cristanne Miller, “Tongues
‘Loosened in the Melting Pot’: The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side,”
Modernism/Modernity 14:3 (2007), pp. 455–76.

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31. Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 361.

32. Pound, “Others,” pp. 56–58.
33. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American
Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 165.
34. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Teaching Trilogy: H.D.’s War and Peace,” in
Annette Debo and Lara Vetter (eds.), Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and
Prose (New York: Modern Language Association, 2011), pp. 135–41, 133.
35. Helen V. Emmitt, “Forgotten Memories and Unheard Rhythms: H.D.’s Poetics
as a Response to Male Modernism,” Paideuma 33:2–3 (2004), pp. 131–54.
36. Maeera Shreiber, “Divine Women, Fallen Angels: The Late Devotional
Poetry of Mina Loy,” in Shreiber and Tuma (eds.), Mina Loy: Woman and Poet,
pp. 463–82.
37. Linda Kinnahan, “Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and
Marianne Moore,” in Cary Nelson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern and
Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.
143–72.

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 Chapter 27
Marianne Moore and the Printed Page
Robin G. Schulze

In many ways, the world of print that Marianne Moore and her modern-
ist peers entered ofered an embarrassment of riches when it came to pub-
lishing. Moore started her writing life at the same time that a host of new
American publishing venues sprang up in the years before the First World
War. Throughout her career, Moore’s powers as a poet developed as she strug-
gled to meet the physical and commercial demands of the venues that pub-
lished, and refused to publish, her work. Her experience proves a vital window
into the ways in which modernist poets negotiated the changing demands of
early twentieth-century print culture.
Between 1890 and 1916, American print culture underwent an unprece-
dented expansion, due in part to an immigrant-fueled increase in the nation’s
population, in part to urbanization and a consequent rise in literacy rates,
and in part to technological advancements in printing that lowered the prices
of and improved access to print materials. Indeed, Frank Luther Mott esti-
mates that between 1890 and 1916, no fewer than 7,500 new magazines entered
the American market.1 American print culture of the early twentieth century,
then, seemed expansive and varied enough to accommodate any emerging
author.
Changes were afoot, however, that had dramatic consequences for those
seeking to get on what Robert Darnton has dubbed a “communications cir-
cuit” of print culture that runs “from the author to the publisher (if the book-
seller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and
the reader.”2 As James L. W. West notes, in the years before the turn of the
twentieth century, American book publishing was a “clubby,” politically con-
servative, Ivy League afair of family-owned houses that took pride in their
mission of cultural uplift.3 Although long-standing houses such as Harper,
Appleton, Scribner, Putnam, and Holt were certainly in the business of mak-
ing money, they were run on what Michael Winship terms an “ad hoc” basis
that did not employ modern business models of internal organization.4 The

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established publishers knew their authors personally and aimed their prod-
ucts at the well heeled and the well educated. The book market in turn drove
the periodical market. Houses such as Harper and Scribner created expen-
sive, high-toned magazines that served primarily as teasers for their books and
more generally as the public faces of the houses that issued them. Subsidized
“book magazines” routinely ran in the red.
By the turn of the twentieth century, though, this old world was swept
aside by a new business model in publishing. Demographic shifts inspired
entrepreneurial publishers to conceive of periodicals as vehicles for advertise-
ments aimed at a growing middle-class audience.5 At the end of the nineteenth
century, the American middle class remained a reading market lost between
the relatively expensive and high-toned book magazines aimed at America’s
educated elite and the lowbrow penny “story papers” pitched at the working
classes. All this changed in the face of a series of industry-shifting price wars
based on the premise that a magazine’s price could be subsidized by the sale
of advertising. Publishers could sell magazines for far less than it cost to pro-
duce them, increasing circulation, which would in turn attract more advertis-
ers. General magazines such as Munsey’s, McClure’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal
became mass-market periodicals, selling not 10,000 or 20,000 but 500,000 cop-
ies. Circulation of monthly magazines rose from 18 million in 1890 to 64 mil-
lion in 1905.
By the time modernist poets such as Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle,
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams were undergraduates,
then, American print culture, formerly focused on the book, was driven by the
periodical. The increasing status of art as commodity and publishing as big
business meant that both American artists and the venues that printed them
needed to think harder than ever before about the audiences they wished to
attract. Publishers needed to focus less on what they wanted to print and more
on what readers in particular market segments wanted to read.
The proliferation of periodical literature and the parsing of readers into
market segments had profound efects both on the content of American
books, newspapers, and magazines and on their material features – what
Jerome McGann terms their “bibliographic codes.” In McGann’s view, all texts
are made up of two sets of codes: linguistic codes, the syntactic array of words
on a page, and bibliographic codes, the book cover, dust jacket, trim size,
typography, font, illustrations, paper, and ink that constitute a text’s material
presentation. Products of the socializing processes of printing that make texts
palatable and saleable, bibliographic codes are just as important as linguistic
codes in determining the meaning of a given text.6 Bibliographic codes send

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social signals about the genre, audience, and subject of printed matter that
direct the processes of decoding words on a page before such processes even
begin at the level of syntax. With so many periodicals, newspapers, and books
on the market vying for consumer attention, the act of signaling what a reader
would encounter in any particular book or periodical took on a new urgency.
The drive to attract and engage an audience before a single word of linguistic
content was consumed led to a brave new world of material codes, such as col-
orful book dust jackets, screaming banner newspaper headlines, and full-page
halftone photographs.
Critics of the new ad-driven system pictured American culture as a sub-
ject of tyrannical consumer preference. American art, they complained, was
doomed to be determined by the mediocre democratic mass. One common
reading of “modernist” literature situates such grumblings in the emergence
of the diicult, genre-bending, experimental work that critics have retrospec-
tively granted the “modernist” label. Andreas Huyssen famously argued that
literary modernists worked hard to produce art that could avoid the “contam-
ination” of mass culture, which was gendered female. Modernists consciously
produced works hard to read and impossible to sell in an elitist bid to rise above
the consumer culture they despised as intolerably cheap and degraded. They
also established an alternative print culture – “little magazines,” bookshops,
small presses – to share work while keeping art out of the hands of those who
would sully it. With its “paranoid view of mass culture,” modernism, Huyssen
contends, “begins to look more and more like a reaction formation.”7
Scholars of modernist print culture, such as Mark Morrisson and Sean
Latham, have spent the last decade or so revising Huyssen’s perhaps mislead-
ing vision by demonstrating how literary modernists participated, willingly
and hopefully, in the literary marketplace. As Morrisson puts it so well, “the
institutional adaptation of promotional culture by young modernists suggests
an early optimism about the power of mass market technologies and institu-
tions to transform and rejuvenate contemporary culture.”8 Indeed, Marianne
Moore’s experience, reading practices, and poetry suggest that not all the
modernists who participated in the alternative print world of the modernist
little magazine were averse to reading and publishing in mass-market peri-
odicals. Moore’s archive reveals her love of periodicals of all kinds, including
those of the mass market. In one of her early reading diaries, she records
snippets of text from such mass-market publications as Literary Digest, Littell’s
Living Age, Life, Munsey’s, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The
same diary, however, contains references to numerous “book periodicals,”
including Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Century, as well as manifesto-driven

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modernist little magazines, including Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis’s Blast
and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s Little Review. Moore was equally
catholic when it came to the ways in which she made use of what she read. She
employed periodicals to direct her reading, relying on reviews to point her to
books of interest. As a hopeful reviewer herself, she also used magazines and
newspapers to model her critical prose. Most importantly, mass-market and
book periodicals frequently provided not only the inspiration for but also the
substance of her poems. While Pound and Eliot were apt to make poetic allu-
sions to works of high Western culture, Moore was more likely to reference
a picture she cut out of the National Geographic or a story she read in the New
York Times. She grabbed direct quotes from her periodicals, employing bits of
language in quotation marks that captured common habits of thought that
she wished to examine or expose.
Perhaps even more surprising, however, was Moore’s desire, at the start
of her career, to participate as both an editor and content provider in the ad-
driven communications circuit of mass-market print that Ezra Pound claimed
he had led to London to escape. Moore was, in the eyes of her modernist
peers, a “poet’s poet.” From her earliest days, her work was diicult – unique
in ways that drove many readers to distraction. Eschewing traditional verse
forms, Moore constructed her poems in syllabic stanzas, choosing to hold
them together with intricate patterns of full, light, and of rhyme. Eschewing
traditional poetic subjects and symbols, she wrote poems about curious
plants, animals, and objects that often seemed wholly descriptive. Eschewing
emotional rhetoric and the lyric “I,” her poems seemed treatises rather than
testimonies of feeling – as Ezra Pound wrote, “a mind cry rather than a heart
cry.” How Moore imagined such work would play well in Peoria in the early
twentieth century is something of a mystery. And yet, at the beginning of her
national career, she did.
As her archive attests, at the start of her career Moore privileged popular
venues over modernist little magazines when it came to the submission of
her poems. At the same time that she was reading modernist little magazines
such as the Egoist and Blast, she was submitting her work to high-circulation
magazines such as McClure’s, the infamous purveyor of “muckraking” jour-
nalism, with a circulation of 400,000 in 1906, and Everybody’s Magazine, a digest
of literary gossip, features, short stories, and poetry with a circulation of more
than 750,000 in 1908. Her poem “A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic,”
which takes a loon, a vulture, and a goose as its subjects, went out irst to the
Youth’s Companion, a weekly magazine aimed at adolescent boys and girls with
a circulation of more than 300,000 before World War I. Moore reported to her

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brother in July 1915 that she was “trying to sell” her “gander” to the Youth’s
Companion, but, if the magazine did not take the poem, she would forward
it to Alfred Kreymborg, editor of the modernist little magazine Others, who
could not aford to pay.9
Indeed, the ultimate publication of Moore’s “A Fool, a Foul Thing, a
Distressful Lunatic,” irst printed under the title “Masks,” demonstrates just
how far she was willing to go to join the world of mass-market print. At the
beginning of her career, Moore’s goal was to be not just a poet but a “man
of letters.” She needed to work to support her family (Moore lived with her
mother her entire life, in part because her father left the family before she was
born), and she wanted to do so by writing essays, comments, and reviews that
would contribute broadly to the public life of the arts. She also, unlike some of
her wealthier peers, needed to sell her work to venues that would pay for it.
In the ten years following her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909,
Moore tried hard to put together a life as a paid writer. At the same time that
she was publishing her poems in modernist little magazines, she was making
serious attempts to “get on” as a critic at the Boston Evening Transcript and the
Philadelphia Public Ledger, two of the largest newspapers in the East. She wrote
to her brother:
I feel sure I can get a job with the Ledger, not by pulling Mr. [Samuel
Duf] McCoy’s leg (he is on the Ledger and revised some of my poems for
Contemporary Verse) but by my concentrated exertions in the past. I am just as
sure of getting it as I am of eating, if I could only see them.10

Moore was not above thinking about connections that might advance her
career, particularly when it came to the Philadelphia Public Ledger. In 1916,
Samuel Duf McCoy, a Princeton graduate who was working as both a poet
and a journalist on the Public Ledger, founded Contemporary Verse. McCoy liked
didactic and often frankly sentimental verse with strict form and full rhyme.
Moore sent Contemporary Verse “A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic,”
which McCoy, as Moore states, “revised.” By way of comparison, here is the
poem as Moore produced it in a pre-1916 typescript.

With webs of cool

Chain mail and his stout heart, is not the gander
Mocked and ignorantly designated yet,
To play the fool?
“Egyptian vultures, clean as cherubim,
All ivory and jet,” are they most foul?
And nature’s child,

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That most precocious water bird, the loon – why

Is he foremost in the madman’s alphabet;
Why is he styled
In folly’s catalogue, distressful lunatic?11
Moore’s typescript version of the poem bears many hallmarks of her early
verse. Her poem constitutes a challenge to those who allow conventional
thinking to dictate their approach to experience, particularly of the natural
world. Waging an assault on dead metaphors that keep humans from mark-
ing the true value of the organic world around them, Moore’s speaker calls
on her audience to rethink a “silly goose” as a composed battle-ready knight,
a “dirty vulture” as an angel, and a “crazy loon” as a creature of rare ability.
Stylistically, the poem also resembles Moore’s other work of the early 1910s
in its carefully wrought collections of syllabic lines, many of which l irt with
metrical regularity but ultimately reject it in favor of complex, conversational
rhythms. The line breaks of “A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic” work
to emphasize the play of rhyme – full, light, and slant – that holds the poem
together: “cool,” “fool,” and “foul”; “child,” “why,” and “styled”; and “yet”
and “alphabet.” Also characteristic are Moore’s insistent questions, which she
often employed to interrogate misguided interlocutors or, in a more rhetorical
vein, the laws of her culture.
The poem that appeared in Contemporary Verse in 1916 under the title “Masks”
is a very diferent piece. It begins:
“Loon” . . . . “goose” . . . . and “vulture” . . . .
Thus, from the kings of water and of air,
Men pluck three catchwords for their empty lips.
Mock them, in turn, wise dumb triumvirate!
You, gander, with stout heart tooled like your wings of steel,
What coward knows your soul?12
Under McCoy’s hand, Moore’s poem became not an address to those deter-
mined to use a “madman’s alphabet” at the expense of their relationship
with other living things but an address to the birds themselves. The poem
urges the loon, goose, and vulture to “mock” the men who label them. The
two questions that remain in the poem are posed not to the ofending par-
ties who need to be corrected, Moore’s usual practice in her early poems,
but to the injured parties. The birds, too, acquire characteristics that do
not speciically argue against the terms used to demean them. The loon
appears as a “precocious” child in Moore’s typescript, a word that empha-
sizes its unusual maturity and positions the bird as the antithesis of a mad,

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foolish “lunatic.” In McCoy’s version, the loon becomes instead a symbol

of triumphant and scornful individuality – a “water bird, / That shouts
exultantly among lone lakes” and “laugh[s]” at its oppressors. McCoy dis-
rupts the rhyme so ubiquitous in Moore’s early verses, as well as the play
of enjambment that makes the sonic relations between Moore’s words so
prominent.
My point here is not to scold McCoy but to suggest what Moore was willing
to do to make her way into the paying literary world she wanted so badly to
inhabit. She accepted McCoy’s revisions to her “gander” poem, as her letter to
Warner suggests, for the sake of her chances at the Public Ledger. Her note to
Warner reveals that she did not, as of 1916, see an unbridgeable gap between
her literary life in modernist little magazines and her potential literary life as
a critic and poet in popular venues. For Moore, the ad-driven world of period-
ical print culture was a continuum rather than a realm divided into “modern-
ist” and “other.” When considering her potential reading public, Moore did
not begin by considering her work as particularly subversive or experimental.
Only as the rejection slips from mass-market venues mounted did she start to
think of her poems as somehow unsuited for a mass market.
By the end of 1919, Moore had reached a crossroads. At the age of thirty-
two, she had made a name for herself as a poet and made many literary friends
and acquaintances, but she still had not managed to translate her talents into
regular paying work. Both of her most supportive periodicals, the Egoist and
Others, ceased publication in 1919, leaving Moore without a regular venue. In
the summer of 1919, she tried one last time to ind employment at the New
York Times Book Review. Her brother Warner secured an interview for Moore
that resulted in an invitation to pen some sample reviews of recent books. But
when she did not hear back from the Times, she wrote to Warner:
As for the Times, . . . I hope you will not do anything about it further. And don’t
have it in mind to get a hearing for me anywhere else – I think I could do such
work and am sure of it in fact but I don’t believe I it in with the program of
the average daily and will have to get at the matter some other way.

She added relectively:

The more I think of it, the more I think it is a matter of temperament, that
editors for large crowds of people don’t want ine distinctions and meditative
comment they want something practical and colorless that would not draw
attention to itself or seem contentious. And the more play I had in what I
wrote the more ofensive uncompromising I would be, so I will have to let
things go as they are for a while.13

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Unable to secure a position as a man of letters, Moore took a part-time job

at the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library. Moore did not
turn her back on mass publishing until it seemed that mass publishing had
turned its back on her, a narrative that poses a distinct challenge to readings
of modernist production as either a heroic stick in the eye of a more conser-
vative bourgeois culture or a frightened and elitist rejection of a feminized
mass culture. Moore wanted “in” to the paying world of the average dailies.
She only began to think of her work as in any way “contentious,” diicult, and
temperamentally unsuited to large crowds when constant rejections made
any other view untenable. At the beginning of her career, Moore became an
aesthetic “radical,” to use Harriet Monroe’s derogatory term for her work,
because only the most experimental journals would publish her work.14 It was
her experience in negotiating the communications circuit that constructed her
literary identity.

Enter the Dial

Ultimately, it was Scoield Thayer and J. Sibley Watson who both saved and
made Moore’s career. Thayer and Watson purchased the Dial magazine in
1919 and set to work turning it into a premier journal of modern art and cul-
ture. Thayer and Watson were willing to spend big money to buy the art they
deemed representative of “advanced cultural life,” regardless of whether or
not it sold the magazine. As Lawrence Rainey points out, however, Thayer
and Watson were not simply altruistic supporters of the arts. They were
canny investors. In identifying the works they printed as valuable examples
of “advanced cultural life,” they set out to create a consumer demand for the
cultural capital that they were themselves purchasing.15 Thayer, in particular,
was an avid collector who well understood the investment potential of art. All
he needed to do, he surmised, was to make other people value the works he
loved, and their commercial value would increase. As editor of the Dial, he
had a plan for how to accomplish his mission. Thayer wrote in his “Statement
of Purpose” for the Dial that the goal of the magazine was to place “radical
creations” by younger artists in conversation with more “traditional” works
by older and established artists so that “the enlightened public” might see the
continuity between the two. Of course, the scheme was contingent on having
the money to purchase works by “accepted artists,” works that had a much
higher commodity value than those by unknown youngsters.16 The expense
was worth it, however, from the standpoint of raising the stock of those more
experimental artists who were in the habit of giving their work away.

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As Rainey makes clear, patron-investors like Thayer and Watson rescued

literary modernism from a consumer-driven model of publishing, even
while they strove to invest literary modernism with a new form of com-
modity value. This new model, however tenuous, solved several problems
for Moore. First, Thayer and Watson paid well for her work out of their
own pockets. Second, the Dial published prose as well as verse, and Thayer
and Watson let Moore explore the sorts of “meditative” criticism that she
could not sell to the average dailies. Third, the Dial, although not aimed
at a mass audience, had a much larger circulation than either the Egoist or
Others. By 1922, the Dial had 6,374 subscribers and a monthly circulation of
9,200 copies.17 Finding herself published alongside Yeats and Conrad, Moore
gained a cultural imprimatur that proved vital to her career. The Dial, with
its glossy photographs of “modern” art, long pieces by “serious” and “estab-
lished” authors from around the globe, and high price tag, coded her work
as a lasting contribution to what Thayer and Watson termed the “advanced
cultural life.” Ultimately, eleven of the fourteen new poems Moore pub-
lished between January 1920 and December 1924 appeared in the Dial. Just
as important, the Dial printed the bulk of Moore’s critical prose from 1921
to 1924.
The Dial not only granted Moore a new artistic peer group but also changed
both the style and substance of her art. The Dial granted Moore a larger trim
size that gave her room to experiment with ever-longer lines. Starting in 1921,
she abandoned her syllabic stanzas; her tight, ubiquitous rhymes; and her com-
plex indents in favor of long, free verse lines anchored against the left margins.
She also began to experiment with what were, for her, very long poems, which
the Dial, unconcerned about expense, would print. Her verses also began
to ruminate on an important subject that the Dial made evident. Featured
alongside a range of established modernist writers and artists from England,
France, and Germany, Moore fashioned a number of poems that considered
the diferences between the aesthetic approaches of various nations. In “New
York,” Moore compared her city’s roughness, the “savage’s romance,” to the
overcivilized urbanities of Europe as a means to explore America’s potential
as a breeding ground for art. In “People’s Surroundings,” she compared the
living spaces that people of diferent regions and cultures create in order to
relect on what aesthetic models might be best to follow and why. In “Novices”
she measured the work of brash young American artists whose false sophis-
tication and egotism appalled her against the lively and honest verses of the
ancient Hebrews. The Dial inspired her to consider whether or not aesthetic
cosmopolitanism was a good idea.

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Moore by the Volume

By 1919, Moore’s colleagues sensed that she was doing something unique.
They also felt, however, that they needed to see her work en masse in order
to make sense of it. Her growing circle of literary friends began to urge her
to publish a book. Moore certainly had options. Book historians frequently
refer to the period from 1915–1940 in the United States as the golden age of
publishing: readership soared, and brash, talented new publishers entered the
market. B. W. Huebsch, Alfred Knopf, Horace Liveright, and Alfred Harcourt,
for example, all started publishing irms in the early twentieth century. As
George Bornstein has pointed out, many of these men were Jews who found it
hard to advance in the frankly WASPy world of the traditional American East
Coast publishing houses.18 Out on their own, they were in stif competition for
good things to print and were often willing to take chances on modernist texts
that proved risky for the bigger houses.19 In addition, several of the patron-
investors behind the little magazines also opened “little presses,” inverting the
book-magazine model of pre-twentieth-century publishing irms (books irst,
then magazines to support them). In 1923, Scoield Thayer and Sibley Watson
started the Dial Press to support the Dial magazine. In keeping with the art-
as-investment model that drove the patron-investors, the stock in trade of the
little presses was the luxury limited edition – the book designed for wealthy
collectors that would sell out quickly, thus enhancing its future potential as a
bankable commodity. Also, older, more traditional irms in both America and
Britain, such as Henry Holt, Macmillan, and Houghton Mil in, sometimes
took chances on experimental poetry.
The choice of book publisher, however, had just as many consequences
for a poet’s career as the choice of periodical venues when it came to cod-
ing a poet’s work for consumption. While the small commercial irms had
chutzpah, they did not necessarily promise the stability, or the respectabil-
ity, that many artists craved. The larger, more established irms l irted with
experimental poets, but only to a point. The patron-investor presses generally
produced beautiful limited editions, but, as Rainey has demonstrated, by their
very nature they did not provide access to a wide readership.20
Moore had tough decisions to make when it came to her irst book pros-
pects, but she ultimately did not get the chance to decide for herself. H.D.,
Bryher, and Harriet Shaw Weaver took the matter of Moore’s book publi-
cation into their own hands. After Moore had politely declined their ofer to
make up a volume of her verse, the three went ahead and published a small
book entitled Poems from the Egoist Press without Moore’s consent. The book

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arrived in Moore’s mailbox on July 7, 1921, a beautiful limited edition with

thick papers and an ornate cover. Moore knew the gift was a labor of love, but
she was upset about having the decision of where, when, and how to publish a
book made for her. As she wrote to Bryher: “I had considered the matter from
every point and was sure of my decision – that to publish anything now would
not be to my literary advantage; I wouldn’t have the poems appear now if I
could help it and would not have some of them ever appear and would make
certain changes.”21
A product of the segmented world of early twentieth-century print cul-
ture, Moore sensed that her “literary advantage” was inevitably tied up with
the social signals that both the material and institutional codes of a particular
publication would send. Moore had managed to ind a well-paying outlet in
the Dial that placed her work in the company of those who published books
regularly with established commercial houses. As a regular Dial author, Moore
had reason to hope for better than the Egoist Press. As she revealed to Bryher
in the context of turning down her services as a publisher, she also still had
the desire to open her verses out to more readers. “If the poems were to be
published,” she stated, “I think there ought to be more of them and I think that
there ought to be among them some that are easy to understand and that are
beyond doubt, alluring.”22
Unfortunately for Moore, Poems coded her as a poet suited for only the
smallest of educated coterie audiences. Richly produced with a brightly col-
ored, patterned cover that invoked a Byzantine mosaic, Bryher and H.D.’s
volume positioned Moore’s poems as the gorgeous products of an archeologi-
cal dig. Inside the cover, the book employed a font full of ligatures that con-
sciously referenced an earlier age of print. By titling the book simply Poems,
Bryher and H.D. encouraged readers to anticipate that they would ind texts
between the covers that would be recognizable to most readers as traditional
verse – a problematic strategy considering the experimental, genre-bending
contents.
Moore’s publishers, however, were perhaps less concerned about the con-
tradictions inherent in the volume’s bibliographic coding because they were
not producing the book to sell. Bryher printed Poems as an expensive calling
card for Moore, something to give away. Bryher’s strategy as Moore’s patron
was one that many of Moore’s modernist peers adopted on their own behalf:
Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin Arlington Robinson all published a
volume at their own expense in order to shop their work to potential reviewers
and future publishers. The strategy backired in Moore’s case, however, pre-
cisely because Bryher was not focused on the issue of Moore’s marketability.

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Harold Child of the London Times Literary Supplement savaged the volume,
laying emphasis on the sheer obscurity of the poems. “She writes . . . a clumsy
prose,” wrote Child, “and tries to give an adventitious efect to it by tricks of
printing which only obscure her meaning.”23 Writing for the Nation, Mark
Van Doren declared that Moore’s “manners” were “those of the absurder
coteries.”24 Bad notices were not an entrée to the sort of publishing house
with whom Moore wished to work. When Bryher, who remained Moore’s
good friend, asked for help in publishing her novel Adventure, Moore made the
following list of suggested presses: “Macmillan, Doran, Knopf, Huebsch.”25
Her irst choice was not a press that would produce a luxury edition, or one of
the upstart irms, but the staid and long-established Macmillan.
Upset with the response to her Poems, Moore retreated from book
publication. Once again, Thayer and Watson rescued Moore’s career. In
mid-1924, Thayer urged the editor of the ledgling Dial Press, Lincoln
MacVeagh, to approach Moore about putting together an American vol-
ume. Thayer assured Moore that the Dial Press was “a business house”
that would undertake the publication of her book “with hope of inancial
gain.” “Although,” he added, “I trust you will believe me, not only with
that purpose.”26 Secure in the notion that Thayer believed her book was
potentially marketable, Moore set to work putting together the manuscript
of Observations. Thayer’s interest in Moore’s book marked one of his most
savvy ploys as a patron-investor. Archival evidence reveals that, before ever
approaching Moore about a book, Thayer and Watson had already decided
to award the annual Dial Prize for 1924, a magniicent sum of $2,000, to
Moore. The awarding of the prize would sell the book, Thayer surmised,
enriching the Dial Press. The sale of the book would, in turn, sell Moore
and the Dial magazine.27
Thayer’s patron-investor strategy, partly conceived to promote Moore’s
poems, partly conceived to promote the Dial, left Moore $2,136.25 richer in
prize money and royalties. The sales of Observations were good enough to
prompt a second edition. The Dial Press was not a commercial press by the
standards of the day, but it allowed Moore to imagine that her work, while
still subsidized by Thayer and Watson, had a viable paying audience. Thayer
also coded Moore’s book for a readership beyond a coterie. Unlike the ornate
Poems, Thayer’s book was typographically simple. The cover he selected was
a plain black cloth with a small black-and-white label. He also employed a
limited-run dust jacket of gold foil that positioned Moore not as an excavation
of lost artistry but as a winner. The cover was a product not of a vision of the
book as art but of a marketing strategy based on the Dial Prize. Moore chose

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the title Observations for her volume, and Thayer included a full set of notes
to her poems as well as an index to the subject matter in her verses. Together,
the title and the apparatus suggested that Moore’s poems were as much infor-
mation as they were art.
Unlike Poems, Observations received wide reviews that were at least mixed,
including a full-page spread by Herbert Gorman, with Moore’s picture, in the
New York Times Book Review. Gorman noted that both Moore’s Dial Prize and
her Dial book “gave inordinate pleasure to an audience of readers which had
long since overgrown the limitations of a coterie.” He was happy to see that
Moore at last had a book “issued in a trade way and between cloth covers” and
hoped that the award and the book would “quite deinitely aid her in widening
her audience.”28 Gorman admitted to reading Moore’s Egoist Press Poems, but
he did not review Moore until the prize and the book “issued in a trade way”
made her a worthy subject for the New York Times.
The Dial not only gave Moore credentials as a trade author but also made
Moore, at last, a man of letters. In 1925, she took over as acting editor from
Alyse Gregory and later became editor in chief alongside Sibley Watson when
Thayer, plagued by mental illness, could no longer manage the job. Between
1925 and 1929, she directed the content of the magazine and wrote constantly
for its pages, producing a vast corpus of reviews, essays, and comments. As the
editor of the Dial, Moore became a igure to be consulted and contacted. She
drew a regular salary from the Dial and, for the irst time, felt inancially secure
in her chosen profession.
The Dial also gave Moore her irst true taste of editorial control. Throughout
her early career, Moore decided very little when it came to the material pre-
sentations of her poems. As the editor of the Dial, however, she had serious
input into the content and presentation of a major publication. She had a
taste of the power to manage the material codes that deined her literary
identity – a power that many of her modernist peers were willing to do just
about anything to get. Pound was constantly searching for a wealthy backer
who would allow him to create a magazine in which the linguistic and biblio-
graphic content of every page would express his aesthetic program. Writing
beyond the pale of recognizable literary genres, modernists such as Pound,
Moore, Williams, and Eliot – all of whom served as editors – had a larger
stake than more traditional artists in creating material codes that could carry
the burden of signaling how their work should be read. For many modernist
poets, editing a successful magazine was a holy grail because, in the absence of
recognizable generic markers (no rhyme, no regular meter, and no traditional
poetic form), material codes (the ordering of poems, the placement of lines,

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the illustrations, and the typographic cues, such as dashes, ellipses, bold type,
and expressive fonts) proved vital to the intelligibility of their work.
In 1929, however, the Dial closed its doors: Thayer’s mother no longer
wished to pay for the magazine that her son was too sick to edit. From Moore’s
literary perspective, the collapse of the Dial was both good and bad. Editing
a major periodical left Moore little time to devote to her own verse. Between
1925 and 1931, she published no poems. Once the Dial had shut down, she
returned to her own poetry, and many critics now see her expansive, complex
verse of the 1930s as the capstone of her career. But Moore again faced the
uncomfortable task of making a living, made all the more urgent by the global
economy’s collapse.

The 1930s, the “Real” Presses, and One Last

Bit of Luxury
Moore’s editorship of the Dial had put her at the center of the modernist
cultural production of the late 1920s. The economic chaos of the early 1930s,
however, made it very diicult for Moore to capitalize on the literary reputa-
tion that she had built throughout the end of the decade. In the wake of the
inancial collapse, many modernist little magazines established in the 1910s
and 1920s failed. As the Depression deepened, a new set of agenda-driven
political magazines replaced them. Little magazines like the New Masses, the
Anvil, Dynamo, the Partisan Review, the Modern Quarterly, and transition con-
sidered the verse they printed as part of their political programs. Although
Moore had certainly written a fair amount of political poetry throughout her
life – her many poems decrying the carnage of the First World War and her
poems that make reference to the Irish Troubles, for example – she despised
the leering, propagandistic tone of many of these new publications. “Judged
by our experimental writing,” Moore complained in a review of three anthol-
ogies of new poetry in the 1930s, “we are sufering today from unchastity,
sadism, blasphemy, and rainsoaked foppishness.”29
The politicizing of the 1930s little magazine scene meant that, once again,
Moore found herself in a tenuous position when it came to outlets for her
work, although there were still a few paying little magazines in America and
England, such as Lincoln Kirstein’s Hound and Horn and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion,
that considered Moore’s Dial editorship to be bankable cultural capital. The
most important of such outlets for Moore in the 1930s was Harriet Monroe’s
Poetry, which published eight of Moore’s nineteen new poems between 1932

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 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

and 1936. Moore’s experience with Monroe at the start of her career had not
been happy. Monroe published a handful of Moore’s poems in 1915 but disliked
her style and told her so. Monroe’s 1922 review of Poems stated frankly that
Moore’s poetry was not poetry at all. A decade later, however, Monroe and
Moore found themselves on the same side in the battle against leftist backlash.
Chided throughout the early 1930s for being ignorantly detached and apoliti-
cal, Monroe defended her editorial policy of “aesthetic value” at Poetry. “We
cannot believe,” she wrote in her reply to Stanley Burnshaw, “that it is our
duty to accept and spread before our readers such half-baked eforts at class-
consciousness poetry as the New Masses, the Anvil, Partisan Review, Dynamo, . . .
and other enthusiastic organs of the Left groups . . . may perhaps legitimately
use.”30 Like Monroe, Moore hated the idea of baldly polemical thinking where
art was concerned.
Again, Moore’s poems evolved in response to the venue that published
them. Monroe was very conscious of the ordering of poems in her magazine
and asked her authors to think about the arrangement of their verses. She also
asked them to provide overarching titles for the groups of poems she printed.
Monroe’s practice of thinking of poems as sets prompted Moore to do the
same. The poems that Moore sent to Poetry in 1932 constituted her irst major
poetic sequence, “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play.” Composed
of three poems, “The Steeple-Jack,” “The Student,” and “The Hero,” Moore’s
extended meditation on American character and the role of art and learning in
American culture was the irst of several carefully composed sequences.
Perhaps most important, Moore’s appearances in Poetry positioned Moore’s
work as belonging to what critics of the time saw as Monroe’s apolitical aes-
thetic program. In 1922, Monroe claimed that Moore’s art was a misguided
“rallying point for radicals.”31 As true political radicals began to take to the
artistic ield in the early 1930s, however, the aesthetic radicalism of the 1920s
began to look tame by comparison. Moore’s poems of the 1930s were among
her most stylistically challenging work. They were just as geometric and cryp-
tic, just as lacking in conventional emotional climax, as her earlier poems.
They were also, in their own way, political. Yet, because they were poems that
took pelicans, pangolins, and peaches as their subjects, they appeared more
engaged with aesthetic matters than with the “real” political and economic
crises that dominated the headlines. At the height of her career as a technically
advanced “diicult” poet, Moore became aesthetically palatable to Harriet
Monroe and the centrist little magazine that had rejected her verse ten years
earlier.

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The repositioning of Moore’s poems as something other than radical had

one very important result: once Moore was regularly represented in the pages
of Poetry, a breeding ground for Macmillan authors, Harold Latham, the lead
acquisitions editor for the New York oice of Macmillan, sought her out in
early 1933.32 Moore responded that she lacked suicient material for a new
book but promised to send her next volume his way. Only a few months later,
T. S. Eliot, then an editor at Faber and Faber, contacted Moore about the pos-
sibility of giving a volume of verse to his press. Having depended on presses
that were not business houses to produce her volume work of the 1920s, she
now had two business houses vying for her services. Moore ranked Macmillan
irst among her own choice of publishers and did not want to break her prom-
ise to Latham. She also, however, did not want to turn down Eliot and forgo
the obvious advantage of having him, a valued colleague with growing lit-
erary celebrity, involved in the project. She was also comforted by the fact
that a book for Faber would be not a favor but a commercial product. “The
commercial superstition is such that one does need a certain inancial recog-
nition,” she wrote to Eliot, “and I should be entirely pleased with the royalty
you mention.”33
Eager to sign Moore, T. S. Eliot sent fellow Faber and Faber director,
Frank Morley, to call on her. Moore was thrilled. “There is ‘a man,’ ” she
wrote to her brother admiringly: “He and T. S. Eliot, and Mr. Latham are,
so far, my irst experience of real publishers. Ask me about this, and you
shall hear; and of Paul Revere at Macmillan’s also.”34 Morley impressed
Moore as an industry insider who, along with Latham, Moore could not
help but picture as a rescuer. Moore must have explained the situation
with Macmillan to Morley, who took the logical step of contacting Latham
directly. Ultimately, T. S. Eliot agreed to both select and supply an intro-
duction to a book of Moore’s poems that would include both new work
and previously published poems. Macmillan in turn agreed to publish
an American edition, leaving the English edition to Faber. When all was
said and done, Moore’s Selected Poems, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot,
appeared irst in the United States from Macmillan and then a few months
later from Faber and Faber in England.
Selected Poems secured the career that the Dial had launched, not by mak-
ing Moore easier to read but by making her harder. Eliot let Moore select her
verses, but he ordered them. He chose to put Moore’s most challenging new
poems at the start of the volume, a group of poems on animal subjects that
Moore dubbed her “animiles” when she saw them together. His decision, as

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 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

he wrote to Moore, was speciically designed to separate the wheat from the
chaf when it came to her readers:
I want to start with the new poems hitherto uncollected, and shove some of
the slighter pieces toward the end. At your simplest, you bale those who love
“simple poetry,” and so one might as well put on diicult stuf at once, and
only bid for the readers who are willing and accustomed to take a little time
over poetry.35
Eliot’s introduction echoed his strategy to market Moore through her difer-
ence and diiculty.
Moore’s entrée into the house of Macmillan again changed her mode of
literary production. In December 1934, after Moore was already working with
Latham and Eliot, H.D. contacted Moore about making up a small book for
Bryher’s Brendin Publishing Company. Funded by Bryher, the Brendin Press
was the antithesis of a commercial venture. Like the Egoist Press, also sup-
ported by Bryher’s wealth, the Brendin Press specialized in small-run lux-
ury editions, roughly eight times the price of high-end trade books of the
period. Given Moore’s drive to work with “real” presses, it seems odd that she
should turn to Bryher and the Brendin Press on the brink of the appearance
of Selected Poems. She had a standing contract with Macmillan, and Latham
had an option on anything she wished to print next. Latham’s promise, how-
ever, was just the security Moore needed in order to experiment with a luxury
book. Latham assured her that publishing with Brendin would be no obstacle
and that he would gladly print the poems she gave to Bryher again in a longer
volume whenever Moore wished. Such assurances gave Moore the freedom
to do what she had longed to do her entire career – exert real control over the
bibliographic codes of a volume of verse. One enticement that Bryher used to
lure Moore to the Brendin Press was the promise that George Plank, a highly
successful graphic artist, would illustrate her book. The luxury edition also
allowed Moore to explore her new preoccupation with poetic sequences born
of her 1930s relationship with Monroe’s Poetry. At the time of H.D.’s query
about a book for Brendin, Moore had four new poems – “Pigeons,” “Bird-
Witted,” “Half-Deity,” and “The Pangolin” – that remained uncollected. As
Heather White tells the story, Moore sent the poems to Eliot, asking him, once
again, to help her with the arrangement.36 But by the time Eliot responded to
her initial plea for help, Moore had already reorganized her poems, along
with the new “Virginia Britannia” (originally entitled “Jamestown”), into a
sequence entitled “The Old Dominion”:

619
 R ob i n G. S ch ul ze

I
Jamestown
II
Bird-Witted
III
Half-Deity
Pigeons
The Pangolin37
She ultimately removed “Pigeons” and inserted “Smooth Gnarled Crape
Myrtle.” She also removed “The Pangolin” from the “Old Dominion” sequence
and left it to stand alone at the end of the volume. The inal table of contents
for The Pangolin and Other Verse read:
The Old Dominion
Virginia Britannia
Bird-Witted
Half-Deity
Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle
The Pangolin38
George Bornstein argues that both the ordering of the poems and the
George Plank illustrations in The Pangolin and Other Verse bring the commen-
tary on colonial race relations in “Virginia Britannia” front and center.39 As
Bornstein notes, the volume begins with a Plank illustration that pictures out-
stretched hands, one black, one white, attempting to meet in a handshake.
Between them, Plank interposes the early American Gasden lag, which pic-
tures a coiled rattlesnake over the legend “Don’t tread on me.” The lag tropes
on Benjamin Franklin’s cartoon depicting the American colonies as a snake
cut into segments. Together, the cartoon argues, the colonies will be deadly
to tyranny; un-united, they will die. In her poem “Virginia Britannia,” Moore
invokes the lag as evidence of her country’s strange progression from colony
to colonizer. In Virginia, the home of Jamestown, the irst permanent colony
in the New World, the English settlers encountered the tidewater natives of the
Pamunkey nation, including the princess Pocahontas. The meeting resulted in
a strange new amalgamation from which, Moore contends, America – nei-
ther English nor native – was born. The “feminine / odd Indian young lady,”
Pocahontas, is no odder, Moore suggests, than the “Odd / thin / gauze-and-
tafeta- / dressed English ” mistress who sets up house in the New World.
Terrapin
meat and crested spoon

620
 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

feed the mistress of French

plum-and-turquoise-piped chaise-longue;
of brass-knobbed slat front-door and
everywhere open
shaded house on Indian-
named Virginian
streams, in counties named for English lords. The
rattlesnake soon
said from our once dashingly
undiident irst lag, “don’t tread on
me,” tactless symbol of a new republic.40

The meeting of “Pamunkey princess” and English mistress results in a new

breed. The English woman’s “odd,” too-dainty ways transform by necessity:
the silver spoon with the family crest now holds not consommé but turtle
meat. From such an audacious mixture, the idea of America arises – a separate
country that is at once spunky and sadly lacking in humility. Under the rattle-
snake lag and the motto “don’t tread on me,” the “new republic” of America
forgets all too quickly what it feels like to be placed beneath another’s boot
soles.

the dwarf
fancying Egyptian, the American,
the Dutch, the noble
Roman, in taking what they
pleased – colonizing as we say –
were not all intel-
lect and delicacy.41

Moore lumps the new Americans together with the ancient imperial Romans
and Egyptians. The colonized have become, she laments, the imperial colo-
nizers, purchasing their power at the expense of the “savages” – black people
and Native Americans (those subject to Powhattan’s “deer-fur Crown”) – that
they consider expendable animals. In the last stanza of the poem, however,
Moore concludes that there is still hope for her nation. Against the setting sun,
the various trees outside her Virginia window, both native species and those
imported by settlers, “lose identity / and are one tree.” Ultimately, “Virginia
Britannia,” while holding out hope for a future marked by amity, endorses a
vision of American history that does not erase the violence bound up in the
nation’s founding.
Moore’s sequence title in The Pangolin and Other Verse, “The Old Dominion,”
suggests that not only “Virginia Britannia” but all four of the poems under

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 R ob i n G. S ch ul ze

that heading question America’s relationship to various forms of tyranny. Do

old forms of “old dominion” still hold sway? Has America fulilled its poten-
tial or its promises of freedom? With such questions in mind, the other poems
in Moore’s set become considerations of how Virginia’s chosen symbols and
mottoes might be productively recontextualized and reread. On the heels of
the “Old Dominion” sequence, “The Pangolin,” Moore’s “armored animal,”
with “sting-proof scales,” made “graceful by adversities, con- // versities,”
becomes a symbol of eternal vigilance, a reminder that tyranny is an ever-
present threat and that the beauty that emerges through struggle is the only
viable form of self-protection.42
Bibliographic control, the freedom Bryher granted Moore to order her
poems and collaborate with her illustrator, gave Moore the means to consider
how she might forge a more direct political identity as a poet. The experi-
ment, however, was one that few would ever see. Bryher priced the book, in
a print run of only 120 copies, at ifteen dollars, a price that Moore deemed
appalling. The lesson of how to produce an efectively ordered small volume
of verse, however, was one she took with her into the 1940s. In 1941, Moore
published her next volume, What Are Years, with Macmillan. As she had prom-
ised Latham, she took all the poems from The Pangolin and Other Verse into
her new book, most of them heavily revised. She also included ten uncol-
lected poems published between 1936 and 1941. The new book looked noth-
ing like the Brendin Press collection, particularly where the “Old Dominion”
sequence was concerned. Moore still grouped the four “Old Dominion”
poems together, but she moved “Virginia Britannia” to the end of the group.
She then placed the four poems in the middle of the volume and removed the
identifying sequence header, efectively obscuring the relations between the
poems that she had worked so hard to build in The Pangolin and Other Verse.
White reads Moore’s new arrangement for What Are Years as a move to a
more personal poetic that relects her family struggles of the 1940s, especially
the declining health of her beloved mother.43 What Are Years ends not with
“The Pangolin” but with “The Paper Nautilus,” Moore’s ode to the power of
motherly love. In his analysis of Moore’s 1941 volume, Bornstein argues that
“the stripping of the Pangolin volume’s bibliographic codes for the plainer
production of commercial publication signiicantly reduced the political bite
of [‘Virginia Britannia.’]”44 But there is a wider point to be made. Moore’s
reordering of her poems for her trade press does not so much personalize
or depoliticize her poems as repoliticize them in the context of another elo-
quent arrangement. In the wake of the eruption of global war, the second
in Moore’s lifetime, the tyranny that Moore deemed a threat in The Pangolin

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 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

and Other Verse became an all-too-present fact. What Are Years is a volume that
takes the question of survival in a brutal world as its central subject. Drawing
on her earlier experience of sequencing her poems, Moore began What Are
Years with four newer poems that unl inchingly face the fact of mortality, and
possible extinction.
In the lead poem, “What Are Years?,” Moore begins with a pointed ques-
tion, “What is our innocence, / what is our guilt?” Moore surprisingly answers
that, from the standpoint of the current conl ict, the question of guilt or inno-
cence is immaterial – all creatures “are / naked, none is safe.”45 The poem and
the three that follow are a call to action, a plea for American intervention in
the war. In “Rigorists,” Moore appreciates the survival skills of the reindeer,
“adapted // to scant reino,” whose transportation to Alaska by the interces-
sory Sheldon Jackson prevented “the extinction / of the Esquimo.”46 In “Light
Is Speech,” Moore laments the tragic fall of France to Nazi forces in 1940.
As Cristanne Miller argues, the poem doubles as an attempt to “stimulate
the French and non-French into action.”47 In “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’ ”
Moore considers the ostrich, the world’s largest bird, who, although l ightless
and mercilessly hunted throughout history, has managed to avoid extinction.
“Heroism is exhausting,” she states of the bird’s gallant actions in defending its
young, “yet / it contradicts a greed that / did not wisely spare / the harmless
solitaire // or great auk in its grandeur.”48 Extinction awaits all those unpre-
pared to be heroes.
Selected Poems, its order determined by Eliot, had presented Moore as a
frankly “diicult” poet; What Are Years, the irst trade volume whose order
Moore determined herself, recoded Moore in wartime as a relevant poet. The
recoding had measurable results. In his review of the 1943 anthology New
Poems, which included Moore’s verse, Kimon Friar wrote that, in contrast to
most of the poets represented in the volume, Moore “faces the hatred and
carnage of our times with searing directness and with greatest personal dis-
tress. . . . In her masterful poem ‘What Are Years,’ Miss Moore departs from her
usual exact description of external objects by which the theme is suggested, to
write . . . [a poem] in which the theme is explicitly and even emotionally stated,
a change courageous and welcome.”49 Friar was not alone in his assessment.
After the appearance of What Are Years, Moore found herself with access to
the two most important weekly journals of anti-isolationist liberal opinion in
America, the Nation and the New Republic.
Moore’s rehabilitation from cruelly diicult modernist to liberal moralist,
one engineered in part by Moore’s ordering of her 1941 volume, again had
repercussions. In Moore’s next small volume, Nevertheless (1944), Macmillan

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drastically changed the bibliographic codes they had put into play in the mid-
1930s to market her work. The dust jacket cover Macmillan had chosen for
What Are Years mimicked the cover of the American edition of her 1935 Selected
Poems. The title of the book and Moore’s name appeared in large, white block
capitals with minimal serifs on a black ield, a restatement of the cover of Selected
Poems that testiied to Moore’s diiculty and seriousness. The bibliographic
codes of Moore’s 1944 volume, however, were much softer. The trim size for
the book was a scant ive and one half by seven and one half inches, a bow to
wartime scarcity and to the slimness of Moore’s output of only six new poems.
For the jacket, Macmillan chose an elegant, slanted white italic font that left
ample open space on a navy blue ield. The initial “N” of the title Nevertheless
was beautifully curved, with a vine detail crossing the letter. The codes of the
volume positioned Moore not as a diicult writer but as a calm, uncomplicated
center of a global storm. Macmillan ultimately printed four thousand copies of
Nevertheless, the largest print run that Moore had garnered to date.50
Sadly, just as Moore had truly achieved the broad public appeal that she
had always hoped for her poems, her mother died, and Moore entered a
period of depression that left her with little energy to write. Moore’s last
act as a Macmillan author was the preparation and publication of her 1951
Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award,
and the Bollingen Prize and catapulted Moore into a whole new level of
literary fame.
Moore’s career is a testament to the ways in which access to the various
institutions that constituted the circuit of modernist publishing shaped the
writing lives of those who entered it.
Throughout her career, Marianne Moore inhabited a number of diferent
subject positions as an author, positions determined in large part by the venues
that published her work. Her poems were, by turns, collectible and compan-
ionable, cruelly diicult and calmly reassuring, cutting edge and conservative,
and unsellable and widely marketable. The venues that published Moore’s
work made it legible through the bibliographic codes they employed and the
institutional deinitions of the genre of poetry they enacted, codes and deini-
tions that Moore could never wholly control.
Notes
1. F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines 1885–1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1957), p. 11.
2. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books,” in D. Finkelstein and A.
McCleery (eds.), The Book History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 11.

624
 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

3. J. L. W. West III, “The Expansion of the National Book Trade System,” in C.

Kaestle and J. Radway (eds.), A History of the Book in America. Vol. 4, Print in
Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 79.
4. M. Winship, “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States,”
in Kaestle and Radway (eds.), A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, p. 57.
5. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of
the Century (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 25–30.
6. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991), pp. 48–68.
7. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and
Postmodernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), p. 53.
8. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and
Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 6.
9. Marianne Moore to J. W. Moore, July 20, 1915, Marianne Moore Collection,
Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia (hereafter cited as
Rosenbach).
10. M. Moore to J. W. Moore, December 16, 1915, Rosenbach.
11. M. Moore, typescript of “A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic,” folder 1:
02: 06, Rosenbach.
12. Marianne Moore, “Masks,” in Marianne Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore:
Early Poems 1907–1924, ed. Robin Schulze (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), p. 186.
13. M. Moore to J. W. Moore, October 5, 1919, Rosenbach.
14. Harriet Monroe, “A Symposium on Marianne Moore,” Poetry 19 ( January
1922), p. 208.
15. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 87. See Lawrence Rainey’s
account of the general role of patron-investors in modernist production,
pp. 1–9, and his detailed account of Thayer’s and Watson’s patron-investor
strategies at the Dial, pp. 77–106.
16. Scoield Thayer, “The Dial: Statement of Purpose,” Dial/Scoield Thayer
Papers, YCAL MSS 34, series II, box 9, folder 309, Beinecke.
17. Lawrence Rainey, “The Cultural Economy of Modernism,” in M. Levenson
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 48.
18. George Bornstein, “Textual Scholarship and Diversity: Which Needs
Airmative Action More,” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 3:1
(2008), p. 72.
19. See Catherine Turner’s account of the problems faced by the upstart presses
in their search for publishable materials in Marketing Modernism Between the
Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

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20. See Rainey’s account of the efect of coterie luxury edition publishing on
H.D.’s career in Institutions of Modernism, pp. 146–68.
21. M. Moore to Bryher, July 7, 1921, in B. Costello, C. Goodridge, and C. Miller
(eds.), Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 164.
22. M. Moore to Bryher, October 15, 1920, in Costello et al. (eds.), Selected Letters
of Marianne Moore, p. 133.
23. H. Child, “Poems by Marianne Moore,” Times Literary Supplement (London),
July 21, 1921, p. 471.
24. Mark Van Doren, “Women of Wit,” The Nation 113:2938 (October 26, 1921), in
E. Gregory (ed.), The Critical Response to Marianne Moore (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2003), pp. 33–34.
25. M. Moore to Bryher, August 31, 1921, in Costello et al. (eds.), Selected Letters of
Marianne Moore, p. 178.
26. S. Thayer to M. Moore, August 18, 1924, Dial/Scoield Thayer Papers, YCAL
MSS 34, series IV, box 35, folder 974, Beinecke.
27. See my account of this arrangement in Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore,
pp. 29–38.
28. H. S. Gorman, “Moore’s Art Is Not a Democratic One,” New York Times,
February 1, 1925, p. BR5.
29. M. Moore, “Courage, Right, and Wrong,” The Nation 143 (December 5, 1936),
in P. Willis (ed.), The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (New York: Penguin,
1987), p. 341.
30. H. Monroe, “Comment: Art and Propaganda,” Poetry, A Magazine of Verse 44:2
( July 1934), p. 212.
31. Monroe, “A Symposium on Marianne Moore,” p. 208.
32. Sheila Kineke, “T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and the Gendered Operations of
Literary Sponsorship,” Journal of Modern Literature 21:1 (1997), p. 131.
33. Costello et al. (eds.), Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, p. 317.
34. M. Moore to J. W. Moore, March 1, 1934, in Costello et al. (eds.), Selected Letters
of Marianne Moore, p. 319.
35. T. S. Eliot to M. Moore, July 20, 1934, Rosenbach.
36. See Heather Cass White’s account of Moore’s production of The Pangolin and
Other Verse in her introduction to the facsimile edition of the book Heather
Cass White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance: Marianne Moore, 1932–1936 (Victoria,
B.C.: ELS Editions, 2008), pp. 15–30.
37. White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance, pp. xviii–xix.
38. White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance, p. 11.
39. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 112–17.
40. M. Moore, “Virginia Britannia,” in White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance,
p. 17.

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 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

41. M. Moore, “Virginia Britannia,” in White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance,

p. 18.
42. M. Moore, “The Pangolin,” in White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance,
pp. 27–29.
43. White (ed.), A Quiver with Signiicance, pp. xxi–xxii.
44. Bornstein, Material Modernism, p. 115.
45. Marianne Moore, What Are Years (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 1.
46. Moore, What Are Years, pp. 2–3.
47. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 161.
48. Moore, What Are Years, p. 8.
49. Kimon Friar, “The Action of Incorrigible Tragedy,” Poetry 64:2 (November
1944), pp. 89–90.
50. Craig Abbott, Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh, Pa.:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 27.

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 Chapter 28
The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan
L e sl ey Wh e e l er

Modernism claims the new for itself. Because a fractured, spare, allusive
free verse is modernist poetry’s signature style, formal verse has often been
regarded by poets and critics as modernism’s antithesis. Received forms,
according to this logic, are feminine, retrograde, and populist, while the dis-
junctive modernist aesthetic occupies a violently masculine world, manifests
innovative genius, and subverts the cheap sentimentality of mass culture. For
example, expatriates H.D. and Ezra Pound cast themselves as rebels against
the stil ing values of the American bourgeoisie. From New Jersey and Harlem,
William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes posed challenges to their audi-
ences that entwined aesthetic and cultural critique. The early work, at least, of
Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot is satirically resistant to the social and poetic
status quo.
This is the dominant narrative of the twentieth-century critical response
to modern poetry, even though the most prestigious U.S. poets of this era
admired W. B. Yeats’s formal genius enormously, wrote verse haunted by met-
rical patterns, and were, as Louise Bogan put it, “engaged in a task of resto-
ration as well as of originality.”1 Modernism’s “story of experimentalist tri-
umph” has been successfully critiqued by Cary Nelson, Suzanne Clark, Joseph
Harrington, and others, and the “new modernist studies” is temporally and
spatially expanding the period’s scope.2 The political and aesthetic meanings
of rhythm and rhyme during modernism nevertheless deserve further analy-
sis. Vers libre, although enormously important and inl uential, was only one of
the revolutions afecting poetry’s sound and shape, its production and recep-
tion, during the irst half of the century.
A great deal of formal verse was in circulation during the same decades – in
newspapers and periodicals, on the radio, in live recitation, and elsewhere,
doing “vital cultural work.”3 Much of it was meant to uplift, comfort, and
reairm traditional order in a time of race riots, war, and rapid technological
and cultural change. In other cases, however, technical mastery could in itself

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be a controversial testament to the full humanity of the writer, proof that a

member of an excluded group deserved respect as an artist. Received forms
empowered poets, delivered them to new audiences, and in themselves consti-
tuted a radical message. Sometimes, too, meter was the object of innovation,
as poets tested contemporary language and attitudes against inherited verse
structures. Could less common verse forms be put to modern use, as Pound
and Edna St. Vincent Millay did with Anglo-Saxon measures? Could English
prosody accommodate a casual voice, as in W. H. Auden’s poems? Could
American music be mined for new poetic structures, as Langston Hughes did
in his blues poetry? Could a sonnet be a call to arms, as in Claude McKay’s
work, or a closet, as for Countee Cullen? Could a woman put on sonnet con-
ventions as if donning a man’s armor, as in Elinor Wylie’s verse, or a male
soldier’s uniform, as in one sequence by Gwendolyn Brooks?
Several modernist-era poets who worked largely in meter and rhyme were
innovators: their use of received forms was an integral part of their response
to modernity. Sound-driven lyricism retains a connection to oral cultures that
were receding during the advent of mass media – especially the displacement
of local entertainments, including music and recitation. Invocations of a lis-
tening audience by Millay and others anticipate later eruptions of oral struc-
tures and a performance orientation into U.S. verse during the Beat, Black
Arts, antiwar, feminist, ethnopoetics, and spoken word movements, and in
the poetic practice of indigenous Americans in the late twentieth and early
twenty-irst centuries.
Modernity is characterized by alienation: as communication and travel
technologies developed rapidly, new modes of connection seemed to obviate
immediacy and proximity. Radio broadcast began in the United States in 1920,
for example, and announcers’ voices began to displace reading aloud by the
hearth. Accordingly, the period generated many poetic explorations of the
dialectic between presence and absence, an issue that is as old as the printed
lyric but that gained new urgency in the twentieth century. Not only did print,
a distancing technology in itself, enable poets to reach audiences over tempo-
ral and geographical gaps, but in the 1920s and 1930s, poets began to negotiate
other media, including radio and recording. Even as Eliot sketched out his
poetics of impersonality, U.S. audiences were responding eagerly to the rel-
atively new phenomenon of well-known print poets delivering programs of
their own verses in public spaces – a spectacle dependent less on the skill of
the performer, as in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century displays of elo-
cution, than on the identity of the performer.4 The most innovative and suc-
cessful poet-performers were as likely to be practitioners of free verse (Amy

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Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Hughes) as of meter and rhyme (Robert Frost, Millay,
Vachel Lindsay). This very fact suggests an alternate way of organizing canons
and perceiving resemblances among writers. Instead of grouping poets chiely
by their relation to traditional English prosody, one might ask: Who recorded
work at the Harvard Vocarium, and how did they approach the task? Who
toured the literary societies or experimented with radio broadcast, and who
maintained chaste, silent seclusion? The answers to these questions, too, indi-
cate communities of experiment and resistance.
Themes of presence and absence recur in the verse of this period, whether
or not the poet was a platform entertainer or an aicionado of rhyme and
meter. However, sound-driven poetry is particularly insistent in its appeal to
the physical body. This physicality, further, implies a larger role for race, gen-
der, and sexuality in verse. Print disembodies the poet entirely, although read-
ers reconstruct a sense of textual voice and therefore, to some degree, of the
presence of the poet through rhythm, other acoustic efects, diction, syntax,
punctuation, and typographical elements. A live reading, conversely, mani-
fests gendered and racial bodies strongly, in both a visual and auditory way.
Recording and broadcast separate physical voice from real-world presence but
can still convey gender and race, although less reliably. It is no wonder, then,
that women were among the most successful users of poetry’s new platforms
and that the same women became marginal to the modernist canon. A poetics
of presence responds to the same crisis as does a poetics of impersonality –
both are undergirded by a critique of the estrangements of modern life.
Andreas Huyssen argues that “mass culture has always been the hidden
subtext of the modernist project” and that “mass culture is somehow asso-
ciated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of
men.”5 According to Clark, modernist discourse banishes domestic culture
by designating women’s writing as “sentimental.”6 Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar likewise ind that modernist innovations not only contrast but are moti-
vated by the popular and critical successes of female writers.7 Certainly, many
women lyricists of the era – Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Georgia Douglas
Johnson – wrote work that, for all its beauty and value, was fundamentally
opposed to the project of poetic modernism. However, in other cases, this
binary fails. Formal verse can be modernist, addressing in its concerns and in
its very style what it meant to live and work in the United States early in the
twentieth century.
This chapter concentrates on formal verse by women that explicitly
engages the modern world, in large part by exploring sound, presence, and
physicality amid technological alienations, revolutionized gender roles, and

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 The Formalist Modernism of Millay, Johnson, and Bogan

racial oppression. “Form” and “formalism” are contested terms, but in this
context they indicate adherence to sound patterns borrowed from a preexist-
ing prosodic tradition rather than invention of new aural structures. These
established forms can include syllabic and accentual verse as well as accentual-
syllabic meter, used strictly or loosely; however, most of the poems discussed
here deploy meters and stanza shapes that have been common in English-
language poetry since the Renaissance.
The lyric poetry of Millay, Helene Johnson, and Bogan is in conversation
with modernist experiments, although each of these poets emphasized dif-
ferent aspects of twentieth-century politics and culture and, at least to some
extent, aspired to reach diferent audiences. Millay had wide popular appeal
during her career and is still read beyond the academy; Johnson has always
been obscure beyond her literary circle; and Bogan was better known as a
critic than a poet and is now read chiely by other writers. Much of their work
is also marked, like the free verse of H.D. and Mina Loy, by candid portray-
als of female sexual desire. Millay cultivated and capitalized on an intensely
feminine public persona, but her poems highlight self-construction rather
than self-expression and depict her struggle to restore physical presence to
the printed lyric. Johnson uses rhyme and meter to intensify her invocation of
beautiful African American bodies and to convey erotic drive. Most of Bogan’s
work stresses the deadly silence of the printed poem, the stoppage of com-
munication, and the occultation of identity and feeling; however, her later
work features uncanny incursions of sound and presence. All these poets ind
in received forms ways to embody convention, disjunction, and conl ict, par-
ticularly the physical experience of modernity. Meter is not the only way to
emphasize sound in poetry, and emphasizing sound is not the only way to con-
jure presence and embodiment. However, to argue that modernism precludes
formalism is to sideline some of the most powerful, interesting, and radical
poetry of this era.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was considered by many contemporar-
ies to be a premier American poet – one of “the two and only two great things
in the United States,” according to Thomas Hardy, along with the skyscraper.8
Then and since, she has also been received as a lyric poet in a Romantic vein
with particular achievements in the sonnet form, as a promiscuously rhyming
bohemian, as a gifted entertainer with a highly theatrical and elocution-inl u-
enced performance style, as a “female female impersonator” who parodies
gender roles in order to critique “a tradition predicated upon her silence,” and
as a hysterical propagandist.9 Millay’s poetry also constitutes a direct response
to a range of international crises and to the conditions of modern American

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 L es l ey Wh e e l er

life, especially to urbanization, the rise of mass culture, and women’s increas-
ing sexual and political freedom.
Like Frost, she built a popular audience by delivering poetry’s familiar plea-
sures through a familiar persona but also charged those forms and stereo-
types with colloquial energy and uncomfortably dark perceptions of human
relationships and the natural world. Her performance of the femme fatale
occurred both on the page and on the stage; she was immensely popular as a
reader, her long gowns and dainty frame described rapturously in countless
news reports. Also like Frost, Millay published her most diicult and interest-
ing poems amid much more conventional lyrics. Both poets have a complex
relation to modernism, standing outside it in their strong commitments to
aural order, but, with the so-called high modernists, perceiving and some-
times mourning the erosion of other organizing paradigms, such as religion
and community. Unlike Frost, however, Millay has not been fully restored to
literary history as a creator of complex, beautiful, disturbing poems that have
had a substantial impact on writers and readers.
Although Millay made her name with the extended lyric “Renascence” in
1912, and although a high proportion of her work is pastoral in setting and
elegiac in tone, she is better known now for the urban seductress poses she
strikes in verses such as “First Fig” and “Only until this cigarette has ended.”
She married in 1923 but was notorious for her sexual afairs with men and
women; some of her love poetry uses second-person address to obscure the
gender of the beloved. Her work ranges in length from memorable epigrams
and brief lyrics, through mid-length narrative poems such as the “Ballad of
the Harp Weaver,” to sonnet sequences – one of them, Fatal Interview, is book
length. As her poetic success developed, Millay maintained serious interests
in other media: she was an accomplished pianist, worked for a stint with the
Provincetown Players, had verse dramas and radio plays produced, and pub-
lished short iction. The character and range of her work was conditioned
not only by ambition, predilection, and talent, but by her economic situation.
Millay was raised in poverty in Maine by a divorced single mother; her Vassar
education was paid for by a wealthy woman impressed by Millay’s talent; and
although, in 1923, she was only the second woman to earn the Pulitzer Prize in
Poetry, she struggled to attain inancial security. Millay lacked the family funds
that underwrote young H.D. and Eliot. Rather than pursuing a bourgeois pro-
fession as Wallace Stevens or Williams did, Millay made the same choice as
Frost and Hughes: she sought to earn a living as a writer.
Millay’s poetic oeuvre is remarkable for the variety of received, modiied,
and invented forms she employs, but she is most admired for her dexterity

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 The Formalist Modernism of Millay, Johnson, and Bogan

with the sonnet. She used both the English and Italian varieties throughout
her career, most often on the failure of romantic love; her books regularly
end with a set of poems in this form. “Bluebeard” and a few other sonnets
create distinct personae, but in most, the speaker resembles some version of
Millay herself. Sometimes the diction is elevated and the rhymes predictable.
However, Millay also produced many striking examples of sonnets in l uently
natural voices, full of references to subways and advertisements, using the
form’s architecture brilliantly. “If I should learn, in some quite casual way,”
for example, suspends a single sentence over three quatrains and a couplet.10
The speaker imagines reading of a lover’s death in a newspaper, suppressing
her grief, and delecting her attention to journalistic advice on “where to store
furs and how to treat the hair.” The tension between sentence and form sug-
gests one painfully prolonged moment; the crowded urban setting pressures
her to maintain the neutral face of a busy consumer; and the syntax, knitted
together by dashes, dramatizes both this “formal” behavior and the strain it
causes. Millay highlights how one constructs a public self and the disjunctions
inherent in this activity – the absence in her presence.
Millay dramatizes such paradoxes at the level of diction and meter, too.
“Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) ends
with the couplet: “So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, / I am most
faithless when I most am true” (EMCP, p. 570). Every line in the poem presents
some variation to the iambic pentameter pulse; only the penultimate line is
perfectly, satisfyingly regular. As Millay relects that it would be illogical to
remain faithful to this errant lover, or to received gender norms more gener-
ally, she enacts this noncompliance on an acoustic level. Obedience to social
or poetic rules constitutes treason to feeling, an inherently unruly condition.
The next poem in the book ends, likewise, with cynicism: “Whether or not we
ind what we are seeking / Is idle, biologically speaking” (EMCP, p. 571). The
shift from conventionally poetic to scientiic diction delates the poem’s emo-
tional intensity. Because the sonnet is strongly associated with male pursuit of
a female beloved, Millay presses at its boundaries in the very act of perform-
ing female sexual desire. She characterizes this yearning as a physical instinct
that may exist quite apart from love. Both this scientiic-mindedness and her
address to an ungendered “you” unsettle the heterosexual order. Millay’s son-
nets often invoke heterosexual romance only to subvert it or make space for
same-sex love, thus participating in a countertradition of queering the form.11
Other forays into sonneteering bend the poem’s technical parameters.
“Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,” a seventeen-poem sequence often cited
as among her best work, tells of a young woman nursing her dying husband

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in rural isolation. Millay highlights her critique of marriage as an institution

by closing each sonnet with a heptameter line that variously reaches into an
imagined future (“Who planted seeds, musing ahead to their far blossoming”),
laments the monotony of the woman’s condition (“That here was spring, and
the whole year to be lived through once more”), and presents the complexity
and mysteriousness of each partner’s interior life (“But the oak tree’s shadow
was deep and black and secret as a well”) (EMCP, pp. 606, 616, 615). The latter
sequence is a particularly powerful achievement, but Millay never stopped
experimenting with the sonnet’s rules. Later in her career, Millay published
“Three Sonnets in Tetrameter,” using an abbreviated line to depict the violent
foreshortening produced by war (EMCP, p. 694).
Perhaps her most radical takes on the form occur in the 1939 volume
Huntsman, What Quarry? The fourteen lines of “Rendezvous” and “The
Fitting” are so elongated and rhythmically irregular that the rhyme pattern is
almost undetectable (EMCP, pp. 340–43). “Rendezvous” cites Milton, rhymes
“Greek” wittily with “chic,” and remarks caustically on visual appearances:
overly decorated rooms, overly scrubbed skin. The tryst it presents is strained
by the speaker’s sense that authentic connection – that moment when “you are
you” – is diicult to achieve. The excess, talky length of many lines could be
read as overdecoration that compensates for a lack of intimacy, but this poem
also anticipates a shift in what authenticity sounds like: not harmonious verses
but loose vernacular. The long lines of “The Fitting” give the latter poem
a similar complexity, especially because, paradoxically, it concerns diminish-
ment. “The Fitting” depicts French seamstresses fussing over the speaker’s
thin igure, altering her dresses to it her shrinking frame. This encounter
between women’s bodies is both intimate and alienating, as the clash of lan-
guages within the poem emphasizes. Elision of emotional detail, the unpretty
frankness of sensory imagery (“smelling of sweat,” “her knuckles gouged
my breast”), and casual language all show Millay inding common ground
between modernist aesthetics and the sonnet form. The subject matter also
manifests her concern with presence, the way the body withdraws from the
language as the poem’s aural order dissolves.
Although most of Millay’s poetry is iambic, she organized her lines in a wide
range of ways throughout her career. Each book moves a little further away
from the strict formalism of her early publications; her last books mix received
forms, free verse, and heterometric iambic poems (the uneven lines of these
pieces look random, but meter is often present). However, Millay employed
free verse occasionally, even early on. For example, the lead poem in Second
April (1921), “Spring,” uses ragged, angry rhythms to depict what Eliot would

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soon call “the cruellest month.” In fact, the crux of Millay’s complaint is the
same as Eliot’s – the rebirth of beauty in the spring tortures the half-dead, dis-
illusioned speaker – although, unlike the expatriate poet, she personiies April
as an Ophelia igure, “babbling and strewing lowers” (EMCP, p. 53). Elsewhere
Millay deploys less common meters or establishes an accentual-syllabic pat-
tern. For example, the falling rhythms of trochees evoke the elusive nymph in
“Daphne” and the decline of summer in “Autumn Chant” (EMCP, pp. 141, 152).
Deviant long lines in “Visiting the Asylum” suggest the uncanniness of the
“queer folk” who reside there, and in “The Plum Gatherer,” they dramatize
the asymmetry of the past and present (EMCP, pp. 166, 248).
Finally, Millay was well read in the English tradition and resourceful in her
use of nonmetrical sound patterning. One example in her lyric poetry is the
hypnotic “Recuerdo,” in A Few Figs from Thistles (EMCP, p. 128). This three-
stanza poem, whose title could mean “I remember,” “memory,” or “memento,”
depicts a late-night adventure in her friendship with Nicaraguan poet Salomón
de la Selva. “Recuerdo” is full of returns and exchanges: between the two poets
who go “back and forth all night on the ferry” between Manhattan and Staten
Island; between the revelers and street vendors of fruit and morning papers;
and between the poor bohemians (who are nevertheless “very merry”) and
a more profoundly poor woman to whom they give their apples, pears, and
“all our money but our subway fares.” Its lines are accentual – six beats with a
medial caesura and occasional alliteration – rather than accentual-syllabic, as
is meter in English verse. Accentual measure is characteristic of oral poetry in
English, from nursery rhymes to spoken word. Not surprisingly, Millay also
employed it in her opera libretto, The King’s Henchman, based on a tale of love
and treachery from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The libretto closely adheres
to her Anglo-Saxon sources, employing heavy allusion and two- and four-
beat lines. She even sent a telegraph to the composer, Deems Taylor, to insist
that the title not be changed because she was carefully designing the libret-
to’s diction: “KINGS MESSENGER ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE FOR THIS
REASON THE WORD MESSENGER WAS BROUGHT INTO ENGLISH
BY THE NORMANS AND I AM WRITING MY ENTIRE LIBRETTO IN
ANGLOSAXON THAT IS TO SAY THERE IS NOT A WORD IN THE
LIBRETTO WHICH WAS NOT KNOWN IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER
IN ENGLISH A THOUSAND YEARS AGO.”12 Her awareness of the history
and context of language and verse was high.
Millay’s poetry both employs received forms and deforms them, just as
she both deies feminine stereotypes and deploys them strategically. Her best
poetry is starker than that of the nineteenth-century “songbirds” she might

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be compared to, but it doesn’t represent a clean break from that tradition: as
a prosodist, she renews rather than reinvents. She is most modern stylistically
in her attitudes toward poetry’s media. Her experiments in performance and
broadcast were forward-looking and nostalgic simultaneously. In reading her
poems for a national radio series in 1933, she approached a technology that
listeners found both exciting and threatening and discovered in it a new way of
delivering the seductive illusion of presence to audiences.13 Millay conceived
of print as only one of poetry’s media, and not the primary one. She trans-
formed the oral tradition she had received – poems memorized and recited
at home and at school for the betterment of the soul and the citizenry – for
the new conditions of mass culture, the incursions of radio broadcasters into
domesticity, and the increasingly intense phenomenon of national celebrity.
Form remained political for Millay, a way to counter alienation and enact
progressive views. While there was always a latent critique of poverty and
injustice in her work, by the late twenties she used lyric to address political
crises directly, dismaying some readers. “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” for
example, appeared in the New York World on the afternoon before Sacco and
Vanzetti’s executions, and later poems forthrightly address World War II. She
is both too politically progressive and too formally conservative to it some
deinitions of modernism, and yet she could hardly have been more engaged
with the cultural crises of her time.
Most women poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance period wrote
frequently, although not exclusively, in rhyme and meter. Alice Dunbar-
Nelson (1875–1935), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), Jessie Redmon
Fauset (1882–1961), Anne Spencer (1882–1975), Eie Lee Newsome (1885–1979),
Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1979), Gladys May Casely Hayford (1904–1950), and
others practiced formalism with an edge of racial protest. At the time, Georgia
Douglas Johnson was compared to Millay and Teasdale, but now the work of
Harlem Renaissance women is too rarely considered alongside the formalisms
of white women poets.14 Helene Johnson (1906–1995) was one of the youn-
gest among these African American women, and her work contrasts with
the regular iambs and familiar sentiments of her elders: although her career
izzled early, she wrote free verse of especial boldness and energy. Meter and
rhyme, however, are far more pervasive in Helene Johnson’s work than is gen-
erally acknowledged. For Johnson, aural patterns provided an important back-
ground for rebellion as well as a way to re-create sound and presence. There
is no evidence that these two New York City poets met or read each other’s
work, but Millay and Johnson both bring deiant sexuality, deep commitment
to sound, and an experimental edge to formal poetry.

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 The Formalist Modernism of Millay, Johnson, and Bogan

Helene Johnson was a promising early light in the Harlem Renaissance:

in 1925, at nineteen, she won an honorable mention for “Trees at Night” in
Opportunity’s annual contest; she earned three more in the 1926 competition,
judged by Robert Frost. She had received a top-notch education in Brookline,
Massachusetts, where she was unconventionally raised by her mother and a
cadre of aunts, most of whom worked “in service,” as maids. Johnson eventu-
ally moved to New York with her cousin, author Dorothy West, where James
Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston encouraged her writing. In 1933
Johnson married, in 1935 she published her last poem, and she ceased writ-
ing for many years as she worked as a correspondent for Consumer’s Union
to support her child. Her verse was not collected in book form until Verner
Mitchell edited This Waiting for Love, a volume of poems and selected letters
published in 2000.15 Many women writers of that era vanished after early suc-
cess, but Johnson’s disappearance was compounded by her iercely private
temperament. For example, she dwelled in New York City for nearly all of her
adult life but operated well under the radar of scholars and poets researching
the Harlem Renaissance. When asked to give a public reading in 1987, she sent
in a tape recording instead.
The forty-seven poems in This Waiting for Love are both sound driven and
lyric. Although Mitchell writes that Johnson’s “preferred form was the free
verse of Whitman or Hughes,” twenty-six of these poems use meter or rhyme
in a prominent way (TWL, p. 12). Several of those are sonnets; quatrains are
also common, although many regular ballad stanzas are broken visually into
more than four lines. Like Millay, Johnson tropes constantly on song, drawing
attention to aural structures even as she disguises them, and writes often about
sexual desire and transgression. Although some of these erotically charged
pieces conjure black bodies vividly, others tease out an almost-presence.
Johnson’s free verse is shot through with irregular rhyme; conversely, the
music of her formal poetry is highly varied. “The Road,” for instance, com-
pares a dusty highway irst to a thrush’s “single singing line of dusky song”
and then to the “trodden pride” of her race (TWL, p. 25). The tone is raptur-
ous as she exhorts the road, in the poem’s inal line, to “Rise to one brimming,
golden, spilling cry!” Although this poem is imagistic and its diction recalls
Romantic poetry, especially Keats and Whitman, it is also distinctly political.
“The Road” celebrates racial beauty, decries oppression, and, in that last line,
urges uprising, at least through artistic expression.
Johnson magniies the poem’s latent tension by establishing iambic pentam-
eter and then disturbing that pattern. It begins with a fully rhymed couplet, but
while the end rhyme creates harmonies, the word “song” lacks a partner, and

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the poem ends on an assonantal slant rhyme (“pride” / “cry”). The line length
l uctuates, too. The fourth and ifth are three and seven feet long, respectively.
Together they add up to two pentameter lines, but the variation accents a con-
trast between song and silence: the short line ends in a “drowsy hush,” and the
longer culminates in that extended description of “dusky song.” Another for-
mal variation is more subtle. Of the eighteen polysyllabic words in the poem,
all but one are trochees. Johnson creates a falling rhythm within and against
the rising iambs. While poets commonly use trochaic words in iambic poems,
the strategy is strikingly predominant here. The conl icting rhythms perhaps
imitate the undulation of the road, its “leaping clay hill,” but they also build a
sound of loss or ambivalence into a forward-looking poem, a memory of pain
within its optimism.
In “The Road,” Johnson uses the color brown to link dust and clay with
“my race.” In fact, she often rhymes the natural landscape, particularly earth
itself, with human lesh or depicts a person in erotic contact with the soil to
convey the fertility and beauty of both. In the quatrains of “Fulillment,” for
example, the speaker desires to “dig my hands deep into the pregnant earth,”
and to “melt the still snow / with my seething body / And kiss the warm earth
tremulous underneath” (TWL, p. 28). In other pieces, even less convention-
ally beautiful aspects of the cityscape incite arousal. In “A Missionary Brings
a Young Native to America,” a woman’s body is invaded by the sound of
stampeding pedestrians, the “city grit upon her tongue,” and a “steel-spiked
wave of brick and light” (TWL, p. 43). Although she is initially fearful, by the
end of the Petrarchan sonnet’s overlowing octave (nine lines balance against
ive here, rather than eight against six), songs “surge” within her, and she
must recite prayers and litanies to contain her “young abandon” and defuse
her “Unholy dreams.” The swallowed urban dust becomes, by nightfall, an
aphrodisiac.
One of Johnson’s boldest embodiments occurs in “Sonnet to a Negro in
Harlem,” another apostrophic poem, this time addressed to a “disdainful and
magniicent” man. The power of his character is so great that Harlem melts
away around him in favor of “palm trees and mangoes” – the poet’s eye and
ear focus only on him. Johnson frankly admires the man’s “perfect body” and
angry posture. Paradoxically, however, this sonnet suggests the pointlessness
of writing sonnets. Johnson accuses this Negro in Harlem of being “incom-
petent / To imitate those whom you so despise”: she insists on his diference
without specifying the possible grounds for imitation, but other moments in
the poem hint that African American use of European forms is on her mind.
Metrical puns come to the fore when Johnson lingers on attributes of his “gait.”

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Because “Scorn will eface” any mark he tries to make, she says, he refuses to
“urge ahead [his] supercilious feet” (TWL, p. 40). Although Johnson reverses
the sonnet’s usual gendered dynamic and produces a poem that praises much
more intensely than it mocks, she raises questions here about what it means
to be a desiring woman and how received forms modulate the expression of
that desire.
“Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” is one of several poems by Johnson that
invoke the power or beauty of black male bodies, especially those of danc-
ers. They contest a white vision of African American identity – the vision of
a jazz club tourist in Harlem – by re-deploying primitivist tropes. “Poem,”
featuring a “little brown boy” whose song suggests African tom-toms, is one
such piece, its free verse structured by anaphora and the repeated apostrophe,
“Gee, boy” (TWL, pp. 38–39). The swelling free verse lines of “Bottled,” too,
invoke Africa as they depict a man who, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis puts it, is a
“tricked-out igure being tricked yet being trickster . . . a black person doing
blackface minstrelsy” (TWL, pp. 85–86). Johnson demonstrates a persistent
interest in such blurred identities, performances layered over performances,
even as she insists on physicality: her poems “both assert and refute the idea of
authenticity.”16 The presence Johnson seeks to materialize through her poems
is always black and always explicitly gendered, but it is not typically the speak-
er’s or the author’s.
As one might expect given Johnson’s ambivalence about publicity, the
women in her poems are sometimes half-hidden, as in the couplets of “Night”
(TWL, p. 26), or conceal erotic secrets, as in the slant rhymes of “The Little
Love” (TWL, p. 30). Elsewhere she expresses a preference for night’s myste-
riousness over daylight’s revelations (TWL, p. 42). Night can be a racial signi-
ier in African American poetry, a way “to assert the primacy of blackness,”
although it suggests concealment as well.17 Other poems, however, exhibit
an open, exuberant physicality. The “Widow with a Moral Obligation,” for
instance, begs to repeat a failed seduction attempt, promising to overcome her
feeling of being haunted by her dead husband. In the process of repudiating
shyness, she twice promises to “have my hair unbound, / My gown undone”
(TWL, p. 59). The fully rhymed quatrains, in short lines of two or three beats,
convey a playful lightness as the sexually alive speaker materializes to dis-
place the dead man’s jealous specter. Johnson can’t deliver full presence even
through this vivid, sound-saturated writing, but many of her poems aspire
toward that consummation. Contemporary urban settings, celebrations of
female desire, and explorations of racial tension mark Johnson’s engagement
with modernity, but so does her work within and against rhyme and meter.

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In a well-known essay, Louise Bogan (1897–1970), a formalist in her own

poetry, praises how
the cluster of lyric poets that appeared on the American scene just before and
after 1918 restored a genuine and frank feeling to a literary situation which
had become genteel, artiicial, and dry. Sara Teasdale’s later verse; the best of
Edna Millay’s early rebellious songs and meditations; Elinor Wylie’s ability
to fuse thought and passion into the most admirable and complex forms; the
sensitive, intellectual poetry of Leonie Adams – all these poetic productions
helped to resolve hampering attitudes of the period.18
Bogan believed that “the large and true poetic talents, in Europe, England, and
America, since before 1914, have either worked in form or toward the discov-
ery of form.”19 Her many reviews convey particular esteem for the technical
achievements of Yeats and Auden. However, at other times Bogan expresses
skepticism about twentieth-century formalism as an enterprise. She suggests
that adherence to received forms deadens contemporary writing, cautioning
May Sarton away from sonnet cycles in a 1961 letter. Bogan warns that “I do
not think that such sequences can be written, nowadays, with any hope of
efectiveness,” citing sequences by Millay and Wylie as exemplary failures.20
Familiar measures can “force poets into stock attitudes, usually of pomposity
or gloom.” Addressing poetry by women, she suggests that “there is no basic
reason for women to excel in the art of poetry by producing the same sort of
poetic structures as men” and cites the bold experiments of Gertrude Stein,
H.D., and Moore as examples of aesthetic revolution. Change is paramount:
“The whole encumbered ground must be cleared.” This is true even of suc-
cessful metrical verse – it must represent a real break from the work preceding
it. For example, she inds Auden’s poetry so forceful because he can be “casual
in tone” even as he employs regular couplets or a “disused Byronic stanza
form”: this change is not a supericial one, she judges, but the result of a pro-
found reexamination of modern poetry’s “intellectual pretension, and spiri-
tual gloom.”21 Bogan is more often claimed as a modernist than other women
writers who work primarily in meter, in part because of her commitment to
“reducing the lyric to its essentials,” but her critique of formalism is another
important credential.22
While Johnson is a more formal poet than readers have recognized, Bogan
may be less so. Most of Bogan’s poems employ rhyme, and many are metri-
cal; however, Bogan produced free verse as well, and even poems arranged
into rhymed verses can be rhythmically irregular enough that one can barely
discern an underlying meter. Nor does Bogan link formalism with sexual

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liberation and empowered female desire, as Millay and Johnson do. Bogan
certainly resisted the strictures of her Catholic upbringing and describes her
teenaged self as a “radical and a Fabian.” However, although she wrote in one
unsent author questionnaire, “I also like love-making, when it is really well-
informed,” another statement from the same piece is more representative: “I
prefer to draw the veil over my experiences, sexual and otherwise from the age
of nineteen, when I married for the irst time, to the present.”23 Her poetry,
too, even when it clearly springs from personal sufering, is more delective
than revelatory. Her verses are typically economical, engaged in what Gloria
Bowles describes as an “aesthetic of limitation.”24 Bogan does share common
ground with the other poets treated in this chapter, nevertheless. Like Millay
and Johnson, she investigates the connections between gender and form, and
in particular the ability of the lyric to convey authorial presence. For the most
part, the self performed in them is insubstantial, half-hidden, inaccessible.
Bogan’s later poetry, however, emphasizes the authentic gestures and residues
that give a poem life.
Bogan was born to working-class parents in Maine in 1897, sufered an
unhappy childhood, and discovered writing when a benefactor subsidized her
education at a girls’ Latin school. She spent a year at Boston University and,
after much struggle, was able to earn her living as a writer of poetry, iction,
and noniction prose. Her three slim poetry volumes were published between
1923 and 1937, their selections overlapping in part; most, but not all, of these
verses are collected in The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968, which remains in
print. Her verse was well received in her lifetime, but she was at least as highly
lauded for her thirty-eight-year stint as poetry reviewer for the New Yorker.
Bogan has a reputation for misogyny. She often resisted reviewing other
women poets. Although she argued that “to separate the work of women
writers from the work of men, is, naturally, a highly unfeminist action,” she
regarded women’s poetry as essentially diferent from men’s, as discussed sub-
sequently.25 Her early poem “Women” identiies the whole sex with stil ing
containment. Women do everything wrongly, feel too much, and think too
little. They are “Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts / To eat dusty
bread,” but even when they step out of those cells, Bogan alleges in the last
stanza, they do so at the wrong moment, when they should be accepting their
exclusion from “life.”26 The steady pattern of full rhymes in the quatrains –
most of the rhyme words are single syllable – reinforces this predictability.
With this poem, Bogan sets herself apart from her sex. She speaks as if from
beyond gender, seeing and hearing what real women fail to perceive, measur-

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ing all their shortcomings. This outsider stance is typical of her work, marked
by dissociation and solitude.
While “Women have no wilderness in them,” however, these stanzas do.
The apparently locked-up quatrains are less regular than they appear in a
visual assessment. Lines l uctuate unpredictably, with the weightier irst and
third lines of the ballad stanzas ranging in length between four and ive feet,
the second and fourth between two and three. Although the poem is rhymed
and iambic, the lineation is unruly. The sound of “Women,” in other words,
runs contrary to meter’s reason. Is this a mark of unreasonable femininity? In
any case, the little cells or rooms of this poem are deformed, as if by women’s
frustration, or Bogan’s own.
Bogan is generally less likely to criticize women in her poems than she is
to mock those who seek to conine them. Her irst volume, The Body of This
Death (1923), is full of characters who look at women, trying and failing to
control them with a steady gaze: “The Frightened Man,” “Portrait,” “The
Romantic,” and “Statue and Birds.” The female presence in each piece escapes
domination, or at least seeks escape. Bogan’s best-known and most discussed
meditation on vision and power is “The Medusa,” a piece formally similar to
“Women” and from the same book – arranged in rhymed quatrains, it contains
both anapestic lines and roughly iambic ones, and the line lengths vary to an
unusual degree. The speaker of this piece, whose gender is not identiied, has
glimpsed Medusa and is now trapped in a “dead scene” of permanent stasis
(BE, p. 4). “What is glimpsed by the poem’s speaker,” according to Clark, “is a
shadow of herself, a feminine subjectivity that is unspeakable and uncanny.”27
Medusa’s apparition occurs in the single ive-line stanza, again as if the power
of the goddess deforms the poem’s scheme.
The Body of This Death contains many references to time’s breakdown, but
in “Medusa” and other poems the stoppage is not paradisiacal but deadly. It is
also profoundly silent: bells can never toll, the “rusted mouth” cannot speak,
wind is “arrested” (BE, pp. 3, 17). When the air does vibrate, the sound is hypo-
thetical and faint, as in the evocative closure of “Men Loved Wholly Beyond
Wisdom,” when the speaker imagines “Listening to the prisoned cricket /
Shake its terrible, dissembling / Music in the granite hill” (BE, p. 16). Bogan
draws a contrast between vision and sound that resonates with Millay’s sense
of the lyric. Printed, a poem is a lasting monument, but it is deathly quiet. It
encodes longing for physical voice.
Bogan was no populist performer but an intensely reserved person who
sufered from depression and alcoholism and was “temperamentally and aes-
thetically hostile to display.”28 Her poems betray horror at the persistence of

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 The Formalist Modernism of Millay, Johnson, and Bogan

the body – mixed with some wry humor. “The Alchemist,” for example, seeks
to burn away matter in favor of “passion wholly of the mind,” but what the
ire leaves behind is in fact not some pure spiritual essence but “unmysteri-
ous lesh” (BE, p. 15). The poem’s initially steady rhythm starts to disintegrate
as the speaker recognizes the staying power of physical emotions. In “The
Crows,” an “old” woman continues to experience love and desire, but a sense
of age and mortality inlects those feelings; the inal line of each quatrain
is foreshortened to suggest the diminished time remaining. What should be
“heart’s laughter” turns into the raucous crying of those unbeautiful birds, as
if sexuality in a mature woman is repulsive, unseemly (BE, p. 17).
When Bogan’s poetry depicts the wild strength of the body and its drives,
physical presence is sometimes half-hidden. Dark Summer (1929), her second
collection, uses images of secrecy and latency that resemble the concealments
in Johnson’s verses. Dark Summer also depicts separations between writer and
reader as if poetry has no communicative function. The emblem it ofers
for the lyric poem is a mirror in an “abandoned chamber,” in which natu-
ral beauty changes and dies with no one to observe it (BE, p. 34). A still later
poem, “Man Alone,” addresses a man who seeks his own face in books and
mirrors and inds only strangers there. “The printed page gives back / Words
by another hand,” Bogan writes, insisting on literature as a construction made
of words rather than a space of recognition or relationship (BE, p. 75). Metrical
disruptions mimic the cognitive ones, and sight rhyme in the last stanza cre-
ates additional dissonance: the look of the words is betrayed by their sound.
Bogan suggests, nonetheless, in the 1933 essay “Managing the Unconscious,”
that writing can involve some uncanny manifestations. Her advice seems
both a way to conquer writer’s block and a mechanism for channeling “rich-
ness” into poetry: get up early and write while one is still half-dreaming, she
instructs; write anything, without consideration of audience; “forget that
you have any critical faculty.”29 This process may or may not have generated
“Medusa” and other surreal poems in Bogan’s canon, but Bogan certainly, in
a subset of her verses, imagines the lyric as haunted by mysterious power and
impossible presence.
“Homunculus,” for example, ofers a very diferent metaphor for poetic pro-
duction than the unwatched mirror in “The Cupola.” The speaker describes
the little man of the title, with some delight, as “A delicate precious ruse / By
which death is betrayed,” a perfect bit of trickery, “ine,” “strong,” “wise,” and
“young” (BE, p. 65). However, like a golem or Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the
homunculus requires animation: “It lacks but life: some scent, / Some kernel
of hot endeavor.” The homunculus is the poem – in this case, one possessing a

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regular iambic heartbeat, ligaments of alliteration, and symmetry in its stanza

pattern. The end rhymes suggest that its creator devised it as a cunning bid
at immortality: “made” / “betrayed,” “ruse” / “use,” “endeavor” / “forever.”
Although the process of animation occurs in the present tense and is not com-
pleted, this poem does, in fact, possess weird force, uncanny liveliness.
In other poems, “life” in art comes explicitly from personal sources. In “The
Dream,” four quatrains of anapestic tetrameter, the speaker is about to be
trampled by a terrible horse and cowers in terror. A braver woman leaps in:
“Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm” (BE, p. 103). Although
the speaker despairs of salvation, she obeys, pulling the glove from her right
hand and l inging it at him; the horse submits and assumes a posture of devo-
tion. Bogan invites psychoanalytic reading by plainly labeling the poem as a
dream. The reticent woman has another, bolder self who can help the speaker
strip away her prim covering, give of herself, and thereby conquer fear and
receive love. Her ierce muse in “The Daemon” also demands self-exposure:
the speaker must “show outright / The bruise in the side” (BE, p. 114). The
syntax and structure are simple, involving quatrains of alternating full rhymes
and pared-down dimeter lines. For Bogan, however, self-expression is not a
straightforward project. The poem mingles personal and religious revelation,
alluding to Jesus’s side pierced by soldiers after the cruciixion ( John 19:33–37).
How can one express a self that is so layered, so ruptured?
Inner division, paradoxically, enables the poet to “speak” and “tell” (BE,
p. 114), to move the metaphorical “rusted tongue” on the very irst page of her
irst collection. In “The Sleeping Fury,” for instance, vision displaces sound.
The speaker watches “my scourge, my sister” slumbering, analyzing from a
calm distance the Fury’s beauty and destructive power (BE, p. 78). This poem,
along with much of Bogan’s other work, suggests a woman’s struggle against
her own unmanageable will, her disappointment in the world, and painfully
acquired knowledge assessed from an isolated vantage. The “clamor” of
repressed force is both present and absent. In a later poem, “Little Lobelia’s
Song,” Bogan reverses this situation. An embodied dream, given a diminutive
name, is estranged and seeks a way back to the mind that generated it; the
poem consists entirely of her voice, although she “can barely speak,” and the
poem’s brief verses depend on repetition and tightly limited diction: “Else
I weep, weep, / Else I cry, cry” (BE, p. 133). Poetry erupts from all this ierce
grieving and partakes of its eerie, half-formed presence.
The psychological thrust of Bogan’s later work suggests the midcentury
poetics of Lowell, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton more than it resembles mod-
ernism, formalist or otherwise. The hide-and-seek of the self in her poems,

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though – ambivalence about the divide between author and audience and a
persistent drive to restore at least the illusion of co-presence – marks Bogan’s
work as modern. The point of this chapter, and of many recent retellings of
literary history, is that the poetic production of this period is too robust and
heterogeneous to be captured in any one narrative. The quest to manifest
impossible presence nevertheless suggests a through-line with as much explan-
atory power as what Nelson calls the “story of experimentalist triumph” and
makes room for a wider range of practice.
An important context for these three writers and all modern poetry is the
more traditional rhymed and metered verse produced by Georgia Douglas
Johnson, Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), Léonie Adams
(1899–1988), and others. Georgia Douglas Johnson was the most antholo-
gized woman poet of the Harlem Renaissance – she was part of the old guard
against whom Helene Johnson, Langston Hughes, and others rebelled but was
still critical of the constrictions women faced in their professional and afective
lives.30 Teasdale and Wylie were literary celebrities, and Wylie was an object
of social scandal. The latter deserve discussion here for their achievements
and their inl uence, although they might reasonably be labeled antimodernist.
Proximity to modernism, after all, is not the only measure by which poetry of
this era succeeds or fails.
Teasdale’s formalism is marked by nostalgia for chivalry and the classical
world, and her most common subject is romantic love, often failed, faded, or
thwarted by circumstance. Like Georgia Douglas Johnson, she is faithful to the
traditional territory of women’s verse, both in form and theme. Her poetry
started appearing in print in 1907, earlier than the works of other writers dis-
cussed here, and she was certainly one of the popular writers against whom
the modernists took their highbrow stand. Yet Teasdale’s language itself is
straightforward and modern. She wrote about the contemporary urban world
as well as nature and romantic historical scenes; a poem about the New York
City subway, for example, appears in her 1915 collection.31
Teasdale’s poetry is predicated on lack or absence, a trope that is common
in Bogan’s work and, to a lesser extent, in Millay’s. However, Teasdale does
not counter it with attempts to manifest physical presence. In “Vox Corporis,”
the mind holds the body (or “beast”) irmly back (STCP, p. 38). In fact, physical
intimacy turns out to be a disappointing experience. In “The Kiss,” Teasdale
observes the disjunction between idealized romance and the reality of het-
erosexual coupling: “His kiss was not so wonderful / As all the dreams I had”
(STCP, p. 28). Elsewhere she gives her lover the “gift” of her absence (STCP, p. 5)
and predicts, in “Land’s End,” that “none will care” about the disappearance

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of her footprints from the sand. In “The Tree,” she wishes to be transformed,
through a series of displacements, into words on a page. She begins, “Oh to be
free of myself,” imagining her heart “as bare / As a tree in December,” fearless
and unburdened. Her plaint ends with the desire to be “heedless / If anyone
pass and see / On the white page of the sky / Its thin black tracery” (STCP,
p. 156). In other words, she would disappear into her poems with complete
indiference to the work’s audience. The impulse behind this poem could not
be further from Millay’s urgent renewal of connection between author and
audience through the igure of voice.
Teasdale redirects sensual passion toward language itself. “Indian Summer,”
a poem in four Sapphic stanzas from Rivers to the Sea (1915), suggests the kind
of music that resonates in Teasdale’s work. “Indian Summer” apostrophizes
“lyric night,” a twilight scene during the last moments of summer heat.
Sound triumphs over vision: the ields are “shadowy,” but the night is full of
song. “Never a bird” calls, she observes, rejecting that common igure for the
lyric poet in favor of the “passionless chant of insects,” “The grasshopper’s
horn,” and “the wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence” (STCP, p. 61).
These voices are not expressing feeling but producing a disembodied sound
in increasingly mechanical metaphors. When Teasdale shifts gears to apos-
trophize the “little insects” ighting the “heartless” winter and compares this
listening to gazing into the eyes of a departing loved one, the poem loses some
energy and vividness. The stock irst-person mourning woman is less compel-
ling than the link Teasdale had earlier forged between her own falling rhythms
and the weird persistence of inhuman sound.
Elinor Wylie, like Teasdale, uses an impressive range of metrical and stan-
zaic patterns and received forms with exceptional l uency and was widely
read during this period. Wylie’s contemporaries admired both her technical
skill and the intelligence at work in her verses. Her tonal range is similar to
Millay’s in that it includes lyric ecstasy, philosophical meditation, and sharp
satire – the satirical poems, often in couplets, are thick with witty, incongruous
polysyllabic rhymes such as “alarums” / “bar-rooms.”32 While some of her
poems convey frustration at traditional feminine roles, though, most are oth-
erworldly, chivalric, classical, or otherwise removed from modernity. There
is no reference more current than trolley cars or the American Civil War in
her entire Collected Poems, no phrase that could not have been uttered in the
nineteenth century.
Cheryl Walker identiies Wylie as a “woman warrior” and “the angriest
woman in the nightingale tradition” and hears echoes of her outrage in Anne
Sexton and Sylvia Plath.33 Wylie’s strategy for coping with hostile conditions

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was to ride out in masks and armor. She constructed a masculine, knightly
persona while nevertheless adhering to the nineteenth-century notion of sep-
arate spheres. Wylie, raised an Anglophilic American aristocrat, preferred a
pose of modest reticence even in her public art. The motif governing Black
Armour, for instance – a collection divided into sections called “Breastplate,”
“Gauntlet,” “Helmet,” and so on – both draws attention to the body and con-
ceals it. Again and again, she describes herself as “a spiritual savage caged”
by lowly lesh, emphasizing the purity of word and spirit in contrast to the
“carnal mesh.”34 Occasionally her imagery has a racial cast as she imagines a
leeting absent whiteness in contrast to dark embodiment. In “August,” she
unfavorably compares a Negro pushing a cart of bright “smouldering dai-
sies” to the hypothetical creamy coolness of white lilies “Plucked from some
hemlock-darkened northern stream / By fair-haired swimmers.” More subtly,
in “Self-Portrait,” the mind is a “lens of crystal” and “the little rest / A hollow
scooped to blackness in the breast.”35 Here the true speaker, an intellectual
essence, is not so much concealed as transparent or insubstantial, and the
residue is a hollowed-out black body. The efect, despite resurgent anger, is
resistance to the noisy, urban, racially mixed world she dwelled in, and to the
sexual adventure celebrated by Millay and Johnson. Wylie declares her physi-
cal removal from her own elegant lyrics.
Surveying the history of verse by U.S. women in her 1947 essay “The Heart
and the Lyre,” Bogan ofers sweeping generalizations about the gifts and
handicaps of women poets: “They are not good at abstractions and their sense
of structure is not large”; forced to become adults early, “they are practical,
intense . . . and they are natural singers.” “In women, more than men,” she
writes, “the intensity of their emotions is the key to the treasures of their
spirit.” She inishes by lamenting current trends toward a distant, logical style
in the poems of younger women poets, although she cites only Elizabeth
Bishop by name, and urging these women to keep “the emotional channels”
of literature open.36
Formalist modernists do create an efect of expressiveness, of authorial
presence that deies modern alienation. They also subvert, interrogate, and
unsettle this illusion in part by manipulating traditional English prosody, using
form as a resource in social critique and to remediate modern ills. Millay,
Johnson, and Bogan tackle the same material canonical modernists engage:
shifting gender codes; isolation amid urban crowds; racial pride and conl ict;
estrangement from religion, except through numinous nature; consciousness
riven by buried drives; the debasement of language and the failure of human
connection; and science, politics, and the terrible costs of twentieth-century

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warfare. In their shared insistence on aural patterns and the power of sound,
they also sustain a connection to the past and anticipate the rebellions of U.S.
poetry at midcentury and beyond.

Notes
1. Louise Bogan, A Poet’s Alphabet: Relections on the Literary Art and Vocation, ed.
Robert Phelps and Rith Limmer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 12.
2. Cary Nelson, “The Fate of Gender in Modern American Poetry,” in Kevin
J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (eds.), Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion,
Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp.
321–60, 323; Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist
Studies,” PMLA 123:3 (2008), pp. 737–48, 737–38.
3. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics
of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),
p. 23; see also Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of
Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
4. Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to
the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 3–13.
5. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodern-
ism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 47.
6. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the
Word (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–2.
7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman
Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1988, 1989, 1994), vol. 1, p. 131.
8. Elinor Wylie, “A Nightingale at the Court of King Eadgar,” New York Herald
Tribune, February 20, 1927, pp. 1–6, 1.
9. Sandra M. Gilbert, “ ‘Directions for Using the Empress’: Millay’s Supreme
Fictions,” in Diane P. Freedman (ed.), Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), pp. 163–81, 170; Stacy
Carson Hubbard, “Love’s Little Day: Time and the Sexual Body in Millay’s
Sonnets,” in Freedman (ed.), Millay at 100, pp. 100–16, 102; Susan Schweik, A
Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 59–69.
10. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems, ed. Norma Millay (New York:
HarperCollins, 1956), p. 565. This collection will be cited in the text as EMCP.
11. David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 61–85.
12. Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York:
Random House, 2001), p. 282.
13. Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry, pp. 46–58.

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 The Formalist Modernism of Millay, Johnson, and Bogan

14. Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem
Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 179.
15. Helene Johnson, This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem
Renaissance, ed. Verner D. Mitchell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), pp. 125–27. This collection will be cited in the text as TWL.
16. Katherine R. Lynes, “ ‘A Real Honest-to-Cripe Jungle’: Contested Authenticities
in Helene Johnson’s ‘Bottled,’ ” Modernism/Modernity 14:3 (2007), pp.
517–26, 523.
17. Maureen Honey (ed.), Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem
Renaissance, 2nd ed. rev. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2006), p. xlv.
18. Louise Bogan, A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), p. 319.
19. Bogan, A Poet’s Alphabet, p. 12.
20. Bogan, A Poet’s Prose, p. 184.
21. Bogan, A Poet’s Prose, pp. 223–27.
22. Elizabeth Frank, “A Doll’s Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent
Millay and Louise Bogan,” in Martha Collins (ed.), Critical Essays on Louise
Bogan (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), pp. 128–49, 128.
23. Bogan, A Poet’s Prose, pp. 63–65.
24. Gloria Bowles, Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
25. Bogan, A Poet’s Alphabet, pp. 431–32.
26. Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1968), p. 16. This collection will be cited in the text as BE.
27. Clark, Sentimental Modernism, p. 117.
28. Frank, “A Doll’s Heart,” p. 137.
29. Bogan, A Poet’s Prose, p. 85.
30. See Georgia Douglas Johnson, Selected Works, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1997), and especially Claudia Tate’s introduction.
31. Sara Teasdale, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1937), p. 58. This collec-
tion will be cited in the text as STCP.
32. Elinor Wylie, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 59.
33. Cheryl Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in
Modern Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 67–69.
34. Wylie, Collected Poems, p. 47.
35. Wylie, Collected Poems, pp. 8, 69.
36. Bogan, A Poet’s Prose, pp. 318–19.

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 Chapter 29
The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the
Poetry of Wallace Stevens
G e o rg e S . L e ns i n g

No other poet of modernism makes a claim such as this from Wallace Stevens:
“It was in the earth only / That he was at the bottom of things / And of him-
self. There he could say / Of this I am.”1 Many poets of the Romantic tradition
have imputed a salviic and restorative eicacy to the natural powers of the
earth, yet we are struck at once by the injection of the adverb “only”: only in
the earth – nowhere and with no one else – does the speaker ind “the bottom
of things / And . . . himself.” The mysterious “he” of the poem may include
a potential everyone, including the reader, but it is a typical disguise whereby
Stevens slightly camoulages himself.
In these opening lines of the poem “Yellow Afternoon,” a poem written
mid-career, in 1940, one’s inclination is to identify the setting of the poem
with earth’s bounty in spring and summer – like a Virgilian georgic or
Wordsworthian “pastoral farms, / Green to the very door” – an earth of fru-
ition and renewal.2 But, Stevens hastily adds, “This reposes alike in springtime
/ And, arbored and bronzed, in autumn,” as if the possession of the earth in all
its climates and seasons, all its blooms and decays, is equally requiting.
Stevens’s poem, however, makes an even greater claim: the earth is held as
the object of his perfect and compulsory “love.” Stevens’s “he” must love the
earth because it demands no less, and it remains his “only” love. Even for the
poet, the wordsmith, “The odor / Of the earth penetrates more deeply than
any word.” The poem’s conclusion pushes his claims even further, as if Stevens
must now check himself by duly noting that similar compensations have come
in the past from “men” and “in a woman,” although they, in the end, are lesser
things, perhaps more inconstant than the gifts of the earth:
The thought that he had found all this
Among men, in a woman – she caught his breath –
But he came back as one comes back from the sun
To lie on one’s bed in the dark, close to a face
Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.

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The haunting, even shocking, conclusion leaves the speaker and his “he”
on the lover’s bed beside a spectral presence obviously not the woman who
caught his breath: “close to a face / Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one
and speaks.” The eyeless and mouthless igure on the bed, skeletal and cold,
momentarily disrupts the poem’s conident airmations. The poem ends with
these words, but the ghostly lover on the bed, the earth’s very personiication,
has already become his eager substitute. If it is the earth “only” that returns
his love, what can it speak? Nothing. The earth has already been deined in the
poem as “mute” and “Around which silence lies on silence.” The mouthless
lover speaks the silence of the faithful earth. The “he” has found “unity” not in
the woman but in the earth – “as one loves that / Of which one is a part as in
a unity.” What has brought about these circumstances? Have men and women
somehow failed the speaker? And, if so, how can the recompenses of the earth
placate those failures?
The life of Stevens (1879–1955) has its center in three diferent places:
Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was born and spent his irst eighteen years;
New York, where he lived after three years as a student at Harvard and where
he eventually studied law, began to practice it, and lived with his wife, Elsie
Kachel; and Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived for almost forty years as
an attorney for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and eventu-
ally a vice president in charge of surety claims. In each of these three settings,
Stevens sought and found his pastoral retreats, a part of the earth where “he
was at the bottom of things / And of himself.” They, more than home or
oice, became the central loci of his life.
At the time of his engagement to Elsie, while she was back in Reading and
he was in New York, he gave her a glimpse into that home country – Mount
Penn, Mount Neversink, the ields of Oley, and the Schuylkill, Perkiomen,
and Tulpehocken Rivers – as a personal arcadia: “I always walked a great deal,
mostly alone, and mostly on the hill, rambling along the side of the moun-
tain.”3 When he was nineteen, doing farm work at home in Pennsylvania after
his second year at Harvard, he recorded in his journal: “One inds immense
satisfaction in studying the lyrics of song-sparrows, catbirds, wrens and the
like. A valley choked with corn assumes a newer and more potent interest
when one comes to notice the blade-like wind among the leaves.”4
Stevens’s journals during his New York years are all but devoid of refer-
ence to his study and practice of law or to the city itself, except to record
concerts, museums, and plays he attended or to lament the coldly impersonal
life of the urban mass that surrounded him. He seized every opportunity,
especially on weekends and vacations, to return to Reading or to get out of

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the city and hike along the nearby Hudson River paths and the surrounding
New Jersey countryside. Most of his hikes were solitary and sometimes of
twenty or thirty miles or more. Collecting twenty of his own short and undis-
tinguished poems for his iancée’s birthday, he included these words from
“Song”: “A month – a year – of idle work, / And then, one song. / Oh! all that I
am and all that I was / Is to that feeble music strung, / And more.” The poem
ends as another voice from forest and capes “calls me to it without choice, /
Alone” (SCP, pp. 503–04), just as the earth of “Yellow Afternoon” mandated
that “it must be loved.” At the age of twenty-two, Stevens acknowledged that
his love of nature was assuming a religious signiicance and upending the
Presbyterianism of his youth: “Last night I spent an hour in the dark transept
of St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” he noted in his journal, “where I go now and then
in my more lonely moods. An old argument with me is that the true religious
force in the world is not the church but the world itself: the mysterious callings
of Nature and our responses.”5 It was not long after this that Stevens aban-
doned his Christian faith, although never his love of churches and religious
rituals.
In 1916 Stevens and his wife left New York and moved to Hartford, the city
where he would spend the second half of his life, eventually to become “the
dean of surety-claims men in the whole country” and a vice president of the
company.6 Seven years later, Stevens and his wife became the parents of their
only child, Holly. After purchasing what would become his permanent home
on Westerly Terrace, he made it his daily practice to walk the two miles that
separated him from the oice and then again to return home on foot at the
end of the day. That journey skirted Elizabeth Park, a large public park that
enclosed a wooded area, large pond, rock gardens, greenhouses, and winding
paths. It became Stevens’s favorite part of the city, and he often paused there.
A neighbor would later recall: “As he walked I could almost see him compos-
ing in his mind. He had a very interesting walk. It was slow and rather sym-
metrical. He almost walked in cadences. Every Sunday he used to walk over
to the park. Rain, or sometimes it’d be sleeting, he’d walk over. He’d spend an
hour; all kinds of weather.”7
I cite these examples of Stevens’s pastoral predilections to illustrate what
the “earth” of “Yellow Afternoon” meant to the poet himself. It is not just
that Stevens, like other Romantics, found solace and strength in the natural
world, but that he loved it with a passion as if it were a lover and that, in truth,
it became a kind of eyeless and mouthless lover. Helen Vendler was among
the irst to call attention to Stevens’s “inner world” and “human loneliness.”8
Shortly before his marriage to Elsie, in 1909, he wrote: “The truth is, it gets to

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be a terror here. Failure means such horror – and so many fail. If only they
knew of the orchards and arbors and abounding ields, and the ease, and the
comfort, and the quiet. –One might preach the country as a kind of Earthly
Paradise.”9 Writing in his journals when he was in his mid-twenties and living
in New York, Stevens described his own state of mind, including “loathing”
and “disillusionment,” but he also laid out a course of consolations for his per-
sonal future as well as that of his poetry. I reproduce the entry in its entirety:
I am in an odd state of mind today. It is Sunday. I feel a loathing (large &
vague!), for things as they are; and this is the result of a pretty thorough disil-
lusionment. Yet this is an ordinary mood with me in town in the Spring time.
I say to myself that there is nothing good in the world except physical well-
being. All the rest is philosophical compromise. Last Sunday, at home, I took
communion. It was from the worn, the sentimental, the diseased, the priggish
and the ignorant that “Gloria in excelsis!” came. Love is consolation, Nature is
consolation, Friendship, Work, Phantasy are all consolation.10
His loathing of “things as they are” points to the future modernist’s need to
transform them through the projection of his imagination. In his future work,
the phrase itself becomes a kind of catchword for a manifestation of reality
that is sometimes found wanting: “ ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon
the blue guitar’ ” (SCP, p. 135). Indeed, “Phantasy,” with its interior power to
change things as they are, is already identiied as one of his “consolations” just
as “Nature” is his exterior consolation. If there is “nothing good in the world
except physical well-being,” one might suspect that such robust and blood-
coursing physicality exists to allow him to bring himself into greater company
with the earth itself.
Notably missing from his list of consolations is religion itself, although he
was still taking communion. Ten years after this Sunday entry laying out his
consolations, Stevens would publish one of his best-known poems, “Sunday
Morning,” in which he proclaims that for his post-Christian woman, lounging
among her physical luxuries on a more secular Sunday morning, “Divinity
must live within herself.” Although in “contentment” she still feels “The need
of some imperishable bliss,” she nonetheless surrenders the ixed and static
imperishable of “paradise” for the dynamically perishable “earth . . . remem-
bering / The bough of summer and the winter branch.” All physical things
take on an urgent and heightened beauty in the cycle of life and death: “Death
is the mother of beauty,” and “from her, / Alone, shall come fulillment to
our dreams.” In place of God, “Sunday Morning” concludes, there remains
the earth, where “the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” and
“Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness” (SCP, pp. 53–56).

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Stevens’s estrangement from religious faith set him at odds with the evolv-
ing orthodox traditionalism of a poet like Eliot: “After all, Eliot and I are dead
opposites and I have been doing about everything that he would not be likely
to do,” Stevens wrote in 1950.11 Feeling sharply the absence of God, Stevens
attempted to construct a kind of substitute for him and thus to clear his own
modernist path. As he said in one letter, “It is not possible merely to disbelieve
[in God]; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. . . . It is easier to
believe in a thing created by the imagination” (LWS, p. 370).
One such ictional object of belief is Stevens’s concept of the hero. In a
letter to his friend Henry Church in 1943, Stevens hinted at his growing dissat-
isfaction with humanism: “The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns
human beings. Between humanism and something else, it might be possible
to create an acceptable iction” (LWS, p. 449). The hero as inal man, inal
poet, and inal substitute for God could only be imagined as a projection of
the future, an eschatological igure both human and more than human, sub-
stantial and insubstantial, real and ictional: “Unless we believe in the hero,”
he asks in “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” “what is there / To
believe” (SCP, p. 246)? The hero is the counterpart of Stevens’s conception of
a “supreme iction,” to which he can write only “notes.” Like the supreme ic-
tion, the hero remains an “impossible possible”; he is
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up. (SCP, p. 227)

In the early journal entry already cited, Stevens deined his ive consolations:
love, nature, friendship, work, phantasy. Each was posited on the foundation
of “physical well-being,” there being “nothing good in the world” except it.12
By the time he wrote “Yellow Afternoon,” Stevens seemed to possess the con-
solations only of nature and phantasy. What of love and what of work and
what of friendship? “Yellow Afternoon” suggests that he had found, at least
for a while (“Among men, in a woman – she caught his breath”) just such con-
solations in friendship and love, and yet the “he” of the poem returns to the
spectral presence of an eyeless and mouthless lover, the earth itself.
Personal friendships did not come easily for Stevens. In the interviews
conducted by Peter Brazeau and collected under the title Wallace Stevens
Remembered: An Oral Biography, Stevens’s business associates invariably found
him distant and sometimes rude. One of them remembered: “Most executives,
whenever they are free to do so, love to sit around and chat, relax, unwind,

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lollygag. Stevens was not that kind of person. He was not receptive.” And
another colleague commented, “He had diiculty relating to people; he was
not oriented toward being able to see their problems.”13 (Some of the younger
associates whom he guided and promoted at the Hartford company remem-
bered him more warmly.) There were other kinds of acquaintances, such
as those from his literary world, but they were largely epistolary in nature.
Stevens collected such friends from all parts of the world, and he relished the
kinds of artifacts, foods, and even postcards they sent him, but he saw them
in person hardly at all, if ever. Having never left North America in his lifetime,
this most cosmopolitan of poets brought the world to him through his cor-
respondence: “I survive on postcards from Europe” (LWS, p. 797). As for the
work itself, Stevens brought to it intelligent competence, hard work, and per-
sistence. One cannot escape the impression, however, that he derived little real
pleasure in it, just as, during the New York years, he did “not exist from nine to
six, when I am at the oice” (LWS, p. 121).
From his parents and four siblings in Reading he became all but completely
estranged, especially after his marriage to Elsie Kachel. The wedding in
Reading was attended by none of the Stevens family, after an altercation
between Stevens and his father, and the estrangement continued until his
father’s death and almost his mother’s. Elsie herself, almost eight years his
junior and a dropout from high school after attending only her irst year, was
a gifted pianist but seemed to have little sympathy for his mature poetry and
dissociated herself from his business world. The two came to live separately
in the house on Westerly Terrace. Poems like “Red Loves Kit,” “Arrival at the
Waldorf,” “World without Peculiarity,” and “Good Man, Bad Woman” hint at
these strains.
In editing her father’s journals, Holly Stevens remarked on the isolation
of the family: “We held of from each other – one might say that my father
lived alone.”14 He increasingly withdrew into the sanctum of his own room on
Westerly Terrace, his books, his music, his letters, and his visits to the park.
The consolations of work, friendship, and love wore thin and sparse. Three
years before his death, he wrote a favorite correspondent: “The truth is that
one gets out of contact with people during the summer and feels the immense
need (of which one is not conscious in other seasons) of people for other
people, a thing that has been in my thoughts for a long time, in one form or
another” (LWS, p. 759). Left in large part with the consolations of nature and
the powers of the interior phantasy, Stevens in many ways lived out his most
intense and personal life through his poems. Again and again, he would hint at
his personal recourse to art as “our salvation,” “my piety,” “life’s redemption,”

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and “the better part of life” – and, inally, he wrote, “I have no life except in
poetry. No doubt that would be true if my whole life was free for poetry” (SCP,
p. 652; LWS, p. 473; SCP, pp. 901, 913).
Beginning with the poems of his irst volume, Harmonium (1923), and contin-
uing through his Collected Poems (1954) and other poems written before his
death the following year, his poems play an orchestral point and counterpoint,
deriving from that interior world of thought and will and sensory abstraction,
but drawing toward and seeking harmony with the outer world of the earth
itself. Invariably, the words “imagination” and “reality,” words of Stevens’s
own choosing, have become for his readers the great polarities of what he
once called his “grand poem.” Even so, the words themselves are sometimes
confusing, because, for one thing, the imagination possesses its own reality
and, for another, reality itself can never be known except by abstracting it into
consciousness and thus making it an irreality: “According to the traditional
views of sensory perception, we do not see the world immediately but only
as the result of a process of seeing and after the completion of that process,
that is to say, we never see the world except the moment after” (SCP, p. 857). I
prefer the deinition he laid out in brief remarks on one of his poems, called
“Les Plus Belles Pages,” in which the terms are applied more expansively, in
contrast to the sometimes mechanical application of them by his readers:

Les plus belles pages are those in which things do not stand alone but are
operative as the result of interaction, interrelation. This is an idea of some
consequence, not a casual improvisation. The interrelation between reality
and the imagination is the basis of the character of literature. The interrela-
tion between reality and the emotions is the basis of the vitality of literature,
between reality and thought the basis of its power. (SCP, p. 867; emphasis
added)

When using the term “imagination,” Stevens sometimes seems to mean

consciousness itself, all the agencies of perception: the senses, the will, and
the complete synthesizing powers of perception. One might equate it with
the composite subject. Its counterpart consists of all that is the object of per-
ception, reality as the thing itself, all that is outside consciousness. At times
the abyss that separates the two forces dissolves, and they meet naturally and
spontaneously in harmony: “In the presence of extraordinary actuality, con-
sciousness takes the place of imagination” (SCP, p. 905).
More typically, Stevens refers to imagination and reality in more restricted
ways. Although reality, for example, may aford us the moments of “visible
and responsive peace,” as “Yellow Afternoon” would have it, at other times

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reality does not present itself so invitingly (SCP, p. 216). Reality is the “malady
of the quotidian,” in “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”; or the disorder of
“meaningless plungings of water and the wind,” in “The Idea of Order at Key
West”; or even social cataclysm: a “body in rags” and “streets . . . full of cries,”
in “Mozart, 1935” (SCP, pp. 81, 105, 107–08). In the face of these confusions,
Stevens boldly enlists the imagination to combat ennui, disorder, ugliness, and
social eruptions, to become “a violence from within that protects us from a
violence without” (SCP, p. 665).
At the foundation of Stevens’s oeuvre is the supposition that by remaking
his pastoral world into the words of his poems, he could share with others the
very power of the earth that had sustained him. I emphasize here the social
dimension of Stevens’s project, because he never intended it as a sealed-of,
private world.

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which,
we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions,
makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them,
makes us search the sound of them, for a inality, a perfection, an unalterable
vibration which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them.
(SCP, pp. 662–63)

He then adds that the ability of the imagination’s power to combat the less
desirable aspects of reality and its pressures “seems, in the last analysis, to
have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why
the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives” (SCP,
p. 665).
Stevens was conscious that the exercise of the imagination placed him
within the tradition of English and American Romanticism. At the same time,
he knew that his place within it had to be modern. “Sailing after Lunch” sug-
gests the paradox of the necessity of the Romantic versus the need to deny it:

Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer.

The romantic should be here.
The romantic should be there.
It ought to be everywhere.
But the romantic must never remain,
Mon Dieu, and must never again return. (SCP, p. 99)

In one of his essays on the poetry of Marianne Moore, he recognizes that

the term itself (“Romantic”) “in the pejorative sense merely connotes obso-
lescence” (SCP, p. 777). There remained, however, another sense: “It is absurd

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to wince at being called a romantic poet. Unless one is that, one is not a poet
at all. . . . It means, now-a-days, an uncommon intelligence. It means in a time
like our own of violent feelings, equally violent feelings and the most skil-
ful expression of the genuine” (SCP, p. 778). In a sense, modern Romantic
verse had to reclaim the genuine with violent feelings and an uncommon
intelligence; it must dissociate itself from what had come to be regarded as
the excesses of Romanticism – dissociation from what T. S. Eliot abhorred
in Swinburne as “an hallucination of meaning” or from the mannerisms of
Tennyson that Ezra Pound loved to parody.15
I have been implying that Stevens’s self-deined mode of survival depended
on his consolation of phantasy, all the powers of the imagination acting on
his consolation of nature, the earth itself. But one cannot discuss for long the
poetry of Stevens without taking into account the varieties and complexities of
both consolations. The assembly of his collected poems discloses a vast conge-
ries of associations of self with world, modulations and nuances of inner and
outer connections. The poet’s shifting responses are deeply rooted in his own
fascination with epistemology itself: the world outside seems rooted in philo-
sophical realism, but the processes of perception reshape our knowledge of it
into a Kantian idealism. At times, the frangibility of the world and its unknow-
able essences push him toward a kind of solipsism: “There never was a world
for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (SCP, p. 106). Other
philosophers, known by Stevens from his Harvard years (1897–1900), pointed
him in another direction. In the year before Stevens’s arrival at Cambridge,
William James published his essay “The Will to Believe,” which Stevens knew
and absorbed into his own will to know the “volatile world”: “There was a
will to change, a necessitous / And present way, a presentation, a kind / Of
volatile world, too constant to be denied” (LWS, p. 443; SCP, p. 344). George
Santayana, whom Stevens knew well during his Cambridge years – the two
even exchanged rival sonnets – was an even greater inl uence. His Scepticism
and Animal Faith (1923) invokes the same Stevensian skepticism that rises from
the Cartesian chasm between knower and known. At the same time, “animal
faith,” like the will to believe, is the means whereby one airms the “exis-
tence” of a world that conceals its “essence.” Such a world may be “false,” but
we nonetheless accede to a faith that “there is a future, that things sought can
be found, and things seen can be eaten – [even though] no guarantee [of their
verity] can possibly be ofered.” For Santayana, such a faith in life’s empiri-
cisms “launches the adventure of knowledge.”16
The elusiveness and shifting allegiances of Stevens point to another way in
which he redeined Romanticism. When he talks about believing for a while in

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the imagination but then turning to believe in reality, he hints at two powerful
strains, each running counter to the other in his poetry. The former is closer
to Stevens’s joyous self-enfolding on the world that he so proudly loved, as he
describes it in “Yellow Afternoon.” But the latter – the desire to possess the
pure and unmediated, or nearly unmediated, real – requires a rigorous self-
abnegation, a less Romantic and more classical subjugation of the self, with all
its qualities of phantasy and iction making. Remaking the world into words
makes it a tentative and copied thing; this is especially dangerous for the poet,
for whom words are his only resource: “It is a world of words to the end of it”
(SCP, p. 301).
Stevens’s tentative verbal gestures toward the world prompt Angela
Leighton to conclude: “[Stevens’s] delight in words which move and express
movement for its own sake, rather than for description’s sake, is the key
to his work.”17 That part of Stevens that distrusted the movement of lan-
guage for its own sake has had a strong appeal to poststructuralists under
the inl uence of Derrida at the end of the twentieth century. If the ground
of reality is unattainable and unknowable, only the poet’s schema remains
to cover over the widening abyss. Writing on Stevens, J. Hillis Miller puts it
this way: “Without the production of some schema, some ‘icon,’ there can
be no glimpse of the abyss, no vertigo of the underlying nothingness. Any
such scheme, however, both opens the chasm, creates it or reveals it, and at
the same time ills it up, covers it over by naming it, gives the groundless a
ground.”18 Stevens’s pursuit of the real at “the exactest point at which it is
itself ” releases his more classical side (SCP, p. 402). Aware that his poetics
pushed toward a purely verbal world, he was no less hasty to retreat to the
very descriptiveness of the sensual world that Leighton inds wanting: “We
keep coming back and coming back / To the real: to the hotel instead of the
hymns / That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek // The poem of pure
reality” (SCP, p. 402).
Balancing back and forth between the claims of the real and the imag-
ined, Stevens never allows himself to rest for long with either. Just as the
imagination, for example, modiies reality, so by the same measure it distorts
it, ultimately to its own disadvantage. The aggregation of Stevens’s poems
eventually makes up a kind of journey of revisitations – often keyed to the
four seasons of the year. Fearful of those very exaggerations of the imagi-
nation, the poems of autumn give vent to the poet’s disavowal of the imag-
ination’s previous iction making, a de-creation that is coterminous with the
stripping of the leaves themselves. Here Stevens as anti-Romantic comes into
play. The mind reorients itself in the direction of the real. “The imagination

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loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” he says in one place, and in
another, “The real is only the base. But it is the base” (SCP, pp. 645, 917). In the
poems of winter, he seeks to draw as near to the pure and unmediated real-
ity as his abstracting and transforming perception will permit, nature itself
as cold, white, and denuded. It is in their pursuit of “the thing itself ” that the
modernist poetics of Stevens and William Carlos Williams converge and mark
both poets as heirs of Imagism. Quoting the whole of Williams’s short, four-
line poem “El Hombre,” Stevens’s poem “Nuances on a Theme by Williams”
upholds Williams’s “ancient star,” stripped of anything that a distorting “you”
could lend it. Addressing the same star, Stevens then rewrites Williams: “Lend
no part to any humanity that suf uses / you in its own light. / Be not chimera
of morning, / Half man, half star” (SCP, p. 15).
Stevens’s longing for the real, however, could never be as complaisant for
him as it came to be for Williams. The poems of spring release the imagination
to the beginnings of its newly awakened life, while those of summer trans-
port him into a brief but idealized unity and harmony with a now-mediated
world – the harmony that “Yellow Afternoon” deines. Having rediscovered
“reality” in the poems of autumn and winter, the poet then makes it “the foot-
ing from which we leap after what we do not have and on which everything
depends” (LWS, p. 600). Yet, one quickly notes, the imagination’s evolving dis-
tortions can make illusions into delusions, and the cycle must be relaunched
by returning to autumnal suppressions of the imagination’s impositions. The
poems of winter and summer become his polarities; those of autumn and
spring, his transitions.
In “Autumn Refrain,” Stevens moves from high melody to something
approaching desolate stillness, from the “measureless measures” of the night-
ingale – although, for him personally, such measures are “evasions,” ones “I
have never – shall never hear.” The American grackle and its harsher “skreak
and skritter” are also dismissed. What remains is the grackles’ “residuum” of
minimal sound, the something that remains when evasions are nulliied: “The
stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound” (SCP, p. 129).
The poems of the season that coalesce around “Autumn Refrain” share the
quality of impoverishment, a self reduced to a lesser thing, a radical, some-
times painful disengagement of the mind from its actions on a diminished
world. We are left with an empty house and cast-of dress in “The Beginning,”
a “barbarous green” of the last plant of “The Green Plant,” or “the evening’s
one star” in “One of the Inhabitants of the West” (SCP, pp. 431, 428). The
“inally human” of “Lebensweisheitspielerei” is reduced to “indigence” and
“poverty”:

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Little by little, the poverty

Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.
Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
(SCP, pp. 429–30)
“Montrachet-le-Jardin” arrives at “the naked man in a state of fact,” while in
the often-anthologized “The Plain Sense of Things,” “The great structure has
become a minor house. / No turban walks across the lessened loors,” leaving
only the “inevitable knowledge” of the shrunken imagination to behold the
rat, muddy pond, and silence (SCP, pp. 237, 428). “The Auroras of Autumn,” a
longer meditation and the title of Stevens’s 1950 volume, places a viewer gaz-
ing at the aurora borealis as it “leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,
/ Extinguishing our planets, one by one” and leaving, as in “Autumn Refrain,”
a “shivering residue” (SCP, pp. 355–63). The various cantos of the poem intro-
duce other tropes of collapse: a deserted cabin, the dissolved mother, “a time
of innocence / As pure principle”:
So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign
Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this holiness
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep. (SCP, p. 360)

In “Metamorphosis,” the poem itself seems to disintegrate as it moves from

“Sep-tem-ber” to “Oto-otu-bre” to “Fro-Niz-nil-imbo.” Deep into autumn,
November is a cryptogram of diminution: frozen, in limbo, and the nil of
nothing (SCP, pp. 238–39).
If the poems of autumn leave the poet in a state of limbo, those of winter
seek the “nothingness” that can only be imagined, a “pure principle” of reality
shorn of all human intrusions. The nothingness of winter is the pure some-
thing, even though it remains nothing to the absented human beholder. Such a
beholder could only be the snowman, or (phonetically) “this no man,” who, as
the poem of that title demands, is “nothing himself.” Enigmatic and riddling,
“The Snow Man” continues to fascinate us (SCP, p. 8). How, we ask, can the
bareness of winter convey such searing beauty (“junipers shagged with ice,”
“spruces rough in the distant glitter”) and, at the same time, harshly dissolve
the human “One” (the irst word of the poem) into a dehumanized snowman

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possessing “nothing” and “nothing himself ”? It seems to be a poem violently

beautiful and cruelly purifying, costing, as Eliot would say, “not less than every-
thing.”19 Indeed, if it necessitates the very forfeiting of one’s humanity, it truly
costs no less than everything. Still, “the nothing that is” is the poem’s inal and
exigent prize, an immaculate and pristine thing in its intrinsic and unmarred
essence. If in “Yellow Afternoon” Stevens airms that “Everything comes to
him / From the middle of his ield,” and if it is “this that I could love,” one
should note that it is not only the ef ulgence of summer but, equally, the noth-
ingness of winter that engages his passion for the earth (SCP, p. 216).
But we are not snowmen; we have not forfeited our humanity, even though
Stevens once wrote, “I want, as poet, to be that in nature, which constitutes
nature’s very self ” (LWS, p. 790). Other poems of winter draw as near “nature’s
very self ” as a chastened perception will allow. A lonely “syllable” remains,
and it “Intones its single emptiness” in “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” (SCP,
pp. 261–62). The “One,” otherwise violently dismembered in the irst stanzas,
enters the scene as a minimal self, joining the malicious crow at the end of
that poem, “But at a distance, in another tree.” A state of “complete simplic-
ity” is attained in “The Poems of Our Climate,” in opposition to the “evilly
compounded, vital I.” But now, “At the end of winter,” the beholder is allowed
a tincture of color, a cold, porcelain bowl of “Pink and white carnations.” The
“never-resting mind,” awakening to its own new life, desires more than the
faint colors of the carnations, “More than a world of white and snowy scents,”
where “scents” is also “sense” (SCP, pp. 178–79).
Spring is an awakening from sleep, as well as a sexual awakening to the
promiscuous earth, itself budding with new life. It is a journey commenced,
open to the earth’s redolent pleasures. But the long-suppressed mind is ten-
tative, experimental, and childlike, settling for the minimum, but also eager,
anticipatory, and resolute. The previous program of harshly stern self-denials
has come to an end. Having earned its proximity to an undistorted real, “The
imagination wishes to be indulged” (SCP, p. 901). Penelope, yearning for the
return of Ulysses in “The World as Meditation,” enters the poem at day-
break and at a time when “winter is washed away.” While it is his “arms” that
“would be her necklace / And her belt,” such a consummation must now be
deferred. Instead, the rising sun itself becomes for the lonely and beleaguered
Penelope a “Someone,” a “form of ire,” and a “savage presence [that] awak-
ens the world in which she dwells.” So powerful is the “barbarous strength
within her” that Penelope “meditates” her husband’s presence and mediates
it through the sun: “It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met.” At the
end of the poem, Penelope is “repeating his name with its patient syllables,”

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much as the poem’s irst line overtly repeats his name in rhythm and sound:
“Is it Ulysses . . . approaches . . . east” (SCP, pp. 441–42). Penelope’s combing
and repeating at the end becomes an enactment of the decelerated and loat-
ing meditation that constitutes the style of the whole poem: caesuras in sev-
enteen of the poem’s twenty-four lines; ostensible repetitions in lines 2 and
10, 9 and 20, and 1, 16, and 19; an anaphora in lines 14 and 15; and chiasmus in
lines 7 and 8. Everything in the poem works toward the l uidity of thought
in motion.
An awakening similar to Penelope’s occurs in “Not Ideas about the Thing
but the Thing Itself.” The cry of leaves “that do not transcend themselves”
from “The Course of a Particular” now becomes the “scrawny cry” of a bird
at dawn (SCP, p. 460). Like Penelope, the “he” of the poem awakens to the sun
at daybreak. The cry is “not from the vast ventriloquism / Of sleep’s faded
papier-mâché.” Both bird and sun are “outside,” but, heard and seen, they are
also inside. The poem’s title – and the qualifying “like” of “It was like / A new
knowledge of reality” – notwithstanding, the poem’s “he” has internalized
both the sound of the bird and the rings of the sun: “He knew that he heard it”
(SCP, pp. 451–52). His ideas about the thing, his “new knowledge,” now cancel
the “inert savoir” of “The Plain Sense of Things” (SCP, p. 428).
When Ulysses symbolically returns, when the scrawny cry is full throated,
other tropes deine the mind in perfect appeasement with the earth, and these
poems often occur in the season of high summer. As even its title suggests,
“Credences of Summer” is a set of propositions calling for something like reli-
gious faith in the season’s accord for those who seek it (SCP, pp. 322–26). As
Stevens wrote in one essay, “While it can lie in the temperament of very few of
us to write poetry in order to ind God, it is probably the purpose of each of us
to write poetry to ind the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous
with God” (SCP, p. 786). In this poem he inds that “good” in an intense momen-
tary cessation of time and space: “Things stop in that direction and since they
stop / The direction stops and we accept what is / As good” (SCP, p. 323).
Throughout the poem’s ten cantos, the speaker commemorates the time when
“the mind lays by its trouble” and indulges the efulgent world, “this and the
imagination’s life” (canto I). Even the “consolations” that had eluded Stevens in
his own private life are now reinstated: “these fathers standing round, / These
mothers touching, speaking, being near, / These lovers waiting in the soft dry
grass” (SCP, p. 323). The poet’s entanglements with the world always suggest
change. If in “Credences of Summer” it is “the last day of a certain year” (canto
I), the succeeding days will inevitably dislodge him from that station and push
him toward a diferent one. Indeed, the poem’s inal cantos are already pointing

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to some kind of rupture of the ideal moment: “A complex of emotions falls

apart, / In an abandoned spot,” as “last year’s garden grows salacious weeds”
(SCP, p. 326). The cycle of the seasons is about to be replayed again.
Stevens’s pastoralism inevitably invites comparisons with Robert Frost.
Stevens, who knew Frost from his business trips to Key West, Florida, once
accused him of writing a poetry of “things,” to which Frost retorted that
Stevens wrote poems of “bric-a-brac.”20 There is more of the decorative in
Frost and more thingness in Stevens than either poet seems to have allowed.
But both created a poetry of the seasons, an engagement of the mind reaching
out to a world in l ux and l uidity – often inviting, sometimes forbidding. But
unlike Frost, Stevens is more dedicated to ferreting out the world, possessing
it joyfully and relinquishing it ruefully; he is less interested in deducing the
“truths” of nature than in attaining nature.
Having noted Stevens’s seasonal transitions, the reader quickly becomes
aware that the poems themselves resist easy and mechanical applications of
such a formula. Stevens’s poems, like those of no other modernist, often tend
toward the machinations of thought itself in all its spontaneity and discur-
siveness. As a result, such poems take on a quality of tentative and specu-
lative drift, as these titles suggest: “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Like
Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” “Prologues to What Is Possible,” “Variations
on a Summer Day,” “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” “Extracts from Addresses
to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” and so on (emphases added).
In generalizing, we have come to associate the poetry of Stevens with a
certain kind of formal stateliness, a diction of luxuriant elegance, and a syn-
tax of parataxis and apposition like the movements of thought itself. His
cadences favor something like blank verse but not so rigorously as Milton or
Wordsworth: “My line is a pentameter line, but it runs over and under now
and then” (LWS, p. 407). I want to argue, however, that Stevens’s voice has a
quality of the unpredictable about it. If, in its composition, a poem’s “true
subject” and “poetry of the subject” are brought into tension, as he suggests,
we expect in Stevens’s poetry a quality of caprice, playfulness, dislocation,
and surprise (SCP, p. 785). For all his formality, Stevens can sometimes adopt
the spontaneity of a wide-eyed child: “People ought to like poetry the way a
child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it,” he once insisted (LWS, p. 349).
Especially in his poems from his irst volume, Harmonium, come interjections
like “Chieftain If ucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!”
(SCP, p. 60). The comparison of cock versus dove plays to the advantage of the
latter in “Depression before Spring”: “But ki-ki-ri-ki / Brings no rou-cou, /
No rou-cou-cou” (SCP, p. 50). As early as 1926, with Harmonium her only

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specimen, Marianne Moore thought that “Wallace Stevens’ sensory and tech-
nical virtuosity was perhaps the ‘new’ poetry’s greatest ornament.”21
There is one line in “Yellow Afternoon” that I have not yet cited; it occurs
in the poem as part of his claim to be “a part [with the desirable earth] as in a
unity.” For the lover of earth, his life consists of “all the lives that comprise it,”
as if the speaker brings all aspects of his life and personality to bear on his lov-
ing “unity” with the earth. The poem then adds an illustration of such diver-
sity and multiplicity of lives: “So that one lives all the lives that comprise it / As
the life of the fatal unity of war” (SCP, p. 216). The poem poses the possibility
here that such a “fatal unity” may be diferent from “A unity that is the life one
loves.” How, in fact, can one love the earth when it is co-opted by a devastation
like war? That question remains unanswered in “Yellow Afternoon,” even as
it is laid before us.
Stevens’s personal political loyalties are diicult to categorize. In the middle
of the Great Depression, he had found himself “headed left, but there are
lefts and lefts, and certainly I am not headed for the ghastly left of [NEW]
MASSES” (LWS, p. 286). Later, writing after the upset victory of Truman (a
Democrat) over Dewey (a Republican), he confessed:
As to Truman: I am of two minds about the result of the election. So far as I
am personally concerned his election is probably a misfortune because he is
one of those politicians who keep themselves in oice by taxing a small class
for the beneit of a large class. . . . On the other hand, I recognize that the vast
altruism of the Truman party is probably the greatest single force for good in
the world today. (LWS, p. 623)
In the presidential election four years later, he declared that “Stevenson [a
Democrat] was not my man.” He favored Eisenhower (a Republican): “We
ought to have a little prose in the White House after all the poor poetry” (LWS,
p. 765).
Stevens’s poetry, spanning the irst half of the twentieth century, included
the time of the Great Depression, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the
Korean conl ict, and some of the most menacing years of the Cold War, as
weapons of mass destruction were added to national arsenals. Stevens wrote
poems that addressed each of these menaces. How, in the face of such catas-
trophes and threatened catastrophes, could poetry even justify itself without
appearing irrelevant? At the same time that he wrote “Yellow Afternoon,”
Stevens wrote another poem called “Of Modern Poetry,” the poem that
begins, “The poem of the mind in the act of inding / What will suice.” Such
a poem, by its very modernity, becomes indentured to historical circumstance,
war itself:

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It has to think about war

And it has to ind what will suice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear. (SCP, pp. 218–19)
How could such poetry avoid “afectation” even as it contained the mind
in a state of war (SCP, p. 654)? (At this time, America’s direct entry into World
War II was still more than a year away.) In each decade of his writing, Stevens
asked similar questions about the other national and international events
that created massive human sufering. The question is part of the larger one
that seems to recur in every generation about how poetry, and art in general,
can engage with historical threats and calamities as they are “occupying our
thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of anything except the actual and the
necessary” (LWS, p. 365). Can and should poetry be an arm of political ideol-
ogy? Even as he viewed the “misery of Europe” after the end of World War
II, Stevens noted that a proposed new literary magazine was likely to appear
“academic and unreal” and even acknowledged that at such times, “one is
inclined, therefore, to sympathize with one’s more unsympathetic critics”
(LWS, p. 525).
Stevens’s position in the face of these questions and issues was remarkably
consistent throughout his life. While a student at Harvard, Stevens dismissed
“art all alone, detached, sensuous for the sake of sensuousness” as “inexcus-
able rubbish.” He then added, “Art must it with other things; it must be part
of the system of the world. And if it inds a place in that system it will like-
wise ind a ministry and relation that are its proper adjuncts.”22 The position
outlined here would be substantially unchanged for the rest of his life. His
political poetry would walk a ine line – avoiding the sensuous self-indulgence
of an art of social disengagement, at one extreme, while abjuring any particle
of propagandistic or nationally ideological side taking, on the other. For both
disavowals, he would sufer criticism.
Even in his own lifetime, charges of insuicient sensitivity to contemporary
social and political disruptions occasionally stirred him to poetic response.
When Stanley Burnshaw condemned the poems of Harmonium in 1935 as
“the kind of verse that people concerned with the murderous world collapse
can hardly swallow today except in tiny doses,” Stevens responded with his
poem “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” originally the second part of the longer
poem “Owl’s Clover” in its irst publication. Later, the accusation that he was

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a poet of merely “charming distemper” by an anonymous soldier at the front

in World War II discomited Stevens enough to lead to his composition of
“Esthétique du Mal.”23
The “sudden rightnesses” that Stevens called on the poet to deliver in “Of
Modern Poetry” can perhaps best be demonstrated by examples from the
poems themselves (SCP, p. 218). I want to mention only two, “Mozart, 1935” and
“Contrary Theses (I),” one of which is from the time of the Great Depression
and the other from World War II. “Mozart, 1935” lays out a time of social dis-
orientation and violence, leaving only the date in the title to suggest the his-
torical circumstance. Unidentiied people “throw stones upon the roof ”; they
“carry down the stairs / A body in rags” and “the streets are full of cries.” It is a
time of “angry fear” and “besieging pain.” Far from addressing a political pan-
acea to such times of desperation, he addresses a “poet,” commanding that
person to be “seated at the piano.” What poetry-music could he possibly play?
The answer is Mozart, but not a Mozart of evasion or distraction. “Strike the
piercing chord. // . . . Be thou, be thou / The voice of angry fear, / The voice
of this besieging pain.” The poet-musician must absorb the “wintry sound”
itself. Only then can he create a momentary surcease “By which sorrow is
released, / Dismissed, absolved / In a starry placating” (SCP, pp. 107–08). The
poet-musician does not inl uence the immediate circumstances of the Great
Depression; his contribution is more to those individuals who are victimized
by social circumstances, the victims and perpetrators of anger and pain. He
ofers them an almost religious (“Be thou, be thou”) alternative, a momentary
calming against the forces of enveloping distress.
A few months after Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II,
Stevens wrote “Contrary Theses (I).” The immediate circumstances seemed
to call for a poetry of deiant outrage and patriotic fervor. Stevens, however,
wrote a diferent kind of poem. An anonymous soldier, of any era or national-
ity, “walks before my door” and then “stalks before my door” (SCP, p. 239). The
stalking soldier tramps over all attempts to push him aside in favor of autum-
nal ripeness or even “seraphs” and “saints.” Five times in the poem’s twelve
lines the soldier’s arrival at the door is announced – as disruptive to the poem
as it is to the speaker. As a contrary thesis, the soldier cannot be dismissed or
forgotten. The igure only presages the violence he represents: “Blood smears
the oaks.” It could be any war in any century; the soldier could be a German
soldier at the door of an American home or an American soldier at the door
of a German home. Even the poem’s rhythm enacts the soldier’s footsteps:
“Befóre, befóre, befóre my dóor.” Domestic peace is disrupted by the contrary
thesis of war; to expose that menace seems to be the poet’s dramatic purpose.

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Only the order imposed by the poem on the scene and the circumscribed form
of the six couplets counter the disorder and fear that it evokes. Both “Mozart,
1935” and “Contrary Theses (I)” ofer a “violence from within” to act against
the “violence without” (SCP, p. 665).
In the larger context of Stevens’s poetry of reality and the imagination, the
consolations of nature and phantasy are Stevens’s only consolations. In the
end, he asks, “What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I except it
comes from the sun?” (SCP, p. 104). His “sense” of the world and his “sense”
of the poem are one: “Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense” (SCP,
p. 902). And in a letter he states: “We are physical beings in a physical world. . . .
The state of the weather soon becomes a state of mind” (LWS, p. 349). For a
poet whose life was made up of so many personal abstentions and withdraw-
als – from faith in God, from parental ties, from a distant wife, and from friends
and associates (although each of these absences requires a degree of qualiica-
tion) – Stevens could not escape the larger social and political cataclysms that
intruded on him. What remained was the earth in all its weathers, in all its
seasons – and words. “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images
and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (SCP, p. 902). For
this poet, who, according to his daughter, “lived alone,” one feels compelled
to ask if words, in the end, were enough. Was the earth enough? Was the eye-
less and mouthless lover enough? Even Stevens had his moments of doubt,
as he questions himself in “World without Peculiarity”: “What good is it that
the earth is justiied, / That it is complete, that it is an end, / That in itself it
is enough?” Then, in the following line, he ofers his only response to that
question, “It is the earth itself that is humanity” (SCP, p. 388). Was it enough?
For this loneliest of poets, one can only ask the question. What remains is
Stevens’s renewed Romanticism – always followed by its accompanying dis-
avowals and reconstitutions – evolving into his own amassing “grand poem”
and marking his unique testimony to modernism in the last century.

Notes
1. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan
Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 216. This collection will be
cited in the text as SCP.
2. William Wordsworth, Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1977), p. 358.
3. Wallace Stevens, The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie,
ed. J. Donald Blount (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006),
p. 134.

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4. Wallace Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly
Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 48.
5. Stevens, Souvenirs, p. 104.
6. Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York:
Random House, 1977), p. 67.
7. Brazeau, Parts of a World, p. 239.
8. Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 5, 7.
9. Stevens, The Contemplated Spouse, pp. 199–200.
10. Stevens, Souvenirs, p. 146.
11. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York:
Knopf, 1966), p. 677. This collection will be cited in the text as LWS.
12. Stevens, Souvenirs, p. 146.
13. Brazeau, Parts of a World, pp. 22, 27.
14. Stevens, Souvenirs, p. 4.
15. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 327.
16. George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), pp.
180–81.
17. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 187.
18. J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 399–400.
19. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1958), p. 145.
20. Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1936 (New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), p. 666.
21. Marianne Moore, “ ‘New’ Poetry since 1912,” in Stanley Braithwaite
(ed.), Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926 (Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1926), pp.
172–79, 175.
22. Stevens, Souvenirs, p. 38.
23. Stanley Burnshaw, “Turmoil in the Middle Ground,” New Masses XVII (October
1, 1935), p. 42; quoted in John Crowe Ransom, “Artists, Soldiers, Positivists,”
Kenyon Review 6 (1944), p. 276.

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 Chapter 30
Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
and the East Coast Projectivists
M att h e w H o f er

As radical innovators throughout their careers and also the main sponsors of
the major American avant-garde movements launched in 1931 (the Objectivist
generation) and in 1950 (the projectivist generation), Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams have often been igured as the authors of a counterculture
in American poetry. Once expedient, perhaps even sensible, that persistent
account of an outsider twentieth-century literary history is no longer viable
in the twenty-irst century. It is surely no longer necessary. Critics as well as
poets increasingly agree that the contributions of these modernist inventors
fall much nearer the center of the art than its margins. Among projectivist
writers the inl uence of Pound and Williams is openly acknowledged. These
East Coast poets ailiated with Black Mountain College – including Charles
Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Larry Eigner – have owned this
debt and occasionally struggled with it, particularly when confronted with
Pound’s erratic and ofensive political pronouncements. However, Pound’s
and Williams’s poetic techniques resonate demonstrably in the inest work of
subsequent generations.
Friends and rivals from their days at the University of Pennsylvania (1902)
through old age, Pound and Williams constantly praised, critiqued, promoted,
and contested each other. They shared more than a few ideas and goals, but
not a poetics. Neither was prone to compromise, and their various engage-
ments, although often productive, were rarely genteel. The prologue to Kora
in Hell (1917) recounts what was for Williams an exemplary dispute between
hungry young poets, in which “I contended for bread, he for caviar. I became
hot. He, with ine discretion, exclaimed: ‘Let us drop it. We will never agree,
or come to an agreement.’ He spoke then like a Frenchman, which is one who
discerns.”1 Williams’s equivocation is not trivial. In fact, his adept assessment
of their relative temperaments is no less sensitive than the subtle linguistic
play that informs his anecdote: its jibe turns on a historical conlation of the
Old French terms discern, “to separate or distinguish,” and decern, “to decide

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

or decree.” By Pound’s cool acquiescence Williams depicts the future expatri-

ate as both mediator and polemicist, a traditional critic with an avant-garde
bent, and anything but American.
Of course, Pound’s attraction to Continental culture was by no means
restricted to Gallic discernment, and his decision to expatriate igures cen-
trally in his extended debate with Williams about the appropriate course for
modern (American) poetry. In a reply to Williams’s early complaint to his “old
friend” about “hurt feelings,” Pound exhorts, “I demand of you more robust-
ezza. Bigod sir, you show more robustezza, or I will come over to Rutherford
and have at you, coram, in person.”2 Even in praise of an early masterpiece like
Kora – “the best you have done” – Pound urged above all a ierce independence:
“ANYHOW blaze away, and more power to yr. elbow. Dont listen to any one
else, and above all dont listen to me.” However, with reference to Williams’s
express goal of establishing a “representative American” writing, Pound did
share the reasonable insight that it “will be that which can be translated in for-
eign languages without appearing ridiculous to us after it has been ‘accepted’ ”
and, moreover, that it “will appear new” to those outside the United States.3
Neither disagreement nor hurt feelings precluded solidarity. When Pound
called from London “to break the pentameter” and formulated the three
tenets of Imagism, he solicited Williams’s poem “Postlude” for inclusion in
his revolutionary anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). This memorable love lyric
begins with a proposition as unsentimental as it is precise, invoking cyclical
nature and sequential history in order to explain transitory human relations in
terms appropriate to architectural monuments:
Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.4

Appropriately for a postlude, this poem begins right “now”; it begins, that
is, in the present tense, and the speaker’s emotions, although they endure,
are past perfect. Following the comparatively muted and relective negotia-
tion of the irst strophe (in which “masonry” insistently evokes “memory”),
the second rises to meet the irst tenet of Imagism – the “direct presentation
of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective” – head on in terms that ren-
der the modern afair commensurable to a little-known yet much-conquered
ancient city: “Your hair is my Carthage / And my arms the bow,” “our words
arrows / To shoot the stars” (WCPI, p. 3). While successfully avoiding strict
rhythm, tight rhyme, and elevated diction, the chiming of end words such as

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“bow” and “arrows” intensiies the presentational metaphor, which provides

a homophonic undertone of eros as well as an attendant cupidinous image.
This underscores the Imagist rebuke to “use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation” (tenet 2) as well as the insistence “to compose
in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”
(tenet 3).5
A mediated contact with Imagism did much to modernize Williams, and
“Postlude” showcases several qualities he retained from this style, although its
classical references and foreign lourishes – typical of H.D., Richard Aldington,
and Pound – are of course remote from the American idiom the obstetrician-
poet would later famously claim to have gotten “from the mouths of Polish
mothers.” Pound, a key igure among the original Imagists, quickly broke with
the movement after Amy Lowell commandeered it (rendering it “Amygism”),
because, as Hugh Kenner notes, any coterie “in part deines one’s company,
and Imagism . . . soon entailed negotiating with dim and petulant people.”6
Williams, however, whose company and identity never risked being deter-
mined by his loose association with the Imagist, Objectivist, or projectivist
writers, maintained his persistent adherence to the principles of Imagist writ-
ing, selectively at least, throughout his career. He even proposed, in a 1953
letter to Creeley, that his dedication to the poetic image was what precluded
him from fully appreciating Olson’s comparatively imageless poems.7 Yet an
appreciation of a style was for Williams no more constrained by systems or
institutions than was the use of it; his sense of ailiation, almost always cast as
a commitment to the local, particular, and “new,” was more l uid than that.
Pound’s and Williams’s essays on each other’s work are remarkably per-
ceptive, and although their criticism can be severe, their praise, however sar-
donic, is also genuine. For example, in “Dr. Williams’ Position,” Pound extols
the accurate observation and pragmatic expertise of Williams’s art. However,
in his estimation, those qualities stemmed from the biological, cultural, and
linguistic hybridity that simultaneously “provided the infant William with
material sustenance” and relegated him to the position of “the observant for-
eigner” (LE, p. 391). “In his verse,” Pound cautions readers, “Williams’ integ-
rity passes for simplicity.”8 While his work is by no means simple, Williams
was prepared to run the risk of allowing it to appear so; simple was, for
him, a less compromising quality than conventional. Thus Williams could
mordantly profess to “praise those who have the wit and courage, and the
conventionality, to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective
world where the signposts are clearly marked, viz., to London” and yet ear-
nestly wish to “conine them to hell for their paretic assumption that there

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

is no alternative but their own groove” (IM, p. 27). In response to Pound’s

seeming compliance with this general paresis – and despite publishing his
own irst commercial volume of poems, The Tempers (1913), with Pound’s
London publisher Elkin Mathews – the nativist modernist proclaimed the
preeminent expatriate to be “the best enemy United States verse has” (IM,
p. 26). The promise of an identiiably American modernism was for Williams
always worth the efort.
Just as Williams’s abiding interest in concrete imagery did not make him
a holdover from the original Imagist movement, so Pound’s Vorticism is not
merely Imagism by another name. The success of an Imagist poem is gauged
by its capacity to present “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time,” which “instantaneously . . . gives that sense of freedom from time
limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience
in the presence of the greatest works of art” (LE, p. 4). Pound’s celebrated
Imagist poem “The Garden” achieves this efect by a series of deft and swift
comparisons that characterize “the end of breeding” – that is, its purpose and
its limit. In it, a pair of perfectly calibrated sibilant adjectives, “excessive and
exquisite,” particularize the redundant yet highly reined boredom of an aris-
tocratic woman, repeating the syllable “ex-” not only for the dense sound
structure it generates but also to recall its typical etymological function as
a preix that emphasizes a degree of dignity, an inviolate singularity, and an
inevitable obsolescence. The logic of the Imagist poem – “This thing, that
hath a code and not a core” – allows for a series of static associations that main-
tain their distinctiveness even in the moment of most insistent association.9
A toney woman walking in the public-private space of Kensington Gardens
is like (but is not) a “skein of loose silk blown against a wall.” Her perceptible
if incremental death from “a sort of emotional anaemia” stands in sharp con-
trast to the encroaching (but still separate) crowd of “ilthy, sturdy, unkillable
infants of the very poor.” Finally, her altogether visible boredom is igured as
a desire to be addressed that nearly justiies (but fails to entice) an incursion by
the modern artist: “She would like some one to speak to her, / And is almost
afraid that I / will commit that indiscretion” (PT, pp. 264–65). These tropes are
far from ornamental; they present the woman’s movement, situation, and sta-
tus precisely. Imagism remains distinct from symbolism because “the symbol-
ist’s symbols have a ixed value, like numbers in arithmetic,” but the “imagiste’s
images have a variable signiicance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra.”10 Such
variables give rise to a sensation of freedom or sudden growth when their
meaning suddenly becomes apparent in relation to one another. But nothing,
in the poem, actually happens.

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Against the backdrop of the coming world war, the speciic advance that
Vorticism made on Imagist practice entails a renewed commitment to repre-
sentational energy, igured materially as a dynamic spiral “from which, and
through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (GB, p. 92).
Whether swelling to the national level (“The Great English Vortex”) or focus-
ing down to the individual practitioner (“Vortex: Pound”), Vorticism extends
to painting, sculpture, and music; its igure of spiral-patterned energy with
an unmoving center ampliies the preceding literary movement. Unlike
Imagism, the Vortex asserts the energy of the diagonal as opposed to the sta-
sis of gridded binaries, and, unlike Italian Futurism, it posits no divorce from
history. Pound, building on the analogy that had distinguished symbolism
from Imagism, frames a distinction between Imagism and Vorticism in terms
of that between algebra (which exceeds the “arithmetic” power of symbol-
ism) and analytical geometry (which equally exceeds the “algebraic” power of
Imagism). Applied to Vorticism, the theory of analytical geometry provides
a universal idiom, complex and elegant, that points to a “new way of dealing
with form” (GB, p. 91).
From a literary perspective, the Vorticist “one-image poem” concentrates
the intensity of the poetic event in an efort “to record the precise instant
when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing
inward and subjective” (GB, p. 89). This is how the signature transformation of
faces into petals occurs in Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .11
While the title serves as a necessary irst line – providing orientation via its
prepositional phrases as well as a sense of a modern, urban, and technologi-
cally advanced setting – the disarticulated colon (later rendered as a semico-
lon) that separates and links these disparate images visibly marks the moment
of radical transformation that Pound’s prose articulates. Conspicuous blank
spaces, closed up in later presentations, help to structure the irst version of
this poem – which was published in Poetry (1913) – governing the rhythm of the
change. The spaces usefully highlight what a successful Vorticist poem invari-
ably does: it channels the syntactic movement from one image to the next,
compartmentalizes attention, focuses power, and defers completion. That is
to say, although something is manifestly happening here, nothing is being
consumed in the process. Rather, the “precise instant” of transformation from
the objective to the subjective thing is made literal, material, and powerfully
present. This is how art handles life in the Vortex.

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

The nascent Vortex beneited from Pound’s receipt in 1913 of Ernest

Fenollosa’s papers, which simultaneously conirmed the evolution of his post-
Imagist poetics and expanded his cultural scope, inally giving rise to the ideo-
grammic method of the cantos (arranging what Pound previously called the
“luminous details” of short lyrics into larger structural units, and so making
the long poem possible). Scholars rightly, if pedantically, argue that Fenollosa’s
study of Chinese writing lacks linguistic accuracy with regard to the ideogram,
yet the poetic theory adapted from it reveals a great deal about English, which
is, like Chinese, uninlected. Edited by Pound as The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry, the essay relates the transference of force in writing, and
the “lash of lightning” stands in as the prime sentence that can “redistribute
force” within “a regular and lexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself.”12
From this perspective, Fenollosa posits that the conventional sentence form
is impoverished, distracting, and unnatural, given that nature cannot support
the concept of an abstraction, a negation, a truly completed action, or an action
(verb) that is separate from an actor (noun). These insights efectively autho-
rized the modernist revolution in poetic syntax as parataxis.
For Pound’s poetics – as for the projectivists’ sense of the open ield that
extends (or supplants) free verse – the freshly liberating observation is that
nature has “no grammar.” Cleaving to the processes of nature rather than
being constrained by artiicial forms for making meaning allows poets to
rediscover forgotten yet vital mental processes in which relations become
“more real and important than the things which they relate.” Moreover, as a
“time art,” poetry promises simultaneous access to “the vividness of painting”
and “the mobility of sounds,” although “it is, in some sense, more objective
than either, more dramatic.”13 The drama that Fenollosa identiies here cor-
responds to a version of the energy that deines the Vortex. However, even
a cursory look at the short-lived Vorticist journal BLAST (1914, 1915) also sug-
gests how the correlation of illumination to an energizing, renewing, or sani-
tizing violence was informed by a practical naïveté about the horrors of total
war. When these horrors became evident and unavoidable, the radical drive of
modernism could neither reconcile its logic nor survive its losses. The resul-
tant Thermidor did much to suppress poetic experimentation prior to the 1950
salvo of Olson’s “Projective Verse” manifesto, the critical demonstration piece
that theorized the practice of open ield composition and inaugurated the
New American poetics.
The concept of ideogrammic juxtaposition was integral to the development
of an open ield method of projectivist composition. For Creeley, the “ordering
of expression” that the formal innovation made available to poetry “duplicates

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the diferentiation of force in actuality as consequence leading to new conse-

quence.” The Chinese Written Character essay also led Olson to posit that while
the use of adjectives can produce a “logic of time, as event,” this logic is “viti-
ating because it is inherently descriptive”; however, he contends that a meta-
morphosis in time and space is possible by way of the pressure adverbs place
on verbs “to change them, to move them,” and, he later adds, “thus ourselves –
changed.”14 This understanding of ideogrammic theory, predicated on illumi-
nation and a sense of the spatial as well as the temporal elements of a poem,
helps to conirm the terms of Pound’s distinction of Vorticism from Imagism.
However, to the extent that Creeley and Olson are concerned with the artic-
ulation of language as spoken, it also anticipates a corrective Olson thought
to provide in open ield poetics “on this biz of, expression versus illumination.
All the way thru I ind em (including Ez’s absolute ARS POETICA) half right.
(They leave out one side of the thoroughfare, much-travelled side.)” (CC1,
pp. 137–38). The much-travelled side involves the resources of rhetoric, which
are oral, prosaic, and pedagogical. Olson’s drive to explain and systematize
required that he prioritize the communication of content (expression) in a dis-
cursive poetics that is often more tightly controlled than his expository prose.
In this and in his masculinist attitudes toward art, Olson resembles Pound –
the predecessor whom he sedulously rejects in “GrandPa, Goodbye” – more
closely than he could, or in any case ever did, acknowledge.

*
An urgent desire to make writing new motivated both Pound and Williams,
each after his own fashion. Kenner’s early sense of the high modern poet-crit-
ics balances Pound’s passion for activity against Williams’s underrated “tena-
ciousness,” dismissing, with a sidelong swipe, T. S. Eliot’s supposed careerist
drive: “Where Mr. Pound reads his contemporaries to ind out if they are still
alive, and Mr. Eliot to see if they merit introductions, Dr. Williams reads and
rereads them to ind out what they mean.”15 Reading and rereading Pound’s
work, Williams recognized achievements that he sought to adapt for his own
writing. As early as 1913 he (like most open form poets) denied writing “free
verse” and claimed not to “believe in vers libre,” since in any poem “the motion
continues or it does not continue, either there is rhythm or no rhythm.”16 He
considered “formal invention” crucial because he held that only in “intimate
form” do “works of art achieve their exact meaning . . . to give language its
highest dignity, the illumination in the environment to which it is native.”17
For Williams, who disdained the “beautiful illusion” and all things mimetic,
“poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination – the perfection

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of new forms as additions to nature” (IM, p. 140). Materiality, while not nec-
essarily inimical to clarity or precision or euphony, came to mean more to
Williams than those qualities. Although Williams was capable of remarkable
precision, he was often opaque, as Pound observed (“The thing that saves your
work is opacity, and don’t forget it”) (IM, p. 10). To him, traditional features,
sustained by linear continuity, plot, and connectives, were the elements of the
bound thinking that he sought, in his writing, to unbind. This, too, is evident
as early as the genre-defying experiment Kora in Hell, in which the artist’s pro-
cess is described in terms of a struggle to represent reality as a conscious prod-
uct of the active imagination: “The stream of things having composed itself
into wiry strands that move in one direction, the poet in desperation turns at
right angles and cuts across currents” (IM, p. 17).
The contour of these early insights helps explain the shape of the successive
experiments of Spring and All, The Descent of Winter, and the triadic structure of
late poems composed with the variable foot. The technologies of Cubist com-
position intensiied Williams’s prioritization of perception over meaning and
latness over depth. This is explicit in the metonymic experimentation of Spring
and All, in which Williams asserts, “the word must be put down for itself, not as a
symbol of nature,” and insists that “words freed by the imagination airm reality
by their l ight” (IM, pp. 102, 150). The early texts push toward, even if they do not
fully achieve, the openness of a process poem; they gesture powerfully toward
key features of what will become the projectivist practice of privileging energy,
body, and sound. Some of Creeley’s most memorable compositions, including
the open ield seriality of Pieces, pursue and develop Williams’s insights.
Pound imagined poetic vocabulary diferently, prizing cheng ming, the prin-
ciple of the rectiication of names, which points to the revelatory clarity of
words that are, so to speak, unwobbling pivots. This faith in words as solid ref-
erents is a key distinction between Pound’s and Williams’s approaches to mod-
ernism. For Pound, and for Olson too, the deep history of linguistic evolution
was as true a history as culture workers could ever approach: Pound went back
to the Greek and Chinese classics, and Olson’s ambition drove him deeper still
to the ancient “E on the stone,” the “navel stone” at Delphi, which is given as
the oldest glyph extant – predating Greek civilization – in “The Kingishers.”18
Olson elaborates on his intellectual suspicion of punning and linguistic play in
a letter to Eigner about Robert Duncan’s “arbitrary etymologies” as irrespon-
sible fabrication. In it he stipulates that “what’s most needed right now is an
Indo-European Dictionary – roots, so one can feel that far back along the line
of the word to its irst users – what they meant, in inventing it” (COSA, p. 78).
Here “inventing” means to come upon, ind out, discover – never to make up.

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Pound’s association of vital language with historical thought aims to discover

“the gristly roots of ideas that are in actions” (Paideuma).19 It also informs the
two liberative themes of The Cantos that were singled out by Williams: “a
closed mind which clings to its power – about which the intelligence beats
seeking entrance” and the idea that “all men are contemporaries, in whatever
time they live or have lived, whose minds (including the body and its acts) have
lifted them above the sordidness of a grabbing world” (SE, pp. 106, 167). This
gets close to what Pound demanded in his credo “make it new”: a regener-
ated, intensiied, and so relevant sense of tradition as the “tale of the tribe”
(Sagetrieb).20 Making it new, Pound and Olson agree, is not making it up.
A less sympathetic, perhaps more anxious reader of The Cantos, Olson
began from insights similar to Williams’s but reached rather diferent con-
clusions. Williams understood the transformation efected by the poem as a
move “away from the word as a symbol toward the word as reality,” by which
he meant that Pound was efectively employing each word as “an objective
unit in the design – but alive” (SE, p. 107). This is an act of will exercised at the
level of the word. However, in the course of their instructive conversation in
letters about projective verse, Olson advises Creeley that “to undo free verse”
will require poets to “hammer each line out as purely as each SYLLABLE, or
we’re dead ducks, like // the Amygists, / or even EZ, when, as so often, in the
Cantos, he / goes by his will, thinks / that it will carry him, he’s / so strong. It
don’t, & / IT WON’T” (CC1, p. 126). In his Mayan Letters, written to Creeley,
Olson elaborates on this critique, concluding that The Cantos originates in a
lawed method that results in a largely failed project:

Ez’s epic solves problem by his ego: his single emotion breaks all down to
his equals or inferiors. . . . Which assumption, that there are intelligent men
whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time and thus
creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-ield where, by inversion,
though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply
by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have,
space & its live air. (CC5, p. 49)

What remains available for poets of the 1950s to use – historical time trans-
formed into a space-ield – appears, on this account, to be incidental, even acci-
dental. This liberation from time, as Robert von Hallberg explains, permits
Olson to compose didactic poems that can “shift idioms abruptly, without
warning, without explanation,” and to do so without committing, as Pound
did, to the “nonrational psychology and rhetorical strategy” of the ideo-
grammic method (COSA, pp. 19, 3). The theory of projective verse is inally

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irreconcilable to an ideogrammic model that harmonizes disparate images,

voices, and ideas within a horizontal chord (found also in Arabian music and
Provençal metrics), which gives rise to a meaning-making order elaborated in
a claim from Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, in which Pound posits that
“any chord can follow any other.”21
During the 1930s, as Pound’s economic, political, and racial statements
grew increasingly strident, Williams strove to keep their exchanges as literary
as possible. With the depression raging and the prospect of a second world
war in Europe looming, he had only partial success, at best. As he attempted to
explain, “When you go of the handle about the economic situation, though
I acknowledge you may be in the right, you are all wet to me. But when you
write as you have written in the preface to the Active Anthology you are superb.
You do hold the lamp and it is lit.”22 Pound’s Active Anthology (1933) – which
included ifteen poems by Williams – was meant in part to direct and in part
to counter Objectivist writing as represented by Louis Zukofsky’s special issue
of Poetry magazine (February 1931) and his “Objectivists” Anthology of 1932.
Pound was then losing faith in the aesthetic of objectiication, characterized
by “sincerity” and the “totality” of “perfect rest,” because it seemed to him
increasingly remote from the orientation it had initially taken from Imagism
and Vorticism.23 A late limerick published in the European recalls his concern
about abstraction succinctly:

This is the grave of old Zuk

who wasn’t really a crook
but who died of persistence
in that non-existence
which consists in refusing to LOOK.
(PT, p. 1200)

The grave, like the theft, is metaphorical only: Zukofsky lived and wrote well,
albeit in relative obscurity, until 1978. But some of Pound’s 1930s cantos do
begin to display a tendency to revisit or even revise history that does not
always go in fear of abstraction. This is less a refusal to look than an increas-
ingly biased tendency to seek out and accumulate evidence that betrays traces
of conspiratorial thinking. The poems are made vulnerable to that tendency
by the easy connection of unlike events, people, and concepts facilitated by a
less than ideally careful application of the ideogrammic method.
Pound’s best cantos of the 1930s remain thematically focused, concrete,
and also continue to display his signal use of end-stopped lines and rhythmic
regularity to bring the lines to a felt conclusion, after which the beginning of

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the next line will “catch the rise of the rhythm wave” (LE, p. 6). Consider, for
example, the fully achieved canto 45, which stages its lyrical condemnation
of usury in what Peter Makin has termed “the grand prophetic style: terse,
emphatic, and denunciatory.”24 If few poems are so well suited to Pound’s con-
temporaneous advice for learning about the art while avoiding the boredom
of “professorial documentation” – “LISTEN to the sound that it makes” – few,
too, have been as compellingly analyzed by critics.25 This terrestrial inferno
documents “sin against nature” and also against art – which is neither “made
to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and sell quickly” – and so,
Pound indicates, the extent of economic corruption can be gauged from the
quality of art produced during a given era: “with usura the line grows thick /
with usura is no clear demarcation” (C, p. 229). This is followed in canto 49 by a
rare ideogrammic “glimpse of paradiso” that makes use of many of the same
formal resources. Known as “The Seven Lakes Canto,” this free translation
creatively adapts material from a series of eight Chinese poems and paintings
from a Japanese manuscript volume that came to the poet through his parents
in 1928.26 The sonorous and image-rich approach to a capacious personal his-
tory inspired by the heirloom extends a familiar sense of thematic anonymity,
beginning in canto 1 with an Odyssean descent into hell, which nonetheless
retains individuality in the expression of a style. Canto 1 demands that there
be no interruption, no distortion of that style as a result of translation (in
this case of Homer’s Greek into Latin), in the lines “Lie quiet Divus. I mean,
that is Andreas Divus, / In oicina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer” (C, p. 5). The
opening line of canto 49, “For the Seven Lakes, and by no man these verses,”
is, besides the closing distich, one of four interpolated Poundian lines.27 The
balance is carried over from the composite source.
“Translation,” broadly construed, is an integral term of an authorial pro-
cess responsive to a demand to “make it new,” one that seeks out and adapts
source material that represents origins or perfections wherever those may be.
Such capaciousness, which exceeds individuality, sometimes appears contrar-
ian. For example, Pound’s early interest in what resources a poem like “The
Seafarer” might ofer to modern English from the Anglo-Saxon tradition came
about while he was building a reputation as an expert in Romance languages
and literature. A similar interest is recapitulated in the inspired and obscure
carrying-over of canto 36, which reprises Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti’s can-
zone “Donna mi pregha” in its ine realization of the Provençal troubadour
tradition. In “The Seven Lakes Canto” this interest produces a glimpse of
paradise in parallax that proceeds from a depiction of digniied and harmoni-
ous but altogether ordinary events and routines: wholly apart from – yet not

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exclusive of – our three dimensions, Pound inds “The fourth; the dimension
of stillness. / And the power over wild beasts,” a divine (Dionysian) power that
is granted only on rare occasions to special humans (C, p. 245).
The stylistic distinction between Pound and Williams as incipient open form
poets relevant to projectivist writers is a matter of individualized structures
and distinctive rhythms. The modern impulse to establish new forms in addi-
tion to breaking conventional ones – canto 81 recalls, “To break the pentam-
eter, that was the irst heave” – inds support in Pound’s observation that the
regular use of symmetrical stanzas “naturally HAPPENED when a man was
singing a long poem to a short melody which he had to use over and over.”28
Both Pound and Williams avoided the constraints of external symmetries and
meters, but where Pound often inds ways to bring his lines to a kind of resolu-
tion, Williams depends on radical enjambment and intensiications of syntax
to construct rhythms that either describe the action of his poems or serve to
make their meaning apparent. Williams exhibits textual strategies for the rep-
resentation of energy and motion in the formally distinguished “Poem” (“As
the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset”), which demonstrates a
style largely compatible with the projectivist emphasis on kinetics, in which
content dictates form (WCPI, p. 352). Not unlike his ideal verbal cat, the four
tercets that compose Williams’s unpunctuated one-sentence poem embody
precarious balance as well as purposeful motion. Remarkably modest at the
level of the word, “Poem” begins in the middle of an act less tentative than
intense, which makes the past tense of the action feel present and the language
seem solid. The consequence of the act it describes – climbing over leads to
stepping down – is all but inevitable. There is nothing extraneous here to dis-
tract from the progression, yet each line is unpredictable based on the ones
that precede it. “Poem” resists easy paraphrase because its form commands
all the signiicance of its content. Although the poem provides orientation
via prepositions, precision via verbs and adverbs, and weight via nouns, these
words in this order generate a formal sense of movement capable of produc-
ing surprise.
Williams’s emphasis on movement and form clariies his deinition of the
art of poetry, because “to write or to comprehend poetry the words must
be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack
of it which occurs in the piece” (IM, p. 146). This insistence on kinetics –
which enjoins readerly participation – pertains to the development of open
or organic verse to the extent that the projectivists deined composition by
ield by expressly rejecting “the inherited line, stanza, over-all-form, what is
the ‘old’ base of the non-projective.”29 In taking modernist experimentation

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to its logical limit, Olson and Creeley declare that the open poem operates
on a “principle” that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
CONTENT” and by a “process” that shapes the energies of the one “right
form” into a “high-energy construct, and, at all points, an energy discharge,”
stipulating that “one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON
ANOTHER” (COPr, p. 240).
For “projective or OPEN verse” poets, form requires movement, and the
manifesto opens with the constellation of terms “projectile,” “percussive,”
and “prospective,” all in opposition to the verse that “print bred,” which con-
tinues to dominate both American and English poetry “despite the work of
Pound & Williams” (COPr, p. 239). In a projective poem, form is determined by
content but is also unique to its author, given that it is shaped by “the HEAD,
by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE” as well as by “the HEART, by way of
the BREATH, to the LINE” (COPr, p. 242). “That’s the whole biz,” as Creeley
wrote Olson, “I mean / is precise, exact: what all Ez’s negatives were trying to
push to / in the Imagist biz. Look & see” (CC2, pp. 60–61). The varied appear-
ance of open form poems on the page – that is, Creeley’s poems look nothing
like Olson’s – is attributable to the physical makeup of each writer. That is,
the voice comes from the body, “speech is the ‘solid’ of verse, the secret of a
poem’s energy,” and particular speech reiies the poem so that “everything in
it can now be treated as solids, objects, things” (COPr, p. 244). A poet, declares
Olson, who is inclined to “sprawl” will “ind little to sing but himself,” yet one
who “stays inside himself ” is “able to listen, and his hearing through himself
will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make
their own way. It is in this way that the projective act . . . leads to dimensions
larger than the man” (COPr, p. 247). The signiicance of such a claim is not
only stylistic but also mystical, bridging a gap between the physical and meta-
physical, accessing “that place where breath comes from, where breath has its
beginnings, where drama has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all act
springs” (COPr, p. 249). Williams, in Spring and All, praises Marianne Moore
on similar terms: her poems also reject the “shapes” and “meter” of verse,
and some may be “diagrammatically informative,” yet they come “invariably
from the source from which poetry starts” (IM, p. 145). And then, of course,
they move.
Williams’s poems of the 1930s continued to experiment with kinetics and
form, in terms of the motion of feet and movement across lines, anticipat-
ing his 1940s move toward what he called a “variable foot” in a triadic stanza.
This gives rise to a model of the poem as a dance – a model that Olson,
whose “Tyrian Businesses” raises the question of “how to dance / sitting

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down,” shares.30 For both poets, a tendency to employ radical enjambment,

syntax-driven rhythms, and a rich, trim, local, and particularized language
renders such a model not only viable in theory but sometimes remarkably
successful in practice. In his introduction to Williams’s Selected Poems, the
poet Charles Tomlinson – professing a desire to be “the second Englishman
to read [Williams] aright” (the irst was D. H. Lawrence) – further relates
Williams’s practice to projectivist composition. He contends that the best of
these poems makes manifest “a vivid sense of what Olson calls ‘the elements
and minims of language,’ down to the syllabic components or ‘the dipthong /
ae.’”31 Although Tomlinson’s aptly chosen example is from poem VI in Spring
and All, the process is also on display in “The Dance,” a masterful ekphrastic
poem that reproduces in a single sentence the movement of a painting via the
music of lyrical language. As the sounds – consonants and vowels – accrue and
advance with an almost ritualistic sureness, the poem captures in just twelve
lines of tripping, falling rhythm (made primarily of wraparound dactyls) the
manner in which sixteenth-century village “dancers go round, they go round
and / around, the squeal and the blare and the / tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle
and iddles” (WCPII, p. 58). Ultimately, when the irst line, “In Breughel’s great
picture, The Kermess,” repeats as the last, to halt the movement and signal its
completion, Williams’s motivated, stylized, purposeful repetition is anything
but redundant. It is eicient.
Repetition is not only present in but integral to Williams’s body of work:
ideas, phrases, and sometimes whole poems are recapitulated in new contexts.
As Williams happily acknowledges, his own position is diametrically opposed
to that of “the extractors of genius” like Eliot, because in his work he is “mak-
ing a modern bolus” destined to be “the mass in which some other later Eliot
will dig” (SE, p. 285). His principle of accretion depends on a method that is
articulated in the preface to Paterson, Book 1 (1946):
To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum. . . .32

Consider, for example, the well-known phrase “no ideas but in things,” which
makes its way into Paterson, Book 1, part 1, by way of the irst lyric of The Wedge
(1944), “A Sort of Song” (WCPII, p. 55). The earlier presentation of “No ideas
/ but in things” in The Wedge responds to the overwhelming fact of America’s
then-current war against fascism, dismissing any relevance of metaphysics, and
expressing its key aesthetic concepts as “two bald statements: There’s nothing

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sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made
of words.” The poet’s focus on particulars demands special attention to the
relations between parts, and this process requires Williams to seek materials
that are close at hand and to arrange them precisely “into an intense expres-
sion of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the
speech that he uses” (WCPII, pp. 53–54). However, after the war, the opening
book of Paterson sought to isolate and then “unravel” a “common language”
that is composed of these very words, and in the process to recover the “mirac-
ulous” prospect of thoughts that are – and must be – “divorced from [our]
minds” (P, p. 12).
The accomplishment of Williams’s variable foot, which is perhaps his most
important contribution to the open ield poetics of the projectivists, may be
approached by way of another repetition. Poems that attempt to marshal a
variable foot too often fail to epitomize the form in the (rather vague) critical
terms Williams used to describe it, but “The Descent,” irst printed in Paterson,
Book 2, part 3 (1948), and reprinted as the opening to The Desert Music (1951),
embodies its possibilities nicely. The poem, which begins as a kind of ersatz
poetics statement, warrants attention and analysis, although its formal intrica-
cies – as with “Poem” or “The Dance” – intend to frustrate selective quotation.
It ends:
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat – since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness . (WCPII, p. 245)
In depicting the gain that follows from loss, like a victory taken from defeat,
Williams’s lines stand witness to global as well as personal history. They attest
that, in postwar America, poetry retains relevance as a tool of discovery, a
strategy for preserving memory, and even a species of action. Measure may be
the only reality modern humans can know, but poetic measure in particular
can open up new places, concepts, perceptions, and even places “formerly //
unsuspected.”
Williams’s art (like Creeley’s) is principally an art of linguistic making,
whereas Pound’s art (like Olson’s) typically prioritizes teaching or explaining.
But those two goals are by no means mutually exclusive. Williams expounded

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on his newest poetic ideas and their general relevance just two years prior to
Olson’s publication of “Projective Verse,” calling for “a revolution in the con-
cept of the poetic foot” that would result in “sweeping changes from top to
bottom of the poetic structure” (SE, p. 281). In his unstinting focus on the syl-
lable as “the minimum and source of speech” in an efort to undo “the smoth-
ering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot,” Olson was the one
to make the attack – and Williams subsequently reprinted Olson’s “Projective
Verse” in his Autobiography, appreciably increasing its audience (COPr, p. 241).
In a late interview, Williams agreed that Olson’s theorization of the syllable
and line followed in the same Whitmanian tradition as his variable foot with
regard to “the spacing of the verses,” but admitted that he had “been trying to
approach a shorter [measured] line which I haven’t quite been able to nail.”33
These statements relate to the claim that ield poetics ultimately generates
active force via form: the two halves are the language of illumination (“the
HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE”) and the kinetics of the poet’s
body (“the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”) (COPr, p. 240).
The variable foot was a signiicant if not uniformly successful quantitative
experiment in lexible cadence that, despite an ongoing critical expression of
not unreasonable skepticism, poets – certainly projectivist ones – found use-
ful. The standard critical responses to the variable foot pithily dismiss it as a
“rubber inch” (after Kenner) or elaborately attempt a degree of technical pre-
cision that risks generalizing it into meaninglessness as “one heavily accented
syllable, an unlimited number of unaccented syllables, and an unlimited num-
ber of syllables of secondary accent” (after Yvor Winters).34 Marjorie Perlof
ofers a fresh perspective by proposing that it was scored to the eye rather than
the ear (NSE, p. 25). Among the poets, Levertov vindicates it explicitly, insisting
that it is “temporal and auditory,” that each segment has the same duration in
time, and that the “variations in speed” as well as the pauses in each foot (or seg-
ment) “have expressive functions to fulill – waiting, pondering, or hesitating”
(NSE, pp. 24, 25). Williams also commends Levertov’s comprehension of the
“unity” of his own “metrical arrangement of lines,” crediting her with being
“very much more alert to my feeling about words.”35 This alertness, however,
also extends beyond her sense of the rhythmic possibilities of the variable foot;
as von Hallberg recounts, “Levertov is one of the few people to observe that
much of what ‘Williams said about the American idiom is not really borne out
in his poetry because much of it rises way above the American idiom as it is
commonly used. It’s a kind of high language’ ” (COSA, p. 74).
The claim for the memory of whiteness in “The Descent,” which seems
carefully calibrated to the capacity assigned to whiteness in Pound’s Pisan

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Cantos to preserve and synthesize, suggests a relevant thematic connection

between Williams’s and Pound’s postwar work. Written from a cage in the
U.S. Army’s detention training center near Pisa, with no access to research
materials, these may of necessity be the most American as well as the most
personal of Pound’s cantos. The questions they pose are at once formal, his-
torical, public, and private. The lines to which Williams responds are found
near the beginning of canto 74:
What you depart from is not the way
and olive tree blown white in the wind
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candor?
“the great periplum brings in the stars to our shore.”
(C, p. 445)
“Candor” is a powerful term that speaks to the prospects for art and memory
after defeat, denoting not only a brilliant illumination (or literal whiteness)
but also integrity, sincerity, and freedom from bias. Whether these nostal-
gic, troubled cantos constitute an attempt to atone for Pound’s wartime
activities (adherents to this position promote as evidence the lines near the
end of canto 81 that repeat the insistent refrain “Pull down thy vanity”) or
to explain and vindicate them (“But to have done instead of not doing / this
is not vanity”) has been contested. If there is a degree of contrition, it is cer-
tainly intermittent. However, a clear measure of fellow feeling and mutual
appreciation persists in the tense times after World War II. Williams – who
had expressed annoyance to Zukofsky at being absent from Pound’s epic
when so many others were present – inally makes his début at the end
of canto 78, during a scenic description that ultimately recalls the dictum
“no ideas but in things” and pays tribute to the achievement of “The Red
Wheelbarrow”:

and as for the solidity of the white oxen in all this

perhaps only Dr Williams (Bill Carlos)
will understand its importance,
its benediction. He wd/ have put in the cart. (C, p. 503)

Although Pound and Williams never again collaborated as closely as they did in
the years prior to World War I, and although in 1939 Williams publicly accused
Pound of anti-Semitism in his review of Guide to Kulchur, their persistent
regard for each other’s literary work helped sustain a friendship. They shared
not only an editor – James Laughlin of New York’s New Directions – but also

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mutual interests in representations of American history in literature, theories

of social credit, and the development of emerging American poets such as
Olson and Creeley. Postwar publications brought new celebrity and acclaim to
both poets, particularly through Pound’s celebrated and contested Pisan Cantos
and the earliest installments of Williams’s ive-part long poem, Paterson. In the
wake of World War II, during the twelve-year period when Pound was incar-
cerated at St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., Williams remained skeptical
about the plea of mental incompetence that had excused Pound from standing
trial on charges of treason. But he nevertheless visited Pound in the asylum
and provided what support he could, until his lagging health prevented him
from doing more.
Olson, who had recently resigned from a promising political career
in the Roosevelt administration to begin his career as a poet, still lived in
Washington, D.C., after the war and visited Pound at St. Elizabeths. “The
K,” the early poem in which he publicly tenders his resignation from politics
(“Take, then, my answer . . .”), not only declares the continuity of his public
commitments (“The afairs of men remain a chief concern”) but also posits
the importance of place as well as the cyclical nature of change (“There! is
a tide in the afairs of men to discern”).36 In light of his focus on the role of
political art, Pound’s ideas and conversation proved unsurprisingly inimical
to Olson’s liberalism, and he told Creeley bluntly in the summer of 1950 that
his “big struggle, after the decision to leave politics (THE K), was to leave Ez”
(CC1, p. 136). The praise Olson ofers in “GrandPa, Goodbye,” the essay that
oicially records his decision to “leave Ez,” is qualiied, ambivalent: while
Olson inds The Cantos overly personal and even nostalgic, he also asserts
that Pound himself was “an extraordinary ear of an era, and did the listening
for a whole time, the sharpest sort of listening, from Dante down. (I think
of Bill Williams’ remark: ‘It’s the best damned ear ever born to listen to this
language!’)” (COPr, p. 146). Creeley, too, established a correspondence with
Pound at St. Elizabeths, irst ostensibly through Dorothy Pound and then
directly with the incarcerated poet (who, for a time, was signing his letters
“Anon E. Mouse”). Creeley did not elect to “leave Ez” after Olson’s strident
fashion, although his real ambivalence is evident in a letter to Cid Corman
that embraces the “man who pushed prosody in speciic uses” and “who
demanded Joyce, Williams, Eliot, etc. should be READ” but cautions against
the “man who delights in conspiracy / & the resulting superiorities,” whom
“one sd damn well stay clear of,” concluding that he is describing “A tightrope
granted / but one you have to walk.”37 In Creeley’s “have to” the senses of
both need and inevitability are deeply felt.

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Olson’s commitment to renewal, to change as evolution or revolution, is a

focal issue even in his earliest open verse experimentation. “The Kingishers,”
written in 1949, is a both sustained and overt meditation on this relation,
beginning with the universal and ahistorical proposition paraphrased from
Heraclitus, “What does not change / is the will to change.” In Olson’s usage
a slash becomes a symbol that marks not a line break but “a pause so light it
hardly separates the words” (COPr, p. 245). To develop a means of punctu-
ation that separates sounds without either afecting the semantic meaning
of the line or slowing its progress is crucial, because, in a projective poem,
“one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”
(COPr, p. 240). Precise and regulated typewriter composition – which requires
monospaced type with an augmented range of punctuation marks – afords
the poet for the irst time “the stave and bar that a musician has had,” and the
projective writer is therefore able to “indicate exactly the breath, the pauses,
the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases”
(COPr, p. 245). Musicality here is more than a convenient analogy; the achieved
ability to record the music of speech without recourse to the devices of rhyme
and meter is central to Olson’s theory of projective verse. While the poems
may be pedagogical or didactic, the knowledge that Olson seeks to transmit
is absolutely not available in facts alone and is antithetical to ornamentation
and fancy. It depends on a repeatable performance that is derived from the
acts of the body rigorously listening to its voice and transcribing the syllables
and lines meticulously on the page. As Olson himself emphasizes, the “per-
sonal and instantaneous” recording of “the meaning and the breathing” is
what enables “the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and
Williams are practicing it” (COPr, p. 246).
Olson’s long and insistently active poem Maximus is an epic of the local,
“Root person in root place,” and it is concerned with an isolated conjunction
of perceptions, concepts, and events that can be brought together only by
the imagination of the poet (MP, p. 16). This conjunction animates the pro-
jective poem. Its operation is powerfully revealed in “Letter 3,” a poem that
elucidates the particular sense of locality that drives the epic. The root here is
literal, that of the tansy plant, which is given at the outset as “Tansy buttons,
tansy / for my city / Tansy for their noses” (MP, p. 13). However, the concept
of the local in Maximus’s Gloucester is a condition of the possibility presented
by the harbor and the sea and, as such, does not preclude an idea of mobility.
Tansy is, in fact, a igure for both rootedness and mobility, because it simul-
taneously characterizes Gloucester as a particular place from which to sing
yet also as one to which the singer (and the herb) are not native. As Olson

688
 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

recalls, tansy was brought to the area in an accident of commerce on the

bottom of sacks, and its disappearance from the place was “due to more ei-
cient mowers, and the desire (like blacktop) to have anything smooth and of
one sort or character,” which prompts the poet to “celebrate TANSY MORE
THAN BEFORE.”38 Formerly common in Gloucester and rare elsewhere,
tansy is reminiscent of the more familiar goldenrod; it has extremely limited
commercial use and is in no conventional sense important, which is exactly
what renders it an ideal repository of cultural value for Olson. The pungent
herb becomes indistinguishable from the smell of freedom, “of all owners,”
“of all of us,” which is expressly opposed to slavery and the commercialism
of “mu-sick”: the object assumes value because its referent is known and
mutually prized, unlike “those who use words cheap, who use us cheap.”
Even when the young Olsonian speaker – here distinguished from Olson’s
“Tyrian” (one source for this compound hero is the second century A.D. phi-
losopher Maximus of Tyre) – as a boy, newly arrived in Gloucester, rolled
in tansy from Cressy’s Beach on Freshwater Cove “and didn’t know it was
tansy,” he did appreciate “how rare it was” (compared to Worcester, where
he was born) (MP, pp. 13, 14). Knowledge of a locale, like deinition, is com-
munal; inclusion in community is synonymous with an ability to recognize
it as your own.
Olson’s Maximus, which essentially agrees with Pound’s ideas about vocab-
ulary and pedagogy but with Williams’s ideas of syntax and structure, is
an American depiction of the Greek polis (city-state), a local setting that is
deined by the quality of relations among citizens rather than the fact of a
group dwelling in a particular place. This difers clearly from the standard
deinition of the nation, and Olson’s estimation of the diference is clear in
Maximus’s appeal to the heterogeneous city: “o tansy city, root city / let them
not make you / as the nation is.” The goal of the poem is to achieve and main-
tain the unity of polis, a totality mirrored by that of the citizens who compose
it, in the coherence that can be revealed by a rare scent, by “a few” who remain
sensitive to “a word”:

and that word meant to mean not a single thing the least more than
what it does mean (not at all to sell any one anything, to keep them anywhere,
not even
in this rare place. (MP, p. 15)

Although Williams’s Paterson does not share this emphasis on civic relations,
the concept of a long poem dedicated to a single city (“the LOCAL”) was

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as important to Olson as what he derived from Pound’s methodology (“the

RAG-BAG”), and he clariies this debt to Corman in 1953:
Or put it that pat: EP the verb, BILL the NOUN problem. To do. And who,
to do. Neither of them: WHAT. That is, EP sounds like what, but what his is
is only more methodology, in fact, simply, be political. Politics – not econom-
ics – is him. And validly. For (1) politics is a context wide as nature, and not
only what we call “politics”; and (2) its essence is will. Which latter – will – is
what EP cares abt.39
For Creeley the concern about methodology was inextricable from a con-
cern about structure, as he came to recognize following an abortive attempt
to read the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead that had moved Olson so
profoundly. As he explains to Pound, his efort to comprehend Whitehead was
codiied by The Chinese Written Character essay: “I’d been reading Whitehead,
and came out, inally, with not much more than this sentence, ‘The only
endurances are structures of activity . . .’ And I felt it, then, a warping of his
own emphases to so isolate it. But here, in the Fenollosa, it is altogether clear
and unequivocal (page 60 – ‘a true noun, etc.’); it falls precisely to hand.”40
Forms – or “structures of activity” – are integral to projectivist practice,
and particularly so to Creeley’s remarkable diverse compositions and col-
laborations, from early to late. When Creeley, whom Olson ordained as “the
igure of Outward” in the dedication of Maximus, left Harvard to drive an
ambulance for the American Field Service in Burma, he took with him copies
of The Wedge and The Cantos. These were happy choices. Yet achival research
led George Butterick to realize that “much of Creeley’s earliest verse is
poetry aching toward deinition,” because the poet disarticulated the lines of
the verse he wrote in the late 1940s that was composed in regular stanzas – for
example, “Still Life or” and “Sanine to Leda” – revising that work “for Le Fou,
his irst collection, in accordance with his understanding of poetics as they
had begun to emerge from the discussion with Olson underway.”41 The words
remain virtually unchanged, as these 1940s poems were recast from conven-
tionally closed forms to open ones, and Creeley’s projective practice contin-
ued to develop through the 1950s into the 1960s. The poet Robert Grenier
puts a point on this observation when he declares – in a piece called “I HATE
SPEECH,” published in the irst issue of This – that “ ‘PROJECTIVE VERSE’
IS PIECES ON,” suggesting that the projective element of Creeley’s writing
dominates in the 1968 volume Pieces and everything after.42 Creeley neatly
sums up the force of this development as personal revelation: “Sometime in
the mid-sixties I grew inexorably bored with the tidy containment of clusters
of words on single pieces of paper called ‘poems’ – ‘this will really get them,

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

wrap it up. . . .’ I could see nothing in my life nor those of others adjacent that
supported this single hits theory.”43 Of the fresh seriality of Pieces, Creeley
recalls how a shift from composing on the typewriter to “scribbling” in note-
books of various sizes opened up “many senses of possibility” because “such
notebooks accumulated the writing and they made no decisions about it – it
was all there, in whatever state it occurred, everything from addresses to
moralistic self-advising, to such notes as I now ind in the smallest and irst
of them”:
This size page forces the
damn speciously gnomic
sans need for same
– it
it –44
The point, for Creeley, is that this provides access to “the truth, however
unreal,” a more accurate and meaningful representation of experience that is
not only personal but also public and communal. This transformation of writ-
ing is one also of thinking about when the process “began to lose its speciic
edges, its singleness of occurrence, and I worked to be open to the casual, the
commonplace, that which collected itself. The world transformed to bits of
paper, torn words, ‘it/it.’ Its continuity became again physical” (RCE, p. 575).
The lines that open Pieces describe the structure as well as the purpose of the
new process poem:
As real as thinking
wonders created
by the possibility –
forms. A period
at the end of a sentence
which
began it was
into a present,
a presence
saying
something
as it goes. (RCP1, p. 379)
This combination of qualities – deinite and indeinite, present and absent,
intimate and impersonal, developing and completed – is captured by a pro-
noun that is variously anticipatory, deictic, and exclamatory. “It” stands in
as an abstract concrete, an unrestrained order. That is what Creeley strives

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to present, beginning with a proposition in the past tense, “it was,” and then
deining, modifying, and reifying it as “it goes” into the present.
Creeley attests that the very “intent of the poem” is “a process of deini-
tion” and explicitly attributes his sense of the revelatory nature of the art to
Williams’s comment in the Autobiography that “the poet thinks with his poem,
in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.”45 A poet insistently
of the local – rather than the “small” or “modest” – he is compelled by ideas of
range and perception and thinks about the open ield in terms of its boundar-
ies. This becomes the source of measure as well as the value of chance in any
complex locality: the “unequivocal order” to which poetry obtains, and by
which activity the poet can “as Charles Olson says, come into the world” (RCE,
pp. 486, 488). One limit case for such a world is available in the “so sparely pre-
sent” high desert of New Mexico, a place that, as Creeley approvingly quotes,
“is less ‘nature’ than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries” (RCE,
p. 441). The spare, tight, irregular couplets of “For John Duf ” assess and cri-
tique the place the poet professes to wish to leave: “not a tourist’s paradise,”
“not the solar / energy capital // of the world, not,” in the harsh light of day,
“your place in the sun” (RCP2, p. 169). The night, however, ofers other possi-
bilities, recalling conversation with a sculptor (Duf ) about the shapes, forms,
colors, and company that deine a place. A place, and its history, is of the mind;
the closest rhyme ofered by any couplet in the poem – “a menhir – / remem-
ber” – makes this point insistently. The menhir, here a boundary stone near an
arroyo, marks the inexplicable prehistory of culture or making that persists
without clear purpose beyond its existence, which is given and is suicient.
For Creeley in the New Mexican desert, this rhyme raises a question about the
relation of local culture to myth, history, and, a favorite term, company:
a menhir –
remember
that oar
you could screw into
ground, say,
here I’ll build a city?
No way. (RCP2, p. 170)
The vision of “a quiet // grey column” elicits a reference to the well-made
oar that Tiresias had prophesied that Odysseus (restored as the king of Ithaca)
must carry inland until its function was no longer discernible by the locals, at
which time he would plant it and there establish new residence. In rejecting
this prophecy, the poem latly rejects the literal and concomitantly literary

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

referent as well. A combination of the concrete and the abstract, the spatial
and the temporal, and a continuous present and an inevitable (but not yet) past
instead provokes a discovery that is central to the “it” of Creeley’s projectivist
poetics:
And this it
you gave us:
here
is all the wonder,
there
is all there is. (RCP2, p. 172)

*
To the extent that they are deined stylistically, the key writers of the projec-
tivist and Objectivist generations have long been associated with Pound and
Williams but not with one another. The generations are as uneasily close to the
modernist masters as they are uneasily removed from one another. Explicitly
unconcerned with issues of originality and inl uence, Creeley was proud of
the company he kept and had reason to claim that Objectivism – especially
the work of his friend Zukofsky – forged a continuity between Pound and
Williams and the East Coast projectivist poets.46 Yet Zukofsky conceived of
the connection quite diferently, complaining in a letter to Edward Dahlberg,
Olson’s predecessor at Black Mountain College, that “Projective Verse,” which
he derides as Olson’s “Projectile,” derived directly (if imperfectly) from his
own poetic theories in the February 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry maga-
zine.47 “If anything,” he alleges, Olson’s manifesto was “a steal,” and it was
“bungled up” in the process. Olson gives surprisingly little serious thought
to the Objectivists in “Projective Verse” or more generally. He acknowledges
almost incidentally that “it is no accident that Pound and Williams both were
involved variously in a movement which got called ‘objectivism,’ ” attempts to
shelve it as a (formerly) “necessary quarrel . . . with ‘subjectivism,’ ” and then
proposes “objectism” as “a more valid formulation for present use” (COPr,
p. 247). Although it is uncertain whether Zukofsky’s charge of plagiarism is
warranted, he was surely justiied in challenging this blunt misunderstanding
and curt dismissal of Objectivism.
The development and practice of open form poetics does give rise to ques-
tions of inl uence and originality. On these grounds, Perlof has criticized
Olson more comprehensively than any other major critic, in an article that
takes its title from Olson’s repudiation of Pound and Williams as “inferior

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predecessors.” Here she persuasively demonstrates that “Projective Verse,”

the central demonstration piece, mainly paraphrases theories established by
Pound and concludes that it “is thus not as revolutionary as Olson’s admirers
have professed it to be.”48 Ralph Maud works to ameliorate the appearance of
Olson being “arrogant and ungrateful” by recuperating the context in which
the attribution “inferior” was used in a literal sense of what is “below or under-
neath . . . as a scafold,” suggesting that any meaningful predecessors (includ-
ing precedent versions of the self ) may be understood as a means of giving
“backing from the past, which can be considered a layer under the present.”49
In any case, few now would disagree that the practitioners of projective verse
are rightly known for amplifying and extending – or, more dismissively, for
imitating – the innovations that distinguished Pound’s and Williams’s mod-
ernism. Such derivations, in Maximus, are frequent, important, and wholly
unembarrassed: borrowings and allusions from Williams’s and Pound’s work
are abundant.
Given Olson’s and Creeley’s propensity to airm – if also to qualify –
literary allegiances, the question of inl uence may be intriguing, but it is
not as damning as it might otherwise seem. When Gerard Malanga asked
Olson shortly before his death whether he could have written Maximus with-
out having known Williams’s and Pound’s work, the poet replied, “That’s
like asking me how I could have written without having read.”50 This is, of
course, neither a statement of value (relative or absolute) nor an admis-
sion that his work has nothing new to ofer; to the contrary, Olson inti-
mates that Maximus “was created to put me out of business, as well as my
friend, the lovely Dr. Williams, as well as Mr. Pound.”51 The evidence of
an Objectivist struggle to be recognized as the generation that followed
Pound and Williams, entirely left out of Olson’s account, became apparent
when the projectivist generation of 1950 was gaining notoriety. In “Third
Wave Objectivism,” Ron Silliman argues that the return of the Objectivists
to active publication was in part inspired by the very public successes of
the projectivist writers and a desire not to be eclipsed by those successes.52
Rachel Blau DuPlessis explains this historical argument with reference to
Silliman’s claims, positing that a second phase of Objectivist writing after
1929–1935 is deined by the very absence of Objectivist poets, “which created
an extremism in the New American Poets of the 1950s as they tried to for-
mulate an ‘open-form, speech-based’ poetics that would connect them to
Williams and Pound.”53
Objectivist writing is conventionally understood to be about writing itself,
and projectivist writing is about the act of performance, which emphasizes

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 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

speech, or breath and body “telling a brain,” as Olson puts it (COPr, p. 243).
This appears to present a relatively clear choice to subsequent writers, whose
preference shapes the contours of literary history – but the choice is not so
simple. In 1929 Zukofsky tried to express to Williams the risks of collabora-
tion both within and across generations: “What bothers you I suppose is that
[Pound is] always wanting to button your overcoat – as you say – but after all
he has a beard, and that’s his privilege. Somehow my allegiance – if I have
any – is all your old friend’s after all.”54 By 1950 Williams had a beard too, and
Olson, whose professed allegiance ran the other way, then proposed to him
that the projectivists must “love, not imitate, you and ez.”55 When inl uence
is at stake, such choices are l uid, complex, often misleading, and just as often
misunderstood.
The diiculty even to identify the key members of the East Coast projec-
tivist generation beyond the Olson-Creeley core exacerbates this misunder-
standing. Spending time at Black Mountain College is not a useful criterion
for inclusion, because some of those who were there it the model less easily
than, say, Levertov or Eigner, who never so much as visited the place. Style is
more telling. In “Maximus, to Himself ” the “wind / and water man” sits at
the harbor and speaks of the as-yet “undone business” of apprehending “the
known,” which cannot be discovered but must be given, as “a life, love, and
from one man / the world” (MP, pp. 57, 56). (This one man is Creeley, who
expressed the sense of the “world” as, etymologically, the span of a life [RCE,
p. 66].) He entertains questions about his superiority, his process, and his con-
tribution, but not about his presence, “with the sea / stretching out / from
my feet,” or “the stem of me,” which circumscribes place and polis (MP, p. 57).
This relation of presence to projection allows for an expression of cultural
power as a measurement of the song and the singing self, as Maximus relates
in “Letter 9”:
I measure my song,
measure the sources of my song,
measure me, measure
my forces. (MP, p. 48)

Olson’s image of projection is usefully complicated by the actual demands of

the breath and body when the facility of those qualities can no longer be taken
for granted. If stylistic consonance rather than proximity deines the group,
Eigner can help. His best poems press projectivist principles about form and
content – about the syllable and the line, the ear and the breath – to their log-
ical limits. This is because, although Eigner was palsied from hard birth, his

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poems are not merely a vocal prosthesis, an expression of his physical limita-
tions. Eigner’s emphasis on slowness, parataxis, and the motion of individual
phonemes resembles the movement of the triadic line for Williams and the
physical dimensions of the page for Pound’s Cantos.
Eigner’s work clariies the relation of song, sources, and forces as well as
the measurement that corroborates them. In his poems, Eigner consciously
aims to produce “a piece of language in verse, measured, deliberated,” that is
really “a stretch, process of thinking, one thought really attained, in a second
or longer time, leading to another, a math of everyday life, penetrating or
anyway evaluative.”56 Privileging intensity rather than alacrity, Eigner uses the
“immediacy and force” of poetic composition to achieve projective thought
in which, as Olson speciies, “our management of daily reality as of the daily
work” gets on.57 Consider, in this regard, what may be his most famous poem,
“Again dawn,” from another time in fragments. It ends:
nowhere
empty the blue
stars
our summer
on the ground
like last night another
time
in fragments58

Here the “invisible whiteness” of the sky (invoked earlier in the same poem)
occludes the blue of the stars, simultaneously presented as center of the text
yet absented from it, to fragment time and displace memory. This is not, how-
ever, any conventional act of preservation; Eigner’s fragments are not being
shored against the ruin of anyone or anything. These fragments, which for
Duncan encompass “melodies of perception” that “raise the very body of a
world whose reality we sought in poetry,” cannot stand in to protect or salvage
an integral experience, precisely because they are the experience.59 For Charles
Bernstein, this “other” time “extends and deepens the always present present,
created by the algebra of constellated (or multiplied) moments of perception,”
resulting in “a kind of hyperperceptual poetry.”60 These stars stand as the only
experience available to us, the one witnessed at the center of the poem, the
dropping, passing out, and emptying that, together, “we saw.” Thus a season,
like a night, is memorable only for its evanescence and its repeatability, and
the space-ield (here “nowhere”) of the modern gives way once again to what

696
 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

Olson called “space & its live air” (“Again dawn”) (CC5, p. 49). In 1993 this poem
was carved into the façade of the Berkeley University Art Museum.
Together Pound and Williams ofered future generations of American poets
access to a spirit of radical innovation as well as a precedent for efecting change,
but they also provided distinctive theories about how vocabulary, syntax, line-
ation, rhythm, and even history and thought operate in a (late) modern poem.
What Pound and Williams made possible for these writers and those who fol-
lowed – Language writers of the late twentieth century and conceptual writers
of the early twenty-irst – is a particular way of understanding poetic language,
not as a mode of communication but as a material practice pitched between
speech and music. This, as Kenneth Goldsmith intriguingly argues, is inally the
end of modernism and the beginning of something else, something conceptual
and apparently postmodern: “Real speech, when paid close attention to, forces
us to realize how little one needs to do in order to write. Just paying attention
to what is right under our noses – framing, transcription, and preservation –
is enough.” Goldsmith insistently iterates the mantra “I LOVE SPEECH”
throughout an essay dedicated to “methods of disorientation” that require us to
“reimagine our normative relationship to language,” marking a new return to
speech, as opposed to writing or composition, even.61 This radical shift positions
experimental predecessors such as Pound, Williams, and the projectivists nearer
the main line of American writing, and it makes their experiments appear to be
conventionally “literary” in the process. It also demands that we ask whether
that is, in the inal analysis, a more interesting place to be.

Notes
1. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 26.
This collection will be cited in the text as IM.
2. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of
Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: New
Directions, 1996), p. 31.
3. Pound and Williams, Pound/Williams, pp. 42, 44.
4. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz
and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), p. 3. This col-
lection will be cited in the text as WCPI.
5. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New
Directions, 1968), p. 3. This collection will be cited in the text as LE.
6. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971),
p. 191.

697
 Matt h e w H ofe r

7. Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 208. This volume will be cited in the text
as COSA.
8. Ezra Pound, “Praefatio aut Tumulus Cimicium,” in Ezra Pound (ed.), Active
Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 400.
9. Ezra Pound, “An Object,” in Richard Sieburth (ed.), Poems and Translations
(New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 236. This collection will be cited in
the text as PT.
10. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970),
p. 84. This volume will be cited in the text as GB.
11. Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz
(New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 251.
12. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra
Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1936), pp. 12, 7.
13. Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, pp. 16–17, 22, 9.
14. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, The Complete Correspondence, 10 vols., ed.
George F. Butterick (vols. 1–8) and Richard Blevins (vols. 9–10) (Santa Barbara,
Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980–1994), vol. 9, pp. 229–30. This collection will
be cited in the text as CC1–CC10.
15. Hugh Kenner, Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (New York:
Obolensky, 1958), pp. 58–59.
16. Barry Magid and Hugh Witemeyer (eds.), William Carlos Williams and Charles
Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 95.
17. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems. Vol. II, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher
MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988), p. 55. This collection will be
cited in the text as WCPII.
18. Guy Davenport, “Scholia and Conjectures for Charles Olson’s ‘The
Kingishers,’ ” Boundary 2 2 (1973–1975), pp. 252–53.
19. William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1954), p.
109. This collection will be cited in the text as SE.
20. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995), pp.
53, 264. This volume will be cited in the text as C.
21. Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924; New York: Da Capo,
1968), p. 20.
22. Pound and Williams, Pound/Williams, p. 139.
23. Louis Zukofsky, “An Objective,” in Mark Scroggins (ed.), Prepositions+: The
Collected Critical Essays, rev. and expanded ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2000), pp. 12–13.
24. Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), p. 205.
25. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1933; New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 201.
26. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), p. 190.

698
 Pound, Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

27. Hugh Kenner, “More on the Seven Lakes Canto,” Paideuma 2 (1973), p. 46.
28. Pound, ABC of Reading, pp. 199–200.
29. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 239. This collection will be
cited in the text as COPr.
30. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), p. 39. This volume will be cited in the text
as MP.
31. Magid and Witemeyer (eds.), William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson,
p. 95.
32. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York:
New Directions, 1992), p. 3. This volume will be cited in the text as P.
33. Walter Sutton, “A Visit with William Carlos Williams,” Minnesota Review 1
(1961), pp. 309–24, 310.
34. Denise Levertov, New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992),
pp. 25, 23. This collection will be cited in the text as NSE.
35. Sutton, “A Visit with William Carlos Williams,” p. 311.
36. Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, ed. George F. Butterick
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 14.
37. Robert Creeley to Cid Corman, July 17, 1950, Robert Creeley correspondence,
The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. Reproduced courtesy
of the Lilly Library, and by permission of the Robert Creeley Estate.
38. George F. Butterick, A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), pp. 22–23.
39. Charles Olson, Letters for Origin: 1950–1956, ed. Albert Glover (New York: Cape
Goliard Press, 1970), p. 129.
40. Robert Creeley to Ezra Pound, September 28, 1951, Robert Creeley Papers,
Stanford University, Department of Special Collections and University
Archives – Manuscript Division, Stanford, Calif. Reproduced courtesy of
Stanford University Libraries, and by permission of the Robert Creeley Estate.
41. George F. Butterick, “Robert Creeley and the Tradition,” in Carroll F. Terrell
(ed.), Robert Creeley: The Poet’s Workshop (Orono, Maine: National Poetry
Foundation, 1984), pp. 120–21.
42. Robert Grenier, “I HATE SPEECH,” This 1 (1971), n.p.
43. Robert Creeley, Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), p. 574. This collection will be cited in the text as RCE.
44. Creeley, Collected Essays, pp. 535, 536; Robert Creeley, Collected Poems, 2 vols.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 2006), vol. 1, p. 391. Volumes 1 and
2 of Collected Poems will be cited in the text as RCP1 and RCP2, respectively.
45. Creeley, Collected Essays, p. 473; William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography
of William Carlos Williams (1951; New York: New Directions, 1967), pp.
390–91.

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46. Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971, ed. Donald Allen
(Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons, 1973), p. 14.
47. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern
American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 147.
48. Marjorie Perlof, “Charles Olson and the ‘Inferior Predecessors’: ‘Projective
Verse’ Revisited,” ELH 40 (1973), pp. 285–306, 288.
49. Ralph Maud, Charles Olson at the Harbor: A Biography (Vancouver, B.C.: Talon,
2008), p. 169.
50. Gerard Malanga and Charles Olson, “The Art of Poetry XII,” Paris Review 49
(1970), pp. 176–205, 198.
51. Malanga and Olson, “The Art of Poetry XII,” p. 197.
52. Ron Silliman, “Third Phase Objectivism,” Paideuma 10 (1981), pp. 85–89.
53. George Oppen, Selected Letters, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1990), p. 364.
54. William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, The Correspondence of William
Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahern (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. 39.
55. Charles Olson to William Carlos Williams, April 21, 1950; quoted in James E. B.
Breslin, “Introduction: The Presence of Williams in Contemporary Poetry,” in
William Carlos Williams, Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger
Poets, ed. James E. B. Breslin (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 28.
56. Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954–1989, ed. Benjamin Friedlander
(New York: Roof Books, 1989), p. 25.
57. Eigner, Areas Lights Heights, p. 135; Olson, Collected Prose, p. 240.
58. Larry Eigner, another time in fragments (London: Fulcrum Press, 1967), p. 2.
59. Robert Duncan, jacket note for Eigner, another time in fragments, n.p.
60. Charles Bernstein, “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” in Louis Armand
(ed.), Contemporary Poetics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
2007), p. 9.
61. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Postlude: I Love Speech,” in Marjorie Perlof and Craig
Dworkin (eds.), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 285–90, 286.

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 Chapter 31
Langston Hughes and His World
D av i d C h ion i M o o r e

African American poetry lourished in the early twentieth century – key

igures included James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and
Countee Cullen – giving African American poets a more established but still
marked presence, seen not as American poets (who were Negro) but as Negro
poets. Much the same obtained in African American poetry’s next major lo-
rescence, in Black Arts–era writers like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and the
elder Gwendolyn Brooks. Their markedness, or status as an inevitably raced
collective, can be seen in a 1993 precursor to the present volume, Jay Parini’s
Columbia History of American Poetry. Parini’s History ofers single-author chap-
ters for Longfellow, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens,
Williams, Crane, and Auden – all there individually as poets, but not as whites.
In contrast, the volume assigns the seven African American poets named
previously, plus Langston Hughes, to three chapters set aside for black poets:
“Early African American Poetry,” “The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance,”
and “The Black Arts Poets.”1 “Oicial” recognition that African American
poets could stand unclustered and be seen as integral rather than supplemen-
tary to “general” or white American traditions arrived a decade later in Sacvan
Bercovitch’s eight-volume Cambridge History of American Literature, whose
chapter “Langston Hughes: The Color of Modernism” argued for the individ-
ual importance of at least one raced poet, and for his position in a seemingly
unraced literary movement.2
Thus the present chapter, part of a next-stage consideration of African
American poetry, is titled “Langston Hughes and His World.” This title sug-
gests many things. “World,” for one, is a capacious term, far larger than (for
example) “circle,” and it includes but exceeds the United States. “World” is
also not “era” or “age” and so argues that Hughes’s long career is framed
as well by space as it is by time. “World,” too, is in the singular, relecting
Hughes’s conviction, and the evidence of his work, that Harlem piano play-
ers, Georgia mothers, conscript Moors, Spanish Negroes in the cane ields,

701
 Davi d C h ioni Mo ore

and even Chinese workers in the foundries can all ind voice in one poetic
oeuvre. The title’s “his” suggests not that Hughes owned the world, but that
he considered it his artistic home. In that broad light, this chapter surveys and
assesses the poet Langston Hughes in the context of his many worldly links.
More speciically, it proposes four frameworks through which Hughes and his
many diverse works, especially his poems, can productively be viewed: the
bardic-demotic, left-internationalist/Afro-planetary, professional, and subli-
mated-closeted frameworks.
The great African American poet and man of letters James Langston
Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, into an uncertain
future.3 Although descended on his mother’s side from distinguished African
American activists and leaders, Hughes was abandoned early by his father,
who hated U.S. racism and became a prosperous if cold-hearted business-
man and landowner in Mexico. Hughes was likewise not well cared for by his
mother. His childhood was spent living with diferent relatives (and some-
times his mother) in Missouri, Kansas, and inally Ohio, where he attended
Cleveland’s burgeoning multicultural Central High School, graduating in
1920 as the class poet. Sent by his father to study engineering at Columbia
University in New York – an unusual distinction for an African American of
that era – Hughes dropped out after one year and took up work as a messboy
on an ill-maintained freight ship that plied the coast of Africa. In his irst pub-
lished autobiography, Hughes said he tossed all his books overboard as the
ship left New York, but he confessed in a draft that he had kept one volume:
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After a brief return to the United States, Hughes
shipped out again for Europe, where he spent several vagabond months before
repairing again to New York. Throughout the 1920s, Hughes divided his time
among Europe, Harlem (the great center of Negro cultural life in New York),
Washington, D.C., and the small but distinguished historically black Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in 1929. (In deference
to Hughes’s lifelong usage and self-identiication, this chapter will often use
the respectful term “Negro,” preferred in American speech through at least
Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Hughes saw himself as a poet from a young age. Although he claimed an
accidental origin for this vocation (he was the only Negro in his grade school
class, and because Negroes were supposed to have rhythm, he was elected class
poet), he self-identiied primarily as a poet (or a “social poet”) from his late
teens until his death. He published his irst and eternally most famous poem,
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the W. E. B. Du Bois–edited oicial magazine
of the NAACP, the Crisis, in June 1921, when he was just nineteen. During the

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 Langston Hughes and His World

1920s, Hughes rapidly became a major igure in the Harlem Renaissance, pub-
lishing a growing body of verse in prominent black and white periodicals, and
enjoying emerging connections with noted black and white igures such as the
philosopher Alain Locke and the litterateur Carl Van Vechten. All this led to the
publication of Hughes’s irst volume, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and his second,
Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927, by the young yet elite irm of Alfred A. Knopf.4
As a rough characterization, African American poetry in the few decades
prior to Hughes came in two main styles: a genteel tradition, composed
largely in the staid, formulaic rhyme schemes found in mainstream white
poetry of that time, and a “dialect” tradition, rendered in a caricatured ver-
sion of African American peasant speech, which, often double voiced, wryly
explored the race relations of the day. Many poets wrote both; some were
dismayed that the latter sold better, as when Paul Dunbar complained that the
world preferred “a jingle in a broken tongue.”5 Themes and subjects ranged
across slavery, freedom, dignity, resistance, uplift, song, race, the South, and
Christian igures and motifs, including sufering, redemption, deliverance, the
cross, Daniel, Judas, Cain, and Christ.
Important poets of this era, such as James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay,
and, intensely but briely, the modernist Jean Toomer, began to surpass pre-
decessor traditions. Johnson (1871–1938) was by turns a teacher, lawyer, song
lyricist, U.S. diplomat in Venezuela and Nicaragua, novelist, and scholar. His
poems richly invoked African American folk and spiritual musical traditions,
as in “O Black and Unknown Bards”:
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred ire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
...
Who heard great “Jordan roll”? Whose starward eye
Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he
That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh,
“Nobody knows de trouble I see”?6
His 1900 poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” later set to music by his brother,
the composer John Rosamond Johnson, is known to this day as the Negro (or
black or African American) national anthem. No reader of American poetry
could then have anticipated the recitation of its last stanza, 109 years later, at
the start of the Reverend Joseph Lowery’s benediction for Barack Obama’s
presidential inauguration. Claude McKay (1889–1948), a novelist and activist

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as well as poet, was Jamaica born but a U.S. resident and international traveler
from his early twenties to his death. After two 1912 books of poems in Jamaican
English, McKay moved to the United States and began to combine conven-
tional verse forms in standard English with a franker, more militant voice and
new urban settings. His critique of prostitution in “Harlem Shadows” speaks
bitterly of “dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet” who trudge, “thinly shod, from
street to street,” to “bend and barter at desire’s call.” His bold 1919 sonnet “If
We Must Die,” irst published in the radical magazine Liberator, galvanized a
generation of African American readers. It began by asserting that “If we must
die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” and
ended thus: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to
the wall, dying, but ighting back!”7
Langston Hughes arrived on this scene in 1921 at age nineteen, his best
poems suf used with unusually mature insight and historical and geographic
scope. We must reproduce his irst-published and most enduring poem, “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in full:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
low of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.8

Other early Hughes poems ofered a keen sense of voice beyond his own, in
both age and gender, such as the celebrated “Mother to Son” from 1922:
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you inds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.9

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As a formal matter, Hughes’s earliest published verse owed much to his

acknowledged models Sandburg and Whitman. Thus, although acutely
attuned to meter, form, and sound, Hughes shunned the high-culture English
verse conventions still favored by others such as Countee Cullen and McKay. As
the twenties wore on, his work steered to the adaptation of African American
song forms, especially the blues – as here in “Bound No’th Blues” from 1926:
Goin’ down de road, Lawd,
Goin’ down de road.
Down de road, Lawd,
Way, way down de road.
Got to ind somebody
To help me carry dis load.10

Thematically, Hughes’s irst decade of published work ranged widely. Dreams

loomed large and would remain for his entire career, from his 1923 injunc-
tion to “hold fast to dreams”11 to his 1950s meditations, later invoked by ig-
ures from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Barack Obama, on “a dream deferred.”
Hughes’s frank celebration of blackness and Africa (“I am a Negro: / Black as
the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa”12) had few precedents,
even if Hughes’s positive African image irst tended to stereotyped tom-toms
and jungle moons. Hughes also added to African American poetry’s long-
standing confrontation with the rural South by unl inchingly addressing the
formerly taboo topic of race mixing, as in this wrenching triply voiced excerpt
from his 1927 “Mulatto”:
The scent of pine wood stings the soft night air.
What’s the body of your mother?
Silver moonlight everywhere.
What’s the body of your mother?
Sharp pine scent in the evening air.
A nigger night,
A nigger joy,
A little yellow
Bastard boy.13

Despite all of these varied subjects, Hughes is best remembered for his engage-
ment with the urban Negro North, especially Harlem. His poems robustly
portray the dancers, piano players, hustlers, prostitutes, and other “low-down
folk” who constituted a new center of gravity in African American life. The
title poem of his irst volume, The Weary Blues, sets its raceless speaker as both
auditor and omniscient observer of an iconic Harlem scene:

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Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the loor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more –
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisied –
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.14

In this and many other poems, Hughes’s 1920s were indissolubly linked to the
cultural lourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, for which competing terms
then included the “New Negro Movement,” “New Negro Renaissance,” and
“Negro Literary Renaissance.” Encompassing music, theater, writing, and the
visual arts, the Harlem Renaissance captured national attention, including
that of white elites. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes durably termed the era
“when the Negro was in vogue.”15 Beyond new voices like Cullen and Hughes,
somewhat older poets like Johnson and McKay were key: Johnson was admired
for his landmark 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry and his own
1927 collection God’s Trombones, which did for the Negro sermon what Hughes
had done for blues; and McKay, for his 1922 collection Harlem Shadows and his
1928 novel Home to Harlem.16 Another new voice, Jean Toomer, was celebrated
for his 1923 composite Cane, which blended poems, stories, and vignettes and
is seen today as a modernist success.17 Nearly everyone discussed previously,
plus others such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Anna Julia Cooper, Eric
Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen, as well as the electrifyingly
controversial pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, were either born or spent signii-
cant time outside the United States.18
Against this backdrop, and to invoke the four-part framework outlined
early in this chapter – of bardic-demotic, left-internationalist, professional,
and closeted-elusive viewpoints – Hughes’s 1920s were spent largely in the
bardic-demotic mode, in which he spoke primarily of, as, and for the ordinary
Negro. Adapting but never mocking common Negro speech, and mobilizing
the most vernacular of Negro song forms, Hughes voiced the travails and
achievements of his people. Despite his own early Atlantic travels and those
of Harlem Renaissance igures around him, the impact of internationalism on

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Hughes’s poems was still modest: Paris served as something of an imagined

refuge, the Afro-diasporic Caribbean remained marginal, and Africa itself,
despite Hughes’s coastal encounters, was still largely an idea. As for the pro-
fessional, Hughes was still in his twenties and glad for monetary prizes, white
patrons, college scholarships, and a semivagabondish style. In the 1920s, writ-
ing was Hughes’s life, but not yet his profession.
If Hughes had a poetic rival in the 1920s, it was the NYU- and Harvard-
educated Countee Cullen (1903–1946), with his sustained command of histor-
ically lauded forms. In “Heritage” he asked, “What is Africa to me: / Copper
sun or scarlet sea, / Jungle star or jungle track, / Strong bronzed men, or regal
black / . . . / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?”19 In the
protest-focused “From the Dark Tower,” Cullen asserted that “We shall not
always plant while others reap / The golden increment of bursting fruit, /
Not always countenance, abject and mute / That lesser men should hold their
brothers cheap.”20 But Cullen’s most creative phase lasted less than a decade;
his political and social vision was less compelling than that of, for example,
McKay; and his brilliance in traditional European forms captured neither the
variety of African American speech nor the embrace of its newest literary
generation.
A far more demotic (but not bardic) poet, Sterling Brown (1901–1989), is often
associated with the Harlem Renaissance, but as a lifelong non–New Yorker
and Renaissance skeptic, he embodied an alternative tradition. Although edu-
cated at the elite Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Williams College,
and Harvard, Brown spent most of the rest of his life in or near the American
South, studying black folk traditions as a professor at Howard University.
Brown’s work thus resonates with that of folk-inlected igures ranging from
Robert Burns, Carl Sandburg, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alan Lomax to the
white poets of the Popular Front. The title poem for Brown’s vernacular- and
blues-based 1932 volume Southern Road, a convict blues, included this:
Doubleshackled – hunh –
Guard behin’;
Doubleshackled – hunh –
Guard behin’;
Ball an’ chain, bebby,
On my min’.
White man tells me – hunh –
Damn yo’ soul;
White man tells me – hunh –
Damn yo’ soul;

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Got no need, bebby,

To be tole.21

Brown’s alternative tradition, however, sparked little interest among contem-

porary readers and appeared in book form only after his era’s 1920s peak. He
thus devoted himself to teaching, scholarship, and commentary but enjoyed
a late-life revival, warmly embraced (and freshly published) by poets of the
1970s.
Although Langston Hughes was not a “theoretical” poet, his 1926 essay
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in the inl uen-
tial white leftist magazine the Nation, became the literary manifesto of the
Harlem Renaissance. In it, Hughes criticized the white-aspiring preferences of
the Negro middle and upper classes, defended his portraits of “the low-down
folks,” rejected sterile respectability, and concluded by asserting the right of
his generation to “express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . .
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . .
If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know
how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”22
For all the majesty of this declaration – one of Hughes’s rare published
statements on his writerly profession – Hughes did care deeply what his col-
ored readers thought. To be sure, he had a taste, especially in his twenties
and thirties, for upsetting pieties, but as an emerging professional, he worked
tirelessly to reach ever-wider audiences. Some of this is seen in his substantial
work as an anthologizer, discussed subsequently, and in his lifelong com-
mitment to national poetry-reading tours, which emphasized Negro venues.
His publisher correspondence contains frequent requests for inexpensive edi-
tions he could sell while on the road, and hundreds of his personal letters
mention an enclosed gift volume of his verse. Here we see the fusion of
the demotic and professional Langston Hughes. In sharp contrast to near-
contemporary white modernists like Eliot, Cummings, Stevens, and Pound;
the noted black modernist Melvin B. Tolson; or the later African American
poet Robert Hayden, almost all of Hughes’s nearly 900 published poems
could be readily understood by a reader (or listener) of limited formal edu-
cation. Indeed, one of the best-known moments in Hughesian reception his-
tory came in Jonathan Kozol’s 1967 critique of American schools, Death at an
Early Age, which recounted Kozol’s iring from a public elementary school
in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for assigning his black fourth graders poetry by
Hughes.23 To return to Hughes’s “Racial Mountain,” Hughes would not have

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cared if white principals (or Negro parents) disliked his poems, but he cared
immensely if anyone, especially ordinary readers, were barred from coming
to his work.
Langston Hughes’s 1930s difered sharply from his 1920s and can be charac-
terized as the radical-global phase of both his writing and his life. He gained
his irst extended exposure to the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean
with visits to Cuba in 1930 and Haiti in 1931 – spaces he considered brethren
within the African diaspora. There he met the Cuban négrismo poet Nicolás
Guillén and the Haitian indigenist poet, novelist, and ethnologist Jacques
Roumain. Hughes translated both into English, and they returned the favor
in French and Spanish. Thus by January 1932, at age twenty-nine, Hughes had
already traveled to four continents – unprecedented for an African American
writer of his era – and, with the 1929 German volume Afrika Singt, had appeared
in at least four languages.24 The more he learned about the United States and
the black Atlantic, the more he adopted a radical leftist account of the whole
world’s injustice. In a U.S.-focused mode, his critique of the abuse of reli-
gion by the powerful was never stronger than in the riveting poem “Christ in
Alabama” (from Contempo in 1931), which begins:
Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black –
O, bare your back.
Mary is His Mother –
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.25

Such U.S.-focused poems aside, the 1930s most profoundly marked the emer-
gence of Hughes’s third major mode, beyond the already described bardic-
demotic and professional: the left-internationalist. For example, his protest
poem “Scottsboro,” also published in December 1931, began “8 black boys
in a Southern jail. / World, turn pale!” but then moved rapidly to invoke not
just standard Euramerican martyr igures like Christ, John Brown, and Jeanne
d’Arc but also the Haitian revolutionary Dessalines, the black insurrectionist
Nat Turner, the controversial young Gandhi, the anti-U.S. Nicaraguan revolu-
tionary Sandino, and “Lenin with the lag blood red.”26 “Left-internationalist,”
however, is too vague a word for what Hughes became. He is best termed a
rooted Afro-planetarist, meaning that, whether reporting on a Moscow visit,
analyzing changes in the Uzbek poetic tradition, or relecting on Japan’s role in
World War II, Hughes and his poems saw the world through what he termed
“Negro eyes.”27

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In this connection, in March 1932, while in California on the inal leg of a

cross-country poetry-reading tour, Hughes got an invitation from the New
York–based African American activist and editor Louise Thompson to join a
Negro artists and musicians group traveling to the Soviet Union to serve as
screenwriter for a Soviet motion picture, Black and White, about the oppres-
sion of African Americans in the U.S. South. Soviet Moscow was a relatively
race-free revelation, but the ilm project soon fell apart. Hughes, however,
remained and received permission to travel to largely forbidden Soviet Central
Asia, which he saw as the USSR’s own colored, dusty, cotton-growing South.
There he wrote poems, met literary and cultural elites, and toured (often with
Arthur Koestler) factories and collective farms.28
In this phase of his career, Hughes was at his worst a bad propagandist.
There is little to cherish, politically or poetically, in poems that begin like this:
“Put one more S in the U.S.A. / To make it Soviet. / One more S in the U.S.A. /
Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.”29 One of his most strident 1930s poems, “Goodbye
Christ,” later caused him massive troubles when repeatedly reprinted by his
detractors in the 1940s and 1950s.30 Indeed it is unclear whether one should
classify some of Hughes’s 1930s compositions, such as the “mass chants” he
wrote for rallies, as poetry. But the thirties also saw Hughes write initially
little-noted poems that would be interpreted decades later as important mod-
ernist interventions, such as the 1934 “Cubes.” Its irst stanza begins, “In the
days of the broken cubes of Picasso,” and ends, unexpectedly, “I met on the
boulevards of Paris / An African from Senegal.” The poem links France’s
long historical entanglements with “the cubes of black and white, / black and
white, / black and white” to a long roster of colonial and economic sorrows.31
Even a poem with a title as wince-worthy as “Ballads of Lenin” was, on closer
inspection, a moving and heterodox claim to include the worldwide colored
poor in a white-dominated leftist pantheon.32 Hughes’s internationalist com-
mitments were furthered by his 1937 work as an Associated Negro Press jour-
nalist reporting from the Spanish Civil War. During this era, Hughes poems
such as “Letter from Spain” – which began “We captured a wounded Moor
today. / He was just as dark as me. / I said, Boy, what you been doin’ here /
Fightin’ against the free?” – illustrate the widely divergent estimations of his
work.33 For some critics, “Letter from Spain” embodies both vernacular elo-
quence and a far-seeing awareness that preigures later global political conigu-
rations like the Non-Aligned Movement. Such critics hold that Hughes’s Afro-
planetarism supplies substantive depth, while his mild vernacular bespeaks
demotic strength.34 For others, such as Hughes’s unsurpassed biographer and
most inl uential critic Arnold Rampersad, “Letter from Spain” is a “maudlin

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dialect poem” characteristic of the “proletarian doggerel” Hughes would go

on publishing “for years to come.”35
In the broadest sense, Hughes’s 1930s poetry is indissoluble from his linkages
to the American and international left. Figures with whom Hughes interacted
included white poets such as Muriel Rukeyser, the black poet Frank Marshall
Davis, and Mike Gold, who, as editor of New Masses, regularly solicited and
published poetry by Hughes. But for all his internationalism, Hughes – unlike
igures such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and at times Paul Robeson
and W. E. B. Du Bois – never simply abandoned the United States. Indeed
Hughes’s engagement with America’s unmet promise was never deeper than
in his long 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again,” which conversed with
classic American voices like Whitman and Woody Guthrie and diverse patri-
otic anthems to rhapsodize that “I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, /
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, / And torn from Black Africa’s
strand I came / To build a ‘homeland of the free.’ ” Then the poem’s subse-
quent two-word stanza starkly asks, “The free?”36
It is appropriate here, at the midpoint of this essay and of Hughes’s life, to
speak to Hughes’s vast literary career beyond his poems, not least to under-
score his professional dimensions. After his groundbreaking 1926 and 1927
poetry collections, Hughes next published a gentle midwestern coming-of-
age novel, Not Without Laughter. A penetrating, stylistically diverse, and accu-
rately titled short story collection, The Ways of White Folks, was written just
after his return from the Soviet Union and appeared in 1934. Indeed, some of
its draft pages have its U.S.-set short stories on one side and draft magazine
essays on Soviet Central Asia on the other. Hughes also wrote extensively
for the theater; he completed some sixty-three pieces, including radio plays,
operas, gospel musicals, and dramas for venues from major Broadway houses
to regional Negro theaters.37 One of these, the musical Street Scene, was co-
written with Kurt Weill, while another, Mule Bone, was co-written with Zora
Neale Hurston but not produced until 1991 due to a bitter authorship dispute.
Although Hughes had been asked to write a memoir as early as 1926, his irst,
The Big Sea, would not appear until 1940; its last section remains the most
valuable irsthand portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that we have. A sec-
ond autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, a retrospectively mild recounting of
Hughes’s radical 1930s, followed in 1956.38
Through his weekly column in the nationally circulated Negro paper the
Chicago Defender, Hughes reached an enormous audience (and received a
steady paycheck) from 1942 to 1962, commenting on political, social, literary,
and artistic topics in the United States and abroad. About one-fourth of those

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columns launched Hughes’s career as a humorist. In these columns, a usually

unnamed but bland, formal, educated narrator chats at a local bar with his
loquacious, grammar-bungling folk genius friend, Jesse B. Semple, known as
Simple. Hughes gathered his Simple stories into ive books from 1950 to 1965.
Also worth naming, for their both professional and demotic dimensions, are
Hughes’s books for children: a 1932 story, Popo and Fiina, co-written with Arna
Bontemps; a 1932 collection of verse for younger readers, The Dream Keeper;
and ive didactic “irst books” on Africa, the West Indies, rhythms, jazz, and
Negroes.39 Hughes also had a serious career as an anthologist, with The Book
of Negro Folklore, The Book of Negro Humor, Famous American Negroes, and two
groundbreaking photo histories with the visual archivist Milton Meltzer.
Returning to poetry proper, Hughes’s sense of himself in the history of
African American verse was consolidated by his 429-page anthology, co-ed-
ited with Arna Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, which innova-
tively contained a rich selection of “tributary poems by non-Negroes” includ-
ing Whitman (“The Runaway Slave” and the Civil War–themed “Ethiopia
Saluting the Colors”), Blake, Browning, Wordsworth (“To Toussaint
L’Ouverture”), Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Melville, Vachel Lindsay,
Hart Crane, Sandburg (“Jazz Fantasia”), and Elizabeth Bishop (“Songs for a
Colored Singer”).40 Among the irst books to recognize the complex poetic
linkages between African America and the West Indies, the anthology also
ofered a long selection of Caribbean poets, including translations from
Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and the négritude co-founders Aimé Césaire and
Léon Damas. Interestingly, Hughes and Bontemps placed Claude McKay in
their Caribbean section, although McKay lived most of his adult life in the
United States. The Poetry of the Negro included just one poet from anywhere
in Africa, Aquah Laluah, the pen name for the prominent Anglo–Sierra
Leonean Gladys May Casely Hayford; we will return to Hughes and Africa
subsequently.
Hughes translated (in part with Ben Carruthers Guillén and Roumain),
notably recasting (with co-translator Mercer Cook) Roumain’s peasant novel
Masters of the Dew into U.S. southern rural speech.41 He translated Federico
García Lorca at least twice: the Gypsy Ballads in 1951 and, in a manuscript
unpublished until 1994, the landmark play Blood Wedding.42 Hughes was also
the irst substantial translator of the Chilean Nobel laureate poet Gabriela
Mistral.43 Further aield, Hughes translated Louis Aragon’s Soviet-themed
poetry from the French and, with assistance, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Cuba-
set poems from the Russian and some Central Asian folk poetry from the
Uzbek.44

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Hughes did not achieve inancial stability until relatively late in life, and he fre-
quently referred to himself, in letters to Arna Bontemps, as “a literary sharecrop-
per.”45 Yet Hughes was the irst African or African-descent writer in English to
make his living exclusively from his published words. But Hughes’s wide-ranging
proliicness was motivated by much more than money. Theatrical writing, for
one, is a notoriously unreliable way to wealth; it functioned for Hughes instead
as a way to reach more people. Translation proved so nonmuniicent for Hughes
that his exasperated agent Maxim Lieber once ordered him to stop. A similar
analysis can be applied to Hughes’s tireless 1950s promotion of African writing.
The fastest, richest writing job he ever had – as Hollywood co-screenwriter,
along with Clarence Muse, for the forgettable 1939 RKO musical Way Down
South – was so artistically and politically unsatisfying that he never sought such
work again.46 Instead, anthologizing, children’s writing, translation, drama, and
the promotion of African writing gave Hughes ways to present ever-fuller U.S.
and global materials to an ever-wider range of readers, to further enhance his
cultural depth and literary craft, and often to speak through other authors’ pens
or names: the bardic-demotic, internationalist, professional, and sublimated all
at once.
With this, we move to the 1940s, during which period Hughes began a steady
withdrawal from the overt Left and carefully balanced support for American
involvement (including heroic African American involvement) in the antifas-
cist ight with critique of the irony that an internally race-oppressing nation
battled racism overseas. His 1942 Shakespeare in Harlem, much like his 1927
Fine Clothes to the Jew, ofered a wide portrait of African American life in the
idiom of blues, but shorn of his 1930s political commitments. A poem that
began obscurely as an aria in his late-1930s libretto for a Haiti-themed opera
co-written with the composer William Grant Still became, with multiple later
printings, one of his most enduring statements:
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind –
Of such I dream, my world!47
More darkly, his 1942 “The Bitter River” recast prior positive imagery of
dreams and rivers to protest a Mississippi lynching. The poem’s sustained
anger is only partly captured by the irst of its many stanzas:

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There is a bitter river

Flowing through the South.
Too long has the taste of its water
Been in my mouth.
There is a bitter river
Dark with ilth and mud.
Too long has its evil poison
Poisoned my blood.48

Toward the end of the decade, Hughes’s 1947 “Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”
deepened his long history of poetry on jazz. It begins with this:
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.

Then shifts to unusually (for Hughes) sexual imagery:

The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid ire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire –

Several stanzas later it closes by blending images of heroin, style, and release:
“The Negro / With the trumpet at his lips . . . Does not know / Upon what rif
the music slips // Its hypodermic needle / To his soul.”49
Hughes’s next strong poetic achievement came in 1951, with Montage of a
Dream Deferred, whose eighty-six separate elements form a coherent whole.
Marking a fresh musical inl uence, Hughes’s preface stated that “this poem on
contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conl icting changes, sudden
nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, [and] broken rhythms . . . of the
music of a community in transition.”50 Its opening section, “Dream Boogie,”
accordingly plays with reader expectations, in both emotional and metrical
uncertainty:

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 Langston Hughes and His World

Good morning, daddy!

Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a –
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a –
What did I say?
Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h! (MDD, p. 3)
In subsequent pages, Montage’s segments, ranging from eight short words
to several dozen lines, voice the earnest student, sassy neighbor, dramatic
preacher, and simple Harlem witness. Its “Theme for English B,” of interest
to any teacher-reader of this volume, may be the most perceptive short text
ever written on the relationship between black students and white professors.
A poignant short poem, “Casualty,” speaks of shell-shocked veterans of any
era, including ours: “He was a soldier in the army, / But he doesn’t walk like
one. / He walks like his soldiering / Days are done. // Son! . . . Son!” (MDD,
p. 59). Another brief entry, “Dime,” puts Hughes’s cherished and airming
1922 “Mother to Son” in a much more bitter light:
Chile, these steps is hard to climb.
Grandma, lend me a dime.
Montage of a dream deferred:
Grandma acts like
She ain’t heard.
Chile, Granny ain’t got no dime.

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I might’ve knowed
It all the time. (MDD, p. 62)

Montage’s most widely reproduced poem, “Harlem,” begins by repeating

the volume’s standard question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and
then, uncertain in reply, asks yet further questions that would supply, eight
years later, the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s celebrated play: “Does it dry up /
like a raisin in the sun? . . . Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it
explode?” (MDD, p. 71). Hughes’s Montage had a mixed reception in its day, espe-
cially among elites. Arthur P. Davis noted coolly in the Journal of Negro History
that it had “recaptured some of the magic” of The Weary Blues, while Babette
Deutsch of the New York Times disparaged its “facile sentimentality” and “con-
trived naïveté.”51 If Hughes had once been glad to upset reviewers with his
idelity to Negro life, he was far from glad to hear reviewers say his art had
been surpassed. For in ways it had been surpassed, in both quality and elite
acclaim, most signiicantly by Gwendolyn Brooks, ifteen years his junior and
the beneiciary of Hughes’s generous support when she was young. Brooks’s
formal versatility ranged from urban vernacular to modernist free verse to
the sonnet, as in “The Children of the Poor,” from her 1949 Pulitzer Prize–
winning Annie Allen:
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because uninished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.52

Another segment from Montage, although little noted at the time, ofered
Hughes’s irst express poetic relection, thirty years into his career, on
homosexuality:
Café: 3 A.M.
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody

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made them that way.

Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where? (MDD, p. 32)

This poem ofers a good starting point for consideration of Hughes’s sexual-
ity, and with it, the closeted-sublimated dimension of Hughes’s work noted
at the outset. Hughes has, especially in the past two decades, frequently been
referenced as a gay or queer or homosexual poet – three overlapping but not
identical designations. Hughes’s unsurpassed biographer, Arnold Rampersad,
has noted that, even in his exhaustive reading of the vast Hughes archive and
lengthy interviews with dozens who knew Hughes, he found no serious evi-
dence of any sustained sexual or afective relationship between Hughes and
anyone, female or male, in his entire life. Rampersad concludes that Hughes
was largely “asexual,” or that his sexual desire had been “not so much sub-
limated as vaporized.”53 Aware that Hughes’s sexuality was long subject to
question – after all, Hughes was a bachelor, poet, and former bohemian and
sailor – Rampersad inds no “concrete evidence” of Hughes’s sexual disposi-
tion, beyond perhaps a lack thereof, and asserts instead what Hughes’s close
friends felt was its “maddening elusiveness.”54
Critics and scholars reading Hughes as gay have responded that the over-
whelming power of the closet in the United States from the 1920s to the 1960s,
especially among African Americans, would have deterred Hughes from leav-
ing any clear trace of his orientation. Noting Hughes’s long-standing friend-
ships with numerous less-closeted gay men, including Carl Van Vechten, and
the degree to which Hughes’s commitment to efectiveness in (and income
from) the public sphere would have precluded his endangering that efective-
ness, such scholars instead focus on reading Hughes’s poems for their gay or
queer inlections. Exploring the “homoeroticism and other gay markings” in
these poems,55 these Hughes scholars detail “Hughes’s lyric archive of queer
sociality”56 both directly, in poems such as “Café: 3 A.M.,” “Curious,” and
“Desire,” and obliquely, in Hughes’s many tales of racial (rather than sexual)
passing.
The charge of afectional sublimation resonates with many other Hughesian
self-suppressions. Politics is Hughes’s other great axis of suppression, only
with undeniable evidence of his 1930s leftism, despite his later attempts to
recast and suppress it. But of course the literary question is not “was Hughes
a self-suppressor,” “was he in the closet,” or “was he gay,” but rather “can his
works productively be read as queer or gay,” and “how and to what efect do

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his writings re-channel what he could or would not say?” The answers to these
questions vary.
Remarkably, Hughes seems never to have attempted a full-ledged love
poem in a half-century literary career.57 Yet elsewhere Hughes’s personal re-
channeling produced some of his most vivid creations, from his fearless alter
ego Simple to the sassy, uncompromising “Madam” Alberta K. Johnson. At
some level, however, reading the sublimated Hughes often requires pursuit
of the not-said, never more explicitly than in the 1933 poem “Personal,” which
begins, “In an envelope marked: / Personal / God addressed me a letter,” and
then describes, or does not describe, Hughes’s “answer,” also “In an envelope
marked: / Personal.”58
At this juncture, a discussion of the place of Hughes’s primary biographer
and major critic, Arnold Rampersad, is required. After publishing a superb
literary biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, Rampersad arranged with George
Houston Bass, Hughes’s last private secretary and co-executor of his literary
estate, to write Hughes’s biography, based in good measure on access to the
trove of papers held at Yale’s Beinecke Library and only later opened to all
scholars. The resulting two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986 and 1988) set
a nearly unsurpassed standard for American literary biography. No scholar,
past or present, commands as full an understanding of Langston Hughes
as Arnold Rampersad. What is more, as co-executor, Rampersad has been
involved in the continued publication of Hughes’s extant and archival works,
often penning introductions to fresh Hughes volumes edited by others.
In consequence, current readers and scholars of Langston Hughes, the
author of the present chapter included, engage not simply Hughes’s literary
history but the literary history of Rampersad’s Langston Hughes. Thus (to
choose one example), proponents of gay or queer interpretations of Hughes’s
verse also contend with Rampersad’s view of Hughes. Likewise, admirers of
Hughes’s radical-internationalist poems make claims not just on Hughes but
also against Rampersad’s negative framing of Hughes’s radical-internation-
alist incarnation. I do not mean to suggest a negative relationship or efect –
indeed, to the contrary. But never has the literary afterlife of a major American
poet been so thoroughly inlected by his leading biographer, scholar, succes-
sor co-executor, and critic.
The standard Hughes volume today is the 1994 Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, co-edited by Rampersad and David Roessel. Rampersad and Roessel
follow standard practice by printing the last published version of each poem
authorized by the poet in his life. But Hughes was far from the same poet in
1959 or 1967 that he had been in 1926 or 1931. Early in this chapter, for example,

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 Langston Hughes and His World

one inds a portion of Hughes’s “Bound No’th Blues” as originally printed in

the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity and Hughes’s The Weary
Blues in 1926. But the Collected Poems version comes from his 1959 Selected Poems,
which “whitened” the voice by shifting “de” and “dis” to “the” and “this.”
Although many of Hughes’s changes are described in the Collected Poems’s
notes, others are not. A good example is Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama,” dis-
cussed previously. The poem irst appeared in the leftist Chapel Hill magazine
Contempo in December 1931, and then in Hughes’s now-rare 1932 Scottsboro
Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse. But today’s readers typically know
“Christ in Alabama” only in its milder 1967 version. This more recent version
difers, among other things, in capitalization, italicized voice, an “us” changed
to “Him,” and the closing line breaks: the irst six lines of the later version, for
example, replace dashes with colons, remove all italics, and add an exclama-
tion point in line 3.59
Hughes’s 1930s past would haunt him. Called to testify before Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s subcommittee in 1953, Hughes endured a withering assault on his
prior radical verse, especially “Goodbye Christ,” and nearly saw his writing life
destroyed. Although his brief public testimony suggests a mild, even “supine”
posture before the committee,60 the recently released transcript of his long
private interrogation reveals that Hughes mobilized a vast range of rhetorical
strategies and tactics, decidedly not including deiance or anger, to defuse the
committee’s ire.61 And he named no names. He emerged with his reputation
diminished on the left but in general intact. Still, he engaged in even greater
self- and retrospective suppression for the remainder of the decade. The bal-
ance of Hughes’s 1950s was not devoted to new poems; he focused instead on
his second memoir (1956), the Langston Hughes Reader (1958), Selected Poems
(1959), and many more workmanlike or semicommercial publications. His cre-
ative reputation was far below its peak; the most damaging evidence of this
was James Baldwin’s brutal New York Times Book Review account of Hughes’s
Selected Poems, which began with this: “Every time I read Langston Hughes I
am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts – and depressed that he has done
so little with them.”62
On a far more airming note, the 1950s also saw Hughes’s deep interna-
tionalism reignite, now in direct exchange with Africa. In 1923, Hughes had
visited many African ports as a menial sailor. He thematized the continent
in often stereotyped ways in the three decades to follow, penned a scathing
poem on the Johannesburg mines in 1925, and kept vaguely aware of the con-
tinent’s anticolonial struggles. But that was about the extent of his involve-
ment. Although he was revered by the Francophone négritude movement and

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by many Anglophone African poets from the early 1930s on, Hughes him-
self was barely aware of their existence.63 Hughes’s African consciousness
reawakened in 1953 when he received, out of the blue, an invitation to judge
an Africa-wide short story contest for the widely distributed, black-oriented
South African magazine Drum. Impressed by the entries, Hughes determined
to assemble an African anthology for the U.S. and British markets at a time
when African writing of any kind had a microscopic presence in both nations.
It took nearly a decade, endless correspondence, and heavy triangulation
between emerging African writers and American and U.K. publishers before
Hughes came out with the multigenre African Treasury in 1960 and Poems from
Black Africa in 1963.64 Nearly every notable Francophone and Anglophone
African poet and writer of the 1950s and early 1960s corresponded warmly
with Hughes, the most widely known black writer in the world, before his
death in 1967.
Hughes traveled to the continent ive times during this period, at times as a
U.S. State Department cultural ambassador. In November 1960, with Hughes
in the audience, his short, uplifting 1924 poem “Youth” (“We have tomorrow
/ Bright before us / Like a lame”) was recited by his old Lincoln University
schoolmate Nnamdi Azikiwe at the close of Azikiwe’s inauguration as the irst
governor-general of independent Nigeria.65 Hughes’s post-1953 re-cognition
of himself as a pan-African or Afro-planetary internationalist fueled his last
major poetry achievement, the luxuriously produced 1961 Ask Your Mama: 12
Moods for Jazz. Conceived as a single poem, Ask Your Mama takes its impe-
tus from the comic/bitter African American insult ritual called “the dozens,”
as here:
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES
where sit-ins are conducted
by those yet uninducted
and ballots drop in boxes
where bullets are the tellers
they asked me at thanksgiving
did i vote for nixon?
i said, voted for your mama.66

Despite its origin in the dozens, Ask Your Mama goes far beyond its insult-driven
seed. It was conceived, like Hughes’s 1951 Montage, as a multifocal portrait of
a Negro world, although 1961’s portrait was much more densely allusive, vio-
lent, and global than any before. Accompanied by narrative musical cues in its
right-hand column, Ask Your Mama begins:

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IN THE
in the quarter
in the quarter of the negroes
where the doors are doors of paper
dust of dingy atoms
blows a scratchy sound.
amorphous jack-o’-lanterns caper
and the wind won’t wait for midnight
for fun to blow doors down.67
A few score additional lines in the same voice then invoke, among other great
African American igures, “Leontyne Sammy Harry Poitier / Lovely Lena
Marian Louis Pearlie Mae,” and then George S. Schuyler, “Jimmy Baldwin,”
“Arna Bontemps chief consultant,” and “Lieder, lovely lieder / And a leaf of
collard green.” But then Ask Your Mama veers to a global, anticolonial mode:
IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES
Nkrumah
In the shadow of the negroes
Nasser nasser
In the shadow of the negroes
Zik Azikiwe
Cuba castro guinea touré
For need or propaganda
Kenyatta
And the tom dogs of the cabin
The cocoa and the cane brake
The chain gang and the slave block
Tarred and feathered nations
Seagram’s and four roses
$5.00 bags a deck or dagga.
...
And they asked me right at christmas
If my blackness, would it rub off?
I said, ask your mama.68
Needless to say, this difers sharply from any prior poetry by Hughes, not
only in its sustained intensity but also in its reliance on speciic knowledge.
For understanding Ask Your Mama requires a vast grasp not only of African
American references but also of mid-twentieth-century African, Afro-diasporic,
and global Third World events and persons. Although massively internation-
alist and Afro-planetary, it is one of the few nondemotic poems Hughes ever
wrote. To choose but one of the preceding uncommon terms, “dagga” is the

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Afrikaans- and Kohekohe-derived South African English term for marijuana –

something few American readers knew in 1961. Unsurprisingly, contemporary
reviews of Ask Your Mama ranged from laudatory to derisive to confused.
The keenest came from the pioneering Africana studies scholar John Henrik
Clarke in the black progressive journal Freedomways. Stating correctly that
the poem represented Hughes’s estimable outreach to “a second generation,”
Clarke concluded by noting that if this second generation wished to know
what the irst Negro generation thought of Hughes, the task was simple: “Ask
Your Mama.”69
Hughes wrote little notable poetry in the remaining six years of his life.
To be sure, his poems responded to the tumult of the 1960s: they marked
the emergence of independent African nation-states, sang a “backlash blues”
about white opposition to what he still termed “Negro advancement,”
engaged the heightened strife in northern cities, and revisited long-standing
themes. But Hughes broke no new formal or stylistic ground. Whatever thun-
der he still held could not compete with the profane intensity of the Black Arts
Movement poets, especially Amiri Baraka, who until the last year of Hughes’s
life still went by LeRoi Jones. The two writers had a mutually respectful if
increasingly distant relationship across their generational divide; their dis-
tance lowed from Jones’s sense of Hughes’s political and stylistic datedness,
and Hughes’s reactions to poems such as Jones’s 1966 “Black Art.”
Apart from a highly successful late career as the originator of yet another
genre, the gospel musical or gospel play – key achievements being Black
Nativity and Jerico Jim Crow – Hughes’s 1960s had a senior-statesman lavor,
replete with the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, induction into the National
Institute of Arts and Letters (preceded among African Americans only by Du
Bois), European leisure travel, and an invitation to a White House luncheon
hosted by President Kennedy to honor visiting Senegalese president Léopold
Senghor. Langston Hughes died in New York on May 22, 1967, at sixty-ive,
of complications following prostate surgery. His jazz-infused Harlem funeral
was heavily attended.
Hughes’s poetic afterlife has taken on many guises. Among ordinary
American readers (especially but not only African Americans), his presence
has been unbroken. For the white public in particular, this has lowed from his
continual assignment in American schools. The widespread popular embrace
of Hughes’s poems, as well as his memoirs, short stories, and other writ-
ings, contrasts with an older, eroding, but still extant academic notion, based
perhaps on insuiciently examined standards, that Hughes was less literar-
ily important than the midcentury African American prose writers James

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Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright and midcentury white poets like
Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound. In this light, it is worth suggesting
that Hughes’s tremendously wide and profuse professional literary output
may have masked his depth. One wonders what critical reputation Hughes
would have today if he had had, like his near contemporary Elizabeth Bishop,
the monetary resources and personal inclination to concentrate on poems
only, or if today we read, as we do with Bishop, only the best 105 of the nearly
900 poems Hughes put in print.
Also important here is history’s l uctuating view of mandarin versus bardic-
demotic verse – with Hughes’s poems decisively in the latter camp – and of
social-political versus personal or abstracted poetry, with Hughes’s Afro-
planetary commitments again putting him on the wrong side of most elite
and academic taste. As for the fourth assessment framework ofered in this
chapter, the closeted-elusive, the literary question is again not “was Langston
gay but in the closet” but rather “how productively did Hughes re-channel
what he would or could not say?” And the answer is, again, quite mixed. In
all of these domains, historical shifts in reader interests, canons of taste, and
scholarly understanding of movements such as modernism have continually
refreshed our view of Hughes. Throughout it all lies a core view of Langston
Hughes – a professional, bardic-demotic, and Afro-planetarist writer who
might have had a lot to hide and a descendent of Whitman, Sandburg, and a
complex Negro tradition – as the most committed, innovative, sympathetic,
and deeply rooted poetic exponent of African American life, and the most
globally engaged major American poet of any kind. In Hughes’s words, and in
Hughes’s world, it’s not so far from here to yonder.

Notes
1. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (eds.), The Columbia History of American Poetry
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
2. Irene Ramalho Santos, “Langston Hughes: The Color of Modernism,” The
Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5, Poetry and Criticism 1900–1950, ed.
Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
3. Much of Hughes’s biography is multiply attested, well known, and naturally
relies on Hughes’s two memoirs: The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander
(1956). Still, the authoritative source for Hughes’s life, on which this chapter
substantially relies, is Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. I,
1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and
Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. II, 1941–1967: I Dream a World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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 Davi d C h ioni Mo ore

4. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), and Fine
Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).
5. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Poet” (1903), in Herbert Woodward Martin (ed.),
Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 152.
6. James Weldon Johnson, Writings, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Library
of America, 2004), pp. 817–18.
7. Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), pp. 22, 53.
8. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” The Crisis ( June 1921), p. 71.
9. Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” The Crisis (December 1922), p. 87.
10. Langston Hughes, “Bound No’th Blues,” Opportunity (October 1926), p. 315.
11. “Dreams,” irst published in 1923, here from Langston Hughes, The Dream
Keeper and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 4.
12. Langston Hughes, “The Negro,” The Crisis ( January 1922), p. 113, and later
published as “Proem” in Hughes, The Weary Blues, p. 19.
13. Langston Hughes, “Mulatto,” Saturday Review of Literature ( January 29, 1927),
p. 547.
14. Hughes, The Weary Blues, pp. 23–24.
15. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 223.
16. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New
York: Viking, 1927); James Weldon Johnson (ed.), The Book of American Negro
Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922); Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), and Home to Harlem (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1928).
17. Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923).
18. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the
Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), p. 4.
19. Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” in Color (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925),
p. 36.
20. Countee Cullen, “From the Dark Tower,” in Copper Sun (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1927), p. 3.
21. Sterling A. Brown, “Southern Road,” in Southern Road (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1932), p. 47.
22. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation
( June 23, 1926), pp. 692–94.
23. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1967), chap-
ters 17–20.
24. Anna Nussbaum (ed.), Afrika Singt: Eine Auslese neuer afro-amerikanischer Lyrik,
trans. Hermann Kesser, Josef Luitpold, Anna Siemsen, and Anna Nussbaum
(Vienna: Speidel, 1929).
25. Langston Hughes, “Christ in Alabama,” Contempo (December 1931), p. 1.
26. Langston Hughes, “Scottsboro,” Opportunity (December 1931), p. 379.

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27. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New

York: Rinehart, 1956), p. 116.
28. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, pp. 101–90, although Hughes’s autobiographical
account of this period plays down his most radical dimensions.
29. Langston Hughes, “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.,” Daily Worker (April 2,
1934), p. 7.
30. First published without Hughes’s permission in The Negro Worker (November–
December 1932), p. 32.
31. Langston Hughes, “Cubes,” New Masses (March 13, 1934), p. 22.
32. Langston Hughes, “Ballads of Lenin” (initially published as “Ballad of Lenin”),
Anvil (May 1933), p. 17.
33. Langston Hughes, “Letter from Spain,” Volunteer for Liberty (November 15,
1937), p. 3.
34. See, for example, Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of
the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 186–207.
35. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 351.
36. Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” Esquire ( July 1936),
p. 92, and in diferent form in Langston Hughes, A New Song (New York:
International Workers Order, 1938).
37. Susan Dufy, The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 2, 201.
38. J. Saunders Redding, “Travels of Langston Hughes: Events as Seen in Passing,”
New York Herald Tribune (December 23, 1956), p. 7.
39. In chronological order, the titles of these books are as follows: The First Book
of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of Jazz (1955),
The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1960; rev. ed.
1964).
40. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (eds.), The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949
(New York: Doubleday, 1949).
41. Nicolás Guillén, Cuba Libre, trans. Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic
Carruthers (Los Angeles: Anderson & Ritchie, 1948). Jacques Roumain,
Masters of the Dew, trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook (New York:
Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).
42. Federico García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Langston Hughes, Beloit Poetry
Journal, chapbook no. 1 (1951). Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding, trans.
Langston Hughes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994).
43. Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Langston Hughes
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957).
44. Louis Aragon, “Magnitogorsk,” trans. Langston Hughes, International
Literature 4 (1933–1934), pp. 82–83. The typescripts of Hughes’s and Lydia
Filatova’s joint translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Syphilis” and “Black
and White” are held in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Research

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Center, Sc. 891.7-M. Ghafur Ghulom, “On the Turksib Roads,” translated
from the Uzbek by Langston Hughes with the assistance of the author and
Nina Zorokovina, International Literature 5 (March 1933), pp. 67–69.
45. See, for example, Charles H. Nichols (ed.), Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes
Letters, 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), pp. 277, 282, 283, 292, 408.
46. Langston Hughes, “Statement in Round Numbers Concerning the Relative
Merits of ‘Way Down South’ and ‘Don’t You Want to Be Free’ as Compiled
by the Author Mr. Langston Hughes.” Typescript “sent to Louise, Loren,
Arna,” November 6, 1939. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, JWJ Mss 26 367.5927.
47. Langston Hughes, “I Dream a World,” in Langston Hughes, Collected Poems,
ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994),
p. 311.
48. Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 242–44.
49. Langston Hughes, Fields of Wonder (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), pp.
91–93.
50. Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (New York: Henry Holt, 1951),
p. 1. This text will subsequently be cited parenthetically as MDD.
51. Arthur P. Davis, “Review of Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes,”
Journal of Negro History 36:2 (April 1951), pp. 224–26. Babette Deutsch, “Waste
Land of Harlem: Review of Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes,”
New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1951, p. 12.
52. Gwendolyn Brooks, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander
(New York: Library of America, 2005), p. 49.
53. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 69.
54. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 336.
55. Karl L. Stenger, “Langston Hughes (1902–1967),” in Emmanuel Nelson
(ed.), African American Dramatists (New York: Greenwood, 2004), pp.
226–46, 228.
56. Shane Vogel, “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics
of Harlem Nightlife,” Criticism 48:3 (2006), pp. 397–425, 400. See also Anne
Borden, “Heroic ‘Hussies’ and ‘Brilliant Queers’: Genderracial Resistance
in the Works of Langston Hughes,” African American Review 28:3 (1994), pp.
333–45; and also Juda Bennett, “Multiple Passings and the Double Death of
Langston Hughes,” Biography 23:4 (2000), pp. 670–93.
57. Tellingly, the closest he came seems to have been a handwritten poem given
to the beautiful Afro-Chinese Trinidadian Soviet dancer Si-Lan (Sylvia) Chen,
to whom Hughes could not commit: “I am so sad / Over half a kiss / That
with half a pencil / I write this.” See Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol.
1, p. 265.
58. Langston Hughes, “Personal,” The Crisis (October 1933), p. 238.

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59. The versions quoted here are from Contempo (December 1931), p. 1, and
Hughes, Collected Poems (1994), p. 142.
60. This is the interpretation of Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 219.
61. “Testimony of Langston Hughes (Accompanied by His Counsel, Frank D.
Reeves),” Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
of the Committee on Government Operations, vol. 2, Eighty-Third Congress, First
Session, 1953, made public January 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 2003), pp. 972–98.
62. James Baldwin, “Sermons and Blues,” review of Selected Poems of Langston
Hughes. New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1959, p. 6.
63. For example, late in the editing of his 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, a
letter came to Hughes from the Howard University French professor Mercer
Cook advocating inclusion of the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold
Senghor. But Hughes had never heard the name and couldn’t insert Senghor
in time. Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook,
August 9, 10, and 11, 1948. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, box 47, folder 867.
64. Langston Hughes (ed.), An African Treasury (New York: Crown, 1960), and
Langston Hughes (ed.), Poems from Black Africa (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1963).
65. Langston Hughes, “Youth,” The Crisis (August 1924), p. 163. See Rampersad,
Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 325.
66. Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961), p. 70.
67. Hughes, Ask Your Mama, p. 3.
68. Hughes, Ask Your Mama, pp. 5–8.
69. John Henrik Clarke, “Book Reviews,” review of Langston Hughes, Ask Your
Mama, Freedomways 2 ( January 1962), pp. 102–03.

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 Chapter 32
The Objectivists and the Left
M a r k Sc ro g g i n s

Over the course of the depression that followed the stock market crash of
October 1929, American poets on the left wrote an enormous amount of
often passionate poetry addressing their social contexts. Such writing initially
addressed the economic, racial, and gender inequalities these poets perceived
in American capitalism and called for radical reforms, even revolution on the
model of the Soviet experiment in Russia. In the latter part of the decade,
many leftist poets turned their attention to the Spanish Civil War, where the
conl ict between left-leaning democracy and fascism presented itself in bold
relief. In the pages of New Masses and other Communist-linked periodicals,
readers might be hailed by voices drawing their attention to bread lines and
foreclosures, unfair labor practices, and harsh economic inequities, and calling
them to revolution. If they moved in the circles of the East Coast avant-garde,
readers could trace the doctrines of Marx in complex, fugal juxtaposition with
contemporary events, or they could read sharply elliptical, personalized por-
traits of the intransigent conl icts of capital in crisis. Or if a reader were lucky
enough to know Lorine Niedecker, living quietly in rural Wisconsin, she or he
might be able to read utopian aspirations cast in the gentle, questioning tones
of Mother Goose:
Scuttle up the workshop,
settle down the dew,
I’ll tell you what my name is
when we’ve made the world new.1

The reigning ideologues of the Communist Party–connected literary Left,

under the inl uence of the cultural oices of the Soviet Comintern, tended
to promote an aesthetic of socialist realism in both poetry and prose, which
led in practice to a poetry of easily apprehensible political content and overt
persuasive or hortatory intent. Such writing was diametrically opposed to
the various innovative forms and rhetorics American modernist poets had

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pioneered in the irst decades of the century. But although it might be con-
venient to divide American poetry of the 1930s between a straightforward,
rhetorically transparent leftist poetry and a politically quiescent (or even reac-
tionary) modernism, in reality the forms and modes of American leftist poet-
ries were as varied as those of less politically engaged writing. The boundary
between aesthetic experimentation and social commitment (always, one sus-
pects, an artiicial distinction) was never less than porous, and in many cases
poets would assert a direct connection between their formal innovations and
their revolutionary fervor.

*
Perhaps the most familiar model of the politically engaged poem is epitomized
in the refrain of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” – the hortatory poem, that
which calls on the oppressed to rise up and seize what is rightfully theirs: “Rise
like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number . . . Ye are many – they
are few.”2 There were many poems in this vein published during the 1930s, like
Edwin Rolfe’s “These Men Are Revolution” (“Come brother, come millhand,
come miner, come friend – / we’re of ! and we’ll see the thing through to the
end”), Richard Wright’s “I Have Seen Black Hands” (“I am black and I have seen
black hands / Raised in ists of revolt, side by side with the white ists of white
workers”), or H. H. Lewis’s “The Sweeter Our Fruits . . .” (“Before 1918 we
were ‘visionaries,’ / Socialism ‘against human nature,’ / But now / We point /
To Red Russia”).3 Mike Gold, among the most prominent of left-wing literary
igures and an editor for New Masses (a self-appointed successor to the 1911–1917
leftist journal the Masses, edited by Max Eastman), argued for muscularity and
clarity in writing: the poet should avoid “verbal acrobatics,” which are “only
another form for bourgeois idleness. The worker lives too close to reality to
care about these literary show-ofs, these verbalist heroes” (NM, p. 208). The
“verbalist heroes” Gold derides, presumably, are such modernist igures as T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. But revolutionary American poetry of
the 1930s was inevitably written in the atmosphere of the modernist formal rev-
olution. Poems like those of Rolfe, Wright, and Lewis cited previously, straight-
forward exercises in preaching to the choir or raising the consciousness of the
downtrodden, were by no means the inevitable staple of 1930s leftist poetry
(as the literary scholar Cary Nelson has shown in his expansive surveys of the
ield); nor, some would argue, were they the majority of radical poetry.4
For poets on the left, the rapidly forming modernist canon sometimes
ofered itself as an object of scorn and ridicule. The symbolically dense and
formally heterodox works of the “high” modernists, although they might be

729
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

revolutionary in a strictly literary sphere, in reality expressed the decadence of

a dead-end bourgeois culture. Eliot in particular, whose Waste Land (1922) had
so rocked the poetic landscape, had in 1928 declared himself “classicist in lit-
erature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”5 Stanley Burnshaw
attacked him in his 1934 “Mr. Tubbe’s Morning Service”:
The priceless Mr. Waldo Tubbe
And all his little Tubbes now dare
Approach the world they long to snub,
Well insulated with despair. (NM, p. 64)

And Sol Funarof refunctioned The Waste Land itself into a revolutionary
screed, “What the Thunder Said: A Fire Sermon,” in which the thunder of
part V of Eliot’s poem becomes the harbinger of an explosive eruption of
new social forms, “the synthesis of new worlds . . . worker palaces of art and
culture . . . higher bonds of social union.”6 These poets derided the cultural
despair they read in Eliot’s work, and they regarded the overtly reactionary
politics of Pound’s poetry as positively repugnant, but many of them had
nonetheless learned from and been inl uenced by the poetics of the modern-
ists. If one leaves aside the hard-nosed socialist realism of New Masses and
similar outlets, one inds that ideological debates over leftist poetry, such as
that between Burnshaw and Wallace Stevens in 1935, sometimes centered less
around accusations of obscurantism and decadence than around the precise
degree to which a poetic work could be read as properly “committed.”7 But
the forms that commitment took over the 1930s were varied indeed, and many
of them partook of the innovations of the irst generation of modernists or
responded to modernity by forging new, hybridized poetic forms.
Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961) grew up in the Midwest but after college
moved to New York City, where he published pseudonymous pulp iction and
wrote poetry that was deeply imbricated in the urban culture of the Roaring
Twenties and the Great Depression. Even New Masses liked his work, which
combines acute social observation, often gleeful satire, and hard-boiled realism
in an electric, fast-moving style. In 1921 Eliot had observed how Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring had transmuted “the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of
machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the
underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life” into music.8
One might argue that Fearing’s verse, at its most energetic, packs a similar
panoply of contemporary life – with the addition of newspaper headlines,
radio news, and ilm newsreel text – into verse. In “1933,” for instance, an
unnamed “you” has beheld

730
 The Objectivists and the Left

the faith, the union of rags, blackened hands, stacked carrion, breached
barricades in lame,
no default, credit restored, Union Carbide 94 3/8, call money 10%, disarm,
steel ive points up, rails rise, Dupont up, disarm, disarm, and heard again,
ghost out of ghost out of ghost out of ghost. . . .9
In passages like this, Fearing presents modernity as a barrage of informa-
tion, a sift of unsorted indices to the enormities being perpetrated on the
working classes – whom he presents, inevitably, in the person of an ordinary
man or woman. Fearing plays out the class struggle in the same deadpan,
afectless register as the hard-boiled detective novels he would write from the
late 1940s. There is always a touch of the surreal in such poems, however, as
when the poet addresses the businessman in “Portrait of a Cog”: “When they
dig you up, in a thousand years, they will ind you in just this pose, / One hand
upon the buzzer, the other reaching for the phone, eyes ixed upon the calen-
dar, feet irmly on the oice rug.”10 It is easy to see how Fearing’s poems, with
their terrifying vision of the boredom of modern life, their electric sequences
of connection, and their moments of revolutionary uplift, would appeal to a
leftist readership seeking an emphatically contemporary idiom. But Fearing’s
epic catalogues, as exhilarating as they may be in moderate doses, often spend
themselves out in trivialities, and his Whitmanian rhetoric (sometimes satiri-
cally delated, but just as often painfully earnest) wears rapidly threadbare.
A more compellingly modern voice from the Left, perhaps, is that of Muriel
Rukeyser (1913–1980). A native New Yorker, Rukeyser was only twenty-two
when her Theory of Flight won the Yale Younger Poets Prize; that book already
evinced her leftist leanings, nurtured by her education at the Ethical Culture
Fieldston School and Vassar College. Rukeyser’s most startling achievement
(her career included volumes of criticism, history, and biography, as well as
poetry) is the 1938 poem The Book of the Dead. The poem drew on Rukeyser’s
investigations into the town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, the site of the
Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. The company responsible for this hydroelectric
project, Union Carbide, drilled through the tunnel’s seam of silica “dry” in
order to save time. It did not use water, which was customarily used to prevent
the spread of dangerous silicate dust, and neglected to provide its workers
with proper protective gear; hundreds of miners contracted debilitating or
fatal silicosis.
Rukeyser’s poem – really a sequence of twenty shorter poems – takes its title
from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, or The Book of Coming Forth by Day,
a series of spells to assist one’s entry into the afterlife. Rukeyser alludes to that
text on a number of occasions, but her own Book of the Dead is more broadly

731
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

a memorial to the men who died (or who were dying) from the efects of
the silica dust, and a scathing exposure of the corporate interests that caused
their demise. What sets the poem apart from other poems on industrial disas-
ters – there were no doubt any number of poems written about the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory ire of 1911, for instance – is its daring, genre-crossing struc-
ture. From section to section, Rukeyser shifts from pastoral travelogue, to
interviews with tunnel workers (or their widows), to court testimony, and to
the intimate, lyrically rendered voices of Gauley Bridge inhabitants. The poem
in efect marries a sort of late-born symbolism to the gritty documentary style
emerging in such works as James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men (then in progress), and in the oral history and ethnography being
produced under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project.
Rukeyser does not burst forth in invective against Union Carbide; she lets
the company’s representatives be indicted in their own words, and in the tran-
scribed (but edited and lineated) words of the congressional committee inves-
tigating the disaster. The poem’s overall shape is that of a descent into, and
then reascent from, the Inferno. It begins with an address of invitation to an
unnamed American “you” – “These roads will take you back into your own
country. / Select the mountains, follow rivers back, / travel the passes. Touch
West Virginia” – an invitation that leads, down highways and through his-
tory, to Gauley Bridge and Hawk’s Nest Tunnel.11 It ends, after hundreds of
lines of personal tragedy and industrial betrayal, on a note of solidarity and
optimism:
fanatic cruel legend at our back and
speeding ahead the red and open west,
and this our region,
desire, ield, beginning. Name and road,
communication to these many men,
as epilogue, seeds of unending love.12
The abstraction of such an ending might not have pleased Rukeyser’s associ-
ates in the Communist Party; her focus is on the minute human details of
the mine disaster, rather than the capitalist system that made it occur. But
the power of the crosscut lyricism and documentary realism of The Book of
the Dead is undeniable, and the work Rukeyser produced over her long career
would make her an important elder igure for both leftist and feminist poetic
traditions. In particular, her poems exploring feminine subjectivity in by
turns mythopoeic and quotidian terms have been deeply inl uential on such
contemporaries as Adrienne Rich.

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 The Objectivists and the Left

*
The Romantics clearly associated their formal poetic innovations and their
republican political sympathies – Wordsworth would call Lyrical Ballads an
experiment, written “with a view to ascertain how far the language of conver-
sation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of
poetic pleasure.”13 But the Objectivists, by far the most interesting group of
American poets to emerge in the 1930s, wrote in the shadow of and built on
the achievements of a generation of modernist poets, Pound and Eliot most
notably, whose formal innovations were often in the service of quite conserva-
tive, even reactionary political agendas. Far from being a rebel, Eliot seemed to
aim at being absorbed into and playing a leading role in English conservative
culture; and since 1924 Pound had been living in Italy, where he had become
a fervent admirer of Mussolini’s fascist regime, continuing regularly to issue
cantos whose reactionary political implications were far from subtle.
The Objectivists themselves – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi,
Charles Reznikof, and Lorine Niedecker – were nothing if not second-gener-
ation modernists, writing in the immediate tradition of The Waste Land, The
Cantos, and the innovations of William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and (to
a certain extent) Gertrude Stein. Pound and Eliot, however, for all the for-
mal modernism of their verse, can be classiied ideologically as “restitutionist
Romantics,” as Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre deine the term: they partake
in the general Romantic revulsion at the social changes brought about by
maturing capitalism and, like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, look back
with longing on an imagined precapitalist, medieval past.14
The Objectivists, in contrast, are thorough-going modernists, looking for-
ward in both aesthetic and political terms. The work of these ive poets is
widely divergent, but it is safe to describe it, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter
Quartermain do, as “a non-symbolist, post-imagist poetics, characterized by
a historical, realist, antimythological worldview.”15 Michael Heller sums up
these poets’ commonalities rather nicely when he calls the Objectivists “a
lying poetic truth squad.”16 “No myths,” writes Hugh Kenner, “might be the
Objectivist motto.”17
It is misleading to speak of the Objectivists as a “group” or “movement”
in any formal sense, on the model of the Pound-led Imagists or of André
Breton’s tightly policed Surrealists. DuPlessis and Quartermain aptly describe
them as a “nexus,” a group of writers “conjoined through a variety of per-
sonal, ideological, and literary-historical links.”18 The term “Objectivists” irst
appeared in the February 1931 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Ezra Pound
had persuaded Poetry’s editor, Harriet Monroe, to allow his young New York

733
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

correspondent Louis Zukofsky to edit a “special number” of the magazine;

she agreed but insisted that Zukofsky present his selection of poets under the
banner of a new “movement.” Zukofsky was somewhat nonplussed – he was
unaware of participating in any such movement – but he complied, retooling
an essay he had earlier written on the work of his friend Charles Reznikof,
“Sincerity and Objectiication,” into a theoretical statement that could describe
what he found most vital in the rather disparate work of the twenty-odd poets
published as “ ‘Objectivists’ 1931.”
Zukofsky’s Objectivist “manifesto” – which he had drafted before he knew
it would serve as such, and which was written without consulting any of
the other poets who would come to be known as Objectivists – is in large
part a restatement of the principles Pound had presented in support of the
Imagists back in 1913; where “Sincerity and Objectiication” difers from and
goes beyond Pound is in its emphasis on the poem’s overall form. “Sincerity”
is a kind of poetic askesis, a writing that hews closely both to the poet’s expe-
rience and to the quality of his words; it is writing “which is the detail, not
mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing
them along a line of melody.” “Objectiication” is a formal principle, “the
resolving of words and their ideation into structure,” a tangibility in which the
readerly mind can attain “rested totality.”19
Movement manifestos, of course, rarely capture the range of practices
within a group. “Sincerity and Objectiication” describes Zukofsky’s concep-
tion of his own writing, and of what he deems worthwhile in any poetry,
more than it does the work he collected in the February 1931 Poetry issue, or
in An “Objectivists” Anthology, which he edited in 1932.20 Indeed, Zukofsky was
at pains to dissociate the term “Objectivist” from any organized “movement”:
“The interest of the [Poetry] issue was in the very few recent lines of poetry
which could be found, and in the craft of poetry,” he wrote in the preface to
the Anthology, “NOT in a movement. The contributors did not get up one
morning all over the land and say ‘objectivists’ between tooth-brushes.”21
There were some two dozen poets in the “ ‘Objectivists’ 1931” issue of
Poetry, and ifteen in the Anthology. The ive who would come to be identiied
as the core “Objectivists were associated through a tenuous web of personal
ties. Four of them were Jews, to some degree outsiders in an overwhelmingly
Anglo-Saxon American literary culture. Zukofsky and Reznikof (a decade
older than the others) had been friends for some time; Oppen had discovered
Zukofsky’s work while l ipping through a magazine in a bookstore and then
met Zukofsky himself shortly afterward in New York; Rakosi’s relationship
was with Zukofsky and was primarily epistolary, as Zukofsky had discovered

734
 The Objectivists and the Left

his poetry in the little magazines and had written him (he was then living in
Houston) for work to include in the Poetry issue. Niedecker was the latecomer:
she was so taken with the writing in Poetry that she contacted Zukofsky from
her remote Wisconsin home, visited him in Manhattan, and established a
close, lifelong friendship.
These poets’ work, however, was various indeed. Charles Reznikof (1894–
1976) was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents and pursued his poetry in
relative solitude. In the face of almost entire public indiference – a number
of his early books were typeset and printed by the poet himself – Reznikof
honed a minutely detailed poetics of observation, drawing on the sonorities
of the King James Bible, the lyrics and epigrams of the Greek Anthology, and the
formal precisions of the Imagists and William Carlos Williams. Reznikof was
an inveterate, even obsessive, walker, and his poems vividly depict the sounds,
sights, and smells of New York in the irst part of the century. With a remark-
ably keen eye for detail, he is able to fashion endlessly resonant images out of
the welter of everyday perceptions: “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies /
a girder, still itself among the rubbish.”22
Other Reznikof poems explore the gritty, everyday reality of urban life –
the struggles of minor artisans, oice workers, and small businessmen – and
dwell in a melancholy key on his own sense of isolation within the polis, both
as a Jew within a culture that deined itself overwhelmingly as classical and
Christian and as a Jew who found himself estranged from his own tradition.
“How diicult for me is Hebrew,” Reznikof writes, “even the Hebrew for
mother, for bread, for sun / is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion.”23 In
“Hellenist,” the poet laments the slowness of his own access to the richness of
Gentile culture: “As I, barbarian, at last, although slowly, could read Greek, /
at ‘blue-eyed Athena’ / I greeted her picture.” The awkward, stumbling
phrases of the irst line mime the poet’s stumbling encounter with glaukopis
Athene, while the last clause – “the beautiful lips slightly scornful” – captures
his timidity in an image of cold classicism.24
When he was not writing short lyrics, Reznikof was much engaged in
recasting biblical stories, or retelling Jewish tales from the intertestamen-
tal period. Many of his poems also present narratives of contemporary life;
they are practically short stories in verse, often haunting in their obliquity.
Reznikof had been trained as a lawyer and had a keen eye for the human
drama concealed beneath legal evidence. His work as a researcher on the
Corpus Juris legal encyclopedia would contribute immensely to his long poem
Testimony: The United States (1885–1915), Recitative. This sprawling work presents
edited and versiied excerpts from thirty years of courtroom testimony across

735
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

the nation and lays out a sometimes dreary panorama of injustice, inequality,
and violence. Reznikof understood “Objectivist” as referring to the necessary
objectivity of the judge or the courtroom reporter: his “testimony” stands
unalloyed and uncommented on and is all the more scarifying in its nakedness
as objective social commentary.
Carl Rakosi (1903–2004) was born in Berlin, his parents immigrated to the
Midwest when he was seven, and he grew up in Chicago and Indiana; he knew
Kenneth Fearing when he attended the University of Wisconsin. In sharp con-
trast to Reznikof, Rakosi rarely essays narrative verse, or poems longer than
a page or two. His verse is distinguished in turn by a plainspoken formal care,
an almost inical attention to enjambment and stanza break reminiscent of the
Williams of Spring and All, and alternately by a lorid, ornate diction strongly
redolent of Wallace Stevens, as in “Salons,” with its “lines of peridot,” “cairn-
gorm pomp,” and “reinements of the clavichord.”25 Rakosi is an unabashedly
lyrical poet, but with a propensity toward satire that often aims at (but rarely
skewers) social targets. When he openly expresses his political sentiments,
as in “To the Non-Political Citizen,” the result is no more subtle than New
Masses’s common fare: “When will you become indignant / and declare your-
self / against the wrongs of the people?”26 More than anything else, Rakosi’s
poems seek to see the world in its fresh and colorful detail; the social structures
of that world rarely engage his attention for long.
Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) was a poet of large if often frustrated ambition.
He was the irst American-born child of immigrant Lithuanian Jews; his father
worked as a pants presser in the Manhattan garment district, a life of back-
breaking drudgery that Zukofsky was determined to escape. And escape it he
did, graduating from Columbia University with a master’s degree at twenty-
two, and striving throughout his life to make the Western cultural inheritance
his own. Zukofsky’s irst major work, “Poem beginning ‘The,’ ” is a 330-line
parody of The Waste Land that draws on contemporary American Yiddish
verse, and that asserts, in the face of the anti-Semitism of Eliot’s shorter verse,
Zukofsky’s stubborn pride in his own Jewishness. “Poem beginning ‘The’ ” ends
with a moment of most un-Eliotic optimism, hope in the Russian Bolshevik
experiment. Zukofsky’s early short poetry veers between moments of chis-
eled, almost inically crafted free verse observation and political statements
distinguished largely by their obliquity; this was verse that, whatever its merits
in formal precision and intellectual density, could be of little use to the Left.
From early on Zukofsky intended to write a long poem, and he began
his twenty-four-section “A” in 1928, expecting it to occupy no more than a
few years. In the event, he would labor at the poem for almost ive decades.

736
 The Objectivists and the Left

“A” begins much in the mode of Pound’s Cantos: each movement of verse
concatenates materials from the present, the historical past, and the gen-
eral cultural record, aiming to elicit a larger movement or meaning from
the juxtaposition of the discrete elements. (Zukofsky himself liked to
describe the formal structure of the early movements of “A” as in some
sense “fugal.”) But where The Cantos tend to contrast historical shifts and
events with timeless, mythological moments, “A” is concerned with tracing
the dialectics of history, the inconsistent relationship between a capitalist
system in crisis and artists’ repeated reaching for timeless beauty, a utopian
moment continually undermined by economic inequity. Marx is a major
presence in the early movements of “A”; the irst half of “A”-9 (1938–1940) is
an adaptation of the Renaissance Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone
“Donna mi priegha” (a poem Pound had translated repeatedly), adopting
the original’s complex meter and rhyme scheme to present a restatement
of the passage from Capital in which Marx deines value in the voice of the
commodity itself.
If “A” had begun as something of a Marxist Cantos, as the poem progressed
into its middle sections, it became increasingly a showcase for Zukofsky’s
formal experiments, his attempt to fashion the materials of his historical
moment, his wide reading, and his personal life into a bewilderingly various
larger whole – what he called “a poem of a life.”27 Zukofsky’s work would
come to be a set of modernist limit texts, the pushing to extremes of radical
condensation and the ruthless excision of bridge passages, connectives, and
all materials of less than “irst intensity”;28 translation as an instrument for
the poet’s taking on unfamiliar voices, and as the discovery of new formal
“templates” for verse (most notably in Zukofsky’s translation – with his wife
Celia – of Catullus); and quotation, the creation of the poem out of widely
disparate but cunningly joined fragments of others’ writing.
Like Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) hailed from the Midwest, but her
own upbringing was a rural one, and apart from her visit to New York City
she would spend most of her life in the marshy, lake-spotted Wisconsin area
where she was born. During the irst years of her association with Zukofsky,
she was deeply interested in Surrealism, in exploring the various levels of indi-
vidual consciousness through techniques of semi-“automatic” writing and
dream exploration. In a pair of sets of poems published in 1935, for instance,
she sought to tease out successive “planes of consciousness”: in the “Beyond
what” set, those of the “subconscious,” “toward monologue,” and the “social-
banal” (LNC, p. 370). This is in some sense Freud, of course (id, ego, and super-
ego), but it is edging toward political commentary, especially in its inal lines:

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 Mar k S cro ggi n s

“the stars and stripes forever / over the factories and hills of our country / for
the soldier dead” (LNC, p. 34).
Over the course of the second half of the 1930s, Niedecker’s verse became
sparer and sparer. Turning from the expansive innerscapes of her Surrealist
work, she pursued the potentials of a stripped-down language of startling
clarity, and the formal possibilities of traditional vernacular verse forms – folk
songs and nursery rhymes. This direction in her work culminated in the formi-
dable achievement of the New Goose collection (published in 1946, but includ-
ing work dating back to the mid-1930s). New Goose includes poems of personal
experience, deep meditations on the privations and riches of Niedecker’s rural
existence: “Remember my little granite pail? / The handle of it was blue”
(LNC, p. 96). In a poem about her mother – one of many – Niedecker writes,
“I’ve wasted my whole life in water. / My man’s got nothing but leaky boats.
/ My daughter, writer, sits and loats” (LNC, p. 107). Other pieces touch on
historical characters – John James Audubon (“Tried selling my pictures. In jail
twice for debt. My companion a sharp, frosty gale”), Vincent van Gogh (“At
times I sit in the dunes, / faint, not enough to eat”), and the fur trader John
Baptiste DuBay (LNC, pp. 107, 108).
As her citations from Audubon and van Gogh indicate, Niedecker took
note of the economic hardship all too often sufered by the artist, and that
hardship, other poems of the collection imply, is part and parcel of a system
of private property and capitalist competition. As the Sauk chief Black Hawk
holds,

In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.

But the Sauks are dispossessed by the expanding United States, “and to this day,
Black Hawk, / reason has small room” (LNC, p. 99). Niedecker’s political com-
mitments are quite evidently leftist and are as evidently on display through-
out New Goose; but she rarely strays into sloganeering. Instead, her social and
political commentary is embedded in wry, Mother Goose–like quatrains, its
impact all the sharper for its playful tone. The “folk” idiom of New Goose is
a continuingly impressive achievement: Niedecker’s vernacular vocabulary
and sharp eye for the patterns of ordinary rural conversation (often quoted
seemingly verbatim) speak to a wide range of readers, while her minutely
calibrated line breaks and deliberate syntactic obliquities reward the closest
repeated attention.

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 The Objectivists and the Left

In one poem, the nineteenth-century naturalist Asa Gray writes to his col-
league Increase Lapham, “pay particular attention / to my pets, the grasses”
(LNC, p. 105). Such language would seem to forecast the future of Niedecker’s
own interests. Both Gray and Lapham were celebrated nineteenth-century
naturalists; Lapham is known as the irst great cataloguer of Wisconsin’s lora
and geography, and Gray’s injunction to him – to pay special attention to the
natural phenomena around him, the “grasses” under his feet – is one that
Niedecker would take to heart.
George Oppen (1908–1984) grew up in a more than well-to-do family in
downstate New York and San Francisco, but by 1928, when he met Louis
Zukofsky and Charles Reznikof in New York City, he had turned his back on
that milieu, hitchhiking across the country with his wife, Mary, and working
odd jobs. Oppen’s only book of the 1930s, Discrete Series (1934), is perhaps the
most obdurate, unaccommodating work of the irst wave of Objectivist poetry.
“I see the diference between the writing of Mr. Oppen and Dr. Williams,”
Pound writes in his preface to the volume; “I do not expect any great horde
of readers to notice it.”29 The angular, eloquent line breaks of Williams’s free
verse, as well as the spare observations of the Imagists, are perhaps the most
evident inl uences on Oppen’s poetics. But the poems of Discrete Series aim to
go beyond the Imagists’ presentational aesthetics: as Oppen’s editor Michael
Davidson puts it, to link “the phenomenal object with an experiencing, lan-
guage-using subject” (GONC, p. xxx).
In practice, this means that there are no poems of pure observation in
Discrete Series; every phenomenon the poet observes is mediated through a
keen awareness of its position within a social order. Driving “our car . . . on a
higher road,” the poet notes that

Nothing can equal in polish and obscured

origin that dark instrument
A car
(Which.
Ease; the hand on the sword-hilt (GONC, p. 8)

The car, then as now the quintessential emblem of American freedom and
masculinity, attracts by its “polish,” its easy instrumentality, but those very
aspects make it near kin to the premodern emblem of manhood, the sword.
Just as the “Frigidaire” hides its inner workings behind a polished enamel
surface, or the soda jerk making an egg cream cracks eggs out of sight of the
customer – “the prudery / Of Frigidaire, of / Soda-jerking” – “big-Business”
occludes itself “Above the // Plane of lunch, of wives” (GONC, p. 7), removes

739
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

itself from quotidian consciousness, even as it continues to manipulate the

social order that allows one a lunch hour during which one might step out for
an egg cream.
This is perhaps as close as Discrete Series comes to outright social commentary,
save for another brief poem that freezes a Depression snapshot: amid automo-
bile traic, “By the elevated posts / And the movie sign,” “A man sells post-
cards”(GONC, p. 30). Oppen’s verse is simultaneously a sensory and an intensely
cerebral poetry: his poems seem to stammer their way through the shifting
experience of “the world, weather-swept, with which / one shares the century”
(GONC, p. 5). They dramatize a search for certainties in a society that seems in
terminal crisis, and while they register the rumbling movement of larger social
forces, they refuse to settle for easy answers. Poetry, Oppen found, was – like phi-
losophy – the process of discovering the words to ask the big questions; and as
Marx had charged in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” the time had perhaps come for
the philosophers to set aside “explaining” the world in order to change it.

*
In the wake of the February 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry maga-
zine, Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikof sought to prolong the public atten-
tion focused on their “movement” with a pair of publishing ventures: To
Publishers, bankrolled by Oppen and edited by Zukofsky, which issued An
“Objectivists” Anthology and volumes of prose by Pound and Williams, and the
Objectivist Press, a collective venture that published Williams’s Collected Poems
1921–1931, Oppen’s Discrete Series, and four volumes by Reznikof. (Williams’s
presence in both of these lists as a fully participant Objectivist both demon-
strates the ductility of the Objectivist moniker and underlines the movement’s
continuity with an older generation of modernism.) Neither of these presses
was very successful, and as the Depression deepened, more and more of the
little magazines that had printed these poets were forced to close. New Masses
continued publication, and for a while Zukofsky made some editorial contri-
butions to it and even placed a couple of poems there; but he ultimately found
that he could not convince Mike Gold and the other editors of the value of his
own intransigent modernism, however authentically Marxist his ideological
stance might be. As the 1930s wore on, Zukofsky and Niedecker found them-
selves almost entirely without publishing outlets.
Rakosi similarly found that, although he was a committed leftist, the left-
wing magazines had no use for his lyrics, and after he married in 1939 he stopped
writing, mostly out of sheer lack of time. Oppen made an even cleaner break.
Unable to reconcile his commitments to poetry and social activism, after the

740
 The Objectivists and the Left

publication of Discrete Series he joined the Communist Party, on whose behalf

he worked as an election campaign manager and strike organizer. He entirely
gave up poetry, unwilling to write the sort of poems the party demanded. He
fought as an infantryman on the western front in the Second World War, but
in 1950 moved with his wife Mary to Mexico to avoid harassment by the FBI on
account of his earlier political activities.
As a “movement,” and as individual poets, the Objectivists had been largely
forgotten by the end of the 1930s. Oppen and Rakosi had ceased writing,
and Reznikof had to some extent forgone poetry for prose writing. While
Zukofsky and Niedecker continued writing poems, they had extraordinary
diiculty getting their work published. Their irst book collections were issued
during the 1940s and were received with resounding silence. By the postwar
years, it was as though these poets had never existed.

*
But the poets of the Objectivist nexus experienced a remarkable public resur-
gence over the 1960s. In 1958 Oppen, after a quarter century away from poetry
and eight years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, began writing again and moved
back to the United States. Rakosi returned to writing in the 1960s after a similar
hiatus, and Reznikof turned his attentions back to poetry. These three poets
found a wider audience than heretofore, as they were now published by New
Directions, Pound’s and Williams’s publisher. Even Zukofsky, who had issued
a series of small press (and self-published) books over the 1940s and 1950s,
by the late 1960s found his poetry being published by the trade irm W. W.
Norton. A new generation of American avant-garde poets, inspired largely by
Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” manifesto – among them Robert Duncan,
Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, and Denise Levertov – began rediscovering the
Objectivists. At irst these younger poets looked to Zukofsky and Oppen as
still-living relics of an earlier generation of experimental writing, a surviving
direct link to the heroic irst generation of high modernism. But soon enough,
it became clear that these poets were by no means museum exhibits but were
writing some of the most vital poetry of the postwar decades.
Of course, if the Objectivists had ever really been a group back in the 1930s,
by the 1960s they were a heterogeneous set of poets who shared little besides
memories and past associations. Rakosi’s own return to writing had been
spurred by the English poet Andrew Crozier’s contacting him in 1965, but he
had been out of touch with the others for years. Zukofsky and Oppen had
tried to reestablish their once intimate friendship when Oppen moved to New
York in 1958, but the two men found themselves radically incompatible on

741
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

both aesthetic and personal bases. By the mid-1960s they were no longer on
speaking terms. Niedecker and Zukofsky alone, carrying on their epistolary
relationship over the decades, sharing personal news and poems, constituted a
“movement” of two. Niedecker in the 1950s and early 1960s was more isolated
than ever, her primary contacts with the literary world her correspondence
with Zukofsky and, later, with the poet and editor Cid Corman.
Although James Laughlin of New Directions had used the Objectivist con-
nection to promote the books he published by Oppen, Rakosi, and Reznikof,
the notion of the Objectivists as a group of four – those poets and Zukofsky –
was crystallized by their appearance together in a 1969 feature in Contemporary
Literature, “The Objectivist Poet: Four Interviews.” The texts of those inter-
views, indeed, demonstrate rather decisively how loose any conceptual com-
monalities of the original “movement” had been: the very term “Objectivist”
becomes a kind of Rorschach blot, eliciting four diferent deinitions from the
four poets. The young poets of 1931 were now poets in their late middle age.
More crucially, the subject matter, forms, and techniques of their work had
blossomed in new, provocative directions that were to prove an instigation to
younger poets through the rest of the century.
One index of the shift in Zukofsky’s concerns is the second half of “A”-9
(1948–1950), written a decade after the irst. The poem is still an adaptation
of Cavalcanti, his internal and end rhymes and meter intact. But where the
irst half uses the words of Das Kapital to deine labor, the second half uses the
words of Spinoza’s Ethics to deine love. Between 1938 and 1948 Zukofsky had
become a husband and a father, and to a large degree the focus of his work
shifted from political engagement to the more immediate sphere of his family
life. That he rewrote “A”-9’s irst half, however, preserving its original rhyme
words, indicates the degree to which Zukofsky had become obsessed with
formal experimentation. Indeed, the later movements of “A” can be read as a
series of increasingly strange and recondite formal challenges issued by the
poet to himself: to excavate a poem out of Paradise Lost, preserving Milton’s
words in their original order, but distributed in two-word lines (“A”-14); to
open a poem on the death of John F. Kennedy with a passage from the book of
Job, its Hebrew homophonically translated into barely grammatical – but very
strange-sounding – English (“A”-15); to write an elegy for his friend William
Carlos Williams, using only the words he had previously written about or to
Williams (“A”-17); to translate Plautus’s Rudens (The Rope) into a slangy ver-
nacular, keeping to one ive-word line for each line of Latin hexameter, and
preserving as much of the sound of the original as possible; and to plot a pair
of geological, linguistic, and cultural histories of the world on the structure

742
 The Objectivists and the Left

of one thousand ive-word lines (“A”-22 and -23). These last movements are
indeed, as some of their inal lines put it, a “never- / Uninished hairlike water
of notes / vital free as Itself – impossible’s / sort-of think-cramp work x.”30
Zukofsky’s late work presses the very limit of the intelligible. His inal
collection, 80 Flowers, published shortly after his death in 1978, is a series of
strictly formal short poems – eight ive-word lines – each one addressing a
given plant or lower, each one a collage of quoted, translated, or transliter-
ated words. The opening lines of “Bearded Iris,” for instance – “Gay ore geek
con candlelows / driveway west fanswordleaves equitant stride” – condense
passages from Virgil’s Georgics (whose Greek title, Georgikon, is transliterated
in the irst words) and from Gray’s Manual of Botany, crosscutting them with
direct description (“fanswordleaves,” “driveway west”) and allusions to one of
Zukofsky’s recurrent images, that of the poet as laboring “horse” (“equitant
stride”).31 Zukofsky could not have expected his readers to be able to unwind
these condensed miniature labyrinths of reference: these are not the late
Cantos, in which a single talismanic word alerts us to a reference to Justinian
or Confucius. Rather, these forty-word lyrics function as nodes of alluring
indeterminacy, challenging the reader to test their alternatives of syntax and
meaning, and to wonder at their ghosty, half-perceived depths of resonance.
Already by the 1960s there were a number of poets whose voices were deeply
inl uenced by Zukofsky’s angular lyricism, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, John
Taggart, and Ronald Johnson among them. His fantastically impacted, obdu-
rate late writing would have a deep impact on an even younger generation – the
poets of the Language Movement, among them Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman,
Charles Bernstein, and Barrett Watten, who looked to Zukofsky’s early writ-
ing as one model of a politically engaged modernism, and to his late work for
models of nonlinear and semantically indeterminate lyricism.
The poems George Oppen made when he returned to writing in the late
1950s are quite unlike his early Objectivist work in both texture, intensity, and
scope. His keen eye for detail is the same, as is his halting, almost stammering
lyricism, but there is a philosophical depth only hinted at in Discrete Series. His
irst posthiatus collection, The Materials, opens with an epigraph from Jacques
Maritain – “We awake in the same moment to ourselves and things” (GONC,
p. 38) – and this preoccupation with the very state of being in the world, which
Oppen also found brooded on by Heidegger, is at the center of Oppen’s
mature work. “I am no longer sure of the words,” he writes in “Leviathan”
(whose title evokes Thomas Hobbes’s political meditation), “The clockwork
of the world. What is inexplicable // Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ . . . We
must talk now. Fear / Is fear. But we abandon one another” (GONC, p. 89). The

743
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

poems of Oppen’s later collections from The Materials (1962) to 1978’s Primitive
are a series of approaches to very basic questions: What does it mean that we,
as language-using creatures, are living in a world of objects and animals? In
what ways do those seemingly dumb phenomena among which we live speak
to us? And how can we manage to live with one another, given our propensity
for violence and self-destruction?
Oppen’s late work is an inescapably political poetry, but it is political in a
deep sense that transcends divisions of party: what does it mean that the
human being is (in Aristotle’s phrase) a zoon politikon, a “political animal,” one
who by rights lives in a polis, a community? The issue is explored most exten-
sively in the long title poem of Of Being Numerous (1968), which moves and cir-
cles back in numbered sections from a meditation on the objects among which
we live, to memories of Oppen’s military service in the Second World War, and
to the present state of the American republic, at once engaged in a war of impe-
rialist aggression in Vietnam and lacerated by civil dissent at home. The funda-
mental American paradox, to form a single polis out of inviolable individualities
(“e pluribus unum”), is at stake here, the signiicance of “being numerous”:
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous. (GONC, p. 166)
In order to confront the horrors and paradoxes of his time, the poet must
somehow, through his word skill, through his passion of his thought, rise
above the common level; at the same time, he must retain his vital connections
to others, must avoid “the bright light of shipwreck” (GONC, p. 173), the solip-
sism of those who have detached themselves from their fellows and direct the
helicopters against the rice paddies.
The poet’s primary responsibility, in Oppen’s eyes, is to confront the world
as openly and keenly as possible, and then to speak what he sees with the
utmost clarity possible:
Clarity
In the sense of transparence,
I don’t mean that much can be explained.
Clarity in the sense of silence. (GONC, p. 175)
The problems the poet confronts may be at the very limits of our understand-
ing, ultimately intractable, but the poet’s duty is to speak them as plainly as

744
 The Objectivists and the Left

possible. What this ethos gives rise to in Oppen’s later work is a poetry in
which questions of staggering philosophical weight are revolved and pon-
dered in fragments of sometimes inarticulate questioning and lashes of great
lyric beauty. It is something like Heidegger in verse, but without Heidegger’s
serene conidence in the surety of his own intuitions.
Oppen’s emphasis on clarity no doubt contributed to his break with
Zukofsky; he saw the increasing hermeticism and formal complexity of
Zukofsky’s later work as no better than a series of formal lourishes, evidence
of Zukofsky’s having turned his back on the readers with whom Oppen so
desperately wished to communicate. Oppen’s own poetry found many readers
indeed over the 1960s; they were attracted in part by the poems’ willingness
to confront the pressing political issues of the day. (Of Being Numerous was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, much to Oppen’s discomiture.) But Oppen
has become a central inluence on succeeding generations of writers, moved
by his work’s craggy lyricism, its utter sincerity, and its intransigent thoughtful-
ness. His writing has spoken not merely to adherents of various avant-gardes,
such as the Language poets, but to such “mainstream” poets as Sharon Olds.
Niedecker’s early poetry had explored her own experience as one exem-
plar of class relations and struggle. Over the course of the postwar decades,
her work came to dwell more insistently on her own relationship to her mid-
western setting, and to explore the natural, even geological histories of her
surroundings. And although she continued to compose in the tight, compact
forms she had evolved over the 1930s, she gradually abandoned the evocations
of traditional folk forms, developing a wonderfully spare and evocative ver-
nacular, free verse idiom. Her 1968 collection North Central contains several
striking longer poems or sequences, in which she works to build larger wholes
out of her mostly self-suicient shorter units.
“Lake Superior,” for instance, a poem based on a car trip she took around
that lake in 1966, is at once travelogue, geological exploration, and history
lesson. As Niedecker rounds the lake, she evokes the French explorers who
irst opened up the region to European settlement and the Indians who lived
there before them, and she meditates on the importance of iron deposits and
iron shipping routes, on the various rock formations she encounters, and on
the succession of names given to points on the lake’s environs: the lake itself
becomes a palimpsest of history, reaching back beyond its human inhabitants.
“Wintergreen Ridge” is another tour de force of naturalistic description, mov-
ing from geological observation to a minute tracking of lora, all interspersed
with personal relection and cultural allusion. In the midst of meditation on
time and falling leaves, Niedecker notes that

745
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

Nobody, nothing
ever gave me
greater thing
than time
unless light
and silence
which if intense
makes sound (LNC, p. 253)
These lines would seem beautifully to sum up Niedecker’s quiet, penetrating
aesthetic.
Zukofsky was given to comparing Niedecker to Emily Dickinson (while at
times he compared himself to Walt Whitman). The grounds of the analogy are
clear, if unfortunately sexist: the isolated female poet, cut of from the world
of literary commerce, piecing out her “letter to the world” in mostly unread
lyrics. Perhaps that stereotype has been reinforced by the critical attention paid
to “Paean to Place,” a late, longish (for Niedecker) poem that dwells much on
the poet’s forebears and her Wisconsin environment, and that displays little
of the range of cultural references that so inlects most of Niedecker’s poetry.
But “Paean to Place” is indeed a masterpiece of self-relection and natural
observation. Midway through, Niedecker describes her own lyrical gift:
I was the solitary plover
a pencil
for a wing-bone
From the secret notes
I must tilt
upon the pressure
execute and adjust
In us sea-air rhythm
“We live by the urgent wave
of the verse” (LNC, p. 265)
Niedecker is neither an autodidactic hermit nor a self-obsessed spinster but
an immensely subtle and sophisticated poet who brings a formidable mastery
of sound, lineation, and diction and a deep knowledge of poetic tradition to
bear on a sometimes deliberately limited set of subject matter. Of all of the
original Objectivists, her work is perhaps most widely known and valued by a
broad readership, forty years after her death.

746
 The Objectivists and the Left

Leftist poetry in 1930s America lourished in response to a particular historical

moment, just as many thousands of antiwar poems were written during the
Vietnam War. What is most fascinating about the politically engaged poetry of
the 1930s, however, and what sets it apart from similarly engaged work written
during, say, the American Revolution or the English Commonwealth, is that it
was written in the wake of a large-scale formal revolution in English-language
writing. Leftist poets of the 1930s wrote in relation both to the possibility of polit-
ical revolution and to modernism, a “revolution of the word” that had radically
redeined the terms of poetry itself. Some committed poets essentially ignored
modernism or dismissed it as bourgeois decadence; others, like the Objectivists,
sought to make their politico-rhetorical interventions in the forms and modes
pioneered by the modernists, and to extend those modernist modes.
In fact, it might be argued that the Objectivists advance what amounts to a
fundamentally materialist poetics, in which their relentless foregrounding of
the materiality of the poem – the graphic shapes of the words and lines out of
which it is made and the aural sounds of its words – becomes a sustained ana-
log for the representation of conditions of objects and persons in the world.
The political charge of Objectivist poetry lies less in the speciically political
stances taken up within the poems – although much of the Objectivists’ work,
especially their early work, is very committed indeed – than in the forms and
idioms of that work, which ceaselessly question the accepted order of things
and which might even be read as restlessly hunting for the utopian in the
nooks and crannies of a capitalist world order.
It is possible to speak of a “second generation” of Objectivist poets, those who
knew and have been directly inluenced by the original Objectivists, and whose
works are both grounded in the Objectivists’ projects and extend those projects
in new directions: Michael Heller, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein,
and Hugh Seidman would be among such poets. But the Objectivists’ inluence
has become far more widely difused than their relatively modest success during
their lifetimes would indicate. However belatedly – certainly the Objectivists’
impact has paradoxically lagged behind that of Charles Olson and the poets
associated with his “Projective Verse” (Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and
Denise Levertov) – literary history has begun to recognize the Objectivist nexus
as one of the central instigations of twentieth-century American poetry.

Notes
1. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), p. 87. This collection will be cited in the text as LNC.

747
 Mar k S cro ggi n s

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 305.
3. Joseph North (ed.), New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York:
International Publishers, 1969), pp. 56, 58, 66. This collection will be cited in
the text as NM.
4. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics
of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989);
Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left
(New York: Routledge, 2001).
5. T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and
Gwyer, 1928), p. vii.
6. Nelson, Repression and Recovery, p. 215.
7. James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), pp. 135–47; Harvey Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics,
Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), pp. 116–33; and, more generally, Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left:
Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
8. T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed.
Lawrence Rainey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 189.
9. Kenneth Fearing, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of
America, 2004), p. 43.
10. Fearing, Selected Poems, p. 101.
11. Muriel Rukeyser, Out of Silence: Selected Poems, ed. Kate Daniels (Evanston, Ill.:
Triquarterly Books, 1992), p. 10.
12. Rukeyser, Out of Silence, p. 40.
13. William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen
Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 591.
14. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity,
trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
15. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (eds.), The Objectivist Nexus:
Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 3.
16. Michael Heller, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and
Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. 7.
17. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York:
Knopf, 1975), p. 187.
18. DuPlessis and Quartermain, The Objectivist Nexus, p. 2.
19. Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays, rev. and expanded
ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), p. 194.
20. Louis Zukofsky (ed.), “Objectivists,” special issue, Poetry 37:5 (1931), http://
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc/221; Louis Zukofsky (ed.),
An “Objectivists” Anthology (Le Beausset, Var, France: To Publishers, 1932).

748
 The Objectivists and the Left

21. Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 214.

22. Charles Reznikof, Poems 1918–1936: Volume I of the Complete Poems, ed. Seamus
Cooney (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1976), p. 121.
23. Reznikof, Poems 1918–1936, p. 72.
24. Reznikof, Poems 1918–1936, p. 107.
25. Carl Rakosi, Poems 1923–1941, ed. Andrew Crozier (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon,
1995), p. 87.
26. Rakosi, Poems 1923–1941, p. 140.
27. Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 228.
28. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” in Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, ed. Ira B. Nadel
(New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 281.
29. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New
Directions, 2002), p. 4. This collection will be cited in the text as GONC.
30. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (1978; New York: New Directions, 2011), p. 563.
31. Louis Zukofsky, ANEW: Complete Shorter Poetry (New York: New Directions,
2011), p. 345.

749
 Chapter 33
“All the Blessings of This Consuming
Chance”: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore
Roethke, and the Middle-Generation Poets
D av i d W o ja h n

At the time of his death in 1977, Robert Lowell was the most esteemed
American poet of his era, enjoying a reputation comparable to that of his
great modernist predecessors T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Like them,
he had come to be seen as not only a strikingly original and inl uential poet
but also a public igure whose import far surpassed that of other poets of his
generation. As early as 1965, critic Irvin Ehrenpreis could declare “the Age
of Lowell.”1 This adulation began very early in Lowell’s career. He was not
yet thirty when he received the Pulitzer Prize for his second collection, Lord
Weary’s Castle and was barely in his forties when his greatest and most inl uen-
tial collection, Life Studies, appeared.
During the years since his death, Lowell’s reputation has waned, although
he remains a writer of considerable interest among readers and scholars;
he has been the subject of two biographies. Lowell is now seen less as the
dominant poet of his time than as a leading member of the so-called middle
generation of American poets born between roughly 1905 and 1920, whose
ranks include such formidable names as John Berryman, Theodore Roethke,
Randall Jarrell, George Oppen, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hayden, Lorine
Niedecker, Delmore Schwartz, Stanley Kunitz, Weldon Kees, and above all
Elizabeth Bishop – Lowell’s closest literary associate, whose reputation has
now eclipsed that of her generational peers. The middle-generation poets
represent various aesthetics and schools, but all of the names on this list share
a particular unease toward what they came to regard as the excessively pro-
grammatic high modernism of Eliot, Pound, Moore, and Stevens. Yet the
middle-generation poets emphatically regarded themselves as the successors
of the modernists, seeking less to depart from their example as to vary, reine,
and individualize a manner that came to be seen by them as rareied and aes-
thetically restrictive. Lowell may not today be regarded as the greatest poet of

750
 “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”

his era, nor even the most signiicant talent among the middle generation, but
he is arguably the poet most representative of the middle generation’s partic-
ular aesthetic and personal anxieties. And, if the desire for stylistic change can
be regarded as a primary hallmark of ambition, then he is perhaps the most
ambitious American poet of his time, his work falling into at least four distinct
periods; few other poets have so successfully made such radical changes.
Furthermore, Lowell’s inl uence on later generations continues to be felt,
and of the middle-generation poets he is second only to Bishop in this regard.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Lowell’s work is that his seminal col-
lection, Life Studies, gave several generations of American poets permission
to write an overtly autobiographical poetry that appeared to derive directly
from experience, often the experience of emotional extremity. These topics
included accounts of mental breakdowns, marital strife, dysfunctional family
histories, and drug and alcohol abuse, subjects considered indelicate at best,
even taboo. The critic M. L. Rosenthal dubbed such writing “confessional
poetry,” a label that displeased Lowell, and one that came to have a slightly
pejorative import.2 By the end of the 1980s, the style began to fall into dis-
favor. Still, without Lowell’s example, the careers of as diverse a group of
American poets as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Frank Bidart,
C. K. Williams, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Frederick Seidel, Louise Glück,
Mark Doty, Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds, and Yusef Komunyakaa would be
hard to imagine. Lowell’s inl uence on Anglophone poetry in the British Isles
and elsewhere is similarly considerable. Figures such as Seamus Heaney, Derek
Walcott, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, and Geofrey Hill all owe, in difering
ways, a considerable debt to Lowell.
Yet Lowell is a more complex and challenging igure than any of the poets
on this list, not merely because he allowed autobiographical testimony to
return to poetry after its diminishment in the era of the modernists, but
also because he drew little distinction between his desire for scrupulous self-
examination and his ambition to speak as a public igure of authority, address-
ing – in a tone sometimes merely stentorian but at best authentically pro-
phetic – the complacency and conformity of the Eisenhower era, the Cold
War and its threat of nuclear annihilation, and the hubris that lead to the U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War. Although Lowell felt decidedly ambivalent
about his New England predecessors, the Transcendentalists, Lowell epito-
mizes the sort of American poet whom Emerson envisioned when he called
for a “genius . . . with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incompa-
rable materials” and could above all confront the “barbarism and materialism
of the times.”3

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Lowell was drawn to address the turmoil of his era in no small measure
because his own life was itself manifestly turbulent. Not long after the pub-
lication of Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he was diagnosed with severe bipolar
disorder, a disease that at the time was little understood and diicult to treat
with the psychotropic drugs then available. During Lowell’s manic attacks,
which occurred on an almost annual basis from the 1950s until the time of his
death, his behavior could be highly delusional and sometimes violent, and
his stays in mental hospitals – which he wrote about with disarming frank-
ness in Life Studies and in his inal collection, Day by Day – became so frequent
as to amount to ritual. He was married three times, irst to the novelist Jean
Staford, then to the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, and inally, after
his move to Great Britain in the 1970s, to the iction writer Lady Caroline
Blackwood. Each of these relationships was strife ridden, and Lowell’s insis-
tence on writing about them in sometimes lurid detail resulted in perhaps the
greatest controversies of his career. Bidart, Lowell’s amanuensis and editor of
his posthumous Collected Poems, has labeled Lowell a “transgressive” writer,
a canny label that suggests both Lowell’s bravery – which was considerable –
and his indiscretion, which some would regard as equally considerable.4
To fully appreciate Bidart’s characterization of Lowell as an artist of trans-
gression, one must also take into account other aspects of his writing. The
irst two arise from his biography. Few American poets have been as con-
cerned with how family history intersects with personal history, and this
concern is partly explained by Lowell’s unusual background, at once quin-
tessentially American and democratic and on the other hand deeply elitist.
Lowell’s mother’s family, the Winslows, could trace their ancestry back to the
Maylower pilgrims. His father’s ancestors included such luminaries as the
poets James Russell and Amy Lowell, and the astronomer Percival Lowell.
The poet was keenly aware both of the burdens of his ancestry – in the Life
Studies poem “Waking in the Blue,” he characterizes himself as a “Maylower
screwball” – and of his ability to exploit it.5 In his poems he often regards
himself as the heir of a fraught New England legacy composed of repressive
Calvinism, Romantic and Transcendentalist naïveté, and a pronounced sense
of moneyed privilege. This position permitted Lowell to speak with author-
ity in political-historical poems such as “For the Union Dead” and “Near the
Ocean.” But it also allowed Lowell to exploit a more self-satisied element of
his character. The blank verse sonnets of the collection he entitled Notebook,
which were later published in a revised form and many yet again in History,
at times grow benumbing as Lowell name-checks his acquaintances with the
likes of Robert Kennedy, Norman Mailer, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

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Yet Lowell’s snobbery was tempered by poems and letters that show an abid-
ing devotion toward his many literary friends and mentors. Indeed, his pub-
lished correspondence, especially the letters exchanged with Bishop, are one
of the most bracing elements of his legacy.
Coming as he did from a New England saturated with the Calvinism of the
Bay Colony, on the one hand, and the Romantic subjectivism of Emersonian
thought, on the other, it is no wonder that theology was also one of Lowell’s
abiding concerns, informing some of his best but also some of his most gothic
and inlated writing. The arc of Lowell’s spiritual questioning also invites the
adjectives “tumultuous” and “transgressive.” In his twenties, Lowell became
an ardent convert to Catholicism, although it might be said that Lowell’s con-
version was to a kind of literary Catholicism in the manner of his mentor, the
poet and critic Allen Tate, or of Flannery O’Connor. Still, the religious feel-
ing that dominates Lowell’s irst three books, particularly Lord Weary’s Castle,
gives them a tone of stern apocalyptic dread that is an uncompromising and
strangely appropriate response to the carnage of the Second World War and
the tension of the Cold War that succeeded it. The world is bent out of shape,
and Lowell seems willing to take it on himself not so much to right it as to
warn us of even greater tribulation to come. Still, the sincerity of Lowell’s
Catholic phase should not be too strongly questioned: in 1943, distressed by
the Allies’ bombing of civilian targets in Europe, Lowell refused induction
into the army and spent several months in jail as a conscientious objector.
(Characteristically, this decision was announced via a haughty personal letter
to President Franklin Roosevelt.) Lowell’s Catholic phase was fairly short-
lived, and by the early 1950s he had written a farewell to the Catholic Church
in “Beyond the Alps,” the iercely ironic poem that opens Life Studies. “Much
against my will,” he laments in the poem, “I left the City of God where it
belongs” (RLCP, p. 113). From this point on, the poet was a nonbeliever, ascrib-
ing to a position very much akin to the stoically self-reliant stance of existen-
tialism in vogue within the literary circles of Lowell’s day. Yet this position is
haunted by a poignant nostalgia for the stability of Christian belief, one that
informs some of his best work, most notably the poems “Skunk Hour,” “For
the Union Dead,” and “Near the Ocean.” The latter poem ofers a couplet that
tidily encapsulates Lowell’s later stance toward belief and spiritual reckoning:
“O that the spirit could remain / tinged but untarnished by its strain” (RLCP,
p. 384).
It is in Lowell’s approach toward composition and his evolution as a stylist
that his identity as a transgressive artist is most pronounced. Lowell had a
remarkable capacity to repeatedly remake himself as a poet. Beginning as a

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formalist whose work could display his ability to ofer a prosodic tour de force
while at the same time retaining a roughhewn insistence, Lowell then remade
himself as a highly idiosyncratic free verse poet in much of Life Studies and
in For the Union Dead. Yet in 1967’s Near the Ocean, he returned to traditional
form, employing an almost preposterously restrictive tetrameter couplet he
had modeled after Andrew Marvell. Near the Ocean also relects Lowell’s abid-
ing interest in classical literature and includes a set of deeply ironic adapta-
tions of Juvenal and Horace – poems ofered in part to emphasize the parallels
between the arrogance of imperial Rome and the messianic recklessness of
American Cold War policy. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he began
to compose the hundreds of unrhymed sonnets that make up Notebook and
the trilogy of books that grew out of it. But in his inal collection, Day by Day,
Lowell returned once again to free verse, this time employing a loose and l u-
ent line much diferent from the free verse of his earlier books. These prosodic
changes do not arise from a mere desire for expressive variety; they are adapted
to relect the searching and restless changes in Lowell’s stance toward politics,
religion, history, and above all self-revelation. Lowell’s newfound interest in
vernacular speech seems essential to capture the immediacy of the autobio-
graphical disclosure that characterizes Life Studies, just as his return to rhym-
ing couplets in Near the Ocean helps Lowell to frame the rhetoric of the odd
jeremiads that blend the personal with a searing condemnation of American
imperialism during the height of the Vietnam War. Lowell was able to enact
these stylistic transformations partly because of a dizzyingly vast knowledge
of the literary tradition, and partly because, as so many of his fellow poets
who read his work in manuscript have attested, he was a dogged reviser of
his poems. Proliic though he may have been, he was reluctant to let go of
his work. Although Lowell had a careerist streak, he had an uncalculating and
helpless ambition to be a great poet; the sheer urgency of this ambition is per-
haps the most instructive legacy Lowell left to the generations of poets that
followed him. Lowell felt deeply competitive with many of his peers, particu-
larly Berryman and Roethke, and, in a more complicated way, Bishop. But his
overriding desire was to compete with his pantheon of great English-language
poets, with Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Hopkins, and Pope, to name just
a small group of the igures who inl uenced and provoked him. The fact that
Lowell’s mental illness and his tumultuous public and private life may well
have prevented him from achieving his ambitions haunts all of Lowell’s poems
and increases their level of pathos, if not their ultimate value. The concept of
greatness is of course highly suspect today, but Lowell steadfastly – and some
would say tragically – believed in its existence and sought it for himself.

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Perhaps the best way to ofer evidence of Lowell’s enduring importance

is to chart his development, which falls into four periods: the early work,
up to Life Studies; the controversial, celebrated books from Life Studies to
Near the Ocean; the books of sonnets (1968–1973); and the inal volume, Day
by Day.
Like that of many of his fellow middle-generation poets, Lowell’s early
work was written at a time when modernism had retreated from the pro-
sodic and thematic experimentation that characterized its “heroic” era of
the 1920s. The lengthy, fragmented, collage-like, and often densely allusive
work of Eliot in The Waste Land, Pound in his early cantos, and – in a difer-
ent way – Williams in works such as Kora in Hell and Spring and All had been
replaced by a more domesticated brand of modernist writing, one best exem-
pliied by W. H. Auden, the most inl uential poet of the 1930s. Furthermore,
the 1930s saw the rise of the poet-critic, irst in the form of Eliot’s highly
inl uential and often very prescriptive essays, and later in the work of igures
such as Lowell’s mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. New Critical
approaches to reading poems lent themselves especially well to analysis of
the dense intricacies of the metaphysical poets, particularly John Donne, and
later igures such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work had only recently
become available. At this particular moment, Lowell was able to ofer pre-
cisely what this literary establishment wanted – work compacted, formal,
brimming with biblical and literary allusion, and exemplifying a kind of stern
orderliness whose import was as much ideological as aesthetic, relecting
modernism’s growing political and prosodic conservatism. The closing words
of Allen Tate’s introduction to Lowell’s irst volume, Land of Unlikeness, state
the cause alarmingly well: “In a young man like Lowell, whether we like
his Catholicism or not, there is at least the memory of the spiritual dignity
of man, now sacriiced to mere secularization and a craving for mechanical
order” (RLCP, p. 860).
Published in a ine press edition in 1944, when Lowell was only twenty-
six, Land of Unlikeness is a work of rhetorical brio that does not coalesce into
a coherent artistic statement. Steven Gould Axelrod rightly notes that the
book is concerned with “three related themes . . . history, current events, and
God. In one form or another, these subjects continued to haunt and nourish
[Lowell] throughout his career, but in Land of Unlikeness they are handled
inefectively.”6 “On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception” illus-
trates Axelrod’s point all too convincingly, mixing topical relections on the
Second World War with a portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a kind of comic
book superheroine:

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Freedom and Eisenhower have won

Signiicant laurels where the Hun
And Roman kneel
To lick the dust from Mars’ bootheel
Like foppish bloodhounds; yet you sleep
Out our distemper’s evil day
And hear no sheep
Or hangdog bay! (RLCP, p. 866)
But one cannot completely dismiss Land of Unlikeness as the work of a tyro.
It earned respectful reviews from the likes of the then-esteemed poet Conrad
Aiken, and a prediction by Randall Jarrell, the inest poet-critic of the middle
generation, that Lowell would write “some of the best poems of the next
years.”7 More importantly, several of the most successful poems of the collec-
tion were later reprinted – and sometimes substantially revised – in 1947’s Lord
Weary’s Castle.
The themes of Lord Weary’s Castle do not difer from those of Land of
Unlikeness. But the writer who pursues them is a far more able technician.
Witness these lines from “The Holy Innocents”:
King Herod shrieking vengeance at the curled
Up knees of Jesus choking in the air,
A king of speechless clods and infants. Still
The world out-Herods Herod; and the year,
The nineteen-hundred forty-ifth of grace
Lumbers with losses up the clinkered hill
Of our purgation . . . (RLCP, p. 10)
Several of the hallmarks of Lowell’s mature style are in evidence here.
The poet’s willingness to counterpoint metrical regularity with dissonance
is especially impressive. “A king of speechless clods and infants. Still” is a
strict pentameter, but it is complicated by the caesura after “infants” and
the strategic enjambment of “Still.” “Lumbers with losses up the clinkered
hill,” with its trochaic substitutions and the oddball adjective choice of
“clinkered” displays a typically Lowellian metrical variation and approach
to syntax.
Long and rangy sequences in the high modernist mode were a sort of rite
of passage in the early work of the middle-generation poets – we see evidence
of this in Roethke with his “The Lost Son,” Berryman with Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet, and Schwartz with Shenandoah. These poems are in certain respects
the middle generation’s attempt to beat the modernists at their own game,
and in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” Lowell joins them. Yet the 147-

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line poem incorporates other inl uences as well, most notably Melville’s Moby
Dick, Milton’s Lycidas, and even borrowings from Thoreau.8 Like Milton’s
poem, “The Quaker Graveyard” is an elegy, mourning the death at sea of
the poet’s cousin Arthur Winslow. By giving the poem a speciic occasion,
one that is at least nominally personal, Lowell is able to rein in the brooding
theological rhetoric of his other early poems. I suspect, however, that what
impresses most readers about “The Quaker Graveyard” is its formal gravity
and enthralling music. Most of the sections are written in heavily enjambed
couplets that move the poem along at a rather dizzying speed. Most kinetic of
all is the opening section, which describes Winslow’s burial at sea. Written in
irregular rhyme and meter, with a distant source in Thoreau, the movement is
propulsive, even while Lowell embellishes the section with some of his most
intricate metaphors:
A brackish reach of shoal of Madaket, –
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurtling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. (RLCP, p. 14)
Lord Weary’s Castle made Lowell something of a celebrity. The book gar-
nered the Pulitzer Prize, and Lowell was appointed to the prestigious post
of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. He was even the subject of
a photo spread in Life magazine. But the next few years were also troubling
ones for Lowell, seeing the end of his marriage to Jean Staford and his new
marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, the death of his mother while she was visit-
ing Italy, and the onset of his mental illness. The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951),
the book of Browningesque monologues and gothic character studies that
emerges during these years of triumph and turmoil, is Lowell’s least success-
ful collection. The book’s best eforts, “Mother Marie Therese” and “Falling
Asleep over the Aeneid,” are artfully rendered but today seem afected and
quaint. Lowell had worked the intricacies of his early style to exhaustion.
Eight years separate The Mills of the Kavanaughs and Lowell’s next collec-
tion, 1959’s Life Studies. Lowell undertook a long and painstaking struggle to

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revamp his style and adopt new subject matter. Although many of the Life
Studies poems hew to traditional form – “Inauguration Day: January 1953,”
one of Lowell’s most scathing political poems, is a tautly rendered sonnet, as
is a biting monologue spoken in the voice of Hart Crane – the book replaces
the mandarin utterances of Lowell’s earlier work with a vernacular mode
that Lowell claimed was borrowed in no small measure from William Carlos
Williams, with whom he had long maintained a friendship. Yet Life Studies rep-
resents a loosening of Lowell’s previous style, not a complete abandonment
of it. Although Lowell was aware of the Beat poets, he was interested in the
appearance of immediacy, not in actual improvisation. Indeed, Lowell said in
1961 that his wryly ironic elegy for his father, “Commander Lowell,” was orig-
inally composed “in perfectly strict four-foot couplet[s]” but altered to a looser
form because its “regularity just seemed to ruin the honesty” (RLCPr, p. 243).
The poems seem less conversational than diary-like, and this mode seems
the only one that will do justice to the concerns of Life Studies, which include
(among others) family history, the workings of memory, the loss of religious
faith, and mental and marital instability. The predominant tone is elegiac, not
in the formal sense of the word as it pertains to a poem such as “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket,” but as it applies to a particular American male of the
1950s as he enters middle age. Of course, Robert Lowell is by no means a typi-
cal American male of his time; he feels the burdens of his peculiar aristocratic
family history and especially his personal failings. Lowell further cements the
book’s autobiographical intentions by including a prose memoir, “91 Revere
Street,” modeled on Elizabeth Bishop’s bittersweet prose recollection of her
own childhood, “In the Village.” Indeed, it is possible to view Life Studies as a
lengthy prose autobiography subjected to erasure, the events of the poet’s life
ofered as fragments and distillations selected for their dramatic intensity and
psychological penetration. Behind the poems we sense the ruin of a larger
work – an efect that may well have been intentional, a manifestation of what
Richard Tillinghast has called the “damaged grandeur” that is to him the cen-
tral element of Lowell’s writing.9
On the level of the book’s individual poems, this lawed grandeur emerges
through ruthless self-appraisal, through vividly rendered images that pos-
sess nothing of the Byzantine quality of Lowell’s earlier igurative language,
and thanks to a large measure of self-deprecating humor. The book’s most
famous poems begin in duress: “Memories of West Street and Lepke” recalls
the jail where Lowell was incarcerated as a conscientious objector; “Skunk
Hour” charts the speaker’s dark night of the soul in a Maine resort town;
“Sailing Home from Rapallo” records Lowell’s journey to Italy to bring his

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mother’s body back to New England; and “Waking in the Blue” is set in a
ward at Mclean’s, an upscale Boston mental hospital. Yet the most memora-
ble and haunting elements of the poems are often their mordant wit. “Czar
Lepke,” the Maioso in “Memories . . .” is a far cry from the stereotypical crime
boss: “Flabby, bald, lobotomized / he drifted in a sheepish calm, / where no
agonizing reappraisal / jarred his concentration on the electric chair” (RLCP,
p. 188). “What use is my sense of humor?” Lowell asks in the opening stanzas
of “Waking in the Blue” (RLCP, p. 183). One is tempted to answer his ques-
tion by saying that the humor creates a tonal edginess and unpredictability.
Self-mockery gives way to pathos; irony gives way to dread. As “Waking in
the Blue” progresses, we are ofered portraits of fellow inmates. The descrip-
tions are brisk and absurdist: “Bobbie,” “a replica of Louis XVI / without the
wig – / redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale” (RLCP, p. 183). Yet in the
closing stanza of the poem, the speaker can no longer maintain his distance
from his fellow “Maylower / screwballs” (RLCP, p. 184). As in so many of
Lowell’s poems, its closing suggests an imminent apocalypse, but in this case
it is acutely and tragically personal: Lowell can

see the shaky future grow familiar

in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor. (RLCP, p. 184)

Bishop and Tate had seen the book in manuscript, and while Bishop immedi-
ately understood the book’s importance, Tate brutally dismissed the poems
as having “no public or literary interest.”10 Reviews tended toward extremes:
the British poet Thom Gunn complained of “trivial autobiographical details,
rambling and without unity,” but John Thompson, in perhaps the most per-
ceptive appraisal of Lowell’s work to that time, recognized an artistic triumph,
“a major expansion of the territory of poetry.”11
In 1961, Lowell published a small anthology of translations – many of
them very freely adapted – entitled Imitations. Lowell’s selections ranged
from Homer and Sappho to twentieth-century European poets, most nota-
bly Eugenio Montale, Boris Pasternak, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The volume’s
supporters regarded the collection as a form of self-portraiture, relecting, in
Ben Belitt’s words, Lowell’s “irascible and inquiring genius.”12 But more than
one critic found Lowell’s deliberate lack of what they saw as even minimal
idelity to the originals to be troubling.13 Fifty years on, now that attempts at

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equivalent and freely rendered rather than literal translations of European

verse into English have become something of the norm, the charges leveled
against Lowell’s approach in Imitations seem rather beside the point. The book
also helped to form tastes, ofering the irst widely circulated English transla-
tions of such seminal igures as Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti.
If Life Studies is Lowell’s best individual collection, then the title piece of his
next volume, 1964’s For the Union Dead may be seen as Lowell’s greatest indi-
vidual poem. (The poem was in fact added as the closing efort of a 1960 paper-
back edition of Life Studies.) “For the Union Dead” is the poet’s most sustained
attempt at synthesizing personal and public history. Like so much of Lowell’s
work, the poem’s overriding concerns are eschatological, epitomizing the
unique sort of dread that haunted American culture at the dawn of the 1960s,
with the escalation of the nuclear arms race and the placid conformity of
the Eisenhower years about to be challenged, most notably by the civil rights
movement. As the poem unfolds, Lowell insinuates that the carnage of that
earlier conl ict is but a foretaste of a greater carnage to come. Lowell answers
the reactionary solemnities of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” – a poem
much admired in its time – with a series of implicit but urgent questions, ones
that depart radically from traditional approaches to the formal ode. Can we
survive what we now are facing? What can we take from the past that will
sustain us? The poem investigates these questions in a mode of imagistic jux-
taposition, ofering a fugue-like repetition of its central motifs, and through a
kind of apotheosis of its central character, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who
died leading one of the irst black regiments of the Union army and is memo-
rialized with them in a famous monumental sculpture by Augustus Saint-
Gaudens, which sits near the State House on Boston Common.
As Mark Rudman notes, Lowell turns the Common into “the symbolic cen-
ter of America.”14 It is here that Lowell recalls the Boston Aquarium that so
mesmerized him in his childhood, now dismantled and replaced by an under-
ground parking garage. It is a landscape of the most abject desolation, given
dignity only by Shaw and his troops. Yet theirs is a vexed nobility. Their monu-
ment “sticks like a ishbone / in the city’s throat,” more an object lesson than
a representation of valor. And Shaw, the prototype of the solitary existential
hero, suggests to us that it may no longer be possible for bravery to be a col-
lective endeavor: Shaw “rejoices in man’s lovely / peculiar power to choose
life and die” (RLCP, p. 377). The catalogue of images that complete the poem
ofers little by way of solace, but it is a breathtakingly ironic tour de force. A
“commercial photograph” shows “Hiroshima boiling // over a Mosler safe,”
television shows “the drained faces of Negro school-children” facing violent

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resistance to integration, and “Everywhere / giant inned cars nose forward

like ish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease” (RLCP, pp. 377–78).
Written largely in a rhyming free verse, the individual lyrics of For the Union
Dead continue the loosening of style and approach that began in Life Studies.
As with For the Union Dead’s title poem, their method tends to be associative
and image driven. The orderly retrospective intentions of the earlier book
are replaced by a desire to chart the shifts and vagaries of consciousness as
it moves from sensation to sensation, from self-recrimination to rueful self-
acceptance, and from nostalgia to more troubled reckonings with the past.
“Eye and Tooth” begins with a painstakingly rendered description of the
speaker’s scratched cornea but concludes with Lowell bemoaning a larger
failure of vision, one characterological and psychological. “I am tired,” he
writes in the poem’s inal line, “everyone is tired of my turmoil” (RLCP, p. 335).
The volume’s poems achieve their success because we sense how mightily
the speaker is struggling against the forces that bedevil him. Lowell, in an
interview with Stanley Kunitz, suggested that “some readers have turned to
my poems because of the very things that are wrong with me. I mean the dif-
iculty I have with ordinary living, the impracticality, the myopia. Seeing less
than others can be a great strain.”15
Near the Ocean (1967) completes a kind of trilogy that began with Life Studies.
The book’s genesis can be traced to an event that represents a typically Lowellian
mixture of the public and the personal. In the summer of 1965, as a gesture of
protest against the war in Vietnam, Lowell declined to attend a White House
event in celebration of the arts. Lowell composed a letter to President Lyndon
Johnson that warned that the United States was “in danger of imperceptibly
becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drift-
ing on our way to the last nuclear ruin” (RLCPr, p. 371). Lowell released it to the
New York Times, and twenty leading igures in the arts, unbeknownst to Lowell,
signed a statement endorsing his position. The Times ran a front-page story on
the controversy. The event is further evidence of how slyly Lowell was able to
manipulate his public image. Yet what Lowell termed his “dismay and distrust”
at the nation’s misadventure in Vietnam was deeply felt, manifesting itself in his
later support for antiwar Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy
and Robert Kennedy, and in his avid participation in antiwar protests.
“Near the Ocean” is a lawed sequence, veering from urban melodrama
(“Central Park”) to a chatty verse epistle to Lowell’s cousin Harriet Winslow
(“Fourth of July in Maine”) and ending with its title piece, an unsettlingly
ambivalent love poem to Hardwick. Yet the sequence’s opening section,
“Waking Early Sunday Morning,” closely rivals “For the Union Dead” in its

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ability to incorporate both the domestic and the political and to investigate
the question of faith in a world where religious belief is deemed impossible.
Although the section’s tetrameter couplets are sometimes less then dexter-
ous, the abruptness of their enjambments beits the poem’s immense shifts
in scale, evoking a world gone wrong on microcosmic and macrocosmic
levels. After some Swiftian description of Johnson and his cabinet, “Waking
Early Sunday Morning” moves to a heartfelt passage in which Lowell’s famil-
iar themes of gloom and doom are not so much replaced as freighted with a
weary abjection. In the penultimate stanza, rhetoric gives way to a purer form
of lamentation:
Wars
l icker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner with his knife
busy about the tree of life . . . (RLCP, p. 386)
Like most of Lowell’s best poems, “Waking Early Sunday Morning” con-
cludes with a gesture of fraught prophecy: the “pruner with his knife” is not
the bucolic reaper familiar to us from the pastoral tradition but the Grim
Reaper; and in the poem’s inal stanza, the legacy bestowed by imperialist
America on future generations is seen as a terrifying one: “until the end of
time / to police the earth, a ghost / orbiting forever lost / in our monotonous
sublime.”
Beginning in 1967, Lowell wrote the hundreds of largely blank verse sonnets
that were eventually gathered in his 1973 trilogy of collections: History, For
Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. On the one hand, the sonnet trilogy is the
culmination of Lowell’s decades-long struggle to admit immediacy, impro-
visation, and serendipity into his method – because he is the most willful of
writers, this goal is by no means easy to attain. On the other hand, Lowell, like
many of his fellow middle-generation poets, was always a writer in search of a
masterwork, a grand poetic statement that could compete with the long poems
of the modernists. In a eulogy for John Berryman, whose Dream Songs surely
inl uenced the sonnet trilogy, Lowell wonders if the middle generation were
merely the “uncomfortable epigoni of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore,
etc.” (RLCPr, p. 115). Indeed, one might argue that the most notable thing
about the sonnets is how acutely they attest to this discomfort: the result is an
almost helpless drive to alchemize small gestures into ostentatious ones, and

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to manipulate desultory reportage into rigorously plotted drama. This desire

is evidenced even in the books’ bewildering publishing history. The trilogy
derives from three published editions of a work that Lowell originally entitled
Notebook, which appeared in a U.S. edition in May 1969, then in a revised British
edition in July of that year, and in yet another, much revised and expanded,
edition in 1970. Notebook was originally intended to be a kind of poetic jour-
nal, in which, in Lowell’s own words, “accident threw up subjects and the
plot swallowed them.”16 Some of the poems are highly immediate responses
to events of the turbulent late 1960s, particularly the continued escalation of
the Vietnam War and the protest movement against it. We are ofered poems
on the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Che Guevara,
and poems occasioned by the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, along-
side historical vignettes and portraits of igures ranging from Lincoln to King
David to Attila the Hun. Lowell also adds poems about Hardwick and their
daughter Harriet, elegies for fellow writers such as Randall Jarrell and I. A.
Richards, and poems of memory and retrospection in the mode of Life Studies.
“At the Dentist” is a loopy monologue spoken in the voice of the poet’s den-
tist; “Words for Muin, a Guinea Pig” is related by Lowell’s daughter Harriet’s
pet. At their best, the Notebook poems abundantly display Lowell’s seemingly
boundless capacity to concoct startling metaphors and striking adjective-noun
combinations; and they hinge on searching and jittery statements that seem
to arise from the intricacies of consciousness rather than from rhetoric. “To
Allen Tate 3. Michael Tate: August 1967–July 1968,” an elegy for Allen Tate’s
infant son, showcases all of these qualities:
his small gravestone,
his one-year common as grass in auld lang syne
is beyond our scale of faith . . . and Michael Tate
gagging on your plastic telephone,
while the new sitter drew water for your bath,
unable to hear you gasp. They think: if there’d been
a week or two’s illness, we might have been prepared.
(RLCP, p. 518)
This is the 1973 version of the poem, published in History, and it difers in
several small but signiicant ways from the version published in the third revi-
sion of Notebook.17 And “Michael Tate” is but one example among many of
Lowell’s obsessive tinkerings as Notebook grew larger and was then recycled
and expanded once again. History became the repository for the historical
and topical poems of Notebook; For Lizzie and Harriet bracketed the Notebook
poems that Lowell had composed for Hardwick and the couple’s daughter.

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The Dolphin was an entirely new sequence, devoted to the breakup of Lowell’s
marriage to Hardwick and his subsequent marriage to Caroline Blackwood.
During the trilogy’s composition, Lowell’s personal life was once again in
upheaval. Although Lowell had involved himself in a number of extramarital
afairs during his years with Hardwick, these attachments were usually linked
to the onset of Lowell’s bipolar episodes, and Hardwick came to be wearily
tolerant of them as yet another manifestation of Lowell’s mental disorder.
But Lowell’s involvement with Lady Caroline Blackwood – which began in
1970 while Lowell was in Britain at the University of Essex – was diferent.
Soon Lowell and Blackwood were living together, and in 1971 Blackwood gave
birth to the couple’s son, Robert Sheridan Lowell. The collapse of Lowell’s
marriage to Hardwick and his new involvement with Blackwood is narrated,
sometimes obliquely, sometimes with a frankness disarming even for Lowell,
in the poems that make up The Dolphin. Lowell’s wholesale quotation from the
letters Hardwick wrote him during their breakup is dubious on ethical terms,
surely, but also on aesthetic ones, for the quoted passages seem merely to give
authenticity, veering from prosy incidentals (“I’m of / to Dalton to pick up
Harriet’s grade and record”) to hurt sentimentality (RLCP, pp. 661, 663). The
book does not so much unfold a plot as continually complicate the speaker’s cri-
sis; his self-recriminations about leaving Hardwick and their daughter Harriet
are too manifold, and his uncertainties about his future with Blackwood are
too grave. The Dolphin’s inal sonnet is tinged with the same sort of regret that
characterizes the closing of For the Union Dead’s “Eye and Tooth.” Yet where
that earlier poem evokes its speaker’s remorse with a pained directness that
gives it considerable rhetorical power, the concluding lines of the newer poem
seem oddly self-aggrandizing, however exquisite their syntax and parallelism:
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself –
to ask compassion . . . this book, half-iction
an eelnet made by man for the eel ighting –
my eyes have seen what my hand did. (RLCP, p. 708)
Adrienne Rich made this passage the fulcrum of her excoriating review
of The Dolphin. “I have to say,” Rich writes, “that I think this is bullshit elo-
quence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous
to balance injury done to others with injury done to myself.”18 Vicious as this
critique may be, it is not entirely unfair – Lowell’s stance in the book is indeed

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presumptuous, yet in the nearly forty years that have elapsed since the book’s
publication, its characterological shortcomings seem somewhat less scandal-
ous. Richard Tillinghast’s 1995 appraisal of The Dolphin is perhaps the most
measured and accurate assessment and might be extended to the trilogy: “As
lawed and problematic as it is, it still has a measure of greatness.”19 Lowell
never again wrote sonnets.
Lowell published his inal collection, Day by Day, in September 1977, just
weeks before his death from a heart attack. The poet had determined to
end his marriage to Blackwood, and return to Hardwick. On his way from
Kennedy Airport to Hardwick’s Manhattan apartment, Lowell died in a taxi-
cab; beside him on the seat was a small portrait of Blackwood rendered by her
irst husband, the renowned British painter Lucian Freud.
During his years in England, the poet’s bipolar episodes continued to result
in hospitalizations, and in January 1977, he was hospitalized after a heart attack
and diagnosed with congestive heart failure. It is impossible to read the weary
and mortality-obsessed poems of Day by Day without seeing them as premoni-
tions of Lowell’s death. The ironically entitled mental hospital poem “Home”
is a kind of prolix rewrite of “Waking in the Blue.” The wit and sprightliness
of the earlier poem is replaced by a tone of exhaustion and fear:
The immovable chairs have swallowed up the patients
and speak with the eloquence of emptiness.
By each the same morning paper lies unread. . . .
Less than ever I expect to be alive
six months from now –
1976,
a date I dare not aix to my grave . . . (RLCP, p. 825)

In its form, “Home” is typical of Day by Day. Written in a leisurely free

verse that eschews the enjambments and linguistic pyrotechnics of his ear-
lier work, the poems at times seem laccid, but the best of the book’s writing
possesses a sober and unhurried gravity. The poems tend to revisit subjects
treated earlier. Lowell’s hectoring mother makes yet another appearance, as
does Lowell’s irst wife, Jean Staford, and the collection contains a somber
elegy for John Berryman, who committed suicide in 1972. Perhaps the most
striking element of the book is that certain of the poems seem inally to
achieve the lyric immediacy that Lowell had so long sought. Yet this immedi-
acy is bittersweet, because it is found mainly in poems such as “Last Walk?”
and “Runaway,” which foretell the end of Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood.
In Day by Day, a poet whose signature mode is of grand designs and even

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megalomania is forced to reinvent himself as a writer of diminishment, of

discontinuity, one who struggles for insight but who ultimately meets largely
with “lost connections.” Still, as Helen Vendler insists, Lowell’s “unfailing
gift for images” let him “invent a style incorporating inertia and death,” in
part through mere “glimpses” in place of developed narrative, and in part
through conspicuous “subtraction,” lines and sentences with something
clearly left out.20
“Notice” is a good example of the method that Vendler describes. The poem
begins with the promise of drama, the memory of a mental ward psychiatrist
who confesses that his treatments will be of little help (RLCP, p. 828). Yet by
the second stanza of the poem, Lowell leaves the hospital dialogue behind:
The doctor’s name is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush hour train. . . .
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment. (RLCP, p. 828)

Although the poems of Day by Day often begin in recollection, in what

Lowell calls a “downlook,” they soon, as Vendler notes, become a subspecies
of the carpe diem poem.21 To embrace the moment must serve as change
enough, and in order to achieve this, Lowell must also look back on his life and
work with an acceptance that is considerably more restrained than the often
self-lacerating gestures that had previously characterized his work. Like The
Dolphin, Day by Day closes with an ars poetica, but the bombast of the earlier
book is replaced in “Epilogue” with a stance that is querulous and chastened.
Lowell yearns to make “something imagined, not recalled,” but he fears that
the “threadbare art” of his autobiographical vision has made his legacy one
of mere snapshots, pictures that are “lurid, rapid, garish, grouped / height-
ened from life but paralyzed by fact. / All’s misalliance” (RLCP, p. 838). The
lines are archetypal Lowell: even in one of his most abashed self-assessments,
he cannot resist a pyrotechnical catalogue of adjectives or a grandiloquent
statement. As the poem moves to its closure, the poet’s self-doubts are eased,
although by no means erased:
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each igure in the photograph
his living name. (RLCP, p. 838)

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A few months prior to his death, the journal Salmagundi published a fest-
schrift to honor Lowell’s sixtieth birthday; in it the poet ofers a short and self-
deprecating essay about the development of his work that is remarkably sim-
ilar to the “Epilogue” of Day by Day. The concluding paragraph of the piece
sometimes even employs some identical word choices and syntax, and the
key phrases of both works are tellingly liturgical: “I pray that my progress has
been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another,
a series of rebufs. I hope there has been an increase in beauty, wisdom, trag-
edy, and all the blessings of this consuming chance” (RLCP, p. 991).
It is unlikely that Robert Lowell will ever regain the position of preem-
inence that he enjoyed during the middle years of the last century. Yet any
serious reader of Lowell (and he will always ind such readers) is likely to con-
clude – even when confronted with Lowell’s overreaching, infelicities, grandi-
osity, and occasional exhibitionism – that Lowell’s inal prayers were answered.
No other American poet has examined the workings of his inner life with
such ruthless penetration. Yet at the same time no other American poet has
engaged historical force with a greater degree of urgency; and of America’s
great political poets, Lowell is the one whose vision, from Life Studies onward,
is least burdened and muddled by ideology. Furthermore, Lowell was a con-
summate technician; no other igure among the middle-generation writers
save for Bishop can be regarded as his equal in this respect. And inally, in a
manner that is at once paradoxical and characteristically American, Lowell
ranks among our greatest poets in part because of his very willingness to fail –
to fail in a way that is at once grand and humbling.22
The careers of John Berryman and Theodore Roethke parallel that of
Lowell in several crucial ways. Although both were slightly older than Lowell –
Roethke was born in 1908, and Berryman in 1914 – they rose to their greatest
prominence, as Lowell did, in the 1950s and 1960s. They shared with Lowell
many of the major prizes and awards: Roethke received a Pulitzer Prize in
1954 for his fourth collection, The Waking, and Berryman too was given the
Pulitzer, for the irst installment of his major work, The Dream Songs, in 1965.
Also like Lowell, their literary reputations were far more substantial during
their lifetimes than they have been since. Roethke and Berryman possessed
Lowell’s driving ambition – as well as his careerism. Although Lowell did not
share with Berryman or Roethke the abiding literary friendship he possessed
with Elizabeth Bishop, he held both writers in high regard. Most importantly,
the three poets shared a desire to construct personal mythologies; all three
made from the autobiographical impulse poems of great individuality and
formal ingeniousness. Sadly, in the case of Berryman and Roethke just as

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much as in that of Lowell, self-interrogation and formal innovation derived

in no small measure from trauma and psychological sufering. Like Lowell,
Roethke was al icted with an acute bipolar disorder during an era when the
condition was little understood. He endured numerous stays in mental hos-
pitals and was subjected at least once to electroshock therapy. Berryman too
lived a disordered and troubled existence. Married three times, his domestic
life was turbulent, not least because of his lifelong struggle with alcoholism.
Hospitalized on several occasions, Berryman’s inability to overcome his con-
dition was a deciding factor in his suicide in 1972, at the age of ifty-seven.
Although Berryman and Roethke are less read today than they deserve to be,
they are – despite the marked eccentricities of their mature styles – among the
best and most characteristic voices of the middle generation.
The future John Berryman was born in Oklahoma in 1914. John Allyn
Smith, his father, was a banker. But a move to Florida in 1925 for that state’s real
estate boom proved disastrous for Berryman’s father, who sufered a series of
business failures. In 1926, John Allyn Smith was found shot dead outside the
family home. Although the death was ruled a suicide, the poet harbored a
lifelong suspicion that his father was in fact murdered by his mother and her
lover, John McAlpin Berryman. The pair were married only a few weeks after
his father’s demise; the young poet was given his stepfather’s last name and
was packed of to boarding school. Berryman remained rather uncomfortably
close to his mother throughout his life, and the death of his father became one
of the overarching concerns of The Dream Songs.
At Columbia University, the poet Mark Van Doren encouraged both
Berryman’s poetry and his interest in Shakespeare. In 1937 he was awarded
a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, and he began the kind of literary
career that typiied his generational peers. He held academic appointments at
Princeton, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Iowa, and eventu-
ally the University of Minnesota, where he taught from 1955 until his death.
He authored a biography of Stephen Crane and worked for many years on a
book (published posthumously) about Shakespeare. Very derivative of Yeats
and to a lesser extent of Auden, The Dispossessed (1948) is best read as a skillful
representation of its period’s style. More daring is the sequence of 120 sonnets
that he wrote in 1947, during the throes of an illicit love afair with the wife of
a Princeton colleague. These poems, inally published twenty years afterward,
are afected and uneven and often seem less to do with erotic fervor than with
the desire for subject matter to exploit. Yet the sonnets’ stylistic and syntacti-
cal eccentricities – revealing a considerable debt to Hopkins – would later be
reined in The Dream Songs.

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Berryman’s irst major work is his long poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,
published in book form in 1956. It is Berryman’s entry into the modernist long
poem sweepstakes, indebted to Eliot’s The Waste Land and to Crane’s The
Bridge. It is nominally a character study of the seventeenth-century American
poet Anne Bradstreet, alternating between the voice of Bradstreet and that of
the poem’s narrator. However, as with the later Dream Songs, the poem is char-
acterized by abrupt and often unattributed shifts in speaker and person, and
the willful archaism of the poem’s style and syntax help to make it a cramped
but impressive tour de force. The poem’s most famous passage, narrated by
Bradstreet as she gives birth to a daughter, is a good representation of the
poem’s tonal complexity and devotional ardor:
No. No. Yes! everything down
hardens I press with horrible joy down
my back cracks like a wrist
shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late
hide me forever I work thrust I must free
now I all muscles & bones concentrate
what is living from dying?
Simon I must leave you so untidy
Monster you are killing me Be sure
I’ll have you later Women do endure
I can can no longer
and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me
drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!
One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvelous,
unforbidding Majesty.
Swell, imperious bells. I ly. . . .23
Homage was a critical success. For his next work, Berryman projected a long
poem of several hundred sections, each comprised of three rhyming stanzas
of six lines each. The poem would build on the structural and narrative meth-
ods of his earlier sonnet sequence, but its scope would be much larger. One
of Berryman’s biographers, Paul Mariani, draws on Berryman’s unpublished
notes:
He wanted the poem to deal with the human condition, but channeled
through the life of one man. Each poem would have at least “one stroke
of some damned serious humor.” He wanted a “gravity of matter,” but he
wanted it wedded to a “gaiety of manner.”. . . He also meant to get all the
sexual longing and lust into his poems he could. . . . He would use the old
iambic norm, but jazz it up and make it freer, mixing it with “rocking meter,

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anapests, spondees, iambs, trochees, dactyls” until he drove the prosodists

“right out of their heads.”24
This project, which eventually became The Dream Songs, does not fulill the
poet’s epic intentions, but Berryman’s intended mixture of thinly veiled auto-
biography, gallows humor, prosodic variety, and “sexual longing” is every-
where. The poet’s alter ego, “Henry Pussycat,” sometimes speaks in the irst
person, is sometimes discussed in the third, and frequently engages in dialogue
with an unnamed companion who speaks in blackface dialect drawn from the
minstrelsy tradition, addressing Henry as “Sir Bones” or “Mr. Bones.” The dic-
tion of the poem wavers violently between a kind of mock-Elizabethan mode
and contemporary slang, and as with Mistress Bradstreet, the poem is illed with
syntactical inversions, archaic spellings, and neologisms concocted to fulill
the rhyme scheme.
Few signiicant American poets have adopted a style as mannered or as
extreme. Berryman can sustain this argot for hundreds of pages, making the
style supple enough to incorporate not only Henry’s skewed self-portraiture
but also elegies for his contemporaries (especially Randall Jarrell and Delmore
Schwartz) and topical poems, as well as tender poems in praise of Berryman’s/
Henry’s children. Also, despite The Dream Songs’s many contrivances, the efect
of the individual sections can be quite immediate and visceral – and as often
as not discomforting. Berryman’s emotional intentions seem to shift not just
from section to section and stanza to stanza but often from line to line. The
mannerisms and bufoonery so often present in the poem’s sections almost
invariably give way to an abjection that, within the framework of Berryman’s
verbal pyrotechnics, can seem little short of shocking. Dream Song 29, one of
the book’s many anguished attempts to reckon with the suicide of Berryman’s
father, shows us the poet at his very best: it begins,
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.25
Berryman’s inest writing can be found in 77 Dream Songs (1963); the much
longer concluding volume, 1968’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, shows a marked
falling of. During the last years of his life, Berryman published two additional
volumes, Love and Fame, a series of autobiographical poems in free verse that
sufer in comparison to The Dream Songs, and the uneven Delusions Etc., which

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was in press at the time of the poet’s death. In a review of 77 Dream Songs,
Robert Lowell paid eloquent homage: “All is risk and variety here. This great
Pierrot’s universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear” (RLCPr,
p. 111).
Theodore Roethke was born in Michigan in 1908; his father was the owner
of a prosperous greenhouse establishment. The elder Roethke, a stern but lov-
ing parent of German extraction, died of cancer when the poet was ifteen; as
with Berryman, Roethke came to regard the loss of his father as a crucial event
in his life, and he returns to the subject repeatedly in his poetry. Roethke’s
greenhouse-keeping father becomes in his poetry inextricably identiied with
the forces and cycles of nature. Indeed, Roethke is often called a nature poet,
but his treatment bears little resemblance to the pantheism of Wordsworth.
Roethke at his best is a poet of spiritual yearning in the tradition of igures
such as the metaphysical poets George Herbert and Henry Vaughan and later
poets such as Hopkins, Christopher Smart, and especially Yeats, all of whom
Roethke read with special seriousness. Like Yeats, he seems to have been moti-
vated to create a theology through his poetry. But the mandarin occultism
of Yeats’s philosophy bears little resemblance to the worldview that Roethke
formulated, which was roughhewn and might best be described as animistic –
nature for Roethke is a realm of highly charged and undisciplined spiritual
forces, nominally controlled by a father igure whose powers are sometimes
dynamic, sometimes insigniicant. This symbolic vocabulary draws signii-
cantly from Freud and especially Jung, despite the poet’s disclaimers.26
When Roethke’s do-it-yourself cosmology is matched with the animated
and urgent pacing of his best writing, he shows himself to be a poet of great
originality and invention. But Roethke, like Berryman, was a decidedly uneven
writer, prone to self-imitation and excessively dutiful imitations of the poets
who inspired him, particularly Yeats. A large, gregarious man of great appe-
tite and considerable charisma, Roethke was also a gifted teacher, and his
students at the University of Washington – where he taught for the last if-
teen years of his life – included James Wright, David Wagoner, Richard Hugo,
Tess Gallagher, and Carolyn Kizer, all of whom went on to notable careers as
poets.
The poems collected in Roethke’s irst volume, 1940’s Open House, are skill-
ful but very formally constrained lyrics in the manner of Stanley Kunitz, who
formed a long friendship with the poet, and Louise Bogan, with whom he
had had a short but intense love afair. Roethke’s second volume, The Lost
Son, develops his characteristic style. Written in both ixed forms and a
supple free verse, the poems of The Lost Son are a carefully plotted cycle, a

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spiritual autobiography charting birth, death, and the poet’s tentative rebirth.
Beginning with poems that energetically describe the greenhouse lora of
his childhood, and culminating with the book’s title poem, with its mixture
of childhood memories, recollections of the poet’s father, and renderings of
spiritual yearning and regression, the collection is notable for both its lyric
particularity and its haunting replication of a child’s sensibility. Within a few
lines, the style of the poems can veer from Whitmanian catalogues to the
cadences and vocabulary of nursery rhymes. As with Berryman’s Dream Songs,
the poems are characterized by radical shifts in tone. In the title poem, the
poet recalls a childhood night spent alone in his father’s greenhouse:
There was always a single light
Swinging by the ire-pit,
Where the ireman pulled out roses.
The big roses, the big bloody clinkers . . .
Scurry of warm over small plants.
Ordnung! Odnung!
Papa is coming!
A ine haze moved of the leaves;
The rose, the chrysanthemum turned toward the light.
Even the hushed forms, the bent yellowy weeds
Moved in a slow upsway . . .27
“Ordnung” is German for “order,” and the father’s emergence at the end of
the section, giving purpose once again to the unruly world of the greenhouse,
is a gesture often repeated in Roethke’s poetry. A later poem, “Otto,” employs
these motifs even more explicitly. Here is the poem’s closing section:
In my mind’s eye I see those ields of glass,
As I looked out at them from the high house,
Riding beneath the moon, hid from the moon.
Then slowly breaking whiter in the dawn;
When George the watchman’s lantern dropped from sight
The long pipes knocked: it was the end of night.
I’d stand upon my bed, a sleepless child
Watching the waking of my father’s world –
O world so far away! O my lost world!28
Roethke issued four collections in the 1950s, and some of his strongest
work can be found in 1964’s posthumously published The Far Field. Yet
Roethke, like Berryman in The Dream Songs, found it diicult to overcome
the expressive constraints and peculiarities of the style he had forged. As
Adam Kirsch observes, “The Lost Son is the peak of Roethke’s inventiveness

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as a poet, but his attempt to extend its discoveries into a series of poems
exposed the limitations of his style: without the momentum of narrative,
it quickly grows static.”29 Still, Roethke’s literary inl uence was consider-
able. The Deep Image poets who emerged in the 1960s, particularly James
Wright and Robert Bly, are especially indebted to Roethke in their insistence
on the primacy of metaphor in their poetry. Roethke’s inl uence was felt in
England as well: the violence and mystical atavism of the natural world in
Ted Hughes’s poetry owes much to Roethke’s example. Just weeks prior to
Roethke’s death, Robert Lowell sent his fellow poet a letter whose troubled
and valedictory tone seems prophetic: not simply of Roethke’s own death
but of the way that Lowell and all of his middle-generation peers would be
viewed in the future:
We couldn’t be more diferent, yet how weirdly our lives have gone the same
way. Let’s say we are brothers, have gone the same journey and know far
more about each other than we have ever said or will say. It’s a strange fact
about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn’t exactly seem to
have always been true. It’s this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with
such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning. . . .
There must be some kind of glory to it that people coming later will wonder
at. I can see us all being written up in some huge book on the age.30

Notes
1. Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Age of Lowell,” in Michael London and Robert Boyers
(eds.), Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time (New York: David Lewis,
1970), p. 155.
2. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1987), pp. 286–87. This collection will be cited in the text as RLCPr.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mil in, 1876), p. 37.
4. Frank Bidart, “Foreword,” in Robert Lowell: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. xiii.
5. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 184. This collection will be cited in the
text as RLCP.
6. Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1978), p. 44.
7. Axelrod, Robert Lowell, p. 49.
8. On “The Quaker Graveyard” and its sources, see especially Vereen Bell, Robert
Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp.
10–32.

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9. Richard Tillinghast, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 43.
10. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982),
p. 238.
11. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, pp. 272, 271.
12. Ben Belitt, “Imitations: Translation as Personal Mode,” in London and Boyers
(eds.), Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time, p. 114.
13. See especially John Simon, “Abuse of Privilege: Robert Lowell as Translator,”
in London and Boyers (eds.), Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time,
pp. 143, 141.
14. Mark Rudman, Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), p. 137.
15. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, p. 309.
16. Robert Lowell, Notebook, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1970), p. 262.
17. Compare this passage with Lowell, Notebook, p. 251.
18. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Biography of Robert Lowell (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1994), p. 422–23.
19. Tillinghast, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work, p. 105.
20. Helen Vendler, Last Books, Last Looks: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 71–72.
21. Vendler, Last Books, Last Looks, p. 71.
22. Hayden Carruth, Selected Essays and Reviews (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper
Canyon Press, 1996), p. 88.
23. John Berryman, Selected Poems, ed. Kevin Young (New York: Library of
America, 2004), p. 36.
24. Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: William
Morrow, 1990), p. 301.
25. Berryman, Selected Poems, p. 107.
26. Theodore Roethke, Selected Letters, ed. Ralph J. Mills (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1968), p. 360.
27. Theodore Roethke, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Hirsch (New York: Library of
America, 2005), p. 28.
28. Roethke, Selected Poems, p. 109.
29. Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 176.
30. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), pp. 427–28.

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 Chapter 34
Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the
Lost World of Real Feeling
Ri c h a rd Fly n n

On October 29, 1964, at a reading at the Guggenheim Museum celebrating

Elizabeth Bishop’s $5,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets,
Randall Jarrell read Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and his own because Bishop was
unable to leave Brazil to receive the award. Robert Lowell, a longtime friend
of both poets, introduced the reading, and his introduction relected his esti-
mation of each poet’s reputation, an estimation that would remain the con-
ventional wisdom for years to come. Speaking irst of his good friend Bishop,
he noted that her poetry difered both from the “standardized somewhat
machine-made Academic poem,” and from poetry that “comes through with
a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind.” Echoing Jarrell’s review
of North & South (1946) as well as his own, Lowell praised Bishop’s “eye” and
her “tolerance and humor” and noted the “beautiful formal completeness” of
her poetry. He also repeated the unfortunate sexism of his own review, noting
that Bishop was “one of the two or three best women poets in the language.”
Introducing his friend Jarrell, Lowell described him primarily as a brilliant
critic who had once written some of the inest poems about World War II and
as the “last of the great critics.”1 Although he praised Jarrell’s recent poetry for
its “Chekhovian directness and subtlety,” one senses that Lowell (and indeed
Bishop) would not have disagreed with Helen Vendler’s judgment that Jarrell
put his “genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry.”2
Although both Jarrell and Bishop were well respected, their work was some-
what overshadowed by lashier postmodernist innovators, not just by the New
York School, Beat, projectivist, or other New American poets but by the lin-
guistic pyrotechnics of John Berryman, the personal revelations of confes-
sional poets like W. D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton, and, perhaps, more than
anyone else, by Lowell himself. Bishop had a coterie following as what John
Ashbery would later call a “writer’s writer’s writer” and Jarrell was considered
a strong critic whose most recent poems bordered on the sentimental.3 Both
poets resist the orthodoxies of their time. Accounts of the ainity between

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Jarrell and Bishop, at least since the 1990s, have served as correctives to what
James Longenbach and others have criticized as “the breakthrough narrative,”
in which Lowell’s Life Studies represents a turning point when a caricature
of modernist “impersonality” is replaced by “free verse and free thinking”;
as Longenbach notes, this story is “often cast in terms of masculine forti-
tude,” which cannot account for writers like Bishop nor for writers like Jarrell
concerned with traditionally feminized or childlike points of view.4 Langdon
Hammer has argued convincingly that “the world of [Jarrell’s] poems is unreal,
eccentric, or ‘lost’ (the title of Jarrell’s inal book of poems is The Lost World)
because he self-consciously created it in opposition to the world in which
he lived and worked, the ‘real’ world where literature and power were very
intimately linked.”5 Hammer argues that the “manifest excesses” of Jarrell’s
poetry are deliberate, “evidence of his dissatisfaction with the boundaries . . .
deined by New Criticism’s canons of taste.”6 Despite concerted advocacy,
Jarrell’s conversational style and unfashionable late subject matter (fairy tales,
children, and housewives) have often been attacked as sentimental, “soppy or
sloppy if you skim it instead of reading it,” as Stephen Burt puts it.7 Critical
of “academic, tea-party, creative-writing-class poets” whose poems Jarrell
described as “at bottom, social behavior calculated to satisfy a small social
group of academic readers, editors and foundation executives,” Jarrell insisted
that one ought to write poems that come “out of life,” acknowledging that
this aesthetic seemed to violate “the rules or standards implicit in . . . ‘the best
modern practice.’ ”8
Bishop, as Lowell’s commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet
who refused to write the “standard” academic poem fashionable at midcen-
tury, nor did she write the kind of “confessional” poem that was quickly sup-
planting it. Despite her admiration for Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and Sylvia
Plath’s Ariel, which she read in the 1965 British edition, she resisted the notion
of confessional poetry, even as her poetry was becoming more personal. In
the 1967 Time cover story on Lowell, she made her now-famous dismissal of
Lowell’s “confessional imitators”: “The tendency is to overdo the morbidity.
You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.”9 Bishop her-
self, who once jokingly described herself as “a minor female Wordsworth,”
was also troubled about her slow production of poems, and in her late years,
according to Frank Bidart, was increasingly “diident about her work and
reputation”:

She felt that because she had been out of the country so long she was unfash-
ionable, half-forgotten. (Years later, visiting my apartment, she plucked The

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Modern Poet, a volume of essays edited by Ian Hamilton, of my shelves. There

were essays on Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Jarrell – nothing on her. She scanned
the table of contents, then putting the book back said, with woe in her voice:
“It’s like being buried alive.”)10

Far from being unfashionable or half-forgotten, Bishop’s work has steadily

risen in the regard of readers and critics of poetry since her death in October
1979. She is now widely considered a canonical poet – the major poet of her
circle – and one of the most important igures of the mid-twentieth century.
Jarrell, whose poetry was truly unfashionable during his lifetime, continues
to be undervalued precisely because his poems frequently violate normative
expectations of both gender and genre. As Alan Williamson has argued so
cogently, Jarrell’s intense exploration in his poetry of “the earliest, most for-
gotten experiences of life and with the senses of identity, relationship, and
gender that begin to form there” is what makes his work unique. It is also,
Williamson argues, the reason that “at its most incandescent moments, it
completely transcends the accusation” of sentimentality.11
Jarrell himself was the irst to recognize his ainity with Bishop, noting an
uncanny, “queer feeling” that they were “very diferent but did come from the
same planet.”12 Jarrell expressed “awed wonder” at seeing in Bishop’s poems
such as “Manners” (1955) and “Sestina” (1956) “some phrases feeling to me a
little like my own phrases, in your poems,” noting that they shared the ability
to “really remember childhood”; he wrote Bishop that he was “particularly
interested in the ‘more subjective, personal interior life-kind’ ” of poems that
became more prominent in Bishop’s later career.13 The personal dimension
had attracted him to Bishop’s work all along, and it was this same dimension
that, when displayed in his own work, provoked critical controversy. Since the
1990s, critics have demonstrated the ainity between the two poets, in terms
of both style and subject matter.14 But to most readers in the 1940s, 1950s, and
1960s, their poetry seemed very diferent on the surface. Bishop’s star rose
(albeit slowly) during this period because her poetry resisted received notions
of feminine poetry by virtue of its objective, impersonal eye, whereas Jarrell’s
reputation declined as he increasingly rejected conventionally masculine
authority in favor of a personal and conversational style that he himself attrib-
uted, in a 1939 letter to Allen Tate, to his “poetic and semifeminine mind.”15
Both poets experienced childhood dislocations that inl uenced their work.
Jarrell, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 6, 1914, spent much of
his childhood in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. When his parents
separated in 1924, he moved with his mother to Nashville but later spent a

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year between 1926 and 1927 in the “blue wonderland” of Hollywood with his
paternal grandparents and great-grandmother before returning to Nashville,
a period commemorated in his poem “The Lost World” (1963). Jarrell fre-
quently expressed a feeling of estrangement from his mother’s side of the fam-
ily and also felt a sense of betrayal when his grandparents made him return.
At Vanderbilt University he studied with Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and
John Crowe Ransom. Moving to Kenyon College in 1937 to follow Ransom,
Jarrell worked as an instructor and roomed in Ransom’s attic with Robert
Lowell. After completing his M.A., he taught at the University of Texas, where
he met and married fellow instructor Mackie Langham in 1940. By the time
Jarrell enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, he had become well estab-
lished as a critic and had published Blood for a Stranger (1942) and Little Friend,
Little Friend (1945).
Bishop’s early dislocations were more profound. Born in 1911 in Worcester,
Massachusetts, Bishop lost her father when she was eight months old. Moving
to Great Village, Nova Scotia, in 1915, Bishop lived with her maternal grand-
parents; when she was ive years old, her mother was committed to a public
mental hospital in Nova Scotia. Bishop never saw her again. Brought back to
Worcester “unconsulted and against my wishes,” she lived irst with her pater-
nal grandparents and then her aunt Maud Shepherdson and sufered from
eczema and asthma.16 At Vassar College, she met lifelong friends who helped
her cultivate her writing. Marianne Moore became an early mentor, choos-
ing some of Bishop’s poems, including “The Map,” for the anthology Trial
Balances. Bishop traveled widely and wrote slowly until her irst manuscript of
poems received the Houghton Mil in Literary Fellowship in 1945.
The two poets irst met shortly before Jarrell reviewed that irst book, North
& South (1946), when Jarrell, just discharged from the army, was replacing
Margaret Marshall for a year as literary editor of the Nation. In January 1947, he
introduced Bishop to Robert Lowell, who became her most important literary
friend. In the fall of that year, Jarrell accepted a faculty position at the Woman’s
College in Greensboro (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro).
Throughout the forties his reputation as a critic was legendary, while his rep-
utation as a poet was still insecure. Shortly after his third book, Losses, was
published, the September 1948 issue of Poetry magazine led of with a selec-
tion of seven Jarrell poems followed by both a negative and a positive review
of the volume, under the title “Jarrell’s ‘Losses’: A Controversy.” The negative
reviewer, W. S. Graham, faulted Jarrell’s poems for wishing to connect “poetic
experience” with its “veriiability in the ‘real’ world,” describing as faults what

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 Bishop, Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling

most sympathetic readers of Jarrell today see as deining characteristics of his

style:
As an addition to his intended verisimilitude Mr. Jarrell sprinkles his poems
full of little conversational phrases trailing of to dots, which, as a device, have
a loosening efect upon a poetic line which is, in the irst place, conceived at
too low a tension. He also employs dashes liberally, although not consistently,
sometimes to do the work of commas, other times of periods. The whole
would seem to represent a revolt against the “poetic,” and urge to deal with
an honest thorny reality.17
Graham, no doubt, would have been unsympathetic to Jarrell’s later aes-
thetic credo: “Art matters not merely because it is the most magniicent orna-
ment and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is
life itself.”18 In keeping with this belief, Jarrell would later criticize (somewhat
unfairly) the ending of Richard Wilbur’s “The Death of a Toad”: “You think
with a surge of irritation and dismay, ‘so it was all only an excuse for some
Poetry’ ” (PA, p. 251). Interestingly, Bishop thought this review more than fair,
remarking to Lowell that Jarrell’s “reviews infuriate me and yet that activity
and that last minute devotion to criticism is really wonderful. I think he admires
Richard Wilbur too much, though.”19 Clearly, however, Bishop shared Jarrell’s
ideal aesthetic, his belief that a moral commitment to accurate observation
and an allegiance to “life” were more important than the mere technical facil-
ity of “Poetry.” This aesthetic is exempliied in his praise for the lines from the
middle of section 33 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” beginning with “I under-
stand the large heart of heroes” and concluding, “All this I swallow, it tastes
good, I like it well, it becomes mine, / I am the man, I sufered, I was there.”
“These lines are so good,” writes Jarrell, “that even admiration seems like inso-
lence, and one is ashamed of anything that one might ind to say about them.
How anyone can dismiss or accept patronizingly the man who wrote them, I
do not understand” (PA, p. 127).
Jarrell’s praise for William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Book 1, and for the
poems of Bishop’s North & South is predicated on a similar aesthetic. “The
subject of Paterson,” Jarrell writes in his 1946 omnibus review that included
both poets, “is: How can you tell the truth about things? – that is, how can you
ind a language so close to the world that the world can be represented and
understood in it?” (PA, p. 228). His famous and still inl uential assessment of
Bishop’s irst book works in a similar vein:
Instead of crying, with justice, “This is a world in which no one can get along,”
Miss Bishop’s poems show that it is barely, but perfectly possible – has been,

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that is, for her. Her work is unusually personal and honest in its wit, percep-
tion, and sensitivity – and in its restrictions too; all her poems have written
underneath, I have seen it. She is so morally attractive in poems like “The Fish”
or “Roosters,” because she understands so well that the wickedness and con-
fusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people’s wickedness and
confusion, but not, for you, your own; that morality, for the individual, is
usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heartwarming afair
of omissions and commissions the greatest of which will seem ininitesimal,
ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize or deplore. (PA,
p. 235)

As James Longenbach has argued, Jarrell here “seems to be describing the

ideals of his own poems.”20 The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in
part because Jarrell’s postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume,
in poems such as “Moving” (1948). Like Jarrell’s late poem “The Lost World”
(1963), “Moving” also frames the perceptions of the child (in this case a little
girl) against the more jaded relections of the adult. In many ways the inno-
cent relections of the child in “Moving” resemble those of Bishop’s later chil-
dren, such as the child in “Sestina” (1956), who perceives the kitchen animisti-
cally and “draws another inscrutable house,” or the child in “First Death in
Nova Scotia” (1962).
For Bishop, the period between 1948 and 1951, when she left for Brazil, was
extremely diicult, marked by an almost unwelcome visibility as poetry con-
sultant at the Library of Congress (1949–1950) as well as a number of personal
upheavals. Her decision to stay in Brazil and the stability of her relationship
with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, allowed her to begin developing
her later style and subject matter, in which exploring questions of childhood,
“questions of travel,” and the “art of losing” became more urgent (BPL, pp. 74,
166). Although she continued to think of Jarrell as a good friend, their corre-
spondence became sporadic during the 1950s, and they saw each other only
during Bishop’s infrequent visits to the United States. Paradoxically, it is dur-
ing this period that the two poets’ work shares similar concerns and strate-
gies. Writing to Bishop after a long silence, in 1957, Jarrell told Bishop that he
saw Jarrell-like phrases in Bishop’s poem “Sestina” (1956). Mary Kinzie, in a
convincing comparison of Jarrell’s and Bishop’s styles, notes that both poets
“address an earlier state of being with a later mind and resources”; Kinzie
points to “the astonishing resemblances in their nearly simultaneous discov-
ery of the child among its objects.”21 For both poets, “adult ease only intensi-
ies the illusion of young wonder and unmediated freshness, which, in turn,
rescues the commonplaces, makes authentic (hence poetic) the self-evidential,

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approximate, halting, interrupted, and fussily circular utterances that pepper

the style of both.”22
Temperamentally, the poets were indeed very diferent: Jarrell loved teach-
ing, was reputedly quite a performer in the classroom, and relished his role
as a public intellectual as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. More
than any poet in his circle, he experienced suburban culture from within, both
in Greensboro and in northwest Washington, D.C. After his second marriage,
to Mary Von Schrader in 1952, his life – at least outwardly – was typical of the
new Cold War ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family: he had both a devoted
wife and stepdaughters. While he wrote scathing indictments of consumer
culture, he also seemed to celebrate and enjoy the professional life of what
Karl Shapiro would soon call (in capital letters) “the Bourgeois Poet.”23 In
contrast, Bishop was terriied of teaching and even of reading her poems in
public, and her year as poetry consultant was perhaps the most miserable year
of her life. Living on a modest trust fund and fellowships until the late 1960s,
she was, for much of her career, an American living outside of American cul-
ture. As Camille Roman has shown, Bishop’s long-distance relationship with
the United States compounded the profound sense of alienation that she felt
so acutely in the late 1940s.24 While Jarrell was frequently critical of American
culture, he criticized it from within.
Bishop admired Jarrell’s poetry, calling him “a ine poet . . . and the best
and most generous critic of poetry I have known,” but she had reservations
(BPL, p. 717). In particular, she was troubled by what she was to describe
years after his death as “his understanding & sort-of-over-sympathizing with
the lot of women” (WA, pp. 741–42). Bishop’s discomfort with Jarrell’s cross-
gendered performances may have stemmed from her objection to the out-
right sexism in poems like “Woman,” which Bishop hated both in its early
version in Botteghe Oscure (1953) and in its 1964 version, included in The Lost
World. While she rightly criticizes the poem for perpetuating “all those cli-
chés about women,” her discomfort also seems somewhat bound up with
her vigilance about sentimentality, which oddly takes the form of her insis-
tence on preserving rather than disrupting conventional notions of gender.
Even as early as 1948, she had not known how to respond to one of Jarrell’s
most successful cross-gendered poems, “The Night before the Night before
Christmas,” which she characterized as “limp and more suited for a short
story” (WA, p. 73). In 1960 in a letter to Lowell, Bishop expressed her disdain
for what she characterized in Anne Sexton as “the ‘our beautiful old silver’
school of female writing” and, later, for its male equivalent in the work of
W. D. Snodgrass (WA, pp. 333, 359). She then reassured Lowell that his own

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work in Life Studies was “really ‘masculine’ writing – courageous and hon-
est” (WA, p. 360). Bishop seemed to understand that Jarrell was deliberately
pushing the boundaries of sentimentality. Writing to Anne Stevenson in
1964, she commented, “Randall, I think – well, I think that sentimentality is
deliberate, you know – he is trying to restore feeling perhaps – but I just don’t
think we can believe in it these days.”25 In addition, Jarrell’s obsession with
aging undoubtedly contributed to her uneasiness. Writing to Lowell in 1975,
she implores him, “Please, please don’t talk about old age so much, my dear
old friend! You are giving me the creeps” and goes on to say that what “Lota
admired so much about us North Americans was our determined youthful-
ness and energy” (WA, p. 778). Often tying self-pity about aging in her friends
like Lowell and Jarrell to her general disdain for what she perceived to be the
sentimental excesses in “lesser” poets like Sexton and Snodgrass, she never-
theless deined the drawbacks of midcentury verse in terms of an absence
of “real feeling.” Writing to Lowell in 1960, Bishop complains about merely
“adequate” poetry:
I get so depressed with every number of POETRY, The New Yorker, etc. . . . so
much adequate poetry all sounding just alike and so boring – or am I growing
frizzled small and stale or however you put it? There seems to be too much of
everything – too much painting, too much poetry, too many novels – and too
much money, I suppose. (Although I certainly welcomed mine.) And no one
really feeling anything much. (WA, p. 344)
For Bishop, who was a severe censor of her own work, Jarrell’s poems may
have had too much feeling – may have been too distinctive sounding and more
disturbing than boring. They were also, Bishop insisted, “truly American”:
You are truly “American,” too – if again one can leave out all the unfortunate
possible meanings of that word – You make me feel almost homesick and dis-
loyal. – I should go back and live it all over again – except that I always was an
expatriate of sorts, from the beginning, and I suppose that’s why your poems
amaze me so with their realer USA than any I ever knew – (BPL, p. 868)

Bishop, living in Brazil, often characterized herself as “3/4ths Canadian” (BPL,

p. 852) and wrote to Lowell that Jarrell “does write about a class of American
life that is strange to me – perhaps it is the ‘west.’ He makes me feel scarcely
American at all, and yet I am, through and through” (WA, p. 573). Responding to
“The Lost World,” she writes Jarrell, “I’m naturally fascinated by the autobio-
graphical ones – I really have to read them more as poems, though – right now
I am so amazed at how very diferent our lives were that that’s what strikes me
most of all” (BPL, p. 868).

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Lowell wrote to Bishop that he admired Jarrell’s now widely anthologized

poem “Next Day” (1963). The poem, spoken by a middle-aged suburban house-
wife in the supermarket, stood in a long line of monologues spoken by aging
women through whom Jarrell expressed his own loss of vitality. The woman’s
predicament hearkens back to Jarrell’s polemical essays criticizing American
consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the
detergents “Cheer,” “Joy,” and “All,” vainly seeking their emotional equiva-
lents. Bishop did not share Lowell’s enthusiasm for “Next Day,” but she had
little irsthand experience of the consumer culture that gave rise to the speak-
er’s – and Jarrell’s – sad heart at the supermarket. Neither did she, like Jarrell,
have extensive experience as an educator of young women, many of whom,
like the speaker of “Next Day,” might well have ended up in supermarkets,
quoting William James to themselves, because they had few opportunities to
make use of their college educations in their conventional marriages. Bishop
was to maintain an idyllic – some would say naïve – view of Brazil itself as a
lost paradise, recommending it to Jarrell as an antidote. Brazil, Bishop wrote
Jarrell, is “a country where one feels closer to real old-fashioned life”:

With all its awfulness and stupidities – some of the Lost World hasn’t quite
been lost here yet, I feel, on the days I still like living in this backward place. –
This is true particularly when one gets away from Rio, or the coast. – The peo-
ple in the small poor places are so absolutely natural and elegantly polite. –
I’m not really of the subject of your poems – it is that I think the things you
feel a sense of loss for aren’t entirely lost to the world, yet. I gather up every
bit of evidence with joy, and wish I could put it into my poems, too – (BPL,
pp. 870–71)

Much of what Bishop learned of the United States between 1951 and her irst
extended return visit in 1957 she learned from the popular magazines, such as
Time and the Saturday Evening Post, representatives of the “instant culture” that
Jarrell had begun railing against.
Although she shared Jarrell’s criticism of the direction of postwar America,
Bishop, for the most part, had viewed it from afar. During Bishop and Soares’s
only extended visit to the United States (March 31–October 15, 1957), although
Jarrell was getting a lot of attention as a public intellectual, he was also in
the depths of what he described as depression, unable “to write on poems,
criticism, or anything.”26 Bishop, seeing the proliferation of “superhighways”
and “automobiles” since 1952, asked whether “it’s just some lack of vitality in
myself that makes me feel so hopeless about my own country. . . . I really can’t
bear much of American life these days – surely no country has been so ilthy

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rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time” (WA, pp. 228–29). But it
is clear that Jarrell felt his own dismay far more keenly. Writing not as an expa-
triate but from within Eisenhower’s America, he lamented the fundamental
diference between the American postwar present and the American past:

The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns,
small things grow great and what was great grows small; whole species dis-
appear and are replaced. The American present is very diferent from the
American past: so diferent that our awareness of the extent of the changes
has been repressed, and we regard as ordinary what is extraordinary – omi-
nous perhaps – both for us and for the rest of the world.27

Jarrell’s cultural pessimism was compounded by a feeling that his poetry

was not being read or appreciated. Despite winning the National Book Award
for Poetry for The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), he had also sufered a
poetry writing block for a number of years; the award-winning volume con-
tained a large number of translations and few genuinely new poems. So he
must have been dismayed when, in a 1962 article titled “Poetry in English:
1945–62,” the anonymous author(s) of Time declared Lowell and Bishop (along
with Theodore Roethke) the most important poets of their generation. To be
sure, the article described their work in stereotypical terms; Lowell’s career
was described in terms of the emerging breakthrough narrative as that of
someone who had changed from a poet with “a driving religious concern
and a nervously aggressive masculine line” to a poet who, in Life Studies, “lim-
bered his forms and strengthened a strong and even peculiar personal tone
that sounds a little like cubistic Browning.” Bishop was described as “limited
and proicient”: “The cool, eely slickness of her poems is sometimes repellent.
They have little human warmth, no speciic temperature. She seldom writes
about people or their feelings.” But Jarrell received only a passing mention as
one of four poets who were “moved to describe their military experiences in
rough-edged verse that some did not like but all could understand.”28
Later that year, insult was added to injury when Time introduced excerpts
from Jarrell’s lecture “Fifty Years of American Poetry” in a way that surely
must have stung: “Poets’ opinions of other poets are often unintelligible to
anybody except a poet. But Minor Poet Randall Jarrell is also a witty critic
who can sometimes be more eloquent in prose than he is in verse.”29 During
the last year or so of his life, Jarrell sufered from severe mania and depression
brought on by the careless prescription of the newly marketed antidepressant
Elavil, but his condition was also aggravated by a vicious attack in the New York
Times Book Review charging his last book of poems, The Lost World (1965), with

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“an indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism.”30 When Jarrell was struck by a car
in October 1965, the mystery surrounding his death unfortunately delected
attention away from his work. But despite some of her reservations, Bishop,
in a letter Jarrell may not have received, recognized the unique value of his
last poetry: “You’re both very sorrowful, and yet not the anguish-school that
Cal seems innocently to have inspired – the self-pitiers who sometimes write
quite good imitations of Cal! It is more human, less specialized, and yet deep”
(BPL, p. 867).
By the time Bishop returned to live permanently in the United States – on
Christmas Eve, 1967, after Soares’s suicide – she had been living abroad so
long that she experienced culture shock, living in San Francisco with a much
younger partner. Brett Millier notes that Bishop “was not quite prepared for
San Francisco the winter following the Summer of Love.”31 Bishop wrote to
Louise Crane expressing a bewilderment worthy of the speaker of Jarrell’s
“Next Day,” albeit with a much better sense of humor:

Now I have a little lat, little car, somebody else’s little boy, and have joined the
great lower-middle-class American public in spending a lot of time looking
for a place to park. It is a strange sensation. I had never been in a laundromat
before. I’m getting used to it now, but at irst when I went to the Supermarket
I spent hours because I wanted to read what it said on all the packages.32

She wrote to May Swenson in November 1968 that the United States was “all
pretty new to me, after 17 years away. I really was awfully out of touch I ind.”33
Despite her sojourn in what was not quite Randall Jarrell’s “west,” her feelings
of displacement from American culture seem to have made her “Questions of
Travel” ever more urgent.
As Bishop worked on her late poetry, particularly that in Geography III, she
worked hard to negotiate the line between sentimental excess and “real feel-
ing” in her own work. The drift in Bishop studies toward an insistence on the
poet as more personal than the reticent, modest poet for whom “restraint,
calm and proportion” (PA, pp. 234–35) are paramount has given the general
reader access to letters, drafts, and ephemera previously available only to
scholars willing to travel to various archives. But the publication of this mate-
rial has been somewhat controversial. Alice Quinn’s edition, Edgar Allan Poe
and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, outraged Vendler,
who castigated the publication of “these maimed and stunted siblings” of
Bishop’s published poetry.34 One need not share Vendler’s outrage to concur
with her judgment that the draft pages from Bishop’s aborted “Elegy,” written
for Lota de Macedo Soares, pale in comparison to the masterpiece “Crusoe

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in England.” And with a handful of exceptions, one sees in the fragments and
drafts that producing a poem of “real feeling” was for Bishop an act of intense
craftsmanship – the relatively banal and prosaic irst draft of “One Art” is a
case in point. Like her Crusoe, Bishop understood the temptation to “[give]
way to self-pity,” but by the time that impulse made its way into a inished
poem, the poet distanced herself from raw emotion in such a way that real
feeling could emerge:
What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
Over a crater’s edge, I told myself
“Pity should begin at home.” So the more
Pity I felt, the more I felt at home. (BPL, p. 153)

Crusoe’s monologue is leavened with this sort of wry humor throughout; as

in much of Bishop’s best work, her poetic voice captures the characteristic
combination of “awful but cheerful” that she irst invoked in “The Bight”
(1949). Bonnie Costello has ofered a provocative reading of Crusoe in which
she criticizes what she sees as biographical reductiveness in the burgeoning
Bishop industry, but I’d like to point to a draft Bishop abandoned in order to
illuminate what Jarrell saw as the point of connection between himself and
Bishop: the great poems and stories about childhood that Bishop wrote in the
1950s and early 1960s.35 Certainly, Bishop abandoned the draft “Where are the
dolls who loved me so” (from the early 1950s) because she detected that it gives
way to self-pity in the way that inished poems like “Sestina” (1956) or “First
Death in Nova Scotia” (1962) do not. The dolls, with their “blank crotches, /
and / play / wrist-watches, / whose hand moved only when they wanted –”
possess a
stoicism I never mastered
their smiling phrase for every occasion –
They went their rigid little ways
To meditate in trunks or closets
To let [life and] unforeseen emotions
Glance of their glazed complexions. (BPL, p. 235)
The elements of early childhood animism that are the key to the inished
poems remain unprocessed here. Indeed, the fragment seems almost to be a
preliminary note for the 1953 autobiographical story “Gwendolyn,” and little
more. This story and the much more accomplished “In the Village” (1953) lay
the groundwork not only for the poems about childhood in the “Elsewhere”
section of Questions of Travel but for poems such as “In the Waiting Room” and

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“The Moose” in Geography III. That the doll fragment was abandoned shows
Bishop’s good judgment about her own writing. But it also shows a fear of
allowing herself too much emotional excess in her writing, censoring herself
just when the messy feelings in the draft threatened to spin out of control.
Bishop was always protesting that she was not a critic, but she appears to
be an astute (and speciic) critic to Lowell and others in her letters. Given
her ambivalence about Jarrell’s work, she was often more dismissive than
astute in her judgments of his poetry, and she often withheld those judgments
from Jarrell. However, despite her frequent complaints about Jarrell’s aging
women, one poem of his she praises is “The Player Piano” (1964). Her praise is
not without qualiication, but it is clear that she admires the poem more than
other cross-gendered performances by Jarrell. Nevertheless, her praise contin-
ued to emphasize her diference from Jarrell:

Right now I am so amazed at how very diferent our lives were that that’s what
strikes me most of all. It is too bad, perhaps, that “The Player Piano” didn’t
get in this book, too. The ending of that is marvelous – Heavens – I remember
the false armistice – but, for some reason, not the real one. However, I don’t
seem to mind growing old at all, or rarely. – I just get bored because any sto-
ries need longer explanations than they used to, because so many people are
now younger – I suppose that means one should stop telling them. But not
your kind – these are invaluable, and the only poems I know that do tell any of
these things. (BPL, p. 868)

A monologue spoken by yet another of Jarrell’s aging women, the poem

engages the lost Southern California landscape of Jarrell’s childhood. Although
it is doubtful that he himself would have remembered the false armistice,
which took place when he was four years old (Bishop was seven), the poem
certainly contains autobiographical elements, like “The Night before the Night
before Christmas” (1948), “The Face” (1950), “The Woman at the Washington
Zoo” (1960, but irst sent to Bishop in 1957), and monologues such as “Next
Day” (1963) and “The Lost Children” (1965). “The Player Piano” is, as Stephen
Burt has demonstrated, “one of Jarrell’s last and best poems about the life
course,”36 so its excellence may have overcome Bishop’s general aversion to
Jarrell’s women. Here is the ending of the poem Bishop praised:

Here are Mother and Father in a photograph,

Father’s holding me. . . . They both look so young.
I’m so much older than they are. Look at them,
Two babies with their baby. I don’t blame you,
You weren’t old enough to know any better;

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If I could go back, sit down by you both,

And sign our true armistice: you weren’t to blame.
I shut my eyes and there’s our living room.
The piano’s playing something by Chopin,
And Mother and Father and their little girl
Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
I go over, hold my hands out, play I play –
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my ingers.37
“The last two stanzas,” Bishop wrote in a postscript to Jarrell,
remind me just a little bit of one I think is still just about Roethke’s best – “My
Papa’s Waltz” – but more, they suddenly brought back to me one of my very
favorites of Hardy’s – “The Self-Unseeing” – one of his most beautiful little
poems, I think. (I’ve even been trying to write a poem about it.) But yours has
a stranger and more contemporary – although still past – mystery to it – those
keys. . . . And the word “keys” itself seems to be so full of ambiguity. (BPL,
p. 869)
Bishop’s connection of Jarrell’s poem with Hardy’s small masterpiece is
indeed more apt than any supericial resemblances the poem might have to
“My Papa’s Waltz.” The mystery of Jarrell’s poem might seem more “con-
temporary,” but what Burt identiies as Jarrell’s sophisticated management
of repetition and time scales is indeed reminiscent of the Hardy poem, with
its “ancient loor, / Footworn and hollowed and thin,” and its “former door /
Where the dead feet walked in”:
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!38
David Bromwich connects Hardy’s poem (the third stanza in particular)
with Bishop’s concept of “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration”
necessary for both experiencing and creating a work of art, from the famous
“Darwin Letter” to Anne Stevenson (BPL, p. 861).39 The correspondence with
Stevenson is now available in its entirety in Prose, and the Darwin Letter
was begun on January 8, 1964, and inished on January 20, a little more than
a month before Bishop’s letter to Jarrell about “The Player Piano” (BPL,
pp. 855–65). So it would appear that what resonated for Bishop in the Jarrell
poem touched the heart of her own fundamental creative principles – one

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might even say, paraphrasing “Poem” from Geography III, that their “looks”
coincided here.
One might also say that, alone among the handful of Jarrell’s posthu-
mously published poems, “The Player Piano” might have pointed to Jarrell’s
poetic future. Certainly, the aesthetic that Bishop touches on in the Darwin
Letter relects her understanding that the recently completed Questions of
Travel represented a shift in the direction of her work. Given Bishop’s work-
ing habits, it was a shift that began in 1952 with her move to Brazil and dis-
covery of a “de luxe Nova Scotia” (WA, p. 676) in writing both poems and
stories about early childhood and poems about Brazil. Jarrell had undergone
a signiicant shift in both subject matter and style in the late forties and early
ifties and then again from 1962 until his death. Bishop learned from Jarrell
that she could let her guard down a little. She would confront her childhood
(and adult) losses more directly and more discursively. And although she was
still suspicious of Jarrell’s apparent sentimentality, she learned that adopting
Jarrellian personae (Crusoe, for instance) allowed her to express emotion
more directly as well. Jarrell learned from Bishop to pay closer attention to
concrete particulars in his poems and to manage their music more skillfully:
although he had learned much of this already from Robert Frost, Bishop’s
example also helped him discover the unobtrusive yet masterful music of the
terza rima of “The Lost World” and of the children’s poems from The Bat-
Poet, as well as that of “The Player Piano.” Writing about The Lost World and
The Bat-Poet, Bishop says, “you are the real one and only successor to Frost.
Not the bad side of Frost, or the silly side – the wisdom of the ages side, etc. –
but all the good. The beautiful writing, the sympathy, the touching and real
detail” (BPL, p. 867).
Both poets strove to pay attention to facts while remaining open to the pos-
sibility of “sinking or sliding giddily of into the unknown” (BPL, p. 861). For
Bishop, this involves bridging the apparent split between conscious and uncon-
scious states: “There is no ‘split.’ Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the
always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of
empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really
see full-face but that seems enormously important” (BPL, p. 861). If Darwin
was Bishop’s hero, Freud was Jarrell’s. And while it seems that he placed more
stock in works of art as wish fulillments, the trajectory of his work points
to the importance of empathy and intersubjectivity; in similar ways, the tra-
jectory of Bishop’s work points to what Victoria Harrison terms “relational
subjectivity,” especially as Bishop turns to childhood as a subject, beginning in
1952.40 Perhaps one diference between the two poets in terms of their interest

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in psychoanalysis is that Bishop found the object-relations theory of Melanie

Klein more signiicant than Freudian theory.
The epigraph to Bishop’s last book of poems, Geography III (1976), was
drawn from a book John Ashbery had given her, First Lessons in Geography
(1884), and ends with a dizzying series of questions. Reading the epigraph on
Susan Howe’s Paciica Radio show, Bishop says, “Then the book gets rather
hysterical”:41 “In what direction is the Volcano? The Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The
Strait? The Mountains? The Isthmus? What is in the East? In the West? In the South?
In the North? In the Northwest? In the Southeast? In the Northeast? In the Southwest?”
(BPL, p. 148). In her early work, such as “The Map” (1935), “topography displays
no favorites”: “More delicate than the historian’s are the map-maker’s colors”;
in her late work, the poet inds herself answering the dislocation suggested
by the epigraph by returning to what Jarrell called “The Elementary Scene.”42
The epigraph’s irst lessons have no conclusive answer except for the “un-
rediscovered, un-renameable” lost world of “In the Waiting Room” (1971) and
“Crusoe in England” (1971) (BPL, p. 151). “Was there / a moment when I actu-
ally chose this?” asks Crusoe – and Bishop. Perhaps I chose it that moment in
the waiting room on “the ifth / of February, 1918” when nearly seven-year-old
“Elizabeth” discovers she is an “I” and therefore “one of them” (BPL, p. 150).
Reviewing Walter de la Mare’s anthology Come Hither in Poetry magazine
in 1958, Bishop connects de la Mare’s selection of verse for “the young of all
ages” with Jarrell and Crusoe: “[De la Mare] loves ‘little articles,’ home-made
objects whose value increases with age, Robinson Crusoe’s lists of his belong-
ings, homely employments, charms and herbs. As a result he naturally chose
for his book many of what Randall Jarrell once called ‘thing-y’ poems, and
never the pompous, abstract, or formal” (BPL, p. 700). There are a number
of poems and passages in Jarrell’s work – for example, his own 1949 Crusoe
poem “The Island” and the passage in “The Lost World” on Barrie’s play The
Admirable Crichton – that appear to have inl uenced “Crusoe in England,”
which Bishop began writing in 1964.43 As with Jarrell’s beloved objects – the
children’s arms in “The Lost World” that “arm, for a child’s wars, the child”
but are inefective “in the sands / Of age in which nothing grows, where
all our friends are old” – “the living soul has dribbled away” from Crusoe’s
“home-made” objects, which are now mere museum pieces: “How can any-
one want such things?” he asks (BPL, p. 156). If talk about old age gave Bishop
“the creeps,” perhaps it is because her understanding of old age and of loss
is far bleaker than Jarrell’s. For Jarrell, there is a tentative rapprochement
between child and adult – as in “Thinking of the Lost World,” in which adult
emptiness is traded for the emptiness of the child, an emptiness that seems

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to be marked by a potential for wonder, imagination, and creativity. There is

a transaction, however evanescent, between the lost world and the world of
the poem’s present.
But unlike the ending of “Thinking of the Lost World,” the ending of “The
Player Piano” resembles the conclusion of “Crusoe” in its bleakness. “If only
somehow I had learned to live,” laments Jarrell’s speaker; “How can anyone
want such things?” cries Bishop’s Crusoe. Lowell pointed out to Bishop the
presence of Jarrell’s late style in the poem:

Jean Valentine sent me (what I’m really writing about) your long “Crusoe in
England” – maybe your best poem, an analogue to your life, your “Ode to
Dejection.” Nothing you’ve written has such a mix of humor and despera-
tion; I ind bits of the late Randall, his sour witty downgrading of his own
jokes, somehow this echo, if it is, makes the poem still more original and
sealed with your voice. (WA, p. 755)

The ambiguity of those “keys” Bishop noticed, as the speaker’s waltz plays
itself out, emphasizes that those treasured objects that once “reeked of mean-
ing” are no longer alive (BPL, p. 156). A piano roll playing Chopin, snatches
of the 1918 popular song “Till We Meet Again,” a memory of Fatty Arbuckle
before the scandal, and the false armistice: while they appear to be shared,
“live,” and “touching in detail / – the little that we get for free, / the little of
our earthly trust” – these objects are ultimately “Not Much” (BPL, p. 166).
One particular passage from Jarrell’s last book of poems that Bishop admired
were the lines from “The One Who Was Diferent”: “I feel like the irst men
who read Wordsworth. / It’s so simple I can’t understand it” (BPL, p. 870). The
twenty-irst century understands that Bishop’s great poems that articulated
the art of losing resonated within and beyond the noisier, messier 1960s and
1970s. Jarrell’s early death has obscured for too long our understanding of his
idiosyncratic and original poetic style – tentative, conversational, qualiied,
irrational, tender, and aggrieved. Bishop wrote in her memorial tribute that
she and Jarrell, despite the occasional quarrel, “really were in agreement about
everything that matters” (BPL, p. 717). In the same “Inadequate Tribute” she
describes her friend as “diicult, touchy, and oversensitive to criticism” as well
as “constantly tuned up to concert pitch that most people, including poets, can
only maintain for short and fortunate stretches” (BPL, pp. 717–18). Although
we were deprived of the poems Jarrell might have written in the 1960s and
1970s, he was, like Bishop, an inveterate explorer of the lost world of real feel-
ing in poems that our century could beneit from reading as attentively as we
have learned to read hers.

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Notes
1. “Randall Jarrell Reading the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and His Own Poems.”
Academy of American Poets Reading. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, October 29, 1964. 2 CDRs.
2. “Randall Jarrell Reading the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and His Own Poems”;
Helen Vendler, “Randall Jarrell, Child and Mother, Frightened and Consoling,”
New York Times Book Review, February 29, 1969, pp. 5, 42, reprinted in Suzanne
Ferguson (ed.), Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), pp.
37–41.
3. John Ashbery, “Second Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop,” World Literature
Today 51:1 (1977), pp. 8–11, 8.
4. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 8.
5. Langdon Hammer, “Who Was Randall Jarrell?” Yale Review 79:2 (1990), pp.
389–405, 392.
6. Hammer, “Who Was Randall Jarrell?,” p. 403.
7. Stephen Burt, “A Pure Reader,” Yale Review 88:3 (2000), pp. 148–58, 154.
8. National Poetry Festival: Held in the Library of Congress. October 22–24, 1962,
Proceedings. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1964), p. 135.
9. “Poets: The Second Chance,” Time, June 2, 1967, http://www.time.com
/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,902090,00.html.
10. Frank Bidart, “Elizabeth Bishop,” Threepenny Review 58 (1994), pp. 6–7, 7.
11. Alan Williamson, Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identiication
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 11.
12. Randall Jarrell, Randall Jarrell’s Letters, ed. Mary Jarrell, rev. ed. (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 420.
13. Jarrell, Randall Jarrell’s Letters, pp. 420, 422.
14. Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Longenbach, Modern Poetry After
Modernism; Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1999); Jeredith Merrin, “Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop:
‘The Same Planet,’ ” in Suzanne Ferguson (ed.), Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co.
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), pp. 41–57.
15. Jarrell, Randall Jarrell’s Letters, p. 19.
16. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd
Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 402–09, 413. This collec-
tion will be cited in the text as BPL.
17. W. S. Graham, “It All Comes Back to Me Now,” Poetry 72:6 (1948), pp.
302–07, 303.
18. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (1953; Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2001), p. 22. This collection will be cited in the text as PA.

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19. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence
Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia
Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 130. This collection
will be cited in the text as WA.
20. Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism, p. 58.
21. Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry, pp. 93, 66.
22. Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry, p. 93.
23. Karl Shapiro, The Bourgeois Poet (New York: Random House, 1964).
24. Camille Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
25. Elizabeth Bishop, Prose, ed. Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011), p. 421.
26. Richard Flynn, “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy: Cultural Criticism, Childhood, and the
1950s,” in Ferguson (ed.), Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co., pp. 93–112, 95.
27. Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (New York: Athenaeum, 1962),
p. 86.
28. “Poetry in English: 1945–62,” Time, March 9, 1962, pp. 92–95, http://www
.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,939990,00.html.
29. “View from Parnassus,” Time, November 9, 1962, http://www.time.com
/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829367,00.html.
30. Joseph Bennett, “Utterances, Entertainments and Symbols,” New York Times,
April 18, 1965, BR 24.
31. Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), p. 399.
32. Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1994), p. 394.
33. Bishop, One Art, p. 500.
34. Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and
Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Helen
Vendler, “The Art of Losing,” The New Republic, April 3, 2006, pp. 33–37, 37.
35. Bonnie Costello, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal,” American Literary
History 15:2 (2003), pp. 334–66.
36. Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002), p. 259.
37. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1969), pp. 354–55.
38. Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and Present (London: Macmillan, 1903), pp.
211–12.
39. David Bromwich, “Poetic Invention and the Self-Unseeing,” Grand Street 7:1
(1987), pp. 115–29.
40. Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 17.

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41. Susan Howe and Charles Ruas, “Elizabeth Bishop: Reading and Interview
on WBAI (NY) Paciica Radio,” PennSound (April 19, 1977 [misdated 1979]),
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Howe-Paciica.php.
42. Jarrell, The Complete Poems, p. 231.
43. Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, p. 259.

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 Chapter 35
Writing the South
E r n e st S ua r e z

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren laid the founda-
tions for twentieth-century southern poetry at Vanderbilt University in the
twenties. Their writings resulted in two verse traditions that responded to
broader American trends and developed within universities. One tradition is
tied to Ransom’s turn away from politics and return to aesthetics after I’ll Take
My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) drew allegations of fas-
cist tendencies from reviewers. Ransom’s emphasis on form and local settings
inl uenced a line of lyric poets, including Donald Justice and Charles Wright,
whose verse largely remained outside the sociopolitical arena. Another tradi-
tion grew out of Tate’s and Warren’s embrace of modernism, but this tradi-
tion transformed in the forties, when modernism’s inl uence diminished, and
World War II served as a catalyst for Warren’s and Randall Jarrell’s turn toward
more accessible, psychologically oriented narrative verse, a tendency that con-
tinued with James Dickey. During the second half of the century, southern
poets absorbed and modiied techniques associated with confessional and
other midcentury movements but did not participate in them. Instead, a long
succession of relationships within the academy led Wright, Dave Smith, and a
new generation of southerners to extend and alter their predecessors’ creative
practices.
Before discussing these developments, it’s important to consider how a
lack of academic opportunities helped determine southern poetry’s history.
Without exception, the South’s most accomplished poets met at universities,
where they studied, earned a living, inl uenced one another, and formed alli-
ances. When Ransom entered Vanderbilt in 1903, the South was the poorest
and most backward region in the United States. For much of the century,
its legacy of poverty made obtaining an education that might result in lit-
erary accomplishment diicult for anyone except the well-to-do; its history
of discrimination made such an education almost impossible for people of
color. Ransom and Warren came from relatively humble backgrounds, and

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Tate’s parents went bankrupt when he was a teenager; but all three men
were academic overachievers who found the means to cultivate their talents.
However, African Americans and women faced much more daunting barriers
and were largely denied faculty positions, which made practicing the poorly
compensated craft of poetry even more diicult ( James Weldon Johnson of
Jacksonville, Florida, and Sterling Brown of Washington, D.C., are exceptions
treated in other chapters). While a number of women lourished as prose
writers, except for Margaret Walker’s For My People (1942), no signiicant collec-
tion of verse by a woman appeared until Eleanor Ross Taylor’s A Wilderness of
Ladies (1960). This situation didn’t change until the inal decades of the twen-
tieth century, when faculty trained after the gains of the civil rights and wom-
en’s movements reached maturity, and African American and female poets
achieved greater access to the academy.

*
John Crowe Ransom’s (1888–1974) emphasis on traditional forms and local
settings had its most substantial inl uence on southern poetry after World
War II, but his greatest period of poetic creativity was from 1916 to 1927, after
which he published a small handful of original poems, revised previous work,
and primarily dedicated himself to writing criticism and editing The Kenyon
Review. The son of a Methodist minister from Pulaski, Tennessee, he entered
Vanderbilt University at age ifteen. His studies in philosophy and classical
literature at that university, and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, led
him to believe that people had become marred by a disassociation between
rationality and sensibility; cultural rituals, including art, could serve as restor-
atives. Those convictions informed his writing for the rest of his life. Ransom
believed form and subject were ontologically bound, inseparable components
of a textured, nuanced rite.
Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927) featured carefully
modulated and intricately crafted poems that relected Ransom’s disdain of
abstraction, his love of the concrete, and his commitment to traditional forms.
Two widely celebrated poems, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (1924)
and “Janet Waking” (1927), suggest how Ransom controls irony to balance
tone in relation to subject. The former poem concerns a traumatic event,
the death and funeral of an energetic young girl, and consists of ive qua-
trains that develop according to the three-stage progression of the elegy,
moving from lament to praise to consolation. The irst stanza opens with the
observation, “There was such speed in her little body,” and proceeds to shift
between images of motion and stillness, presenting the girl in her coin and

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the narrator’s reaction: “It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all.”1
The use of “wonder” and “astonishes” is characteristic. In most contexts these
words would not be associated with understatement, but here they invoke
surprise and only imply pain and grief. The three middle stanzas shun the
melodramatic, providing a tongue-in-cheek description of the rambunctious
girl’s pursuit of geese. The inal stanza returns to images of motion and still-
ness, but the surprise expressed in the irst stanza is replaced with an accep-
tance of reality.
But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.

The mourners are set in motion by the bells and are now “ready.” However,
that declaration is quickly modiied when they are “sternly stopped” by the
somber image of the dead girl. As Robert Penn Warren observed, the word
“vexed” summarizes the mourners’ reactions: astonishment, anger, grief, and
consternation, all underscored by the wrenchingly ironic image of the once-
active girl now “Lying so primly propped.”2
Similarly, “Janet Waking” concerns the shock of death, but the poem’s tone
is altered to it a far less tragic situation, a young girl’s response to her pet
hen’s death. Instead of understatement, Ransom heightens emotion to por-
tray the child’s reaction and create humorous afect. After a night of restful
sleep in her secure, happy home, she goes “Running across the world upon the
grass,” a phrase that suggests her innocence and inexperience.3 Janet discov-
ers her pet has been killed by a “transmogrifying bee.” Janet, “weeping fast as
she had breath,” implores her parents to wake the bird. She is unready to “be
instructed in how deep / Was the forgetful kingdom of death.”4
Whether addressing tensions between body and spirit, reason and imagina-
tion, or past and present, Ransom consistently privileges aesthetic experience.
At times, particularly when science is his nemesis, his poems can be overly
schematic. Ransom’s more successful poems that address the need for a rich
imaginative life rely on subtle, contradictory pressures. “Morning” involves a
relatively common decision, whether to spend the day having fun or attending
to mundane responsibilities. Cast in three seven-line stanzas with near-identi-
cal metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, the poem opens with Jane waking
Ralph “so gently” that he remains in bed.5 Jane’s tenderness and the alluring
scenery entice him to consider spending the day with her, “walking / Through
the green waves,” “singing not talking.” But in the last stanza the “dutiful mills

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of ” his “brain” begin to “whir with their smooth-grinding wheels,” and “man-
liness” returns “entire to Ralph,” phrases that suggest the stern demands of
adult responsibilities. The poem ends as Ralph rises from bed and grudgingly
but stoically accepts that it is “Simply another morning.”
Ransom’s student John Orley Allen Tate (1899–1979) of Winchester, Kentucky,
shared his teacher’s skepticism of a materially oriented culture and also portrayed
science as the imagination’s bête noire. Where Ransom relied on traditional
forms, realistic settings, and irony, Tate wrote allusive verse heavy with pro-
vocative, sometimes idiosyncratic, metaphors. He believed that modern poets’
tendency to experiment could be likened to modern painters’ rejecting the “tyr-
anny of representation” in order to remake the “constituted material world” in
a subjective manner that expressed the artist’s interior reality.6 In “Morning” and
other poems, Ransom’s characters entertain imaginative possibilities, but their
experiences aren’t fantastic or surreal. In “Last Days of Alice” (1932), Tate draws
on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to cast mod-
ern humans as “Alice grown lazy, mammoth,” a ghoulish projection of people
who passively accept science’s power to turn the physical world into abstract
theorems, “all ininite, function, depth and mass / Without igure, a mathemat-
ical shroud / Hurled at the air – blesséd without sin!”7
As an undergraduate, Tate’s enthusiasm for modernism led him to reject
Ransom’s literary practices. Their acrimonious rift over T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land helps clarify their diferences and points to similarities Tate shared with
Eliot. When Ransom’s scathing review of The Waste Land appeared in the
Literary Review of the New York Evening Post on July 14, 1923, Tate reacted angrily.
Ransom asserted that art’s vitality depended on critics’ ability to expose aes-
thetic defects. He went on to disparage Eliot’s capacity to reconcile the poem’s
disparate themes, allusions, and techniques. The twenty-three-year-old Tate
ired of a letter to the Literary Review, accusing his former teacher of violating
the “principle of free critical inquiry” by using an important poem to advance
his own critical agenda. Tate declared that Ransom wasn’t really an individual;
he “is a genre.”8 Their acerbic exchange resulted in several years of personal
tension, during which they slowly reconciled, but as Ransom wrote to Donald
Davidson in 1926, Tate’s enthusiasm for modernism served to “destroy any
illusion that we are a ‘school of poets’ with unity.”9
Tate and Ransom’s disagreements were formal, not ideological. Like Eliot
and many modern writers, they both believed that the dissolution of traditional
religion and culture had fractured humans’ relationship to the past, nature,
and the metaphysical, resulting in alienation and a loss of a coherent sense
of self. Tate’s disdain for cultural relativism led him, like Eliot and Ransom,

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to embrace classicism, particularly in the form of Greco-Roman culture, a

characteristic evident in “Aeneas at Washington,” “The Mediterranean,” “To
the Lacedemonians,” and other poems. His best-known poem, “Ode to the
Confederate Dead” (1927), is cast in the irregular rhymes of Milton’s “Lycidas”
and employs Eliot-like imagistic stanzas that disrupt the narrative. In the
poem, a modern man enters a graveyard and compares his existential uncer-
tainty to Confederate soldiers’ resolve. Four of the ive imagistic stanzas con-
tain slightly varied images of “leaves,” that “lying, plunge, expire,” an allusion
to Glaucus’s words to Diomedes in The Iliad, part VI: “Just as the generation of
leaves, so is that also of men. The wind scatters the leaves upon the earth, but
the forest as it lourishes, puts forth others when spring comes.”10 But in Tate’s
poem there’s no hope of regeneration; only the “ravenous grave” awaits – a
sentiment that recalls The Waste Land. In his essay on the poem, “Narcissus
as Narcissus” (1938), Tate invokes the Greek myth of a handsome young man
who peers into a pool of water and perishes because he falls in love with his
own image. In “Ode to the Confederate Dead” Tate uses the myth to point
out that modern humans are their own worst enemies; their loss of faith and
inability to connect with the past or with nature, including their own nature,
has resulted in a devastating form of self-consciousness and has reduced life
to a series of trivial routines – “And in between the ends of distraction / Waits
mute speculation, the patient curse / That stones the eyes.”
Robert Penn Warren’s ability to change and challenge his own artistic and
political beliefs over a long and proliic career led him to become the South’s
most inl uential poet and one of the United States’ most celebrated literary
igures. Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, Warren (1905–1989) shared Ransom’s and
Tate’s suspicion of romantic idealism, but his interest in naturalism modiied
his nostalgia for antiquity and was in stark contrast to their emphasis on tra-
ditional, ritualistic religion. The son of a bank clerk and a schoolteacher, he
entered Vanderbilt in the fall of 1921 after an eye injury prevented him from
accepting admission to the U.S. Naval Academy. Ransom was his freshman
English teacher, and as Warren later recalled, he became “like a father to me.”11
Warren read Ransom’s Poems About God (1919), which is set in middle Tennessee,
and felt the “world that I knew around me to be the stuf of poetry.”12 But Tate
introduced him to Eliot’s work in the summer of 1922. When The Waste Land
appeared in Dial that November, Warren was “completely overwhelmed”
and memorized the entire poem.13 The 1923 August–September issue of the
Fugitive – a literary magazine named after a group of Vanderbilt faculty, stu-
dents, and others who gathered to discuss philosophy and poetry – featured
Warren’s “After the Teacups,” an allusion to “The Love Song of J. Alfred

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Prufrock.” On one afternoon of that same year, Tate returned to Wesley Hall
and was thrilled to discover that Warren had painted four murals from The
Waste Land on their dormitory walls.
Eliot’s and Ransom’s inl uences on Warren would be enduring. For the next
quarter century, his diction and imagery often echoed Eliot’s, and his poems
relected the metrical regularity Ransom advocated, a combination that some-
times resulted in mannered and derivative verse. An overly prophetic tone
and persistent world-weariness plague Thirty-Six Poems (1935). Naturalism, via
Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser, inlects the more successful poems,
including the “Kentucky Mountain Farm” sequence and “The Return: An
Elegy.” But Eliot’s inl uence is pervasive, as in these lines from “The Return”:
“rain creeps down the loam again / Where the blind and nameless bones
recline. / they are conceded to the earth’s absolute chemistry.”14
Despite their disagreement over verse techniques, Ransom and Tate united
in the South’s defense as the region came under greater national scrutiny,
particularly in regard to The State of Tennessee v. Scopes (1925), a trial in which
Clarence Darrow defended a high school teacher’s right to teach the theory
of evolution. Ransom, Tate, and Donald Davidson began planning the essay
collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), which
endorsed the virtues of a less materialistic, pastoral way of life in opposition to
the threats they believed communism and corporate capitalism posed. Most
of the essays support family ownership of small sectors of land and local
businesses and are informed by the assumption that industrialization and cen-
tralized power undermine a sense of community. Richard Gray points out
that “even while clinging” to “Southern mythologies,” the Agrarians “had
to reinvent them, reinterpret them according to their needs.”15 In their essays
Ransom and Tate draw close parallels between preindustrial Europe and the
South, characterizing their home region as the last bastion of a traditional cul-
ture uniied by religion and a personal relationship to the land. Warren, still
in his early twenties, wrote an essay that would later trouble him. “The Briar
Patch,” which Tate and Davidson thought too liberal, was an evasive defense
of racial segregation. Warren invokes Booker T. Washington’s “emphasis on
vocational education” and considers how an agrarian society ofers a rich life
for black and white people alike. He acknowledges the shortcomings of a
separate-but-equal ideology yet asserts that the “negro” should “sit beneath
his own vine and ig tree.”16
Robert Brinkmeyer has shown that many reviewers associated the
Agrarians’ agenda with feudalism and fascism, charges that led to the group’s
disintegration, and dramatically changed southern poetry’s direction.17 After

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publishing another controversial collection of essays, Who Owns America? A

New Declaration of Independence (1936), Ransom withdrew from political com-
mentary and devoted himself to literary criticism that examined what he
called the “ontological” relationship between form and content in poetry. In
his essay “Art and the Human Economy” (1945) he declared that Agrarianism
had been a mistake, and the few poems he wrote later in his career used politi-
cally neutral contexts and echoed themes he’d emphasized in the twenties.
“Painted Head” (1945) describes the portrait of a relatively young man and
stresses the split between mind and body, and between the material and the
aesthetic. In contrast, Tate continued to use modernist verse techniques and
to engage social matters. His best-known poem of the period, “Seasons of the
Soul” (1944), invokes World War II and employs literary and religious allusions
to link humans’ penchant for violence to what Eliot called a “dissociation of
sensibility,” the rupture between mind and spirit.
Ransom’s return to aesthetics proved inluential, particularly as university
creative writing programs became widespread, and Tate’s reputation waned
as a younger generation shunned modernist techniques. However, Warren
changed in a radical manner. Unlike Ransom and Tate, whose poetics and
themes remained consistent from the twenties to the end of their careers,
Warren became dissatisied with his previous creative practices and questioned
his political convictions. Late in the summer of 1939, Warren and his wife
departed for Italy, despite warnings of impending war. During his stay abroad
he worked on a verse play – Proud Flesh – that became the basis for All the King’s
Men (1946), a novel set in the American South that examines the dynamics of
demagoguery. “Terror,” the inal poem of Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942),
moves from iambic pentameter to free verse and employs irregular rhymes,
techniques designed to relect humans’ unpredictability. The poem’s distraught
narrator listens “by radio” to how the “brute crowd roars or the blunt boot-
heels resound / In the Piazza or Wilhelmplatz” (CPRPW, pp. 77–78).
Selected Poems, 1923–1943 (1944) contained new works – “The Ballad of
Billie Potts” and the sequence “Mexico Is a Foreign Country: Five Studies in
Naturalism” – that continue to experiment with verse forms. “The Ballad of
Billie Potts,” which Warren called an attempt to “make a tie between modern-
ism and balladry and make them both stack up to a kind of view of American
history and a kind of interplay of styles,” used looser, more conversational
verse laced with looping rhyme schemes, dialogue, and a strong narrative.18
The poem’s narrative sections contain playful, singsong rhythms – “Little Billie
heard hoofs on the soft grass, / But he squatted and let the rider pass” – that
difer from the prophetic tone he’d adopted from Eliot, but the parenthetical

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philosophic passages are laden with Eliot-like diction: “And the waitress says,
‘Will that be all, sir, will that be all?’ / And will not stop. / And the valet says,
‘will that be all, sir, will that be all?’” (CPRPW, pp. 81–92). Warren remained
proliic – publishing novels, criticism, and the verse play Brother to Dragons
(1953) – but “The Ballad of Billie Potts” was the last new poem he would in-
ish for more than a decade. In a 1957 interview with Ralph Ellison, Warren
expressed the frustration he’d felt in the forties and early ifties, observing that
he “quit writing poems for several years; that is, I’d start them, get a lot down,
then feel that I wasn’t connecting somehow . . . they felt false.”19
Warren’s use of the word “false” relected his belief that both modernist
and formalist literary practices had come to seem contrived, and like many
American poets at midcentury, he sought a fresh style. During his hiatus from
poetry, he watched his friend and former student Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)
become the irst southern poet – and one of the irst American poets – to
make the transition toward conversational, neo-Romantic verse that explored
the nature of identity. Jarrell’s verse would have a wide inl uence on southern
poets, and the development of his career suggests changes that took place in
southern poetry during the middle of the twentieth century. Jarrell, Warren,
and a new generation of southern poets participated in American poetry’s shift
toward more personal, conversational verse, but they did not take part in the
major contemporary movements – Beat, confessional, Black Mountain, Deep
Image, and New York School – that arose after World War II. Instead, south-
ern poetry divided along two lines: one associated with Ransom’s emphasis
on aesthetics, and another that examined the self within competing social and
philosophical contexts.
Jarrell inl uenced the latter trend, largely due to his diferences from his
mentors. Jarrell studied with Warren, Ransom, and Davidson at Vanderbilt in
the thirties and was particularly close to Tate, who paved the way for the pub-
lication of his irst book, Blood for a Stranger (1942); but Jarrell, who was born
in his parents’ native Tennessee and spent his youth moving back and forth
between Nashville and California, did not see himself as a southern poet, and
his Marxist political sympathies were in sharp contrast to the Agrarians’ con-
servatism. In the early forties, Jarrell pulled away from Tate, and in his essay
“The End of the Line” (1942), he declared that the modernism of Eliot, Tate,
and others was “dead.”20
Jarrell’s military experiences during World War II contributed to changes
in his verse. Stephen Burt asserts that “Jarrell derived his concerns about post-
war conformity from his experiences of the Second World War,” prompting
him to explore themes of loneliness and loss by creating highly individualized

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characters.21 In Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), Jarrell, who
served as an aerial navigation instructor in Arizona, often focused on Air Force
personnel. In The Seven-League Crutches (1951) Jarrell widened his explorations
of characters’ psychology, an approach that would impact southern poets –
including James Dickey and Eleanor Ross Taylor – for decades to come.
In the ifties Warren followed Jarrell’s example and turned toward stylis-
tically looser poetry that examines the nature of the self. Warren, who had
published more than twenty of Jarrell’s poems in the Southern Review, later
recalled that Jarrell would visit him and “brutally criticize my poems. I would
listen carefully. He was so often right.”22 After reading Warren’s Selected Poems
of 1944, Jarrell made an astute observation that indicates his dissatisfaction
with Warren’s verse. In a letter to a friend he contended that Warren’s poetry
tended to be too abstract, “the world and everything in it . . . is so purely
Original Sin, Horror, loathing, morbidness, inal evil . . . whereas the practice
he lives by says the exact opposite.”23
Changes in Warren’s personal life, particularly his divorce from Cinina
Brescia in 1951 and marriage to author Eleanor Clark in 1952, would lead him
to the more concrete, personal qualities Jarrell felt his verse lacked. In 1954
Warren resumed publishing lyric poetry, resulting in Promises (1957), a book
that relects his later verse’s tendency to address the personal within larger cul-
tural or philosophical contexts. Some poems are composed in irregular meters,
and others are experiments with irregular rhyming free verse, with diction
that is variously idiomatic and formal. The book displays Warren’s practice of
organizing many of his later collections as carefully plotted, interrelated series
of poems. Promises opens with “To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined
Fortress.” The ive-poem sequence is dedicated to Warren and Clark’s daugh-
ter Rosanna and is set at La Rocca, a decaying fortress the Warrens frequented
on an Italian peninsula. Warren largely abandons modernist distance, but a
naturalistic outlook still permeates the verse. For instance, part III concludes
with a reference to Rosanna – “I think of your goldness, of joy” – but the
mood is tempered by a deterministic perspective: “how empires grind, stars
are hurled. / I smile stif, saying ciao, saying ciao, and think: this is the world”
(CPRPW, p. 104).
In the mid-1960s Warren’s interest in American pragmatism, particularly the
thought of William James and Sidney Hook, led him away from a relatively
strict naturalistic perspective, and a vigorous dialectic between determinism
and idealism began to drive his verse. Change and transformation – charac-
teristics that marked his career – became important themes in his poetry and
were informed by pragmatism’s emphasis on ideas’ practical consequences.

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Where the naturalistic perspective that shaped his early verse often resulted
in expressions of Weltschmerz, in his later poetry Warren became a self-
described “yearner” who seeks insight into existential dilemmas, rejecting any
single answer as insuicient. The result was an outburst of poetic creativity.
Harold Bloom has claimed that, from 1966 to 1986, “between ages sixty-one
and eighty-one,” Warren enjoyed a “poetic renaissance fully comparable to
the great inal phases of Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace
Stevens” (CPRPW, p. xxiii).
The new poems in Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923–1966 display an increas-
ingly accessible style, and the collection contains several sequences central
to Warren’s canon. “Homage to Emerson, on Night Flight to New York” is
a guarded tribute that suggests how Warren distinguished between the dan-
gers of idealism as a guiding philosophical concept and its value as a way of
confronting the mysteries of existence. John Burt points out that Warren had
disparaged Emerson’s thought since the 1920s, viewing it as an American style
of Romanticism that unwittingly led to destructive national impulses, includ-
ing the concept of manifest destiny.24 In “Homage to Emerson” the narrator
is in an airplane, and “Emerson – / The essays, on my lap, lie.” The meta-
phorical use of “lie” alludes to Emerson’s conidence in human perfectibility.
The narrator asserts that at “38,000 feet Emerson / Is dead right” – a phrase
that acknowledges Romantic idealism’s danger and appeal – and warns that
“at 38,000 feet you had better remember something speciic, if / You yourself
want to be something speciic.” Emerson is pictured as someone who had
naïvely “forgiven God everything,” but memories of a wart on the narrator’s
inger and of a drunk, disabled man serve as reminders that life isn’t an idealis-
tic “allegory.” However, the poem ends by contemplating humans’ responses
to natural beauty and people’s feelings for one another. The narrator declares
“there must be / A way by which the process of living can become Truth”
(CPRPW, pp. 194–97).
The relationship between determinism, idealism, and pragmatism also
informs Warren’s concept of individual autonomy, an issue he regarded as
central to American democracy. Audubon: A Vision (1969) is widely considered
his most important poem and ranks with All the King’s Men as his greatest
literary achievement. The poem explores the conl ict between an individu-
al’s quest for self-fulillment and deterministic circumstances. Composed in
diction that wends between the philosophical and the vernacular, the poem
mixes narrative and lyric modes over some 440 lines, arranged in 27 sections.
Audubon begins by examining a speciic character’s identity but moves
toward greater ampliication. The poem opens by announcing that, contrary

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to rumor, Audubon was not the “lost dauphin,” the ofspring of Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette; instead he was “only / Himself, Jean Jacques, and his pas-
sion.” Vivid descriptions of the natural world establish how nature serves as a
major source of Audubon’s identity. In the second stanza, Audubon watches
a heron glide over the horizon at dawn, “long neck outthrust, wings crooked
to scull air, moved / In a slow calligraphy, crank, lat and black against / The
color of God’s blood spilt.” Warren’s use of spondees to create resistance
and to compel the reader to absorb the imagery suggests how he alters his
rhythms to pace the narrative. In a typical turn, Warren ends the irst section
with a line that extends the poem’s meaning. The question “and what is your
passion?” enlarges the context to include the reader (CPRPW, pp. 253–67).
In contrast to the two lyrics that set up the poem’s major themes, part II,
“The Dream He Never Knew the End Of,” presents a dramatic, suspenseful
narrative. Audubon inds himself in a shoddy cabin, the domain of an ugly,
witchlike woman and her two sons. The woman takes Audubon’s gold watch,
hangs it around her neck, and fondles it, making Audubon’s “gut” twist “cold.
He cannot bear what he sees. / Her body sways like a willow in spring wind.
Like a girl.” The ensuing sections make it clear that Audubon’s reaction does
not result from the woman’s unattractive physical appearance. That night,
pretending to sleep, Audubon listens to the woman and her sons whisper to
one another as they drink and ominously sharpen a knife. Audubon – “gun
by his side, primed and cocked” – thinks “Now,” knowing “What he must do,
do soon,” but he is overcome by “lassitude,” leading him to wonder “what
guilt unmans him,” a scene that underscores how Audubon’s desire to act and
deine himself butts up against something within his nature. At that moment,
three men break into the cabin and administer frontier justice, hanging the
woman and her sons the next day. Unlike the sons, who pray and “blubber,”
the woman remains true to her identity “And is what she is.” In contrast to the
scene in which Audubon is repulsed by the woman playing with his watch,
her actions during the hanging attract him to her. Unlike Audubon, who can’t
act because of a gap between his desires and his nature, resulting in an amor-
phous sense of self, the woman’s identity achieves a kind of permanence.
Audubon “suddenly sees,” she is “beautiful as stone, and / So becomes aware
that he is in the manly state” (CPRPW, pp. 253–67).
Warren’s declaration in the poem’s inal section that the “name of the story
will be Time / But you must not pronounce its name” relects his long-held
belief that “Time” provides the fundamental framework for comprehending
the human condition, and that narrative supplies the scafolding for explor-
ing an individual’s plight within that context. Warren regarded poetry and

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other literary forms as a “laboratory for living.” In his essays “Literature as

Symptom” (1936), “Pure and Impure Poetry” (1943), “Democracy and Poetry”
(1975), and other works, he advocated art that dramatized the concrete and the
paradoxical as a means of emphasizing individual autonomy and resisting ide-
ology. Time and circumstance – “this century, and moment, of mania” – help
determine one’s story and help shape the tensions between Audubon’s desires,
nature, and actions, resulting in a mixture of free will, fortune, and destiny.
Warren’s next book of verse, Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968–1974 (1974), is a
meticulously crafted long poem composed of individual poems interrupted
by a series of interjections. The book contains some of Warren’s strongest
verse, including “The Nature of a Mirror,” the surrealistic “I Am Dreaming
of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision,” and “Homage to
Theodore Dreiser.” “Rattlesnake Country,” one of Warren’s most compelling
examinations of the dynamic between Romantic and naturalistic impulses,
ends with a meditation on time, memory, and the self, the “compulsion to try
to convert what now is was / Back into what was is” (CPRPW, pp. 294–97).
In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of race continued to tug at Warren and other
southern poets, particularly Tate, who was embarrassed by the publication of
a letter he wrote to editor Lincoln Kirstein in 1933. In The Hound and the Horn:
The History of a Literary Quarterly (1966), Leonard Greenbaum quoted Tate’s
claim that the “negro race is an inferior race. . . . A white woman pregnant
with a negro child becomes a counter symbol, one of evil and pollution.”25
Tate, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s and had gradually
begun to reverse his attitudes on race (his correspondence reveals a mixture
of guilt and defensiveness), had surprised the literary community by writ-
ing an introduction to Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953)
and by giving a speech announcing his support for Martin Luther King, Jr., in
1959. One of his inest late poems, “The Swimmers” (1960), was inspired by a
childhood memory of seeing the corpse of a lynched black man. The poem
describes his reaction at encountering evil for the irst time and concludes by
declaring the community’s complicity: “This private thing was owned by all
the town, / Though never claimed by us within my hearing.”26 Tate casts the
poem in Dante’s terza rima, and shuns his often idiosyncratic use of myth and
metaphor in favor of a straightforward, quickly paced narrative. But his racist
past hovered over him, further eroding his already diminished reputation.
Warren drew criticism in 1972 when Sterling Brown, a distinguished African
American poet and critic, chastised him in print for his naturalistic depiction
of a black character in “Pondy Woods,” a poem published in the 1920s. Warren
was also willing to chastise himself. Nearly two decades after Promises, Warren

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addressed the changes he underwent during that period in one of his most
important works, “Old Nigger on One-Mule Car Encountered Late at Night
When Driving Home from Party in the Back Country.” The poem was irst
published in the New Yorker and later collected in Selected Poems: 1923–1976 (1977)
in a section titled “Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Poems 1975.” The
section’s title comes from the poem’s last line. At the end of the poem, the
narrator wonders if he can see Arcturus, the brightest star in the constellation
Bootes. The question comes from the point of view of a person confronting
the extent to which the panorama of time has resulted in self-knowledge, and
it links the changes in Warren’s poetry to changes in his racial assumptions.
One of Warren’s most celebrated later books, Now and Then: Poems 1976–
1978 (1978), is divided into two sections, “Nostalgic” and “Speculative,” and
most of the poems explore relationships between past and present. The verse
is conversational and rhymed and unrhymed, without metrical regularity.
“American Portrait: Old Style” describes an encounter with Warren’s child-
hood friend Kent Greenield, a crack rileman and Major League pitcher. Like
much of Warren’s later poetry, the collection shows a keen awareness – as he
states in “Identity and Argument for Prayer” – “that old I is not I anymore,”
a dynamic that led to a career of perpetual change, growth, and accomplish-
ment (CPRPW, pp. 372–73).
James Dickey’s and Donald Justice’s careers demonstrate how southern
poetry divided along two distinct lines for much of the later twentieth cen-
tury. Previous southern poets inl uenced both writers, but in starkly diferent
ways. Dickey (1923–1997) was born into a well-to-do Atlanta family and served
in the U.S. Air Corps during World War II, an event that profoundly shaped
his outlook. After the war he enrolled at Vanderbilt. Davidson was the only
remaining faculty member who had been associated with the Fugitive, but
Dickey soon realized that Jarrell, a fellow veteran, was the southern poet who
“appealed to me most,” and he turned away from “language” that was “too
busy” and illed with “rhetorical efects” and concentrated on creating acces-
sible narratives.27
Dickey continued Warren’s and Jarrell’s tendency to probe the paradoxical
nature of identity. His poems present disparate points of view – including
those of soldiers, women, suburbanites, laborers, criminals, children, religious
fanatics, and animals – to investigate how attempts to relate the self to elemen-
tal situations can serve as a vital, but potentially destructive, catalyst for endow-
ing life with meaning. His irst three books, Into the Stone (1960), Drowning
with Others (1962), and Helmets (1964), feature heavily cadenced poems that use
dactyls, anapests, and trochees to propel the action. “The Performance” and

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“Between Two Prisoners” are based on the executions of Dickey’s fellow sol-
diers Donald Armstrong and Jim Lalley, who were captured by the Japanese.
As in most of Dickey’s verse, the focus is on individual revelation. The com-
mon bonds of war and death unite the characters, a situation the narrator
of “Between Two Prisoners” asserts is not desirable – “I would not wish to
sit / In my shape bound together with wire” – but that results in knowledge
otherwise unattainable.28 Similarly, “The Heaven of Animals,” a near-perfect
lyric, presents an idealized cycle of predators and prey fulilling their destinies.
“Cherrylog Road” describes two young lovers in a junkyard, where their love-
making energizes them and restores life to the symbolic wasteland.
In Buckdancer’s Choice (1965) Dickey uses longer lines and experiments with
“split lines” of sonic and imagistic clusters, for example, in “The Firebombing,”
“The Shark’s Parlor,” “The Fiend,” and “Slave Quarters.” In these poems
Dickey creates a poetic stream of consciousness to regain ground he felt poetry
had ceded to prose. His masterful and controversial “The Firebombing” pres-
ents a former American pilot confronting his “guilt at the inability to feel
guilt” at having bombed Japanese civilians during World War II. In order to
induce the guilt he believes he should feel, the narrator recalls participating
in an “anti-morale” mission but can only remember being “Deep in aesthetic
contemplation, / Seeing the ponds catch ire / And cast it through ring after
ring of land,” a sensation he identiies as “this detachment / The honored aes-
thetic evil, / The greatest sense of power in one’s life” (WM, pp. 193–200). He
can only confront the destruction he committed by imagining his American
suburb irebombed: he can’t conceive of anything that isn’t as “American as I
am, and proud of it,” a conclusion that points to the paradox of committing
oicially sanctioned atrocities in a war worth ighting. Buckdancer’s Choice won
the National Book Award, but trouble arose when Dickey’s old friend and
editor, Robert Bly, denounced Dickey’s alleged support of the Vietnam War.
In “The Collapse of James Dickey,” Bly used “The Firebombing” as evidence
and interpreted the poem as if it concerned Vietnam instead of World War
II. Dickey was widely identiied as a prowar poet, despite his support for and
friendship with Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar presidential candidate. Dickey
made matters worse by striking macho poses, sometimes playing the south-
ern redneck, and inventing tall tales, including an oft-repeated story in which
he parachuted from a plane and was rescued by a submarine.
Dickey’s Poems 1957–1967 included “May Day Sermon to the Women of
Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church”
and “The Sheep Child,” forays into what he called “country surrealism.”
“Falling,” perhaps his best-known poem, is based on a New York Times account

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describing the death of a twenty-nine-year-old stewardess who plunged to her

death when an airplane’s emergency door opened mid-l ight. Dickey, who was
much inl uenced by French existentialism, used the circumstance as an anal-
ogy for an individual’s descent through life, in which every moment brings
one closer to death. During her fall the stewardess engages in what Dickey
called “creative lying,” assuming various roles, and clinging to the possibility
of survival. Her inal words, “AH, GOD,” are deliberately ambiguous, suggest-
ing a plea for immortality and the uncertainty of life after death.
The 1980s and 1990s were decades of literary experimentation for Dickey,
but unlike Justice, whose formal gymnastics and apolitical themes met critics’
expectations of him, Dickey provoked controversy. Puella (1982), a series of
sonically complex verses written from the perspective of a young girl coming
into womanhood, confused critics who had known him as a singularly mascu-
line writer. In the early 1990s he experienced a creative resurgence, publishing
a ine book of verse, The Eagle’s Mile (1990), and The Whole Motion: Poems 1945–
1992 (1992). “Daughter,” one of his best later poems, celebrates the birth of a
child from his second marriage and presents his conception of the “real God.”
The narrator holds his newborn and tells her “you are part / Of the lowing
stone: understand: you are part of the wave, / Of the glacier’s irrevocable
/ Millennial inch” (WM, pp. 446–48). Similarly, “The Eagle’s Mile” envisions
Supreme Court justice and outdoorsman William O. Douglas soaring like a
bird over Appalachia, his “death drawing life / From growth / from low, as in
the gill-cleansing turn / Of the creek,” a fantasy that relects Dickey’s stress on
the essential union between fundamental natural forces and the imagination
(WM, pp. 444–46).
Justice’s sense of lyric restraint and tendency to foreground technique –
qualities he inherited from Ransom – were in sharp contrast to Dickey’s dra-
matic narratives and willingness to engage controversial topics. Justice, whose
parents were raised on small Alabama farms, was born in Miami, Florida, and
never ventured outside the South until age eighteen. As an undergraduate
at the University of Miami, he studied with composer Carl Ruggles, whose
love of music inl uenced Justice’s verse, and befriended poet George Marion
O’Donnell, who introduced him to Ransom’s poetry. In 1947 he took an M.A.
at the University of North Carolina with a thesis titled “The Fugitive-Agrarian
‘Myth’ ” and then briely enrolled at Stanford University, where he audited
Yvor Winters’s class and “learned a good deal about the meters.”29 At age
twenty-six he entered the University of Iowa and honed his formal practice
under the direction of Robert Lowell, who had been mentored by Ransom,
Tate, and Warren, and John Berryman, who had studied with Tate.

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Justice’s manipulations of the sestina in his irst book, The Summer

Anniversaries (1960), suggest how his verse’s self-conscious, meditative qualities
invite the reader to linger over his poems’ designs. In “The Metamorphosis”
the repetends consist of half rhymes rather than repeated words; in “Here in
Katmandu” shortened lines of varying length replace iambic pentameter; and
“Sestina on Six Words from Weldon Kees” is based on the end words “others /
voyage / silence / away / burden / harm.”30 Justice’s second book, Night Light
(1967), contains prose poems and experiments with free verse, but whereas
Dickey used split lines to dramatize his themes, Justice remained focused on
technique. In “Early Poems” he announces his dissatisfaction with his previ-
ous work, declaring “How fashionably sad those early poems are! / . . . The
rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!” (DJC, p. 87). “Memos from the Desk
of X” and “For a Freshman Reader” address stylistics from a professional writ-
er’s perspective. In “The Grandfathers” and “Elsewheres,” Justice depicts the
South in terms of relatives and domestic scenes – a vivid contrast to Dickey’s
“Slave Quarters,” which presents a contemporary white southerner’s vision of
a man lusting after his female slave and confronting a son he doesn’t acknowl-
edge but owns. Justice’s ars poetica, “The Thin Man,” is a subtly sculpted lyric
that consists of two three-line stanzas with ive syllables per line. In the irst
stanza Justice observes, “I indulge myself / In rich refusals. / Nothing suices”
(DJC, p. 88). The word “indulge” indicates his poetry’s playful characteris-
tics, and the phrase “rich refusals” suggests his preference for spare, evocative
verse that spurs the imagination through understatement. Similarly, the inal
stanza – “I hone myself to / This edge. Asleep, I / Am a horizon” – relects
his desire to imply more by saying less. Two of Justice’s inest poems are cau-
tious meditations on bourgeois conformity. “Men at Forty” likens the onset of
middle age to the unsteady sensation of standing on a ship’s deck. “Bus Stop”
consists of six stanzas of syllabic verse that move between haunting, Edward
Hopper–like imagery – “Lights are burning / In quiet rooms” – and suggestive
interpretation of the images – “Where lives go on / Resembling ours” (DJC,
p. 100).
The title of Departures (1973) indicates its diferences from Justice’s previ-
ous poetry, as well as his tendency to use others’ work as inspiration. “ABC,”
a poem about poetry – “A syllable with skin, / Tough and saurian, / Alive
in the sewer’s mouth” – recalls Baudelaire (DJC, p. 123). Three poems – “On
the Night of Departure by Bus,” “White Notes,” and “Cool Dark Ode” – are
loosely modeled on poems by Rafael Alberti. “Variations on a Text by Vallejo”
plays of the line “me moriré en París con aguacero” and presents a whimsical
reverie cast in anapests of the day “I will die in Miami in the sun” (DJC, p. 158).

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A night of poker with the composer and writer John Cage led Justice to experi-
ment with “chance” poems, in which he “made up three large decks of ‘vocab-
ulary’ cards – one deck each for nouns, verbs, and adjectives – and a smaller
fourth deck of ‘syntax’ cards” and shuled the cards to create poems.31
Selected Poems (1979) won the Pulitzer Prize, helping bring Justice the acclaim
that largely had been reserved for his teaching and his students’ success. New
oferings included “Memories of the Depression,” a suite of lyrics concerning
places his family lived. His most highly regarded book, The Sunset Maker (1987),
consists of interrelated poems, stories, and memoirs, including the sonnet
sequence “My South.” But despite his use of personal materials, Justice never
embraced the confessional mode. His poems refrain from including intimate
details and, like Ransom’s, maintain a well-mannered distance. A series of
largely tongue-in-cheek poems is presented under the heading “Tremayne,”
a character who is often viewed as a surrogate for Justice. In contrast to the
rough-and-tumble image Dickey projected, Justice describes his alter ego as a
quiet, slightly obtuse poet who “as usual, misquotes, / Recalling adolescence
and old trees / In whose shade once more he memorized that verse / And
something about ‘late lowers for the bees’ ” (DJC, pp. 224–26).
The new poems in New and Selected Poems (1995) and Collected Poems (2004)
continued to involve music, painting, and the South of his youth, and to high-
light formal dexterity. “The Miami of Other Days” describes a time when the
“city was not yet itself ” but still a relatively small town where people danced
on the beach to the “new white jazz / of a Victrola on its towel in the sand”
and “crackers down from Georgia (my own people) / Foregathered on the
old post oice steps” (DJC, pp. 247–48). Collected Poems, published two weeks
before Justice passed away, closes with “There is a gold light in certain old
paintings.” The poem invokes Orpheus, a igure Justice sometimes used to
address the poet’s craft. Justice’s fondness for nostalgic reminiscence is sug-
gested as Orpheus hesitates “beside the black river / With so much to look for-
ward to he looked back . . . / At least he had seen once more the beloved back”
(DJC, p. 278). As a poet and teacher, Justice bequeathed to southern poetry –
and American letters – an acute awareness of stylistics and of spare, chiseled
verse’s resonance. His student Ellen Bryant Voigt remarks, “Any time I put an
adjective in a poem . . . I hear Don Justice asking why it’s there.”32
The last three decades of the century produced what Charles Wright
called a “lowering” of southern poetry. In 1998 Wright, a lyric poet and stu-
dent of Justice’s, asserted that from “Dickey /Warren to Smith / Bottoms
. . . Almost everyone who’s thought of as a southern poet is a narrative poet”
(SI, p. 49). Narrative’s predominance can largely be attributed to the power

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of Warren’s and Dickey’s verse, which inspired a new generation, including

Dave Smith, David Bottoms, Fred Chappell, Andrew Hudgins, Betty Adcock,
T. R. Hummer, Rodney Jones, and Kate Daniels. Like Warren’s and Dickey’s
poetry, Smith’s verse examines the self ’s relationship to a range of social cir-
cumstances. Smith (b. 1942) sees himself as a “regionalist” in “my deepest
sense of self ” and asserts that he “learned to write a drama” from Dickey, add-
ing, “Dickey’s use of folk narratives to ennoble and elevate lower-class, blue
collar disempowered people was particularly important to me” (SI, pp. 28, 34).
Many of the poems in Smith’s early books, collected in Floating on Solitude:
Three Volumes of Poetry (1996), are set in his native coastal Virginia and are
plotted in the style of Dickey’s longer poems. He uses a technique he calls
“orchestration” (the “exfoliation of imagistic constructs which reinforce each
other in such a way that the reader is led to perception by repeating signals”) to
create complex narratives with multiple, often contradictory, layers of mean-
ing (SI, p. 23). Helen Vendler has claimed that “Smith’s narrative poems . . .
require quotation in full to display their (often stunning) cumulative efect.”33
“Night Fishing for Blues” concerns racial tensions. In the poem, a contempo-
rary white southerner ishing near a family of black southerners at Fortress
Monroe, a Civil War battle site, is forced to confront paradoxical feelings asso-
ciated with his southern heritage. As in many of his poems, Smith’s muscular,
polyphonic Anglo-Saxon rhythms – “the big-jawed Blue-ish, ravenous, sleek
muscle slamming / at rock, at pier legs, drives into Chesapeake shallows” –
create resistance, forcing the reader to slow down and ponder obstinate emo-
tional quandaries.34 Another signiicant early poem, “Cumberland Station,”
describes a man’s return to an economically depressed town for his grandfa-
ther’s funeral. The narrator’s conl icted sense of guilt leads him to confront
painful memories without resolution.
In the 1980s, Smith claims, he “switched allegiances” from Dickey to Warren,
moving away from an emphasis on action and toward relective narratives
(SI, p. 33). The Round House Voices (1985) spans seven previous collections and
includes twenty-two new poems. In the title poem an adult narrator addresses
his dead uncle and remembers how as a boy he’d sneak into a railroad yard
and play baseball with him. Various voices – of the narrator at diferent stages
of life, the uncle, and a guard – inhabit the poem and mix to form an intricate
mediation on death, social class, and the artist’s urge to combat loss. “The
Tire Hangs in the Yard,” a poem dedicated to Warren, involves an adult nar-
rator’s visiting a place that represents the “end / of the childhood road.”35 The
poem divides into a series of ive interrelated memories concerning time and
identity. The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems (2000) gathers work from

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seventeen previous collections, including a series of haunting thirteen-line

near sonnets from Fate’s Kite (1996).
Ransom’s and Justice’s inl uence can be seen in Wright, Miller Williams,
and Voigt’s lyric practices. Wright (b. 1935), of Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, stud-
ied under Justice at the University of Iowa and was inl uenced by his emphasis
on spare, imagistic language. But Wright takes his teacher’s – and Ransom’s –
tendency to foreground the aesthetic over the social in another direction.
While they worked with a variety of forms, Wright composes in unaccentual
syllabics and favors odd-numbered syllable counts in order to avoid traditional
meters. Thematically, he fashions an aesthetic of perception reminiscent of
Wallace Stevens. An awareness of the subject/object split consistently informs
his verse and creates a l uid dynamic between his narrator’s observations and
the world outside the self. In poem after poem, Wright explores his totem sub-
ject, the relationship between “landscape, language and the idea of God.”36
Relatively early in his career Wright realized the interconnectedness of his
poems and began to assemble what critics often call a “trilogy of trilogies.”
Italy and the poetry of Dino Campana and Eugenio Montale, whose works
Wright translated, were important inl uences on Wright. His irst trilogy,
Country Music (1982), was conceived as a “small time inferno, purgatorio, and
paradiso” (SI, p. 56). But unlike the Divine Comedy, Country Music doesn’t con-
tain a readily identiiable narrative. Instead, Wright drew on Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s concept of “inscape” and developed a technique he calls the “under-
narrative . . . the story line that’s underneath the imagistic line on the top. . . .
The story line is what the poem is about, the journey you are reminded of
each time you come back out to the landscape” (SI, p. 49). “Clear Night”
begins with the narrator observing the “thumb-top of a moon” against “a
back-lit sky” and moves from description to prayerlike yearning: “I want to be
bruised by God. / I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.”37
“Snow” relects Wright’s desire to meld “an exterior world and an interior
world” in order to create “an It which is a combination of the two”: “If we, as
we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises, / Then we will rise and recongregate
/ In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue.”38
In his next trilogy, The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990), Wright
lengthens his lines and uses the “dropped line” as means of keeping the verse
“line from breaking under its own weight” while maintaining the “integrity
of the single line musically.”39 Wright’s interest in art and oriental thought are
more pronounced than in his irst trilogy, and his explorations of the relation-
ship between perception, landscape, and language extend as the book pro-
gresses. The collection’s penultimate section, Zone Journals, is a freewheeling

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long poem illed with metaphysical speculations that are constantly asserted,
undercut, and modiied. His spiritual quest often settles into a quasi-Buddhist
position, the “Immeasurable emptiness of all things.”40
Wright’s move to the University of Virginia in 1983 had a substantial efect
on his verse. His return to the South led him to conceive of his inal trilogy,
Negative Blue (2000), as an “Appalachian Book of the Dead” that explores the
possibility of “trying to bring what’s not there into terms of what is visible in
the visible world” (SI, p. 57). The book begins with a typical situation. The nar-
rator sits in his backyard and attempts “To answer the simple arithmetic of my
life” by contemplating his surroundings.41 He observes that “This object and
that object / Never contained the landscape / Nor all of its implications.” In
the collection’s inal poem, “Sky Diving,” Wright notes,

I’ve talked about one thing for thirty years,

And said it time and again,
Wind like big sticks in the trees –
I mean the still, small point at the point where all things meet;
I mean the form that moves the sun and the other stars.42

Characteristically, Wright presents an image – “Wind like big sticks in the

trees” – that melds into a search for the interrelatedness of all things. But
instead of discovering an answer, he ends the trilogy by inviting the reader to
let the starlit sky “swallow us,” and to join him and “open our mouths” to the
heavens, a summons that suggests the symbiotic nature of the relationship
between the perceived and the perceiver, the world and the imagination. The
inal line – “I mean the form that moves the sun and the other stars” – echoes
the last line of the Divine Comedy – “l’amor che move il sole e le altre stele” –
and reairms the link between Wright’s trilogy and Dante’s. Wright’s descrip-
tion of his subsequent books as a “long goodbye” to his trilogy of trilogies
indicates his subject matter’s consistency.43 In a poem from Scar Tissue (2006),
“The Minor Art of Self Defense,” he asserts, “Landscape was never a subject
matter, it was a technique / . . . Language was always the subject matter, the
idea of God / The ghost that over my little world / Hovered.”44
The late twentieth and early twenty-irst century signaled a shift in south-
ern poetry, largely due to increased opportunities within the academy for
women and people of color. Female and African American poets were inl u-
enced by previous southern poets but brought diferent perspectives to their
materials. The achievement of southern women – including Voigt, Adcock,
Daniels, Sonia Sanchez, C. D. Wright, Brenda Marie Osbey, Claudia Emerson,
and Natasha Trethewey – in the late twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries

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helped reawaken interest in Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011). Taylor, born in

rural North Carolina, studied at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro
with Tate and his irst wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, who helped her get
a scholarship to Vanderbilt, where she took courses from Davidson. Jarrell
helped edit and secure a publisher for her irst book, A Wilderness of Ladies
(1960), but Taylor’s poetry attracted little attention until the century drew
to a close and other southern women poets airmed her importance. Betty
Adcock calls Taylor the mother of subsequent southern female poets, and
Ellen Bryant Voigt claims that it’s “no surprise to ind so many pioneers” in her
verse “since she herself is one.”45
Like Jarrell, Taylor often writes monologues and uses female personae. But
unlike Jarrell, who rarely wrote about the South, or other previous southern
poets, Taylor emphasizes rural, southern white women. She describes her
materials as “back-woods Southern characters, the poverty of the rural South
during the Depression years, handed down family stories, and the echoes of
hymns and Scripture from Southern country churches.”46 Taylor was also
inl uenced by Emily Dickinson’s elliptical lyrics and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s
emphasis on “current, everyday life.”47 In A Wilderness of Ladies, “Sister” starts
in medias res and uses colloquialisms – “And we two alone here in this peace
pan / Are ever strolling uphill to the old-house-place” – to express a country
woman’s regret at the life she feels she missed.48 “Woman as Artist” employs
taut, Dickinson-like lines – “I’m mother. / I hunt alone.” – and compares the
giving and caring of life to the creative process.49
Taylor’s next book, the Vietnam-era collection Welcome Eumenides (1972), dis-
plays her preference for allusive, modernist techniques. The book’s title comes
from an entry in Florence Nightingale’s diary, and several poems stress the
ravages of war. The ambitious title poem draws from Nightingale’s biography
and vividly dramatizes her war-torn consciousness in imagistic language akin
to Hilda Doolittle’s. “After Twenty Years” presents the thoughts of a woman
whose son was killed during World War II and whose husband subsequently
committed suicide. Taylor notes that “A Few Days in the South in February (A
Hospitality for S. K. Wightman, 1865)” is modeled on Wightman’s “account
of his pilgrimage to North Carolina reprinted from family papers in American
Heritage February 1963,” which details a perilous journey he undertook to
retrieve his dead son’s body. Richard Howard has called it the “best poem since
Whitman about the war between the states.”50 Taylor’s later poetry, collected
in Days Going/Days Coming Back (1991) and Captive Voices: New and Selected
Poems, 1960–2008 (2009), addresses her upbringing on a farm that lacked plumb-
ing or electricity but was illed with religion and an emphasis on education.

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Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) provides another example of how southern

poets rearranged their relationships to literary and social trends. Komunyakaa
studied at the University of California–Riverside with Wright and was “drawn
to” his “patterns of images” (SI, p. 141). Warren and Dickey also impacted his
verse. Promises furnished “a sense of place” that seemed “somewhat more
inclusive than John Crowe Ransom and much of Allen Tate” (SI, p. 136).
Komunyakaa studied Dickey’s “attention to detail . . . the precise naming of
things. I knew those names, the nuances of language” (SI, p. 138). But he notes
that as an African American he had a diferent relationship to the South than
those poets. Komunyakaa, born James William Brown, Jr. (he later took his
great-grandparents’ surname), was born and raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a
city once infested by the Ku Klux Klan. In “Chair Gallows,” from Dedications
and Other Darkhorses (1977), the narrator reads of a lynching and declares, “I
know war criminals / live longer than men lost between railroad tracks / &
crossroad blues, with twelve strings / two days out of hock.”51 “How I See
Things,” from I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1979), involves violence per-
petrated on black people during the civil rights era. A contemporary narrator
recalls “Men run twelve miles into wet cypress / swinging bellropes” and asks
“Have we earned the right / to forget, forgive / ropes for holding / to moon-
struck branches?” (NV, p. 89). Magic City (1992), perhaps his strongest book,
recounts his youth in racially charged Louisiana and continues to explore slav-
ery’s devastating legacy.
Komunyakaa’s use of blues and jazz rhythms was inl uenced by Langston
Hughes and Sterling Brown, poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance
but with ties to the South, and by Bob Kaufman of New Orleans, associated
with the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance. In contrast to Warren and
Dickey’s emphasis on broad philosophical contexts and narrative dramatics,
Komunyakaa writes “tonal narratives” in which a series of compressed images
unfold into a “sped-up meditation.” He draws on musical patterns to inject
multiple perspectives into his verse and create visceral relationships between
images. He shuns the didactic and strives for poems that “one person may see
. . . as blasphemous, and another . . . as sacred or a song of praise” (SI, p. 133).
His tonal narratives often generate complexity by presenting a central story
with other stories within it. “Blues Chant Voodoo Revival,” collected in Neon
Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993), relects blues songs’ tendency to “talk
around a subject or situation” involving emotional pain (SI, p. 133). The poem’s
terse lines “chant . . . my story,” “your story,” “this story,” and “our story”
through images of items – “feathers from a crow,” “honey locust leaves,” “the

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speaking skull,” “the seventh son’s mojo hand” – used in vodun rituals (NV,
pp. 81–83). “Change; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road,
with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” consists of two parallel col-
umns of verse. The irst column draws on gospel and blues music’s call-and-
response format to present a conversation between two women. The second
column mimics improvisational jazz through irregular punctuation and free
association: “Rhythms / like cells multiplying . . . language & / notes made
lesh. Accents & stresses, / almost sexual. Pleasure’s knot” (NV, pp. 8–10). In
“Song for My Father” fourteen quatorzains play of of one another to por-
tray a son’s conl icted relationship with his parent. Komunyakaa’s celebrated
Vietnam War poems tend to shun overt political commentary and present indi-
viduals’ struggles with the psychological and emotional consequences of war.
“You and I Are Disappearing” juxtaposes a series of imagistic similes – “She
burns like a cattail torch / dipped in gasoline. / She glows like the fat tip / of a
banker’s cigar” – to convey the narrator’s memories of a woman being incin-
erated (NV, p. 142). In Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One (2004) Komunyakaa
writes in tercets and explores black people’s relationship to Western culture,
particularly through instances of miscegenation. Thomas Jeferson sits “at his
neo-classical desk / musing, but we know his mind / is brushing aside abstrac-
tions / so his hands can touch lesh.”52
Southern poets’ absence from histories of contemporary American poetry
suggests what makes their poetry distinctive and is linked to the Agrarians’
political demise. In the years before World War II, critics and reviewers’ asso-
ciation of the Agrarians’ agenda with fascism and racism motivated Ransom’s
move away from politics and back toward poetics, leading to a line of lyric
poets who emphasized the aesthetic over the social. Critics’ charges and events
involving World War II led Warren to question his political assumptions and
helped spark changes in his verse. Warren’s and Jarrell’s shift to more personal
verse that explored issues of identity within various social contexts helped
generate a branch of narrative poets who distrusted ideology and stressed the
paradoxical.
Contemporary southern poets have enjoyed a good deal of individual rec-
ognition, but Warren and Dickey’s emphasis on competing philosophical con-
texts and Justice and Wright’s on aesthetics difer from the values and poet-
ics often associated with Beat, confessional, Deep Image, Black Mountain,
and New York School poetry. The South’s history of racism and poverty, and
the Agrarians’ legacy and missteps, helped create a poetry dominated by
white men who were wary of certainties, a situation that changed in the late

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twentieth century as a more diverse group of southern poets gained increased

access to the academy and negotiated their relationships to their predecessors,
southern history, and an evolving cultural landscape.

Notes
1. John Crowe Ransom, Selected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 11.
2. Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, American Literature:
The Makers and the Making (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), vol. II, p. 2654.
3. Ransom, Selected Poems, pp. 58–59.
4. Ransom, Selected Poems, pp. 58–59.
5. Ransom, Selected Poems, p. 65.
6. Allen Tate, “Whose Ox?” The Fugitive I (December 1922), pp. 99–100.
7. Allen Tate, Collected Poems: 1919–1976 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1977), pp. 38–39.
8. See John Crowe Ransom, “Waste Lands,” Literary Review, New York Evening
Post 3, July 14, 1923, pp. 825–26, and Allen Tate, “Waste Lands,” Literary Review,
New York Evening Post 3, August 4, 1923, p. 886.
9. Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe
Ransom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 176.
10. Tate, Collected Poems, pp. 20–23.
11. Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers (eds.), Robert Penn Warren Talking:
Interviews, 1950–1978 (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 287.
12. Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (New York: Random House,
1997), p. 33.
13. Watkins and Hiers, Robert Penn Warren Talking, p. 180.
14. Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John Burt
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), pp. 33–35. This volume
will subsequently be cited in the text as CPRPW.
15. Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 125.
16. Robert Penn Warren, “The Briar Patch,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and
the Agrarian Tradition (1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1977), p. 264.
17. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and
European Fascism, 1930–1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2009).
18. Interview with Warren, conducted by David Farrell on May 9, 1978. Robert Penn
Warren Oral History Project, Department of Special Collections and Archives,
University of Kentucky.
19. Robert Penn Warren, “The Art of Fiction No 18,” interview conducted with
Ralph Ellison and Eugene Walter, Paris Review 16 (Spring/Summer 1957),

818
 Writing the South

collected in Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, Talking
with Robert Penn Warren (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 34.
20. Randall Jarrell, “The End of the Line,” The Nation, February 21, 1942, p. 226.
21. Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002), p. 55.
22. Robert Penn Warren, “A Reminiscence,” in John Edgerton (ed.), Nashville: The
Face of Two Centuries (Nashville, Tenn.: Media Plus, 1979), p. 218.
23. William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1990), p. 149.
24. John Burt, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1989).
25. Leonard Greenbaum, The Hound and the Horn: The History of a Literary
Quarterly (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), pp. 145–48.
26. Tate, Collected Poems, pp. 132–35.
27. James Dickey, Self-Interviews (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 34, 85.
28. James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), pp. 94–95. This volume will subse-
quently be cited in the text as WM.
29. Dana Gioia and William Logan (eds.), Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald
Justice (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), p. 178.
30. Donald Justice, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 16–17.
This volume will subsequently be cited in the text as DJC.
31. Gioia and Logan (eds.), Certain Solitudes, p. 178.
32. Ellen Bryant Voigt, in Ernest Suarez, Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 66. This volume will subse-
quently be cited in the text as SI.
33. Helen Vendler, “Catching a Pig on the Farm,” review of The Wick of Memory:
New and Selected Poems 1970–2000 by Dave Smith, New York Times Review of
Books 48:4, March 8, 2001, p. 45.
34. Dave Smith, Floating on Solitude (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp.
112–16.
35. Smith, Floating on Solitude, pp. 260–63.
36. Charles Wright, Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 123.
37. Charles Wright, Country Music: Selected Early Poems, 2nd ed. (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), p. 152.
38. Wright, Country Music, p. 112; Suarez, Southbound, p. 40.
39. Wright, Quarter Notes, pp. 79–80.
40. Charles Wright, “Virginia Reel,” in The World of the Ten Thousand Things:
Poems 1980–1990 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 17.
41. Charles Wright, Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2000), p. 3.

819
 Er ne st S uar e z

42. Wright, Negative Blue, p. 201.

43. Joe Mofett, Understanding Charles Wright (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2008), p. 105.
44. Charles Wright, Scar Tissue (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp.
33–39.
45. Betty Adcock, unpublished audiotaped panel discussion with Ernest Suarez,
Millennial Gathering of Southern Writers, Vanderbilt University, April 7, 1999;
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Foreword,” in Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New
and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2008), p. xiii.
46. Eleanor Ross Taylor, “Eleanor Ross Taylor Transcends Place,” The Women’s
Review of Books 16:10/11 ( July 1999), p. 19.
47. Susan Settlemyre Williams, “An Interview with Eleanor Ross Taylor,”
Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts 1:1 (2002), http://www
.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/noniction/williams_s/taylor_page.shtml.
48. Taylor, Captive Voices, pp. 8–9.
49. Taylor, Captive Voices, pp. 14–15.
50. Richard Howard, “Eat Some, Drink Some, Bury Some,” The Kenyon Review
14:4 (1994), p. 186.
51. Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Hanover, N.H.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1993), p. 38. This volume will subsequently be cited
in the text as NV.
52. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Monticello,” in Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), pp. 27–28.

820
 P a rt I V
*
BEYOND MODERNISM:
A M E R I C A N P O E T RY, 1 9 5 0 – 2 0 0 0
 Chapter 36
San Francisco and the Beats
S te ph e n F r e d m a n

In the 1950s San Francisco acquired a reputation, which it has since maintained,
as a mecca for poetry. In the popular imagination, San Francisco poetry is syn-
onymous with the Beat Movement, which irst rose to prominence there.
Ironically, the writers most responsible for launching the Beat Movement
as a social phenomenon, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, came from the
East Coast and left California after only a few years, but the efect of those
years, especially on Ginsberg, was decisive. Prior to the arrival of Ginsberg
and Kerouac, an experimental poetry scene, anchored by Kenneth Rexroth,
Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, had been aloat in the Bay Area for a decade.
It was this scene into which the new poets entered and found a place. After the
Beat phenomenon took of, readers lost sight of the extent to which the San
Francisco scene was a single milieu in which all of these poets participated.
This chapter presents the salient features of that milieu and then discusses
what have been seen as the two strains within it: the spontaneous and the her-
metic. From the spontaneous wing, Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman are discussed
in detail; from the hermetic wing, the chapter addresses Spicer and, to a lesser
extent, Duncan. Finally, a consideration of Gary Snyder, who partakes of both
tendencies, argues again for the unity of the San Francisco scene.
San Francisco in the mid-twentieth century promised fertile ground for the
lowering of a poetry renaissance. A city of striking natural and architectural
beauty, isolated from the Eastern cultural establishment, San Francisco had
a history of permissive social mores and radical politics, which encouraged
sexual, political, and mystical shoots of varieties rare in postwar America. The
arts in particular lourished: the Fillmore District was home to a vibrant jazz
scene; the screenings of the Art in Cinema Society helped make the Bay Area a
breeding ground for independent ilm; the California School of Fine Arts (later
the San Francisco Art Institute) fostered new departures in painting and sculp-
ture; Anna Halprin’s epoch-making Dancer’s Workshop took of in the late
1950s; and budding poetry circles, including the Berkeley Renaissance of the

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late 1940s (headed by Duncan, Spicer, and Robin Blaser) and Rexroth’s highly
inl uential “at-homes,” devoted to poetry and anarchism, had begun to blos-
som. Out of this cross-fertilization of geographic, political, social, and artis-
tic strains arose the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry, composed of poets
who became associated with the Beat Movement, such as Ginsberg, Kerouac,
Kaufman, Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and
Diane di Prima; those who congregated around Spicer and Duncan, including
Blaser, William Everson, Joanne Kyger, and Helen Adam; and those who trav-
eled easily between these two groups, such as Rexroth, John Wieners, Philip
Lamantia, David Meltzer, and Michael McClure. Although di Prima, Kyger,
Adam, and other women were active in San Francisco poetry, the milieu had
the hallmarks of a boys’ club. It took forty years to acknowledge women writ-
ers’ substantial contribution, most notably through the publication of two
anthologies, Women of the Beat Generation (1996) and A Diferent Beat (1997).1
A glance at the landmark 1960 poetry anthology, Donald Allen’s The New
American Poetry, shows the poets mentioned previously located in four of the
ive groupings around which Allen organized his volume – the Black Mountain
School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York
School, and a group of unailiated younger poets – of these groups, only
the poets of the New York School were not represented in San Francisco.
Although Allen’s designations have proven durable for half a century, he
admits in his preface that the groupings are more arbitrary than they seem
and that their main function is to create “some sense of milieu” and thus pre-
vent relegating the then-unheralded poets to an undiferentiated miscellany.
These heuristic labels have reiied over time, and readers have lost sight of the
extent to which the poets in Allen’s anthology share an aesthetics he character-
izes as third-generation modernism, following, as did the Objectivists of the
second generation, “the practices and precepts of Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams” (to which list of decisive precursors one would wish to add
Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, and Surrealism).2 Allen’s labels also obscure the
extensive degree to which poets falling under diferent headings met and con-
versed with, corresponded with, gave readings with, published with, learned
from, disagreed with, and defended one another. In the 1950s, the two major
geographical lodestones for the New American poets were San Francisco and
New York City – along with the outlier of Black Mountain College, situated in
North Carolina but occupying a predominantly literary space through Black
Mountain Review.
From a sociological perspective, though – a perspective prompted by atten-
tion to the intricate interaction of poets in San Francisco – it would be possible

824
 San Francisco and the Beats

to apply a single capacious label to all of the poets in the Allen anthology:
Beat. The origins of the term are controversial, but it emerges from the hip-
ster culture inspired by jazz, in the physical gesture of snapping one’s ingers
to keep a beat. The Beat Movement also took on two opposing metaphorical
extensions of the word “beat”: “beaten,” as in downtrodden, and “beatiic.”
As participants in the aesthetic reaction to the social and political conformity
mandated by a fearful American society during the Cold War, these poets
explored, in styles ranging from the most cosmopolitan to the most vernac-
ular, the dark underside to America’s rise to economic and political domina-
tion, and they joined in currents of personal, sexual, religious, and political
liberation that inspired the larger social movements of the 1960s. Writing in
a 1956 letter that accompanies an early version of “Howl,” Ginsberg informs
his former mentor, Columbia University professor Lionel Trilling, about an
historic shift in literary taste:

I think what is coming is a romantic period (strangely tho everybody thinks by

being hard-up and classical they are going to make it like Eliot which is silly).
Eliot & Pound are like Dryden and Pope. What gives now is much more per-
sonal – how could there be now anything but reassertion of naked personal
subjective truth – eternally real? Perhaps Whitman will be seen to have set the
example and been bypassed for half a century.3

Ginsberg puts his inger on the newly emerging dividing line in the American
cultural imaginary between the Beat and the square, the hipster and the
social conformist; he sees the Beat ethos as a return to the prophetic stance
of Romanticism and to Whitmanian democratic comradeship after the polit-
ical and aesthetic conservatism of the previous twenty years. If we look at
the Beat Movement as an antiestablishment culture in the late 1950s and early
1960s, in which writers joined with jazz musicians, action painters, existen-
tialist philosophers, and Buddhist seekers, then all of the New American
poets (regardless of the very real diferences among them) would have been
regarded by American society at the time as Beats, as seemingly incomprehen-
sible outsiders.
Although the writers who have been seen as the vocal leaders of the Beat
Generation – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs – met
in New York in the mid-1940s, the inaugural public manifestation of Beat
aesthetics was a poetry reading that took place in San Francisco at the Six
Gallery on October 7, 1955. The Six Gallery was launched in September 1954 on
Fillmore Street by Spicer and ive of his students from the California School of
Fine Arts. In addition to showing the most avant-garde San Francisco art, the

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 S t ephe n F r edm an

gallery hosted poetry readings and staged a notorious production in January

1955 of Duncan’s play Faust Foutu (Faust Fucked).4 Duncan, Spicer, McClure,
and Adam all read parts in this contemporary setting of the Faust legend, at
the climax of which Duncan disrobed in order to display the power and vul-
nerability of the poet. Duncan’s gesture had a decisive impact on one member
of the audience, Ginsberg, who learned the rhetorical value of nakedness as
a form of truth telling – which he then espoused not only while stripping at
his own poetry readings but by championing emotional nakedness as a funda-
mental virtue in writing. An earlier venue, the King Ubu Gallery, had opened
at the end of 1952 in the same cavernous auto repair garage that would house
the Six Gallery. Named for the eponymous hero of a play by Alfred Jarry, the
King Ubu Gallery was founded by Duncan and two artists (including his life
partner, Jess); it produced exhibits by local painters and sculptors and poetry
readings by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, as well as the irst public screening
of ilms by Stan Brakhage. In this grimy garage on Fillmore Street, the poets
and artists created a locus for artistic happenings, poetry readings, jazz, ilm
screenings, and theater.
One of the artists who ran the Six Gallery, Wally Hedrick, met McClure
on the street and suggested he organize a poetry reading as a follow-up to
Faust Foutu. McClure agreed but turned over duties to a recent acquain-
tance, Ginsberg, who was eager to take on the task. Ginsberg had arrived in
San Francisco a year earlier with a letter of introduction to local poets from
William Carlos Williams. Learning that Duncan and Jess had decamped for
Europe and that Spicer had gone to New York and Boston (he participated
in the reading via a letter urging someone in the audience to ind him a job
so he could return from exile), Ginsberg arranged for Rexroth to act as mas-
ter of ceremonies and for a group of largely unpublished poets – McClure,
Lamantia, Whalen, Snyder, and himself – to read.5 Lamantia, who already had
a reputation as an American Surrealist, was the only poet who had published a
book, and he chose to read work by a friend who had recently died in Mexico.
The Six Gallery reading has acquired the status of legend, recounted count-
less times in memoirs by participants and ictionalized in Kerouac’s novel
The Dharma Bums.6 For most of the poets, this was their irst public reading;
the audience, which included Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady (hero
of Kerouac’s as-yet-unpublished On the Road), had no idea what to expect.
Ginsberg, the penultimate reader, got of to a slow start, nervous about
whether he could propel the prophetic tenor of his poem and worried that
its humor would undercut its serious intent. He began in a Whitmanian vein,
projecting a self capable of communing with the souls of his fellow Americans

826
 San Francisco and the Beats

and ascertaining their deepest conl icts: “I saw the best minds of my genera-
tion destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves
through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry ix, / angelheaded
hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in
the machinery of night.”7
The opening lines of “Howl” have achieved emblematic status as the abject
testimony of self-exiled outsiders who sought a shamanic vision into the
recesses of the American spirit (often through the agency of drugs), but when
Ginsberg irst uttered these lines to an audience, they fell a bit lat. It wasn’t
until he picked up the beat from the anaphoric “who,” which leads of nearly
all of the succeeding “strophes” (as Ginsberg called his verse paragraphs), that
he began to read the long lines as if he were taking a full-breathed, ecstatic,
and unpredictable saxophone solo in the mode of the iconic bebopper Charlie
Parker. Kerouac immediately understood and began shouting “Go! Go!” –
urging Ginsberg on as he would an artfully improvising instrumentalist. As
the reading gathered intensity, the audience joined with Kerouac in voicing
encouragement and approval. The efect was transporting, as if both poet and
listeners were witnessing the discovery of a new form of rhythmic truth tell-
ing. When Ginsberg inished with an invocation of a self “speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, . . . the madman bum and angel beat in Time,”
who “rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of
the band and blew the sufering of America’s naked mind for love,” he broke
down in tears, having reduced the collective body to stunned silence.8
“Howl” was a breakthrough poem in many ways. For Ginsberg, it was a sty-
listic and confessional revolution. He reports writing the irst section in a fur-
nished room at 1010 Montgomery Street, only a few blocks from Ferlinghetti’s
City Lights Bookstore. Using “a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch
paper,” he typed

not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sym-
pathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my
thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of
enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awk-
ward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current
literature.9

The style that crystalized from this relaxed exercise, combining collage,
Surrealism, anecdotes, and prophecy, was unprecedented in midcentury
American poetry; its most direct ailiations reach back through Crane to
Whitman. In personal terms, the poem constituted Ginsberg’s coming out

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 S t ephe n F r edm an

as a homosexual and his avowal of empathetic connection to various forms

of madness, drug addiction, high jinks, and economic destitution. In San
Francisco, he had had the rare good fortune to meet with a young psychia-
trist, Dr. Philip Hicks, who, during a year of therapy “to overcome a block
in his writing,” was able to convince the poet that he was not mentally ill,
that it was ine to explore his homosexuality, and that writing itself could be
therapeutic.10
More than a half century after its composition, the poem continues to pack
a wallop to irst-time readers. Ginsberg’s incantatory exposé of his own fears,
transgressions, and erotic desires and those of his friends, coupled with his
denunciation of a rapacious capitalist culture in the form of the devouring
god Moloch, has made “Howl” an epoch-deining poem. Delivered exactly a
hundred years after Whitman’s ecstatic assessment of American promise in
the irst edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), “Howl” endeavors to take the spiri-
tual pulse of the nation after the lapse of a century. Employing the prophetic
cadences, exuberant declarations, and omniscient catalogues of Whitman,
“Howl” maintains a darker tone that pits individual anarchic actions and
perceptions against an overweening social conformism painted as far more
restrictive in the contemporary United States. At the same time, the poem
harks back to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), building on it as a model for
the postwar reassessment of a wounded culture. Ginsberg was so insistent
on analogies between his poem and Eliot’s, which was the most prestigious
modern American poem during Ginsberg’s lifetime, that he compiled a text to
demonstrate the similar stature of the two poems. Just as Valerie Eliot caused
a scholarly sensation in 1971 by printing a facsimile edition of the manuscripts
of The Waste Land (showing Ezra Pound’s heavy editing), Ginsberg hoped to
prompt a reassessment of “Howl” by assembling, thirty years after its irst edi-
tion, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated
by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading,
Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography (1986).11 Another measure of
the poem’s impact can be found in the obscenity trial that greeted the initial
release of Howl and Other Poems in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. The trial
catapulted the book’s sales far beyond what the publisher, Ferlinghetti, could
have dreamed (it remains the press’s best-selling title), and the verdict inding
against obscenity in The People of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti became a
landmark in civil liberties law and helped open wide the door to freedom of
expression, especially with respect to sexual frankness.

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 San Francisco and the Beats

The publication of Howl and Other Poems in 1956 drew nationwide attention
to the San Francisco poetry scene. Evergreen Review, edited by Barney Rosset
(publisher of Grove Press) and Donald Allen, provides a timely snapshot of the
“San Francisco Scene” a year later, just prior to the publication of Kerouac’s
On the Road (1957). The second number of the magazine contains writing by
everyone who had read at the Six Gallery except for Lamantia (who tem-
porarily abjured publishing); by poets who attended the reading – Rexroth,
Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac; by other acknowledged eminences of the Bay Area –
Duncan, Spicer, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), James Broughton, and
Josephine Miles; by a transplanted student from Black Mountain College –
Michael Rumaker; and by a tutelary spirit living in Big Sur – Henry Miller. The
editors round out the picture of San Francisco as a cultural capital with the
“San Francisco Letter” by Rexroth, a tour of “the San Francisco Jazz Scene” by
local jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, an evaluation of “the San Francisco School”
in visual art by New York Times critic Dore Ashton, and a gallery of portraits
of eight poets by photographer Harry Redl.12 Rexroth’s “Letter” is particularly
fascinating because it discusses the “San Francisco Renaissance and the New
Generation of Revolt”13 – which will soon be called the “Beat Generation” – as
a single phenomenon.
Rexroth begins by complaining that there has been “so much publicity
recently about . . . Our Underground Literature and Cultural Disailiation
that I for one am getting a little sick writing about it, and the writers who are
the objects of all of the uproar run the serious danger of falling over, ‘dizzy
with success.’ ” He explains that for “ten years after the Second War there was
a convergence of interest – the Business Community, military imperialism,
political reaction, the hysterical, tear and mud drenched guilt of the ex-Stalin-
ist, ex-Trotskyite American intellectuals,” and the ascendancy of the southern
poets and critics associated with the New Criticism; this “ministry of all the
talents formed a dense crust of custom over American cultural life – more of
an ice pack. Ultimately the living water underneath got so damn hot the ice
pack has begun to melt, rot, break up and drift away into Arctic oblivion.” San
Francisco he characterizes as the only “Mediterranean” city in North America,
where the warm spirit of “laissez faire and dolce far niente” makes a cultural
revolt conceivable. Then, employing a hipster rhetoric that imagines a strict
demarcation between the cognoscenti and the legions of benighted conform-
ists, he chastises anyone who doesn’t understand that San Francisco is the only
city where the ice pack of custom could be breached: “But – like all squares
if you don’t know already you won’t know anymore than you did before.”
Discussing countercultural currents such as mysticism and Surrealism among

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“disailiated” writers in San Francisco, he gives the most extensive treatment

to “Howl,” which the issue reprints. He claims that “Howl is much more than
the most sensational book of poetry of 1957” and foresees that it epitomizes
the generational revolt that will continue to gather momentum during the
next decade: “Listen you – do you really think your kids act like the bobby sox-
ers in those wholesome Coca-Cola ads? Don’t you know that across the table
from you at dinner sits somebody who looks on you as an enemy who is plan-
ning to kill him in the immediate future in an extremely disagreeable way?”
Arguing against the critics and commentators who denounced the poem as
merely an angry screed illed with nihilism, Rexroth insists, “Howl is the con-
fession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in 1965
and 1975 – if it’s still there to run.”14
The “San Francisco Letter” marks the last moment in which Rexroth
had the unquestioned authority to speak as an elder and mentor for the San
Francisco poetry scene. “Noretorp-Noretsyh,” his poem that accompanies
the letter, contrasts “the brilliant Paciic sky,” “the cry of the peacocks” in
Golden Gate Park, and his lover’s “incomparable thighs” with the grim polit-
ical reality of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; harking back to earlier revolu-
tionary moments, Rexroth imagines brigades of anarchists and poets arriving
in Budapest to defeat the Soviets.15 With the publication of On the Road and
the emergence of the Beat Generation as a full-ledged cultural phenome-
non, Ginsberg and Kerouac soon greatly overshadowed Rexroth, and his
historic commitment to political anarchism looked instantly old fashioned.
Duncan and Spicer, too, grew envious and resentful of the sudden renown
of the Beats, inding their own acknowledged prominence questioned and
the San Francisco Renaissance hijacked by the recent arrivals from New York.
In Kerouac’s hurriedly written follow-up novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), he
enshrines the Six Gallery reading as the deining moment in San Francisco
poetry and focuses on Snyder, Ginsberg, and himself as the major igures,
with Whalen and Rexroth as minor adjuncts. From this moment forward,
the rupture within the San Francisco scene caused by the rapidly spreading
fame of the Beat Generation split the poets into two camps – which, although
they share many qualities in common, can be labeled the “spontaneous” and
the “hermetic.” Employing what Kerouac called “spontaneous bop prosody”
(as outlined in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”), the spontaneous wing
wrote a vernacular poetry inspired by jazz; in addition to an improvisational
writing style, many of these poets developed a jazz-inlected performance
style.16 Making a virtue of eschewing fame, the hermetic wing turned inward,
viewing the scene of writing as akin to magic or séance – in which spirits

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might direct the making of poetry – and addressing the poem principally to a
group of like-minded initiates.
The vogue for poetry readings as verbal performances spread rapidly out-
ward from San Francisco. After the Six Gallery reading and other celebrated
renditions of “Howl” around the Bay Area, Ginsberg gained conidence in his
performing abilities. Over the course of his career he honed a bardic style of
declamation and cultivated the related modes of chant and song. Bob Dylan,
an assiduous student of Ginsberg and Kerouac, taught Ginsberg to accom-
pany himself on the harmonium and brought the poet with him on several
musical tours. For a time during the 1960s and 1970s, Ginsberg himself was
able to ill auditoriums and stadiums around the world with avid listeners. In
San Francisco, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, whose million-selling A Coney Island
of the Mind (1958) embodies a commedia dell’arte style of physical humor and
satire, read poetry to jazz accompaniment, and Meltzer and his wife, Tina,
formed an early rock band.17 McClure created a “beast language” for his Ghost
Tantras (1967), roaring into the face of lions at the San Francisco zoo; he also
collaborated with Jim Morrison and the Doors and continues to perform with
one of the members of the Doors, Ray Manzarek.18 He has made a major
contribution to American theater as one of the irst playwrights to bring over
the entire European tradition of Dada, Surrealist, and absurdist drama that
begins with Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu. McClure’s play The Beard (1965), which
stages an extended tête-à-tête in eternity between Jean Harlow and Billy the
Kid that ends in a simulated sex act, was prosecuted unsuccessfully for obscen-
ity and helped break open American theater in the same way that “Howl”
had shattered the sexual taboos in American poetry. From the East Coast, ex-
convict Gregory Corso made his way to San Francisco and wrote “Ode to Coit
Tower,” using elements of jazz and Surrealism to pair the phallic monument
near North Beach with the fortress prison of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay:
“Ah tower from thy berryless head I’d a vision in common with myself the
proximity of Alcatraz and not the hip volley of white jazz & verse or verse &
jazz embraced but a real heart-rending constant vision of Alcatraz marshaled
before my eyes.”19 The performative style that grew out of the readings and
plays at the King Ubu and Six Galleries was also embraced by street poets in
the Bay Area, who could be found declaiming spontaneous verse in cofee
houses, in bars, and on street corners. Over time, this style contributed to the
national rise in the 1980s of poetry slams and freestyle rap.
The best-known poet in San Francisco to embrace the spontaneous style
wholeheartedly was Bob Kaufman, an African American improvisational per-
former who became in many ways the epitome of a Beat poet. Born in New

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Orleans with a mixed African American heritage that included a Jewish ances-
tor, Kaufman joined the Merchant Marine while still a teenager and became
a radical labor organizer in New York City. He moved to San Francisco in
the 1950s and spent most of the rest of his life there, often holding court in
the early days at the Cofee Gallery and the Coexistence Bagel Shop. Like
his mentor Langston Hughes, Kaufman was steeped in jazz and drew poetic
inspiration from Whitman and Federico García Lorca; like many of the Beats,
his other major poetic precursor was Hart Crane. Kaufman’s spontaneous
style incorporates several elements of Surrealism, drawing especially from
the négritude of Caribbean Surrealist Aimé Césaire. Kaufman lived a precari-
ous life like those chronicled in “Howl,” battling drug addiction and sufering
numerous arrests and beatings by the police. His poetry speaks of anger, revo-
lution, and nuclear apocalypse, but it also celebrates Black art and culture and
even Black patriotism, in the form of the iconic Crispus Attucks, martyr of the
Boston Massacre. Kaufman’s is an essentially oral poetry, addressed often to
speciic occasions, and he was reluctant to write it down or publish it.
One of his most renowned poems, “Bagel Shop Jazz,” chronicles the social
layers of the Beat scene in North Beach, making clear how each layer depends
on its own relationship to jazz. The poem begins ominously, as do many
of Kaufman’s poems, with a reference to nuclear nightmare: he speaks of
“Shadow people, projected on cofee-shop walls” from “a generation past,”
as though the cofee shop contained revenants from the atomic blast at
Hiroshima. As the poem continues, it becomes clear that “shadow people”
refers also to social misits in the present who frequent the Coexistence Bagel
Shop. Kaufman devotes a stanza each to three diferent groups of habitués:
“Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings,” “Turtle-neck angel guys . . . with syn-
agogue eyes,” and “Cofee-faced Ivy Leaguers.” Kaufman sees that the girls
will never fulill their “cofee dreams” but will instead settle for becoming
sexual partners, “Losing their doubts in the beat” – that is, losing their inhibi-
tions to the jazz beat while taking a Beat lover. The Jewish guys dressed in
turtlenecks and dungarees show their worldly sophistication by “Mixing jazz
with paint talk.” The Black hipsters, “Whose personal Harvard was a Fillmore
district step,” gained their education hanging out around jazz. They are the
most essential denizens of the cofee house, advertising their hipness by talk-
ing about the jazz pantheon (“Bird and Diz and Miles”) and at the same time
concealing the “secret terrible hurts” of racial discrimination. For them, jazz
and the life built around it deine the limits of aspiration; they are “Hoping
the beat is really the truth.” Kaufman paints a picture of a cofee house illed
with inquisitive young people for whom jazz supplies the “beats” that contour

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their time. Although he lovingly depicts these various groups of hipsters, the
poet acknowledges the precarious and even illusory nature of their nighttime
revels: at the end of the poem “The guilty police arrive,” breaking up the con-
viviality and leaving behind the “beautiful shadows” burned on the wall with
which the poem began.20
The subtle Black-White interplay in Kaufman’s poetry inds a powerful locus
in his repeated invocation of the Spanish poet Lorca, whose Poet in New York
(1940), with its penetrating portrait of Harlem at the beginning of the Great
Depression, haunted Kaufman. Poet in New York is Lorca’s most Surrealist
work, comprising poems, such as “The King of Harlem,” “Standards and
Paradise of the Blacks,” and “Ode to Walt Whitman,” that chronicle his devas-
tating sojourn in the United States in 1929 and 1930. From the second of these
poems Kaufman takes a phrase, “crackling blueness” (“el azul crujiente”), which
he makes a touchstone of the Black experience: “crackling blueness” connotes
the electrifying quality of African American sorrow as it is transmuted into
art.21 In fact, it could serve as an epithet for bebop jazz, in its rapid-ire, l icker-
ing rhythmic ascensions. Lorca and his crackling blueness appear in many of
Kaufman’s poems, such as “THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES,” in which
the poet’s arrival signals a racial liberation. In this poem, “NEGROES LEAVE THE
SOUTH / FOREVER ” and ascend “INTO CRACKLING BLUENESS .”22 Near the end of
his long apocalyptic prose poem, “The Ancient Rain,” Kaufman quotes a num-
ber of lines from “The King of Harlem” and then repeats them with variations.
He claims Lorca as his own, recalling that after he left the Merchant Marine,
he followed Lorca’s footsteps around Manhattan and “decided to move deeper
into crackling blueness.” As a Black man, Kaufman feels he understands Lorca
better than others: “I observed those who read him who were not Negroes and
listened to their misinterpretation of him.” He inds that Lorca’s surrealistic
vision of the spiritual power of African Americans in a United States whose
soul has died ofers the fullest scope for his ambitions as a shaman-poet: “I
remember the day I went into crackling blueness.”23

*
Lorca, especially in his book Poet in New York, forms a vital link between the
spontaneous and the hermetic strains in San Francisco poetry. Ginsberg found
Poet in New York inspirational in the writing of “Howl”; in his annotated edition
he reprints “Ode to Walt Whitman” among the explicit “precursor texts” for
the poem.24 On the hermetic side, Spicer and Duncan both saw Lorca’s poetry,
and Poet in New York in particular, as central to their aesthetic explorations
during the 1940s and 1950s. For Ginsberg, Duncan, and Spicer, Lorca’s example

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was not only that of a Surrealist in the New World but also that of a modern-
ist gay poet. Duncan read Poet in New York in Spanish when it irst appeared in
1940 and incorporated its incantatory rhythms into some of his earliest poems.
Like Kaufman, he identiied with the prophetic ire in the book, although as a
member of a sexual rather than a racial minority: “The impact of Lorca’s Poeta
en Nueva York was . . . immediate, a voice speaking for my own soul in its rage
it seemed.” Duncan recounts how in the late 1940s he and Spicer, “as young
poets seeking the language and lore of our homosexual longings as the matter
of a poetry, [sensed] that Lorca was one of us, that he spoke from his unan-
swered and – as he saw it – unanswerable need.”25 As Duncan discusses at length
in a later preface to his 1955 Caesar’s Gate, while writing the book, during 1949
and 1950, he was haunted by Lorca’s poetry of war and of veiled homosexual-
ity and by the seemingly unutterable pain associated with both conditions. In
the title of one of his own poems, Duncan asks in bewilderment, “What Is It
Have You Come to Tell Me, García Lorca?”26
In 1957, the year when On the Road appeared in print and Howl and Other
Poems went on trial, Spicer published his own breakthrough book, After Lorca,
which could be read as a response to Duncan’s question. The book begins
with an introduction, supposedly written by the dead poet, in which he
declares himself “fundamentally unsympathetic” to the “diicult and unre-
warding task” Spicer has undertaken – namely, to write a book in English
that includes translations and transformations of poems by Lorca, original
poems by Spicer posing as translations, and letters to Lorca.27 In the intro-
duction, Spicer ventriloquizes Lorca, even to the point of gloating, “I have
further complicated the problem (with malice aforethought I must admit)
by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written after my death which he has
also translated and included here” (MVD, p. 107). Right at the outset of his
irst book, Spicer thus enacts the mysterious theory of dictation for which he
would become famous. In the simplest sense, by presenting Lorca as a barely
cooperative interlocutor, Spicer dramatizes the uneasy relationships between
original poem and translation and between an earlier author and his epigone.
In a more occult sense, Spicer becomes a kind of shaman when he makes
the dead author speak, in the manner of Pound’s Odysseus, who profers
sheep’s blood so that Tiresias will speak from the Underworld in “Canto I.”
Like Pound, Spicer calls up the spirits of dead poets in an attempt to escape
his own personality and gain a wider vantage point. To a certain extent, both
poets believe they can receive instruction from dead poets or mythological
beings and that this mediumship gives them entry into transpersonal states
of being.

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Setting forth his theory of dictation in lectures delivered just prior to his
early death in 1965, Spicer claims that he heard the new poems he wrote in After
Lorca through “a direct connection like on the telephone”: it “was Mr. Lorca
talkin’ directly.”28 Another media metaphor Spicer uses more commonly to
describe poetic dictation is the radio. He seizes on scenes in Jean Cocteau’s
ilm Orphée, in which Orpheus receives radio transmissions of new verse from
a dead poet and publishes them as his own, as providing an image of the pro-
cess of dictation: “Essentially you are something which is being transmitted
into” (HJB, p. 7). Spicer contrasts his technique of dictation to T. S. Eliot’s
contention that the poet participates in the entirety of tradition and alters
it slightly by his new contribution: “I think when you pay attention to a tra-
dition like Eliot does, you get into all sorts of the most soupy static that you
can possibly have, so that you don’t know what is your reading of English
literature and what is ghosts” (HJB, p. 138). Spicer insists that his poetry repre-
sents a static-free transmission from the “ghosts,” whether dead poets or other
beings outside the phenomenal world (sometimes he calls them “Martians”),
who tell him things that can’t be learned through literary interpretation. The
content of such “communication,” however, is not “spiritual” knowledge but
a clearer view of reality. The practice of dictation purportedly enables the
poet to slip beyond the grasp of the ego and to use language to disclose the
real world without distortion, rather than revealing the poet’s personality or
his imaginative or interpretive prowess. In one of the letters to Lorca in After
Lorca, Spicer avows:

I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that
the reader could cut or squeeze or taste – a real lemon like a newspaper in a
collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real
moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to
do with the poem – a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination
pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem
that has no sound in it but the pointing of a inger. (MVD, pp. 133–34)

By eschewing what he calls “the big lie of the personal,” Spicer endeavors to
perform a Zen disappearing act, in which the inger that points to the objects
in the world can vanish – leaving only the quivering lemon (MVD, p. 150).
The reference to collage is also telling. Beginning with After Lorca, Spicer
conceives of each book of poetry as a serial composition, as a collage of inter-
related elements. If the two essential criteria for creating a collage are the
importation of fragments of found material and the juxtaposition of these
fragments in a nonlogical or nonhierarchical or paratactic composition, then

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in Spicer’s books imported fragments (such as Lorca poems and pieces of

poems in After Lorca and folk motifs, baseball plays, or Grail characters in oth-
ers) are strewn among the poems and relect back on one another within the
structure of the book. He thinks of this found material as so much “furniture”
that ills the rooms of the poet’s mind; as such, it has no inherent poetic mean-
ing until a force outside the mind orders it: “Given the cooperation between
the host poet and the visitor – the thing from Outside – the more things you
have in the room the better if you can handle them in such a way that you
don’t impose your will on what is coming through.” Most poets, however,
“can’t resist, if they have all of these benches and chairs in the room, not to
arrange them themselves instead of letting them be arranged by whatever
is the source of the poem” (HJB, p. 9). This would be another way of stating
Spicer’s objection to Eliot, who for all his vaunted impersonalism orders the
fragments of The Waste Land through an emotional logic rather than allowing
them to be structured by “the thing from Outside.” The outside force inter-
venes both at the level of the individual poem and at the level of the book. Just
as a Spicer poem does not originate in a lyric voice but is a collage arranged by
impersonal intervention, so entire books become serial compositions in which
materials within the book “correspond” with one another and thus interact to
create larger structures: “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other.
They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can”
(MVD, p. 163).
In addition to spiritualistic composition and a penchant for occult sources,
such as the Grail myth or the tarot deck, there are two other strikingly her-
metic qualities to Spicer’s oeuvre. The irst is social. Beginning in the mid-
1940s, when he joined Duncan and Blaser in Berkeley and began studying
medieval history with Ernst Kantorowicz (an original member of the German
poet Stefan George’s kreis – his eroticized “ring” of male aesthetic/religious
seekers), Spicer adhered faithfully to the notion that art should be created and
circulated within a coterie of like-minded initiates. Like his sometime rival,
Bob Kaufman, Spicer held court in a few select bars in San Francisco, but he
demanded a much tighter group allegiance than did Kaufman and actively
policed the boundaries of his circle. In what would seem a bald contradiction
to his insistence on impersonality, many of Spicer’s poems are addressed to
speciic members of the clique. Although such poems can include personal
or interpersonal details of a sexual or romantic nature, Spicer also manages
to make the poems uncannily abstract by treating such intimate matters as
“furniture” available to outside composition. He generates a powerful ten-
sion in the practice of dictated poetry by recounting excruciating moments

836
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of romantic rejection and ofering biting criticism of other poets and their
poetics, as well as by insisting that members of the coterie not stray beyond
its conines. One of Spicer’s serial books, Admonitions (written 1957), lays bare
this tension in poems written for speciic individuals. “Each one of them,”
he explains in a letter that opens the book, “is a mirror, dedicated to the per-
son that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The
frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each personal
relection” (MVD, p. 157).
The other hermetic aspect of Spicer’s poetry involves his relationship to
language. Trained as a professional linguist, he lost his position as a graduate
student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 when he refused to
sign a loyalty oath during the postwar Red Scare. In the early 1950s he attended
the national linguistics convention and published an article in Language:
Journal of the Linguistic Society of America (1952). The cover of this issue of
the journal, listing John L. Spicer as co-author of “Correlation Methods of
Comparing Idiolects in a Transition Area,” was reproduced in green as the
cover of Spicer’s book, Language (1965), with title, author, and press infor-
mation scrawled across it in red crayon. Throughout his writing, he remains
highly attuned to sophisticated linguistic issues and, like one of his models,
the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, revels in seeing language take
on a life of its own in poetry. Spicer’s linguistic concerns come to a head in the
serial book Language, which is illed with propositional sentences calling atten-
tion to their own linguistic fabrication. In “Spicer’s Language,” Ron Silliman,
one of the Bay Area poets who inaugurated Language poetry in the 1970s,
acknowledges Spicer as a crucial forerunner. Silliman discusses in detail the
irst (untitled) poem in “Thing Language,” the irst section of the book. The
poem begins, “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises / Tougher than any-
thing. / No one listens to poetry. The ocean / Does not mean to be listened
to” (MVD, p. 373). Silliman’s microreading of this poem attends to the self-
contradictory qualities of its language, which he sees as the most powerful
feature of Spicer’s writing.
According to Silliman, self-contradiction begins with the title, “Thing
Language,” which posits the two nouns as equivalent and impermeable enti-
ties while also seeming to turn “thing” into an adjective modifying “language.”
Spicer’s linguistic knowledge of the arbitrary nature of signs makes him aware
that words and things will never meet, and so he makes disjunction the subject
of this section of Language. Silliman investigates how the passage cited previ-
ously stages the nonmeeting of two voluble entities – poetry (language) and
the ocean (thing) – and he points out the logical nonalignment that takes place

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among the three sentences and across the four lines. He sees Spicer’s skillful
manipulation of such breaks within and between sentences as anticipating
“the essential feature of the ‘new sentence,’ ” which is the disjunctive, linguis-
tically attuned form most closely associated with Language poetry.29 Silliman
reads Language as a book of metapoetry in carefully lineated sentences, in
which the skillful use of enjambment often makes subtle points about the self-
contradictory operations of language: “Through his line breaks, suppressed
verbs and numerous insertions of sentences apparently taken from other dis-
courses,” Spicer upsets the sentence’s ability to predicate and to ofer proposi-
tions about reality. “It is precisely in these nooks and crannies, gaps and lacu-
nae,” Silliman notes, “that the ‘outside’ is permitted inally to speak.”30

*
Although the Language poets rebelled against spontaneity, devaluing it along
deconstructive lines as a naïve and necessarily failed attempt to place the self
ahead of language, another form of hermeticism at work in the poetry of the
San Francisco Renaissance led to a rapprochement between the hermetic and
the spontaneous strains. The practice of meditation and the invocation of
Buddhism and other Asian concepts of nothingness and emptiness took root
forcefully in the poetry of San Francisco and have continued to exert an inl u-
ence on American encounters with Asian culture as part of rapidly expand-
ing Paciic Rim exchanges. For example, one of the Language poets, Leslie
Scalapino, uses the Buddhist concept of the essential emptiness of all phe-
nomena to guide her in a performative poetry that continually fractures con-
cepts and social realities, leaving her fruitfully vulnerable to “how phenomena
appear to unfold” (the title of one of her books).31 The history of Asian cul-
tural inroads into California, whether through immigration or appropriation,
is too vast even to outline, but it would be fair to say that San Francisco poets,
such as Rexroth, Snyder, Kaufman, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Whalen, and Welch,
carried Asian aesthetic and religious ideas forward in their poetry of the 1950s
and 1960s and became important midcentury conduits for transpaciic interac-
tions. In San Francisco poetry, the Asian inl uence has given support to both
spontaneity and hermeticism: spontaneity is regarded highly, for instance, in
Zen Buddhism and in the Japanese arts that rely on it, while meditation and
the study of Asian philosophical treatises can be seen as hermetic practices
that require initiation and isolation. Of course, immersion in Asian philoso-
phies did not obliterate earlier religious training or cultural proclivities in these
poets. For instance, the impact of Buddhism was quite distinct on Snyder,
Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Taking Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums as evidence

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for this impact, it could be argued that Snyder’s Zen is a Protestant Buddhism,
laced with a healthy disdain for authority; that Ginsberg’s (which expands later
with his instruction into Tibetan Buddhism) is a Jewish Buddhism, based on
practice more than belief and evincing a deep-seated sense of compassion;
and that Kerouac’s is a Catholic Buddhism, concerned chiely with salvation
and with social equality.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the igure most fully associated with the
many inl uences of Asia was Gary Snyder. Raised in the Paciic Northwest
and majoring in anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Snyder
moved to the Bay Area to learn Chinese poetics at the University of California
at Berkeley. Shortly after the Six Gallery reading, at which he performed “A
Berry Feast,” Snyder embarked for Japan and spent a decade mainly pursu-
ing Zen study in monasteries. Like Spicer, he contends that the purpose of
poetry is not to reveal personality or to show of stylistic acumen but rather
to disclose the world. His practice of Zen and study of Asian poetry contrib-
ute to a didactic poetics, in which (contra Spicer) seeing is prior to language:
“There are poets who claim that their poems are made to show the world
through the prism of language. Their project is worthy. There is also the work
of seeing the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing
into language. The latter has been the direction of most Chinese and Japanese
poetry.”32 From Snyder’s Buddhist perspective, the poetry of pure seeing takes
place not through dictation from outside but through heightened attention
to the precise contours of the present moment. His lifelong enthusiasm for
mountain climbing, fed by early jobs as a logger and mountain lookout, joined
with his studies of Chinese and Japanese poetry and Zen to make Snyder a
pioneer in the transmission of Asian aesthetic and philosophical concepts to a
White American audience. He also combined his outdoorsman ethos and the
elevation of nature he learned from Asian aesthetics with an appreciation for
Native American investments in landscape, thus becoming one of the earliest
and most passionate spokesmen for the Ecology Movement that began in the
1960s.
In addition to Asian aesthetics, Snyder’s main stylistic inl uences are Pound,
Williams, Rexroth, and Robinson Jefers. “A Berry Feast” displays these inl u-
ences especially in its laconic style, vernacular diction, and heavy consonance.
The latter is particularly striking in lines such as “Bronze bells at the throat /
Bronze balls on the horns, the bright Oxen,” in which Snyder draws from
a number of earlier poetic techniques for emphasizing consonants: Pound’s
attempts to imitate the troubadours’ efect of separating individual words
by beginning and ending them with consonants; the partial elision of articles

839
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to speed up the pace, to separate words, and to emphasize imagery – also

borrowed from Pound and from other translators of Chinese and Japanese
poetry; and the Anglo-Saxon-based practice of alliteration employed by
Pound and Jefers.33 The key consonant in “A Berry Feast” is b, which contin-
ually evokes the huckleberries that appear in each of the four sections of the
poem, as well as their foremost consumer, the bear, whose intimate encoun-
ters with humans form one of the major themes of the poem: “Blackbear /
eating berries, married / To a woman whose breasts bleed / From nursing
the half-human cubs.”34 Although nearly all of the poetry of the San Francisco
Renaissance is urban, most of Snyder’s poetry is not. His work embodies a
powerful attraction to natural beauty and solitary pursuits. The prominence
of Zen, Native American, and wilderness strands in Snyder’s life and work
made him an object of reverence for a number of poets and an object of near
worship for Jack Kerouac, who enshrined him in The Dharma Bums as its hero,
Japhy Ryder. The ictional portrait of Snyder as an ascetic, studious, free-loving,
anarchist, ecstatic mountain climber was extremely seductive as a model not
only for the Beats but also for the hippies who would arrive in San Francisco
in the mid-1960s. Snyder willingly took on the mantle of spokesperson for the
hippies, promoting a vision of communal anarchism, ecstatic eroticism, and
ecological activism that he hoped would bring North America into alignment
with the often-suppressed indigenous values of the entire Paciic Rim.
The social vision that developed out of Beat culture and the San Francisco
Renaissance united the spontaneous, performative strain with the hermetic,
initiatory strain. This is true not only for Gary Snyder but also for many in
the arts in postwar San Francisco. One manifestation of this shared aesthetic
and social project has been called “Semina culture.”35 A journal consisting of
collages, poems, and photographs on loose-leaf cards, Semina (1955–1964), was
printed, stufed into decorated envelopes, and mailed to friends by the artist
Wallace Berman. The poets who took part in Semina, among them Duncan,
Meltzer, McClure, Wieners, Lamantia, di Prima, and Kaufman, joined a circle
of Beat artists, including Bruce Conner, Jess, George Herms, Jay DeFeo, Joan
Brown, Dennis Hopper, and Berman himself in creating an aesthetic culture
that became a way of life. As Duncan puts it, “We began to see ourselves as
fashioning unnamed contexts, contexts of a new life way in the making, a secret
mission.”36 The aesthetic components that went into fashioning this context
include the vernacular compositional form of collage or assemblage, shared
among both poets and artists, and a healthy regard for Surrealism as provok-
ing psychological breakthroughs. All of these igures were fascinated by vari-
ous forms of esoteric thought, religious mysticism, or drug experimentation

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as ofering alternative realities amid Cold War conformism. Sexual noncon-

formity was paramount as well, whether in the form of bodily display or of
queer confession and performance. If there was a “secret mission,” it was a
broadly anarchist one of overthrowing the mundane reality of the 1950s and
early 1960s, substituting a transgressive, ecstatic mode of life. The assemblage
art of San Francisco during this period was known as funk or junk art; much
of it involved drawing together discarded or unremarked fragments (whether
visual or verbal) from daily life in order to reveal “secret” meanings, insisting
on the regenerative potential of everyday experience.
Although critics have separated spontaneous poets like Ginsberg and
Kaufman from hermetic poets like Spicer and Duncan, the separation is
based on distinctions that tend to break down when we take a more encom-
passing view. Ginsberg, for instance, saw his opposite number Spicer as
engaged in a similar compositional style to his own. First, he notes the stated
distinctions between them: Spicer “held a diferent vision of poetry. I think
he had a thing that has nothing to do with Ego, messages come through the
radio stations of the mind, so to speak, whereas I was thinking of the spon-
taneous mind.”37 Ginsberg was also aware of Spicer’s critique of his practice:
“He thought that my own method was much too involved with personal
statement and ego: it’s a legitimate objection.” Although he acknowledges
the conl ict in their stances toward the personal and generously admits the
force of Spicer’s critique, Ginsberg doesn’t feel that their poetic practices
are “actually very diferent in operation.” Regardless of how inspiration
arrives, “as a practical matter of composition” there is a basic similarity:
they both bring fragments of obsessive interest into collage poems marked
by unanticipated juxtapositions.38 Whether Ginsberg, Spicer, and others in
San Francisco create Surrealist-inspired collages via spontaneous improvi-
sation, following the model of jazz, or via hermetic practices of dictation
or meditation, all of the poets have designs on disrupting the status quo.
They mean poetry as “the living water” to burst through what Rexroth calls
the “dense crust of custom over American cultural life.”39 To a remarkable
extent they have succeeded.

Notes
1. Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the
Heart of a Revolution (San Francisco: Conari Press, 1996); Richard Peabody (ed.),
A Diferent Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1997).

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 S t ephe n F r edm an

2. Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York: Grove,
1960), pp. xi–xiii.
3. Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, ed. Barry Miles (New York:
Harper and Row, 1986), p. 156.
4. Robert Duncan, Faust Foutu: A Comic Masque (1960; Barrytown, N.Y.: Station
Hill, 1985).
5. Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San
Francisco Renaissance (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 62.
6. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958; New York: Penguin, 2006), pp.
6–7, 9–11.
7. Ginsberg, Howl, p. 3.
8. John Suiter, Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the
North Cascades (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), pp. 153–54.
9. Ginsberg, Howl, p. xii.
10. Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat
Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 153–54.
11. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed.
Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1971); Ginsberg, Howl.
12. Evergreen Review 1:2 (1957), table of contents.
13. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” Evergreen Review 1:2 (1957), p. 5;
reprinted in Kenneth Rexroth, World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of
Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Bradford Morrow (New York: New Directions, 1987), pp.
57–64, 57, 58, 63.
14. Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” pp. 5–14.
15. Kenneth Rexroth, “Noretorp-Noretsyh,” Evergreen Review 1:2 (1957), pp. 15–16.
16. Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate
Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995, ed. Bill Morgan (New York: HarperCollins,
2000), pp. 344–45.
17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions,
1958).
18. Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras (San Francisco: City Lights, 1967); Ray
Manzarek and Michael McClure, Piano Poems: Live in San Francisco, audio CD
(Oglio, 2012).
19. Gregory Corso, Gasoline (San Francisco: City Lights, 1958), p. 11.
20. Bob Kaufman, Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems, ed. Gerald Nicosia (Minneapolis:
Cofee House, 1996), pp. 107–08.
21. Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Greg Simon and Steven F.
White, ed. Christopher Maurer, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1998), p. 20.
22. Kaufman, Cranial Guitar, p. 128.
23. Kaufman, Cranial Guitar, p. 139.
24. Ginsberg, Howl, pp. 185–86.

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 San Francisco and the Beats

25. Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate: Poems 1949–50 (1955; Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1972),
pp. xv, xxii.
26. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, pp. 44–46.
27. Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed.
Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
2008), p. 107. This collection will be cited in the text as MVD.
28. Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed.
Peter Gizzi (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p. 138. This
collection will be cited in the text as HJB.
29. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1989), p. 151.
30. Silliman, The New Sentence, p. 165.
31. Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Elmwood, Conn.: Potes
and Poets, 1989).
32. Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (San Francisco: Four Seasons,
1965), p. 67.
33. Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992),
p. 86.
34. Snyder, No Nature, p. 84.
35. Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (eds.), Semina Culture: Wallace Berman
and His Circle (New York: D.A.P.; Santa Monica, Calif.: Santa Monica Museum,
2005), pp. 9–15.
36. Robert Duncan, A Selected Prose, ed. Robert Bertholf (New York: New
Directions, 1995), p. 198.
37. Ellingham and Killian, Poet Be Like God, p. 58.
38. Ellingham and Killian, Poet Be Like God, p. 58.
39. Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” p. 57.

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 Chapter 37
The New York School
B r i a n M . Re ed

Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (1960) irst
introduced a national audience to a “generation” of “younger poets,” “long
awaited but only slowly recognized,” that he claimed represents the “true
continuers of the modern movement in American poetry.”1 He labeled one
subset of this new literary phenomenon “the New York Poets.” The name
was rough and ready; it simply designated where most of the relevant writers
lived at the time the anthology saw print. Allen explained that John Ashbery
(b. 1927), Kenneth Koch (1925–2002), and Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) “irst met
at Harvard where they were associated with the Poets’ Theatre,” but this
core group “migrated to New York in the early ifties” and was gradually
joined by other igures, most importantly Barbara Guest (1920–2006) and
James Schuyler (1923–1991).2
Later critics have not shared Allen’s understated approach to the topic. A
year after the appearance of The New American Poetry, John Myers – whose
Tibor de Nagy Gallery had already published books by Ashbery, Guest, Koch,
O’Hara, and Schuyler – rechristened the circle the “New York School of Poets.”
He wanted to elevate a cluster of friends into a full-scale literary movement.
As Ashbery recalls, “Myers . . . thought that the prestige of New York School
Painting” – by which he meant abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline – “might rub of on ‘his’
poets; he coined the term in an article in the California magazine Nomad in
1961, and it has stuck.”3 Indeed, it has become one of the principal points de
repère in the landscape of post–World War II American literary history. If crit-
ics declare that a particular poet is ailiated with or has been inl uenced by
the New York School, their auditors are sure to nod knowingly. Moreover, one
will frequently ind mentions of multiple generations of the New York School,
as if it were possible to draw a genealogical chart tracing the descendants of
Ashbery and company down unto the third and fourth begats. Signiicantly,
these New York School scions need not live in the ive boroughs, nor even be

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American by birth or residence. They are implicitly credited with inheriting a

bundle of traits identiied closely with one or more precursors.
These ways of talking are liable to mystify the uninitiated, not least because
the term “New York School” itself can be confusing. The word “school”
falsely suggests a well-deined shared agenda. No such slate of uniform goals
existed. While some of the poets did write pieces that could conceivably be
called manifestos, they tend, like O’Hara’s “Personism” (1959) and Ashbery’s
“The Invisible Avant-Garde” (1968), to be idiosyncratic exercises that com-
bine wicked satire and coy shenanigans with illuminating advice. The poets’
careers also diverge too greatly to imagine them working consistently in con-
cert. O’Hara died in a freak beach vehicle accident on Fire Island in 1966,
whereas Schuyler’s irst major collection, Freely Espousing, dates to 1969. Guest
arguably came into her own only in the 1980s, and Ashbery continues to write
stellar work well into the twenty-irst century.4 The attribution “New York”
can also be as misleading as “school.” The poets only lived together in the city
for a relatively brief time in the 1950s. Ashbery, for example, had left for Paris
even before Allen’s anthology came out, and Guest was ultimately to become
more inl uential as a Californian than as a Manhattanite.
What can one, then, say about these poets as a group? Even if they lack
the into-the-breach élan of the Italian Futurists, the Russian Constructivists,
and other early twentieth-century avant-gardes, the members of Allen’s and
Myers’s original short lists of writers were nonetheless good friends whose
early work was shaped by the same milieu. As already stated, Koch, O’Hara,
and Ashbery knew one another as undergraduates; they later met Guest via
Semi-Colon (1953–1956), a poetry newsletter put out by the Tibor de Nagy
Gallery. Schuyler was O’Hara’s roommate for several stretches during the
1950s; Ashbery and Schuyler collaborated on a novel, Nest of Ninnies (1969);
and Koch, Ashbery, and Schuyler each edited one or two issues of the little
magazine Locus Solus (1961–1962). They all shared a proclivity for a distinctive
but eccentric and cosmopolitan blend of literary models: Francophone poets
such as Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Pierre Reverdy; European Dadaists and
Surrealists such as André Breton and Tristan Tzara; British modernist mas-
ters of dialogue such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Ronald Firbank, and Henry
Green; and three Anglophone authors whose poetics one might have thought
wholly immiscible, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude
Stein. The New York School poets were all involved, too, in experimental the-
ater, and they wrote a number of plays, among them O’Hara’s Try! Try! (1951),
Ashbery’s The Heroes (1952), Koch’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware
(1962), and Guest’s The Oice (1963). And all ive poets were passionate about

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the ine arts. In addition to acquiring a connoisseur’s knowledge of classical

music, opera, jazz, ballet, modern dance, and avant-garde cinema, they had
contact with composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman; ilmmakers
such as Rudy Burckhardt and Jack Smith; and dance-world luminaries such as
George Balanchine, Edwin Denby, Lincoln Kirstein, and James Waring.
Then there is the connection to the visual arts. In addition to rubbing elbows
with the marquee abstract expressionists in the Cedar Tavern, the Club, and
elsewhere, the poets cultivated close relationships with, and even collaborated
with, a younger cohort of New York painters that included Norman Bluhm,
Jane Freilicher, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Fairield
Porter, and Larry Rivers. They continued to be au courant, too, in the years
1955 to 1965, as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol wreaked
havoc in the art world; each of the poets tested literary analogs to neo-Dada
assemblage and pop appropriation in their own verse. Four of them – Ashbery,
Guest, O’Hara, and Schuyler – contributed essays to Art News. Ashbery also
wrote art reviews for the New York Herald-Tribune; Guest published in Arts
Magazine and Art in America; O’Hara worked his way up to curating major
shows for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); and Schuyler, too,
spent six years as a curator at the MoMA. To learn more about the New York
School’s involvement with the art world, one should consult the collections of
all four poets’ prose about art, above all O’Hara’s Art Chronicles.5

*
There is no such thing as a representative New York School poem. The New
York School poets are too diferent, and they change too much over the course
of their careers, for any one lyric to bear such a burden. This diversity, how-
ever, does not preclude family resemblances. Few good New York School
poems would ever be confused with lyrics from the same years written in rival
styles, such as Black Mountain projectivism, Beat oral athleticism, Black Arts
populism, and confessional pyrotechnics.
The poets share a delight in the messy complexity of urban life, a desire
to challenge norms governing sexuality and gender, a suspicion of grand
schemes and totalizing systems, a faith in self-reinvention, and a belief that
bliss can be found in the here and now. Unsurprisingly, given their biographies,
they are also drawn to ekphrasis, the re-creation of a visual artwork by ver-
bal means. They test every available means of achieving it, too, from learned
commentary (Ashbery’s verse essay “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” [1975]
even includes block quotations) to manipulations of a poem’s layout (the two

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 The New York School

rectangular arrangements of text in O’Hara’s “Joseph Cornell” [1955] echo

Cornell’s signature use of wooden boxes in his sculptures).
Their most frequently pursued ekphrastic strategy is probably homology,
the attempt to coax language to approximate what visual artists can achieve
in their own media of choice. Guest’s “Poetess” (1973), for instance, strives to
evoke a small Surrealist gouache of the same name by Joan Miró that is full of
bold primary colors and biomorphic curved shapes: “A dollop is dolloping /
her a scoop is pursuing / lee vain ignots.”6 The words “dollop” and “scoop”
suggest how Miró applied paint, whereas “pursuing” and “lee” convey the
dynamism of the composition. The phrase “dollop is dolloping” is more than
a tautology; it captures one word morphing into another. Guest hints that
Miró’s painting did not copy something in the external world but rather was
generated by riing imaginatively on a few basic shapes and gestures. Finally,
the neologism “ignots” is like one of Miró’s parti-colored amoebas or lat-
tened blobs. Although the term might call to mind more familiar things (for
example, the words “ingots” and “ignorance” and the name “Ignaz”), it none-
theless remains stubbornly, uncannily an independent entity.
Ekphrastic verse of this variety might push at the accepted boundaries of
reason and logic, but that, signiicantly, is also its attraction. One learns what
happens when divergent means of communication are forced to ind common
ground. Collectively, the New York School is fascinated with the countless
ways that language functions, and from poem to poem and even from line
to line they will switch approaches, now tediously exploring documentary
realism, now spouting glossolalia, now launching into passionate arias. Like
the artists that they admire, these authors dramatize their inquiry into the
very tools, conditions, concepts, limits, and processes that make self-expres-
sion possible. In doing so, they frequently concentrate on the local texture of
verse, churning out only tenuously connected quotable quotes or proposing
quaint, profound, bizarre, or incomprehensible juxtapositions. As far as they
are concerned, a poem can begin anywhere, go anywhere at any time, and
end anywhere. They do not hold that a poet has a responsibility to pursue an
idea, a description, or a narrative in a sustained, rewarding manner, nor must
he or she make sure that all details prove pertinent to the artwork’s unfolding.
Readers, in short, must set aside New Critical dicta concerning architectural
structure and forget the Romantic ideal of an organic coherence in which
parts and wholes align pleasingly and harmoniously. They must steel them-
selves for sudden, unpredictable vertiginous shifts. Even veteran poetry critics
can sufer whiplash.

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 B r ian M. Re e d

Why peruse such demanding verse when there are surely less head-spinning
alternatives? One reason: It is surprisingly pleasurable. Readers can usually
discern and appreciate patterns or trajectories operative if not throughout
then within or across smaller segments (repetition and variation is especially
common). More importantly, the New York School believes that a poet can
be serious about exploring the outer boundaries of artistic possibility with-
out necessarily producing dour, gloomy work. A hallmark of their poetry
is its whimsical free association, outlandish puns, and other sorts of brash
wordplay that one more readily associates with stand-up comedy than high-
falutin’ poesy. Kenneth Koch’s “A Poem of the Forty-Eight States” (1969), for
example, opens with a stanza ostensibly about Kentucky, but he appears to
know nothing about the place beyond its nickname, “the Bluegrass State”:
O Kentucky! my parents were driving
Near blue grass when you became
For me the real contents of a glass
Of water also the irst nozzle of a horse
The bakery truck loating down the street
The young baboon woman walking without a brace
Over a iord 7
Here “grass” suggests “glass” via rhyme, and “blue” plus “glass” leads Koch to
think about water. He then forges gaily on, “water” becoming irst spray from
a “nozzle” and then looding waters rushing “down the street” and inally a
“iord.” He ornaments this chain of word association with other tropes (“noz-
zle” leads to “horse” via the double entendre “hose”); further rhymes (“glass”
suggests the suppressed term “ass,” which Koch replaces, ahem, by “baboon
woman”); and plain old slapstick lunacy (a “bakery truck” loating away).
Such writing can seem pointless, the literary equivalent of doodling. When
faced with a New York School poem, though, one should never prejudge what
constitutes making a point. True, Koch might not be describing a real location,
and he teaches no immediately obvious moral, ethical, or political message.
He is, however, relying on his readers to have a rudimentary knowledge of
American poetic history. He mocks the vatic swagger of would-be American
bards from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg who write as if they are speak-
ing on behalf of a country that is, in fact, exceedingly large and diverse, well
beyond the capacity of any one poet to comprehend as a whole. Such bards,
Koch cheekily informs us, have to improvise and playact like mad if they are
to live up to their implicit impossible claim to be all-knowing about all of
America. At the same time – a twist that raises the work above a cheap shot –
Koch is also poking fun at his own provincialism, his utter lack of experience

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 The New York School

with the goings-on outside Manhattan. What is Kentucky to him, or he to

Kentucky? His comedy, in short, is fairly sophisticated. It depends on a read-
er’s awareness of precursors and intertexts, and its tone is slippery, combining
satire of others with self-delationary gestures.
New York School humor can be hilarious, infuriating, vaudevillian, adoles-
cent, ambivalent, un-PC, and groan-a-minute bad, but it generally serves ends
beyond laughter, often ones that self-relexively concern the nature and func-
tion of poetry. Readers have to be prepared to think not simply about a lyric’s
contents, that is, what it says denotatively and connotatively, but also about
the exemplarity of a particular statement. That is, what kind of writing would
one normally expect to encounter under these circumstances, and how does
this particular gesture of refusal or dissidence or amateurism challenge busi-
ness as usual? Why does this passage or line register as indecorous or purpose-
less? What do these prerational judgments reveal about a person’s underlying
values and assumptions?
Closely allied with the New York School’s delight in whimsy is its fascina-
tion with games and game play. If Romantic poets stereotypically wait for
nature, God, or other agents to inspire them to write, a New York School
poet is more likely to begin composing by l ipping coins, seizing on strange
found texts, running through musical scales, or posing crossword-puzzle-like
verbal challenges. For instance, Ashbery wrote “Into the Dusk-Charged Air”
(1966) based on the rule that every line must name a river: “The Lifey is full
of sewage, / Like the Seine, but unlike / The brownish-yellow Dordogne. /
Mountains hem in the Colorado.”8 He manages to keep the poem going for
150 lines, a testament to his ingenuity. Moreover, he adds details (a movement
through the seasons climaxing with winter, for example) that transform a
brainstorming exercise into an engrossing read.
On occasion, New York School writers push to drastic extremes the sorts of
wordplay to be found in “Poem of the Forty-Eight States” and “Into the Dusk-
Charged Air.” Partly, they do so to explore what happens, what principles
still function, if a poet suspends referentiality, and sometimes grammar too,
almost completely. What is left: Song? Flashes or fragments of imagery? The
play of a sensuous imagination? In such cases, their writing approaches pure
abstraction. Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969) is a virtuosic example,
extending to more than sixty pages:
Hats! hacks! heads! Is buzz. An
Cow-oyster, dollars! alimony of disease-art-lemons, O
Poo, the knack of name’s plate’s poodle, “Ends” is
Sang, “House! mate of jim-jam controlling puce

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Teak!” Out! Badder, yell-place and nick and socker-

Glow, each is and, joyous handlike knickers
Cuckoo. “How could you have gone, bitter
Roistering hint glove task phone ‘ache’ factory hoop device?”9
Although such gleeful babble cannot be paraphrased, one can trace difer-
ent threads of sound or association that keep it from degenerating into total
chaos. This passage begins with h’s and exclamations (“Hats! hacks! heads!”).
The exclamations, though, do eventually give way to a rhetorical question,
even as h’s recede and irst plosive p’s (“Poo . . . plate’s poodle . . . puce . . .
place”) and then hard c’s and k’s move to the fore (“Teak . . . nick and socker . . .
handlike knickers / Cuckoo”). The last line in this passage tries out a march
of heavy monosyllables (“hint glove task phone ‘ache’ ”), a series of emphatic
spondees that designedly contrast with a prior equally heavily accented string
of trochees (“joyous handlike knickers / Cuckoo”). Koch aspires to give his
readers an absorbing spectacle: the lashy, rapid, inventive deployment of
verse’s nonsemantic resources.
Ashbery’s second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), is especially well
known for its turn toward an antirealist agrammatical lyricism. Some poems
of this type, such as “Rain,” are highly evocative. Their verbal pointillism sug-
gests story lines, landscapes, characters, and events that never quite hove fully
into view:
At night
Curious – I’d seen this tall girl
I urge the deep prune of the mirror
That stick she carries
The book – a trap
The facts have hinged on my reply
Calm
Hat against the sky
Eyes of forest10

One wants such moments to lead somewhere, to culminate in a love story, a

mystery, or some other tried-and-true genre. Instead, as with When the Sun
Tries to Go On, the words tend to slip away, leaving trails of sound instead of
sense (c’s and k’s again – “Curious . . . stick . . . carries . . . book . . . facts . . . Calm
. . . sky”). There is another kind of disappearing act, too, an Ashbery trade-
mark: memorable but ultimately empty igures of speech (“the deep prune of
the mirror”). Other, thornier poems in The Tennis Court Oath recall Stein at her
most obdurate: “Neutral daylight sitting things / Like it. It woofed. It liked it.

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 The New York School

// Ordeal a home and / My lake and sat down.”11 For Ashbery – and for the
members of the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s more generally –
this rigorously antimimetic mode of writing represents an asymptote. They
would repeat but not exceed its challenges to conventional English usage. For
half a century, The Tennis Court Oath has served as a litmus test. For some read-
ers, it strays too far in the direction of nonsense and hence represents a wrong
turn in an otherwise glorious career. Other readers, more at home with unan-
chored wordplay, consider the book to be Ashbery’s true contribution to lit-
erary history, a leap into new expressive territory akin to Arnold Schönberg’s
break with tonality in Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, op. 15 (1908–1909).

*
After The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery, like the other New York School poets,
would continue to employ nonnormative syntax on occasion (especially
dangling modiiers, ambiguous antecedents, run-on sentences, violations
of the sequence of tenses, and anacoluthon). Although he did not cease to
experiment with form, he did shift his focus. Like Guest, Koch, O’Hara, and
Schuyler, he made tone central to his innovative poetics. “Tone” is notoriously
diicult to deine and describe, but it is shorthand for, among other things, the
stance that writers adopt toward both their material and their audience. New
York School poets will disregard decorum, alter perspective, provide contra-
dictory evidence, mix stylistic levels, and otherwise write in such a way that
it becomes diicult to say whether they are being sincere, arch, jokey, seri-
ous, frivolous, vacuous, wise, or all of the above at the same time. The con-
sequent tonal instability – a reader’s uncertainty regarding who is speaking
and why – is one reason why the work of the New York School can still feel
remarkably contemporary. Its self-awareness concerning the scene of writing
translates into a theatrical poetry in which speech is never natural or unmedi-
ated. Poetic voice, they believe, is a construct that produces calculated efects; it
is not a unique innate property would-be poets cultivate en route to becoming
authentic writers.
The opening lines of Ashbery’s “The Other Tradition” (1977) can illustrate
his mature style and the role that tone plays in it:
They all came, some wore sentiments
Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness
Of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its rays
Through branches of Norfolk Island pine as though
Politely clearing its throat, and all ideas settled
In a fuzz of dust under trees when it’s drizzling.12

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The poem begins dramatically in medias res, but who “came” and why? We
learn only that “some” were wearing “T-shirts.” Yes, he does specify that the
shirts have “sentiments / Emblazoned” on them, but we do not hear what
those sentiments are, nor do we discover whether we are supposed to inter-
pret “emblazoned” as referring to images, text, or some blend of the two. No
matter; the shirts somehow inform us about “the lateness / Of the hour.”
At this point, the story line begins to feel curiously unmoored, a bit like an
updated version of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1885), with its glittering her-
aldry; its ef usive, vague declarations of heartfelt passion; and its pervasive
mood of belatedness. The bookish transition “indeed” prolongs the intima-
tions of an old-fashioned, high-mannered style, and then Ashbery elegantly
alludes to Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light” (1862). His sun’s
“slanted” rays, however, do not cause “Despair” or deliver “Heavenly Hurt.”13
Weirdly, his afternoon light “[p]olitely [clears] its throat,” acting like a func-
tionary interrupting a meeting. Equally jarring is the next image, of “ideas”
washed out of the air by drizzle and left lying in “a fuzz of dust.” What ideas?
Whose? The word “fuzz” is just slightly wrong as well, rendering a bit too
concrete the cliché “bite the dust.” The tenses go haywire as well. The clause
“when it’s drizzling” does not match up with “slanted its rays” and “all ideas
settled.” Has the speaker become careless or forgetful? While the setting of
this passage is conventionally Romantic – a forest at dusk – within this single
meandering sentence the language careens between apt and dodgy, impre-
cise (“all,” “some”) and exact (“Norfolk Island pines”). Ultimately, one has to
say that Ashbery leaves readers uncertain whether he endorses or mocks the
nineteenth-century rhetoric that he echoes.
The modulations of tone in New York School poetry tend to raise vexing
dilemmas instead of ofering resolutions. Audiences are encouraged to spec-
ulate how and whether a poem might obliquely address the relevant issues,
but in the end there might be no answer, or only a provisional one. A pre-
ferred New York School target for this unsettling treatment is the boundary
between high and low culture. Their lyrics higgledy-piggledy refer to topics
such as Hollywood movies, modernist symphonies, musical theater, French
highbrow iction, tawdry pornography, Renaissance epics, and animated car-
toons. Common are poems such as Koch’s “En l’An Trentiesme de Mon Eage”
(2000), which might have a professor-friendly allusive title (here quoting the
irst line of François Villon’s Le Testament [1489]), and which might genulect,
as this poem does, to canonical poets such as Swinburne, but which nonethe-
less also spotlight less illing fare, in this case comic strips such as Terry and the
Pirates (1934–1973). Adopting the same impassioned tone toward both elite and

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popular culture can leave a writer’s taste level in doubt, as well as lead to res-
ervations concerning his or her fundamental aesthetic values. When O’Hara
gushes about James Dean, when Ashbery pens a sestina about Popeye, when
Schuyler elegizes Janis Joplin, and when Guest names a poem “Jafa Juice”
(1960) after a British soft drink, one has to wonder whether these wear-their-
erudition-on-the-sleeve poets can truly be all that enthusiastic about their sub-
ject matter. Are they temporarily slumming? Laughing at uptight snobs – or at
bourgeois Middle America? How would one ever know for sure?
The word “postmodern” is regularly used to describe New York School
poetry. The term has many meanings, of course, but critics often have in mind
its poets’ games with tone, in particular their disorienting traipsing back and
forth across the high–low divide. Fredric Jameson, for example, singles out
Ashbery as “one of the most signiicant postmodern artists” in part because
his verse refuses to settle into a straightforwardly imitative or parodic mode.14
Instead he reprocesses a myriad of other discourses in ways that are eerily
unmarked. One cannot decide whether he is engaging in pastiche on auto-
pilot, subtle satire, or incisive critique. Does he intentionally stud his verse
with advertising clichés, sugary sentimentality, and empty ideological formu-
lae? Why do his sentences often sound freestanding, as if written by diferent
people at diferent times? Jameson contrasts such equivocal later twentieth-
century work with earlier masterpieces such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream
(1893) that do not hesitate to take a deinite, strong stand against the ills and
horrors of modernization.15
Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues that New York School poetry restlessly declines
to endorse any stance that implies direct or privileged access to “transcendent
truth.” Those poses, though, she goes on to state, are not so much discarded
as made newly available for rhetorical play.16 In other words, all speech acts are
exposed as motivated artiice, and the poets permit themselves to scramble,
invert, reinvent, and otherwise tinker with every available discourse without
respecting any of them as sacred or outside the limits. New York School poets
often exalt in this freedom by making artiice and artiiciality a central theme
in their work. The title of Schuyler’s “Fabergé” (1969), for example, calls to
mind the jeweled and enameled eggs made by the House of Fabergé from
1885 to 1917, especially the exquisite Russian imperial Easter eggs. The poem
goes on, appropriately enough, to talk about gemstones, but each new min-
eral becomes an opportunity for a new l ight of fancy: “I keep my diamond
necklace in a sparkling pond for invisibility. / My rubies in Algae Pond are like
an alligator’s adenoids. / My opals – the evening cloud slipped in my pocket
and I felt it and vice versa.”17 The irst line here is a play on the idea of hiding

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in plain sight, and then the second elaborates on the idea of jewels in water
by identifying another kind of pond (one covered with algae) that could con-
ceivably hide not translucent diamonds but “rubies” as red and large (and ide-
ally as well-protected) as an alligator’s tonsils. Changing tacks, Schuyler then
compares “opals” to being felt up by a cloud, a unique but, it appears, heavenly
brand of seduction. The tone of “Fabergé” combines the ebullience of a col-
lector and the arrogance of the writer who presumes readers can keep up with
a swiftly leaping intellect. Schuyler is singing the praises of (and, of course,
simultaneously poking fun at) his ability to generate images, ideas, and scenar-
ios as glittering, seductive, and treasured as rare crystals. Losing conidence in
transcendent truths can be a prelude to discovering the intoxicating power of
one’s own creative capacities.
The New York School writers each have their own shorthand for the thrill
of losing oneself in the delights of artiice. Guest refers to far-of countries,
Mediterranean or Eastern European, that exist for her more as fantasy lands
than as actual historical states: Morocco, Illyria, Egypt, Tsarist Russia, Turkey,
and above all Byzantium, whose rich silks she writes movingly about in her
essay “Mysteriously Deining Mystery: Byzantine Proposals for Poetry” (1986).
For Ashbery, pageants, masques, tapestries, and sculpture will do, although
architecture is perhaps his favorite, as in “Vetiver” (1987), in which he makes
his habitual equation between buildings and poems unusually overt: “The
pen was cool to the touch. / The staircase swept upward / Through frag-
mented garlands, keeping the melancholy / Already distilled in letters of the
alphabet.”18 O’Hara, a talented trained pianist, is drawn to music, both lushly
Romantic (Rachmaninof ) and austerely modern (Schönberg), but painting
is truly his idée ixe. Whenever paint, painters, or paintings show up in his
writing, these images announce an increased attentiveness to the decisions,
processes, and stakes that inform every efort at making art.
The emphasis on afectation and mannered artiice in New York School
poetry, one must add, coexists with what can appear to be a countervailing
tendency, namely, immersion in everyday particulars. While it might be hard
to miss the self-relexive dimension to a piece titled “On Seeing Larry Rivers’
Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” (1956),
O’Hara is in fact better known for his so-called “I do this, I do that” poems,
which recount in simple, direct fashion where he goes, what he sees, and what
he purchases, often during a lunch hour:
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

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 The New York School

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days.19
Schuyler, too, builds numerous lyrics out of what can seem like straightfor-
ward observations:
The dogs are barking. In
the studio music plays
and Bob and Darragh paint.
I sit scribbling in a little
notebook at a garden table,
too hot in a heavy shirt20
Schuyler also names numerous poems after the date on which they were
written – “3/23/66,” “Dec. 28, 1974,” “October 5, 1981” – and otherwise uses
titles to indicate the setting where both watching and writing took place – “En
Route to Southampton,” “4404 Stanford,” and “Noon Oice.” In such diary-
like poetry, artistry can at irst be notable chiely in its absence.
This way of writing is not, however, ofered as an escape from artiice –
quite the opposite. It teaches that mundane sights and events can provoke
aesthetic responses that, although diferent in kind and intensity from, say,
reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) or viewing a painting by Ingres, are
nonetheless quite real. “I do this, I do that” poems demonstrate that intensi-
ied inspection of each moment as it passes causes speakers to pause over and
marvel at things that might otherwise escape their notice. And these feelings
of wonder can translate into bursts of joyful rhetoric, as in Guest’s “On the
Way to Dumbarton Oaks” (1960):
The air! The colonial air! The walls, the brick,
this November thunder! The clouds Atlanticking,
Canadianing, Alaska snowclouds,
tunnel and sleigh, urban and mountain routes! (BGC, p. 12)
As always with a New York School poem, the tone at such moments is trickier
than a quick read-through might suggest. The naïve pleasure here of watch-
ing clouds form and reform as they scud across the sky (all! those! exclama-
tion! points!) is undermined by grace notes of sophisticated self-awareness.
Dumbarton Oaks, after all, is a center in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the
study of ancient and medieval Byzantium, and Guest’s transposition of “colo-
nial” from D.C.’s architecture to the heavens (“The colonial air!”) prepares a
reader to think about empires, ancient and modern. She then draws not on
nature but on culture to provide metaphors to describe roiling clouds (Canada,

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Alaska, sleighs, tunnels, roads). People constrain the world, she hints, by using
political ictions and merely human creations as standards by which to mea-
sure, and to rein in, its boundlessness and its glories. Tracking how a New
York School poet describes a scene or a series of actions, even when such
scrutiny might appear to verge on overinterpretation, often deepens into a les-
son about phenomenology, more speciically, about the kinds of prerational,
prejudicial, and ideological factors that shape and ilter one’s perceptions of
quotidian goings-on.
The desire to record the texture of ephemeral everyday life – and an accom-
panying puckish impulse to provoke readers to question the whole purpose
of such an endeavor – reaches its deadpan extreme in lyrics such as Ashbery’s
“Grand Galop” (1976), which incorporates verbatim a school menu from a
newspaper that the poet picked up during a tour of the Midwest: “Today’s
lunch is Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad, / Jello, milk and cookies.
Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on a bun, / Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice
pudding, and milk.”21 A reader stumbles over passages of this kind because of
their ordinariness. Why put such neutral language into a poem? Can the imag-
ination redeem or transigure it? Or are readers supposed to stop and think for
a moment about routine existence, the welter of undistinguished things and
happenings that one normally overlooks? The dilemma recalls the challenge
that Pop Art posed during the early 1960s. Is a can of tomato soup or a box of
scouring pads really truly a worthy subject for a contemporary visual artist?
By framing and presenting an audience with subject matter generally consid-
ered too banal for artistic treatment, the New York School poets again draw
attention to the problem of artiice, this time by probing its zero degree, the
boundary between art and nonart. Somewhat paradoxically, they manage to
elevate this investigation into a compelling species of lyricism.

*
How does one read a New York School poem? The process can be compared
to looking at a still life by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Seeing an apple on the
canvas is only a starting point. One must then ask how, speciically, that apple
looks, as well as how the artist has played within and against conventions and
expectations when rendering it in oil. A viewer should relect carefully, too, on
the experience of interacting with the artwork, noting the course, character,
and outcome of that experience. Such an interpretive practice is not, it must
be emphasized, dryly formalist. How, why, when, and what we see (and read)
are among the most pressing political, moral, historical, and cultural ques-
tions anyone could pose.

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When applied to New York School poems, labels such as “postmodern,”

“avant-garde,” and “experimental” are, more often than not, ways of convey-
ing the shock of encountering writing that treats mimesis – the imitation of
reality – as only one tool, and certainly not a privileged one, within a poet’s
utility kit. The sophistication of this position, and its many dizzying literary,
philosophical, and political ramiications, helps explain why a small circle of
friends, irst brought to national attention by a countercultural anthology,
has over the last half century proved to be such a spectacular success among
tweedy academics and other establishment gatekeepers. Ashbery and Koch
have won Bollingen Prizes; Ashbery and Schuyler have won Pulitzers; Ashbery
and O’Hara have won National Book Awards; and Ashbery and Schuyler have
been Fellows of the American Academy of Poets. Rafts of scholarly books
and articles have appeared since 1975, and the rate of their arrival seems to be
increasing, not tapering of.22 Over the last decade there has been a sustained
efort, too, to make as much of the poets’ writings as widely and easily avail-
able as possible.23 Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, humanists have
been reevaluating the Cold War era, and, at least among poetry critics and
readers of poetry, the New York School has retrospectively taken on unex-
pected prominence.
One could argue that the group’s reputation has also beneited to an unusual
degree from the succession of trends in literary criticism over the last half cen-
tury. During the 1950s and 1960s, the New York School’s radical rethinking
and loosening of poetic form appealed to readers constitutionally averse to
the dumbed-down New Criticism prevalent at the time in schools and uni-
versities. The popularization of poststructuralism and deconstruction in the
1970s and 1980s similarly prepared a new generation to appreciate a highly
performative poetics that takes nothing for granted about language or repre-
sentation. The popularization of queer theory in the early 1990s again seems
to have served the same ends. One can read Ashbery, O’Hara, and Schuyler
as pursuing a deconstructive approach to sexuality in which assertions of gay
identity are present but countered and complicated by wild, discursive mash-
ups and other disconcerting rhetorical means of troubling received sociocul-
tural categories.
Turning from the overall picture to individual cases, however, such a nar-
rative of lucky convergence between New York School poetics and academic
criticism is hard to sustain across the board. The poets’ reception histories and
their relative statuses over time vary greatly, and they include dramatic ups
and downs. In comparison to his friends, for example, O’Hara had an almost
immediate impact. Intimately friendly with a remarkable number of talented

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people, he inspired, provoked, and cajoled them into producing inventive,

high-quality work. At the center of the New York art and poetry scenes, he
was able to leave his mark through wit, banter, and scorn on an entire genera-
tion. After his premature death in 1966, he quickly became a legend, even a bit
of a saint, in the circles in which he had traveled. Within a decade, his admir-
ers had assembled and published most of his uncollected writings. The sheer
amount of them was a revelation. O’Hara had always been laid-back about
publication, and during his lifetime only three slim collections had appeared
in print – Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Lunch Poems (1964), and Love Poems
(Tentative Title) (1965) – plus a few limited-edition chapbooks and collaborative
projects. Suddenly, it became possible to gauge the true extent of his accom-
plishments. One consequence, the presentation of the National Book Award
for his Collected Poems (1971), gave him something he had never sought – cred-
ibility among university-based scholars – and the irst monograph surveying
the whole of his career, Marjorie Perlof ’s Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters,
appeared in 1977.24 A cult igure had become canonical.
O’Hara’s best-known verse remains his “I do this, I do that” poems, such
as “A Step Away from Them” (1956), “Personal Poem” (1959), and “Adieu to
Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (1959). Nearly as celebrated are lyrics
such as the Billie Holiday elegy “The Day Lady Died” (1959) and “Poem (Lana
Turner has collapsed!)” (1962) that similarly depict the everyday pressing chaos
of life in a modern metropolis. Opening lines such as “It is 12:20 in New York a
Friday / three days after Bastille Day” (FOC, p. 325) and “It is 12:10 in New York
and I am wondering / if I will inish this in time to meet Norman for lunch”
(FOC, p. 328) have been imitated by so many ephebes that they have since
become a cliché.
The winsome, gregarious speaker of the “I do this, I do that” poems is pre-
possessing, and his casualness and lightheartedness can be a welcome relief
after reading such pomposity-prone contemporaries as Bly, Duncan, Olson,
and Lowell. These particular poems, too, provide welcome historical insight
into the urbane and cosmopolitan intellectual culture in New York during the
early years of the Cold War. A lyric such as “Poem (Khrushchev is coming
on the right day!)” (1959) illustrates how cheerful a person could be despite
(or perhaps because of ) the constant threat of atomic oblivion. In search of
details about the thriving 1950s and 1960s pre-Stonewall queer subculture in
Manhattan, one will ind no more vivid and evocative sources than “At the Old
Place” (1955) or “Poem (I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy)” (1957), and few
homoerotic love poems in English surpass “Les Luths” (1959), “Poem (Light

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clarity avocado salad in the morning)” (1959), and “Having a Coke with You”
(1960), all written for the dancer Vincent Warren.
The “I do this, I do that” poems, however, represent only one small part
of O’Hara’s oeuvre, and, if readers are not careful, they will fail to perceive
their artfulness, that is, the precision with which he employs characteristi-
cally estranging New York School devices such as non sequitur, intense local
sound patterning, repetition and variation, bizarre juxtapositions, obstructive
enjambment, and, everywhere, rhetorical dodges. (“Why I Am Not a Painter”
[1956], for instance, entirely fails to answer the question posed by the title in
a straightforward manner.) To acquire an accurate sense of O’Hara’s poet-
ics, one should read widely in his nearly six-hundred-page Collected Poems.
Particularly rewarding is the series of odes that he wrote in the later ifties,
which includes “Ode to Joy” (1957), “Ode on Causality” (1958), and “Ode to
Michael Goldberg(’s Birth and Other Births)” (1958). Veering between sub-
limity, sappiness, and bathos, these lyrics ambivalently extend and subvert the
high style of the Romantic ode:

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in

and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once and all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like l ies crawling across absorbèd limbs
(FOC, p. 281)

Other poems illustrate his love of French Surrealism: “The razzle dazzle mag-
gots are summary / tattooing my simplicity on the pitiable / The perforated
mountains of my saliva leave cities awash” (FOC, p. 96). The goal, though,
is not to give access to either his or a collective unconscious. Like Richard
Crashaw, Luis de Góngora y Argote, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, and other baroque
poets, he seeks to impress with a deluge of mad ornamentation: “Now! / in
cuneiform, of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs / and onions of red
syrup blended, of sand bejeweling the prepuce / in tank suits” (FOC, p. 146).
One should never confuse O’Hara’s investment in what he calls the “personal”
with the forthrightly autobiographical or the confessional. “I” in his poetry
is an occasion to launch a performance, to try out new ways of combining
words. Like Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg tak-
ing up ordinary objects and declaring them art – bottle racks, shovels, clothes
hangers, lashlights, rubber tires – O’Hara often sorts through the jumble of
daily experience and assembles a poem. He reserves the right, however, to
draw on other materials and resources, and his poetry accordingly possesses

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an impressively wide range, from knee-slapping one-liners to grotesques, to

touching aubades, and to majestic meditations on death’s inevitability.
Ashbery’s career trajectory bears little resemblance to O’Hara’s. Although
it started out brightly – Auden awarded his irst full collection, Some Trees
(1956), the Yale Younger Poets Prize – he failed to capitalize on that early suc-
cess. Even before winning the prize, he had led New York and its manic get-
ahead whirl. In 1955 he traveled to France on a Fulbright Fellowship, where he
taught American literature at the University of Rennes. Afterward he stayed
on in Paris, earning his keep as an art reviewer and as a translator of detective
iction. His sophomore outing, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), especially its long
poem “Europe,” responded thoughtfully to living in a nation still grimly strug-
gling under the long shadow of World War II. The book’s frequent recourse to
collage and its extreme syntactical breakdown have parallels in such contem-
porary French artworks as Jacques Villeglé’s and Raymond Hains’s torn, lacer-
ated posters and Arman’s accumulations of refuse. As he would soon discover,
though, his writing was no longer in step with developments in America,
where the sunny soullessness and deceptive legibility of Pop Art better cap-
tured the superpower’s love afair with consumerism. (Warhol, signiicantly,
had his irst one-man show the same year The Tennis Court Oath came out.)
After returning to the United States in 1965, Ashbery’s next two volumes,
Rivers and Mountains (1966) and Double Dream of Spring (1970), put him on a
diferent path. Grammatically better behaved and generally written in either
meandering free verse or strict form, his verse now began to sound more like
Auden’s, sometimes even like Bishop’s, and the pas de deux that he struck up
with the ghost of Romanticism brought him nearer to another precursor,
Wallace Stevens. He revealed a new versatility as a poet, too. Highlights include
the oddball sestina “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” the intro-
spective discursive lyrics “Clepsydra” and “Soonest Mended,” and the eerily
indeterminate “These Lacustrine Cities.” Finally, these two collections estab-
lished a pattern followed by most of his volumes over the next four decades:
a clutch of short- to medium-length lyrics supplemented by a daringly origi-
nal long poem. After two more abortive stabs at complete self-reinvention –
Three Poems (1973), which consists of three very long, sinuous prose poems, and
The Vermont Notebook (1975), a diaristic experiment – he returned to the
meditative-lyrics-plus-a-long-poem format in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975). It promptly won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National
Critics Book Circle Award. Virtually overnight, he went from being a diicult
pleasure to a critics’ darling. Famously, Harold Bloom used his “considerable
power as a cultural commentator” to tout him as the central postwar poet.25

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For a while, it seemed Ashbery could do no wrong. One well-received book

followed another, a series that includes Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know
(1979), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), and, inally, a free verse quasi-autobi-
ographical epic, Flow Chart (1991). Throughout the 1980s, Ashbery’s reputation
was at its height. He managed to write beautifully, to touch on the sublime, to
let demotic English run riot, and to reinvigorate literary tradition – all while,
as if an enrolled member of the Yale School of Deconstruction, decentering
the self, denaturalizing discourses, and unmasking claims of access to tran-
scendent truth. (Here academic fashion did veriiably seem to play a role in
New York School reception.) His inl uence seemed inescapable: young poets
aped his shifting pronouns, his mix of the concrete and vague, his hollow
metaphors, and his oscillation between grandeur and camp.
During the 1990s and 2000s, he continued publishing, in fact at an increased
rate. Some critics began complaining that he was publishing too much. More
accurately, one could say that scholars and readers have simply proved incapa-
ble of keeping up. His irst twelve or so books, from Some Trees to Flow Chart,
are far from thoroughly digested. How can anyone claim mastery, too, of
the next ten plus? Collections such as Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars
Were Shining (1994), and Can You Hear, Bird? (1995) are clearly as ambitious as
the better-studied but similar successes of the 1980s, whereas more recent
volumes such as As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001), A Worldly Country (2007), and
Planisphere (2009) shift toward a sparer, more epigrammatic style that is also
bawdier than heretofore. There are other surprises, too, such as the book-
length poem Girls on the Run (1999), which is ostensibly based on the work of
the outsider artist Henry Darger but which reads like Victorian children’s liter-
ature put through a food processor. Ashbery might be one of a small number
of late twentieth- and early twenty-irst-century American poets to enjoy an
international reputation, but, as anyone who has read all of his books quickly
discovers via an MLA bibliography search, appreciation of the diversity and
depth of his achievements is still preliminary. Whole continents have yet to
be explored.
Of course, one should keep such declarations in perspective. When turn-
ing from Ashbery to the remaining major New York School poets – Guest,
Koch, and Schuyler – “preliminary” has another meaning altogether. They,
too, might have won numerous awards, but they have yet to receive anything
resembling the celebrity treatment accorded to O’Hara and Ashbery. The sec-
ondary literature on their work remains quite limited in size and scope, and
instead of being treated as authors who develop and deepen over time, they
are still usually approached via discrete close readings that provide scattered,

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isolated snapshots of their poetics. Alternatively, they receive praise for work
in other genres entirely. Schuyler, for example, is noted as a diarist, Guest as a
novelist, and Koch as a pedagogue. (Teachers still regularly consult his Wishes,
Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry [1970].)26
At the present time, though, one of these three “other” New York School
poets seems poised to start receiving star billing in her own right: Barbara
Guest. A generation ago, such a claim would have sounded ludicrous. For
many years she was the most neglected New York School poet. She was regu-
larly omitted from anthologies, articles, and monographs devoted to the phe-
nomenon, and if her name did come up, the impression left was that her verse
was derivative, less skilled, or somehow just not worthy of being set alongside
that of her male counterparts. This insinuation was wholly unwarranted. She
followed up her early volumes The Location of Things (1960) and The Open
Skies (1962), which admittedly do overlap in forms and themes with Some Trees
(1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), by two much stronger books, The Blue Stairs
(1968) and Moscow Mansions (1973), which should have irmly established her
independence as a writer. “A Handbook of Suring” (1968), for example, is a
long poem that draws on a found text to expose connections between the
idyllic golden-boy masculinity at the heart of the 1960s suring craze and the
bellicose posturing in the pro–Vietnam War rhetoric of the same period. Such
a description can make the poem sound like propaganda. It is not. Guest is
tempted by the myths and trappings of conventional maleness, and she writes
with a mix of sympathy and repulsion that puts strain on the poem’s language
and renders its speculations and criticisms anything but cardboard thin. Other
long poems of the time, such as “Knight of the Swan” (1973), go on to ponder
whether a female artist might in fact selectively appropriate and redeem mas-
culine heroic ideals. Guest’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s is only just
beginning to receive the attention that it has long deserved.
Her later work has fared better. During the 1980s, her proile began to
increase. Instrumental was the appearance of Herself Deined: The Poet H.D. and
Her World (1984), a pathbreaking study of the modernist author that alerted
academics to Guest’s name.27 Around the same time, a younger generation
of experimental women poets rediscovered her, and the feminist newsletter
How(ever) (1983–1992) both honored her and gave her a welcome new outlet
for publication. Venues associated with the West Coast branch of Language
poetry began adopting her as a respected elder. Los Angeles’s Sun & Moon
Press, for instance, published Fair Realism (1989), Defensive Rapture (1993), and
her Selected Poems (1995); the Post-Apollo Press of Sausalito, California, put out
Quill, Solitary APPARITION (1996); and Poetics Journal, edited by Lyn Hejinian

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 The New York School

and Barrett Watten, printed her essay “Shifting Personas” (1991). By century’s
end, she had attained a national reputation. In 1999 she won the Robert Frost
Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Work, and soon thereafter she received
another institutional imprimatur, when Wesleyan University Press became
her chief publisher.
Guest’s verse from the early 1980s onward is marked by a turn toward the
ethereal and the fantastic. Her lineation and word placement becomes pro-
nouncedly visual, and she starts to use white space in an almost sculptural
manner. She seems to be intent on injecting silence into her statements, or
perhaps she wishes readers to focus on each line individually and in isola-
tion. At times, her poems sound like scrambled scraps lifted from medieval
romances or pilfered from post-Tolkien heroic fantasy novels:
tell us where light comes from
white curtains in its beak;
closer closer to the splintered mountains
O king endlessly
scattering (BGC, p. 300)
Her references are highly literate, ranging from Ovid to Mallarmé to Theodor
Adorno, and the settings often seem medieval or classical, albeit at a peculiar
remove, as if iltered through an intermediary pair of eyes, perhaps a rococo
master such as Antoine Watteau:
Beyond the roof tiles,
lap of a hill, leur d’or
gold ass on the threshold
Apuleius’s other . . .
Of many colors porcelain
with faerie glove (BGC, p. 439)
While obviously revisiting the New York School fascination with artiice,
Guest at times seems to commit to it almost wholly, allowing imaginary land-
scapes and scenarios to displace any direct treatment of the world around her.
Naturally, one has to ask what she gains and loses thereby, and whether she,
in roundabout ways, is challenging readers to think about how and whether
poetry can any longer fulill – whether it has ever fulilled – expectations that
it serve documentary or instrumental ends. Are imaginary voyages enough, if
they are seductive, variegated, and well constructed, and if they run the gamut
of emotions from grief to rapture?

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Since the publication of Guest’s Collected Poems in 2008, scholars at long

last have an opportunity to view the whole arc of her career and to map
its landmarks, ruptures, and high points. Ill served in the past by the few
anthologies that included her verse – “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry
Us Higher” (1960) and “Red Lilies” (1973), for example, simply are not rep-
resentative of her poetry at its best – her canon remains in l ux. As scholars
become more familiar with her work, its excellences should become more
evident. Young poets are helping. The British poets Andrea Brady and John
Wilkinson, for instance, have written invaluably about her poetics.28 One
can no longer talk about the mid-twentieth-century New York School as if it
were a boys’ club. We still do not know, however, what the circle’s achieve-
ments and legacy will look like once we fully appreciate that Guest was in
the tree house all along.

*
Critics still might not have a complete picture about the original core group
of New York School poets, but that has not prevented them from talking
conidently about second, third, and even fourth generations of the New
York School. The second generation, for example, is usually taken to include
such igures as Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Joe Ceravolo, Clark Coolidge,
Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, all of
whom were active in New York in the later 1960s or the early 1970s. After
O’Hara’s untimely death in 1966, he was especially revered, and much of
Berrigan’s work, as well as Notley’s and Waldman’s earliest verse, reads like
pastiche of O’Hara’s writings, especially his “I do this, I do that” poems:

Time of, dress warmly, 3 A.M . walk

Coat over sweater, shawl over
Hair, boots over slippers, snow
On & over all, I forgot
To mention I’m drunk (martini
& piece of toast)29

Other writers pushed further the radical linguistic experiments that character-
ize such works as Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On and Ashbery’s The Tennis
Court Oath. Coolidge’s The Maintains (1974) is a good example of this tendency:
“at in as on ones / one soon at some as / book on coition lies / abrase snails.”30
Perhaps the most inventive igure in second-generation circles was Mayer,
who was more deeply involved than the others in the New York art world of
the period. (She co-edited the journal 0 to 9 with the conceptual and body artist

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 The New York School

Vito Acconci, for example.) Her work sometimes incorporates photography,

and she is as liable to exhibit the results in a gallery as to publish them. Her pro-
ject Studying Hunger, which still has yet to be published in full, is a prolonged
inquiry into the most fundamental aspects of her existence, namely, how and
what she thinks, feels, and perceives. The resulting prose poetry is self-inter-
rupting, slow moving, and, as it accretes over page after page, extraordinary in
its wholly focused unceasing act of introspection:
A start. A stop. I am woman of beginning. You are all at the shore. You are a
center, you design a week, the meek, a mile, the shore, endless beginnings of
entropy, endless universe of design. New words. What can I speak of, what
can I call? Can I call you, all of you, all, call you to me, can I embrace, can
embrace all, all parade, all center & all (a picture) never, & ever the bird that
speaks, that bird cannot speak, this call to all, eternal rhyme & time, she only
knows the simplest words, the smallest prose closed of design. She opens, she
is cool, she is call of all that wild, she is unerring, she is fall.31
In such writing, Mayer reprises the New York School fascination with every-
day experience and pushes it in a dramatically new direction.
While a second generation of New York School writers is relatively easy
to identify – one can discern a number of young poets who moved to
New York and self-consciously styled themselves as the heirs of O’Hara
and his friends – it becomes increasingly more diicult and tendentious to
track further generations. A critic has to decide which institutions, which
poets, and what kind of aesthetics should deserve priority. One could, for
example, single out St. Mark’s Poetry Project as the core of an ongoing
New York School tradition, because many of the second-generation ig-
ures either helped found it or have served as its director. Putting too much
emphasis on any one milieu, however, risks arbitrarily excluding contem-
porary writers such as, say, John Ash, Anne Lauterbach, Marjorie Welish,
and John Yau whose poetry is manifestly in dialogue with Ashbery’s yet
who are not usually associated with St. Mark’s. Alternatively, one could
limit the label “third generation” to a circle of poets, including Eileen Myles
and Tim Dlugos, who came into their own in the 1980s and whose verse,
while drenched in O’Hara and Schuyler, is more in-your-face queer in both
its themes and politics:
Leonard wears a shark’s tooth
on a chain around his neck
and long blond hair.
These days he’s the manager
of Boots and Saddles (“Bras

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 B r ian M. Re e d

and Girdles,” my beloved

Bobby used to say) and
costumer for the Gay Cable
Network’s Dating Game.32
Why, however, consider such poetry more worthy of the New York
School label than its 1980s rival, the New York branch of Language writ-
ing? Both Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, co-editors of the journal
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1977–1982), which gave the movement its name, could
be read as poet-heirs of a lineage including The Tennis Court Oath, Coolidge,
and Mayer, as these lines from Andrews’s Edge (1973) illustrate: “stallpart /
retro-bulb / spun-a-of / amethyst trunk.”33 This kind of asyntactical word
string confronts readers with the bare, brute materiality of language. They are
encouraged to contemplate sound play, indentation, and whatever else is left
when referentiality is suspended. One does not have to grasp the complex the-
oretical and socioeconomic motives informing such verse to appreciate that it
carries on, in rareied form, the New York School proclivity to think of a poem
as an abstract composition in which conveying information can be secondary
to arranging letters and words on the page in a striking manner. In short, there
are many contemporary candidates for the New York School label. After 1975
or so, it is perhaps best to stop tracing poetic Jesse Trees and to speak more
speciically about which of the many aspects of the New York School legacy
continue to be inspiring – and to whom.
One of the most oft-cited studies of the New York School, David Lehman’s
The Last Avant-Garde (1998), looks back nostalgically at the 1950s and 1960s, as
if Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, and Schuyler (he omits Guest) stood at the end of
a fabulous but doomed enterprise.34 If a person surveys subsequent American
writing, however, that is not a defensible moral to the story. It makes even less
sense if one looks at the school’s international impact. In Britain, for exam-
ple, a prominent line of poets, from Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth in the
1960s to Drew Milne and Mark Ford in the 2000s, have drawn on the New
York School for inspiration. Moreover, the group’s inl uence has not been
limited to English-speaking countries. In postcommunist Poland, poets such
as Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Podsiadło, and Miłosz Biedrzycki have promoted
“O’Harism” as a means of grappling with a swiftly changing society and cul-
ture. Around the world, numerous authors have carried on in sundry, provoc-
ative, and occasionally contradictory ways the pioneering, estranging, heady,
giddy poetics of the New York School.

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 The New York School

Notes
1. Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (New York: Grove,
1960), p. xi.
2. Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry, p. xiii.
3. John Ashbery, Selected Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005),
p. 249.
4. John Ashbery, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (New York: Ecco, 2007).
5. John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987 (New York: Knopf,
1989); Barbara Guest, Dürer in the Window, Relexions on Art (New York: Roof,
2003); Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975);
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: Braziller, 1959); Frank O’Hara,
Nakian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966); Frank O’Hara, Robert
Motherwell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965); James Schuyler,
Selected Art Writings (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1998).
6. Barbara Guest, Collected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 2008), p. 121. This collection will be cited in the text as BGC.
7. Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 183.
8. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 54.
9. Kenneth Koch, On the Edge: The Collected Long Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009),
p. 10.
10. John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1962), p. 31.
11. Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath, p. 23.
12. Ashbery, Selected Poems, p. 208.
13. Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (New York: Bloomsbury, 1992), p. 27.
14. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 26.
15. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 11–15.
16. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop,
Ashbery, and Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10.
17. James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993),
p. 12.
18. John Ashbery, April Galleons (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 1.
19. Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971),
p. 325. This collection will be cited in the text as FOC.
20. Schuyler, Collected Poems, p. 231.
21. Ashbery, Selected Poems, p. 14.
22. Recent high-proile studies include Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies:
Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press,

867
 B r ian M. Re e d

2006); Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other Abstractions
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007); Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The
Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006); John Emil
Vincent, John Ashbery: His Later Books (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2007).
23. Ashbery, Selected Poems; Ashbery, Notes from the Air; Guest, Collected Poems;
O’Hara, Collected Poems; Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford (New
York: Knopf, 2008); James Schuyler, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2007); James Schuyler, Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, ed. James
Meetze and Simon Pettet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
24. Marjorie Perlof, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977; Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997).
25. David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1985), p. 128.
26. Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (New
York: Chelsea House, 1970).
27. Barbara Guest, Herself Deined: The Poet HD and Her World (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1984).
28. Andrea Brady, “Shadowy Figures in Quill, Solitary APPARITION,” Chicago
Review 53/54:1–2 (2008), pp. 120–25; John Wilkinson, “ ‘Couplings of Such
Sonority’: Reading a Poem by Barbara Guest,” Textual Practice 23:3 (2009), pp.
481–502.
29. Alice Notley, Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), p. 9.
30. Clark Coolidge, The Maintains (Oakland, Calif.: This Press, 1974), p. 88.
31. Bernadette Mayer, “From Studying Hunger,” in Ron Silliman (ed.), In the
American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry (Orono, Maine: National Poetry
Foundation, 1986), pp. 410–24, 416.
32. Tim Dlugos, Powerless: Selected Poems 1973–1990 (London: High Risk, 1996),
p. 74.
33. Bruce Andrews, Edge (Washington, D.C.: Some of Us Press, 1973), n.p.
34. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets
(New York: Doubleday, 1998).

868
 Chapter 38
The Uses of Authenticity: Four Sixties Poets
N ic k H a l pe r n

The 1960s was an explosive decade in America, in poetry as in every other

aspect of culture. Adding to the atmosphere of challenge and risk was an
extraordinary emphasis on “authenticity.” What was meant by the word?
Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) wrote,
The word “authenticity” comes so readily to the tongue these days and in so
many connections that it may very well resist . . . deinition . . . but I think that
for the present I can rely on its suggesting a more strenuous moral experience
than “sincerity” does . . . and a less acceptant and genial view of the social
circumstances of life. At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that
was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of
little account.1
Many cultural critics have doubted the success, even the authenticity, of
the decade’s eforts at achieving authenticity. Trilling himself wrote that
“concerted efort . . . to achieve authenticity generates its own conventions.”2
And although Paul Breslin writes that the poets of the 1960s “shared a con-
ception of poetry as engaged in the liberation of human consciousness,” he
suggests that the same has been true many times before, most notably in
the Romantic period. Some poetry “praised for its ‘openness to experience,’ ”
Breslin adds, “has been every bit as narrowly ‘closed’ in its own way, as the
poetry it replaced.”3
For many writers in the 1960s, authenticity was necessary only as a prereq-
uisite for a life dedicated to radical change: to the civil rights movement, for
example, or to the rise of feminism, or to work against the Vietnam War. To
become truly authentic, a poet had to put herself into some relation with the
enormous social and political changes around her. But what relation? Should
one concentrate one’s authentic energies on one’s inner or private life or on
the outer political and public world?

869
 N ic k H al pe r n

Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov all did
some of their best and most inl uential work in the 1960s, and in response
to the changes that vexed decade brought. These four poets ofer a range of
versions of authenticity and at the same time show the variety of possibilities
open to poets about the uses of authenticity. Each of the four poets tried to
write about both the inner and outer worlds. Poets, of course, have always
written about both, but these poets saw enormous pressure to choose one or
the other. Everything seemed to hinge on the choice. These four poets – it’s
one of the most interesting things about their work – refused to choose. The
poems they produced in attempting (for better or for worse) to do justice to
both realms are a signiicant part of what we think of (with admiration and
chagrin) when we remember the poetry of the 1960s.

*
Poets of the 1960s were divided into several camps. Poets were at times over-
conident about the poetic voices coming from their own camp and impatient
with those they heard from other camps. Behind this bravado there was for
many poets a profound anxiety about inding an authentic voice. The sixties
poets didn’t think ahistorically: they understood that others had undergone
this struggle earlier. If the Romantics had experienced the same anxieties, that
didn’t bother these poets, who welcomed whatever help they could get, espe-
cially because, as Devin Johnston writes, “the Romantic self-deinition was,
through the 1950s, heretical in New Critical terms.”4
The belief that many of the poets of that time had in common was the
notion that one’s poetic voice was something to which one had to win access.
(Having already published books of well-regarded verse was no guarantee
of poetic authenticity.) Winning access, though, didn’t have to be a slow or
painful process. Allen Ginsberg’s fearlessness in the face of social norms and
legal obstacles and Robert Lowell’s mildly anxious but mostly untroubled
accounts of getting from the impersonal obscurities of Lord Weary’s Castle
to the autobiographical complexities of Life Studies could seem to suggest
that access to an authentic voice might not be so diicult. And when Donald
Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, came out in 1960, with its divi-
sion of poets into camps, many of the poets in its pages felt conident that the
future belonged to their camp. By 1965 Allen’s anthology had gone through
eight printings, for a total of 40,000 copies. Whatever the writers in The
New American Poetry thought of one another, many of them shared a sense
of condescension toward the writers in New Poets of England and America
(1957), edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson. They were

870
 The Uses of Authenticity

representative, all of them, of the past – and not of the useful (Romantic)
past.5
But powerful inhibitions were in play for some poets who wanted to escape
the past. Some of the obstacles were external and seemed to be permanent.
There were the New Critics, Cleanth Brooks, for example, and Robert Penn
Warren – or Allen Tate, who proudly announced that he, on a trip to Europe,
had thrown The New American Poetry into the mid-Atlantic.6 The New Critics’
prose emphasized craft; a poem was held together by means of tensions and
ambiguities and paradox, its unity revealed through close reading. Many poets
wrote such poems dutifully, some with a nagging sense that they were pro-
ducing period pieces.
Authentic poets would have to declare their independence not only from
the New Critics but also from the modernists. It made the situation worse that
many of the modernists were still alive as the sixties began. Stanley Kunitz
remembered that “immediately after Eliot and Pound, and Hart Crane and
Stevens and William Carlos Williams, to mention only a handful, it was dii-
cult to be taken seriously as a new American poet. . . . These [modernist] poets
would never consent to die.”7 James E. B. Breslin refers to “a crowded and
stultifying space, one illed with the most sufocating presences of all – canon-
ized revolutionaries.”8 Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, or H.D. could be
written to and visited, and they were ready to encourage younger poets. But
the younger poets, returning to their desks, might ask, with Randall Jarrell,
“How can poems be written that are more violent, more disorganized, more
obscure, more – supply your own adjective – than those that have already
been written?”9 No wonder some poets ( James Wright, Robert Duncan, and
Elizabeth Bishop, for example) took to referring to themselves, defensively, as
“minor.” The challenge, for many poets, was daunting. They had to reject the
New Critical rules regarding an acceptable poetic voice, then break away from
all or most of the modernist versions of poetic voice, and then imagine new,
more authentic versions for themselves – and also make the choice of what to
write about, the outer or the inner world.
Meanwhile, there was a matter of initial inhibitions, and some of these
inhibitions were internal. What if one felt a double loyalty to the new ways
of writing and to the old ways of writing? James Wright, in his letters, shows
how passionately some poets struggled with their divided loyalty. For some
poets, no project could have been more exhilarating, but for Wright it was
a series of occasions for blind panic. Wright had already published two well-
received books, The Green Wall (1957), chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale
Younger Poets Award, and then Saint Judas (1959). Inl uenced by John Crowe

871
 N ic k H al pe r n

Ransom, Thomas Hardy, and E. A. Robinson, the books were more than sim-
ply attempts to do homage. They were full of memorable and moving poems
about people in trouble – “A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack,” “At the
Executed Murderer’s Grave,” and “St. Judas,” for example. Why couldn’t he
keep writing poems in their vein? Richard Wilbur and John Hollander were
not disowning their poems. In addition, the iambs and trochees in his irst two
books had given him a badly needed sense of psychic stability and coherence.
Why should he reject them? And what if a poet frightened by the turmoil
of his emotions gave up meter, form, stanzas, ironies, and paradoxes, and in
exchange got nothing but the old chaos without the means to organize it? Or,
worse, what if all the new poems one wrote would seem to posterity merely
“representative” of a new decade? What if all the forward-looking poets were
creating nothing more than a new period style?
James Wright grew up in the middle of the Great Depression in the Ohio
River valley. Neither his mother nor his father graduated from high school,
and his father was repeatedly laid of by the Hazel-Atlas glass factory in
Wheeling, West Virginia. Wright experienced his irst breakdown at age six-
teen and missed an entire year of high school. After serving in Japan with the
U.S. Army’s occupation force, he entered Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill,
where he studied with John Crowe Ransom. He spent 1953 in Vienna on a
Fulbright Scholarship. Receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Washington
in Seattle (where his adviser was Theodore Roethke), he got a job in 1957 teach-
ing literature at the University of Minnesota, where one of his colleagues was
Allen Tate.
In 1958, Wright wrote the poet, translator, and editor Robert Bly a letter,
sixteen single-spaced pages long, introducing himself, and Bly responded by
inviting Wright to visit him at his farm in Rochester, Minnesota. Bly had the
knack of making transformation look both urgent and easy. He encouraged
poets to undertake a journey inward or downward to the so-called deep images
of the unconscious. The useful modernists for Bly were the Surrealists, particu-
larly those from continental Europe and South America. Bly advised Wright to
translate Gottfried Benn, George Trakl, Paul Eluard, Rene Char, César Vallejo,
Pablo Neruda, and Antonio Machado and to let their lines work their magic on
his own poetry. Wright was already familiar with some of the poets Bly men-
tioned, especially the Germans. In one of his letters to Bly he wrote,
So I used to get hideously drunk at parties of academic intellectuals, and after
the point of no return I would stand and bellow Trakl, and Carossa, and Rilke,
and Hölderlin, because nobody knew what the hell I was saying, and because I

872
 The Uses of Authenticity

only slightly felt, rather than understood, what I in the name of God was crying
in the miracles of those images that were sane to the depths of their being and
which yet followed no rules.10
Wright was eager to learn from Bly. Quickly, the closings of his letters
changed from “Sincerely, James Wright,” to “Love, Jim.” In 1958 he wrote Bly,
“Every rhythm must be new and original if it is to contain genuine imagery?
Right? Or am I missing the point? But if this is the point about rhythm then I
want to ask if you do or do not think it is possible to build a new and original
rhythm on the basis of the iambic measure.” In 1958 Wright wrote to Donald
Hall, “I was divided – really divided, as on the blade of a sword – between my
loyalty to those of my contemporaries who were trying to write with intel-
lectual grace and to those, far more disturbing and ruthless, who were raising
hell and demanding greatness” (WP, p. 131).
Who wouldn’t want to raise hell and demand greatness? Grateful as he was
for Bly’s help as a mentor, Wright began to chafe under his authority. Flattering
and attacking him in one sentence, he wrote to Bly: “Your mention of the pos-
sibilities available to us in other literatures is a great, a major statement – or
it would be, if you ofered it as a possibility (the opening of a door) rather
than as what you still too often seem to make it: a despotic command” (WP,
p. 235). Whatever his qualms, the work went on. In a letter to Roethke, Wright
wrote, “I work like hell, chipping away perhaps one tiny pebble per day from
the ten-mile-thick granite wall of formal and facile ‘technique’ which I myself
erected, and which now stands ominously between me and whatever poetry
may be in me” (WP, p. 139). All he could see now, sometimes, when he looked
at his poems of the 1950s, was competence. “I have been depressed as hell,” he
told Theodore Roethke. “My stuf stinks, and you know it. It stinks because
it is competent. . . . I am trapped by the very thing – the traditional technique –
which I labored so hard to attain” (WP, pp. 138–39).
What could be harder to unlearn than technical mastery? Yet there were
good reasons for trying. Some painters in the sixties had become interested in
the idea of “deskilling”; Bly shared in that interest. “All the traditional applica-
tions of the word craft,” he wrote, “have to be dropped.”11 There was some-
thing darker, richer, wilder than craft, and Wright asked Bly question after
question about it. “Will you please explain, however generally,” he asked him,
“what you mean by ‘the ocean world’? I don’t know Jung at all,” he added.
“I know Freud too little” (WP, p. 146). Again, though, he would resist what
he saw as Bly’s dictatorial manner. “Bob, I’m trying to say that your insis-
tence on the utter rejections of iambics is, I believe, an expression of fanatical

873
 N ic k H al pe r n

absolutism” (WP, p. 182). He could be sly, writing to Hall that “we would have
to write iambics without Bob’s knowing it” (WP, p. 187).
His poet friends – Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Donald Hall, and Anne
Sexton – were sympathetic to his struggle, but not all poets were. Denise
Levertov (whom Wright called “one of the best living poets in America”)
wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961,
I wasn’t surprised about J Wright. I heard him read a year or so ago and his
Oxford Group-type confession of guilt & conversion in regard to the iambic
pentameter & the poetry of the French & Spanish Surrealists, followed by a
reading of his old poems (disavowed 5 minutes before) . . . struck me as a weak
hypocrisy. He didn’t have the courage of his convictions because he didn’t
really have any convictions.12
It was easy for poets from other camps, the Black Mountain School, for exam-
ple, to see Wright’s passionate ambivalence as an absence of convictions. It
might have been truer to say that for Wright – as Wright said of himself –
“every absolute command that my imagination hears is almost immediately
turned into an insistence on its opposite – and this takes place not only as an
assertion of the imagination’s freedom; but also as a desire to subversively
overthrow all the critical absolutes” (WP, p. 235). He was never able decisively
to turn his back on his old poems, and, because of that divided loyalty, Wright’s
transformation into a new kind of poet was, as it turned out, not as radical as
it was for other poets. He kept the tone of melancholy and discouragement
from his irst two books, as we will see, rather than adopting Bly’s sometimes
facile conidence. And he retained the people from his irst two books. He was
not going to journey inward to a space without bringing other people, the
troubled people he had known back in Ohio.
Adrienne Rich, too, came to question the value of the poetry she had writ-
ten in the 1950s. In “The Roofwalker,” a poem in response to Levertov, Rich
asks, “Was it worth while to lay – / with ininite exertion – a roof I can’t live
under?”13 Born in 1929 in Baltimore, Rich grew up, unlike Wright, in a book-
ish household. If Wright had Bly as his problematic mentor, Rich’s diicult
mentor was her father, a doctor and pathology professor at Johns Hopkins
University. Her memories of him suggest that the only presence more formi-
dable than a father igure (such as Bly) may be an actual father. Rich would
recall,
My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books,
with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years
I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I

874
 The Uses of Authenticity

was indeed “special.” The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a
long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him (ARP, p. 170).

Writing to “not displease” was a habit that many poets of that time had to
break free from if they were to ind an authentic voice.
In the 1950s Rich wrote two books of well-received poetry. Her irst book,
A Change of World (1951), published while she was still an undergraduate at
Radclife, was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award.
Auden, in his foreword to A Change of World, was decidedly not displeased,
praising Rich’s poems in words that have become notorious: “I suggested at
the beginning of this introduction that poems are analogous to persons; the
poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed,
speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed
by them, and do not tell ibs.”14 Like Wright, Rich was inl uenced by Frost
and Robinson, and also by Yeats, Stevens, Dickinson, and Auden. Living in
Cambridge with her economist husband, who taught at Harvard; writing
elder-respecting, father-pleasing poetry; and having three children in four
years, her work and her life were full of examples of what Wright was worry-
ing about: competence. But almost the only thing readers say today about the
poems in A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters (1955) – almost the only
thing she herself could say later – is that she seems memorably alert to var-
ious kinds of impending doom. In poems like “Storm Warnings” and “Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers” she predicts calamities and writes about the need to prepare
for them. Many of the poems are about the intuition that the world (which
usually consists of everything the speaker understands by ordinary domestic-
ity) will have to come to an end. The construction of these poems – and this
must have been, in part, what frustrated Rich about them later – suggests that
great changes can be prepared for and guarded against. Meter, stanzaic form,
rhyme: formalism was useful against any eventuality. Looking back in 1971 at
her earlier poems, Rich wrote, “In those years formalism was part of the strat-
egy – like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick
up barehanded” (ARP, p. 171). It was not clear to her yet that it would ever be
necessary to pick the materials up barehanded.
Robert Duncan seems to have been prepared for something resembling the
1960s, although it seems fair to say that he would have been prepared for an
even freer, weirder decade. According to Michael Davidson, Duncan “wrote
self-consciously as an outsider to the literary establishment, a gay writer in
a homophobic society, an anarchist within the anti-Stalinist left, a bookish
poet among bohemians, a bohemian among academics, a formalist among

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free versists, a ield poet among closed formalists.”15 Duncan, too, had grown
up in a house full of books, but the books were of a particular kind. Born
in 1919, he was, at the age of six months, adopted by a Theosophist family.
His grandmother was a member of a splinter group of Madame Blavatsky’s
Theosophical Society. His aunt, Fayetta Harris Phillip, wrote books with titles
like The New Hypothesis, Soul Psyche, and The Lady Alchemist. It was an upbring-
ing to which he returned again and again in his essays and poetry. He wrote
to H.D, “For me as a child there was the beneicial sense of the cosmos, of
life being shared with everything in the universe.”16 In another letter to H.D.,
he wrote, “You know I was surrounded in my childhood by the cast of a
Hermetic Brotherhood . . . we were told how we were adopted (my sister and
I) by design of the stars; and we were told that we had past-lives.”17
The fact that the Theosophical conversations went on endlessly (as another
letter says) “over his head,” and that, as he says, he was never “initiated,” may
have spared him the kind of parental pressure that Rich struggled to escape.
In his notes to his book on H.D., Duncan remembered “that my worship
belonged to no church, that my mysteries belonged to no cult, that my learn-
ing belonged to no institution, that my imagination of my self belonged to
no philosophic system.”18 What he inherited instead of “the rites” was a sense
(like Yeats had, while he was writing A Vision) of imminent possibility, a kind
of perpetual spiritual suspense. Anything could happen at any moment (in
the world or on the page) and with wonderfully unforeseeable consequences.
Although he sought out mentors (Pound and H.D., among the modernists),
he treated their doctrines with a determined lightness; he was cautious and
exploratory in his relation to them. Their doctrines were true and untrue; one
believed and did not. ( James Merrill was similarly ambivalent in his attitude to
the occult doctrines presented in The Changing Light at Sandover.) In the poem
“Roots and Branches,” he referred to “casual certainties,” and he called one of
his books of essays Fictive Certainties.19 Not that the inl uences weren’t impor-
tant. Duncan wrote to H.D.,

I remember most clearly the aura [of Pound’s canto 1] “And then went down
to the ships, set keel to the breakers, forth on the godly sea” had. I was seven-
teen, away at college then . . . I went to the bookstore and read those opening
lines, just the two, from which dreams of everything poetry could be to fulill
old promises seemd to low.20

As Duncan tells her more than once in his letters, he was also deeply inl u-
enced by H.D. “Your presence had spoken so directly to me in your work,
and freed in me some force, even the force, of my own work.”21 But presences

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were always speaking directly to him, and forces within him were frequently
being freed – and somehow he was always himself, miraculously, free of those
forces. He published essays toward an extended study of H.D. called The
H.D. Book, but he never completed it. (It was published by the University of
California Press in 2011.) At the same time he read Edith Sitwell, Saint-John
Perse, Coleridge, Blake, Christopher Smart, Thomas Browne, Plotinus, Plato,
and Heraclitus. And (as he says in “Night Songs,” a poem in Roots and Branches)
he dreamed about the earliest songs, the songs at the beginning of everything.
“O to release the irst music somewhere again / for a moment to touch the
design of the irst melody.”22 A lover of “the old lore,” which he found every-
where – in old books, in everyday life, and in his dreams – Duncan was a
collapser of distinctions. What sets him apart in this quartet is that, from the
beginning, the inner and private and the outer and public worlds (for better or
worse) were one to him.
Duncan went to the University of California at Berkeley in 1936. In 1940,
he was drafted and served at Fort Knox, and in 1941 he was discharged for
homosexuality. After his 1943 essay “The Homosexual in Society” appeared in
politics, a journal edited by Dwight MacDonald, his poem “An African Elegy,”
which had been accepted for the Kenyon Review by John Crowe Ransom, was
rejected by Ransom. Ransom wrote that “I read the poem as an advertisement
or a notice of overt homosexuality, and we are not in the market for literature
of this type.”23
In 1945 Duncan enrolled at Berkeley to study medieval history and began
his friendship with Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and James Broughton. Duncan’s
irst book, Heavenly City, Earthly City, was published in 1947. Meeting Charles
Olson that year, Duncan was highly inl uenced by Olson’s theory of projective
verse and “composition by ield.” Like Wright, he thrived on assertions of the
imagination’s freedom from every critical absolute – including the insistence
on total liberation from the past. In 1950 Duncan published Medieval Scenes. In
1951 he began his long relationship with his lover, Jess Collins, a painter and col-
lagist with whom he collaborated. They lived in Mallorca for several years, as
did Robert Creeley, who published Duncan in the magazines (Origin and Black
Mountain Review) that Creeley edited or co-edited; in 1956 Duncan, like Creeley,
came to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Olson was
the rector. Duncan’s major works in the sixties included The Opening of the
Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). All the while,
he insisted that his work was not major and not even original. In his second
letter to Denise Levertov, he wrote, “My titles now for volumes of poetry are:
IMITATIONS, and DERIVATIONS. “originality” is NOT either interesting

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or available to me” (DLL, p. 5). He saw himself as bringing all his inl uences
together into a sort of grand collage. Christopher Beach writes that
Duncan is a poet so highly aware of his own use of poetic models that in his
work the poem, book or entire corpus can be viewed as an open ield for the
interplay of poetic sources. Duncan is not confused by this complex relation-
ship to past writers and texts; instead, he speaks forthrightly about the natural
process of derivation, which is a central aspect of all poetry.24
Just as forthrightly, Duncan rejected the idea of achievement itself. In his
essay “Pages from a Notebook,” he asks, “Why should one’s art then be an
achievement? Why not, more an adventure?” He added,
Poems are now, when they are “ours,” fountains: as in Oz, of life or of forget-
fulness of self-life. What we expected poetry to be when we were children.
A world of our own marvels. Doors of language. Adoration. We dreamd
not originally of publishing. What a paltry concern. No child of imagination
would center there. But we dreamd of song and the reality of romance.25
After Bending the Bow (1968), Duncan vowed not to publish another book
for ifteen years, and he kept his vow. Michael Davidson writes that Duncan
preferred instead “to distribute typescript copies of his work in progress to
friends. . . . Duncan felt that the demands of writing ‘toward’ a book (many
of his previous books had been composed as uniied texts rather than selec-
tions of poems) limited his ability to compose at random.”26 Publishing, for
Duncan, was a distraction from the work, from the interplay of poetic sources,
and from the world within and the world without.
Meanwhile he (cheerfully) called himself trendy and pretentious and fraud-
ulent. Self-descriptions that would paralyze any other poet had the efect
of spurring Duncan on. While Wright had been anxious about becoming a
merely representative poet, a poetaster following fads, Duncan was blithely
unconcerned. It wasn’t arrogance but a kind of ininitely patient fascination
with all the byways of his mysterious creative itinerary. (At the same time,
he was generous in encouraging other poets to follow their own paths. After
Duncan published Aram Saroyan’s one-word poem “Lighght” in the Chicago
Review in 1968, George Plimpton included the poem in the American Literary
Anthology, which was published in 1969 with help from a National Endowment
of the Arts grant. A controversy then erupted in Congress, with Senator Jesse
Helms demanding to know how a poem could consist of one word, especially
when that word was misspelled. Saroyan’s career was made.)
Duncan continued on his own idiosyncratic path. He had organized his
writing life so that nothing could ambush him, certainly no sense of having

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gone the wrong way. Alan Williamson writes, “Duncan would argue that at
least in a certain kind of self-exploratory poetry there are, as in psychoanal-
ysis, no wrong turnings. Every statement, and every misstatement, reveals
the self.”27 And there were his precursors, constant presences, giving him
encouragement, as did Denise Levertov, who wrote him that everything he
did had “a crazy exalted validity, no matter what” (DLL, p. 17). Their relationship
involved an intimate, ongoing exchange of permissions. His poem “Often I
Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” (the irst poem in The Opening of the
Field) begins,
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.28
Levertov helped him believe (what he already knew) that the space he wrote
about and the space he wrote from were both his and not his. The worlds of
the collective unconscious and of his own imagination were (again, for better
or worse) the same world to him. Collapsing all distinctions (or hoping to),
Duncan wrote with a sly, childlike, sometimes ecstatic conidence. Davidson
writes that in Duncan “the poet returns to ‘a place of irst permission’ where
suppressed meanings intrude onto the surface text. Those meanings include
archaic survivals of cultic and atavistic relations whose doctrines propose a
unity of spirit and form. . . . The ultimate meaning of this ‘ield’ of origins is
often a sexual mystery – an allegory of homosexual or bisexual love.”29 Levertov
was instrumental throughout the 1950s and 1960s in helping him maintain his
conidence in writing his poems, as he was in helping her to maintain hers.
Denise Levertov was born in 1923 in Ilford, a suburb of London, and was
educated at home. Levertov’s father, a Russian immigrant Jewish scholar,
joined the Church of England as a student at Konigsberg in the 1890s; his life-
long hope was to unify Judaism and Christianity. Levertov was proud of her
mystical lineage: among her father’s ancestors was the nineteenth-century
Hasidic mystic Schneur Zalman, and among her mother’s visionary ancestors
was the Welsh tailor and mystic Angel Jones.
Levertov published her irst poem in 1940, when she was seventeen. During
the Second World War she served as a civilian nurse in London. One of the
New Romantics (along with Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine, and George

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Barker), Levertov published her irst book of poems, The Double Image, in 1945.
After the war she met her future husband, Mitchell Goodman, in Switzerland.
Moving to America with him in 1948, she broke with the New Romantics and
began writing poems of “dailiness” inl uenced by William Carlos Williams’s
short lyrics and by Pound’s Imagist poems. In 1953 she visited Williams at
his home in Rutherford, New Jersey, and maintained a friendship with him
until his death in 1963. If Williams opened up the world of the everyday for
Levertov, Robert Duncan suggested ways to write poems responsive to the
mysterious world of her spiritual inheritance. (His interests were not enor-
mously diferent from those of Kathleen Raine.) In addition, Duncan and
Creeley introduced her to the ideas of Black Mountain. Would it be possible
to be both kinds of poet: a follower of Williams, writing about the ordinary
world, and a student of Duncan’s, writing about the magic worlds within
and without? Duncan was sure it would be. So was Levertov. Not everyone
believed her. Robert Bly wrote, “She wants to live as other people and then
write as a mystic. That is impossible.”30 Levertov, undiscouraged in her ambi-
tions, trusted in her American mentors. It does not seem to have been a strug-
gle for her to adapt and alter her voice, and once she assumed it she kept it,
for better or worse, until the end of her life. Over the years she had developed
what Charles Altieri calls “an aesthetics of presence,” a determination (in part
derived from her spiritual background) to bear witness to the spiritual fullness
of the passing moment.31 (Hence her relationship to Duncan and Williams.)
The poems to which readers most responded came out of that aesthetic, and
she trusted it. Meanwhile, as the sixties continued, she began to take on a more
public role. In 1961 and again from 1963 to 1965, she was poetry editor of the
Nation (and in the 1970s for Mother Jones); her academic employment included
Vassar, City College of New York, Berkeley, and MIT.
Duncan and Levertov’s letters (seven hundred pages of them, published
in 2004 by Stanford University Press) record a long series of acts of mutual
encouragement: two poets on opposite coasts, almost never meeting, engaged
in an intense, afectionate, wide-ranging conversation. The letters communi-
cate a sense of almost unimpeded intimacy. Almost, because there were signs
of tension in the 1950s, and in the 1960s the signs began to increase. In “Some
Duncan Letters – A Memoir and a Critical Tribute (1975),” Levertov wrote,
Throughout the correspondence there run certain threads of fundamen-
tal disagreement; but a mentor is not necessarily an absolute authority, and
though Duncan’s erudition, his being older than I, his often authoritative
manner, and an element of awe in my afection for him combined to make

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me take, much of the time, a pupil role, he was all the more a mentor when
my own convictions were clariied for me by some conl ict with his.32
When she had a conl ict with Duncan, it usually had to do with her taking the
side of day-to-day reality in an aesthetic debate. Sometimes their arguments
had to do with their sense of what was and wasn’t poetry. Levertov could not
ind a way to share Duncan’s enthusiasm about Gertrude Stein’s language
games, nor was she interested in the kind of verbal ambiguities with which
Duncan was enthralled.
But they always had Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjief or Gershom Scholem
to correspond about. What they shared, always, was a sense of gratitude for
the “old lore” and a feeling of excitement about the ways it came alive in their
poetry. Albert Gelpi writes that “what bonded them was the efort to invest the
kinds of formal experimentation they learned from Pound and Williams with
something of the metaphysical aura and mystique of the Romantic imagina-
tion” (DLL, p. xiii). Levertov was more securely in touch with the world of
the everyday (as it included both ordinary objects and political events) than
Duncan was, and again and again he told her that she gave him a sense of
the concrete particular that he longed for – when he did long for it. “Is there
something in our undertaking religion or magic that declines, has begun to
decline, the open risk of life?”33 Duncan had asked H.D. It was a question that
preoccupied him, and Levertov was able (when called on) to answer it for him.
“I don’t think any poet,” she wrote him, “however diferent in kind, can aford
to forget the words ‘No ideas but in things’ ” (DLL, p. 59). Had the 1960s turned
out diferently, she and Duncan would have been friends for life.
Eight years passed between Rich’s second book, The Diamond Cutters, and
her third book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, in 1963. Great changes were
happening everywhere the poet looked. Nations were testing nuclear weapons
and each other: in October 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the brink
of nuclear annihilation. In November, George Wallace was elected governor
of Alabama, and in January he gave his “Segregation Forever” inauguration
speech. In the summer of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a
Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 1963 President Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas.
This was the atmosphere in which Rich’s new poems were written and the
world her book faced. No longer organized around elegant intimations of
disaster, Rich’s poems now employ lat descriptions of fact and plain state-
ments of feelings. The storm was in progress, and Rich needed an answer-
able style, one that could talk about events outside houses and inside them.

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She wanted to be able to say not only what had happened in America and
the world but also how it had been experienced by her and people like her,
how the events had inl uenced their domestic and inner worlds. She recalled,
in 1964,
In the period in which my irst two books were written I had a much more
absolutist approach to the universe than I now have. I also felt as many people
still feel – that a poem was an arrangement of ideas and feeling, predeter-
mined. . . . Only gradually, within the last ive or six years, did I begin to feel . . .
that in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsiied even, certain disturbing
elements, to gain that perfection of Order. (ARP, p. 165)
“Perfection of Order” was a diicult thing to surrender. A patient attention
to craft was what she had been raised to value. At the same time there was
the “extraordinary relief ” (as she also remarked) of writing angry, impatient
poems, of taking on the tremendous energy of the storm she had earlier
dreaded.
But some of her strongest poems were about exhaustion. In “Snapshots of
a Daughter-in-Law,” she writes, “Banging the cofee-pot into the sink / she
hears the angels chiding, and looks out / past the raked gardens to the sloppy
sky. / Only a week since They said Have no patience” (ARP, p. 9). What’s nota-
ble in these lines is the tone of grim reportage, of a stubborn commitment,
no matter how tiring and destructive it might prove, to accuracy about her
feelings. Everything makes ugly, unpleasant sounds. The cofee pot bangs,
the angels chide. Work is never done. The garden is raked, but the sky is still
sloppy. Whatever good may come will not arrive in an atmosphere of gran-
deur or grace. But something, some change will come. The lines are mem-
orable in their insistence on idelity to experience and their refusal to draw
prematurely optimistic conclusions from that experience.
These changes became the subject of her most memorable poems of the
1960s. Rich moved with her family to New York in 1966. Her husband took
a teaching position at City College, and she taught in a remedial program
for minority students entering CUNY colleges. In 1967 Rich held positions
at Swarthmore College and Columbia University and, from 1968, with City
College of New York. In Necessities of Life (1966), Lealets (1969), and The Will
to Change (1971), she writes about contemporary topics, “Vietnam and the lov-
er’s bed” (ARP, p. 263). Again, Rich strove to write poems that showed how an
individual’s inner and private world could be, must be, radically afected and
altered by outside events, hopeful and nightmarish, both at home and abroad.
The rise of feminism was particularly important to her, although it didn’t con-
sume her attention until the 1970s.

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Many poets were sympathetic to Rich’s work, but some were not. When
Levertov became an editorial adviser for the publisher W. W. Norton in the
mid-1960s, she added Rich to its list. Robert Duncan’s response was condescend-
ing about what he called the “genteel sensibilities” of the new poets Levertov
favored (DLL, p. 543). Duncan believed in 1966 that Rich’s sensibilities were still
(would always be) genteel. Probably he meant that she had gone to Harvard.
(Not every poet she added to the list was uncongenial to Duncan: for example,
Ronald Johnson, a poet associated with the Black Mountain School’s second
generation and later with concrete poetry, whose mystical, diicult, 250-page
poem ARK was, like Duncan’s serial poem Passages, decades in the writing.)
No one’s condescension could discourage Rich, though. She had broken
away from unsupportive igures and was on her own now. There was always
her father, but she was breaking away from him as well. In Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law there is a powerful poem about her father, “After Dark.” She
writes, “That terrible record! how it played // down years, wherever I was
/ in foreign languages even.” And she continues with repetition: “over and
over, I know you better / than you know yourself I know // you better than you
know / yourself I know / you until, self-maimed, / I limped of, torn at the
roots” (ARP, pp. 24–25). I know you better / than you know yourself. Like
James Wright, and Robert Duncan (in his way), Rich had to declare a kind of
independence from her mentors, to say that she knew herself better than her
mentors knew her. Rich had the sense after Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
that she had left – with varying degrees of diiculty and regret – her father
and the New Critics and the high modernists behind. In “In the Evening,”
from Lealets, she writes, “The old masters, the old sources, / haven’t a clue
what we’re about, / shivering here in the half-dark sixties.”34 And in “The Blue
Ghazals,” from The Will to Change, she addresses Wallace Stevens, one of the
“old masters” who inl uenced her early work: “Would this have left you cold,
our scene, its wild parades, / The costumes, banners, incense, lowers, the
immense marches?”35
Poets who have had to break away from mentors will (sometimes) be for
that reason more useful as examples. Adrienne Rich, as the 1960s continued,
was concerned with making herself a model for others, and she wrote more
and more about her life in the world. She insisted on writing poems about pol-
itics and about her personal life, arguing again and again that they were part
of the same phenomenon. Let others choose the political or the personal. She
chose both. Where Duncan collapsed distinctions between the inner and the
outer, and Wright brought the memories of the outer world with him on his
journey into his inner world, Rich was more alert to the tensions between the

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two worlds, writing poems that showed the constant and complicated tension
between them.
Another poet of that time might have chosen the confessional mode. But,
although Rich wrote powerful poems about the end of relationships, the con-
fessional mode didn’t attract her. She was determined to tell her stories in a
way that would prove useful to sympathetic readers. Like Wright, Duncan,
and Levertov, Rich wanted to attach her poetry to something more capacious
than her personal biography. She developed new tonalities appropriate to
political rage and to subversive acts of tenderness. In order to avoid a tone of
magisterial isolation, that of the leader moving ever ahead of her followers – a
tone to which she was drawn – Rich fought to keep herself on the same level
as the readers (women, more and more) to whom her poems were addressed.
Prophetic isolation was a temptation, but Rich kept ighting it. David Kalstone
wrote, “Rich’s poems are bound to be restless, bound to be looking constantly
for new beginnings, because they will never resign themselves to solitude.”36
Over and over, she imagined herself in conversation with her readers. “Our
future depends on the sanity of each of us,” Rich wrote in 1975, “and we have
a profound stake, beyond the personal, in describing our reality as candidly
and fully as we can to each other.”37 Kalstone writes that “her poems, however
public in reference, proceed in a tone of intimate argument, as if understand-
ing – political as well as private – is only manifest in the tones with which we
explain ourselves to lovers, friends, our closest selves.”38
James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break (1963) showed the extent of his
engagement with Deep Image poetics. Galway Kinnell, another Deep Image
poet (others included W. S. Merwin, William Staford, Donald Hall, David
Ignatow, and John Haines), described the strategy of making a progress inward
“until you’re just a person. If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you’d
inally not be a person either; you’d be an animal; and if you kept going deeper
and deeper, you’d be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a
stone could read, [Deep Image] poetry would speak for it.”39 David Perkins
writes that Deep Image poetry “appealed as a way of evading the ego and
making contact with a deeper self, sometimes identiied as the unconscious.
Or it allowed one, so the theory went, to get beyond the personal, social and
historical and to reach a more essential reality.”40 Among the words the Deep
Image poets used were “stone,” “dark,” “water,” “blood,” “tree,” “night,”
“wind,” “branch,” “voice,” “light,” “face,” “ashes,” “moon,” “dead,” “snow,”
“birds,” and “silence.” Even for an unsympathetic reader guarded against
them, these words instantly evoked a certain atmosphere. More was prom-
ised by the images, though, than simply a mysterious mood. The deep image

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carried with it a kind of promise of happiness, especially in Bly’s account. For

him, the deep image had power to heal.
But not every Deep Image reader or poet felt the healing efect. To Robert
and Carol Bly, Wright wrote, “I am just alien, that’s all. My relation to everyday
life, in short, is incredibly tortured” (WP, p. 236). He was, unlike Rich, resigned
to solitude. Writing, in 1972, to Helen McNeely Sherif, his high school Latin
teacher, Wright remembered that “for me personally, the years between 1962
and 1968 were riddled with a confusing and sometimes harrowing loneliness. I
was teaching all the time . . . but even so, I did a good deal of rootless prowling
all around the United States whenever I got the chance” (WP, p. 375). Along
with a sense of despair, Wright’s poems communicated a sense of compassion
for the poor and homeless, the alcoholics, and the physically or mentally ill.
“The sufering of other people,” Robert Hass explained, “particularly the lost
and the derelict, is actually a part of his own emotional life.”41 Shall We Gather
at the River (1967), in particular, is a book notable for the sadness pervading it.
Nothing breaks the hushed spell of the book unless it’s the speaker’s inter-
mittent sense of panic. It reads as if it were a last book. Even the poems that
feel theatrical take on the special power of occasions in which some small
event or terrible feeling is being enacted or experienced for the last time. “The
Life” ends with the words, “It is the old loneliness. / It is. / And it is / The last
time.”42 A reader would be tempted to call it a inal testament – but “testa-
ment” is too elevated a word for a book of poems that often have recourse to
mumbling and muttering and silence.
The sense of a real person, of unaccommodated humanness, in the poems
of Wright’s two 1960s books kept his Deep Image poems from appearing to
play simply the same trick over and over. His work remains compelling to so
many readers in part because of the poems in which he brooded (sometimes
in oblique ways) on his disappointment with the images, with their power to
heal or even comfort. Here is the last stanza of one of the poems in Shall We
Gather at the River:

No!
I kneel down, naked, and ask forgiveness.
A cold drizzle blows into the room,
And my shoulders l inch to the bone.
You have nothing to do with us.
Sleep on.43

Words emerge from the Deep Image lexicon – “cold,” “bone,” “sleep” – and
they try to do what is expected of them, but the speaker is already beyond the

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reach of consolation. The deep images are not helping. At the same time, he
doesn’t depend entirely on them. He is looking outward as well.
Wright died in 1980 of cancer of the tongue. His widow, Anne Wright,
choosing the poems to include in Wright’s Selected Poems, wrote in the preface
to that book, “It was natural to me to gravitate to the later books, especially
those written after our irst trip to Europe in 1970. It was then that the dark-
ness in his poems became infused with the light of Italy and France.”44 Still,
although Stephen Yenser calls Moments of the Italian Summer “a splendid little
book,” the Wright poems that most readers remember and value are mostly
in the books of the 1950s and 1960s.45
As the decade moved into its second half, the Vietnam War increasingly
took over the consciousness of Americans who were following it on the news.
Poets made statements and wrote poetry against it. Paul Breslin writes, “From
1965 onward, the war in Vietnam was the central political issue in American
life, whether one supported it or opposed it. Among intellectuals and writers,
the opposition was, by the late 1960s, almost universal.”46 In addition, more
and more Americans began to make connections between the civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War. Levertov collected signatures from hun-
dreds of artists and writers for an antiwar advertisement that appeared in the
New York Times in April 1965. That month, 25,000 people attended the irst anti-
war march in Washington. In October 1965, there were 100,000 antiwar pro-
testers in 80 cities. In his poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966), Allen Ginsberg
pronounced that the war – at least in his mind – was over.47 (Ginsberg’s par-
ticular place in the culture had, to a considerable extent, been taken over by
Bob Dylan, whose lyrics were a constant inspiration and provocation to poets
and protesters.) Meanwhile, Robert Bly began to organize a series of poetry
readings in various colleges and universities across the United States. All the
poems selected for recitation in some way relected the feelings of opposition
to the war on the part of the participants. In 1966, Bly and David Ray collected
a number of these poems and published them at the Sixties Press under the
title A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War.48 Among the members of Bly and
Ray’s organization, American Writers Against the Vietnam War, were James
Wright, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell,
and Robert Lowell. Levertov gave talks and readings against the war all over
the country, both as part of this group and on her own.
Martin Luther King, Jr., too, was beginning to give speeches against the
Vietnam War. In March 1967 when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey
addressed the National Book Award ceremonies in Manhattan, Denise
Levertov’s husband, Mitchell Goodman, led ifty people in a walkout, shouting,

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“Mr. Vice President, we are burning children in Vietnam, and you and we are
responsible!”49 In 1968 Goodman organized, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock
and William Sloane Coin, an antidraft protest, which involved gathering up
draft cards from young war protesters in Boston and elsewhere and turning
them in to the Justice Department in Washington. The three activists were
sentenced to two years in prison (overturned on appeal). Paul Breslin objects
that “the New Left . . . could mount attention-getting events – demonstrations,
draft card burnings, sit-ins at campuses and draft boards – but fared poorly
with the unglamorous tasks of recruitment and organization.”50 But this is
to underestimate the courage required to participate in many of these “the-
atrical” events. In August 1968 antiwar demonstrators were beaten by police
outside the Democratic National Convention.
More and more poets wanted to write powerful antiwar poetry in support of
the cause, and many poets were forced to adopt public voices for the irst time
in their careers. Those who weren’t sure how to do it could learn from Robert
Bly. He believed that because the authentic poet must address both worlds,
the surreal world and the real world, the “deepest privacy” (luckily) would
not have to be abandoned. In his essay “Leaping Up into Political Poetry,” he
claimed, “The political activists in the literary world are wrong – they try to
force political poetry out of poets by pushing them more deeply into events,
making them feel guilt if they don’t abandon privacy. But the truth is that the
political poem comes out of the deepest privacy.”51 Whether this version of
the statement “the personal is political” was productive of good poetry can be
seen by looking at Bly’s antiwar poems of the period. It is clear, though, why
antiwar poets were drawn to Deep Image poetics. David Perkins writes that
“during the 1960s [Deep Image poetry] seemed to many poets the only literary
language in which it was possible to write of the war in Vietnam.”52
How could Deep Image poetry be useful as a language with which to pro-
test the war? Paul Breslin tries to re-create the process by which a Deep Image
politics was formulated. “White Americans and western Europeans, from
whom I am descended,” thinks Breslin’s imagined composite Deep Image
poet, “have imposed their will on other peoples in terrible ways. What they
have done to others is analogous to what they have done to their own instincts,
justifying such oppression and repression by appeals to reason and law. It is the
ego that has done this; away with it, therefore, and with reason and law, which
are its instruments.”53 The fact that news from overseas seemed increasingly
horriic and unimaginable made Bly’s strategy seem sensible.
Levertov began to write more and more antiwar poems – she was begin-
ning to write hardly anything but antiwar poems – but she wanted to make

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them her own. In the early 1960s she had published With Eyes at the Back of Our
Heads (1960), The Jacob’s Ladder (1962), and O Taste and See (1964). Although
she might at that time have said that the central tension in her poetry (if there
was a tension) was between the everyday and the sacred or magical, the real
tension turned out to be between the everyday, the sacred, the magical, and
the Vietnam War, which was neither an everyday nor a sacred nor a magical
event. For Bly, the war was surreal. Levertov didn’t want to look at it that
way: it seemed too easy. But her models – William Carlos Williams, Robert
Duncan, and Charles Olson – were no help either, when she wanted to write
poems that would express her horror at Vietnam War atrocities. Nevertheless,
she pressed on. Her moral fervor would see her through.
Duncan made his own decisions about how to respond to the Vietnam War.
Although he did write poems like “The Up-Rising,” he made the decision to stop
writing antiwar poems. As Gelpi writes, “Convinced that his own rage at the war,
however morally justiied, implicated him in the violence and betrayed his deep-
est responsibilities as a visionary artist, Duncan chose, after 1966, to maintain an
anarchist detachment from the war zone for the sake of his life in poetry” (DLL, p.
xviii). In his “Vancouver Lecture I,” Duncan’s friend, the poet Jack Spicer, said,
So one day . . . suddenly there comes a poem which you just hate and would
like to get rid of, that says just exactly the opposite of what you mean, of what
you have to say. Like you want to say something about your beloved’s eye-
brows and the poem says the eyes should fall out, and you don’t really want
the eyes to fall out. Or you’re trying to write a poem about Vietnam and you
write a poem about skating in Vermont.54
If Duncan’s poem about Vietnam turned out to be a poem about Vermont, so
be it. In 1966 he accused Levertov of allowing her horror at the war to diminish
her ability to experience visionary wonder:
Denny, the last poem brings with it a sense of how the monstrosity of this
nation’s War is taking over your life, and I wish that I could advance some –
not consolation, there is none – wisdom of how we are to at once bear con-
stant (faithful and ever present) testimony to our grief . . . and at the same
time continue as constantly in our work . . . to keep alive the immediacy of the
idea and of the eternal. (DLL, p. 563)

One can imagine how irritating such a letter must have been for Levertov to
receive. His manner had been “often authoritative” but never so patronizing.
More condescending letters were to come.
Levertov responded to Duncan that she needed to write the poems she was
writing, even if they were taking over her life. In “Life at War,” from To Stay

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Alive (1971), for example, she wrote of the pain and horror of knowing that
human beings,
delicate Man, whose lesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are lowers that perceive the stars
whose music excels the music of birds . . .
still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.55

She had celebrated the numinous in the everyday and the divine in the human
for decades, and she could not understand how human beings could commit
such appalling acts on one another’s bodies. But an aesthetic that had valued
spontaneity and open-endedness now came to seem stif and didactic. A way
of writing (Williams with a touch of the spiritual) that had seemed adequate
to any occasion, an aesthetic that found or made occasions for so many poems,
now came to seem inadequate to any. A sense of desperation entered her anti-
war poems when – to take an example from “Life at War” – words like “mercy”
and “lovingkindness” showed their uselessness except in the service of a savage
irony and when the divine in the human seemed impossible to believe in. At
such crisis moments her voice became shrill: “burned human lesh / is smell-
ing in Vietnam as I write.” Sensing her own stridency and wanting to stabilize
the poem, she often fell back on a tone of absolute certainty. By 1971, Duncan,
ofended by her tone of moral certainty, attacked her antiwar pronouncements
as riddled with sentimental “Polonius pieties”; although he ultimately apolo-
gized, Levertov wrote, “Your letter came at least 2 years too late. I don’t ind it
in me to respond with the warmth & gladness you expected” (DLL, p. 717).
In 1970 Rich ended her marriage. Her collection Diving into the Wreck (1974)
won the National Book Award. Rich refused the award individually but joined
with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde to accept it on behalf of all women. In 1976
she came out in prose: “Heterosexuality as an institution has also drowned
the erotic feelings between women,” she wrote. “I myself lived half a life-
time in the lie of that denial. That silence makes us all, to some degree, into
liars” (ARP, p. 200). Her pamphlet “Twenty-One Love Poems,” the irst direct
treatment of lesbian desire in her work, was included in Dream of a Common
Language (1978). She has continued to write strong poetry that is both intro-
spective and politically committed.

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What happened to Deep Image poetry? Is there such a thing as post–Deep

Image poetry? The excitement didn’t last, although readers are still drawn to
Wright’s poems of the 1960s. But the poets themselves began to lose interest.
The Vietnam War came to an end. Jacques Derrida came to deliver a talk at
Johns Hopkins in 1966, and it became possible to question the idea of “depth”
without seeming uninterestingly down-to-earth. (The “image,” chastened,
returned to its place in Pound’s lexicon.) Some poets stopped descending to
the depths only because they recognized that surfaces are just as productive
of strangeness – certainly its strangeness can seem fresher. Language poets
and minimalist poets took up the burden of writing the strangest possible
poems: Robert Grenier’s work Sentences, for example, consists simply of a
box of cards, on each of which a few words or phrases are typewritten. On
one card is the phrase “waiting it out”; on another, “tree is so hazy”; and on
another, “absence of clutter.” There are ive hundred cards.
Duncan continued to keep all his inl uences in a state of suspense about
him. As Devin Johnston writes, “In both his poetry and his critical writings
on that poetry, Duncan exhibits the desire to maintain all possible interpre-
tations.”56 As Duncan himself put it, “I have never been and never will be
baptized, converted, psychoanalyzed, initiated, graduated, endowed, sacra-
mented or insured.”57 Although Levertov was no longer there to tell him
that everything he wrote had a “crazy exalted validity, no matter what,” he
succeeded in remaining a strong poet in the 1970s and 1980s. Because, as he
wrote in his notes to his book on H.D., “my worship belonged to no church
. . . my imagination of my self belonged to no philosophic system,” he con-
tinued to write idiosyncratic and distinctive poetry about both the inner and
outer worlds, refusing to acknowledge that there was any tension between
them. If his work sufered for this refusal, it gained a kind of eccentric gran-
deur at the same time. In 1984 he published Ground Work: Before the War. That
same year he was diagnosed with kidney failure. In 1987 he published Ground
Work: In the Dark, his inal collection. He died in 1988 of heart and kidney
complications.
In 1972 Levertov and Muriel Rukeyser visited Hanoi as representatives of the
American peace movement. (One can imagine Duncan telling her again that
the war was taking over her inner life.) Her book A Door in the Hive included an
elegy to Duncan. The poem begins,
You were my mentor. Without knowing it,
I outgrew the need for a mentor.
Without knowing it, you resented that,

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and attacked me. I bitterly resented

the attack, and without knowing it
freed myself to move forward
without a mentor.58
Levertov had sailed through the 1950s and 1960s with a style possibly too easily
achieved. The British New Romantics were, as a group, easily left behind. She
found a new American style by mixing Williams and Duncan. It was possible
that she hadn’t had to work hard enough for her new hybrid style, or hadn’t
ever had to make it work harder in her poems. Whether she ever did free her-
self to move forward from her mentors – from Duncan or Williams – is doubt-
ful. If David Perkins is right in saying that she “has the dubious merit of being
a completely representative poet,” her struggles show how diicult it was to
achieve an independent, authentic voice in the 1960s.59

Notes
1. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), p. 11.
2. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 105.
3. Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xiv.
4. Devin Johnston, Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 51.
5. Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York: Grove, 1960);
Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson (eds.), New Poets of England and
America (New York: Meridian, 1957).
6. James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 12.
7. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, p. 1.
8. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, p. 2.
9. Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden and Company, Essays and Reviews, 1935–1964 (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), p. 48.
10. James Wright, A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, ed. A.
Wright and S. R. Maley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 113.
This collection will be cited in the text as WP.
11. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry. Vol. 2, Modernism and After
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 567–68.
12. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise
Levertov, ed. Robert Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2004), p. 266. This collection will be cited in the text as DLL.

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 N ic k H al pe r n

13. Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth and
Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 15–16. This collection will be
cited in the text as ARP.
14. Adrienne Rich, A Change of World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1951), p. 10.
15. Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 174.
16. H.D. and Robert Duncan, A Great Admiration: H.D. / Robert Duncan:
Correspondence 1950–1961, ed. Robert Bertholf (Venice, Calif.: The Lapis Press,
1992), p. 13.
17. H.D. and Duncan, A Great Admiration, p. 45.
18. Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 69.
19. Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 3;
Robert Duncan, Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985).
20. H.D. and Duncan, A Great Admiration, p. 17.
21. H.D. and Duncan, A Great Admiration, p. 26.
22. Duncan, Roots and Branches, p. 6.
23. Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1983), p. 153.
24. Christopher Beach, Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 188.
25. Robert Duncan, A Selected Prose, ed. Robert Bertholf (New York: New
Directions, 1995), p. 14.
26. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 177.
27. Alan Williamson, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 10.
28. Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: Grove Press, 1960),
pp. 5–7.
29. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 175.
30. Robert Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (New York: Harper and
Row, 1990), p. 119.
31. Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During
the 1960s (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979), p. 24.
32. Denise Levertov, New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992),
pp. 205–06.
33. Robert Duncan, in H.D. and Duncan, A Great Admiration, p. 54.
34. Adrienne Rich, Lealets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 15.
35. Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 21.
36. David Kalstone, Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 162.

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37. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995),
p. 190.
38. Kalstone, Five Temperaments, p. 142.
39. A. Poulin, Jr., and M. Waters (eds.), Contemporary American Poetry, 8th ed.
(Boston: Houghton Mil in, 2006), p. 628.
40. Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, p. 559.
41. Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco,
1984), pp. 31–32.
42. James Wright, Shall We Gather at the River (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1967), p. 38.
43. Wright, Shall We Gather at the River, p. 44.
44. James Wright, Selected Poems, ed. A. Wright and R. Bly (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. xii.
45. Stephen Yenser, “Open Secrets,” Parnassus 6:2 (1978), pp. 125–42, 142.
46. Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse, p. 7.
47. Allen Ginsberg, Planet News (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 132.
48. Robert Bly and David Ray (eds.), A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War
(Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1966).
49. “Mitchell Goodman, Antiwar Protest Leader, Dies at 73,” New York Times,
February 6, 1997.
50. Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse, p. 17.
51. Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, p. 247.
52. Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, p. 559.
53. Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse, p. 128.
54. Peter Gizzi (ed.), The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), pp. 6–7.
55. Denise Levertov, Poems 1968–1972 (New York: New Directions, 1987), p. 122.
56. Johnston, Precipitations, p. 98.
57. Duncan, A Selected Prose, p. 3.
58. Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive (New York: New Directions, 1989), p. 4.
59. Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, p. 509.

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 Chapter 39
James Merrill and His Circles
D av i d B e rg m an

Few triumphs would be odder than if James Merrill emerged as the premier
American poet of his highly talented and various generation. And what a
generation it is. The year Merrill was born, 1926, also saw the births of A. R.
Ammons, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara. The next year
John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright were born. Merrill is far more
conservative than most of his cohort, writing in rhyme and standard meter.
In a period whose poetry is marked by self-revelation, emotional intensity,
and extremity, he is decidedly cool, discreet, and even remote. He did not
encourage disciples, although followers came. He did not seek to become a
cult igure. Yet his ambitions outstripped those of his contemporaries. In sheer
volume, even Ashbery’s 200-page elegy Flow Chart seems puny next to the 550
pages of The Changing Light at Sandover. Only a few have dared to engage in a
Virgil-like career in which short poems of technical virtuosity gave way to an
epic on cosmological themes. He asked to be compared to the leading voices
of continental modernism – Yeats, Proust, Cavafy, Rilke, and Montale – not
as a modest follower but as an equal. W. H. Auden, who inl uenced so many
poets, was Merrill’s most important predecessor; Merrill made Auden a cen-
tral character in Sandover, one whose lessons on poetry, life, and the cosmos
they discuss as comrades.
In various ways Merrill’s aspirations and ambitions are consistent with his
privileged birth. He was the son of Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill
Lynch, at one time the largest stock brokerage irm in the world. He grew up
surrounded by servants in a palatial home designed by Stanford White. He
went to Amherst College, then an exclusive men’s school. He could aford to
devote himself to literature, never needing to earn money. He traveled the
world and owned homes in Athens, Key West, and Stonington, Connecticut.
Given such privilege, how could he aspire to anything less than greatness?
And, indeed, Merrill came to win the most important awards given to
American poets. He began slowly enough. His irst volume, Jim’s Book (1942),

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inanced by his father, was published when he was only sixteen. Another
limited edition followed four years later, and it was not until his third com-
mercially published volume, Water Street (1962), that his work became widely
noticed. In the 1960s and 1970s he won the National Book Award twice (1966
and 1978), the Pulitzer Prize (1976), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1974).
Only John Ashbery could be said to be more celebrated.
Yet in many ways the work delects the very greatness to which it so clearly
aspires. The coolness of the work makes it hard to love. Its formality made it
seem like a throwback to an earlier era. Its diiculty makes it hard to assimi-
late. Its vastness is not bridged by the manic energy of James Schuyler or A. R.
Ammons. Its lyrics rarely loat with the limpid musicality of W. S. Merwin.
He does not charm like Frank O’Hara, exhort with the moral conviction of
Adrienne Rich, bemuse like Ashbery, nor sound the deep humanistic chord of
Richard Wilbur. The donné of his epic The Changing Light at Sandover is goofy –
cosmic lessons learned through a Ouija board. How can one take that seri-
ously? How could greatness arise from a source so tawdry, contemptible, even
camp? These are questions the poem raises and in raising both delects the
terms it invites and invites the terms it delects. And because Merrill always
kept readers on their toes, he may well emerge as the major poet of his time,
even as he seems unlikely to do so.
One sort of delection started early – a delection of the homosexual erot-
ics that would become central to Sandover. As Merrill explains in his memoir,
A Diferent Person (1993), “I never doubted that almost any poem I wrote owed
some of its diiculty to the need to conceal my feelings, and their objects.
Genderless as a igleaf, the pronoun ‘you’ served to protect the latter but one
couldn’t be too careful.”1 Sometimes such delections have interesting con-
sequences, as Merrill circumnavigates the issue by sailing into new waters.
Sometimes they merely mule the poem. “River Poem,” from Merrill’s
earliest commercial publication, First Poems (1951), is one that gets muled.
Ostensibly, “River Poem” is about the inability of knowing the contents of
another person’s mind, a theme it enacts by withholding what is on Merrill’s
mind. But as Merrill, who underwent extensive psychoanalysis, would know
all too well, the repressed always makes its return and becomes knowable
(to other minds), albeit in coded and displaced form. The poem begins at
the banks of a river where Charles – Merrill’s alter ego (and the name of
both his father and brother) – and his friends (all seemingly male) observe
a well-dressed, older man watching a crew team practicing.2 As if it were a
Thomas Eakins painting of the Schuylkill, the entire poem is cast in shades of
purple. Signiicantly, the older man has “lavender skin,” and his handkerchief

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topples “from his breast pocket like an iris.”3 In short, the poem codes him by
color and his dandyish apparel as an elderly homosexual, and the scene recalls
that celebrated episode of Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” when “twenty-eight
young men bathe by the river” ogled by the lonesome housewife.4 And just
as Whitman wonders “Which of the young men does she like the best?” so
Charles muses whether the rowers mean to the older man “As much as I can
imagine they mean to him” (JMC, p. 23). Charles is certain that the rowers
mean something to the older man; he is uncertain only whether they hold as
much signiicance as Charles imagines. The irst question that is dodged is
just how much Charles thinks they mean to the man. Or rather, how much
does the older man share Charles’s erotic excitement over the rowers? But the
poem immediately delects those questions with the vague assertion: “Charles
was like that.” The poem then obscures the question of desire still further by
turning the elderly man into “a river lower, thinking of rivery things.” The
rowers, the true object of the nattily dressed older man, have become the gen-
eralized “rivery things,” and then, as though that were still a bit too close for
comfort, the poem ends:
We would never
Know, this we knew, how much it had meant to him –
Oars, violet water, laughter on the stream.
Though we knew, Charles said, just how much he meant to the river.
For he moved away, leaving us there on the grass,
But the river did not vanish, or not then at least. (JMC, p. 23)
The issue now has changed. No longer is the poem about the contents of other
people’s minds; it is now about nature’s indiference to the human. The river’s
indiference to the elderly man is hardly wisdom, even for the callow Charles.
The poem seems to have reached a dead end. Yet what would happen if we
replaced “river” with “rowers”? Would Charles be so certain if he asked how
much the older man meant to the rowers? Are the rowers going to ignore the
old man? Are beautiful young men always going to ignore their admirers? Or,
to put it in Proustian terms: do we get what we want only after we no longer
want it? “River Poem” on the surface mules the very terms it sets up, but if
we do not allow these evasions and work against the poem’s delections, it
holds together reasonably well. Is “River Poem” “wholly successful,” as Daniel
Mark Epstein asserts?5 I do not think so. But it is a far more interesting poem if
we do not give into its suave delections.
“The Lovers” is another poem in which the erotic situation is immediately
swamped by metaphor. Stephen Yenser says that the “vehicle nudges the tenor

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aside,” but it seems to me the nudge is more a crushing blow – a poetic hit and
run.6 Merrill explains that the poem is “one of a great number . . . where the
human situation is a metaphor or perhaps even a vision,” and although he’s
“never altogether pleased to see this happen . . . it does again and again.”7 Once
again, readers are forced to stay on their toes. The lovers of the title appear,
if they can be said to appear at all, only in the irst line, when “They met in
loving like the hands of one / Who having worked six days with creature
and plant / Washes his hands” (JMC, p. 64). The rest of the thirty-line poem
narrates the washing and drying of those Godlike hands. Loving as a Godlike
force is a theme that Merrill will develop many times, but here the tenor gets
sidetracked as he develops the farmer/God analogy. Indeed, by concentrat-
ing on the singular farmer, Merrill obscures the plural lovers. The conclusion
obscures even the humanity of the lovers, from whose hands “issue . . . har-
vest, lood, motherhood, mystery” (JMC, p. 64).
As Merrill grew stronger as a poet and as attitudes toward homosexual-
ity changed, he found less need to delect the subject and more interesting
ways to delect it. These delections became ways of capturing the most elu-
sive emotions and ideas. His was a personality that revealed itself most when
kept partially out of view, and yet because his essential subject was love and
because he lived in an age – unlike that of Proust – when the “thin gold mask”
of literature could no longer be a ig leaf altering the sex of the beloved, he
needed to devise ever more subtle means to reveal himself (JMC, pp. 139–40).
Among Merrill’s most revealing poems is his nightmare/vision
“Childlessness,” which David Kalstone feels is the most important poem in
Water Street (1962).8 The poem grows out of a crisis described in his memoir in
which Merrill accused himself of being “nearly thirty and not yet a father!” He
felt that his childlessness was an attempt to put his parents “in their place” and
that only by siring children could he “make peace” with them (JMC, p. 203).
So anxious was he about having no children – and it is a theme that reappears
throughout his work – that he consulted his psychoanalyst. It is, therefore,
not surprising that the poem that emerged is a dream poem. It begins with
Merrill harangued by a shrewish “dream-wife” for failing to plant a garden
with “certain rare growths yielding guaranteed / Gold pollen, gender of suns,
large, hardy, / Enviable blooms” (JMC, p. 148). Merrill’s reluctance to plant
seems connected to the fact that children constitute not a new beginning but
rather a continuation of what is already “tainted,” because the rain that feeds
the garden is drawn “up from the impure ocean” and passed “through poisons
visible at sunset”; he sees himself clothed by “slow colors” that burst on him

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“like buds, / Like bombs” (JMC, p. 148). Children are bombs (not balms), and
children lead to an apocalypse.
Later I am shown
The erased metropolis reassembled
On sampans, freighted each
With toddlers, holy dolls, dead ancestors. (JMC, p. 148)

The poem ends with a cloak – not unlike the one worn by the dream wife –
thrown down for the earth to wear “in token of past servitude.” The cloak falls
“onto the shoulders of my parents / Whom it eats to the bone” (JMC, p. 148).
The poem plays out a Malthusian drama that is central to The Changing Light
at Sandover: reproduction leads not to greater fertility but rather to greater
competition over scarce resources. Childlessness is not an act of disobedience
to natural law but rather one way to curb the curse of overpopulation. The
dream wife is an “enchantress, masked as friend,” whose cape of what appears
to be “voluminous pistachio, / Safron and rose” is gemmed by bombs that
will eat us to the bone (JMC, p. 148). There is no escape from the violence and
corruption of the world; we can refuse only to play along with it. The dream
poem is one way to delect the homosexual subject and still keep it in play.
One of the ways Merrill developed to delect his meanings is through
riddles – refusing to utter key words. Take, for example, that late, light poem
“b o d y,” in which the “little kohl-rimmed moon” of an o appears on the pro-
scenium, coursing between the uprights of the b and d, while y “unanswered,
knocks at the stage door” (JMC, p. 646). To understand this little drama of the
body, one needs to know “what the b and d stood for” (JMC, p. 646), yet Merrill
keeps mum that in the sexual slang of the day, B and D (cousins to S and M)
stand for bondage and discipline. The body oscillates between the various
signs of abuse. The theatrical context may indicate that Merrill sees these var-
ious strictures as merely playacting or role-playing, but it does not alter the
fact that at some level love requires – don’t ask why – submission to punishing
forces. The body binds us and asks for discipline.
A similar but far more elaborate riddling passage occurs in “Strato in
Plaster.” The poem takes place in Greece, where Merrill lived part of each
year during the 1960s and early 1970s. Strato, a construction worker, was a
friend of Merrill; how close a friend the poem leaves unsaid. Indeed, one of its
central jobs is to delect the depth of their relationship. Nevertheless, Merrill
makes clear that Strato was so remarkably handsome in his day that people
compared him to the Apollo at Olympia; now instead of having a body carved
from marble, he has an arm cast in plaster. But that is hardly the only change

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Strato has sufered. With “Those extra kilos, that mustache / Lies found out
and letters left unanswered,” Strato “Just won’t do” (JMC, p. 336). The break
in their friendship came when Merrill refused Strato’s request for a loan. Still,
Merrill is willing to have him visit, and as he leaves, Merrill takes Strato’s
“swollen hand in both of mine,” uttering
No syllable of certain grand tirades
One spent the worse part of a fall composing,
Merely that word in common use
Which means both foolishness and self-abuse
Coming to mind, I smile
Was the break caused by too much malak ía?
Strato’s answer is a inal burst
Of laughter: “No such luck!
One day like this the scafold gave beneath me.
I felt no pain at irst.” (JMC, pp. 337–38)
What is “that word in common use / which means both foolishness and self-
abuse”? In English it is “jerk of,” and in Greek the slang term is malakía. Strato
is a jerk-of, interested in his own pleasure and his own beneit. The “break” in
their friendship was not caused, however, by too much malakía but happened
when scafolding gave way. The inal line could be interpreted in many ways.
Literally, of course, it means that the broken arm did not immediately hurt,
yet it might signal that, after his break with Merrill, Strato felt no immediate
pain but regretted it later. He also might be contrasting his absence of pain
over their breakup with Merrill’s apparent anguish, and inally he may be indi-
cating that now he feels belatedly the sadness of their rupture. Yet for all the
wordplay about masturbation, Strato’s actual relationship to Merrill remains
unspoken in “Strato in Plaster.” In a later poem, “The House Fly,” the relation-
ship is made much more explicit, but even then it is depicted in chaste terms.
Like John Donne’s “The Flea,” “The House Fly” uses an insect as the interme-
diary between people. But while Donne’s lea draws blood from the two lovers,
Merrill’s housely only alit “on the bare chest of Strato Moulouzélis / Who
stirred in the lamp-glow but did not wake” (JMC, p. 436). The poem ends years
later with another house ly and Merrill partaking of the “mist-white wafer”
of the sun, “making a rite / Distinct from both the blessing and the blight”
(JMC, p. 436). Merrill and the housely take communion, but with the sun, not
with Strato, who is both blessing and blight. If in “The Lover” Merrill’s vehicle
overwhelmed his tenor, here he plays a subtle game of suggesting a variety
of vehicles so that Strato’s bare chest and the October sun might both be the
“mist-white wafer.” The point to keep in mind is that as Merrill developed as

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a poet, his reticence, his tendency to delect information, served to open up

depth of meaning and subtle possibilities of signiicance.
One more riddle poem, “Up and Down,” is presented in two parts. The
irst part, “Snow King Chair Lift,” recounts a journey to the top of Snow King
Mountain in Wyoming, which Merrill undertook with David Jackson, “when
we still thought we were each other’s meat” (JMC, p. 340). The poem concerns
the changes in their relationship, how “each summit is a cul-de-sac,” and that
their once sexually exciting relationship has lattened into domesticity. The
section ends:
Before I led you to the next chair back
And made my crude but educated guess
At why the wind was laying hands on you
(Something I no longer think to do)
We gazed our little ills at boundlessness. (JMC, p. 340)

Once again we have a riddle. What is that “crude but educated guess / At
why the wind was laying hands” on Jackson? The answer is erotic – the wind
wants to blow him. But Merrill won’t speak the word, nor does he indicate
the sex of his companion, who is addressed by a genderless “you.” Indeed,
one of the themes of the poem is the value of reticence. Only the “very great
or very fatuous” have a right to make speeches and “complicate the pinnacles
they reach”; Merrill and Jackson do best by speaking a few words “in that
chill / Lighthearted atmosphere” (JMC, p. 340). The ecstatic is most efectively
addressed by near silence. Truly passionate moments need to be delected to
be discussed at all.
There is something sad in the fact that Merrill no longer thinks to lay hands
on David Jackson, that the physical dimension of their relationship has ended.
Yet this is a love poem, and part of the delicate dance that is typical of Merrill
is the way he treats these painful episodes by producing a “chill / Lighthearted
atmosphere.” Many poems leave Merrill dangling by a thin cable over a seem-
ingly boundless landscape and making the best of his dangerous and comic
position. Merrill remains reined and cheery, even under the darkest and most
painful conditions.
Passionate relations do not last for Merrill except in memory. They are
translated – to use a metaphor that is central to Merrill – into the domestic
if they last at all. One of the purposes of Merrill’s delections is to reduce
the pain that comes from the dissolution of these relationships. Among the
most painful of these dissolutions is the divorce of his parents, a trauma he
rehearses repeatedly. The broken home is at once personal, historical, and

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mythic in nature. It is the need to render the event on all three levels that
occupies him in two of his most celebrated poems: “The Broken Home” and
“Lost in Translation.”
“The Broken Home” begins with one of those delections that contribute
to the complexity of the poem. Crossing the street one twilight, Merrill sees
parents and a child “At their window, gleaming like fruit / With evening’s
mild gold leaf ”: Merrill uses this domestic tableau to light “what’s left of
my life,” but his belief in such a scene of domestic tranquility is almost
immediately thrown into doubt. “Tell me, tongue of ire,” he demands in
the tercet that ends the irst of the sonnet-like units from which the poem
is constructed, “That you and I are as real / At least as the people upstairs”
(JMC, p. 197). The family seems to be more real than he is, but if that is so,
what reality do they have? He needs the icon of domestic ideality in order
to make sense of the dysfunctional family he came from. Yet the Merrills
are not an oddity; they are very much the product of their times. His father,
a veteran lyer in World War I, returns home set on victory in the inancial
world as he was set on victory in the skies over Europe. His mother was
raised in the time when sufragists demanded from men that they “Give us
the vote!” Even the Depression does not stop them, and they proceed with
the intensity of “metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,” molten
into precast igures (JMC, p. 198). But the Merrills are not simply symp-
tomatic of the interwar years; they are embodiments of an archetypal pat-
tern – “Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks” (JMC,
p. 198). Even the Oedipal drama played out in the mother’s boudoir, when
she, startled awake, reaches out for her leeing son, even this conl ict is less
about individual pathology than the eternal drama of the family romance.
The poem ends not with a reinvocation of the family upstairs but with “the
real home,” which is the broken home. Real homes are not ones that you
look into as much as look out from to “watch a red setter stretch and sink in
cloud” (JMC, p. 200).
Tightly bound up by the interweaving strands of the personal, historic, and
mythic is the procreative urge; it is the one imperative that Merrill “Obeyed, at
least inversely.” He will not reproduce as his parents had; in fact, Merrill does
not even “try to keep a garden, only / An avocado in a glass of water – / Roots
pallid, gemmed with air”; when the avocados get too large, he lets “them die,
yes, yes, / And start another.” His interest in the avocado is neither breed-
ing nor food but the aesthetic pleasure of its “small gilt leaves . . . Fleshy and
green.” Merrill concludes that he is “no less time’s child” and “earth’s no less”;
in short, he is the product of both Father Time and Mother Earth (JMC, p. 199).

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By translating his personal trauma into historic and biologic terms, he delects
the pain of the divorce, reenvisions it as a cosmic necessity.
The interweaving strands of the personal, historic, and mythic are even
more tightly bound in “Lost in Translation.” The scene is the library of
Merrill’s parents’ estate, where he is watched by Mademoiselle, his nanny,
while his parents are of attending to their marital diiculties and subsequent
custody battle. But Merrill is not the only person with conl icted loyalties.
Mademoiselle is French only by marriage; her mother was English, and her
father Prussian. She represents a European marriage on the rocks. To occupy
the time while others squabble, Mademoiselle and Merrill cooperatively
assemble jigsaw puzzles, sent each month from “A New York / Puzzle-rental
shop (JMC, p. 363). Instead of being anxious about his parents, young Jimmy
is concerned about his puzzle. One eventually arrives, and as nanny and child
assemble the pieces – border irst – they discover that the puzzle appropriately
depicts an Arabian allegorical scene in which Houri and Afreet both claim a
young page as their own, the child torn between them. Yet another marriage
is ending in divorce.
What is the resolution to this constant process of marriage and separation?
The symbolic answer may reside in Mademoiselle’s nephew, who is a transla-
tor for the United Nations. His job is to use language to bridge the divisions
between nations. But his is only one kind of translation. Merrill’s parents’ bat-
tle over his custody can be said to be translated into the Houri/Afreet jigsaw
puzzle, which is a translation of a French Romantic painting, which is itself
a translation of some other tale. For Merrill, “all is translation / And every
bit of us is lost in it” (JMC, p. 367). The poet gets lost in language to ind him-
self in it. Art translates experience by inding equivalencies between life and
languages.
Yet there are no perfect equivalents, just as there are no perfect marriages.
The translations of art are illed with mismatches, odd pairings, and strange
delections. The Ouija board may be viewed as a great translation machine,
and the spirit world seems fascinated by translations. We learn from Mirabell,
one of Merrill’s interlocutors, that everyone can be translated into a formula.
For example, we are “told” that Merrill is equal to “268 / 1:1,000,00 / 5.5 /
741.”9 But because the numbers are so abstract (and even this string of numer-
als is “vastly simpliied”), the only way to communicate the cosmic reality to
human consciousness is through metaphor – the trope of translation. The
truth worth telling – the lived experience – can never be reduced to language,
numbers, or formulae, but we are forced to use language, numbers, or for-
mulae to suggest or invoke that experience. But because translation is always

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a mismatch and a delection, Merrill is constantly playing with and alerting

readers to the gaps. Each poem asks us to “mind the gap,” as the British say.
These gaps can have profoundly comic efects. Merrill is an inveterate pun-
ster, and puns can be said to be the accidental mismatch between sounds
and ideas. In “Lost in Translation,” for example, Merrill does not know who
painted the scene reproduced on the jigsaw puzzle, but he assumes it was “A
minor lion attending on Gérôme,” in short, a less celebrated follower of the
French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who specialized in oriental subjects (JMC,
p. 365). But the line also punningly refers to St. Jerome, who is traditionally
accompanied by a small lion; the saint translated the Bible into Latin. This
punning allusion to painter and patriarch is one of the accidental mismatches
of language that Merrill revels in.
But there are more profound mismatches. One of Merrill’s inest poems
is “Days of 1964,” a title that relates the poem to a number of poems by
Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet, who wrote about homosexual love.
“Days of 1964” concerns Merrill’s maid Kyria Kleo, who “wore brown, was fat,
past ifty / And looked like a Palmyra matron, / Copied in lard and horsehair”
(JMC, p. 220). Yet despite her looks, her age, and her disabilities – she has bad
legs – Merrill comes to believe that “she was love,” that she was an embodi-
ment of Eros or Aphrodite. He discovers her about to climb a hill where peo-
ple meet for illicit sex. She is wearing a tight sweater, and her face is painted
into “the erotic mask / Worn the world over by illusion / To wedding of itself
and simple need.” Kyria Kleo reminds Merrill that love is anarchic, sacred,
and comic. It does not obey laws, or cling to decorum. It will not be limited
to the domestic. It pops out where least expected. The dowdy, middle-aged
housekeeper who otherwise attends to her aged mother and wastrel son can
be transformed or translated into a goddess.
The Changing Light at Sandover is illed with such transformations. Indeed,
the irst book of the trilogy, “The Book of Ephraim,” is mostly concerned
with the process of reincarnation. According to Ephraim, souls are continu-
ally reborn until they achieve a certain level of spiritual development. But even
in the spirit world there is possibility for transformation. No one and no thing
is quite what it seems to be. The bat-like creature called 741 is transformed by
his association with humans into the peacock that is given the name Mirabell.
Maria Mitsotáki, who with W. H. Auden is the leading guide through the spirit
world, turns out to have been in previous lives Plato and Beatrice and in her
new life a boy in Bombay, “THE YOUNGEST / ORDAINED [BRAHMIN]
PRIEST IN HISTORY! ALREADY / CREDITED WITH 8 MIRACLES” (CLS,
p. 542).

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Spirits are not always happy with their next reincarnation. They also can
get lost in translation. Chester Kallman, Auden’s lover, is to be reborn as a
black male in Johannesburg, which he sees as “GETTING THE / ULTIMATE
REJECTION SLIP” (CLS, p. 184). This note of playful seriousness and sublime
tawdriness – a note that Merrill had been developing throughout his career –
is constantly struck in Sandover. After all, the Ouija board is a kind of game,
which Merrill and his partner David Jackson were given as a present in 1955,
in their second year of living in the house in Stonington, Connecticut, where
they had yet to develop friends. They igured if they could not make friends
with the living, then they might as well try to get acquainted with the dead.
And sure enough, on their irst night of playing with the Ouija board, they
encountered the voice of Ephraim, who told them that he was a Greek Jew
(with a Christian father) born in 8 C.E. in Xanthos, a favorite of Tiberus, and
a lover of Caligula (CLS, p. 8). From 1955 through 1974, Merrill and Jackson
stayed in touch with Ephraim, and “The Book of Ephraim” narrates their
often outrageously funny experiences. Merrill believed he had come to the
end of his Ouija board narrative, but then in 1976 a new voice demanded, “WE
MUST HAVE / POEMS OF SCIENCE THE WEORK FINISHT [sic] IS BUT
PROLOGUE,” and he began what eventually became “Mirabell’s Books of
Number,” “Scripts for a Pageant,” and “Coda” (CLS, p. 113). What had started
out as a 100-page poem – hardly a minor undertaking – mushroomed into
more than 550 pages. What had begun as a wonderfully comic encounter with
the spirit world now took on a new seriousness. It was a strange marriage.
There is something jerry-built about the poem despite its obvious surface
structure. “Ephraim” has twenty-six sections, one for each letter of the alpha-
bet; “Mirabell” has a hundred sections; and “Scripts” is dived into three parts –
“Yes,” “&,” “No.” Yet despite this elaborate superstructure, the poem seems
highly improvised, and it contains recurrent discussions about how to orga-
nize and present the revelations dictated by the Ouija board. The work, for all
its formal expertness, is wonderfully spontaneous – and it is this spontaneity
that makes it diicult to know how seriously to take the voices in the poem
and how far our attention is being delected from serious matters.
The two principal concerns of Mirabell and the angels who come to
instruct Merrill and Jackson are serious enough. Mankind’s continuation is
threatened by two forces: atomic energy and overpopulation. (In his work of
the 1980s and 1990s, the anxiety over a nuclear catastrophe is replaced by the
fear of environmental apocalypse.) “THE ATOM MUST,” they are told, “BE
RETURNED TO THE LAB & THE USES OF PARADISE” (CLS, p. 247). The
population must be seriously cut down to two million. Yet is the urgency of

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these problems heightened by coming through a Ouija board? Doesn’t this

mode of transmission trivialize the issue? How are we to take these revela-
tions? Is something in this message lost in translation?
These questions are ones that Merrill himself asks, and part of “Ephraim”
recounts a visit to his old psychoanalyst, Tom Detre, who tells Merrill that
“what you and David do / We call folie à deux.” According to Dr. Detre, it is
a way that Jackson and Merrill can “sound each other’s depths of spirit” and,
by producing the poem together, compensate for being childless (CLS, p. 30).
Merrill realizes that he had not so much accepted the truth of what Ephraim
said as ignored the absence of proof. It was hard to pin Ephraim down because
his “grasp of dates and places” was feeble, his Latin “Vestigial,” and his mem-
ory “spotty.” Moreover, Merrill and Jackson both understood that it was quite
possible that “his lights and darks were a projection / Of what already burned,
at some obscure / Level or another, in our skulls” (CLS, p. 31). Nevertheless
they were quite willing to play along with him. Indeed, according to Mirabell,
it is precisely because Merrill and Jackson have passively entertained the voices
from the Ouija board that the voices have come. When he came to other writ-
ers, Mirabell was met by a series of demands: “HARDLY HAD WE / FOLDED
OUR MANY WINGS THAN SMALL GREEDY HANDS PLUCKED AT US /
SAYING: WHAT OF TOMORROW? WHAT OF AUNT MIN? WHERE IS
THE / BURIED TREASURE? & O LEAVE BEHIND THE FEATHER OF
PROOF?” (CLS, p. 258). Merrill and Jackson do not ask for future predictions;
they do not ask the spirits to protect them. They welcome the voices as widen-
ing and deepening their experiences; they recognize “How banal / Our lives
would be, how shrunken, but for” Mirabell (CLS, p. 258). In short, Merrill reads
the transcripts of the Ouija board as he would read a poem and as he would
ask us to read his Sandover – as an imaginative experience whose aesthetic plea-
sures are independent of what “truths” they might contain.
One of the central distinctions made in Sandover is between thought and
ideas. Thought is the aggressive intellectual process that analyzes and evalu-
ates ideas, trying to determine their logical consistency and empirical truth.
It does not allow itself to be delected, and as a result, thinking destroys ideas
(CLS, p. 426). It is just this aggressive intellectual process that brought about
nuclear war and threatens the survival of humans. At the end of “Scripts for the
Pageant,” Nature tells Merrill and Jackson that the paradise to come “WILL
HOLD A CREATURE MUCH LIKE DARLING MEN, YET PHYSICALLY
MORE ADAPTABLE” (CLS, p. 512). This new, improved humanlike creature
will be “A SIMPLER, LESS WILLFUL BEING. DULLER TOO? / IF SO, IS
THAT SHARP EDGE NOT WELL LOST / WHICH HAS SO VARIOUSLY

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CUT AND COST?” (CLS, p. 512). This Alpha Man will be able to entertain
ideas and enjoy poems like Sandover but will not pursue the kind of aggressive
intellectual activity that leads to war and global destruction.
In many ways the good reader of The Changing Light at Sandover is learning
the skills needed to be an Alpha Man. Readers demanding logic and consis-
tency will be l ummoxed again and again by Sandover. Things that Ephraim
tells Merrill are corrected by Mirabell, and things said by Mirabell are corrected
by the archangels. On one of the rare occasions that Merrill in frustration asks
for clariication, “Won’t someone please explain the Black?” he is told:
IN AMONG EARTH’S TREASURES ARE
THE INFRA-TREASURES OF THE MONITOR:
NOT FORWARD TIME COMPRESSED (COMBUSTIBLE
OILCAN OF “THINNER”) BUT ATOMIC BLACK
COMPRESSED FROM TIME’S REVERSIBILITY,
THAT IDEA OF DESTRUCTION WHICH RESIDES
BOTH IN MAN & IN THE ACTINIDES
PART OF THE GREENHOUSE, FOR (THO MATTER HOLDS)
THESE FORK TONGUES FLICKER FROM ITS OILS & GOLDS.
(CLS, p. 453)
Judith Mofett calls these lines “the mad, plausible voice of a fever-dream,” of
which “there is little point in struggling to make sense.”10 The poem defeats
attempts to create a coherent, rational structure of the thought. Thought would
destroy the poem. But if we entertain the entire work as a cosmological masque
illed with gods and goddesses, talking animals and creatures (a loveable unicorn
is part of the large cast), angels and demons, and wizards and fairies, then we
would be preparing ourselves for the next stage in human development, or at
least moving away from the destructive attitudes that plague humankind.
The Changing Light at Sandover is a celebration of poetry and the poetic
sensibility that delights in ideas, plays with them, but insists that fact is fable
(CLS, p. 263). It is signiicant that W. H. Auden, who famously proclaimed that
“poetry makes nothing happen,” is one of Merrill’s two guides to the Other
Side. One of the great English poets of the twentieth century, Auden was born
in 1907 and died in Austria in 1973. In 1939, he came to America and, in 1946,
became a U.S. citizen. Not only Auden’s poetry but his voluminous essays
exerted a considerable force on a wide variety of American poets, including
Allen Ginsberg, Randall Jarrell, Muriel Rukeyser, and John Ashbery. But on
no one was the inl uence as decisive as it was on Merrill. In Sandover, Auden
answers Merrill’s doubts about the project of writing the epic by giving a sus-
tained defense of being a poet:

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IS NOT ARCADIA TO DWELL AMONG

GREENWOOD PERSPECTIVES OF THE MOTHER TONGUE
ROOTSYSTEMS UNDERFOOT WHILE OVERHEAD
THE SUN GOD SANG & SHADES OF MEANING SPREAD
& FAR SNOWCAPPED ABSTRACTIONS GLITTERED NEAR
OR FAIRLY MELTED INTO ATMOSPHERE? (CLS, p. 262)

Piotr Gwiazda points out how the igure of Auden in Sandover is diferent from
the historical Auden, but there is no doubt that Auden meant a good deal not
only to Merrill but to the poets that surrounded Merrill.11 Among the most sig-
niicant virtues that Auden exempliied for these poets were his formal virtu-
osity, his linguistic variety, and his wit. Aidan Wasley enumerates seven lessons
Merrill learns from Auden, the last two being that “poets inherit and employ
the voices of their predecessors” and “construct their own voices out of those
they receive from the tradition.”12 Sandover ittingly sees Auden as occupy-
ing not a main salon in the house of poetry but “A BARE LOWCEILINGED
MAID’S ROOM AT THE TOP” (CLS, p. 262). He lives in the servants’ quar-
ters, cleaning up after the grander poets have gone to sleep. And one should
not ignore the camp image of Auden in a maid’s outit, wearing a clean white
apron and a little starched cap. If such an image puts the reader of balance,
so much the better. It is a comic method that Merrill learned from Auden, a
method adopted by Auden’s followers.
Auden is the master of that “chill / Lighthearted atmosphere” that Merrill
breathes into his poems. Take, for example, Auden’s poem “The More Loving
One,” whose most famous lines are the couplet, “If equal afection cannot be,
/ Let the more loving one be me” – his stoic acceptance of the way relation-
ships break down. But the poem ends with a more cosmic sense of loneliness
and emptiness.
Were all stars to disappear and die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.13

What gives the “rueful joke” – as Edward Mendelson calls the inal line – its
bite is the inability to decide whether it is an example of understatement or
a grim acknowledgement of the speed with which Auden is habituated to
isolation and abandonment.14 The anapestic substitution gives it a kind of
skipping, throwaway rhythm that delects the seriousness of the apocalyp-
tic vision. Those like Merrill, Richard Howard, and J. D. McClatchy, whom
we will examine, are sometimes criticized, as was Auden, for their lack of

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emotion. To be sure, compared to contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg,

Anne Sexton, or James Wright, they keep their hearts up rather than wearing
them on their sleeves. With such sleight of hand, Auden uses humor to delect
readers not from deep emotion but from an abyss of feeling into which they
might fall. Auden’s poetry, like Merrill’s, Howard’s, and McClatchy’s, is all the
more deeply felt because his emotions are not allowed free rein but are kept in
check by formal conventions, literary tradition, and personal irony.
A near contemporary of Merrill, Richard Howard (b. 1929) grew up in com-
fortable circumstances in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Columbia University.
He was adopted as a child, and his mother went through several divorces,
yet his poetry rarely engages in Merrill’s theme of the broken home. A pro-
liic translator from the French – he was named in 1982 a chevalier of l’Ordre
National du Mérite by the French government – Howard won the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry in 1969.
In Howard’s mythology, Auden is Hephaistos, the blacksmith of the gods.
It is an association that emphasizes the poem as something made, a sweaty job
requiring heavy lifting. Hephaistos is also ugly and lame; the beauty he pro-
duces is separate from his person, and yet Hephaistos’s very presence is inspir-
ing. In the irst of Howard’s two poems on Auden, “For Hephaistos, with
Reference to the Deaths in a Dry Year of Cocteau, Roethke and MacNeice,”
Howard runs into Auden at the doorway of a New York bookshop, where
Auden casts an “air / Of tweedy degeneration” and is saved from looking like
a bum only by “A inal harmlessness.” This unexpected encounter with the
great man leaves Howard speechless; Auden, however, appears unaware that
he has run into anyone, and the two poets pass without exchanging a word.
Instead of being crushed by the failure to be recognized, Howard takes it as
a lesson:
You taught me, taught us all a way
To speak our minds, and only now, at last
Free of you, my old ventriloquist,
Have I suspected what I have to say
Without hearing you say it for me irst.15

Howard is hurt, perhaps, by Auden’s failure to recognize him, but he sees it as

one of the stages in his own liberation. “Like my old love, I have survived you
best / By leaving you, and so you’re here to stay.” In this slightly campy para-
dox, Howard exhibits the “chill / Lightheartedness” that Merrill addresses.
Howard’s second Hephaistos poem, “Again for Hephaistos, the Last Time”
is an elegy written ten years later, and it is much campier. At that time, Howard

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 James Merrill and His Circles

was long past his poetic apprenticeship and was the winner of the Pulitzer
Prize. The poem is a defense against the accusation in the Times that Auden
“had failed to make, / or even make [his] way inside, ‘a world of emotion,’ ”16
But instead of directing the reader to poems in which Auden struck “the lac-
rimae rerum note,” Howard points to two anecdotes. The irst concerns col-
lege students who mistakenly ask Auden whether he is Carl Sandburg and get
the response: “You’ve ruined mother’s day.” The second places Howard and
Auden backstage at the Y, where Auden is about to give a reading “to the rus-
tling thousands out front.” To make conversation Auden asks Howard
why it was I no longer endured a diicult mutual friend.
“Because he calls everyone else either a kike or a cocksucker,
and since, Wystan, both he and I are . . . well, both of them . . .”
“My dear,” you broke in, and I think you were genuinely excited,
“I never knew you were Jewish!”17
For Howard, Auden’s campy wit represents if “not a world of emotion” then
“the emotion of a world.” Curious, playful, and accepting, it successfully
delects the problems of anti-Semitism and homophobia. For Howard, Auden
opened up a range of references; thus “Again for Hephaistos” mentions Ginifer,
Tintagel, and Santa Maria sopra Minerva as well as Rod McKuen, cocksuck-
ers, and kikes. The campiness that Howard learned to use from Auden is nei-
ther the failure to enter the world of emotion nor the evasion of emotion but
the ability to invite emotions that might become too painful and sentimental
and then delect them through humor or paradox.
J. D. McClatchy is perhaps the most prominent poet of the next genera-
tion who falls squarely into the Auden tradition. Born in 1945, he attended
Georgetown University and received a Ph.D. in English from Yale University
in 1974. Like Merrill, he grew up in considerable comfort. It is quite itting
that he was a friend of Merrill, and with Stephen Yenser has edited Merrill’s
complete works. His poem “Auden’s OED” develops a genealogy of trans-
mission, for the copy of the Oxford English Dictionary now in his possession
was irst Auden’s, on whose death it came to Auden’s lover Chester Kallman,
then to Merrill, and only then to McClatchy. The OED had a special place in
Auden’s literary arsenal. It was “a ixture / in the second-story Kirchstetten /
room” where Auden worked.18 According to Edward Mendelson, Auden read
the OED daily and used it extensively in his later poems.19 Indeed, Auden was
always looking for opportunities to add new words to the OED and believed
that he was the irst to put in print the words “plain-sewing” for mutual mas-
turbation and “Princeton-irst-year” for intercrural sex.20

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 Davi d B e rgm an

McClatchy feels a particular contact with Auden through possession of his

OED, and although he will not go so far as Whitman, who proclaimed that
those “Who touches this [book], touches a man,”21 he does feel that Auden
could be sitting beside one, chin in hand
listening to a late quartet, a gaze
on his face only the inal chord will break.
Here is the faraway something else,
here between the crowded lines of scholarship.
Here is the irst rapture and inal
dread of being found out by words, terms, phrases
for what is unknown, unfelt, unloved.
Here in the end is the language of a life.22
Indeed, so imbued is the OED with Auden’s spirit that when McClatchy’s cat,
named Wystan, claws a page, McClatchy for a second sees Auden’s face in the
wrinkled paper. Startled, McClatchy prays for protection from “St. Wiz.”
At the center of “Auden’s OED” is an account of McClatchy’s irst meeting
with Auden, and it exempliies the process of invitation and delection that
marks the poetry of these men. On his farewell tour of colleges, Auden came
to McClatchy’s university to give a reading. After the reading and reception,
McClatchy accosted the elderly poet, who “wambled tipsily toward his guest
suite” and asked him to autograph his book. “Turn around and bend over,”
Auden orders, and momentarily McClatchy imagines that Auden is about to
initiate a sexual act. But no, Auden needed a surface to write on, and “My back
would do as well as any / Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop.” Auden invites the
erotic and then delects it. The result is comic, but with a sexual frisson that will
not completely dissipate. On relection, McClatchy realizes that Auden had
been writing
on me ever since that encounter
or that I’d unconsciously made of myself
a desk so that he could continue –
the common imagination’s dogsbody
and ringmaster – still to speak up,
however halting or indirect the voice.23
The voice that Auden provides McClatchy – the language inscribed into his
very body – is one of indirection, one that is delected, that comes at queer
angles and at odd moments and that puts one in compromising and comic
positions and requires patience and poise as well as a certain vulgar fun. As
Auden put it in “ ‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning’ ”:

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 James Merrill and His Circles

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,

And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.24
Following Auden’s example, the works of Merrill, Howard, or McClatchy are
not meant for stomachs that must be coddled. Sometimes basted with unusual
savory spices, sometimes beaten to lofty heights, their poetic dishes lure us to
eat without our paying attention to how hearty and illing a banquet they have
set for us.

Notes
1. James Merrill, A Diferent Person (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 141.
2. Ross Labrie, James Merrill (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 52.
3. James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New
York: Knopf, 2001), p. 23. This collection will be cited in the text as JMC.
4. Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New
York: Library of America, 1982), p. 36.
5. Daniel Mark Epstein, “Merrill’s Progress,” The New Criterion 20:7 (March
2002), pp. 24–32, 31.
6. Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 60.
7. James Merrill, Recitative, ed. J. D. McClatchy (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1986), p. 44.
8. David Kalstone, Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 90.
9. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen
Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 143. This collection will be cited in the text
as CLS.
10. Judith Mofett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), p. 221.
11. Piotr Gwiazda, James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Inluence
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 131.
12. Aidan Wasley, The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 99.
13. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random
House, 2007), p. 582.
14. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999),
p. 426.
15. Richard Howard, The Damages (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1967), p. 64.

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 Davi d B e rgm an

16. Richard Howard, Fellow Feelings (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p. 12.
17. Howard, Fellow Feelings, p. 12.
18. J. D. McClatchy, Ten Commandments (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 89.
19. Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 485, 503.
20. Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 498.
21. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 611.
22. McClatchy, Ten Commandments, p. 89; for McClatchy on Auden’s OED, see
also J. D. McClatchy, Twenty Questions (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998), pp. 47–48.
23. McClatchy, Ten Commandments, p. 90.
24. Auden, Collected Poems, p. 617.

912
 Chapter 40
Science in Contemporary American
Poetry: Ammons and Others
Ro g e r G il b e rt

A common way to characterize the shift from modern to contemporary

American poetry is as a turn from sweeping, impersonal myths and symbols
to more locally grounded, experiential stories and images. Yet poetry’s hun-
ger for transcendent vision is not so easily renounced. Having lost faith in the
religious, metaphysical, and national ideals that traditionally sustained their
claims to vatic authority, where might late twentieth-century poets turn for
modes of knowledge extending beyond private experience? One answer is to
poetry’s ancient rival, science. An important, if not a deining, tendency in
American poetry since 1950 has been the incorporation of scientiic concepts
and vocabulary, not as mere ornamentation but as a way of enlarging the
poem’s thematic and visionary scope. The name most frequently associated
with this tendency is A. R. Ammons, whose work from its beginnings displays
an unprecedented openness to the language and insights of science. More than
any other twentieth-century American poet, Ammons validated science as a
source of inspiration, a kind of rationalist muse whose teachings have proved
surprisingly compatible with the imaginative extravagances of poetry.
The poetic invocation of science needs to be distinguished from several
related topics. These include that most venerable of all literary subjects,
nature. Traditional nature poetry takes a predominantly aesthetic view of the
nonhuman realm, one that may at times seem willfully naïve in its avoidance
of scientiic explanations for natural phenomena. Knowledge of photosyn-
thesis or plate tectonics threatens to disrupt the unmediated, pastoral vision
that most nature poetry seeks. One of the challenges for Ammons and other
contemporary science poets is to let such knowledge into their poems while
maintaining the sense of wonder that nature has always inspired in artists.
By contrast, late twentieth-century nature poets like William Staford, David
Wagoner, Robert Bly, James Wright, and Mary Oliver often write a kind of
stripped-down Wordsworthian landscape lyric whose afective power stems in
large part from its cultivation of a prerational, animistic awareness of nature

913
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

that resolutely excludes science. Although the results can be moving, they are
not my focus in this chapter.
I’ll briely mention three other topics that intersect with but difer from
mine. Science and technology are often grouped together, but their roles in
contemporary poetry are quite distinct – particularly so now that technology
has begun to change the ways in which poems are written, circulated, and
read. Poets who engage with technology tend to do so either from a Luddite
perspective that emphasizes its dehumanizing efects or with an excited sense
of the possible ainities between poetic and technological innovations; nei-
ther mode has much in common with the kind of poetry that takes scientiic
knowledge as material for rumination. Like technology, medicine represents
a meeting point between pure science and practical agency, but its emotional
stakes are more immediate. Where poems about science generally seek to
bracket human experience or to locate it within a vastly variegated cosmos,
poems on medical themes must deal with speciically human issues of pain
and mortality. Finally, there is a growing body of sci-i or “speculative” poetry
that draws on scientiic and technological discoveries but subordinates them
to narratives of imagined times and places distinct from our own; here again
the governing impulse is quite diferent from that of science poetry, which
seeks to assimilate facts and theories grounded in empirical observation.
Before I turn to contemporary poetry, it may be helpful to give a brief his-
torical overview of poetry’s engagement with science. Ever since Plato exiled
poets from his ideal republic, poetry has been viewed as a lawed medium
for truth, irredeemably contaminated by imagination and passion. Yet just
as epic poetry often purports to give a factual account of human history, so
certain classical genres have claimed to transmit accurate knowledge of the
physical universe. The Latin poet Lucretius’s long cosmological poem De
Rerum Natura ofers an early version of the atomistic theory of matter, drawn
from the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus; it thus provides the
irst known instance of a poet incorporating scientiic teachings in his work.
The Georgics of Virgil, Lucretius’s contemporary, are more practical in their
emphasis on agriculture and animal husbandry, but they too include a good
deal of natural science. The georgic mode was revived in the eighteenth
century by English poets like James Thomson, John Dyer, and John Philips,
who produced long, didactic poems that mix scenic description with detailed
instruction in the iner points of sheepshearing and cider making. The latent
scientism of this mode culminates in the work of the poet-physician Erasmus
Darwin, whose long poem The Botanic Garden (1791) presents versiied spec-
ulation on a range of topics, from cosmology to the classiication of plants,

914
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

including ideas that anticipate his grandson Charles’s theory of evolution. In

Darwin’s work, science and poetry achieve their closest convergence before
the twentieth century (although not, it is generally thought, to the beneit of
the poetry).
The Enlightenment rationalism that governs much eighteenth-century
English poetry receded in the early nineteenth century, as Romanticism became
the guiding aesthetic and intellectual movement. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is
the most enduring Romantic critique of the scientiic mind, a critique expressed
more concisely in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1829 “Sonnet – to Science”:
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her lood,
The Elin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?1
Poe’s open hostility is an extreme manifestation of the widely held fear that
science would rob nature of its beauty and enchantment, leaving the poet
stranded amid “dull realities.” In a similar mood, John Keats voiced his dread
that Newtonian physics would “Conquer all mysteries with rule and line,”
and in so doing “unweave the rainbow.”2 Not all Romantic poets were so resis-
tant to the allure of scientiic discovery, as Richard Holmes has shown.3 Still,
most nineteenth-century poets only l irted tentatively with scientiic language
and ideas in their verse. In America, Walt Whitman ofered a more nuanced
appraisal of science’s dangers than did his countryman Poe:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the igures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d of by myself,

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 R o ge r Gi l be rt

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.4
Whitman does not accuse the astronomer of destroying the beauty of the
stars; he merely juxtaposes two modes of vision, the scientist’s and the poet’s.
His conidence that the poetic eye will prevail in this contest relects his belief
that “Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest
poet but always his encouragement and support. . . . In the beauty of poems
are the tuft and inal applause of science.”5 As he so often does, Whitman here
echoes his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who proclaimed, “The poet alone
knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop
at these facts, but employs them as signs.”6 Both Whitman and Emerson invest
poetry with the power to absorb science while translating it to a symbolic
plane. Yet as Whitman’s vague reference to “proofs” and “igures” illustrates,
neither poet goes deeply into the particulars of scientiic thought in his work.
In the early twentieth century, poets began to embrace science more whole-
heartedly, often drawing parallels between the work of major discoverers like
Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and the literary innovations being carried
out under the banner of modernism. Perhaps the most explicit version of this
analogy appears in a short poem by Mina Loy entitled “Gertrude Stein”:

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed in phrases
to extract
a radium of the word7

Like her contemporary William Carlos Williams, Stein attended medical

school (although, unlike him, she did not complete a degree). Both poets
introduced a spirit of radical experimentation into American poetry that was
modeled in many respects on pathbreaking work in the sciences. Williams’s
dictum that a poem is a “machine made out of words” relects this new open-
ness to science and technology, as does T. S. Eliot’s use of terms like “cata-
lyst” in his criticism.8 But while words borrowed from physics and chemistry
make occasional appearances in modernist poems, one still sees little sus-
tained engagement with the actual substance of science in American poetry
before 1950.

916
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

A partial exception may be found in the work of Robinson Jefers (1887–

1962). Although often viewed as a primitivist transposing Greek tragedy to the
California coast in long, roughhewn verse narratives, Jefers was in fact deeply
conversant with the sciences, both as a medical student with special interests in
forestry and bacteriology and through his brother’s work as an astronomer at
Lick Observatory, where Jefers was a frequent visitor.9 Jefers typically invokes
science to justify his doctrine of “inhumanism,” a view that rejects human
beings’ narcissistic belief in their own centrality and instead airms the beauty
and nobility of nature in all its guises. In an early poem called “Science,” Jefers
sardonically observes how the incremental expansion of human knowledge
over the past century threatens to destroy anthropocentric illusions:
Man, introverted man, having crossed
In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter century
Has begot giants; but being taken up
Like a maniac with self-love and inward conl icts cannot manage his hybrids.
Being used to deal with edgeless dreams,
Now he’s bred knives on nature turns them also inward: they have
thirsty points though.
His mind forebodes his own destruction;
Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves and his hounds tore him.
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this ininitely little too
much?10
Although he sees the destructive power of science, Jefers does not share the
fear voiced by Keats and Poe that beauty will be among its victims. Instead he
welcomes the disillusionment science breeds, precisely because it fosters a new,
larger appreciation of the extrahuman universe in all its harsh elegance. While
he shows a particular fondness for granite clifs and birds of prey, Jefers inds
instances of the violent yet beautiful workings of the cosmos in phenomena
ranging in scale from atoms to nebulae. The poem “Nova” describes the death
of a star with astronomical precision and then ponders the similar fate awaiting
the sun and the “probable death-passion / For the sun’s planets,” concluding that
“the enormous invulnerable beauty of things / Is the face of God.”11 Perhaps
Jefers’s most sustained exploration of scientiic material comes in a late poem
posthumously published under the title “The Beginning and the End,” which
ofers a wide-ranging account of creation inspired by Lucretius yet replete with
notions gleaned from modern physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology.
Various factors might help explain why American poets began taking a more
active interest in science after World War II, including such large historical

917
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

developments as the atom bomb, the Cold War, and the space race; but the
inl uence of individual innovators should not be discounted. Central among
postwar poets who drew on science was A. R. Ammons (1926–2001). Born
to a farming family in North Carolina, Ammons served in the navy during
World War II and then attended Wake Forest College on the G.I. Bill, where
he majored in general science. In later years he credited a professor of evo-
lutionary botany, Budd Smith, as his most formative inl uence, telling Smith
in a letter that “I have used everything you taught me in my poetry, over and
over.”12 Ammons’s irst book, Ommateum (1955), is largely mythopoeic in style
and contains only leeting allusions to science, but even before inishing it, he
had begun contemplating what he called a poetry of “synthesis”:
The poet, like the philosopher, does not have a subject matter, on the fac-
tual level, that will give him the authority the scientist enjoys – has never
had. The early poet, like Lucretius, was scientist and poet; he found out his
facts, through reading and observation, interpreted them into his own syn-
thesis and converted the synthesis into poetry. Specialization has now made
it impossible for the poet or anyone else to be on the frontier of discovery in
many ields. Nevertheless, the poet must consider knowledge his province
and gather as much as he can. For it is not necessary to be original in details –
to use only what one personally discovers. Culture is cumulative, and the poet
must strive to add a new dimension of meaning to what already exists. The
proper place for the expression of originality is in the poet’s own synthesis.13
These sentences come from an unpublished essay called “Defense of Poetry”
that Ammons wrote in 1954. His assertion that poetry should take all of knowl-
edge as its domain, and not just those areas that lend themselves to personal
expression, betokens a new attitude toward science as a potential source of
poetic material that would become increasingly common over the next half
century.
The irst poem in which Ammons can be said to approach this kind of syn-
thesis is “Hymn,” written in 1956. As its title suggests, the poem adopts the
tone and rhetoric of religious devotion, yet its language is deeply informed by
science. “I know if I ind you I will have to leave the earth / and go on out,”
Ammons writes, “over the sea marshes and the brant in bays . . . and on up
through the spheres of diminishing air / past the blackset noctilucent clouds,”
then continues:
And I know if I ind you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates

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 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces14
While it’s possible to interpret the poem’s dialectical structure in terms of such
traditional religious categories as transcendence and immanence, it should be
noted that the two paths charted in these lines also correspond to distinct
vectors of scientiic inquiry. The vast phenomena observed by astronomy
and the microscopic organisms studied by biology are equally the domain
of the “you” the speaker seeks, whether God or some other unifying princi-
ple. With their blend of precision and opacity, phrases like “light dif usions”
and “microvilli sporangia” evoke the ininite complexity to be found at every
level of existence. Such phrases deine a verbal register that resonates power-
fully even when it does not convey a speciic meaning to untrained readers.
Ammons deepens that resonance by modulating from the dense literality of
“sporangia” and “coelenterates” to more metaphorical conjunctions of spirit
and matter in “praying for a nerve cell / with all the soul of my chemical reac-
tions,” phrases whose incongruity never quite breaks into irony. Where earlier
poets accused science of emptying out the spiritual realm, Ammons insists on
the equal validity of prayer and cell, soul and chemistry.
Ammons’s next major foray into the realm of science came in a poem called
“Mechanism,” which appeared, along with “Hymn,” in his 1963 collection
Expressions of Sea Level:
Honor a going thing, goldinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
animate or inanimate: it
has managed directed balance,
the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
some energy left to the mechanism,
some ash, enough energy held
to maintain the order in repair,
assure further consumption of entropy,
expending energy to strengthen order:
(ARA, p. 77)

Where “Hymn” invokes an indeterminate “you,” “Mechanism” posits the cat-

egory of “going thing[s]” as its unifying principle. That principle informs a
wide array of phenomena, as the list in the irst stanza implies: “goldinch,
corporation, tree, / morality.” All these things exemplify what Ammons
calls a “working order,” a dynamic system that takes in and puts out energy,

919
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

organizes and repairs itself, and staves of entropy and chaos. Although in
theory he might illustrate this concept in greater depth using any of his four
examples, he settles on the goldinch:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
unique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves (ARA, p. 78)
The poem consists of one extremely long sentence, a result Ammons achieves
through his highly unorthodox use of the colon as an all-purpose connective
between clauses. As in much of his poetry, the colon works to establish a rad-
ical continuity among entities and processes. After showing us the goldinch
in its natural habitat, l itting through bushes and eluding a hawk, Ammons
catalogues the many levels of activity taking place inside the bird – physi-
ological, chemical, reproductive, genetic, molecular – while repeatedly ask-
ing us to “honor” the subtleties of its inner workings as we might admire
the craftsmanship of a great work of art. Indeed the poem can be taken as
an implicit rebuke to Yeats’s paean to artiice in “Sailing to Byzantium”; for
Ammons the mechanisms contained by this living creature far exceed any
mechanical golden bird’s in their intricate elegance.
“Mechanism” goes even further than “Hymn” in pushing the boundaries of
poetic diction. The heavily Latinate lexicon that dominates much of the poem
might seem hopelessly prosaic, yet Ammons unlocks a latent musicality in
terms like “platelets,” “hemoglobin,” “enzymic,” and “nucleic,” playing them
against more common words like “rising,” “cloaking,” and “staying.” The
phrase “synthesized into / chirp” nicely illustrates Ammons’s penchant for
such contrapuntal efects, a strong enjambment accentuating the abrupt leap
from abstraction to onomatopoeia. In the poem’s closing lines, the language
of science gives way to a much simpler descriptive vocabulary as we return to
the familiar appearance of the bird in its natural surroundings. The wry paren-
thetical comment “not a great songster” (ARA, p. 79) quietly suggests that the
music embodied by this bird is not vocal but innate, that its beauty lies not in
its singing but in the ininitely complex operations that allow it to exist at all.

920
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

In this respect it serves as a kind of mascot for Ammons’s poetics of synthesis,

which sacriices conventional lyricism for cognitive density.
Ammons also writes poems whose scientiic content does not depend on
specialized words. One of the best known of these is “Cascadilla Falls,” whose
speaker
picked up a
handsized stone
kidney-shaped, testicular, and
thought all its motions into it,
the 800 mph earth spin,
the 190-million-mile yearly
displacement around the sun,
the overriding
grand
haul
of the galaxy with the 30,000
mph of where
the sun’s going:
thought all the interweaving
motions
into myself: (ARA, pp. 206–07)
Numbers replace words as the primary vehicle for science in this poem,
lending mathematical exactitude to the speaker’s apprehension of the cos-
mos as a collection of “interweaving / motions.” For Ammons, the “proofs”
and “igures” that Whitman dismissively sets against silent contemplation
deepen rather than deaden the feelings such contemplation arouses. In place
of Whitman’s serenity, Ammons projects a naked vulnerability limned by the
stone’s metaphorical descent from hand to kidney to testicle, and condensed
in the poignant epithet “shelterless.” Science here is internalized, “thought . . .
into” the self so deeply that knowledge itself becomes unmoored: “Cascadilla
Falls” ends, “Oh / I do / not know where I am going / that I can live my life /
by this single creek” (ARA, p. 207). Where “Mechanism” extracts the minute
operations that keep a goldinch alive, “Cascadilla Falls” projects vast cosmic
motions into a stone; yet although their vectors may difer, the results in both
cases are an intensiication and an expansion of awareness in the act of per-
ceiving everyday phenomena. Ammons’s route to the visionary entails not
the cultivation of simplicity but the ennobling estrangement produced by the
knowledge of complexity.

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 R o ge r Gi l be rt

Like “Hymn,” “Cascadilla Falls” leaps across extremes of scale, distill-

ing sublimity from the disjunction between great things and small. Another
phase of Ammons’s poetry explores a middle region of measurable forces and
events. Poems like “Expressions of Sea Level,” “One:Many,” “Corsons Inlet,”
and “Saliences” record the myriad transactions that shape each moment in a
rich natural environment, while acknowledging that no human observer can
account for all their particulars. In these poems Ammons enters the realm of
what is now called ecopoetics, a mode he anticipates in his long poem Tape for
the Turn of the Year:

ecology is my word: tag

me with that: come
in there:
you will ind yourself
in a irmless country:
centers & peripheries
in motion,
organic,
interrelations!15

Ammons is especially drawn to complex ecosystems like estuaries and

marshes, whose incessantly l uctuating conditions create countless “risks and
possibilities.” In the much-anthologized “Corsons Inlet,” he traces one line of
causality from space to earth:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change . . .
the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab – what? I couldn’t
see against the black mudlats – a frightened
iddler crab? (ARA, pp. 149–50)

Large astronomical and tidal motions help determine the fates of innumera-
ble creatures, whose Darwinian competition Ammons evokes with a distinc-
tive blend of delight (“how beautiful”), curiosity (“what? I couldn’t / see”), and
empathy (“frightened”). In “Saliences,” a poem that seems explicitly intended

922
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

as a sequel to “Corsons Inlet,” Ammons focuses on a diferent aspect of the

same landscape’s internal dynamics:
a variable of wind
among the dunes,
making variables
of position and direction and sound
of every reed leaf
and bloom,
running streams of sand (ARA, p. 152)

Here Ammons uses the language of algebra and geometry to graph the l uid
interplay of matter and motion, even as he concedes that the totality of forces
and events occurring at any moment in this environment is incalculable:
“wind alone as a variable / takes this neck of dunes / out of calculation’s
reach.” These poems, written in the early 1960s, show a striking ainity with
the then-emerging science of chaos theory, which considers how unpredict-
able, seemingly random patterns arise within dynamic systems.
When Ammons took up a position at Cornell University in 1964, he
exchanged the coastal landscape of southern New Jersey for the lacustrine
one of Ithaca, New York, and the scope of his ecological inquiries changed
accordingly. The primary crucible for his thought experiments was now his
own backyard, a simpliied ecosystem consisting of a few trees and bushes,
some birds and squirrels, and an endless supply of weather. At one point he
even entertained the idea of devoting a whole book to one tree: “I was think-
ing last / June, so multiple and dense is the reality of a tree, that I / ought to do
a booklength piece on the elm in the backyard here” (ARA, p. 303). These lines
come from “Essay on Poetics,” a long poem exploring the parallels between
poetic and natural principles of organization. For Ammons, the elm tree exem-
pliies the synthesis of unity and multiplicity, one and many, that he strives
to achieve in his poems. A stable, recognizable landmark that “enters / the
ground at a fairly reliable point,” the tree is nonetheless made up of “twelve
quintillion cells,” in each of which “more takes place by way / of event, dispo-
sition, and such . . . than any computer / we now have could keep registration
of ” (ARA, pp. 303, 308). Ammons’s poetic tour of the elm goes on to consider
the mathematics of branches and foliage, the behavior of seedpods, and the
complex role of elm worms in the tree’s ecology. Although he never produced
that book-length study, Ammons returned repeatedly to the elm tree in later
poems. In “Extremes and Moderations,” another verse essay, he ponders the
signiicance of dead branches that break of and become lodged in the tree’s

923
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

lower boughs, inding in these a parable of the relationship between the living
and the dead in human culture.
Another prominent backyard resident in Ammons’s poems, a quince bush,
enjoys a more volatile, even violent relation to its environment than the elm
tree. A short poem called “The Quince Bush” begins, “The lowering quince
bush / on the back hedge has been / run through by a morning / glory
vine,” and goes on to ind in this image an emblem of hostility and struggle
in the human sphere (ARA, p. 217). If the quince is vulnerable to the parasitic
onslaught of the morning glory, however, it also harbors its own will to power,
as a passage from Ammons’s long poem Sphere suggests:
. . . even though the bush
has put on the strain of blossoming and fruiting, it has
at the same time shot out shoots all over, threatening the
upcoming hollyhock and lemon lilies: a green rage to possess,
make and take room: to dominate, shade out, whiten: I
identify with the bush’s rage, its quiet, ruthless, outward
thrust: whatever nears me must shrink, wither up, or widen
overlarge and thin with shade16

All the rapacity that Ammons beheld on the shore at Corsons Inlet can also
be found within the seemingly pastoral enclave of the backyard, as rival plants
compete for precious light and soil. Ammons clearly feels a special bond with
the quince bush, whose rage to expand and possess resonates with his own
ambition to unfold into as much space as he needs. But this expansive urge
is threatened from within by a lurking enemy, the morning glory waiting to
strike. Even the grass, Whitman’s symbol of democratic community, proves
on close inspection to be a scene of struggle. Ammons sums up the spectacle
in a bitingly concise phrase whose grammar hovers between possessive and
declarative modes: “being’s terror.”17 This is hardly the lesson most people
would derive from the sight of a peaceful suburban backyard, but Ammons
refuses to sentimentalize nature in any form.
“Essay on Poetics” was the irst of several densely discursive poems Ammons
wrote in the late sixties and early seventies that draw on such conceptual lan-
guages as cybernetics, information theory, anthropology, and structural lin-
guistics, all of which straddle the border between scientiic thought and socio-
cultural analysis. These abstract discourses supplement the more empirical
observation Ammons continued to practice, allowing him to develop ambi-
tious analogies between natural and human forms and processes. In these

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 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

longer works, the poetics of synthesis Ammons irst proposed in his 1954 essay
“Defense of Poetry” achieves its fullest realization:
. . . I am seeking the
mechanisms physical, physiological, epistemological, electrical,
chemical, esthetic, social, religious by which many, kept
discrete as many, expresses itself into the
manageable rafters of salience, lofts to comprehension, breaks
out in hard, highly informed suasions, the “gathering
in the sky” so to speak (ARA, p. 300)
Ammons’s singular innovation as a poetic thinker lies in his recognition of the
ainity between the mind’s generalizing faculty and its hunger for images of
transcendence. In passages like this one, from “Essay on Poetics,” he insists
on the equal claims of intellectual and spiritual categories. Favorite terms like
“salience” and “suasion” serve as switch points, efecting a smooth modula-
tion from abstract exposition to hymnlike lyricism. This strain of totalizing
vision reaches its pinnacle in Ammons’s book-length Sphere (1974), a poem
inspired by the image of the earth seen from space during the Apollo space
missions. In Sphere, physics and metaphysics are continuously interwoven in a
rambunctious cosmological divagation dedicated to the principle that “a sin-
gle dot of light, traveling, will memorize the sphere.”18
The diagrammatic tendency in Ammons’s imagination is balanced by his
fascination with matter, particularly in its lowest forms: excrement, waste,
carrion, and garbage. “Scientiic objectivity puts / radiance on / duckshit
even,” he writes in “Summer Session,” characteristically triangulating science,
beauty, and nature at its homeliest (ARA, p. 254). His best-known lyric, “The
City Limits,” ofers a more sustained celebration of the radiance that bathes
all things, including “the dumped / guts of a natural slaughter or the coil
of shit” (ARA, p. 320). The excremental theme receives its fullest elaboration
in a comic litany called “Shit List,” which catalogues dozens of varieties of
feces, pausing to observe their distinguishing features with a wryly clinical
eye. Ammons’s most extended exploration of the poetics of waste comes in
his late masterpiece Garbage (1994), which takes a massive, smoldering landill
as a symbol of the eternal circuit between matter and spirit:
this is just a poem with a job to do: and that
is to declare, however roundabout, sideways,
or meanderingly (or in those ways) the perfect
scientiic and materialistic notion of the

925
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

spindle of energy: when energy is gross,

rocklike, it resembles the gross, and when
ine it mists away into mystical reinements,
sometimes passes right out of material
recognizability and becomes, what?, motion,
spirit, all forms translated into energy, as at
the bottom of Dante’s hell all motion is
translated into form: so, in value systems,
physical systems, artistic systems, always this
same disposition from the heavy to the light,
and then the returns from the light downward
to the staid gross: stone to wind, wind to
stone:19
Despite Ammons’s characterization, the “spindle of energy” is not a con-
cept found in any textbook, yet his impulse to claim a scientiic prove-
nance for his metaphor is consistent with his career-long desire to make all
realms of knowledge the province of his art (even as his allusion to Dante’s
Inferno suggests a continuity with older traditions of poetic cosmology).
After reading Ammons, American poets could never again be quite as com-
placent about the division between imaginative literature and the sciences.
His work demonstrates, on a very broad scale, that poetry can assimilate
the language and logic of science without surrendering its lyric and vision-
ary capacities.
In 1967 Ammons served as poetry editor for a special issue of the liter-
ary magazine Chelsea devoted to science and technology. Among the poets
whose work he included was his mentor Josephine Miles (1911–1985), who gave
Ammons his irst signiicant encouragement while he was a graduate student
at Berkeley. In an unpublished interview with Alice Fulton, Ammons paid trib-
ute to Miles as a “crisp rationalist who had a true mastery of her life,” despite
the disabling arthritis that conined her to a wheelchair for much of her adult-
hood. Miles’s early poems were taut and epigrammatic, but over the course
of her career they gradually grew more porous, taking in particulars from
many areas: nature, politics, personal memory, and science. Her 1968 chap-
book Fields of Learning dramatizes this opening to the diversity of knowledge,
particularly as mapped in academia. The title poem collates bits of erudition
from all over campus and then is followed by more subject-speciic poems,
entitled “Botany” and “Physics.” The latter opens:

926
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

The mean life of a free neutron, does it exist

In its own moving frame a quarter-hour?
In decibel, gram, ohm, slug, volt, watt, does it exist?
Not objects answer us, not the hand or eye,
But particles out of sight.20
Like her student Ammons, whose work she had by this time thoroughly assim-
ilated, Miles savors the quirky, mythopoeic sound of scientiic terms (many of
them derived from proper names), while pondering the deeper mystery of
how the world is made of invisible particles whose existence we can only infer,
not observe. After stanzas that muse on the paradoxical behaviors of matter,
energy, light, and sound, the poem ends with a return to the free neutron,
whose brief life-span makes it a surrogate for all transient beings.
Subatomic particles of all kinds are a running preoccupation for Ruth Stone
(1915–2011), a poet who only began to achieve wide recognition in her eighties.
Her tone ranges from playful to plangent as she explores the nested realms
of molecules, atoms, and their still-tinier kin, inding in them a powerful
analogue for the hidden spaces of the self and the secret residues of loss. In
“Moving Right Along,” Stone jauntily declares, “At the molecular level, / in
another dimension, / oy, are you diferent!”21 “The Latest Hotel Guest Walks
over Particles That Revolve in Seven Other Dimensions Controlling Latticed
Space” stages an apocalyptic fantasy in which the “escaped molecules” of the
previous residents of a hotel room reassemble into “an antihero composed of
all the lost neutrinos,” whose appearance heralds a coming Armageddon.22
More poignantly, “At the Center” juxtaposes the conident assurance of
science –
They say at the Fermi accelerator,
“Rejoice. A clear and clean
explanation of matter is possible,”
as they bombard subatomic particles
at energies never before attained.

– with the wrenching knowledge of a particular loss:

Your eyes, the eyes of a madman that I loved,
far underground, fall apart,
while their particles still shoot like meteors
through space making their own isolated trajectories.23
Viewed by a physicist, the centrifugal motion of particles opens an exhilarat-
ing perspective on the material universe, but when seen in the light of grief

927
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

for a dead lover, that knowledge brings an unbearable clarity to the facts of
death.
Where Miles and Stone take atoms and molecules as instances of the
alien element within and around us, May Swenson (1919–1989) inspects the
intimate mechanics of matter with a tinkerer’s curiosity. Swenson is best
known for the ingeniously shaped visual texts she called “iconographs.”
Poems like “3 Models of the Universe,” “How Everything Happens (Based
on a Study of the Wave),” and “Of Rounds” both anatomize and illus-
trate dynamic forms from the oceanic to the planetary to the cosmic.24
Perhaps her most remarkable exercise in verbal visualization is “The DNA
Molecule,” whose elaborately shaped format is meant to evoke the spiral-
ing contours of its subject. The poem opens with a bold conlation of
science and art, asserting that “THE DNA MOLECULE / is The Nude
Descending a Staircase,” and then draws out the analogy with reference
both to Marcel Duchamp’s famous Futurist painting and to the female body
itself, which is, like the DNA molecule, a miraculous mechanism for self-
reproduction (with some incidental aid from the male body). I quote from
the version of the poem that appeared in Poetry magazine, without its icon-
ographic format:
As a woman ingests the demon sperm and with
the same membrane regurgitates
the mitotic double of herself
upon the slide of time
so The DNA Molecule produces with a little pop
at the waistline of its viscous drop
a new microsphere the same size as herself.25
While respecting the intricate topology that governs its workings, Swenson
superimposes human lineaments on the DNA molecule, granting it a kind
of primordial sexuality that precedes all bodily sex. Her graphic and syntactic
evocation of the molecule’s twining movements relects a deeply aesthetic
response, one by no means alien to scientists themselves. Eleven years after
Swenson’s poem appeared in Poetry, Andrew Weiman (b. 1956) published a
poem called “Andy-Diana DNA Letter” in the same magazine. Although it
makes no explicit mention of molecular biology, the poem represents an even
more ambitious attempt to mimic the double helix structure, arraying par-
allel strands of rhyming syllables so they cross from one side of the page to
the other at regular intervals. While this iendishly complex form may seem
at odds with the poem’s chatty content, Weiman’s point is that even a casual

928
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

love letter ultimately grows from imperatives written into the very molecules
that make us up.26
Along with the discovery of DNA, the emergence of quantum physics and
its increasingly counterintuitive successors is the scientiic development twen-
tieth-century poets have found most alluring. Frederick Seidel (b. 1936) has
ventured further into the complexities of modern physics than most of his
peers, particularly in The Cosmos Poems (2000), commissioned by the Hayden
Planetarium. The sequence explores some of the most diicult of recent sci-
entiic notions, from string theory to dark matter to eleven dimensionality,
while drawing unexpected connections to the realm of human experience.
At times Seidel’s verse merely sketches and paraphrases: “The massless spin-2
particle whose / Couplings at long distances / Are those of general relativ-
ity.”27 But in some passages Seidel succeeds in evoking by metaphor the essen-
tial strangeness of these new conceptions of time and space:
Think of the suckers on the tentacles
Without the tentacles. A honeycomb
Of space writhing in the dark.
Time deforming it, time itself deformed.
Fifteen billion light-years later a president
Of the United States gives the Gettysburg Address.
Two minutes. The solar system
Star beams down on him.28

In its engagement with bal ingly esoteric ideas, The Cosmos Poems represents
something of a limit case for contemporary science poetry. Where the intri-
cacy of the DNA molecule can be visualized and reigured in ways that make
it imaginatively accessible, the elusive concepts of quantum physics resist easy
metaphorical appropriations. Yet Seidel’s work begins to ofer some poetic
purchase on those concepts, and other poets will no doubt continue to bring
them into focus for the untrained reader.
Although he is explicitly commanded by higher beings to produce “Poems
of Science” in his epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill
(1927–1995) does not grant science the same degree of authority that poets
like Ammons, Swenson, and Seidel do. The occult premise of his long poem,
composed largely at the Ouija board, gives spirit lore precedence over rational
knowledge. Merrill is disarmingly candid in voicing his ambivalence toward
scientiic discourse:
Opaque
Words like “quarks” or “mitochondria”

929
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

Aren’t words at all, in the Rilkean sense of

House, Dog, Tree – translucent, half efaced,
Monosyllabic bezoars already
Found in the gullet of a two-year-old.
Whereas through Wave, Ring, Bond, through Spectral Lines
And Resonances blows a breath of life,
Lifting the pleated garment.29
For Merrill, the assimilation of science to poetry is essentially a problem of
diction; certain words are too rebarbatively opaque to be acceptable, while
others partake of the archetypal translucency that poets prize. (Merrill slyly
qualiies his polemic by using the arcane medical term “bezoar” to describe
the simple words he favors.) Because his interest is less in the content of sci-
ence than in its adaptability to mythmaking, Merrill is drawn to words whose
metaphorical associations he can activate and exploit. This odd cooptation of
science in the service of theology culminates in the discovery of a deity called
“God Biology,” who oversees the comings and goings of souls both on earth
and in the higher spheres.
Perhaps the most concerted efort to wed the languages of science and
religion in post-1950 poetry can be found in the work of Ronald Johnson (1935–
1998). Like Ammons’s Sphere, Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and
Seidel’s Cosmos Poems, Johnson’s ARK (begun in 1970 and published in 1996) is a
postmodern cosmogony, a book-length poem drawing elements from Dante,
Milton, and Blake while incorporating vocabularies from disciplines ranging
from physics and optics to cell biology. Its most immediate source may be
Ammons’s “Hymn,” whose devotional impulse ARK expands to epic propor-
tions.30 Throughout the work, Johnson deftly weaves scientiic terms into his
predominantly oracular style. In “Beam 31,” after proclaiming physics “the
music of our time,” he ofers a series of propositions that conlate realms and
scales with nearly manic speed:
Proportions, all things proportions. The solar system is a whoosh of some
doubler bloom than the atom at snowlake’s edge. Matter, which shakes an
electron in the eye, is the pattern of slowed light. The ripple-counter-ripple
of Space-Time-Light is, as an Ancient said of God, “an ininite circle whose
center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” . . .
ITEM: Physics = Psychics. Space is our “compass,” and conl ux with time,
makes a tree (vein, river) form twixt trinities through opposed spirals: vortex
to vortex: in with out: burning bush.31
This lapidary prose alternates with verse sections whose centered lines seem
to insist on the centrality of each moment, particle, and organism:

930
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

this is called spine of white cypress

roughly cylindrical
based
on the principle
of the intervals between cuckoos
and molecules, and molecules
reechoing:
these are the carpets of
protoplast, this
the hall of crystcycling waltz
down carbon atom32

Johnson forgoes Ammons’s patient exposition in favor of a more incantatory

synthesis of material and spiritual elements. This impulse toward compaction
reaches its limit in the concrete poems he scatters throughout ARK, which
serve to diagram the deep structures, at once verbal and metaphysical, he
wishes to evoke. The most famous of these is “Beam 24”:
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth

“Earth” and “heart” become linked in an endless chain, reinforcing the ana-
grammatic proposition “Physics = Psychics.” The following section, “Beam
25,” features an actual diagram of cell mitosis, another instance of the splitting
of a primordial substance into distinct entities. A work of ravishing lyricism and
sweeping vision, ARK is inally less a poem of science than a radically heterodox
ode to a cosmos in which cells and stars share space with angels and gods.
Although Ammons associated himself with the term “ecology” as early as
1964, he never embraced the politics of environmentalism with the fervor of
some poets of his generation. Of these, Gary Snyder (b. 1931) has been both
the most ardent and the most scientiically informed. In “What Happened
Here Before” he gives an accelerated overview of geological and evolutionary
history, leaping forward in hundred-million-year increments to place human
activity in global perspective.33 A similar vastness of temporal vision informs
“Toward Climax,” which draws on the concept of “climax communities,” eco-
systems that have attained maximum stability and diversity. The poem opens
with a passage whose elliptical syntax evokes the l uid exchanges between
environments and organisms:

931
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

teeth, all-purpose little early mammal molars.

primate lat-foot
front fore-mounted eyes –
watching at the forest-grassland (interface
richness) edge.
scavenge, gather, rise up on rear legs.
running – grasping – hand and eye;
hunting.
calling others to the stalk, the drive.34

“Science walks in beauty,” Snyder writes later in the poem, as he contemplates

the notion of “detritus pathways,” the weblike relays that distribute food,
energy, and information throughout a well-balanced system. Like Ammons,
Snyder honors the principle of “working order,” although he inds its human
aspect better exempliied in tribal cultures than in corporations.
Although it would be inaccurate to claim that Ammons fostered anything
resembling a school or movement, it should nevertheless be noted that sev-
eral prominent poets who draw on science in their work have had strong
personal and institutional associations with him. These include the Nobel
Prize–winning chemist Roald Hofmann (b. 1937), a close friend and colleague
of Ammons at Cornell, whose books The Metamict State (1987) and Gaps
and Verges (1990) trace wayward paths between science and feeling. Another
Cornell colleague and fellow North Carolinian, Robert Morgan (b. 1944),
named his recent volume of selected poems The Strange Attractor, a term bor-
rowed from chaos theory. Ammons’s students include the poet and naturalist
Diane Ackerman (b. 1948), whose irst book, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral
(1976), is equally indebted to Ammons and to his Cornell colleague, the pop-
ular astronomer Carl Sagan. Another of Ammons’s students, Alice Fulton (b.
1952), has emerged as his most thoughtful and inventive successor, bringing a
distinctively feminist bearing to the poetic assimilation of science. Her poem
“Shy One” seems a conscious revision of Ammons’s “Hymn.” Like that poem,
it begins by addressing an indeterminate “you”:

Because faith creates its veriication

and reaching you will be no harder than believing
in a planet’s caul of plasma,
or interacting with a comet
in its perihelion passage, no harder
than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological
impromptu l ung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps,
for some denser, more diicult being,

932
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

a subsidiary instance, easier to grasp

than the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,
my stance is passional toward the universe and you.35
The poem goes on to cite particular instances of faith as a necessary compo-
nent of knowledge: “the way electrons exist only when they’re measured”
and “thirteen species / of whiptail lizards consisting entirely of females”
that remain undiscovered because of a “bias against such things existing.”
Concluding that “faith is a cascade,” Fulton adds a further layer of epistemo-
logical subtlety to Ammons’s synthesis of science and religion. Her restless
curiosity has also led her to develop analogies between poetic form and the
complex geometric shapes called fractals.36
Other contemporary poets known for incorporating science into their
work include John Allman (b. 1935), Pattiann Rogers (b. 1940), Linda Bierds
(b. 1945), and Albert Goldbarth (b. 1948). The last two decades have seen a
veritable explosion of science poetry, much of which falls outside the his-
torical scope of this volume. Books published since 1990 that engage with
scientiic themes include Alison Hawthorne Deming’s Science and Other Poems
(1994), Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Endocrinology (1997), Forrest Gander’s Science
and Steeplelower (1998), Christian Bök’s Crystallography (2003), A. Van Jordan’s
Quantum Lyrics (2007), Anna Leahy’s Constituents of Matter (2007), Lyrae Van
Clief-Stefanon’s ]Open Interval[ (2009), Susan Somers-Willett’s Quiver (2009),
Karen Leona Anderson’s Punish Honey (2009), Kimiko Hahn’s Toxic Flora
(2010), Deborah Poe’s Elements (2010), and Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry
(2011). Ranging through theoretical and particle physics, astronomy, chemis-
try, and various strains of biology, these books show that poetry’s appetite for
science as material for thematic relection, metaphorical transmutation, and
visionary elaboration is healthier than ever. If Ammons opened the door to
science for twentieth-century poets, twenty-irst-century poets seem intent on
breaking down the wall.
Writing in 1963, the great physicist and teacher Richard Feynman relected
on what he saw as the unhealthy antagonism between poetry and science:
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas
atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel
them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my
imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-
old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part – perhaps my stuf was belched
from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. . . . It does not do harm to
the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than
any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of

933
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if
he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?37
While the antiscientiic views ascribed to them by Feynman can indeed be
found in the writings of nineteenth- and even some twentieth-century poets,
these views have become vanishingly rare today. The same year those sen-
tences were written, Ammons’s Expressions of Sea Level appeared, containing
“Hymn” and “Mechanism.” In the decades since, poets have more than risen
to the challenge voiced by Feynman. Whether looking out far or in deep,
toward the distant reaches of time and space or the intricate workings of cells
and atoms, contemporary poets have found in science an alternative to more
traditional sources of word and image: myth, religion, history, visible nature.
Major twentieth-century discoveries from relativity and quantum mechanics
to black holes and the DNA molecule have taken root in poets’ imaginations,
furnishing powerful metaphors that often seem to reconcile opposed realms.
At once mysterious, uncanny, and counterintuitive and veriiable, rational,
and objective, these concepts have given twentieth-century poets the means
with which to construct a new kind of visionary poetics, in which reason
and imagination are no longer sworn enemies but uneasy collaborators. To
some degree this development has been spurred by the mass migration of
poets into the university, where they perennially ind themselves competing
for institutional recognition and support with scientists. In any case, more and
more poets appear to be heeding Ammons’s call for a poetry that considers all
knowledge its province, that stakes its claim to the materials of science while
insisting on its right to reimagine them. The enterprises of poet and scientist
can never be identical, of course, but as we move into a new millennium, they
seem increasingly to hold converse.

Notes
1. Allen Tate (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Selected Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 48.
2. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press), p. 357. For a seminal discussion of this and related passages,
see M. H. Abrams, “Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism,” in The Mirror
and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1953), pp. 303–12.
3. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008).
4. Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” in Poetry and Prose,
ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 409–10. For a

934
 Science in Contemporary American Poetry

distinguished mathematician’s response to Whitman’s poem, see David Gale,

“The Sun, the Moon, and Mathematics,” in Tracking the Automatic Ant and
Other Mathematical Explorations (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998), p. 199.
5. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, p. 15.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New
York: Library of America, 1983), p. 456.
7. Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), p. 94.
8. William Carlos Williams, “Author’s Introduction to The Wedge,” in The
Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. II, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher
MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), p. 54; T. S. Eliot, “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 41. For extended discussions of
modernist poets’ engagements with science, see Lisa M. Steinman, Made in
America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1987), and Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound,
Eliot and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
9. For an early but still useful discussion of Jefers’s engagement with science, see
Hyatt H. Waggoner, “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jefers,” American
Literature 10:3 (1938), pp. 275–88. A much more recent account of Jefers as
a poet of scientiically informed biophilia is Christopher Cokinos’s essay
“Nature’s Oracle,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2012, p. 13.
10. Robinson Jefers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jefers (New York: Random
House, 1938), p. 173.
11. Jefers, The Selected Poetry, pp. 597–98.
12. A. R. Ammons to Budd Smith, October 1, 1973, A. R. Ammons Papers, box 21,
journal 56, Kroch Rare and Manuscripts Collections, Cornell University.
13. A. R. Ammons, “Defense of Poetry,” Epoch 52:3 (2004), p. 462.
14. A. R. Ammons, Collected Poems 1951–1971 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 39.
This collection will subsequently be cited in the text as ARA.
15. A. R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1965), p. 112.
16. A. R. Ammons, Sphere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 56.
17. Ammons, Sphere, p. 56.
18. Ammons, Sphere, p. 36.
19. A. R. Ammons, Garbage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 24–25.
20. Josephine Miles, Collected Poems 1930–83 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983), pp. 183–84.
21. Ruth Stone, Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (Cambridge, Mass.:
David R. Godine, 1987), p. 10.
22. Stone, Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected, pp. 40–41.

935
 R o ge r Gi l be rt

23. Stone, Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected, p. 3.

24. May Swenson, Poems to Solve (New York: Scribner, 1966), p. 32; May Swenson,
Iconographs (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 70; May Swenson, More Poems to
Solve (New York: Scribner, 1971), p. 23.
25. May Swenson, “The DNA Molecule,” Poetry (December 1968), pp. 176–77.
26. Andrew Weiman, “Andy-Diana DNA Letter,” in John Frederick Nims (ed.),
The Harper Anthology of Poetry (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 760.
27. Frederick Seidel, The Cosmos Trilogy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003), p. 15.
28. Seidel, The Cosmos Trilogy, p. 9.
29. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1982), p. 110.
30. Johnson and Ammons crossed paths briely in 1960 through their shared con-
nection with the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams. It seems safe to sur-
mise that Johnson had read at least Ammons’s early poetry, although his pri-
mary allegiances were to the Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance
poets.
31. Ronald Johnson, ARK (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2013), pp. 88–89.
32. Johnson, ARK, p. 100.
33. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 78.
34. Snyder, Turtle Island, p. 82.
35. Alice Fulton, Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton,
2004), p. 59.
36. Alice Fulton, “Fractal Ampliications: Writing in Three Dimensions,” in Feeling
as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf,
1999), p. 61.
37. Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most
Brilliant Teacher, ed. Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands (New York: Basic
Books, 1996), pp. 59–60.

936
 Chapter 41
The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”
E dwa r d B ru n n e r

No one, least of all American poets, was prepared for the “succession of
upheavals” that, in Natasha Zaretsky’s study of the 1970s, challenged whether
the county possessed “the political, military, economic and moral resources
to prevail in world afairs and provide for domestic prosperity.”1 An unpop-
ular war divided the populace and questioned the nation’s ability to protect
its far-l ung interests; an oil embargo exposed limited national resources and
conirmed an economy going global; and a White House scandal exposed
government corruption and demonstrated how a sensationalist media could
shape public thinking. As the decade began, poets likened America to the
Roman Empire, but their vision of a great civilization undermined by imperi-
alist adventures was a dead-end model, a “warning” equivalent to confessing
despair. The 1970s, then, have been described as a time of severe contraction.
“Embarrassed by the failure of projected spiritual revolutions,” Charles Altieri
wrote, “all the arts withdrew into a defensive pluralism suspicious of all theo-
retical claims and anxious to align with mainstream cultural values.”2
In the midst of such regrouping, some poets conceived a style of versifying
in direct opposition to doom-saying gestures. Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, and
Robert Hass took from their teachers at Stanford, Yvor Winters and Donald
Davie, examples of poetry and critical writings that envisioned poetry as a
public art that blended responsiveness to large concerns with responsibility
to the poetic tradition. Such a “poetry of the center,” as Robert von Hallberg
was irst to show, was timely, upholding discursive virtues whose “Augustan”
perspective (in Robert Archambeau’s words) was “a matter of commentary,
abstraction and moral statement.”3 Older poets in midcareer (W. S. Merwin,
Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich) also responded to the demands of their time
(ecology, loss of the wilderness, and injustice against women), but when they
took up matters of common concern, they extended the linguistic and struc-
tural boundaries of the poem, modeling alternate styles of perception. They
thought ecologically, not just historically; saw globally, not nationally; and

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worked across deep time. Of these poets, it is Hass who works the intersec-
tion between the two groups. He inds global signiicance in the natural life
of a region; his sense of history conirms the need for ecological balance. He
reines the urbanity of an Augustan perspective by testing its validity within a
shifting series of frameworks, a restless set of viewpoints.

*
Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry (1976) looked back and forward, a cross
between an overview and a manifesto; it summarized the decade of poetry
before it and inl uenced the decades to follow by championing a discursive,
speech-oriented poetics that highlighted the intellect’s capacity to describe,
consider, and evaluate. These values had been heralded by Winters (acknowl-
edged by Pinsky on his dedication page) since the 1940s in critical essays associ-
ating morality with discipline and were further developed by Davie (Winters’s
successor at Stanford) in studies in the 1950s that singled out diction and syntax
as underappreciated features that, by displacing image and rhythm as centrally
expressive, countered the inl uence in England of “Bohemian” poets of rhe-
torical excess such as Dylan Thomas and the early W. S. Graham.4
England in the 1950s could be pertinent to America in the 1970s because
America’s young poets had been experimenting with programmatic language
that, though diferent from the excessive rhetoric of Thomas and Graham,
had become in its own way similarly formulized. A sympathetic description
of the Deep Image poetry of the late 1960s would consider it on the one hand
as stylized to evoke the stress of its time while on the other hand designed
to serve as a haven of stability. Such writing was a staple of Poetry magazine
under Daryl Hine, who regularly printed free verse that portrayed a mythic
or unconscious psychic state in language that was tonally sober, aurally por-
tentous, and visually impoverished, as in these opening lines to poems by
Josephine Saunders, Jon Anderson, and Mark Strand, respectively: “What is to
be found / on the underside of words?” “The heart is a violent muscle; it opens
& shuts. / The subject is death.” “I have a key / so I open the door and walk in.
/ It is dark and I walk in. / It is darker and I walk in.”5
Although such language might appear strange, unnerving, and danger-
ous, its wholesale usage had turned it into coterie talk. Pinsky identiied a
lexicon of key words by distributing them throughout a three-line parody
that, he claimed, any “young poet” could have written on any “campus in
America”: “The silence of my / blood eats light like the / breath of future
water.”6 By 1978, the poetics of this “new surrealism” was so compromised
that Paul Breslin could dismiss it as a “shared set of rhetorical and ideological

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 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

formulas . . . rearranged to make any number of more or less interchange-

able poems.”7 Although this poetry ailiated itself with activism, it pre-
sented acts of withdrawal that it regarded as necessary self-protection in a
bad time.
Breslin’s dismissal downplayed, however, the stress that the ongoing
Vietnam War placed on poets for whom language was an index of cultural
health. The September 1972 issue of Poetry, scheduled for appearance on the
eve of a national election, consisted entirely of poems that answered editor
Hine’s solicitations for new work “protesting the acceleration of the unde-
clared Indo-Chinese War.”8 The issue’s unprecedented all-black cover evoked
an air of mourning, while its complete darkness augured a disruption of the
senses, a blindness the poets verbally reproduced by insisting the working
material of their language had been damaged. The issue conirms Subarno
Chattarji’s observation that poets against the war united in the belief that
“the state manipulated language to wage and sustain the war.”9 Richard Hugo
(now remembered for his rough-edged poems about working-class life in
the Paciic Northwest) warned, in the poem that Hine ofered readers irst:
“Beware certain words: Enemy, Liberty. Freedom.” “Believe those sounds,”
Hugo concluded, “and you’re aiming a bomb.”10
Yet the deep images into which these poets descended could also reveal
what had been lost and what might return. James Wright’s “Eclogue at Nash’s
Grove,” from his 1971 Collected Poems, features language under such stress that it
veers between muttering and cursing. When moments of eloquence emerge,
they are voiced by others, such as a colloquial translation of Virgil’s “optima
dies primus fugit” (sometimes rendered as “the best days are irst to leave,” from
his Bucolics). The poem records a visit to a neglected nineteenth-century cem-
etery in southwest Minnesota. Rare wildlowers can abound in isolated mid-
western burial grounds like Nash’s Grove, whose consecrated land remains
unbroken by a plow. When Wright inds instead a site choked with weeds, its
pioneers’ gravestones crumbling, he collapses into despair, rage, and self-pity:
“Virgin America, all right,” he cries. “The whole place is a grave, a virgin /
Whose belly is black stone.”11
What dislodges Wright from despair is Virgil’s Latin, whose compressed,
incisive phrasing carries such wisdom that it not only survives but merits recy-
cling as Americanized colloquial talk, as if it could emerge from not a book
but a happenstance meeting: “A man whom I never saw told me / The best
days are the irst / To lee away.” By recasting Virgil’s words as a linguis-
tic wildlower from a poetic ancestor who understood loss to be inevitable,
Wright is able to recognize, encompass, and embrace the neglected. All the

939
 E dwa rd Brun ne r

Minnesotans relegated to an overgrown graveyard now can be placed tenderly

in relation to one another and to Wright, allowing him to embrace his own
injuries through acknowledging theirs. The poem we are reading becomes
a new kind of eclogue, not a stylized exchange between “shepherds” whose
rural upbringing puriies their thought but a chance for Wright to align him-
self with the forgotten people of whom he is sweepingly self-aware. He signs
of in a inal line: “This poem is a little / Darkness for them, where they do not
have to weep. / Not for me, anyway.”12
The Virgilian clarity that salvages Wright from emotional wreckage is
scarcely evident in his own poetry, which ends with a sentence fragment. This
efect of a downward spiral was surely intended, because the poem’s Latin epi-
graph is an untranslated and unattributed quote from Catullus – “cui dono lep-
idum novum libellum?” – lines that resonate ironically for Wright (who is among
the few with the knowledge to translate them): “To whom do I dedicate my
elegant little book?” That is the kind of question Pinsky wants to rehabilitate,
to strip of its irony, not just in his critical writing but in his own poetry. For
him, the clarity and directness of ancient poets who concentrate thought into
compelling phrases need not be taken as the neglected virtue of a remote past;
rather, it can be seen as that which the present has available as its heritage from
the medium of poetry that has been shaped over time. To illustrate Pinsky’s
embrace of such linguistic elements as “clarity, lexibility, eiciency,” James
Longenbach, two decades later, chose “Tennis,” from Pinsky’s inaugural vol-
ume Sadness and Happiness (1975), in which a description of the familiar game
becomes the source of rules for upright living, as this passage from section V
illustrates: “Call questionable balls his way, not yours; / You lose the point but
have your concentration, / The grail of self-respect. Wear white. Mind los-
ing.”13 “If Virgil could write poems about the skills of farming,” Longenbach
asks, “why not poems about the skills of tennis?”14 Pinsky delivers one sen-
tence after another, serving up a compressed, aphoristic wisdom, a vernacular
ethics in which humility, grace, and endeavor operate in tandem. It is as if the
game has become a poem and the poem a game (its precise blank verse nod-
ding to an American Virgil, the Robert Frost who famously disparaged free
verse as tennis without a net).
Pinsky establishes, in his volume’s title, a vast polarity within which to
work. “Sadness and Happiness” proclaims its l uency by stepping efortlessly
across the divisions separating each of the thirteen sections (each one with ive
stanzas in four lines each): “Well, somewhere in the mind’s mess / feelings are
genuine,” Pinsky begins, introducing a sentence in section III that continues
with a list of such feelings:

940
 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

cool
blue of Indian summer, happiness
IV
like the sex-drowsy saxophones
rolling latted thirds of the blues
over and over, rocking the dulcet
rhythms of regret, Black music
which tumbles loss over in the mouth
like a moist bone full of marrow.15
The poet’s form, its division into numbered sections, here exists as an obstacle
that can be overtopped and played against, much as the latted-third blue notes
that are supposed to connote sadness can be rolled “over and over” until their
tumbling makes loss palpable, physical, and bodily. Pinsky’s rhapsodic medita-
tions are an extravaganza of equivalences, networks of association that verge
on the tumultuous. To loat productively between sadness and happiness is to
evoke jazz and the blues as allies in versifying.
Pinsky never writes for long without returning to the music he grew up
with, which crosses racial lines, unites disparate groups, and mixes high and
low culture. Extended sequences that consider an America both popular and
elite are a signature of Pinsky’s work. The tercets of “Essay on Psychiatrists,” a
sequence that loats in and out of blank verse, teasingly investigate psychiatrists
(“It’s crazy to think one could describe them,” it begins) and then conclude,
twenty-one sections later, by deciding “we are all psychiatrists,” all profession-
als in one form or another.16 Willard Spiegelman observes that the sequence
moves “from a contemplation of The Bacchae (is Pentheus or Dionysus the true
psychiatrist in the play?), through descriptions of the comic strip igure Rex
Morgan, M.D., through Landor’s Imaginary Conversation between Sidney
and Fulke Greville, and to memories of Yvor Winters.”17 In Pinsky’s l uency,
moving laterally across a broad cultural terrain, poetry regains its authority to
comment on the world beyond it.
How did Pinsky achieve such a breakthrough? Winters, for one, served as
a guide beyond formulaic diction, because the words he had relied on in his
modernist free verse of the 1920s – “cold,” “stone,” “silent,” “alone” – formed
the “rudiments of a personal code,” as Robert von Hallberg observed, that
would “constitute a generation’s poetic diction forty years later.” Winters’s
cure had been to employ a “deliberate, even willful, use of words . . . to situ-
ate his own utterances in implicit relation to the utterances of older poets.”18
Winters, famous for the rigor with which he examined poetry in English, saw
the poem supreme as an accurate, measured exchange between the poet and

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a subject in which the tradition of poetry provides resources that result in an

artwork that both portrays and assesses.19 Precision is so necessary to such a
task that, in a sense, every writer who submits to such a standard is being tested
ethically, while in another sense, the very idea at the heart of poetry – exam-
ining its given subject with the critical care aforded by such a deep and strong
tradition – is inherently ethical. Thom Gunn, a Stanford arrival fresh from a
1950s-era Cambridge education dominated by F. R. Leavis, swiftly transitioned
to Winters’s view of poetry “as an art toward which you have to have respon-
sibility . . . a more exact and precise form of writing than any other.”20 Gunn
developed tight rhymed iambics, as in “Misanthropos” from Touch (1967), in
which he found the words of trust to be voiced by a “last man” looking for
others in the days after nuclear disaster, a catastrophe whose unsparing devas-
tation terribly anticipated his poetry on AIDS in the 1990s.21
Pinsky also found in Davie (who illed Winters’s place at Stanford after his
death, from 1968 to 1978) a model that bridged the worlds of objective schol-
arship and engaged reviewing. Davie’s “Afterword for the American Reader,”
in his 1973 study Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, called for a poetry that pre-
sented civic sense and political responsibility, and Davie elsewhere deined his
study as “making the case for the political Centre.”22 Davie’s own poetry, as
von Hallberg observed, demonstrated the many ways “that a poet who wishes
to speak for the center of his culture can stake his claim.”23 Calvin Bedient has
described Davie’s style with an accuracy that accommodates Pinsky’s work:
The urbane mind scorns the folly and fears the vice of all private perspective;
it trusts in the justice of the general. Accordingly, the ideal style, to it, is a style
without style, as clear, unmarked, and compliant as water – and like water,
wholesome, easy to assimilate, and used by everyone (for as the lines go, so
goes the nation).24
Pinsky’s acclaimed book-length sequence An Explanation of America
(1979) features just such a “clear, unmarked, and compliant” style at its most
endearing:
In a way, every stranger must imagine
The place where he inds himself – as shrewd Odysseus
Was able to imagine, as he wandered,
The ways and perils of a foreign place:
Making his goal, not knowing the real place,
But his survival, and his progress home.25
With this style, Pinsky introduces a charmed world of orderly proportion,
thoughtful ritual, and attentive community: “I want our country like a

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 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

common dream / To be between us in what we want to see” (EA, p. 10). Yet

his readiness to select conventional paradigms for describing the country – its
love of speed, its vast geography, and its openness to the future – also reveals
a work anxiously testing the ability to locate national standards at a time of
unsettling change. He inesses that project, moreover, by proposing to explain
to his young daughter what America means, thus permitting himself to deine
his work space along vast polarities: on the one hand, he speaks of the nation
in its past and future; on the other hand, he speaks to the child he is nurturing.
Limiting himself to addressing the young restricts where his investigations
might lead him. History approached in this manner is no longer a dark hole
with an aura of criminality, as it seemed earlier in the decade. When he takes
up “Rome,” it is not the swollen-with-ambition late Rome of Lowell’s Juvenal
but a morning-in-Italia Rome of Virgil and Horace, whose perspective he
embeds by translating one of Horace’s epistolary-advice poems as if a sub-
urbanite were writing to a cosmopolitan. History is not made subordinate to
literature, but literature is the place where history is fully embodied, imagi-
natively sustained.
Pinsky’s project tests the capacity of poetry to be epic and lyric, to be broadly
descriptive and deeply intimate, yet what is most striking is its resemblance to
romance. The tormented family of confessional verse is replaced by a nuclear
family that is a model of hard work and achievement, and the poem begins
and ends in classroom settings within which his daughter lourishes. When
Pinsky takes up the most distressing moment in recent American history, he
sharply sequesters that discussion. “Someday the War in Southeast Asia,” he
writes, addressing his daughter in stumbling words, “somewhere – / Perhaps
for you and people younger than you – / Will be the kind of history and pain
/ Saguntum is for me” (EA, p. 50). (“Saguntum,” mentioned in one of Ben
Jonson’s famous elegies, is remote indeed: it won its battleground status in the
Second Punic War.) Pinsky banishes Vietnam through scare quotes and ital-
ics. He backs away from “The words – ‘Vietnam’ – that I can’t use in poems /
Without the one word threatening to gape / And swallow and enclose the
poem” (EA, p. 45). Alfred Corn thought Pinsky’s title was a mistake: “Wouldn’t
‘Relections on America’ have been (though no more appetizing) more exact?”26
But an explanation of America is not relecting on America: “as all things have
their explanations, / True or false, all can come to seem domestic” (EA, p. 18).
His concluding section stresses art’s importance but centers on Shakespeare’s
masque-like drama about artiice, The Winter’s Tale, in which aristocrats play
at being rustics. Yet that work also features a mad ruler who regains his sanity,
and the uniting of a family long thought scattered. Pinsky presents a country

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in desperate need of healing, eager to ind stability, and he frames his words
to comfort and soothe.
Pinsky would proceed less cautiously in his later years: he came to describe
An Explanation of America as a “weird experiment,” not a didactic poem but
an example of imagining a didactic poem.27 Frank Bidart, introducing Pinsky
at a 1990 reading, described his post-Explanation poems not as “discursive”
but as “almost the mirror-reverse. Fragmentation, quicksilver transitions,
delirium, dream, brokenness now create the characteristic verbal texture.”28
“The Figured Wheel” (in The History of My Heart [1984]) imagines the poem as
an archival device that absorbs and preserves generational traces of humans
through time and across space. For Pinsky, it is an instrument of humility that
brutally and heedlessly engorges all there is, even as it is brilliantly, dazzlingly
festooned with what others believed to be important: “It is Jesus oblivious to
hurt turning to give words to the unrighteous, / And it is also Gogol’s feed-
ing pig that without knowing it eats a baby chick // And goes on feeding.”29
Structures like this one – lyrics as epics and short poems that encapsulate mul-
tiple extended sequences – are signature texts of Pinsky’s later work. “Shirt”
(in The Want Bone [1990]) peels back the layers of signiicance from an everyday
item, moving beyond its components (listed like an incantatory chant: “The
back, the yoke, the yardage”) into the actual labor behind its making, touch-
ing on the history of sweatshops and the origin of fabrics, and stressing the
class divisions and racial diferences that are both elided and preserved within
an ordinary artifact. At the center of the poem, incidents from “the infamous
blaze // At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven” stand in as re-creations of
the lost histories that drive the poem.30

*
Pinsky’s career unfolds from its sharply focused beginning. From celebrating
the professionalism that served as an avenue of upward mobility for a nation
settled by immigrants, he turns to celebrating the mongrel attributes of a coun-
try that too easily forgets its checkered past. He has moved closer to the position
that Philip Levine, also a student of Winters, developed in the 1970s. Levine’s
“irst and most powerful commitment,” Edward Hirsch wrote, “has been to
the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.”31 Levine may have
transferred from Winters his proclivity for “discovering or gaining attention for
unrecognized or neglected poets” – a “serious matter,” von Hallberg writes, “to
which Winters brought intelligence and taste – and perseverance.”32
Yet if Levine admired Winters’s propensity for the underdog, he bonded
with Winters through a mutual interest in prizeighting. The pugnacious

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Winters, who appears as the garrulous “Old Man” in Pinsky’s “Essay on

Psychiatrists,” is recalled by Levine, in a memoir of his Stanford days, as a frus-
trated boxer.33 Levine’s turn away from the Anglo-American tradition cham-
pioned by Winters and his embrace of the explosive and intuitive imagery of
poetry in Spanish by Neruda, Vallejo, and others were a shift from one style
of battle to another. Far from aristocratically colonizing these Spanish poets,
Levine borrows their phrasing to disclose American practices; he anticipates an
America viewed as “hemispheric” rather than transnational. If the words are
awry and the phrasing bizarre, such distortions can be used, pace Breslin, not
to register the inner world of the sensitized poet but to glimpse the strained
sensibility of the laboring class neglected by an indiferent culture. In a series
of interconnected volumes that represent conditions of the working poor in
Detroit, Levine recast the poetic idioms of Deep Image surrealism to record
the sentiments of the alienated, translating their struggle for dignity into lan-
guage now meaningfully distraught.
Levine’s workers are ground down by routine labor, pressured by invisible
racism, their anger simmering. In one sense, these voices could not have been
clearer: “Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, / Out of black bean and
wet slate bread, / Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, / Out of cre-
osote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, / They Lion grow.”34 This title
poem from They Feed They Lion (1972) draws energy from the same sources
as the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse it strikingly resembles – the rhythms of
repetitive labor, the burden of bodies moving within exhaustion. But there is
nothing quaint about the poem: the poor will not be ground down – their very
bodies are accustomed to absorbing brutalization. If this is an environment of
detritus, of the leftover and discarded, then its fragments and loating phrases
have been shaped by Levine into savagely clustered lists that sound both dam-
aged and reconstituted, both destructive and creative, inhuman and human.
“They Feed They Lion” depicts a generalized voice that sounds harsh; we
are unused to hearing hard labor articulated in verse. What some might dis-
miss as “surreal” by the standards of the Anglo-American poetic tradition
becomes, when viewed through the street life of a damaged American city,
an imagery that relects the cobbled-together tactics that inhabitants need to
survive. Levine’s battle to express the loss of his father at the age of ive is
recorded in “Zaydee,” a poem in which the grandfather is the stabilizing igure
to whom the child turns in his drive to understand. But for Levine at ive, the
answer to the question “Where did my father go in my ifth autumn?” is always
going to be elusive, enigmatic, mysterious: “In the blind night of Detroit / on
the front porch, Grandfather points up / at a constellation shaped like a cock

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and balls.”35 The memories cannot be sorted from a bal ing network of con-
tradictory impressions, of images simultaneously elevated and demeaning,
expansive and constricted, adult and childlike: “He carries a card table out
under the moon / and plays gin rummy and cheats”; “He sings a song of free-
stone peaches / all in a box.” The poem ends when the child steps in to shape
an answer he might comprehend to the question he asked his grandfather:
Where did he go when his autumn came?
He sat before the steering wheel
of the black Packard, he turned the key,
pressed the starter, and he went.
The maples blazed golden and red
a moment and then were still,
the long streets were still and the snow
swirled where I lay down to rest.36
If this closure is inal, it remains just as surely open, as though his father in
time will return to the “long streets” that are still for the moment, just a time
of resting. (He returns in spirit in all Levine’s subsequent poems.) Even so, the
son also knows that what he wants to dream to be temporary – that his father’s
voyage will end in his father’s safe return – is all too permanent. The reality
of death, there in the construction of “lay down to rest,” is both admitted and
refused.
Levine may have had his own bluntness conirmed in Winters’s example,
but he took away an additional lesson – the need to protect against hurting
others. Winters was famous for his brusque dismissals, and his candid remarks
must have stung. “There are a few poems that I should, in fact, have liked to
omit,” Winters wrote in his foreword to the 1937 anthology Twelve Poets of the
Paciic, and he then went on to name the four authors whose work he disval-
ued.37 Levine will not forget incidents in which violence intruded, but he is also
eager to notice violence rebufed by unexpected generosity. The Names of the
Lost (1976) sets out not only to retrieve the forgotten and identify the nameless
but also to honor the guardians, those who found their voice. While “New
Season” appears as a chronicle poem, listing Levine’s anxiety about his teen-
age son’s male friends, who inhabit a culture of violence, and written on the
occasion of his mother’s seventieth birthday, at its center is an anecdote that
carries transcendent weight; it slowly emerges from the anecdotal violence
that surrounds his memory of the 1942 Belle Isle riots, when Levine was ifteen
and Detroit found itself a city “at war for real,” as angry gangs marauded the
streets, enraged by the rumor that “a sailor had thrown a black baby / of the
Belle Isle Bridge”:

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7 years passed
before Della Daubien told me
how three white girls from the shop
sat on her on the Woodward Streetcar
so the gangs couldn’t ind her
and pull her of like they did
the black janitor and beat
an eye blind. She would never
forget, she said, and her old face
glowed before me in shame
and terror.38

Levine’s poetry remains close to violent incidents, an injured child devising

compensations for his loss, shaping from vivid fragments of memory a narra-
tive sensible and practical enough to allow him to move on. To remain close to
the Detroit streets, even to ind traces of those same streets in 1930s Spain, is
crucial. He is the “poet of the night shift,” writes Edward Hirsch, “a late ironic
Whitman of our industrial heartland, a Romantic anarchist.”39 While Levine’s
Detroit waits for its resurrection, its citizenry endlessly demonstrates their
ingenuity as survivors: the only trace of a solution lies in the exceptional acts
of individuals. Levine’s further poetry is adroit at amplifying such moments
without diminishing their humanity.

*
The poetry of Levine and Pinsky is not aianced to Winters through com-
mitment to any orthodoxy. Neither poet aspires to the mantle of the rigor-
ous moralist whose aim is to forge a “truism” that the poem “then has to
make real for the reader.”40 Instead, Winters’s spirit endures in writing that,
for Pinsky (he said in a 1984 talk), embodies a “resistance or transformation of
communal values,” or, for Levine (he said in a 1977 interview), aims “to efect
some kind of moral change.”41 Their communally focused, ethically attentive
poems willingly take on a burden of responsibility – a commitment associated
with another group of poets who deined a crisis whose proportions intensi-
ied during the 1970s and reached beyond any nation.
April 1970 marked the irst celebration of Earth Day, and as Hudson Review
editor Frederick Morgan wrote in a 1970 issue featuring work by W. S. Merwin,
Gary Snyder, William Staford, A. R. Ammons, and others, “ ‘Ecology’ has
become a key word of our time.” A threatened environment ofered itself as a
metacrisis, a problem that drew on rhetoric that had earlier circulated around
nuclear holocaust: “We are living on the brink of an enormous catastrophe,

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and . . . probably the human race wiped out, or reduced to a sufering frag-
ment, within the next half-century.”42 Unlike atomic war, though, this crisis
was evolving, palpable, and susceptible to individual involvement. The crisis
had sweep and grandeur – a disaster unfolding on a worldwide scale – yet
its problems encouraged innovative approaches. Wendell Berry created “The
Mad Farmer” to disrupt the bucolic observations (“The known / returns to be
known again”) in Farming: A Handbook (1970), calling for revolution, describing
a “year of catastrophe,” and ofering “Prayers and Sayings” that placed “hands
into the mire” to learn the “kinship . . . of the living and the dead.”43
The free verse in Merwin’s Writings to an Uninished Accompaniment (1973)
(Morgan published four examples in his 1970 issue) exempliied a “deep ecol-
ogy” that, historian Bruce J. Schulman explains, challenges “the anthropo-
morphic outlook of most mainstream environmentalists with their stress on
human welfare and aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty.”44 In the 1950s,
Merwin had written of the coal-mining facilities in his Pennsylvania home-
town, and he ended “Burning Mountain” (in The Drunk in the Furnace [1960])
by describing a smoldering coal seam that has become “normal / With farms
on it, and wells of good water, / Still cold, that should last us, and our grand-
children.”45 This denial of a deteriorating environment becomes a deliberate
blindness Merwin imagines at the center of The Lice (1967), portraying the
Vietnam War as the ofshoot of a larger technocratic impulse to dominate the
natural world. A nation that can eradicate species can fecklessly devastate a
country, but with fearful consequences: “When the forests have been destroyed
their darkness remains / The ash the great walker follows the possessors.”46
Merwin’s free verse in the 1960s ofered grim, symptomatic sketches of a
deeply distressed culture that were widely adapted by other poets (Paul Breslin
targeted these poems in his 1978 article).47 To turn from despair to hopefulness,
as Merwin did, demanded repositioning. This free verse, structured as para-
ble but using the riddle’s gnomic language, discerns items from the natural
world – mountains, clouds, stars, water, and sun – as relecting a system that
addresses us through acts we fail to grasp: “the same wind that tells you every-
thing at once / unstitches your memory”; “everywhere / the vision has just
passed out of sight / like the shadows sinking.”48 Poems sidle from one para-
dox to another, embracing and inverting contradictions, sounding like legends
or folklore or primitive tales: “nothing on earth / says it’s ours”; “Every word
/ runs the hills at night.”49 Are these the last stories, the fragmentary narratives
that a handful of survivors might recall after world’s end? Or are they the irst
stories, sudden glimpses into truths that can sustain a future? We live in such a
moment that we cannot tell; the natural environment that once helped guide

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 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

our ancestors now sends scrambled messages: “the skies are looking for you /
they’ve left everything / they want you to remember them,” but they resem-
ble “shadows of doors calling calling /sailing / the other way // so it sounds
like good-bye.”50 What these poems ofer, Evan Watkins wrote shortly after
their appearance, is “the possibility of living one’s life as a continual transfor-
mation through being observed, being touched, being judged even by what is
around us, a recognition that at the very point of personal identity there is an
otherness which presses continually upon us.”51
The medium of poetry, as Merwin reconigures it, should be capacious
enough to reproduce concepts from other cultures. Solidarity is found in writ-
ings that are conspicuously transnational. The dangers are global, the planet is
threatened, yet poets know the wisdom transmitted over generations. Merwin’s
translations in Selected Translations 1968–1978 (1980) sound translation-like – dis-
embodied, simpliied, and without associational overtones – and he comes
away with moments that are humble, respectful, and patient, as in “Pilgrim
Songs,” from an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian source (“Our life
on earth / is like the grass growing”), or the thirteenth-century Persian of
Rumi (“Teacher give me a name so that I’ll know / what to call myself ”) or
the twentieth-century Spanish of Vicente Huidobro (“I’m absent but deep in
this absence / There is the waiting for myself ”).52 These direct words convey
a transnational alliance of poets operating as a communality that transmits
across continents and centuries. Poets in an uncertain time become archivists
of ancient knowledge. The Rain in the Trees (1988) centers on a Hawaiian land-
scape midway between continents with a double project: Merwin reclaims
local vegetation damaged by industrial farming and records the indigenous
language overridden by colonists from east and west. The Folding Clifs (1998),
a narrative poem of Hawaii set in the 1890s, dramatizes the clash between
natives and colonists while lovingly portraying the exotic trees, lowers, and
animals of a lost time. Hawaii’s fragility, in Merwin’s handling, represents
the planet’s besiegement, even as this distinctive geography ofers a practical
framework within which to accomplish productive work.
The ability to work across cultures and reconstruct ields of knowledge
beyond the current time frame is crucial to the verbal networks that Gary
Snyder weaves into loosely connected sequences. For Snyder, the medium
of poetry is inseparable from deep time, equivalent to an artifact with an
ancient design. Isomorphic correspondences that link Native American myth
and Buddhist principles clarify the dynamic exchanges among creatures and
vegetation. Turtle Island (1974) is the “new / old” name given to the conti-
nent by Native Americans, “based on many creation myths of the people who

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have been living here for millennia.”53 The work of a scholar-poet who stud-
ied anthropology at Reed, who read Chinese philosophy and the poetry of
the T’ang dynasty (618–907 C.E. ) at Berkeley, who hung out with Beat poets
sojourning in San Francisco, who crewed on oil tankers and manned forest
lookout towers, and who eventually resettled his family into a wilderness area
of California, Snyder’s Turtle Island is, depending on which passage we exam-
ine, environmentalist logbook, scholarly citation, fervent prayer to mythic
deities, outraged tract, or amiable memoir. Snyder can write from the view-
point of the log-truck driver who knows the wilderness as a work site – “In the
high-seat, before-dawn dark, / Polished hubs gleam” – or he can launch into
diatribes that target caricaturized enemies – “The robots argue how to parcel
our Mother Earth / To last a little longer / like vultures lapping / Belching,
gurgling, / near a dying Doe”– or just as easily describe creatures interacting
with transcendent grace:
A whoosh of birds
sweeps up and round
tilts back
almost always lying all apart
and yet hangs on!
together54
Yet Turtle Island never lingers over pictorial grandeur. Its moments of grace
are leeting, and its territory is under siege. Snyder identiies with species
under attack: “The insects side with the Viet Cong,” he insists, as humans
bomb and destroy, moving “across the planet / blinding sparrows / break-
ing the ear-drums of owls.”55 The natural environment within which Snyder
locates himself, although embattled, contains within it resources for survival.
Snyder’s pages exercise freedoms both verbal and visual. Organizations of
words cluster concepts or use line breaks for drama, and linguistic registers
shift from the vernacular to the scientiic or slip into non-English languages to
represent alternate cultures.
By contrast, Adrienne Rich regards her cultural environment as profoundly
hostile – as it indeed had become by the midpoint of the decade. With the fail-
ure of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, antifeminist cam-
paigns “that had been in progress for some time,” Philip Jenkins writes, were
“winning victories that startled a liberal movement long used to victory.”56
“Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and
have real sources,” Rich wrote in a 1971 essay, “built into society, language, the
structures of thought.”57 Her subject, then, exists within the very language she

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 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

has inherited, which she must work with, yet somehow alter: “Our whole life
a translation / the permissible i bs // and now a knot of lies / eating at itself
to get undone.”58 To convey those damaged words, those half-present mean-
ings, Rich sometimes ofers a poetic line scarred with visible gaps:
Death of the city Her face
sleeping Her quick stride Her
running Search for a private space The city
caving from within The lessons badly
learned Or not at all59
Even when Rich’s individual lines blur, grow agitated, or turn opaque, they
airm an alternate space that still dreams that language might become com-
mon. The Manhattan in “Twenty-One Love Poems” is, in its public façade, a
toxic environment where “screens l icker / with pornography, with science-
iction vampires,” and its violence is inescapable, even seeping into private
spaces, where “wounds / break open further with tears.”60 Only in the inte-
rior of “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)” can Rich ind an intimacy with
another woman in which expression is more bodily than verbal, in which it is
possible to claim “Whatever happens, this is.”61 One “irregular” text dominates
the twenty-one others, lourishing apart from yet in relation to the series, in
the irst book of poetry in which Rich identiied as a lesbian. To make a space
that had not previously existed is to open possibility, to include others who
have been excluded, and to envision an alternate future. Indeed, traditional
forms such as the sestinas and sonnets that Marilyn Hacker demonstrated in
a series of volumes beginning with Presentation Piece (1974) were also available
(as, in a sense, they had always been) as vehicles for channeling love’s power,
no matter what public attitudes might be: “the skin wakes / up in humming
networks, audibly whispers / over the dead wind.”62
Rich was “breaking down language,” Suzanne Juhasz declared in 1976, “in
order to be able to recompose it.”63 Helen Vendler saw this process as evolving,
with Rich’s 1991 collection An Atlas of the Diicult World placing in its title “an
adjective of balement and struggle rather than of revolt and revolution.”64
Rich has continued to develop an alternate orthography, with a backslash
in mid-line that evokes prose transcription within a poetic discourse: “This
woman/ the heart of the matter.”65 Sometimes she borrows from forebears
such as Muriel Rukeyser, from whom she takes the colon – sometimes sur-
rounded by space, and sometimes paired with another – as a mark that both
interrupts and equates, that distinguishes among items while relating them.
While such intrusions/insertions appear in a minority of Rich’s later poems,

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their intransigence identiies with the poem’s position as harshly delimited by

the politics of persisting social customs and iercely expressive of resistance to
limits rigorously evoked.
Not unlike Rich’s obduracy is the “ecofeminism” that David Harvey
describes as an environmental justice movement, that poses “matters in terms
of the deilement, violation, and even ‘rape’ of a sacred Mother Earth” to
adopt a “nonnegotiable position of intense moral rectitude untouchable by
legal, scientiic or other rationalistic discourse.”66 To refuse negotiation is to
establish a critical boundary; however, the strength of poetry can also bring the
environmental crisis into manageable proportions. Mary Oliver’s immensely
popular writing substitutes intuitions and feeling for oppositional stances.
Moving against what Patrick Curry calls an “inlated rationalism” through
understanding the “embodied and embedded, situated and engaged, local and
particular,” Oliver speaks for the human community’s need for contact with
that which lies beyond them.67 The social divisions, hierarchical distinctions,
and entrenched customs that Merwin, Snyder, and Rich encounter in their
work tend to dissolve in Oliver’s handlings.
In Twelve Moons (1979), each month gives rise to its own poem, advancing
the seasons beginning with April, a calendar originating when life returns, a
matrix from which events emerge. When Oliver writes of “a woman’s body,”
or calls one woman “round and full and milk-white / as a woman’s breast,” or
populates a poem with her great aunt, her mother, and women who attend
childbirth, as she does in the opening moon-poems, she summons a realm that
is not only fecund but void of men.68 Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” promotes
the stalking of a creature into a quest that ends by killing the bear and then
inhabiting its body in a symbolic possession that is the beginning of poetry.69
Oliver’s “Hunter’s Moon – Eating the Bear” speaks to the bear with reverence
as “Good friend,” as if its spirit could hear. She carefully describes to its spirit
how the bear will be consumed yet still live on. “The shadows of the pines”
that, she explains, “are blue on the ield” as the poem begins will become, at
poem’s end, “the pines you can no longer see” now “twisted and small / their
shadows stretching out, still turning around.”70 The poem is a prayer, a request
for forgiveness, and an act of humility.
Oliver’s poetry takes no totem creature for its own, no coyote or gray wolf
such as Snyder admires in his work; bears recur throughout her books, but
so do black snakes, birds of all kinds (blue herons, vultures, egrets), as well
as whales, dogish, and mussels. The natural scene isn’t deined by any lim-
its or shouldn’t be. In the inal moon-poem, set in March, when “the earth
remembers its own name,” and when “once more the moon and the earth

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are eloping” to bring forth “fantastic children” “who will believe, for years, /
that everything is possible,” Oliver emphasizes that sense of a continuity that
generates a future by closing her poem (and her book) with words of hope:
“and probably / everything / is possible.”71 Among the poets who began in the
1970s, Oliver has consistently held the attention of a large, ever-growing pub-
lic. She returns readers to a rich emotional site that is positively contained by
detailed descriptions; in her work, the otherness of nature exists as a delicate
counterpoint to the human.

*
Robert Hass “might be called a nature poet,” George Bradley wrote, introduc-
ing work from his irst book, Field Guide (1973), for “he writes lovingly plain
descriptions of landscape, mostly Californian – but he is a politicized one,
unsurprisingly so given his time and place.”72 Hass is the poet of his generation
most energized by the uncertainties of the last decades. His poems and prose
poems continually unsettle as they shift from one viewpoint to another, sev-
eral times within a single work. His interests overlap with Pinsky and Levine in
mapping the rituals and afects of a distinct community, even as his West Coast
upbringing places him in a crossroads-like setting.
Hass ofers a third career shaped by an early experience with Winters,
although his studies in Stanford led to a doctoral dissertation on eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century iction. Recalling Winters’s classroom lectures as
“high drama,” Hass regards him as neither ethicist nor pugilist but as victim
to the youthful tuberculosis that sidelined him to “the loneliness of provincial
places” in New Mexico, Colorado, and Idaho. For Hass, Winters valued poets
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because he appreciated “poems
that looked directly and without l inching at the loneliness of human death.”
As a poet, however, Winters failed to solve “the problem of getting from image
to discourse in the language of his time, and instead borrowed the solution of
another age.”73 Hass’s own poems capture not just a moment but that moment
in all its leeting associations, the ebb and low of daydream, with its clutter of
ill-matched but illuminating perceptions.
Hass’s lyrics seem produced expediently, but their rag-tag quality belies the
constellations of meaning they assemble. The poet who writes (and Hass is
quick to make us aware that he is writing what we are reading, that he is set-
ting down words that he wants us to hear) works under a kind of duress to
patch together smart answers to large questions. The fourteen-section sequence
“Songs to Survive the Summer” (from Praise [1979]), with its rapidly iring three-
line stanzas, is close enough to the haiku form that Hass was assembling for an

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anthology at this time that the poem accommodates an adaptation from Issa as
an unspeciied citation –“What a strange thing! / To be alive / beneath plum blos-
soms” – and then abruptly counterpoints it with a raucous California version:
“The black-headed / Steller’s jay is squawking / in the plum.”74 Hass works
with clashes as unlike as the feathery delicacy of those “plum blossoms,” which
have been etched over centuries of Asian poetry, and the blunt actuality of the
California plum, with its annoying jaybird, as he shapes one story after another
in which loss or demise or violent dying igure in some way. While these stories
may be, as he confesses to his daughter, “the frailest stay against / our fears,”
their placement alongside each other forges an ongoing continuity, or as Stephen
Yenser observes: “The secret is that we share. . . . Death is the very warp of it all,
the thing included in everything else.”75 Hass acknowledges the necessity of
singing “a broken song”: his poem’s charge is to hold together the pieces.
In the collections that follow, a shift toward prose rhythms reveals “a new
reliance on the discursive form of the sentence,” Terence Doody has argued,
opening Hass to “a greater range of feelings” with the sentence’s capacity or
“greater drama, higher rhetoric, and ideas that images cannot support.”76 It
also relects his collaborations with the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz
in translating Milosz’s works, a journey as described in the 1976 translation
“On Pilgrimage” as “Searching, not inding, gathering rumors, / Always com-
forted by the brightness of day.”77 The environmental poem is reconceptu-
alized in Hass’s “Spring Rain,” which takes rainwater falling this moment,
“freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,” and after tracing it back to a Paciic
squall, anticipates its return through larkspur “sprouting along a creek above
Sonora Pass next August.” This leads to recalling that without the “gray jays of
the mountains” ingesting these seeds, their propagation would require soak-
ing seeds overnight in the acids of cofee and scoring each one “gently with
a very sharp knife” that might be found among the cofee in a kitchen where
orange poppies “on the table in a clear glass vase, stained” at its bottom “to
the color of sunrise.”78 Rainfall inds its place within an intricate system that is
also the poem’s. Hass’s works enact the regenerative systems found in nature
whose borders are too elusive to deine.
The sentence-based poetry of Hass’s recent work has been described by von
Hallberg as exemplifying “standard American English as an artistic medium”;
it is important that “literary language” not be isolated “from the idioms of the
administrative class,” for such poems are able to alter the language “by com-
bining with general terms the complicating, reining features of more speciic
language.”79 That his poetry might take efect on just that very public that
has the capacity to craft “just legislation, judicious litigation, and progressive

954
 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

social policy” is surely central to Hass, who openly declared political views
from his start.80 Reagan was described by Hass, pausing in the middle of a
book review, as “another California president with yet another set of plans,”
among them “the intensiication of a civil war in Central America” and “the
selling of unadulterated foodstufs to the underdeveloped world.”81
To chart a lineage from Pinsky’s “Tennis” of 1973 to Hass’s “Spring Rain”
and his other works of the 1980s is to realize that poetry that encourages lan-
guage’s discursive aspects develops tools that provide access to, and describe
with increasing acuity, “real-world” situations. It should be no surprise, then,
to ind these poets gravitating toward book-length verse, extended sequences,
multipart texts, and lyrics as epics, for the discursive turn derives poetic form
less from literary inheritances (sonnet, ode, or eclogue) than from subject
matter (psychiatry, America’s next generation, or Detroit’s rust belt) or con-
troversy (deep ecology’s antianthropomorphism, cross-cultural isomorphic
correspondences, or ecofeminism’s epistemology of the local) or some mix-
ture of the two (how to mourn or ecology as a system). Their work demon-
strates how efectively poetry can be an art that gains energy by encountering
problems, an art superbly equipped to describe, consider, and appraise the
complications that surround us.

Notes
1. Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National
Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 1.
2. Charles Altieri, “Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Alex Preminger and
T. V. F. Brogan (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 792–96, 794.
3. Robert von Hallberg, “Yvor Winters 1900–1968,” in A. Walton Litz (ed.),
American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, supplement 2, part 2, ed.
A. Walton Litz (New York: Scribner, 1981), pp. 785–816, 806–07; Robert von
Hallberg, “Donald Davie and ‘the Moral Shape of Politics,’ ” Critical Inquiry
8:3 (1982), pp. 415–36, 419–20; Robert Archambeau, Laureates and Heretics: Six
Careers in American Poetry (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
2010), p. 25.
4. Archambeau, Laureates and Heretics, pp. 190–93; Donald Davie, Purity of Diction
in English Verse (1955; New York: Schocken, 1967), pp. 197–202.
5. Josephine Saunders, “The Underside of Words,” Poetry 116:2 (1970), p. 97; Jon
Anderson, “Creative Writing 307,” Poetry 116:3 (1970), p. 143; Mark Strand, “Seven
Poems (VII),” Poetry 116:3 (1970), p. 181.
6. Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 242.

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 E dwa rd Brun ne r

7. Paul Breslin, “How to Read the New Contemporary Poem,” American Scholar
47:3 (1979), pp. 357–70, 358.
8. Daryl Hine, [Editorial], Poetry 120:6 (1972), p. 361.
9. Subarno Chattarji, “Vietnam Poetry,” Irish Journal of American Studies 6 (1997),
pp. 139–69, 145; see also Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
10. Richard Hugo, “On Hearing a New Escalation,” Poetry 120:6 (1972), p. 319.
11. James Wright, Collected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1971), pp. 195–96; Paul Craigmire, private correspondence, June 7, 2010.
12. Wright, Collected Poems.
13. Robert Pinsky, Sadness and Happiness (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1975), p. 16; James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 148.
14. Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism, p. 148.
15. Pinsky, Sadness and Happiness, p. 21.
16. Pinsky, Sadness and Happiness, pp. 57, 74.
17. Willard Spiegelman, The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary
Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 101.
18. Von Hallberg, “Yvor Winters,” p. 806.
19. Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 233; Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics
and Intellectuals,” in Sacvan Bercovitch (gen. ed.), The Cambridge History of
American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 8, pp.
65–66; Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism, pp. 143–44; Archambeau,
Laureates and Heretics, pp. 35–54.
20. Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry (San Francisco: North Point, 1982),
p. 204.
21. Thom Gunn, Touch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 29–49.
22. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973), p. 18; Donald Davie, “A Comment,” Poetry Nation 1 (1973), pp.
56–57.
23. Von Hallberg, “Donald Davie,” p. 420.
24. Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974), p. 25.
25. Robert Pinsky, An Explanation of America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1979), p. 25. This collection will be cited in the text as EA.
26. Alfred Corn, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 119.
27. Robert Pinsky, “The Art of Poetry: LXXVI,” Paris Review 39 (1997), pp.
188–220, 198.
28. Frank Bidart, “Introduction to a Reading by Robert Pinsky,” Pequod 31:1 (1990),
pp. 159–60.
29. Robert Pinsky, The History of My Heart (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1984), pp. 3–4.

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 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

30. Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel: New and Selected Poems (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 84–85.
31. Edward Hirsch, “The Visionary Poetic of Charles Wright and Philip Levine,”
in Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (eds.), The Columbia History of American Poetry
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 777–806, 778.
32. Von Hallberg, “Yvor Winters,” p. 815.
33. Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (New York: Knopf,
1994), pp. 208–212.
34. Philip Levine, They Feed They Lion (New York: Athenaeum, 1972), p. 34.
35. Philip Levine, 1933 (New York: Athenaeum, 1974), pp. 3–4.
36. Levine, 1933, pp. 3–4.
37. Yvor Winters (ed.), Twelve Poets of the Paciic (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1937), p. 10.
38. Philip Levine, The Names of the Lost (New York: Athenaeum, 1976), pp. 19–21.
39. Hirsch, “The Visionary Poetic of Charles Wright and Philip Levine,” p. 779.
40. Dick Davis, Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 166.
41. Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1988), p. 98; Philip
Levine, Don’t Ask: Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981),
p. 99.
42. Frederick Morgan, “Poetry and Ecology: Editorial,” Hudson Review 23:3 (1970),
pp. 399–400.
43. Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1970), pp. 7, 38, 57.
44. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and
Politics (New York: Da Capo, 2001), p. 91.
45. W. S. Merwin, The Drunk in the Furnace (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 48.
46. W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), p. 63.
47. Breslin, “How to Read the New Contemporary Poem,” pp. 358–60.
48. W. S. Merwin, Writings to an Uninished Accompaniment (New York: Athenaeum,
1973), pp. 53, 46.
49. Merwin, Writings to an Uninished Accompaniment, pp. 51, 49.
50. Merwin, Writings to an Uninished Accompaniment, pp. 29–30.
51. Evan Watkins, The Critical Act: Criticism and Community (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1978), p. 228.
52. W. S. Merwin, Selected Translations (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon,
2012), pp. 195, 249, 171.
53. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), “Note” (n.p.).
54. Snyder, Turtle Island, pp. 63, 48, 53.
55. Snyder, Turtle Island, pp. 21–22.
56. Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of
Eighties America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 109.

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57. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 28.
58. Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 37.
59. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language (New York: W. W. Norton,
1978), p. 39.
60. Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, p. 27.
61. Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, p. 30.
62. Marilyn Hacker, Presentation Piece (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 87.
63. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A
New Tradition (New York: Harper, 1976), p. 198.
64. Helen Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 218.
65. Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995),
p. 21.
66. David Harvey, “What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?”
in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 327–55, 348.
67. Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005),
p. 98.
68. Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 8, 11, 16–17.
69. Galway Kinnell, Body Rags (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1968), p. 60.
70. Oliver, Twelve Moons, pp. 50–51.
71. Oliver, Twelve Moons, p. 77.
72. George Bradley (ed.), The Yale Younger Poets Anthology (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1998), p. 200.
73. Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1984), pp.
146, 148.
74. Robert Hass (ed.), The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa
(Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1994), p. 156; Robert Hass, Praise (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco,
1979), p. 55.
75. Stephen Yenser, A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 46.
76. Terence Doody, “From Image to Sentence: The Spiritual Development of
Robert Hass,” American Poetry Review 26:2 (1997), pp. 47–56, 47.
77. Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems, trans. Robert Hass, Czeslaw Milosz et al.
(Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1988), p. 344.
78. Robert Hass, Human Wishes (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1989), pp. 135–36.
79. Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008), pp. 90, 97, 98.
80. Von Hallberg, Lyric Powers, p. 90.
81. Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures, p. 171.

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 Chapter 42
Latino Poetry and Poetics
R ig o b e rto G on z á l e z

The term “Latino” as an ethnic label used to refer to any citizen or resident
of the United States who is of Latin American descent is the latest designa-
tion of choice in popular and academic culture. Although it is a convenient
collective term, it also homogenizes disparate populations with roots in the
twenty unique countries of Latin America, and it ofers no knowledge of
speciic national identities, political struggles, or immigrant trajectories. In
the general vocabulary of the media, “Latino” is used interchangeably with
the label “Hispanic,” which has been slowly falling out of favor since its
adoption by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1970. Added to the list of labels and
demonyms is the propensity of Latino communities to reclaim their distinct
nationalities either by hyphenating their ethnic identities (Mexican-American,
Dominican-American, Panamanian-American) or by constructing names of
their own (e.g., Chicano and Nuyorican). And then there are those who reject
labels entirely and who refer to themselves simply by their current citizenship:
American.
According to recent census data, Latinos compose approximately 15.5 per-
cent of the total U.S. population, or approximately 47 million people. Of this
igure, approximately two-thirds are of Mexican descent. The two other eth-
nic groups with sizable numbers and long-standing relationships with the
United States are the Puerto Rican community (about 10 percent of the total
U.S. Latino population) and the Cuban American community (about 3 percent
of the total U.S. Latino population). Not surprisingly, this also translates into
three distinct, complex interactions with the cultural, political, and social fab-
ric of the American landscape.
The proliferation of labels causes much confusion and anxiety among
Latinos and non-Latinos alike, because declaring what one prefers to be called
can also reveal such personal information as one’s political ailiations, views
on assimilation, immigration status, or even linguistic ability. Therefore, in
the larger social arena, terms like “Latino” (and “Hispanic”), terms that are

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essentially apolitical and inert, are a safe starting point when interacting with
a person of Latin American descent. Each Latino will then guide the conversa-
tion toward more speciic avenues of inquiry.
The same process applies to an examination of Latino poetry and poetics.
Within the collective term thrive dozens of literary histories, movements, and
aesthetics – threads that this single entry cannot appropriately cover. But even
exploring a few of these avenues will challenge certain misconceptions about
Latino poetry. There is the belief, for example, that Latinos write in Spanish
or that their works are in translation, that the dominant narrative is an immi-
grant narrative, that the dominant theme is identity politics, and that Latino
literature is insularly inl uenced by Latin American letters. All of these facile
assumptions only mischaracterize and dismiss an expansive, diverse, dynamic,
and ever-growing body of writing that will eventually become one of the
most important literary legacies of American culture, because it is estimated
that by 2050, Latinos will compose nearly 30 percent of the entire U.S. popula-
tion, making them the largest minority group in the country.1
In the meantime, what’s worth examining is how the three main U.S. Latino
populations have shaped their respective literatures in order to come to terms
with their identity, language, and history. Although their immigrant trajecto-
ries and political leanings are distinct, the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban
American poetry communities have followed parallel journeys from margin-
alized voices to visible presences in twentieth-century American letters.

Chicano Poetry
In the Chicano community there is no dividing line between a poet and an
activist. The term “Chicano,” which refers speciically to Latinos of Mexican
descent, also designates a set of values that took shape during the Chicano
Movement of the late 1960s, which was mostly concentrated in the American
Southwest. During that activist movement, Mexican American youth adopted
a political identity that was strongly antiwar, antiassimilationist, proeduca-
tion, and procommunity, bringing national attention to such pressing issues as
exploitation of labor, housing discrimination, and other injustices committed
against Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanos (referred to as la raza)
in order to instigate social change. Forty years later, as members of this pop-
ulation have climbed the socioeconomic ladder, new groups of immigrants
continue to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, confronting the same challenges
and obstacles as earlier immigrants, thereby keeping the Chicano sensibility
relevant and active.2

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

One of the most important points of pride of the Chicano community

continues to be cultural production that expresses and celebrates the triumphs
and struggles of la raza. Highly valued among these avenues of expression is
poetry.
Setting its literary legacy apart from Mexican poetry, much of which was
penned by the educated aristocracy, Chicano poetry from the sixties and seven-
ties (although conscious of Latin American popular igures like Pablo Neruda
and Ruben Darío) attempted to implement a working-class consciousness
into the poems that were usually presented at political rallies, community
centers, school events, and literary festivals (called loricantos). Much of this
material carried a nationalistic tone, paid homage to a Mexican indigenous
heritage, and reclaimed Spanish, Spanglish (also called code-switching, an
intralingual wordplay), and caló (Chicano slang, the language of the barrio)
as valid languages for verse. The opening stanza to the poem “La Huelga”
by Lalo Delgado, for example, was also a call to action to support a workers’
strike:
Wash well your throat with tequila
so your voice comes out tranquila
and then softly whisper, huelga
or shout huelga
with anger
as if someone
had killed your parents,
someone has.3
The Chicano Movement period of poetry made a strong efort to document
the everyday Chicano experience, particularly in praise of the family, cultural
traditions, religious beliefs, and secular superstitions. Its purpose was educa-
tional and communicative and not primarily artistic; the majority of the poetry
from this period vanished, because much of it was not published, collected,
or preserved. There were other limitations with the early period of Chicano
poetry: it was dominated by male voices, it overromanticized the female roles
in the Chicano family, it expressed sentimental connections to pre-Columbian
mythology, and it often lacked a fresh use of language and metaphor. (The
role of nostalgia and sentimentality in Chicano poetry, however, cannot be
easily dismissed, because these are important emotional pulls that help com-
munities organize and identify common social and political goals.)
From this group of self-taught poets, a select few voices managed to sur-
vive because they found their way to publication and popularity, their poems
serving more as testimonies and archives to the early literary endeavors of the

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Chicano Movement. Among this small group is Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (I

Am Joaquín: An Epic Poem [1967]), Ricardo Sánchez (Canto y grito mi liberación
[1971]), raúlrsalinas (Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursiones [1980]),
Luis Omar Salinas (Crazy Gypsy [1970]), José Montoya (El Sol y Los De Abajo and
Other Royal Chicano Air Force Poems [1972]), Leroy V. Quintana (Hijo del Pueblo:
New Mexico Poems [1976]), and Alurista (Nationhood plumaroja, 1969–1972 [1972]).
All except the latter two are deceased, and – with the exception of Quintana,
Luis Omar Salinas, and Alurista – most of the subsequent works published by
the authors were self-published projects or were published by small presses
that could not keep them in print. These pioneers, however, kept the spirit of
poetry vibrant and accessible for the next wave of Chicano poets, who would
bring to the practice of verse an artistic discipline learned from the new degree
program available to a new generation of Chicanos: the masters in ine arts.
Three of the more prominent contemporary Chicano poets were all
enrolled in writing programs during the mid- to late 1970s: Gary Soto com-
pleted his M.F.A. at the University of California–Irvine in 1976, Alberto Ríos
completed his M.F.A. at the University of Arizona in 1979, and Sandra Cisneros
completed her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. These writers
also represent the three regions with sizable Mexican and Chicano popula-
tions: the West Coast, the Southwest, and the Midwest.
Soto, raised in the central California valley, infused his work with details of
the agricultural landscape in his early books, The Elements of San Joaquín (1977)
and The Tale of Sunlight (1978). He has since published countless picture books,
young adult novels, and noniction titles, but his eleven books of poetry con-
tinue to inl uence a newer generation of California writers whose poetry
captures the conl icted urban and rural narratives of the working people of
Fresno and its surrounding areas. Among them are Blas Manuel de Luna (Bent
to the Earth [2005]), David Domínguez (Work Done Right [2003]), and Andrés
Montoya (The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems [1999]). The poetry of Soto and
his followers has married a love and respect for an imperfect community to an
intellectual engagement of craft to produce a type of central California ode,
as in Soto’s “Mission Tire Factory, 1969”:
The oven we would enter, squinting
– because earlier in the day Manny fell
From his machine, and when we carried him
To the workshed (blood from
Under his shirt, in his pants)
All he could manage, in an ignorance
Outdone only by pain, was to take three dollars

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

From his wallet, and say:

“Buy some sandwiches. You guys saved my life.”4
The ode reaches back to an important Latin American inl uence, Pablo
Neruda, whose Elemental Odes (1954) was universally praised for its simplicity
of language, concrete imagery, and use of humor. These qualities appealed
to Chicano poets because they could also be found in other genres valued in
Mexican/Chicano culture, among them, song lyrics, folk stories, riddles, and
jokes. For Soto and other poets, the ode allowed them to ind a muse in ordi-
nary things. Soto’s Neighborhood Odes (1992), for example, highlighted a num-
ber of Mexican objects that contained sentimental and cultural value, such as
odes to “La Tortilla,” “La Piñata,” and “El Molcajete.”
Alberto Ríos’s work taps into a landscape that is inescapable in the works by
writers living in the Southwest: the desert and the borderlands. The Chicano
Movement held on to the notion that the American Southwest, which was
Mexican territory before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, was the birth-
right of the Chicano community. Referred to as Aztlán, meaning “homeland”
(which gestured back to the Aztec belief in an ancestral home far north of the
Aztec Empire), this claim to the American Southwest fueled anger against the
policing of the U.S.-Mexico border, and frustrations over the poverty of the barrios
and the overcrowded, crime-infested border towns. But it also gave permission to
la raza to feel at home, and to trust that the beauty and wonders of the desert
landscape were theirs to protect and appreciate. Ríos’s poem “Rabbits on Fire”
captures the duality of the appalling and appealing qualities of the landscape:
During brush ires in the Sonoran desert,
Brush ires that happen before the monsoon and in the great,
Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months, . . .
Jackrabbits can get caught in the lames,
No matter how fast and big and strong and sleek they are.
And when they’re caught,
Cornered in and against the thick
Trunks and thin spines of the cactus,
When they can’t back up any more,
When they can’t move, the lame –
It touches them,
And their fur catches ire.5
Ríos, who was born and raised in Nogales, Arizona, created a complex and mag-
ical portrait of the borderlands with an extensive body of work that included
story collections, a memoir, and his irst full-length collection, Whispering to
Fool the Wind (1982). It must be noted that Ríos’s work usually sidesteps any

963
 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

direct social or political message, which is why his oeuvre has fallen out of
favor with Chicano readers.
Instead, Chicanos turn to another borderlands territory, the Texas South
Valley and El Paso, speciically. This city has produced more Chicano writers
than any other in the United States, perhaps because it is the quintessential
border town that has witnessed, along with its sister city across the interna-
tional border, Juárez, a number of al ictions and conl icts, from the exploita-
tion of sweatshop labor to the femicide epidemic. Poets who have been weav-
ing into their work the bittersweet experience of life on the border include Pat
Mora (Chants [1984]), Bejamin Alire Sáenz (Calendar of Dust [1991]), and Alicia
Gaspar de Alba (La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge [2003]).
Although Sandra Cisneros, who was raised in Chicago, focused on prose
after the hugely successful The House on Mango Street (Arte Público Press, 1984),
her irst publications were in poetry. Bad Boys (1980) and My Wicked Wicked
Ways (1987) helped usher in a feminist sensibility and bravado that had been
present but largely ignored within the Chicano community because feminism
challenged the sexist beliefs inherited from Mexican culture. “You Bring Out
the Mexican in Me” has spawned numerous imitations, even outside of the
Latino literary scene:
You bring out the Uled-Nayl in me.
The stand-back-white-bitch-in me.
The switchblade in the boot in me.
The Acapulco clif diver in me.
The Flecha Roja mountain disaster in me.
The dengue fever in me.
The ¡Alarma! murderess in me.
I could kill in the name of you and think
it worth it. Brandish a fork and terrorize rivals,
female and male, who loiter and look at you,
languid in you light.6
Cisneros stylized the use of cultural references (in the preceding stanza,
she not only inserts elements familiar to the Chicano community, such as the
Flecha Roja economy bus line and the ¡Alarma! tabloid newspaper, but she also
makes a transcultural connection by mentioning an Arabic/Algerian dance,
Uled-Nayl), but she also broke social taboos, in this case by calling attention to
the capacity of females to become violent and by the declaration that gay men
are also attracted to the object of her afection.
The wave of feminist expression gained momentum in the creative and
scholarly ields, shaping the literary careers of such Chicana prose writers as

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, and Helena María Viramontes. And although
Chicano poetry publications into the late 1990s continued to be written
mostly by males – among those gaining attention were Luis J. Rodríguez (The
Concrete River [1995]) and Jimmy Santiago Baca (Immigrants in Our Own Land
[1990]) – the most critically acclaimed poet of that era was a woman: Lorna
Dee Cervantes.
Cervantes made her debut with Emplumada (1981), a book containing a
number of political poems that recalled the activist fervor of the Chicano
Movement. Although she did not attend an M.F.A. program (she received
her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of
California–Santa Cruz), she was part of a collective of writers that included
the gay writer Francisco X. Alarcón and the spoken word poet Juan Felipe
Herrera, which thrived in the artistic community of San Francisco in the 1970s
and 1980s. They formed writing workshops that stressed a preoccupation with
expanding their knowledge of world poetry and with linguistic experimen-
tation and craft, while retaining their activist roots. With From the Cables of
Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger (1991) and Drive (2006), Cervantes engaged
race relations, gender conl icts, and the dangers of globalization in a poetics
of politics that had not quite been achieved with such success in the Chicano
Movement. The following is an excerpt from her most anthologized poem,
“Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-
Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races”:

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn’t fade out
the sounds of blasting and muled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land
and this is my land.
I do not believe in the war between races
but in this country
there is war.7

The Stanford-educated Francisco X. Alarcón did not collect his work into a
book until the publication of Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas (1990), and he had

965
 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

the distinction of being the only successful Chicano poet writing in Spanish.
His poems, usually minimalist verse, were translated into English. He was also
one of the few openly gay Chicano poets, writing numerous homoerotic (but
subtle) poems that added a new dimension to the body of Chicano poetry. In
reality, the “queering” of Chicano poetry has been slow, because Chicano let-
ters has historically excluded homosexual voices, especially gay men.8
A watershed moment in Chicano letters occurred when the National Book
Critics Circle awarded Juan Felipe Herrera the top prize in poetry in 2008 for
his new and selected volume of poems Half the World in Light (2008). That
volume marked a thirty-year career that began with small-press publications
in the mid-1970s. A latecomer to the M.F.A. program, Herrera was admitted
into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1988, although at the time he had already
published four books of poetry. Before his two-year program at Iowa, Herrera
was mostly known as a performance poet, but with the publication of Night
Train to Tuxtla (1994), four years after his Iowa degree, Herrera demonstrated
strengths that would sustain him through a lengthy career in poetry. His work
engaged philosophical thought, pre-Columbian symbolism, Language poetry,
political satire, social critique, and linguistic wordplay. In brief, he was the
amalgamation of all the poetic directions discussed so far, and his literary rec-
ognition in 2008 validated for the Chicano community its place in American
letters. The following is an excerpt from “Fuzzy Equations”:

Humility + oppression + a Virgin − territory = Latin America

Democracy + annihilation by color × 12 = Education
Militarization of Brazil + Xingu extinction × deforestation = Money
Castro Street × Wall Street ÷ 7 straight boulevards = Here9

Before Juan Felipe Herrera, the only other notable Chicano poet work-
ing with avant-garde poetics was Alurista, who is still writing today, although
mostly outside of the spotlight; his new and selected volume Xicano Duende
was published in 2011. Nevertheless, it is Herrera who continues to gain a repu-
tation as the primary literary forefather of a new generation of poets publish-
ing in the new millennium who are looking to move away from the traditional
narrative and to experiment with the postmodern form, even if the content
remains unapologetically Chicano or ethnic identiied. This hybrid poetics is
the merging of two seemingly mutually exclusive schools of poetry (the nar-
rative and the postmodern experimental).
As a literary movement, Chicano poetry has demonstrated that it can
change with the times, expand to include groups that have been tradition-
ally excluded (such as women and the LGBT community), and continue its

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

mission to respond to social injustices by shaping emotion into artistic articu-

lation, and to take personal responsibility as a writer and citizen. There is very
little opportunity to remain static, because, of all the Latino ethnic groups
in the United States, the group most antagonized by government legislation
continues to be the Mexican population.

Puerto Rican Poetry

The relationship between the United States and its unincorporated territory,
the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, bears a long and conl icted history. A
Spanish colony since the days of Columbus, the island of Borinquen (the
Taino name of the island many Puerto Ricans still use; island-born Puerto
Ricans refer to themselves as Boricua) became a U.S. colony in 1898 (along
with Cuba), after the Spanish-American War. Two historical moments that
continue to inl uence the way Puerto Ricans frame a cultural identity are the
passage of the Jones Act of 1917 and the ratiication by the U.S. Congress of
the Constitution of Puerto Rico in 1952. The irst granted all Puerto Ricans
U.S. citizenship, thus beginning a heavy period of migration to the mainland,
which was concentrated in New York City and which didn’t slow down until
the 1960s. The second initiated a political split that continues to create conl ict
among Puerto Ricans to this day: one side accepts the commonwealth status
as a form of conditional independence that precedes complete autonomy,
while the other sees it as an important irst step toward U.S. statehood.10
New York City has the largest Puerto Rican population outside of the island,
with enclaves in every borough, although the most notable in Manhattan took
root in Spanish Harlem and in Loisada, an epithet for the Lower East Side,
locations that continue to be celebrated as the birthplaces of the Nuyorican
Movement. “Nuyorican” as an identity term was coined by poets and eventu-
ally adopted by the Puerto Rican community in New York City as the cultural
presence of the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1975, grew in popularity
and signiicance. The founding of the Nuyorican Poets Café was a communal
efort, and many of the key players went on to have literary careers. Among
them are Miguel Piñero (a playwright), Miguel Algarín (On Call [1980]), Sandra
María Estéves (Yerba Buena [1980]), Pedro Pietri (Puerto Rican Obituary [1974]),
Piri Thomas (known for the memoir Down These Mean Streets [1967]), and
Giannina Braschi (Asalto al tiempo [1980]). The Nuyorican Movement stressed
a performance-based presentation of work that gave voice and visibility to a
working-class urban experience, which was proudly bilingual and indepen-
dent of an island Boricua identity. This cultural center eventually coalesced

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 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

the Puerto Rican community in New York City, which led to important
activist and political eforts that became documented and commemorated
in the writings and stage performances by Nuyorican poets.11 But this New
York–centered identity also resulted in an embattled relationship with island-
born populations, who perceived this new identity as a diluted and misguided
expression of Puerto Rican nationalism. Take, for example, the following
excerpt from Pietri’s poem “Puerto Rican Obituary”:
Here lies Milagros
Here lies Olga
Here lies Manuel
who died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Always broke
Always owing
Never knowing
that they are beautiful people
Never knowing
the geography of their complexion
PUERTO RICO IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
PUERTORRIQUENOS ARE A BEAUTIFUL RACE . . .
If only they
had kept their eyes open
at the funeral of their fellow employees
who came to this country to make a fortune
and were buried without underwears.12
Similar to the early literary eforts of the Chicano Movement, the early
literary eforts of the Nuyorican Movement were delivered orally. Translated
onto the page, the work demonstrated idiosyncratic punctuation and spell-
ing. These performance pieces privileged voice, particularly when it captured
neighborhood vernacular, such as the use of the word “underwears.”
Additional poets who had set the groundwork for the Nuyorican Movement,
and who are considered important literary pioneers, include Clemente Soto
Vélez (La tierra prometida [1979]), Victor Hernández Cruz (Papo Got His Gun
[1969]), Tato Laviera (La Carreta Made a U-Turn [1979]), and Jack Agüeros
(Correspondence between Stonehaulers [1991]). Soto Vélez, who was also a jour-
nalist, was a key igure in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. He was impris-
oned in 1936 for his participation in an uprising against U.S. rule and then
emigrated to New York City after his release, becoming a mentor to a num-
ber of young poets. Hernández Cruz and Laviera lourished as practitioners

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of socially conscious verse in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Agüeros was

also a community activist who was a celebrated curator of another important
Nuyorican cultural center, El Museo del Barrio, which was founded in 1969.
It is important to note the relationship between the Nuyorican Movement
and what would eventually become known as the spoken word/poetry slam
movement, which began in the mid-1980s in Chicago. By the time this urban,
youth-oriented forum made its way to New York City, Nuyorican poets had
eased into the competitive nature of this performance-driven presentation – a
method of expression that was familiar to them. The popularity of spoken
word has not waned as an empowering and conidence-building tool, even if
critics within and outside of the community ind that the stage-based verse
does not always translate into original and endurable verse on the page. A few
poets, however, have crossed over successfully and continue to excel in both
poetry scenes, among them Urayoán Noel (Kool Logic [2005]), Elliot Torres
(Five Years of Solitary [2002]), and Emanuel Xavier (Pier Queen [1997]). All three,
incidentally, are openly gay. Xavier, in particular, is credited with establish-
ing a space for LGBT performers in the poetry slam scene by creating the
glam slam. There has been less resistance to the queering of the Nuyorican
scene (unlike the queering of the Chicano scene) because one of its found-
ers, Piñero, was a bisexual writer who gained fame and critical acclaim for his
plays, particularly Short Eyes. The play’s graphic depictions of violence and gay
sex outed this complex dimension of Puerto Rican sexuality. Xavier and other
gay Nuyorican poets acknowledge that representation but also address more
positive components of queer identity such as same-sex romance and love.
Two dynamic female performers worth mentioning are Caridad de la Luz,
also known as “La Bruja,” and Teresa Fernández, also known as “Mariposa.”
Unapologetically feminist, they infuse their work with literary allusions and
references to igures in pop culture. Both have yet to collect their work in print,
although like many contemporary cutting-edge performers, their pieces are
easily available in audio and video. Despite these new venues for Nuyorican
poetics, what does not change is its airmation of ethnic pride, particularly in
conversation with island Boricuas, who continue to contest the validity of that
claim to nationality. The following is an excerpt from Mariposa’s poem “Ode
to the DiaspoRican”:
What does it mean to live in between
What does it take to realize
that being Boricua
is a state of mind
a state of heart

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 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

a state of soul …
¡Mira!
No nací en Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico nacío en mi.
Mira a mi cara Puertorriqueña
Mi pelo vivo
Mis manos morenas
Mira a mi corazón que se llena de orgullo
Y di me que no soy Boricua.
[Translation of the Spanish:]
Look!
I wasn’t born in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico was born in me.
Look at my Puerto Rican face
My living hair
My dark hands
Look at my heart that ills with pride
And tell me that I am not Boricua.13

Although the Nuyorican scene dominates the body of Puerto Rican liter-
ature in the continental United States, the three most recognized names in
Puerto Rican poetry do not identify as members of the Nuyorican Movement:
Martín Espada, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Rane Arroyo.
Espada was born in Brooklyn in 1957, but unlike the rest of his contemporar-
ies, he left New York City to pursue an education in law and a career as an
attorney. He has spent most of his professional life in Massachusetts. Espada
eventually found his way to the literary scene with the publication of The
Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982), inspired by his father’s arrival in New York
City at the age of nine and his family’s struggles with the hostility against
Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s. This debut set the tone for the
direction of Espada’s subsequent collections: concrete imagery is set against a
landscape of social injustice and political struggles across many cultures. One
of the reasons he prefers the identity label “Latino” over “Puerto Rican” is that
he argues that, within a white-dominant society, all Latinos are subject to the
same oppressions and discriminations, and therefore each Chicano, Puerto
Rican, or Cuban American should not isolate himself within his group but
stand in solidarity with all others. Espada’s sensibilities gesture toward the
politics of Neruda, who also used his poetry to critique capitalist ventures in
Third World countries and government institutions that abuse power. But so

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

too is Espada a literary heir to Neruda’s authoritative and healing voice, as illus-
trated in the following excerpt from “Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100”:
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.14
In 1956, Ortiz Cofer’s family settled in another hub of Caribbean migration,
Paterson, New Jersey, when she was only four years old. A decade later, they
relocated to the state of Georgia, where Ortiz Cofer has spent most of her
adult life as a student and later as a professor at the University of Georgia. But
it is the New Jersey landscape that continues to inhabit her iction, noniction,
and poetry, particularly the sense of disorientation she felt as a young girl ly-
ing back and forth between Paterson and Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; between
English and Spanish; and between the rural and urban landscapes. A consum-
mate optimist, Ortiz Cofer aims for the discovery of beauty and light, even in
the most distressing or unpleasant situations.
Arroyo was born in 1954 and raised in Chicago, another important cen-
ter of Puerto Rican migration, which began in the late 1940s. The Puerto
Rican community settled among other working-class immigrant populations,
like the Mexicans and the Polish, but each group maintained its separate cul-
tural identity. And because of the poor educational opportunities available
to the second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans in Chicago, it is estimated
that 60 percent of the population continues to work in manufacturing and
service industries. Unlike Nuyoricans, who had been developing a cultural
identity independent of island Boricuas, Chicago Puerto Ricans maintained
close political and economic ties to the homeland, but the cultural gap has
since widened, with the youth adopting a distinctly “Chicago Rican” identity.
(A similar phenomenon is taking place in the Puerto Rican communities in
other urban cities like Philadelphia, where the young people call themselves
“Philly Ricans.”) Arroyo’s poetry, although personal and informed by an ear-
lier period in Chicago history, remains timeless because of the unchanging
working-class reality of this community, as is evident in the poem “Write
What You Know”:

I know Papi
worked in factories reigned by melodrama
(a sick day = the righteous anger of

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 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

waltzing bosses in Kmart suits). I know

the word “knowledge” has the words
“now” and “ledge.” I know that
my parents dared to color the suburbs
with their shy children.15

Arroyo, who died in 2010, was also openly gay and a signiicant voice of
the queer experience, such as in the poem “That Flag,” about an encoun-
ter with two boisterous white men whose truck waves the Confederate
symbol:

I sit there thinking the fuckers

are right, that they are big
handsome, that they are our
America’s perfect heirs and
that I’m not – aging Puerto Rican
homosexual poet exiled
to a borrowed bed.16

Cuban American Poetry

Politically, the Chicano community has always expressed admiration for the
Cuban Revolution of 1959 but maintains a conl icted opinion about its leader,
Fidel Castro. In any case, Chicanos have historically positioned themselves on
the opposite side of the political spectrum to Cuban Americans, who, as mid-
dle- and upper-class exiles, lourished quite diferently in the United States.
Although they share the same mother tongue and the same Spanish colo-
nial past as Chicanos, Cuban Americans have been stereotyped as Spanish-
speaking whites with conservative views. And the fact that the Cuban
American population remains concentrated mainly in Florida, far removed
from the Southwest, has only sustained the psychic distance between the
two communities. Cuban exiles held on to the belief that Castro would be
overthrown by the American government and that those who had lost their
properties would return to reclaim them. Newer generations, assimilated
into American society, don’t hold the same sentimental attachment to a place
they have never known and are not opposed to visiting the island, but only as
tourists, not exiles.
In reality, the Cuban American story is much more complex, and prose
writers have been giving depth to this identity through the novel and short
story. The most celebrated of these writers is Oscar Hijuelos, the irst Latino

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to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990).
The number of Cuban American poets, however, has yet to reach a level that
will also illustrate the diversity of experience within the Cuban American
community. In fact, the most visible and accomplished Cuban American poets
are three males: Pablo Medina, Virgil Suárez, and Richard Blanco, all three the
children of exiles.
Medina arrived in New York on the last freedom l ight from Havana, in 1960,
at the age of twelve, old enough to experience culture shock and to under-
stand the trauma of his family’s separation from Cuba. His family’s struggle to
regain their middle-class lifestyle is the subject of his memoir Exiled Memories
(1990). And his critically acclaimed novel The Return of Félix Nogara (2000) is
a thinly veiled critique of Cuba, forty years after the Revolution. Although
there is much disdain for Castro expressed in his work, what more appropri-
ately characterizes Medina’s poetry is a longing for the beauty of the island of
Cuba, now suspended in memory, what is referred to as añoranza. Medina’s
irst two books, Arching in the Afterlife (1991) and The Floating Island (1999),
attempt, among other concerns, to reclaim or reconstruct an Eden by weaving
together the imagery of a new home and the faint memories of the old one:
It snows because there is a widow hiding
under her mother’s bed,
because the birds are resting their throats
and three wise men are ofering gifts.
Because the clouds are singing
and trees have a right to exist,
because the horses of the past are returning.
They are grey and trot gently into the barn
never touching the ground.17
Virgil Suárez also published a childhood memoir (Spared Angola [1997]),
which traces his family’s journey from Cuba to Spain to Florida in the early
1970s, when he was only eight years old. Life in a cultural limbo and the painful
hunger for a home that becomes increasingly romanticized with the passage
of time take root in Suárez’s eight books of poetry, particularly In the Republic
of Longing (2000).
Unlike Medina and Suárez, Richard Blanco was born outside of Cuba,
because his family left the island while his mother was seven months preg-
nant. With his irst two books of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires (1998) and
Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005), Blanco takes Cuban Americans a step
closer toward healing. His work addresses coming to terms with the knowl-
edge of the political and historical weight that burdens his community and

973
 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

shaping metaphors for belonging instead of clinging to the imagery of loss

and displacement:
I am alone with the moon on its path, staring
like a blank page, shear and white as the snow
on the peaks echoing back its light. I am this
solitude, never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.18
Unlike many Chicano poets, a number of Cuban American poets do not
reject or feel disconnected from the literary lineage of their homeland. This
legacy was shaped before the Cuban Revolution, and much of it was inspired
by classical Spanish literature. Even if the language of choice is now English,
descendants of exiles continue to build on a nineteenth-century aesthetic (with
its preoccupation with beauty and the arts) and a formalist tradition. Such
is the case with poets like Dionisio D. Martínez (Bad Alchemy [1995]), Rafael
Campo (What the Body Told [1996]), Ricardo Pau-Llosa (Bread and Imagined
[1991]), and Aleida Rodríguez (Garden of Exile [1999]). The territory of the
work is expansive enough, however, that it does not always have to engage
Cuban history or identity. Campo, especially, has moved into a whole diferent
set of contemporary concerns – gay men’s health and AIDS, in particular –
inl uenced by his occupation as a medical doctor:
Last night I watched it happen. It was death,
As usual and present as the view
Of downtown Boston from my patient’s room.
Before the bleed, he pointed out for me
A wisp of smoke that rose like mystery.19
Males dominate the Cuban American poetry scene and the critical atten-
tion that it garners, although there are a few notable women poets in Florida.
Among them are Sandra M. Castillo (My Father Sings to My Embarrassment
[2002]), Mia Leonin (Braid [1999]), Silvia Curbelo (The Secret History of Water
[1991]), and Emma Trelles (Tropicalia [2011]). These poets bring a feminist and
feminine exploration to Cuban American letters.
Two other lesser-known Cuban American poets worth mentioning are
Adrian Castro (Cantos, Blood and Honey [1997]) and Orlando Ricardo Menes
(Rumba Atop the Stones [2001]), whose poetry pays homage to Cuba’s Afro-
Caribbean heritage by reinscribing a vocabulary that comes from African

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 Latino Poetry and Poetics

myth and religion. For example, consider the following excerpt from Menes’s
poem “Ironman’s Song”:
These arrowheads
covered in dross-mud once touched
Oshún’s anvil breasts, scariied face.
When lesh dressed my bones,
I wore Obatalá’s white tunic
and like him lived chastely, ate no meat.
Derived joy from my work as blacksmith
to the mountain’s orishas.20
It is unfair to make broad assessments out of a small body of work; but
in reality, the Cuban American poetry landscape is still very young and nar-
row, yet it is also the most promising, because poets like Medina and Menes
have been expending extraordinary energy translating into English works of
Cuban writers who are lesser known in the United States. There is an expecta-
tion that the two Cuban-identiied literary communities (the one in exile and
the one inside Cuba) will eventually cease their mutual exclusion and interact
in the spirit of cultural and political exchange.

Conclusions
Despite this entry’s initial objections against the label “Latino,” there are some
beneits to claiming a pan-Latino identity: it can be used to publicize, for exam-
ple, a Latino poetry reading or to organize a Latino poetry discussion panel.
Such events become opportunities to explore and unravel this multifaceted
ethnic identity. It also allows poets from other Latino groups (especially those
of Central American and South American descent) to belong to a larger artistic
community while their own ethnic literary communities in the United States
grow and become organized. One of the complaints by Latino poets who do
not identify as Chicano, Puerto Rican, or Cuban American is that they are
systematically excluded and alienated by the nationalistic tendencies of those
three dominant groups. Indeed, poets such as the Dominican American Julia
Alvarez (The Other Side/El Otro Lado [1996]), the Colombian American Maurice
Kilwein Guevara (Poems of the River Spirit [1996]), and the Salvadoran Americans
William Archila (The Art of Exile [2009]) and Marcos McPeek Villatoro (On
Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared [2006]), whose works ofer insights into
entirely diferent cultures from the Latin American diaspora, should not be
marginalized by a collective of already marginalized groups.

975
 Ri go be rto Gonzál e z

Additionally, even though all three groups are products of a cultural mes-
tizaje, that is, of a mixed-race heritage and history, there is still a tendency to
question the inclusion of mixed-race poets or to demand greater loyalty for
the group allowing membership. This tendency places undue stress on poets
who are already producing a Latino poetics of the future: that which explores
multiracial and multiethnic identity. Among these exciting voices are the Afro-
Latino poets Aracelis Girmay (Teeth [2007]) and John Murillo (Up Jump the
Boogie [2010]), the Ecuadoran Puerto Rican poet Juan J. Morales (Friday and
the Year That Followed [2006]), the Argentinian Latvian poet Julie Sophia Paegle
(Torch Song Tango Choir [2010]), and the Puerto Rican Filipina poet Kristin Naca
(Bird Eating Bird [2009]).
There is also the issue of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban poetry
communities thriving mostly in the American Southwest, New York City,
and Florida, respectively, which locks each distinct identity into a speciic geo-
graphic location. In the coming years it will be interesting to see how migra-
tion patterns shift and what new poetic sensibilities are practiced by Chicanos
living in the Northeast or in the South, Puerto Ricans in the Southwest, and
Cuban Americans on the West Coast.

Notes
1. Important anthologies of Latino poetry generally include Victor Hernández
Cruz, Leroy Quintana, and Virgil Suárez (eds.), Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
(New York: Persea, 2000); Ray Gonzalez (ed.), After Aztlán: Latino Poets of the
Nineties (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993); Rigoberto González (ed.), Camino del
Sol: Fourteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2010); Bryce Milligan and Angela de Hoyos (eds.), Floricanto Sí: A Collection
of Latina Poetry (New York: Penguin, 1998). For anthologies with more speciic
rubrics, see subsequent notes.
2. Two signiicant studies speciic to Chicano and Chicana writing are Alfred
Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) and Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry:
Against Myth, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
3. Abelardo Delgado, Here Lies Lalo: The Collected Poems of Abelardo Delgado
(Houston: Arte Público Press, 2011), p. 4.
4. Gary Soto, New and Selected Poems (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1995), p. 49.
5. Alberto Ríos, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Port Townsend, Wash.:
Copper Canyon, 2002), p. 74.
6. Sandra Cisneros, Loose Woman (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 4.

976
 Latino Poetry and Poetics

7. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 1981), p. 35.
8. On queer Latino poetics generally, see Emanuel Xavier (ed.), Mariposas: A
Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Mountain View, Calif.: Floricanto
Press, 2008).
9. Juan Felipe Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smugler (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2002), p. 74.
10. On Puerto Rican poetry generally, see Robert Márquez (ed.), Puerto Rican
Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
11. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman (eds.), Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets
Café (New York: Holt, 1994); Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of
Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
12. Pedro Pietri, Puerto Rican Obituary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974),
p. 10.
13. Mariposa, Born Bronxeña (Bronx, N.Y.: Bronxeña, 2000), pp. 7–8; reprinted at
http://www.virtualboricua.org/Docs/poem_mtf01.htm.
14. Martín Espada, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002 (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), p. 251.
15. Rane Arroyo, Home Movies of Narcissus (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
2002), p. 68.
16. Arroyo, Home Movies of Narcissus, p. 27.
17. Pablo Medina, The Floating Island (Bufalo, N.Y.: White Pine, 1999), p. 76.
18. Richard Blanco, Directions to the Beach of the Dead (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2005), p. 8.
19. Rafael Campo, Diva (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 79.
20. Orlando Ricardo Menes, Rumba Atop the Stones (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press,
2001), p. 71.

977
 Chapter 43
Asian American Poetry
J o s e ph J on g h y u n J e on

In suggesting that the practice of history has much in common with the writ-
ing of iction, Hayden White famously challenged the truth-value of histor-
ical writing. Whether imaginative or documentary, every narrative, White
argues, “is constructed on the basis of a set of events that might have been
included, but were left out.”1 This historiographic problem in the case of
Asian American literary history is exacerbated by the fact that the term “Asian
American” is itself a fairly recent construct – a coalition irst built in the 1960s
and 1970s – that takes part of its name from the largest and most populated
continent but was originally deined more narrowly, emphasizing immigrants
from China, Japan, and the Philippines. The category has morphed over the
years, widening geographically and retroactively encompassing cultural pro-
duction that predates the term; Susan Koshy has even suggested that the
rubric “Asian American” is catachrestic, not reducible to any stable referent,
and instead relects the internal contradictions that produced it.2 The task of
organizing and tracking such a complex, multivalent set of elements thus
becomes complicated.
One could narrate the history of Asian American poetry, for example, as a
kind of political Bildungsroman, moving from early expressions of marginal-
ized voices to agitated demands for inclusion to inal mainstream acceptance,
and foreground the political history of the post–civil rights era, as well as
the gradually widening scope of the Asian American movement. Alternately,
one could map Asian American poetry onto the trajectory followed by the
artistic movements of the twentieth century, from, say, modernist abstrac-
tion to jazz-inspired beat cadences to postmodern pastiche. One could also
think in regional terms and foreground the particular trajectories in places like
New York, San Francisco, and Hawai’i, where institutions like the Basement
Workshop, the Kearny Street Workshop, and Bamboo Ridge Press supported
groups of writers. Finally, one could trace the appropriation of “Asianness” in
Western, canonical, poetic forms and the way in which Asian American poets

978
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respond to this legacy, beginning with the exotic, orientalist visions of Asian
aesthetics employed by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound and moving to the
fetishization of Asian spiritualism by Beat poets like Gary Snyder and Allen
Ginsberg before tracking how Asian American poets have resisted these ste-
reotypical constructs. While all of these accounts are accurate in some ways,
their insights come at the cost of inevitable blind spots. This chapter does not
avoid this perhaps unavoidable condition. But, rather than choosing an option
from those rehearsed previously, it emphasizes a series of historical pressures,
tensions, and anxieties that contextualize poetic production in each period.
One overarching dialectic is the relationship between a civil rights–inspired
political imperative, on one hand, and an experimental literary ethos, on the
other. Part of the reason for this particular fault line is a pervasive anxiety in
minority discourse about poetry as a suiciently social form. In contrast to
the novel and memoir, which are often considered to be more adept at rep-
resenting the harsh realities of racial injustice, poetry is sometimes regarded
by those invested in minority politics as overly private and idealized, failing to
address the empirical realities of the lived world. This critique is further ampli-
ied in the case of the more avant-garde forms, whose characteristic diiculty
often seems anathema to the inclusive, egalitarian ethos that frequently drives
Asian American studies. In the most forceful account, aesthetic experimenta-
tion in poetry is not just inefective at communicating historical realities but
also socially irresponsible. But such critiques are too quick to read diiculty
as categorically apolitical and aesthetic experimentalism as antisocial, just as
it would be mistaken to read more overtly political poetry as unconcerned
about form. Asian American poetry has always been interested in both polari-
ties, but in varying proportions and to varying degrees of success.

Orient Reoriented
The earliest Asian American poetry predates the political movement and
hence the term itself. These poets would have identiied more with individ-
ual ethnic groups, and their ambiguous status as Americans was frequently
a preoccupation in poetry that often described attempts to gain precarious
footholds, be they social or aesthetic, in the United States. What complicates
our understanding of this period is the way in which parts of it have been
retroactively claimed or disowned as originary moments for later groups and
igures in Asian American poetry. Most historical accounts of Asian American
poetry begin in the 1890s with the poems of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone
Noguchi,3 but these have become vexed igures because, although they are the

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 J os e ph Jongh yu n Je on

earliest Asian American poets writing in English, their work does not explic-
itly address Asian American social concerns. As a result, one interesting aspect
of this early poetry is the discursive function it plays for later Asian American
writers and critics who either acknowledge or disavow these igures as literary
antecedents.
Raised in Germany and the United States, Sadakichi Hartmann was a poet
and art critic but dabbled as both a playwright and a screenwriter. At various
points in his colorful, bohemian life, he was an associate of Walt Whitman,
Stéphane Mallarmé, Emma Goldman, and John Barrymore. Ezra Pound men-
tions Hartmann with admiration in his Cantos,4 and again in Guide to Kulchur.5
As a poet, he was among the irst to write in English tanka and haiku, Japanese
poetic forms, which he tried to reconcile with symbolist aesthetics. This syn-
thetic efort is visible in his “Tanka I” (1920):

Winter? Spring! Who knows!

White buds from the plumtrees wing
And mingle with the snows.
No blue sky these lowers bring.
Yet their fragrance augurs Spring.6

Here, Hartmann uses indeterminate images of lowers to evoke without

explicitly describing inchoate internal states in a manner suggestive of sym-
bolism (complete with synesthesia), modulating the elegant expressiveness
that characterizes what is traditionally a Japanese courtly form into an appre-
ciation of ambiguity that is more suitable for modern times. He further blends
the tanka, a thirty-one-syllable poem broken down in lines of ive, seven, ive,
seven, and seven syllables (although Hartmann inserts an extra syllable in the
third line), with the rhyme scheme of the English quintain (ababb), as in Robert
Browning’s dramatic monologue “Porphyria’s Lover.”
A contemporary of Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, father of the well-known
sculptor Isamu Noguchi, also experimented in English with Japanese forms.
His critical publication, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914) – part of which he
delivered as a lecture at Oxford University – established him in the West as an
authority on the subject, and it has even been speculated that Noguchi was an
important source for Pound regarding Japanese aesthetic forms.7 Noguchi’s
poetry was also well received and recognized by some of the literary elite of
the period. As in his criticism, Noguchi’s poetry worked to present Japanese
forms to Western audiences, particularly the haiku, or hokku, but he also
wrote about his time in the United States, as in “Song of Day in Yosemite
Valley” (1898), in which Noguchi, unmoored from traditional Japanese form,

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 Asian American Poetry

embraces Whitmanian free verse and apostrophe: “I, a muse from the Orient,
where is revealed the light of dawn, / Harken to the welcome strains of
genii from the heart of the Sierras –.”8 Juxtaposing his own Asian subjectiv-
ity against this sublime American backdrop, the poem goes on to narrate the
way in which the latter seems to overwhelm the former: “Behold! Yosemite,
sermoning Truth and Liberty, battles in spirit with the Paciic Ocean afar! /
O unfading wonder, eternal glory! I pray a redemption from the majesty that
chains me – / (Lo, Hell ofers a great ediice unto Heaven!) O, I bid my envy
and praise reset against thee.”9 Here the overwhelmed Asian subject seems
to submit to not only the physical grandeur of Yosemite but also the values
that it seems to profer. The enthusiastic tone of the passage, however, seems
to relect less the ultimate virtue of these values, and more their persuasive
power. Perhaps not surprisingly in this context, Noguchi, unlike Hartmann,
did not settle permanently in the United States, returning to Japan in 1904,
just more than a decade after his arrival in 1893 in San Francisco at the age of
eighteen.
Neither Hartmann’s nor Noguchi’s poems seem to engage Asian American
political issues overtly, and both were later criticized as “Americanized Asians”
in the preface to Aiiieeeee! (1974), an important anthology of Asian American
literature that articulated a cultural nationalist Asian American ethos.10 Poets
that abided by this activist ethos, particularly those with Japanese ancestry
like Janice Mirikitani and Lawson Fusao Inada, tended to avoid writing in tra-
ditional Japanese poetic forms because they felt it important to reject oriental-
ist expectations and to distinguish their poetry as Asian American. Although
Hartmann and Noguchi may indeed be read as complicit with orientalizing
appropriations of Asian aesthetics, their attempts to adapt Japanese forms to
English, however, are not replications of Japanese forms in English but rather
adaptations, in which, as Edward Marx describes in botanical terms, “a sub-
genre is simply grafted onto an equivalent genre within the new culture, to
wither or lourish under the prevailing local conditions.”11 In this regard, the
eforts of Hartmann and Noguchi are also legible, not simply as translations
of an Asian form into a new idiom but as attempts to invent synthetically an
entirely new American form. Here, formal inclusion may function subtly as a
mode of social inclusion.
Such inklings of a proto–Asian American poetics, however, were massively
overshadowed by Western modernism’s appropriation of Asian forms, most
inl uentially by Pound and Fenollosa. Pound in particular made his under-
standing of classical Asian artistic forms and philosophy central to his sense
of modernist aesthetics. Although he treated classical Asian culture with great

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intellectual appreciation, in doing so he also exoticized it. With Pound (as Eric
Hayot and Josephine Park suggest), Asia came to function as central to the
West’s conception of itself, which relied on an imaginary idealization of the
East in orientalizing terms.12 This highly inl uential image of Asia was so dom-
inant in the Western imagination throughout the twentieth century, accord-
ing to these critics, that even Asian American poets could not approach their
subject matter without confronting this legacy. It is this conception of Asia
that the editors of Aiiieeeee! reacted against.
Written and published primarily in the 1940s and 1950s, the poetry of José
Garcia Villa (also devalued in Aiiieeeee!) follows in the tradition of Hartmann
and Noguchi in their encounters with modernism. Garcia Villa’s case ofers
an example of the double bind that often characterizes this early period of
Asian American formal experimentation. In his heyday, Garcia Villa, an early
transnational igure, was regarded as an important igure in Filipino litera-
ture and as a promising up-and-comer in American letters. Living most of his
adult life in the United States, although Garcia Villa wrote at a turbulent time
in the history of the Philippines and in the legacy of U.S. colonial aggression,
he remained relatively apolitical, focusing instead on poetic innovation. In his
irst book of poetry, Have Come, Am Here (1942), he introduced an idiosyncratic
rhyme scheme, which he described as “reversed consonance,” in which the
last-sounded consonants of a word are reversed in the corresponding line, as
in the following:

It is what I never said, (a)

What I’ll always sing – (b)
It’s not found in days, (a)
It’s what always begins (b)13

Volume Two (1949) unveiled a genre that Garcia Villa called “comma poems,”
which used commas after nearly every word and was meant to invoke the
pointillism of the French impressionist painter Georges Seurat.
Focusing on the reception of his work, which was reviewed by major publi-
cations and attracted the attention of important literary igures of the period
(Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, E. E. Cummings), Timothy Yu describes
Garcia Villa’s conundrum as his work became increasingly experimental:
“Readers, unable to reconcile this device with the covert orientalism through
which they read Garcia Villa, lambasted his attempt to behave like any other
American modernist.”14 Yu’s account here describes the larger problematic
of positioning these proto–Asian American poets in relation to current Asian
American discourse. For writers like Garcia Villa, formal experimentation and

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associations with prominent Western literary igures and ideas seem to prom-
ise a kind of literary inclusion that opposes orientalism and allows the poet
to transcend the limited racial category, but the promise is never realized,
because the refashioning of the Asian writer as American negates the original
exotic appeal. Formal experimentation becomes a mode of denying orien-
talizing assumptions, but it also negates the very mode through which the
non-Western subject becomes legible to the Western audience. Furthermore,
as in the denouncement of these writers by the editors of Aiiieeeee!, formal
experimentalism becomes read retroactively as assimilationist and complicit
with the very orientalist ideals that these poets sought, in varying degrees, to
complicate.
If these poets were rejected as authentic origins for Asian American poetry,
the poetry inscribed on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station
detention building (active between 1910 and 1940) often takes their place, not
least because it manifests a central trope in Asian American history, that of
the perpetual foreigner. The institutional embodiment of the Yellow Peril dis-
course of the period, Angel Island detained primarily Chinese immigrants,
and although it was sometimes called the Ellis Island of the West, its ultimate
purpose was not to facilitate immigration, like its eastern counterpart, but to
enforce the highly restrictive Chinese exclusion laws that governed Chinese
immigration to the United States from 1882 to 1943. Written in Chinese, the
poetry inscribed on the walls of the detention building by anonymous detain-
ees, and thus physically marked on the very institution that repressed them,
collectively serves as a historical record of marginalized Asians. Translated
and anthologized in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel
Island, 1910–1940 (1980), the poems have been read primarily as historical
records, more in documentary rather than literary terms.15 But these poems
are also interesting, as Steven Yao has argued, for their formal characteristics,
which Yao reads transnationally in relation to both classical Chinese models
and American jazz aesthetics.16

The Social Poetics of Labor and Internment

Although the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s was certainly
the irst to codify ideological fault lines, deine political imperatives, and group
diferent Asian ethnicities under a single uniied rubric, it did follow in the foot-
steps of a nascent activist tradition that arose midcentury, initially to confront
labor issues. Many of the earliest Asian immigrants to the United States were
manual laborers, and much of the legislation restricting Asian immigration

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to the United States was motivated in part by anxieties within the U.S. labor
movement that Asian workers were taking the jobs from their constituents.
But, as Colleen Lye has suggested, Asian exclusion did not exactly succeed in
keeping Asian workers out of the United States but rather “merely guaran-
teed a disempowered class of laborers.”17 These workers thus found them-
selves working diicult, low-paying jobs for employers who were ambivalent
to their well-being, while remaining unprotected by the often nativist labor
unions, who viewed them as threatening. The earliest Asian American poems
relating to labor are the various oral forms, such as the hole-hole bushi sung
on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations in Japanese. In addition, the Chinatown
Cantonese rhymes that Marlon K. Hom has translated and collected in Songs
of Gold Mountain (1987), from a pair of original manuscripts that date from 1911
and 1915, depict the struggles of Chinese immigrants. And though their con-
cerns vary widely, they exemplify a certain realist sensibility that calls atten-
tion to economic hardship.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Hsi-Tseng (H. T.) Tsiang published proletarian poems
that expressed his dedication to global class revolution, which he believed
should cut across national and racial lines. According to Floyd Cheung,
Tsiang followed the principle of nalai zhuyi (or “grabbism”), which was an
aesthetic theory formulated by the prominent modern Chinese writer Lu
Xun that advocated strategic appropriation of often foreign ideas and forms.
In this mode, Cheung suggests, “Tsiang created a new hybridized literature
by reworking formal and thematic elements from classical and contempo-
rary Chinese literature, the proletarian works of 1920s and 1930s America,
and western classics like the plays of William Shakespeare.”18 Although he
often also included poetic interludes in his prose, his main poetic contribu-
tion was his one volume of published poetry, Poems of the Chinese Revolution
(1929), which is introduced by a short note by Upton Sinclair, who recom-
mends not the poems themselves (he describes them as “not perfect”) but
rather “the movement which he voices.”19 Tsiang’s leftist politics drew the ire
of state oicials in both China, which he led in fear of persecution, and the
United States, which attempted unsuccessfully to deport him. In the poems
of this volume – such as “Rickshaw Boy,” “Chinaman, Laundryman,” “Sacco-
Vanzetti,” and “Canton Soviet” – Tsiang attempts to inscribe marginalized
Chinese/American laborers into Western socialism, particularly in the con-
text of the United States, where Chinese people were excluded from labor
politics (“Don’t call me ‘Chinaman’ / I am the Worldman / ‘The International
Soviet / Shall be his human race’!”).20

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Although he is best known for his novel America Is in the Heart (1946), Carlos
Bulosan began his literary career primarily as a poet who, like Tsiang, called
attention to the plight of alienated workers of Asian descent. After arriving in
the United States in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, Bulosan
worked a series of jobs that were typical for Filipino immigrants of the day,
in canneries and agricultural ields. Disgusted by the poor conditions and rac-
ist treatment that characterized such labor, which was made worse by the
reclassiication of Filipinos in the United States as “aliens” by the Tydings-
McDuie Act in 1934, he eventually became active in organizing unions for
fellow Filipino migrant laborers, who were unprotected at the time by existing
labor unions. His experiences during these years inform his poetry, including
his irst volume, Letter from America (1942). Although these poems do not all
employ the epistolary mode alluded to by the volume’s title, they do follow
letters in fashion, according to Oscar V. Campomanes, by bridging “the gaping
distance between Bulosan and his imaginary reader” in order to conquer “the
historical alienation that becomes the lot of the exiled.”21 Although the title
of the volume nominally imagines a non-American reader, the poems invite
a general audience to witness harsh social realities in a kind of empathic,
journalistic tone.
The streets scream for life, where men are hunting
Each other with burning eyes, mountains are made of sand,
Glass, paper from factories where death is calling
For peace; hills are made of clothes, and trees
Are nothing but candies.22
Like Tsiang, Bulosan depicted a fractured and unjust world, recognizing the
way in which racial politics collided with the nativist interests of American
labor politics. This bleak vision of “America bleeding,” as he describes it follow-
ing the quoted passage, speaks not only to the diiculty of the labor endured
by these workers but also to their marginal social status.
The most extreme example of marginal status in Asian American history
came in 1942, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066,
which efectively called for the removal of approximately 110,000 people of
Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States to camps located
in desolate inland areas. As did anti-Asian immigration legislation, Japanese
American internment clearly demonstrated the extent to which Asians in the
United States were regarded as perpetual foreigners, despite legitimate claims
to citizenship. Although the memoir iction about this history is more well

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known – for example, John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) and Jeanne Wakatsuki
Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973) – the poetry on the subject is equally
important. There have been a number of poetic manuscripts in both Japanese
and English associated with various camps, some anonymous and some attrib-
uted to authors. Recently, critics have called attention to the highly censored
newspapers and journals run by internees at the camps, which sometimes
published subtly resistant poetry.23 At the Topaz camp, Toyo Suyemoto and
Taro Katayama published poems that quietly attempted to make sense of the
traumatic experience and to register dissent, in camp publications like Trek
and All Aboard.24 In many cases, poetry from the camps was rediscovered and
appreciated much later, as was the case for Violet Kazue De Cristoforo’s May
Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration
Camp Haiku (1997). Because it was such a traumatizing event, a common reac-
tion among the imprisoned population, once released, was silence, and intern-
ment literature initially failed to gain a broad audience.25 Consequently, most
of the poetic treatments of internment – such as Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp
Notes and Other Poems (1976), Janice Mirikitani’s Shedding Silence (1987), and
Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp (1993) – do so retroactively as histori-
cal memory, although Yamada’s text stands out as one that was written during
and immediately following her family’s internment.

Dialectics of Asian American Activism and

Antiessentialism
From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asian American poetry developed and
diversiied rapidly and, for the irst time, embraced the term “Asian American”
as an organizing rubric. The legacies of the labor and internment experiences
of the irst half of the twentieth century were invisibility and silence for Asian
Americans, who were marked as perpetually foreign and marginalized from
representational politics. The Asian American movement of the 1960s and
1970s redressed this legacy by privileging visibility and voice as political values:
it imagined a pan-Asian coalition based on a history of similar experiences.
Central to this politics was the construction of a sense of Asian American
identity that rejected both orientalist stereotypes on one hand and assimila-
tion into white American culture on the other. The editors of Aiiieeeee! make
this bifurcated claim on behalf of Asian American literature as anthologized
in its collection (although it did not include poetry until later editions), which
relects “the existence of Asian American sensibilities and cultures that might
be related to but are distinct from Asia and white America.”26 Numerous

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poetry anthologies have taken up this task of delineating Asian American lit-
erary aesthetics, such as David Hsin-fu Wand’s Asian American Heritage (1974),
Joseph Bruchac’s Breaking Silence (1983), Garrett Hongo’s The Open Boat (1993),
and Walter K. Lew’s Premonitions (1995). This interest in circumscribing a ield
of Asian American poetry also gave impetus to the recovery and reconsidera-
tion of the antecedents that I have discussed in previous sections as well as to
the desire to claim origins and formulate historical narratives for this newly
emergent category of writing.
Critics have generally narrated this period from the late 1960s to mid-
1990s as a progression from early activist poetry (Mirikitani, Inada, and Merle
Woo) to a more mainstream antiessentialist lyric poetry by poets trained in
American M.F.A. programs (Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura) and,
inally, to an avant-garde period (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau) that
challenges the legacy of identity politics and the coherency of the lyric “I”
with poststructuralist and postmodern experimental modes.27 Although they
are useful as general accounts, such narratives purchase narrative cleanliness
at the cost of historical accuracy. Sunn Shelley Wong, for example, has pointed
out that the Asian American poetic production of the 1970s is characterized
not only by activist modes but also by “a range of poetic styles and themes
that resist conlation.”28 In addition, John Yau’s irst collection, Crossing Canal
Street, was published in 1976, and Cha’s DICTEE, which is arguably the most
signiicant Asian American avant-garde text, was published in 1982 (although
not widely read until the early 1990s); hence, both were published before what
are regarded as the landmark antiessentialist texts, like Cathy Song’s Picture
Bride (1983), David Mura’s After We Lost Our Way (1989), and Li-Young Lee’s The
City in Which I Love You (1990). Furthermore, the periodization of these poets
tends to ignore their development in careers that outlast the small window of
time with which they are associated, as is the case for Mirikitani and Inada,
both still active today.
Although these genealogies can be schematically useful, they tend also to
elide their own erasures when exceptions threaten the sanctity of the scheme.
So rather than treating this crucial time in the development of Asian American
poetry as a series of quick epistemic changes in which values radically shift
(activist, antiessentialist, avant-garde), I want to think of the irst two stages
instead as polarities or modes implicated in a dialectical relationship, in which
one value might outweigh another in prominence at a given moment but
never vanquishes the other entirely. The third term, “avant-garde,” becomes
one recurring and prominent mode of negotiating and synthesizing the irst
two. In practical terms, this means not only that diferent kinds of poets coexist

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at various moments but also that both polarities also coexist within the work
of individual poets.
Mirikitani’s “Breaking Silence” (1981), which Joseph Bruchac took as a title
for his 1983 anthology, might exemplify the activist polarity.29 Mirikitani par-
ticipated in the student strike in 1968–1969 at San Francisco State, an impor-
tant moment for the Asian American movement, and, with the poet Francis
Naohiko Oka, founded Aion in 1970, which, although short-lived, was the irst
Asian American literary magazine. Occasioned by her mother’s testimony
to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Japanese
American Civilians in 1981, “Breaking Silence” alternates back and forth
between a private lyrical introspection about the experience of internment
that is gleaned from her mother’s comments over the years (“We were told /
that silence was better”) and the mother’s public speech before the commis-
sion. The private mode recounts a history of silence and resigned compliance
to historical injustice that contrasts with the mother’s brave testimony of
anger and resistance:
Mr. Commissioner . . .
So when you tell me I must limit
testimony,
when you tell me my time is up,
I tell you this:
pride has kept my lips
pinned by nails
my rage conined.
But I exhume my past
to claim this time.30
Inspired then by the mother’s decision to “kill this silence,” the poem resolves
into a rallying cry for a collective identity that emerges from history – cit-
ing “war-dead sons / red ashes of Hiroshima / jagged wounds from barbed
wire” – with a sense of self-recognition and pride that accumulates with every
repetition of the irst person plural that closes the poem. In so doing, the
poem claims a Japanese American history and links it to a collective political
identity, transforming inward introspection, associated with quiescence, into
a public, performative declaration of unity and strength:
We must recognize ourselves at last.
We are a rainforest of color
and noise.
We hear everything.
We are unafraid.31

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Suggested by the prominent positioning of “and noise,” voice is only efective

when it becomes openly resistant in a public forum, clamoring for political
representation, and when it comes to encapsulate a collective (rather than
individual) subject position. In claiming a political identity in relation to his-
tory, the poem demonstrates what has been critiqued as a kind of tribalism,
which calls attention to shared experiences of subjugation and uses these
commonalities in order to build a coalition.32
The antiessentialist polarity inds fault in what it regards as an overly reduc-
tive form of tribalism and favors instead a broader appreciation of diference.
Garrett Hongo and David Mura have made forceful claims on behalf of these
values. In his introduction to his anthology The Open Boat, Hongo articulates
the antiessentialist polarity in polemical terms, particularly in his comments
about a 1991 Asian American writers’ conference at the University of California
at Berkeley, by enumerating what he thought to be a set of nefarious assump-
tions that he felt pervaded the conference: a sociopolitical understanding of
an essential Asian American experience, the expectation of a writer’s compul-
sory loyalty to his or her ethnic community, and a dismissal of assimilationist
or commercial writing. Hongo proceeds to sum up these assumptions harshly,
as “nothing more than fascism, intellectual bigotry, and ethnic fundamental-
ism of the worst kind.”33 Mura extends this critique into a valuation of l uid,
multiple identities: “In our postmodern, multicultural, global world, our iden-
tities are multiple, are conditioned by our historical circumstances, are some-
thing we have been given and something we choose, are always changing, are
subject to political and cultural forces beyond our control, are a continuous
creation.”34 Far from discarding the interest of identity in the activist poetics,
writers committed to the antiessentialist line of thought make self-knowledge
about identity more central and pressing, by making it more inchoate and
ephemeral, something that is highly desired and sought, “a continuous crea-
tion,” but slippery and elusive.
Perhaps because of the diicult multiplicity of identity, a central poetic
mode for this line of poetry is the lyric. As Charles Altieri has suggested,
in a world that increasingly values empirically derived, impersonally verii-
able forms of clarity, poetic lyricism in the Romantic tradition is increasingly
aware of its own marginality and thus can only produce “an exhilarating yet
problematic amalgam of intense modes of self-consciousness, riddled with
continual worry that one’s basic values may be only anachronistic escapes
from the reality of a much-diminished world.”35 Altieri’s description here of
lyric values, although focused speciically on modernist aesthetics, might also
serve to gloss Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” (1986).36 On the surface, Lee’s

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poem seems to have much in common with Mirikitani’s “Breaking Silence.”

Both consider cultural inheritance through the relationship to one’s parents
and compare this heritage to other forms of authority that regulate racial dif-
ference. Mirikitani’s poem juxtaposes the mother’s voice and the power of the
commissioner who arbitrates her public speech; Lee’s poem invokes the mem-
ory of his father in relation to Mrs. Walker, the speaker’s sixth-grade teacher,
who punishes the speaker’s otherness, slapping the back of his head for not
knowing the diference between the words “persimmon” and “precision.”
But whereas Mirikitani moves from private memory to public performance
as a way to dramatize political mobility, Lee, who in interviews has rejected
the moniker “Asian American poet,” moves inward toward lyrical introspec-
tion and sensual memory. The poem culminates with the speaker’s account of
rummaging through his parents’ cellar, searching for something he has lost,
while his now-blind father sits with him. This search for the lost object doubles
the father’s eyesight, which he describes as “All gone.” In the inal lines of the
poem, the speaker locates what he has been looking for, a still-life painting by
his father of two persimmons.
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.37
Although the poem ends with quoted speech, signaled by italicization, the
father’s speech in the inal stanza is far from public. The location, the cellar
of the house, suggests remoteness. More importantly, the speaking “I” of the
father in these lines seems to blend into the lyric “I” of the poem that responds
to Mrs. Walker’s enforcement of racial diference through the igure of the
persimmon (which she had earlier described as a “Chinese apple”38) by collaps-
ing the diference between “persimmon” and “precision.” The elision of lin-
guistic diference thus implies a rejection of the racialization implicit in Mrs.
Walker’s semiviolent reproach. Instead, identity in these inal lines comes with
a sensual identiication with the father’s precise rendering of persimmons.
What the speaker shares with the father is not so much a shared set of histor-
ical experiences that authorizes coalition building but rather a more radically

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individualized sense of subjective experience that contests the imposition of

crude, reductive categories like race. And because identity is such a private,
individualized entity – a highly contingent amalgam of personal and familial
history and experience – identity becomes a l uid, continuous creation.
The critique of the activist polarity is implicit in the antiessentialist line,
which regards the former as overly reductive, but some of what has been
iled under the rubric of activist poetry, however, seems already to anticipate
this criticism. From his irst volume of poems, Before the War: Poems as They
Happened (1971), Inada’s jazz aesthetics have privileged syncopated variation
and performative play. So while his invocations of historical trauma link him
irmly to the activist tradition, a link that is bolstered by his editorial par-
ticipation in Aiiieeeee!, his use of African American jazz aesthetics imports a
slipperier ethos under the rubric of performative politics. Juliana Chang has
suggested that Inada’s cross racial identiication with these musical forms does
not imply an essential, ontological connection between minority subject posi-
tions but rather “is articulated through practices of knowledge formation and
code reading.”39 Chang’s analysis suggests that, while Inada is indeed speciic
and explicit about the racial history of the Japanese American subject, this his-
tory does not summarily determine identity, which has more to do with vari-
able modes of engagement than essential modes of being. In a poem entitled
“On Being Asian American” from his volume Legends from Camp (1993), Inada
seems to reply implicitly to the antiessentialist critique:

Take me as I am, you cry,

I, I, am an individual.
Which is certainly true.
Which generates an echo.40

In the broader context of the poem as a whole – which consists of a series of

quatrains in which the second couplet is italicized – the lines read not as an
outright admonishment on the insistence on individuality but as a pair of gen-
tle qualiications that suggest that the fact of individuality does not negate the
larger echoes or reverberations that connect the individual to a political iden-
tity. But as in his more directly jazz-inspired poetics, these echoes inl uence
without determining individual identity.
The antiessentialist polarity has also had its critics, who regard this poet-
ics as ultimately authorizing only the most uncritical and anesthetic forms
of liberal humanist multiculturalism, which David Palumbo-Liu has con-
trasted with what he terms critical multiculturalism. The former functions
to contain the dangerous energy of the civil rights movement by ignoring the

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“complex material speciicities” of minority discourse, which might “occasion

the critique of the ideological apparatuses that distribute power and resources
unevenly among the diferent constituencies of a multicultural society.”41
Instead, liberal multiculturalism institutionalizes a watered-down sense of
pluralism that simply respects cultural diference as such, without engaging in
any ideological investigation. A similar charge has been leveled against poets
associated with the antiessentialist line, like Li-Young Lee, David Mura, Cathy
Song, and Marilyn Chin. Although these poets have been the most visible,
mainstream successes in Asian American poetic history, their success, accord-
ing to this critique, has much to do with the compatibility of their poetics to
the kind of multicultural, and ultimately apolitical, ethos that Palumbo-Liu
critiques.42
This account, however, is also somewhat reductive. First, this poetry is not
so much categorically apolitical as it is arguably politically limited, because of
the way in which it channels its political energies into easily containable forms.
Despite the attention often paid to Asian American history in these poems,
political content here tends to get sublimated into an identity poetics that proj-
ects social content inward onto the subjective terrain of the individual and,
in so doing, transforms racial diference into individual diference. Second,
the antiessentialist ethos is not without its virtues. The sentiment behind the
central metaphor of Hongo’s anthology, that of the open boat, is certainly
vulnerable to the critique of liberal multiculturalism, but it also allows for a
broader vision of what constitutes Asian American poetry. Hongo’s anthol-
ogy, for example, participates in the gradual inclusion of writers with ancestry
from other parts of Asia, including Indran Amirthanayagam, Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni, and the Kashmiri American Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), who
found himself inluential in America at the very end of his life, both for his
evocations of Kashmir in The Country without a Post Oice (1997) and for his
work to promote the Persian and Urdu form called the ghazal.
Finally, this categorical critique undervalues the individual diferences
among poets that fall under this rubric. Although she is sometimes called an
activist poet, Marilyn Chin, for example, is often categorized with the anti-
essentialist polarity because of the tendency of her poetry to demonstrate
the complexity of identity constructs. Her oft-cited poem “How I Got That
Name: An Essay on Assimilation,” from her 1994 volume The Phoenix Gone,
the Terrace Empty, explores individual identity by narrating how her birth
name, Mei Ling, was transliterated into English as “Marilyn” by her father,
who was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe.43 The speaker’s meditation on her
name thus becomes a way of thinking through questions of assimilation, or

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more speciically about how Asian Americans register in American culture

and history. The poem contextualizes individual identity in relation to a ield
of signiiers: historical events (e.g., Angel Island and the paper son phenome-
non, through which some Chinese immigrants skirted exclusion legislation by
falsely claiming that they were the sons of U.S. citizens), historical constructs
(the Asian American model minority myth), literary allusions to iconic poems
by William Carlos Williams and John Berryman, and pop-culture references
to the soap opera Santa Barbara. The poem ends with a mock epitaph (“So
here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin . . .”) that calls attention to the impossibility
of encapsulating identity in stone:
She was neither black nor white,
neither cherished nor vanquished,
just another squatter in her own bamboo grove
minding her poetry –
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.44
This excerpt encapsulates the poem’s attempt to render identity not as entirely
unintelligible but rather as relationally intelligible in historical and cultural
contexts. After a pair of negations that narrow the ield of identity without
specifying it, the poem turns to a stereotype of an Asian exotic minding poetry
in a bamboo grove, and then to a fantastical account of the poet’s death, which
characterizes the blankness of her subject position, an opening chasm, in rela-
tion to an American literary antecedent and an Asian pop-culture reference
that registers in the United States as well. Chin’s antiessentialism does not
involve an apolitical withdrawal into private sensuality but rather depends on
the constantly shifting relationship between the individual and the world in
which she gains deinition.

Avant-Garde Syntheses and Transnational

Reconigurations
As already suggested, avant-garde Asian American poetry is not a discrete
period in a larger historical trajectory of formal and ideological develop-
ment but rather one prominent mode of negotiating a central dialectic of
Asian American poetry. Debate about what constitutes an avant-garde is as
old as avant-garde movements themselves. For the purpose of this chapter, I

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highlight three characteristics as constitutive of avant-garde art. First, avant-

garde art often mobilizes a fundamental defamiliarizing gesture that can be
disorienting, jarring, or even ofensive and that thus functions to signal to
the reader or viewer that he or she must alter familiar interpretive practices
in order to engage the piece at all. Second, the avant-garde artwork typically
engages in some kind of theoretical work, which is frequently staged by the
formal and stylistic properties of the work and is thus often accompanied
by an explicit, sometimes polemic critical discourse (manifestos, statements
of poetics, etc.). Third, avant-garde artworks usually mobilize some kind
of community, whether we understand community in strictly sociological
terms (coteries, movements, and even institutions) or in looser value terms
(an interpretive community). Like many avant-garde works, Asian American
avant-garde poetry generally attempts to imbricate formal/aesthetic experi-
mentation with sociopolitical investigation, and, in particular, to reconstitute
an Asian American poetics that picks up on the activist concern for history and
ideological investigation without relying on an essentialized vision of identity
overly determined by social positionality, on one hand, while rejecting the
mainstream lyrical modes that characterize the antiessentialist polarity, on the
other, aspiring ultimately to relocate Asian American studies on new concep-
tual grounds.
Among the earliest to experiment in this poetic mode, Jessica Hagedorn
and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha both have worked in a number of diferent
artistic media, paying speciic attention to the intersections of feminist and
racial issues. Hagedorn has published both poetry and iction, sometimes in
the same volumes; written and produced plays; performed with a musical
act (West Coast Gangster Choir); and worked as a performance artist. Her
poetry was irst published in a collection edited by Kenneth Rexroth entitled
Four Young Women: Poems (1973), which was followed by a pair of monographs
that mixed poetry and prose: Dangerous Music (1975) and Pet Food and Tropical
Apparitions (1981). Imbued with a decidedly performative ethos, Hagedorn’s
poetry is frantically paced, often incantatory, and driven by rock, jazz, and
Latin musical rhythms and is full of references to American pop culture,
with a heavy dose from the 1940s and 1950s (Rita Hayworth, Desi Arnaz, Tito
Puente). In “Sorcery,” a poem from Dangerous Music, the speaker issues what
is ultimately a disingenuous warning:
stay away
from crazy music.
they most likely
be creating it

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cuz
when you’re that beautiful
you can’t help
putting it out there.
everyone knows
how dangerous
that can get.45
Hagedorn is drawn to precisely this type of music, which is dangerous because
it rails against conformity or, as George Uba has described it, against “the exer-
cise of reason over the less reducible, holistic rhythms of experience.”46 Like
her iction, which has garnered more critical attention, Hagedorn’s poetry
investigates the postcolonial Philippines in relation to American political
and cultural intrusions, hybrid identities, immigration, and assimilation and
eschews easy forms of coherency, jumping from image to image, igure to
igure, at such a rapid clip that what is ultimately delivered is not a coherent
narrative but an idiosyncratic composite of snapshots as well as an ethos that
is equally as suspicious of stasis as it is of authority.
Best known for her experimental text DICTEE (1982), which mixes iction,
photography, poetry, and found documents, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s oeuvre
encompasses various forms of language art (which often straddles genres and
media), ilm, book art, sculpture, photography, and performance. Although
she is more a conceptual artist than a poet, Cha’s experiments with language
in her visual art often dovetail with the various experimental poetics of her
day. Of all the sections of the text, the ELITERE/LYRIC POETRY section is
most committed to poetic forms. The section ends with a meditation on the
life and death of words:
Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in
Time’s memory. Unemployed. Unspoken. History.
Past. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is mother
who waits nine days and nine nights be found.
Restore memory. Let the one who is diseuse, one
who is daughter restore spring with her each ap-
pearance from beneath the earth.
The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it
stops writing at all.47

The verse paragraph here begins clipped and paratactic before resolving into
dramatic incantation. Alluding to the mythic story of Demeter and her daugh-
ter Persephone, which explains the changing of the seasons, the passage here
turns on the pun between “disuse” and “diseuse,” a French-derived term that

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refers to a speciically female performer of monologues. Associated with the

diseuse, Persephone is a igure of traversal, and one that resonates with the
immigrants and exiles on which Cha dilates in DICTEE. According to myth,
Persephone returns every year from Hades and restores spring to the earth.
Speech, the medium of the diseuse, and writing, igured by the spilling ink in
the inal lines, are thus associated with vitality, but also transience, capable of
interrupting only temporarily the death of language, time, and perhaps his-
tory with which the section begins and that is echoed in its conclusion. The
passage as a whole thus calls attention to the kind of boundaries and limits
(national, linguistic, political) with which DICTEE as a whole is obsessed, even
as they are breached. In addition to DICTEE, Cha’s most well-known text, a
wealth of material is archived at the Berkeley Art Museum, which has only
recently begun to receive critical attention. Much of this work was displayed
in a 2001 exhibit, entitled The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
(1951–1982); more recently, a collection of her language art, entitled Exilée and
Temps Morts: Selected Works (2009), was published. In her introduction to the
volume, Constance Lewallen points out that “there was no irm distinction
between Cha’s visual and linguistic practices.”48 This blurring of boundar-
ies is a characteristic ethos in Cha’s work. In her Commentaire, the pages of
the book invoke a ilm screen, as if to call attention to words as images. In
her ilm/video installations, on the other hand, words are projected onto the
screen, as if the screen was now to be understood as a book page. Crucially,
these sorts of aesthetic ambiguities – of genre, medium, and form – parallel
cultural and nationalistic indeterminacies. For Cha, language itself becomes
a strange material object that relects the complex and uncertain material his-
tories of immigration, diaspora, and race. Her work is extremely theoretically
engaged, particularly with ilm theory, a collected volume of which, entitled
Apparatus, she published in 1980. Cha’s life was violently cut short in 1982, just
as she was beginning to do her most important work.
Although he worked as a critic and curator rather than a practitioner, the
poet John Yau, like Cha, is irmly rooted in the world of visual arts. Among
his numerous publications of art criticism, two books, both on Jasper Johns,
stand out: The United States of Jasper Johns (1997) and A Thing Among Things:
The Art of Jasper Johns (2008). What Yau seems to admire most about Johns’s
work is the way in which its repetitions of form and pattern play out the inev-
itable failures of stasis and the ultimate triumph of entropy and l ux. Yau’s
volume Corpse and Mirror (1983) takes its title from Johns’s iconic painting.
Here and elsewhere, Yau plays with Johns’s formal notion of repetition and
variation: one witnesses this logic in, for example, “Variations of a Sentence by

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Laura (Riding) Jackson”; in his Hollywood poems, which often focus on white
actors that played stereotypical Asian characters in ilms (Peter Lorre, Boris
Karlof ); and, perhaps most famously, in his Genghis Chan: Private Eye series,
whose name is a hybrid between the legendary Mongol ruler and the stereo-
typical Asian detective. Yau’s poems explore an iconology of race, performing
a historically informed inquiry into the ways in which race, and speciically
Asianness, has been constructed over the course of time.
Like Cha’s language art, the poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is steeped in
theoretical and philosophic thought. And like both Cha and Yau, she is deeply
invested in visual art. In fact, her mode of composition – in which she writes
out words on strips of paper, cuts them up, and reassembles them – operates
as much according to a visual logic as it does a linguistic one. She was active
in the early Asian American political movements; was included in Bruchac’s
1983 anthology Breaking Silence; and even had a play, One, Two Cups (1974),
which was directed by Frank Chin. As her work became more philosophical
and abstract, it was regarded as moving away from the terrain occupied by
Asian American literature. Increasingly inl uenced by contemporary avant-
garde visual art and music in addition to theoretical writing, Berssenbrugge’s
later work does not so much abandon the concerns of Asian American liter-
ature as much as it attempts to reimagine the various idioms through which
these concerns are addressed. Her volumes Empathy (1989) and Endocrinology
(1997), for example, investigate the phenomenological body and its perceptive
capacities. Although race is not named as an explicit context, the mode of phil-
osophic investigation resonates with the more explicit racial phenomenology
of Frantz Fanon, which considers the possibilities of perception when the per-
ceiver is the object of so much surveillance and derision. Nest (2003) considers
questions of home and belonging, interrogating what it means to be inside or
outside, native or foreign.
As is the case for Berssenbrugge, a prevailing characteristic in much con-
temporary Asian American poetry in this avant-garde mode is a highly self-
conscious concern for language and rhetoric as a point of entry for other
Asian American social issues. Inl uenced no doubt by language poetics and
poststructuralist theory, this metacritical attention to language, in fact, seems
to have surpassed and subsumed the interest in identity as a primary organiz-
ing matrix for Asian American poetics in recent years. One prominent strain
within this emergent tradition is concerned with the interrelation between
English and Asian language along with related issues of translation and trans-
nationalism. This poetry is thus particularly attuned to the recent imperative
in “Asian/American” studies in which the solidus in the middle of the term

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implies an imperative to track the increasingly complex ways in which “ ‘Asia’

and ‘America’ have merged and continue to merge.”49
Myung Mi Kim, for example, approaches the English language as a poet
who has clearly mastered its intricacies and cadences, but from the point of
view of someone for whom it is a second language. So although she is deft
in her presentations of words and keenly aware of their sound and musical-
ity, she also treats them as strange objects that must always be viewed from
a defamiliarized distance. As demonstrated in Under Flag (1991), The Bounty
(1996), and Commons (2002), one abiding concern in her poetics is an inter-
est in the Romanization of Korean into English, which is a concern less for
semantic translation than for the perhaps more primal and afective way
in which sound, and implicitly voice, gets transliterated and reproduced in
other languages. By framing issues of historical violence, immigration, and
diaspora through linguistic rather than social lenses, Kim dramatizes mutu-
ally transformative exchanges between languages that might model broader
social reconigurations. Not unlike Kim’s poetry, Meena Alexander’s work
is informed by a lifetime of migration (from India to Sudan, to England,
and to the United States) and thus by a heteroglossic relationship to lan-
guage. Although she writes in English, her usage is informed by Arabic,
French, Malayalam, and Hindi, and this complex relationship to language
allows Alexander in her poetry to negotiate her complicated relationship to
the colonial history of India. The title poem of Raw Silk (2004), for exam-
ple, dilates on one of the fetishized commodities of European colonialism
in India, the image of which evokes both fond family memories and ugly
reminiscences of brutal violence. Similarly, the speaker recalls her fondness
for the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine in the face of her mother’s disap-
proval: “why mutter poems in a language I can’t understand?”50 Like French
poetry, silk is ultimately a deeply vexed object: beautiful and delicate, on
one hand, but inconceivable outside of the violent history of its acquisition.
Like Alexander, Kimiko Hahn attempts in her poetry to integrate Asian
languages and literary forms into an inventive English-language poetics that
embeds personal experience, in speciically gendered terms, within a broader
ideological network of global power. The Unbearable Heart (1996), for exam-
ple, moves from fairly conventional lyrics occasioned by the sudden death
of the poet’s mother to more experimental forms, including an adaptation
of a zuihitsu (a Japanese literary genre in which the writer ofers a loose
series of personal insights and fragment miscellany) and then two poems
that respond to quotations from Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text
and from Gustave Flaubert’s orientalist account of his intimate relationship

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with an Egyptian courtesan named Kuchuk Hamen. Hahn’s text as a whole

thus connects personal trauma to a colonialist history in which sexual con-
quest of the oriental woman subtends imperialist aggression. As in Mosquito
and Ant (1999) – in which she appropriates the archaic Chinese writing sys-
tem nu shu, which was used exclusively and surreptitiously by women who
were otherwise denied access to literacy – Hahn interrogates the ideological
foundations of gender and race in The Unbearable Heart as relationships to
various forms of linguistic heritage.

What It Means to Be a Postidentity Poet

It is perhaps too early to chart out the contemporary landscape of Asian
American poetry. More work than ever is currently being published and is sup-
ported by institutions like Kaya Press, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop,
Kundiman, and the Association for Asian American Studies. One prominent
value, which might serve as a guiding coordinate, might be a postidentity
ethos, which is accompanied by a robust sense of adventurousness, both for-
mal and ideological. Authorized by the tradition of avant-garde and trans-
national poetry described in the previous section, this movement away from
poetic models that foreground identity as an anchoring concept leaves the
future of Asian American poetry wide open for work as varied as, for example,
Kazim Ali’s measured, minimalist, often spiritual contemplations; Young-Hae
Chang’s transnational, transcultural, digital poetics; Linh Dinh’s irreverent,
sardonic humor; Sesshu Foster’s innovative, genre-bending prose poems; Tan
Lin’s endlessly concatenated oddball musings; Timothy Liu’s impassioned,
feverish hauntings; and Cathy Park Hong’s wonderfully bizarre sci-i romps.
But although the brave new world for Asian American poetry is indeed one
of radical possibility, within the scope of this widening gyre, the devaluation
of identity as a foundational concept seems also to threaten the coherence of
Asian American poetry itself; one wonders if and how the center will hold
when not just the circumference of identity itself but also the question of
whether or not identity is at stake is always expanding and exfoliating. After
all, how does one circumscribe the category of Asian American poetry when
what has been a deining concern is ready to be abandoned? The answer to
this question is uncertain at present. Indeed, the task of much of this new
poetry is to search for provocative answers. Whatever these answers might
entail, the best of them will hopefully formulate futurity in relationship to the
past and not count history, however complicated it might be, as a casualty of
innovation.

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Notes
1. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 10.
2. Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of
Criticism 9 (1996), p. 342.
3. See Juliana Chang (ed.), Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American
Poetry, 1892–1970 (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996).
4. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970),
p. 515.
5. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 309–10.
6. Sadakichi Hartmann, “Tanka I,” in Chang (ed.), Quiet Fire, p. 7.
7. See Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Modern
Philology 90:1 (1992), pp. 46–69, and Edward Marx, “A Slightly Open Door: Yone
Noguchi and the Invention of English Haiku,” Genre 3 (2006), pp. 107–26.
8. Yone Noguchi, Selected Poems (Boston: Four Seas, 1921), p. 21.
9. Noguchi, Selected Poems, p. 22.
10. Frank Chin, Jefrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong
(eds.), Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press, 1974), p. xv.
11. Marx, “A Slightly Open Door,” p. 121.
12. See Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 1–53, and Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of
Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), pp. 23–56.
13. José Garcia Villa, “A Note on ‘Reversed Consonance,’ ” in Eileen Tabios (ed.),
The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings (New York: Kaya, 1999), p. 31.
14. Timothy Yu, “ ‘The Hand of a Chinese Master’: José Garcia Villa and Modernist
Orientalism,” MELUS 29:1 (2004), p. 51.
15. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung (eds.), Island: Poetry and History
of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (1980; Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1991).
16. See Steven Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to
Postethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 70.
17. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 20.
18. Floyd Cheung, “Introduction,” in Works of H.T. Tsiang (unpublished
manuscript).
19. Hsi-Tseng Tsiang, Poems of the Chinese Revolution (New York: Liberal Press,
1929), p. 3.
20. Tsiang, Poems of the Chinese Revolution, p. 8.

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 Asian American Poetry

21. Oscar V. Campomanes, “Two Letters from America: Carlos Bulosan and the
Act of Writing,” MELUS 15:3 (1998), p. 29.
22. Carlos Bulosan, Letter from America (Prairie City, Ill.: Decker, 1942), p. 20.
23. See Susan Schweik, “The ‘Pre-Poetics’ of Internment: The Example of Toyo
Suyemoto,” American Literary History 1:1 (1989), pp. 91–92.
24. Schweik, “The ‘Pre-Poetics’ of Internment,” p. 104.
25. King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Joy Kogawa (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 72.
26. Chin et al. (eds.), Aiiieeeee!, p. vii.
27. See George Uba, “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry,”
in Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (eds.), Reading the Literatures of Asian
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 33–48, and Timothy
Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). Yu’s account complicates
this account by claiming the early activist poetry as avant-garde.
28. Sunn Shelley Wong, “Sizing Up Asian American Poetry,” in Sau-ling Cynthia
Wong and Stephen H. Sumida (eds.), A Resource Guide to Asian American
Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, 2001), p. 291.
29. “Breaking Silence” was irst published in Amerasia Journal 8:2 (1981),
pp. 107–10.
30. Janice Mirikitani, We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (Berkeley, CA:
Celestial Arts, 1995), p. 58.
31. Mirikitani, We, the Dangerous, p. 59.
32. See Uba, “Versions of Identity,” p. 35.
33. Garrett Hongo (ed.), The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (New York:
Doubleday, 1993), pp. xxxv–xxxvi.
34. David Mura, “No-No Boys: Re-X-Amining Japanese-Americans,” New England
Review 15:3 (1993), p. 157.
35. Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The
Contemporaneity of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 62–64.
36. Li-Young Lee, Rose (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA, 1986), pp. 17–19.
37. Lee, Rose, p. 19.
38. Lee, Rose, p. 18.
39. Juliana Chang, “Time, Jazz, and the Racial Subject: Lawson Inada’s Jazz
Poetics,” in Ellen J. Goldener and Saiya Henderson-Holmes (eds.), Racing
and (E)Racing Languages: Living with the Color of Our Words (Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 154.
40. Lawson Fusao Inada, Legends from Camp (Minneapolis: Cofee House Press,
1993), p. 169.
41. David Palumbo-Liu (ed.), The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and
Interventions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 2.

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42. See Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, pp. 73–74, 98–99.
43. Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Minneapolis: Milkweed
Editions, 1994), pp. 16–18.
44. Chin, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, p. 18.
45. Jessica Hagedorn, Dangerous Music (San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1975), p. 2.
46. George Uba, “Jessica Hagedorn,” in Guiyou Huang (ed.), Asian American Poets:
A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002),
pp. 104–05.
47. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, DICTEE (New York: Tanam, 1982), p. 133.
48. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works, ed. Constance
M. Lewallen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 2.
49. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 3.
50. Meena Alexander, Raw Silk (Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 2004), p. 35.

1002
 Chapter 44
Psychoanalytic Poetics
R e e na Sa st r i

In his 1939 elegy for Sigmund Freud, W. H. Auden described the groundbreak-
ing work of “this doctor” in everyday terms:
He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun.1

Bringing compassion and “enlightenment” to the accusing past, Freud’s

work would enable his patients to replace judgment and “excuses” with
“forgive[ness]” and “change,” and thus “to approach the Future as a friend.”2
This work is accomplished through language: in Adam Phillips’s sugges-
tive phrasing, “One goes to psychoanalysis, as one might go to poetry, for
better words.”3 Auden’s scenario implies that psychoanalysis will produce a
new poem.
Poets writing in the United States after Auden developed that implication.
An interest in intimate, seemingly autobiographical material, and an approach
to childhood, memory, and family that made knowing use of psychoanalytic
accounts of gendered identity formation, the impact of early traumas on later
emotional life, and how unconscious wishes shape conscious actions, charac-
terized the poetry of the late ifties and beyond that attracted the label “con-
fessional.” This term irst appeared in M. L. Rosenthal’s review of Robert
Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), often considered a watershed: in Philip Rahv’s
reported phrase, “the one real advance since Eliot.”4 Suggesting the Catholic
ritual of confession whereby penitents are absolved of their sins, and implic-
itly the psychoanalytic dialogue that Freud in 1895 described by analogy (the
patient “giv[es] utterance” to what has been repressed; the analyst works “as
a father confessor who gives absolution [. . . and] sympathy”), the term “con-
fessional,” Rosenthal later said, “seemed appropriate” to describe “the way

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Lowell brought his private humiliations, suferings, and psychological prob-

lems” into poems usually “in the irst person and intended without question
to point to the author himself.”5 It came to be applied not only to Lowell’s Life
Studies but also to W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959), to John Berryman’s
77 Dream Songs (1964) and later volumes, and to the work of Anne Sexton and
Sylvia Plath. In 1970, Marjorie Perlof argued that Life Studies’s real innovation
was the way it transformed the “greater Romantic lyric” (M. H. Abrams’s
term) through metonymic, novelistic detail.6 However, criticism has largely
emphasized this poetry’s subject matter – marriage and divorce, childhood
trauma, and mental illness – linking it to the looser stanzaic and metrical
forms and more colloquial diction adopted. The “breakthrough narrative’s”
account of a decisive shift in poetic careers from formally adept but emotion-
ally restrained verse to more personal subject matter and freer – hence suppos-
edly more psychologically authentic – forms oversimpliies; however, shifts
to more personal-sounding poetry appear in the careers of not only Lowell,
Berryman, and Plath but also younger contemporaries including James Merrill
and Adrienne Rich.7
Whether or not the events recounted matched the poet’s biography, poems
about family life’s pathologies and mental breakdown seemed to defy T. S.
Eliot’s inl uential view that the poet need not be “in any way remarkable or
interesting” in “his personal emotions” and that poetry should represent an
“escape from personality.”8 Eliot insisted on impersonality in order to advance
aesthetically oriented criticism: he wanted critics to attend not to the poet’s
biography or his emotions but to the “new art emotion,” that is, to the poem’s
shapes and sounds, its cognitive and afective valences.9 Although it does not
strictly follow, his position was taken to imply that poetry that sounded per-
sonal lacked aesthetic value.
Poets were at times guilty of promoting the same misleading opposition, as
when Lowell called the style of Life Studies a “breakthrough back into life.”10
More consistently, however, they insisted that their poetry’s directness, inti-
macy, and authenticity were aesthetic efects: Lowell wanted his poems to
have the feel of historical truth, to “make the reader believe he was getting the
real Robert Lowell,” even though he had “tinker[ed] with fact” and “invented”
much.11 Anne Sexton, who began writing poetry in therapy, insisted on the dif-
ference between the two processes: “I’ve heard psychiatrists say, ‘See, you’ve
forgiven your father. There it is in your poem.’ But I haven’t forgiven my
father. I just wrote I did.”12 Poets protested that the term “confessional” ignored
meticulous craftsmanship and knowing self-dramatization. Their resistance
has been echoed by critics who argue that the term implies authorial passivity,

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encourages moral arrogance on the part of readers implicitly positioned as

priest or doctor, and slights the poetry’s complexity and artistry.13 Above all,
it encourages category errors, leading critics to mistake poetic iction for bio-
graphical fact; to confuse aesthetic with moral judgment; and to see the poem
as an unmediated cry, degrading the poet’s status as maker.14
Alternatives proposed include “personal poetry” (Alan Williamson) and
“Freudian lyric” (Helen Vendler).15 Yet the term “confessional” remains valu-
able because it rightly suggests (even, or especially, when distanced by scare
quotes) that the questions of poetry’s relation to personality, of the status of
poetic ictions as ictions, and of the peculiarly intimate scenario of reading
remain open, complex, and compelling. The efects of intimacy and vulner-
ability created in (for example) Lowell’s “Home After Three Months Away,”
with its parenthetical address to his baby daughter and closing diminuendo,
“Cured, I am frizzled, stale, and small,” or Ginsberg’s Kaddish, with its com-
passionate evocation of the harrowing details of his mother Naomi’s mental
and physical illness, depend on particular strategies of crafting a speaking “I”:
colloquial diction, contemporary references, and enjambment that disguises
rhyme patterns (in Lowell) or extended accumulative syntax (in Ginsberg),
among others.16 They also depend on speciic ways of understanding the “I”
and its relation to the reader.
Psychoanalysis helps to illuminate the kind of “I,” and the kind of poem,
these poets created. Its implications include diagnostic patterns for making
sense of familial relationships and their impact on later life, patterns experi-
enced as intensely private, but understood as widely shared; the concept of
the unconscious, and therefore of a divided and only partially knowable self;
a questioning of freedom or agency (if our desires and actions are uncon-
sciously scripted, in what sense are they ours?); and, lastly, an emphasis on dia-
logue: in the talking cure, after all, “nothing takes place between” analyst and
patient “except that they talk to each other.”17 These elements are apparent
when Lowell recounts his childish return from college to his mother’s plate
of milk and Triskets; when Berryman’s Dream Songs mix vaudeville staging,
slang, baby talk, and self-consciously literary locutions to suggest how uncon-
scious energies both breach decorum and motivate grandiose poeticizing;
when Plath’s daughter igures act an “old tragedy” Freud made new; or when
Jarrell’s speakers address themselves to others and seek airming response.18
Because psychoanalysis is centrally concerned with understanding the
efects of the past on the present and aims through that understanding to
enable an orientation of both pleasure and agency toward the future, it implic-
itly ofered a paradigm for the creative transformation not only of personal

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but also of poetic inheritance. (This need not imply Harold Bloom’s repressed
struggle, described in The Anxiety of Inluence, between father-son pairs; in
practice more open, and more collaborative, relations may obtain.) While
New Criticism drew from Eliot’s essays doctrines of impersonality and aes-
thetic reserve, poets including Jarrell and Berryman read Eliot’s poetry against
his prose. Jarrell wrote:
Won’t the future say to us in helpless astonishment: “But did you actually
believe that all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the tra-
dition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of
the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived? . . . From a psychoan-
alytical point of view he was far and away the most interesting poet of your
century.”19
To read Eliot as “daemonic” and psychoanalytically interesting was both an
astute observation and a way of discovering within modernism elements that
the next generation could develop on new terms. Both The Waste Land’s col-
lage of textual fragments, musical refrains, and pub speech and Four Quartets’s
shifts from symbolic to discursive, prosy to oracular, radically severed voice
from a single speaker. The midcentury poets did not return unproblematically
to a model of Wordsworthian poetic speech or the “spontaneous overlow of
powerful emotion . . . recollected in tranquility”; instead, many used psycho-
analytic paradigms to interrogate poetic voice in new ways, ways that placed
the psychic fragmentation of the irst person center stage.20
At its inception, psychoanalysis concerned a move “from body to speech,”
replacing the hysterical symptom with the patient’s and analyst’s verbal work:
voice is as central to psychoanalysis as it is to lyric poetry.21 Poets from mid-
century on have explored psychoanalytic models of personhood, voice, and
dialogue to complicate models of lyric expressivity without rejecting self and
speech. After the irst confessional generation, poets including Frank Bidart
and Louise Glück deploy psychoanalysis’s connection with myth and its orien-
tation toward a scientiic impartiality to mediate the personal and to reengage
with modernist poetics. Their experiments within (rather than dismissal of )
the irst-person lyric challenge narratives of the poetry divides from the sev-
enties on, an era of social atomization and, later, of politicized identities and
suspicion of Enlightenment ideals, shifts that posed fundamental challenges
to the genre of lyric.

*
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has been a test case for the term “confessional.” She
can occupy a polar position: as an exemplar of Al Alvarez’s “extremist” poetry,

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of feminist voice, of authentic self hood, or of sociological analysis of Cold

War femininity and domesticity, Plath’s poetic voice has seemed “scandal-
ously” gendered and embodied.22 Yet the impossibility of tracing voice’s origin
to a singular, historical, embodied self is one of her greatest themes, and the
varied, uncomfortable, and unforgettable ways in which she stages the uncan-
niness of voice – as Gothic haunting or as theatrical scenario – are her truest
legacy. A critical industry has met her expanding archive: work she published,
including The Colossus (1960) and the novel The Bell Jar (1963); the poems in Ariel
(1965) following her death, and in Crossing the Water (1971) and Collected Poems
(1981), which won a posthumous Pulitzer; stories, collected in Johnny Panic and
the Bible of Dreams (2001); Letters Home (1975); and selections from her journals.
Necessary attention to the issues of ownership and control raised by the trou-
bled archival history should not overshadow the arresting urgency with which
the poems interrogate poetic voice, an interrogation central both to confes-
sional poetry and (diferently) to later experimental poetics.
Plath’s suicide at the age of thirty has impacted her work’s reception, begin-
ning with Ariel, a version of the manuscript she had been preparing, edited by
her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes. Plath had attended Robert Lowell’s
poetry workshop at Boston University (alongside Anne Sexton), and Lowell
wrote an inl uential foreword to the 1965 edition of Ariel, emphasizing “con-
trol”: “Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the man-
ner of feeling is controlled hallucination. . . . What is most heroic in her . . . is
not her force, but the desperate practicality of her control.”23 But in Lowell’s
account, control of poetic efects involves forfeiting control over a suicidal
drive; the poetry’s daring is inseparable from risks to mental health: “These
poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.”24
Although Lowell is a sensitive reader of Plath’s poems, his account nonethe-
less implies that the inevitable outcome of Ariel’s poetic achievement was its
author’s death.
While much criticism has pivoted both consciously and unwittingly on
agency, Plath’s work itself thematizes agency and control, often in explicitly
psychoanalytic terms.25 Father-daughter relations follow Freudian patterns in
“Electra on Azalea Path,” “The Colossus,” and “Daddy.” Accepting these pat-
terns is no diferent, Plath sometimes suggests, than calling one’s birth “ill-
starred,” or believing that “ixed stars / Govern a life” (SPC, pp. 118, 270). That
conviction, at the close of “Words,” one of Plath’s last poems, concluded Ariel
as edited by Hughes. But the 1965 Ariel tells a diferent story than Plath’s man-
uscript (published in 2004 as Ariel: The Restored Edition). The manuscript con-
cluded with an image of hibernation leading to rebirth and renewal; according

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to Frieda Hughes, the volume was to have opened with the word “Love” and
closed with the word “spring.”26 In addition to removing several poems Plath
had included, Ted Hughes added eleven poems written later. The trajectory
toward death seems ixed by these poems, particularly “Words” and “Edge,”
which describes a “woman . . . perfected” in death: “The illusion of a Greek
necessity // Flows in the scrolls of her toga” (SPC, p. 272).
What has drawn Plath’s most subtle inheritors repeatedly back to her work,
however, is not its teleological trajectory toward death or rebirth but its var-
ied, complex, and poetically daring evocations of the otherness of self and
of poetic voice. This otherness – fundamentally psychoanalytic – appears in
socially, historically scripted performances, particularly of gender – “A living
doll . . . It can sew, it can cook . . . Will you marry it, marry it, marry it” (SPC,
pp. 221–22) – and in Plath’s arresting evocations of physical, psychic, and lin-
guistic boundaries. Cuts, wounds, bruises, blood, and skin abound. Bodies are
distressingly vulnerable, from the “museum-cased lady” with gnawed ankle
bone in “All the Dead Dears” to the willing patient in “Face Lift” – “Skin
. . . peels away easy as paper”; the victim of “Cut,” her thumb “a hinge //
Of skin” bleeding “red plush”; and the wife in “The Jailer,” “drugged and
raped, . . . Hung, starved, burned, hooked” (SPC, pp. 70, 156, 235, 227). Bodies
turn to stone or to works of art, while bodily processes infect the inanimate
realm; both scenarios unsettlingly sever animation and agency from human
self hood. In the early “Poem for a Birthday,” images of physical and psychic
permeability, eating and being eaten (SPC, p. 131), and digestion and dissolu-
tion suggest the pre-Oedipal emergence of self hood as described by theorists
including Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva.27
Mouths recur throughout Plath’s poetry, mediating between the realm of
bodies, blood, and wounds and the potentially more ethereal realm of voice.
In “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” the moon’s face wears an “O-gape of com-
plete despair”; in “Poppies in October,” the lowers are “late mouths” that
“cry open,” prompting the speaker’s own cry, “O my God, what am I”; in
“Poppies in July,” they are “wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
// A mouth just bloodied”; in “Tulips,” they “are opening like the mouth
of some great African cat” (SPC, pp. 173, 240, 203, 162). Most notoriously, in
“Daddy,” the mouth is where the body, the psyche, language, and history tan-
gle in an impossible “snare.” The speaker addresses her father, imagined as a
Nazi speaking “the German tongue”:
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

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It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuing me of like a Jew. (SPC, p. 223)

The stuttering repetition of the pronoun “I” in a foreign language, one fraught
(in the context the poem evokes) with murderous implications, starkly con-
fronts the linguistic, interpersonal, and political bases of subjectivity. While
Plath’s reference to the Holocaust in this poem has seemed to many a dis-
tasteful appropriation of historical trauma for the expression of a much lesser,
personal, private sufering, for others, it powerfully evokes the inextricability
of the psychoanalytic and political-historical spheres.28
Here and elsewhere words can have the agency, the animation, usually
attributed to selves.29 Language cuts across and into self hood. In “Daddy,”
the relation of “I” to “you” is violently mediated by a physicalized and
estranging language. Yet the barb wire snare is not Plath’s only paradigm for
the production of speech. In “Morning Song,” language – both the infant’s
“handful of notes,” the “clear vowels” that “rise like balloons,” and, implic-
itly, the mother’s speech, including the poem itself, addressed to the child –
crosses the space that separates the pair after birth, forging a new relation
(SPC, p. 157).30
The sequence of poems about beekeeping that closes Plath’s Ariel manu-
script links poetic creation with organic production and reproduction. The
box containing the bees suggests a coin or the unconscious. A struggle for
power ensues: “I ordered this, this clean wood box”; “The box is locked, it is
dangerous / I have to live with it overnight”; “They can be sent back . . . I am
the owner”; “I am in control”; “it is they who own me” (SPC, pp. 212–18). The
hive is a smooth-running factory, a “honey-machine, / [that] will work without
thinking” but also “a box of maniacs” speaking “unintelligible syllables” (SPC,
pp. 213–15). Plath’s images link poetic production with pregnancy and mater-
nity, evoking both in terms, on the one hand, of Gothic scenarios of inva-
sion and “Possession” and, on the other, of redemptive narratives of organic
renewal (SPC, p. 218).31 Plath does not simply undermine the long-standing
metaphor of literary production as the creation of children; she extends it to
suggest how both types of creation depend on a generative strangeness of
body and mind.

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In “Elm,” a speaking tree meditates on voice as an otherness within the self

that escapes to prey on a world of others:
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it laps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terriied by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feather turnings, its malignity.
(SPC, p. 193)
The tree addresses the reader: “Is it the sea you hear in me . . . Or the voice of
nothing, that was your madness?” (SPC, p. 193). To hear this question is to have
our own sanity called into question: we as readers, as much as the tree, are
invaded by a voice.
Such performative efects are among the most diicult elements of Plath’s
poetry to describe. Plath’s gloss on “Daddy” in a script for a BBC broadcast,
written in 1962, obliquely addresses this performativity via the notion of “act-
ing out”: the poem is “spoken by a girl with an Electra complex” whose father
was “a Nazi” and mother “part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry
and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over
before she is free of it.”32 In psychoanalytic terms, “acting out” describes a
compulsive repetition of psychic patterns: the patient “does not remember
. . . what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out.”33 In “Daddy,” analysis
takes place only (implicitly) outside the poem, which itself stages an unre-
solved acting out.
In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker stages herself; this text does not represent
repetition compulsion but enacts the performativity of the irst-person poem
(SPC, pp. 244–47). Awareness of audience is this poem’s most striking fea-
ture, yet critics have frequently insisted that Plath did not intend its unset-
tling efects.34 “Lady Lazarus” is essentially not a narrative (the story of two
suicide attempts takes up only a small fraction of the poem) but rather “a
theatrical // Comeback in broad day,” a conjuring trick that hides in plain
sight. Commands, vocatives, invitations, warnings, deictic terms, and gestural
phrases emphasize performativity:
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees. . . .
Beware
Beware. (SPC, pp. 245–46)

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The poem’s “miracle” is precisely the audience’s belief that someone is speak-
ing. The speaker warns,
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars . . .
a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. (SPC, p. 246)

For critics who take this self-display as Plath’s own and castigate it as morbid
and tasteless, the charge is high: their moral and aesthetic condemnation for-
feits recognition of art’s ictionality. For the reader who can at once believe in
this speaker and recognize that she is an illusion, however, the charge is instead
a frisson, a pleasurable astonishment in the ability of the trick to work.

*
Since Plath’s death, American culture has privileged personal testimony and
contrition, suggesting that we continue to view the self as something to dis-
close, and the therapeutic language of healing and closure has been widely,
and sometimes inappropriately, applied.35 Psychoanalysis proper, by contrast,
has become a much more specialized interest. Movements for racial and
gender equality have claimed political voice for groups previously excluded;
simultaneously, intellectual trends have radically undermined Enlightenment
ideals of sovereign self hood and – particularly after 1968 – political agency.
These cultural trends underlie the dominant divide in American poetry since
the seventies, between late Romantic sincere lyric – the mode of “scenically
grounded personal emotions” and minor epiphany – and a poststructuralist-
and Marxist-inlected experimentalism – in particular that of the Language
writers – that would sever poetry from expressivity, and whose practitioners
associate the sincere lyric both with a false illusion of a coherent self and with
a commodiication of the poem that can only be combated by radical disrup-
tions to surface intelligibility.36 Seen as outpourings of personal emotion, con-
fessional poems seemed to exemplify ideals of lyric and the autonomous self
that Language writing would reject. Yet as Plath’s work demonstrates, this
was far from the case.
The following generation has drawn variously on the confessional legacy.
Sharon Olds (b. 1942) vividly renders embodiment, sexuality, and maternity,
in poems like “The Moment the Two Worlds Meet”; criticism of her work as
merely candid repeats the simplifying gesture applied to earlier poets.37 Robert

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Hass (b. 1941) invokes Lacanian theory in poems like “Meditation at Lagunitas,”
“Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan,”
and “My Mother’s Nipples,” at best balancing relexivity with pathos.38 C. K.
Williams (b. 1936) questions whether sexual and political self hood, and con-
fession itself, is merely mechanistic – “Freud, Marx, Fathers, tell me, what am
I, doing this, telling this, . . . but a machine . . . ?” – but also memorably evokes
how, psychoanalytically and poetically, learning to speak for oneself means
learning to speak with others.39
Frank Bidart (b. 1939) and Louise Glück (b. 1943) have steadily and self-con-
sciously drawn on, and inventively modiied, both confessional and modernist
poetics. Both are much acclaimed: Glück’s honors include positions as U.S.
poet laureate (2003–2004) and two-term judge of the Yale Series of Younger
Poets. Both teach: Bidart at Wellesley, Glück at universities including Williams
College, Yale, and Boston University. Bidart counted Bishop and Lowell among
his close friends and worked closely with the latter on revisions of his poems;
Glück studied with Stanley Kunitz and Léonie Adams. In these ways they are
part of the, or a, poetic mainstream. More importantly, their writing positions
itself in relation to an inheritance central to modern American poetry, open-
ing up fresh ways to see that heritage. Inventing new ways to join the imper-
sonal with the personal, these poets interrogate lyric voice from within, rather
than in combative opposition to, a voice-based poetics.
While the Lowell-Plath-Berryman generation harnessed psychoanalysis to
return the “I,” and its multiple, unruly energies, to the center of the poem,
Glück and Bidart, adopting the centrality of that “I,” use psychoanalysis as a
tool of impartial analysis; drawing out its associations with myth, they trian-
gulate psychoanalysis with the modernism of Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and Joyce.
Myth further enables access to structures of meaning larger than the individ-
ual, but not susceptible to the demand for directly topical public speech in
response to historical crises. At a time when poetry’s “I,” when not replaced
by the text’s materiality, became increasingly allied with social representation
and the forging of ethnically separate poetic identities, the legacy of the con-
fessional and psychoanalysis has enabled Bidart and Glück to explore an “I”
that is lyric, not sociological. For Glück, lyric tradition is inclusive: reading
Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Keats, and Eliot, she writes, “I did not feel exiled,
marginal [due to gender. I felt that this] was my tradition. My inheritance.
My wealth.”40 Bidart’s refrain “We ill existing forms and when we ill them
we change them and are changed,” referring to literary creativity in “Borges
and I” and family dynamics in “The Second Hour of the Night,” captures
how psychoanalysis ofers a paradigm both of the Freudian subject’s struggle

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with his psychic, familial inheritance and of the poet’s struggle with literary
tradition.41
Bidart’s discursiveness can seem unpoetic; he risks a loss of lyric inten-
sity in order to capture the mutual imbrication of thinking and feeling.
His haunted conscience understands the “relational and psychological,”
in Vendler’s words, as “instances of the metaphysical, and even of the
theological.”42 The intensity of psychic violence in his work – as when the
mother hangs her child’s cat in “Confessional” – is matched by the energy of
“making,” which carries a Yeatsian value. Yeatsian, too, is Bidart’s insistence
on the proximity of spiritual and physical: “First, I was there where unheard
/ harmonies create the harmonies // we hear – // then I was a dog, sniing
/ your crotch” (FBC, p. 7).
In a recent interview, Bidart calls the desire to make “a species of the will
to power” whose “enactment . . . always must confront metaphysical and epis-
temological limits.”43 At the stylistic level, seeking these limits creates a tense,
taut surface, characterized by chiasm, paradox, and outright contradiction.
Evoking “nonmastery” as they rework tropes of authenticity and vulnera-
bility, yet harnessing the language of “thought, abstraction, discussion,” his
poems strive to embody, not record, articulate, passionate thought.44 Bidart
explained in 1983:

If a poem is “the mind in action,” I had to learn how to use the materials of
a poem to think. I said to myself that my poems must seem to embody not
merely “thought,” but necessary thought. And necessary thought (rather than
mere rumination, ratiocination) expresses or acknowledges what has resisted
thought, what has forced or irritated it into being.45

Bidart’s poems of “necessary thought” answer Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibil-

ity” in modes quite diferent from the compression and wit of the metaphysi-
cal poets Eliot praises. To dramatize poetic thinking as a strenuous, self-resis-
tant process, at once cognitive and emotional, Bidart employs an unusual and
striking variety of typographical efects: frequent italics, block capitals, varied
line lengths and indentations, and idiosyncratic combinations of punctuation
marks. The poems’ appearance conveys intense struggle and the extreme
psychic states his speakers often inhabit; their prominent use of white space
suggests a dynamic interplay of opposed forces, an intensiied Yeatsian quar-
rel with oneself. This self-resisting dialogue is implicitly psychoanalytic: what
resists conscious thought demands and enables the psychoanalytic dialogue,
in which “each fresh resistance of the patient drives the process forward”;
resistance “drives the engine of change.”46

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The “silently-occurring internal dialogue / of the soul with itself ” that

one poem names “thought” is also a dialogue with earlier poets.47 Bidart
stages openly his confrontation with Western philosophy, religion, and
art, perhaps most notably in his three long poems, each naming an “Hour
of the Night.” Often such confrontations arise within psychological nar-
ratives: in “The First Hour of the Night” (1990), the speaker’s “ ‘DREAM
OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY’ ” – in which the cast of Raphael’s
School of Athens expands to include modern igures who debate freedom
and necessity, knowledge and illusion – occurs while he is visiting the son
of his friend who has died, a son struggling with his material and emotional
inheritance.48 Bidart relected in 2008 on his response to the generation that
included Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath: “They were part of a moment that,
to my mind, was not Post-Modernist but Neo-Modernist, . . . not a repudia-
tion of Modernism’s seriousness and ambition, but a reinvention – a contin-
uing attempt to discover what Modernism left out.”49 In combining Yeatsian
oppositional making and Eliotic innovation within tradition with contem-
porary idiomatic dissection of psychic wounds and familial trauma, Bidart
continues this reinvention.
Distinguishing his poetics from those of his mentor and friend Robert
Lowell, Bidart says that the poems of Life Studies seemed

to communicate an overwhelmingly grim, helpless sense that the dragons

in [Lowell’s] life were simply like that. . . . [They evoke] a world that refuses
knowledge of the causes beneath it, without chance for change or escape.
But . . . my poems had to be about trying to igure out why the past was as it
was, what patterns and powers kept me at its mercy (so I could change, and
escape). (FBC, p. 299)

In “California Plush,” from Bidart’s irst book, Golden State (1973), the speak-
er’s father “does not want to change”; for him, “the debris of the past // is
just debris . . . useless, irretrievable” (FBC, p. 142). The speaker’s own “need for
the past” relects his understanding that because “the past in maiming us, /
makes us” (FBC, p. 141), the future depends on its creative revision. In the later
“Borges and I,” “Frank” had “never had a self that wished to continue in its
own being, survival meant ceasing to be what its being was” (FBC, p. 232).
Golden State opens with Herbert White’s brutally direct, casual recounting
of his murder of a young girl and rape of her body. “Herbert White” is fol-
lowed by “Self-Portrait, 1969,” inviting comparison. The former deliberately
shocks, ofending decency; the third-person subject of “Self-Portrait,” “Sick
of being decent,” nonetheless uses a respected form, the sonnet. Its closing

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couplet’s of rhyme of “another” with “disaster” leaves the portrait’s sub-

ject precariously poised emotionally, but by airming the sonnet’s devastating
power, it positions its author solidly within tradition.
“Herbert White” was the irst of Bidart’s distinctive dramatic monologues.
His most famous may be “Ellen West,” from The Book of the Body (1977). The
poem juxtaposes Ellen’s voice with commentary by Ludwig Binswanger, the
doctor treating her for anorexia, quoting from Binswanger’s case study. But it
does not contrast the rational voice of the doctor with the irrational, emotive
voice of madness; Ellen takes an analytic stance toward her own dilemma. Like
Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” – like all artists – Ellen would like to “defeat
‘Nature’ ” (FBC, p. 112); she attempts to do this through the literal rejection of
her own natural being, a starvation that expresses indignation at the body’s
hold over the soul. Ellen admires opera singer Maria Callas, whose dramatic
weight loss seemed to reduce her to expressive voice. As Ellen recounts,
– The gossip in Milan was that Callas
had swallowed a tapeworm.
But of course she hadn’t.
The tapeworm
was her soul . . . (FBC, p. 114)

The bathetic juxtaposition of digestive parasite and soul makes the point;
to Ellen, the soul’s dependence on the body is just this grotesque. The risk
Bidart runs here compares to those Plath takes with tone, but the mimesis of
impassioned thought, the relective, analytic clarity of the sufering persona,
are his own.
Ellen’s relections unfold in a series of self-contradictions:
Only by
acting; choosing; rejecting; have I
made myself –
discovered who and what Ellen can be . . .
– But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior
to name; gender; action;
fashion;
MATTER ITSELF, – (FBC, p. 118)

The semantic, spatial, and aural relentlessness of the series that ends here,
which includes “know,” “not,” “no,” “No,” “not,” “NOT,” “No,” “know,” “I,”
“myself,” “Ellen,” “NO,” and “I,” conveys the agon and entanglements, the
nots and knots, of self-knowledge.

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In “Ellen West,” Bidart approaches the tropes of nonmastery and vul-

nerability via Callas’s operatic artistry; in “Confessional,” from The Sacriice
(1983), he confronts his inheritance of the poetry thus labeled. In his
“Afterword: On ‘Confessional’ Poetry” in Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003),
Bidart distances the poetry he admires (and implicitly his own) from this
term, which “implies helpless outpouring, secrets whispered with an artless-
ness that is their badge of authenticity, the uncontrolled admission of guilt
that attempts to wash away guilt. Or worse: confession of others’ guilt; lita-
nies of victimization.” However, Bidart goes on, “there is an honoriic mean-
ing to the word confession, at least as old as Augustine’s Confessions: the most
earnest, serious recital of the events of one’s life crucial in the making of the
soul.”50 “Confessional” distinguishes its poetic project from any simple echo
of “the Saturday confession box or the rituals of talk therapy”; yet it engages
in complex ways with both religious and psychoanalytic paradigms, in part
through its dialogue form, in which the speaker’s narration alternates with
questions, indented and printed in italics, from a real or imagined interlocu-
tor.51 The speaker calls this interlocutor “Confessor / incapable of granting
‘rest’ or ‘absolution,’ ” yet nonetheless demands, “LISTEN” (FBC, p. 58). The
interlocutor neither judges nor forgives. Instead, by probing at what has
resisted thought – “Did you forgive her?”; “Why are you so angry?”; “How do you
explain it?” – he ofers the speaker a space for the making of the soul and of
the poem (FBC, p. 58).
“Confessional” cannot be reduced to the two statements that close its two
parts: “Forgiveness doesn’t exist”; “Man needs a metaphysics; he cannot have one”
(FBC, pp. 57, 74). It enacts a struggle to build a structure that “contains” – both
includes and limits – their harsh truths. This structure also contains an ideal
of forgiveness and redemption that the speaker inds emotionally compelling,
if not ultimately credible: an ideal located in Augustine’s account, in Book IX
of the Confessions, of his reconciliation with his mother, Monica, on his con-
version to Christianity. Bidart situates his retelling of a foundational Western
text within a psychological narrative in which the speaker and his mother
implicitly encounter idealized versions of themselves in Augustine’s book;
the layering of “confessional” texts and paradigms destabilizes a sense that the
personal narrative is the poem’s origin.
Forgiveness is resisted in part because
“forgiveness” seems to say: –
Everything is forgotten, obliterated, –
the past
is as nothing, erased . . . (FBC, p. 65)

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The poem itself creates a transformative space in which the past is not erased
but reigured. The speaker despairs that “THERE WAS NO PLACE IN
NATURE WE COULD MEET,” but the poem creates a Yeatsian space “out of
nature” (FBC, p. 58). A Keatsian “MAKING OF [A] SOUL” and a Yeatsian aes-
thetic “ENTERPRISE,” the poem is both a rewriting and an original making,
both an investigation of forgiveness – with that word’s associations with debt,
claim, and what is owed – and itself a giving, a free and gratuitous bestowal
(FBC, p. 63). After his retelling of Augustine, the speaker steps back:
In words like these, but not
exactly these, (Augustine then says,)
they talked together that day –
(just as the words I have given you are
not, of course, exactly Augustine’s). (FBC, p. 72)
The poem’s givens – the mother’s violence and breakdown, the son’s feelings
of guilt and complicity, and the ideal in Augustine – have been transformed
into “the words I have given you.” The poem’s words have made of the past
something given by the poet.

*
Like Bidart’s, Glück’s prose establishes the modernist elements of her
poetics. Her introduction to Best American Poetry (1993) echoes surprisingly
closely Eliot’s advocacy of impersonality: “Poems are autobiography,” she
concedes, “but divested,” not only of “chronology” and “anecdote” but
also of “personal conviction”: in the work the poet “strives to be free of
the imprisoning self ” (PT, p. 92). Her polemically titled “Against Sincerity”
would distinguish art’s “truth” from “honesty or sincerity”: these “refer
back to the already known,” achieving only “relief and not . . . discovery”
(PT, pp. 33, 35). Art requires openness to the unknown, a “scientist’s absence
of bias” – poems are “like experiments” – or Keats’s negative capability; “the
only illuminations are like Psyche’s, who did not know what she’d ind” (PT,
p. 45). Psyche is a telling igure for the artist. While admiring poets like Plath
and Berryman whose “poems seemed blazingly personal,” Glück stresses
that their “materials are subjective, but the methods are not” (PT, pp. 35,
45). Psychoanalysis, for Glück, is such a method: a technique of insight and
of analysis and distance, of illuminating discovery but also of humorous or
delating perspectives on the self. She writes of the seven years she spent in
psychoanalysis – a response to her struggle with anorexia in adolescence – as
her “education”: “Analysis taught me to think . . . to use my tendencies to

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object to articulated ideas on my own ideas . . . to examine my own speech

for its evasions and excisions . . . to use native detachment to make contact
with myself ” (PT, p. 12).
Drawing from myth, psychoanalysis can point not only toward the personal
but equally away, toward what Glück has called “myth’s helpless encounter
with the elemental” (PT, p. 95). While Bidart does as much through exposition
and inventive forms, Glück combines lyric intensity with plainness of diction
and minimalist brevity with a mining of the possibilities of syntax. Overtly
psychoanalytic in its concern with family and childhood and its preoccupation
with gender as a fall, a division felt as loss, Glück’s work is no less psychoan-
alytic in its orientation toward interlocution, address, and performance. For
her, this preoccupation is also a tie with modernism: her commentary on Eliot
(which draws on Berryman) emphasizes Eliot’s poetry’s urgent desire for a lis-
tener and implicitly reminds us that Eliot’s later prose advocates poetry’s tie to
conversation and everyday language (PT, p. 21). Glück rewrites The Waste Land
twice, in The Wild Iris (1992) and Averno (2006), both concerned with earthly
barrenness and fertility and with the origins of poetic voice. Her combined
modernist and confessional inheritance has to do with both the strangeness
of lyric voice and the ordinariness of poetic language, with both the urgent
necessity for communication and the precedence of the communicative sit-
uation over any commitment to the coherence of the selves who might be
communicating. Her eleven volumes pursue an ambitious lyric project that is
also a questioning of lyric.
Published in 1968 – not long after Ariel and 77 Dream Songs – Glück’s debut
volume, Firstborn, is strongly inlected with disgust, often Plathian in its assault
on the reader. (Her deeper Plathian inheritance will emerge later.) Subsequent
volumes, beginning with The House on Marshland (1975), establish Glück’s sig-
nature tone of “spiritual prophecy.”52 Greek myth, biblical stories, and fairy
tales (as in “Gretel in Darkness”) share space with poems of private experi-
ence, embodied and gendered. Anticipating later strategies of combining the
domestic, the psychoanalytic, and the mythic, “Lamentations” retells the bib-
lical fall, the birth of a child yielding a recognition of God’s irrelevance – “they
were the mother and father, / there was no authority above them” – but also
imagines God’s “lea[p] into heaven”: “How beautiful it must have been, / the
earth, that irst time / seen from the air,” the psychological perspective not
wholly displacing the transcendent.53
In Glück’s earlier poems, psychoanalytic insights often appear as tragic:
“Eros,” from Descending Figure (1980), evokes an orthodox Freudian paradigm
that distances the girl child from her own desire, requiring her to transfer her

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love from mother to father.54 Published in Threepenny Review and not collected,
“Psychiatrist’s Sestina” (1984) aligns the sestina’s work with that of psychoanal-
ysis, questioning whether the form’s reiteration of six end words represents
“paralysis,” or whether their rearrangement points, on the contrary, to growth
and change.55 While Bishop’s “Sestina,” with its “child,” “grandmother,” and
unexplained “tears,” kept the psychoanalytic notions of trauma and mourn-
ing implicit in the form, Glück’s end words “death,” “live,” “pleasure,” “time,”
“dream,” and “patient” point directly to Freud.
In later poems, needed distance from the past emerges via humor. In
Meadowlands (1997) the amused detachment of an adolescent son pro-
vides a freeing perspective on the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. In
“Telemachus’s Detachment,” the now-adult son remembers how he once
thought his “parents’ lives . . . heartbreaking”; “Now I think / heartbreaking,
but also / insane. Also / very funny.”56 Syntax, the grammatical rearrange-
ment of a few words, suggests how Telemachus rearranges the elements of
his childhood. His new perspective relies equally on the healing power of
time and the comic power of timing.
The irst of Glück’s volumes to consist, as her subsequent volumes would
regularly do, of a single poetic sequence, Ararat (1990) opens with a psycho-
analytic, and a confessional, donnée: “Long ago, I was wounded.”57 Glück’s
speaker – a woman who, in the wake of her father’s recent death, diagnoses
her own and her family’s dysfunctions – seems to anticipate psychoanalytic
readings of this wound as Freud’s castration, Lacan’s gap between coherent
self-representation and an inchoate self that constitutes a formative self-alien-
ation, or birth as the original wound. Her conident self-diagnoses present
one version of a psychoanalytic perspective. But the volume’s poetics both
incorporate and interrogate that perspective. “In Confession,” Freud wrote,
“the sinner tells what he knows; in analysis the neurotic has to tell more.”58
The speaker of Ararat tells more, paradoxically, mainly through insisting on
what she knows; “I know” is her stylistic signature. Certain about the past’s
continuity with the present, she is determined to protect herself from future
fulillment, because “all happiness / attracts the Fates’ anger” (LGA, p. 25). For
a speaker who has forsworn happiness, who believes “you never heal” (LGA,
p. 55), what good is psychoanalytic understanding?
“The Untrustworthy Speaker” illuminates the volume’s complex relation
to its speaker’s knowingness:

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.

I don’t see anything objectively.

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I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.

When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted. (LGA, p. 34)

While insisting she is not objective, the speaker claims the knowledge and
authority of the expert. Declaring, “I never see myself ” and “In my own mind,
I’m invisible,” she nonetheless ends the poem with a conident self-diagnosis:
“That’s why I’m not to be trusted. / Because a wound to the heart is also a
wound to the mind” (LGA, p. 35). Glück lets us see this central character as an
“untrustworthy speaker” precisely in her certainty.
By exposing the speaker’s limits, the volume suggests a perspective outside
of, and more generous than, hers. As important as what the speaker tells is the
fact, and the style, of telling. Glück has spoken of her delight in discovering a
greater tonal range in writing Ararat, with greater scope for “comic elements”;
she found a way to “sound on the page the way I spoke.”59 There is pleasure
in inding the right language, a no-nonsense, darkly funny way to talk about
the past. Moreover, with its frequent address to the reader – “I’ll tell you some-
thing”; “I’ll tell you what I meant” – Ararat makes interlocutors of its readers.60
We become the poems’ “you,” answering the speaker’s conidence that she
will be heard and understood. In Ararat’s speaker Glück has contributed a new
psychoanalytically inlected voice, building on the examples of Berryman’s
manic Dream Songs, Lowell’s chastened “Waking in the Blue,” and Sexton’s
vulnerable “Music Swims Back to Me.”61
Ararat’s single speaker gives way to a multiplicity of voices in The Wild Iris
(1992). Spoken by a gardener, her lowers, and something resembling a god,
the poems of the Pulitzer Prize–winning volume are implicitly psychoana-
lytic in being structured by direct address. The volume, especially the lower
poems, might be said to unfold both from the opening lines of Eliot’s Waste
Land, in which speech seems to emerge from underground, and from Plath’s
“Elm.” Just as the elm could say, “I know the bottom,” “I do not fear it: I have
been there” (SPC, p. 192), Glück’s wild iris has experienced “that which you
fear, being a soul and unable to speak,” and says: “I tell you I could speak again:
whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to ind a voice.”62
Plath’s and Glück’s nonhuman speakers dramatize the complex relation-
ships between poet and poetic speaker, self and language, interiority and
expression or confession, and feeling and poetry. “The Red Poppy,” ruled by
“Feelings” rather than “mind,” addresses us, her “brothers and sisters”:

were you like me once, long ago,

before you were human? Did you

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 Psychoanalytic Poetics

permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered. (WI, p. 29)

To speak because one is “shattered” might be to utter a cry of emotional dev-

astation. But it might equally be to recognize that to speak is to be open to, and
broken open by, the conditions of speech: psychoanalytic, linguistic, social,
and historical. The guileless poppy shows her heart, suggesting the quintes-
sential Romantic and post-Romantic lyric speaker overlowing with emotion.
But by asking, “What could such glory be / if not a heart?,” the poem throws
into doubt the idea that poetic display expresses psychological depths.
The red poppy claims kinship with human speakers; the white rose asserts
diference. Protesting, “I am not like you, I have only / my body for a voice:
I can’t / disappear into silence,” the rose speaks as a patient signaling psychic
distress through bodily symptoms (WI, p. 47). But the rose’s words equally
describe a poem, a textual body that may or may not be read, but that, once
printed, cannot withdraw the simulated speech that constitutes it. Across the
page from “The Red Poppy,” “Field Flowers” disdains confessional speakers,
lyric poets, or both as infants:

I’m talking
to you, you staring through
bars of high grass shaking
your little rattle – O
the soul! the soul! (WI, p. 28)

But ultimately, Glück’s work lays claim both to the “shattered” speakers of psy-
choanalysis and to the “soul” of lyric poetry and works to show their mutual
imbrication.

*
In the new century, the divide between “sincere lyric” and “experimental” poetry
has been perceived to have broken down. However, articulations of the new
hybridity, such as Cole Swensen’s introduction to the 2009 anthology American
Hybrid, retain experimental poetry’s suspicion of the easily assimilable surface:
Swensen’s representative “hybrid poem” might combine “a stable irst person”
with disrupted temporal sequence or scrambled syntax, or traditional form
with “illogicality or fragmentation”; both combinations resist intelligibility.63

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This resistance (borne out by the anthology’s selection) implies a suspicion

of language’s communicative character. Airming that character, Glück and
Bidart fall outside such models of lyric-language rapprochement. In contrast
with a skeptical poetics emphasizing the materiality or opacity of words, their
distinctive versions of plain speech suggest a commitment to language as a
shared medium, a “good faith in intelligibility,” in poet and critic Susan Stewart’s
words, by means of which “we recognize each other as speaking persons.”64
Adam Phillips writes that, for psychoanalysis – a discipline wholly reliant on
words – poetry, because it makes “words [seem] self-evidently compelling,”
provides reassurance that “language works.”65 In Glück and Bidart, language
works toward both unsparing analysis and faith in words and persons.
In the next generation, the work of Lucie Brock-Broido (b. 1956), author of
A Hunger (1988) and The Master Letters (1995), while much further from every-
day speech, revolves consistently around interpersonal dynamics and strate-
gies of address. Her psychic dynamics of power and pain and contemporary
stories of pathology and violence resemble Bidart’s, but her playful, and elab-
orately embroidered, surfaces do not. Her artiice suggests less the high polish
of the opera house than the mildly disturbing delight of a child with a dress-up
box (that suggestion of the precocious being part of the artiice). Her anach-
ronistic capitalizations and ampersands, launting sound play and lushness of
diction, recall Berryman; but the import of variousness for Berryman’s Henry
depends on this character’s continuity as Henry: Brock-Broido’s variable, vol-
atile “I” draws attention to its self-creation, and in particular its relation to
a speech that both reveals and conceals. “Domestic Mysticism,” the open-
ing poem of her irst book, describes a kingdom “peopled by Wizards, the
Forlorn, / The Awkward, the Blinkers, the Spoon-Fingered, Agnostic Lispers,
/ Stutterers of Prayer, the Flatulent, the Closet Weepers, / The Charlatans,”
its speaker declaring, “I am one of those”; the list invokes the poet as conjurer,
as penitent, as full of hot air.66 “Autobiography” plays with J. S. Mill’s famous
deinition of poetry as overheard, self-addressed, and unconscious of a lis-
tener. Here the noisy next-door neighbors are unconscious of listeners as they
“make love without apology,” while the poet is an eavesdropper, “alone” with
the “autoerotic sounds of my American voice / Getting it all down.”67
Emily Dickinson’s drafted letters to an unknown “Master” inspire the pre-
occupation of The Master Letters with twinned distance and intimacy. Scholars
have attempted to identify a biographical “Master,” but, as Brock-Broido’s
“Preamble” suggests, Dickinson’s letters may be ictions. Brock-Broido’s vol-
ume relishes the dynamics (erotic and otherwise) of role-playing through
language, referring to “My voice thrown, my Other littler self on my own

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 Psychoanalytic Poetics

knee . . . the tongue of the Inventor wagging the tongue of the Invented.”68
Ventriloquy does not displace confessional and Freudian paradigms of hidden
interiority: “each self keeps a secret self which cannot speak when spoken
to.”69 Brock-Broido later writes: “I was looking to become inscrutable. / I was
longing to be seen through.”70 Such paradoxical longing might characterize
both a poetic speaker, lifelike yet transparently ictional, and a human speaker,
both desiring and fearing to be known. This invented, inventive “I” sustains
and makes new confessional poetry’s interrogation of what it means to speak,
in a poem and as a self.

Notes
1. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and
Faber, 1991), p. 274.
2. Auden, Collected Poems, p. 274.
3. Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis
(London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 5.
4. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (London:
Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 306.
5. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, in Sigmund Freud, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and
ed. A. Freud, A. Strachey, J. Strachey, and A. Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001),
vol. 2, pp. 282–83; M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry
Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 26.
6. Marjorie Perlof, “Realism and the Confessional Mode of Robert Lowell,”
Contemporary Literature 11:4 (1970), pp. 470–87.
7. On the “breakthrough narrative” and its failings as literary history, see James
Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
8. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1975), p. 43.
9. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 43.
10. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1990), p. 244.
11. Lowell, Collected Prose, pp. 246–47.
12. J. D. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978), p. 46.
13. Thomas Travisano, Mid-Century Quartet (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1999), pp. 44–66.
14. Lawrence Lerner, “What Is Confessional Poetry?” Critical Quarterly 29:1 (1987),
pp. 46–66, 59.

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 R e e na S ast r i

15. Alan Williamson, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1984); Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
16. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 186; Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and
Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961), pp. 7–36.
17. Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. A. Freud,
A. Strachey, J. Strachey, and A. Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 20, pp.
179–258, 187.
18. Lowell, Collected Poems, p. 181; Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes
(London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 117. Plath’s collection will be cited in the
text as SPC.
19. Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1969), pp. 314–15.
20. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L.
Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 246.
21. Jessica Benjamin, The Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in
Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 1.
22. A. Alvarez, The New Poetry: An Anthology, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968); Christina Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” in Jo Gill (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 107.
23. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. vii.
24. Plath, Ariel, p. vii.
25. On Plath and agency, see especially DeSales Harrison, The End of the Mind: The
Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath and Glück (New York and
London: Routledge, 2005).
26. Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2004),
p. xiv.
27. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991), pp.
29–64.
28. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath; Harrison, The End of the Mind.
29. Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 9.
30. Diane Ward Middlebrook, “What Was Confessional Poetry?” in Jay Parini
and Brett Millier (eds.), The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 645.
31. Susan Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 106–15.
32. Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, p. 196.

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 Psychoanalytic Poetics

33. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and
ed. A. Freud, A. Strachey, J. Strachey, and A. Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001),
vol. 12, pp. 147–56, 150.
34. Deborah Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and
Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004), pp. 112–14.
35. Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Creating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (New
York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–2.
36. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 25.
37. Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980–2002 (New York: Knopf, 2004),
p. 52.
38. Robert Hass, Praise (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1979), pp. 4, 36; Robert Hass, Sun
Under Wood (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1996), p. 12.
39. C. K. Williams, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994),
p. 112.
40. Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1994),
p. 7. This collection will be cited in the text as PT.
41. Frank Bidart, Desire: Collected Poems 1965–1997 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998),
p. 231. This collection will be cited in the text as FBC. The much shorter U.S.
book, also entitled Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), is not a
book of collected poems.
42. Liam Rector and Tree Swenson (eds.), On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the
Page (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 139.
43. Rector and Swenson (eds.), On Frank Bidart, p. 91.
44. Jefrey Gray, “‘Necessary Thought’: Frank Bidart and the Postconfessional,”
Contemporary Literature 34:4 (1993), pp. 714–39, 716, 718.
45. Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990 (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 294.
46. Benjamin, The Shadow of the Other, p. 10.
47. Bidart, In the Western Night, p. 204.
48. Bidart, In the Western Night, p. 193.
49. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009), p. 61.
50. Frank Bidart, “Afterword: On ‘Confessional’ Poetry,” in Lowell, Collected
Poems, p. 997.
51. Bidart, “Afterword,” p. 997.
52. Helen Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 16.
53. Louise Glück, The First Four Books of Poems (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1995), pp.
149–50.

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 R e e na S ast r i

54. Glück, The First Four Books of Poems, p. 132.

55. Louise Glück, “Psychiatrist’s Sestina,” Threepenny Review (Autumn 1984),
p. 15.
56. Louise Glück, Meadowlands (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1997), p. 13.
57. Louise Glück, Ararat (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1990), p. 15. This collection will be
cited in the text as LGA.
58. Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” p. 189.
59. Joanne Feit Diehl (ed.), On Louise Glück: Change What You See (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 184.
60. Jane Hedley, “ ‘I’ll Tell You Something’: Reader-Address in Louise Glück’s
Ararat Sequence,” Literature Compass 2 (2005), pp. 5–6.
61. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968);
Lowell, Collected Poems, pp. 183–84; Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (New
York: Houghton Mil in, 1981), p. 6.
62. Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1992), p. 1. This collection
will be cited in the text as WI.
63. David St. John and Cole Swensen (eds.), American Hybrid (New York: Norton,
2009), p. xxi.
64. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), p. 105.
65. Phillips, Promises, Promises, p. 31.
66. Lucie Brock-Broido, A Hunger (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 3.
67. Brock-Broido, A Hunger, p. 13.
68. Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 6.
69. Brock-Broido, The Master Letters, p. 6.
70. Lucie Brock-Broido, Trouble in Mind (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 64.

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 Chapter 45
American Poetry of the 1980s: The
Pressures of Reality
L is a M . S t e i n m a n

Oppositionally deined schools of poetry are certainly not unprecedented

among twentieth-century American poets. Nonetheless, there was a distinc-
tive rhetoric used to describe poetic practices that were deined against one
another in the 1980s, a rhetoric that persisted, if in changed form, in the decades
that followed. Much was made of the efects and theoretical signiicance of
poetic style, with style deined as encompassing not only diction, syntax, and
imagery but also the formal features that cause poems to be heard as accessi-
ble or opaque, coherent or fragmented, representing spokenness or rhetorical
artiice. Debates about the meaning and efects of poetic style from the 1980s –
and American poets of the time were self-conscious and articulate about the
styles in which they wrote – suggest how the ways in which style was under-
stood positioned readers and writers and may to some degree have masked
commonalities between what seemed to be opposed poetic practices.
This chapter ultimately focuses on the work of two apparently quite dif-
ferent American poets who came of age as poets in the 1980s, in order to con-
sider how poets responded to, resisted, and participated in exchanges about
the signiicance of style as those assumptions unfolded and changed between
1980 and 1990. Throughout, this study hopes to consider the ways in which
larger cultural dialogues informed and were afected by poetic theories and
practices. I want to start, however, by sketching in broad strokes the two pri-
mary poetic styles – often called “mainstream” and “experimental” – that were
invoked and defended in the 1980s.
Many poets by 1980 wrote so-called mainstream or lyric poetry; that is, they
wrote personal lyrics or – to use Charles Altieri’s term – “scenic lyrics,” in
which the situation and feelings of a sensitive, often irst-person, speaker were
dramatized.1 The language was usually characterized as accessible, although

This chapter was written with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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 L is a M . S te i nma n

those who deined themselves in opposition to the mainstream often argued

that the poets who wrote such lyrics had exclusive access to elitist institu-
tions (such as publishing irms, universities, or journals) that distributed and
authorized their work. Those who wrote lyric poetry, however, defended their
practices in other terms. In 1982, the University of Michigan Press, itself one
of those authorizing institutions, published a volume called Claims for Poetry
edited by Donald Hall that included and circulated such defenses. Although
irst written in 1966, Richard Wilbur’s “Poetry and Happiness,” included in
Hall’s collection, crisply encapsulates assumptions informing what was cel-
ebrated or deplored as mainstream poetry through at least the 1980s. Wilbur
remarks on poetry’s origin in the need for “deliberate human meaning” and
sees in poetry “a longing to possess the whole world, and . . . to feel it,” “to
produce models of inclusive reaction,” and, at the same time, to ofer a “dis-
covery and projection of the self,” linking all of these impulses centrally to
description, and further linking descriptive power to a quest for “conversancy
or congruence between self and world.”2 In short, for Wilbur, feeling, mean-
ing, and self-knowledge – in particular, the relationship between selves and
the physical or social world – are all central. Finally, for Wilbur, poetry both
arises from and nourishes in its readers “a vital sense of community” and a
“model of felt experience” (CFP, pp. 484, 486). Wilbur typically wrote formally
careful, often rhyming, poems in a style usually associated with the 1950s. Still,
between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s, his poetics would hardly have sur-
prised readers attuned to expressive theories of poetry in confessional verse,
American versions of Surrealism, or so-called Deep Image poetry, represented
along with Wilbur’s ideas about poetry in Claims for Poetry’s essays by writers
such as Sandra Gilbert, Richard Hugo, and Charles Simic.
I will return to say more about such theories of the lyric and about one of
Wilbur’s poems, but irst let me characterize the other prominent poetic camp
at the time, innovative or experimental or avant-garde poetry, which was char-
acterized less by what the poetry was about – indeed, “aboutness” was used as
a negative term – than by the use and valorization of innovative forms, frac-
tured syntax, and mixed tones and dictions, without an obvious speaking self
of any sort. Experimental poetry was often also called elitist by opponents,
being seen as diicult, overly intellectual or theory driven, and inaccessible to
common readers. Again, defenses of experimental poetry, and in particular of
what is now called Language (then called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry, had
more nuanced theories of the purposes served by such stylistic experiments.
Charles Bernstein, along with Ron Silliman and others, practiced, theorized,
and promoted Language poetry in journals such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,

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published from 1978 to 1981, and in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984),

edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, as well as in the anthol-
ogy In the American Tree (1986), edited by Ron Silliman. Coterie presses
such as Segue Distributing, Sun & Moon Press, and Chax Press promoted
and grew out of the sense of a movement or common project generated
by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry; the movement was also linked to other
small communities that had earlier gathered around journals featuring exper-
imental poetry, journals like the 1971 This or the 1964 Joglars.3 Although these
groups reasonably positioned themselves as marginal, not mainstream, most
professional poets with trade or university press publishers were well aware
of Language poetry, as is evident from the fact that an abbreviated version of
Ron Silliman’s seminal 1979 piece, “The New Sentence,” was included in Hall’s
widely circulated and more mainstream collection by 1982.
Despite the poetic genealogy traced in his essay, which invokes the writ-
ings of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein among others, Silliman’s
work and theories did sound new. At irst blush, “The New Sentence” seems
simply to dismiss poetics like Wilbur’s, questioning the idea of selves, of ref-
erence, and of ordinary procedures for constructing human meaning, argu-
ing for the “limiting of syllogistic movement [and for writing that] keeps the
reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often
at the sentence level or below”; Silliman thus promotes the ways in which
Language poetry resists – even as it calls attention to – more typical or less self-
conscious forms of reading (CFP, p. 397). Yet Silliman also insists on the ways
Language poetry can “suggest the internal [i.e., syntactical] presence of once
exteriorized poetic forms” and “incorporate [while defamiliarizing; Silliman
might add “rematerializing by recontextualizing”] ordinary sentences of the
material world” (CFP, pp. 394, 396). In other words, Language poetry is said to
afect the material world with its refashioning of how language is used. There
are also implicit truth claims made about Language poetry’s representational
power, however stylistically unconventional; of Gertrude Stein’s “Custard,”
for example, Silliman writes: “The portrait of custard is marvelously accu-
rate” (CFP, p. 391). This is in part a joke, because custard is a perfect emblem of
instability, in line with Silliman’s skepticism about language as stable or refer-
ential, and it is in part an act of defamiliarization, because the literary style of
Stein’s portraits is not what most readers would think of as representational;
Stein’s portrait begins: “Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be.
Not to be narrowly” (CFP, p. 390). Yet Silliman nonetheless claims that “accu-
racy” characterizes Stein’s portrait. Finally, too, Silliman’s essay focuses on
“the collective work and interinl uence” of his poetic community’s endeavor,

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which, he thus implies, connects writers with one another, while the commu-
nity’s “new sentences” are meant to refashion readers’ awareness not so much
of the languages of the everyday world but of how the act of reading normally
moves from language (or away from language) to integrative meaning (CFP,
p. 398).
As detailed by Vernon Shetley, there were also other positions staked out
in the 1980s about what poetry should do, and about how it should sound,
by schools that saw themselves as opposed to both Language poetry and at
least some scenic lyric.4 For example, one could point to the so-called New
Narrative poetry featured in Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell’s journal
The Reaper (published from 1981 to 1989), which resisted what was seen as the
“solipsistic meditation” of free verse scenic lyrics and which promoted images
used in service of what Jarman at the time thought of as more accessible or
populist poetry, poetry that could memorably tell stories, paying more atten-
tion to plot and character than to the poets’ states of mind or to igurative
language that called attention to itself as such.5
The exchanges between proponents of these diferent schools tended to be
acrimonious. Still, looking at the ways in which Jarman, Wilbur, and Silliman
locate poetic power actually underlines how all claim not only that poetry
concerns “what is” (aiming at some form of “accuracy” or truth telling) but
also that “what is” inally involves the meeting of what might be called an
agent with a world (social, linguistic, or material), a meeting arrived at – or
described – in terms of feeling or seeing, even if Silliman most often empha-
sizes sight as seeing through the usual ways in which language represents or
constructs inner and outer realities.
Despite these shared assumptions and despite the quarrels that tended
to caricature opposing positions, in practice none of the poetic schools just
described were monolithic, and poetry from the 1980s may not so tidily divide
into two or three camps. One can nevertheless pick out poems and poets that
would clearly have been seen as falling on one or the other side of the main
perceived divide. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to focus on two such
poets, Thylias Moss and Charles Bernstein, whose work and practice can be
used to characterize the substance and the efects of debates about poetic
style in the period. They would have seemed on opposite sides of the liter-
ary universe in the mid-1980s, when the various manifestos I have just char-
acterized were issued, defending and deining opposing poetic camps from
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry to various kinds of lyricism, especially where
defenses of lyricism intersected with calls for previously underrepresented
voices to be published, anthologized, and taught. The latter phenomenon in

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particular helped frame Moss’s irst three books, Hosiery Seams on a Bowleged
Woman (1983), Pyramid of Bone (1989), and At Redbones (1990), which irst
seem and at the time were received as postconfessional or testimonial works
informed by identity politics.6
Moss’s early poems are in some ways exemplary scenic lyrics, in that they
are most easily read as dramatizing an apparently autobiographical and, in
Moss’s case, ethnically identiied self. Moss’s biography and her early state-
ments about her poetry – like the literary circles that embraced and publicized
her work – also made her appear as a representative of African American
identity and poetry. Although she received numerous awards and a signiicant
amount of praise, Moss’s work was and is not as widely known or antholo-
gized as that of some other African American women poets of her genera-
tion, perhaps at irst because of her subject matter, which a few early reviews
found “strident” or “full of anger [and] self-loathing.”7 As more books by Moss
appeared, many critics seemed most taken aback by Moss’s range of reference
and allusion, as well as her use of a style that was not quite what was expected
of African American poetry – not, in other words, what the rather diferent
African American poet Harryette Mullen, writing in 1996, called “representa-
tive blackness” in “speakerly” poems.8 From one perspective, it seems Moss
was expected to write ethnically inlected scenic lyrics, and various readers
found it diicult to follow what she wrote when her poems did not sound,
to some, suiciently like mainstream scenic lyrics or, to others, suiciently
African American.
Certainly many reviews of the volumes that followed her irst book judged
Moss’s work to be either too diicult or simply unclear. For example, Mark
Jarman reviewed Moss’s fourth book, the 1991 Rainbow Remnants in Rock
Bottom Ghetto Sky, voicing a mistrust of Moss’s discursiveness and syntax and
suggesting that the “distant connections” sought in the poems often seemed
to him undisciplined “exercises in association,” full of what Jarman deemed
“errors.”9 It is useful to ask why or by what standard Jarman judged Moss’s
poetry to be lawed. He insists, for instance, that Moss’s line about a Bible
held by an elderly reverend (the Bible is “a dialysis, transfusion that keeps
him alive”) uses the comma to deine what Jarman inds an unconvincing
appositive.10 Yet it might be more to the point to see Moss’s lists as consis-
tently redeining terms – similar to the same poem’s lines about an onion as
“a globe, a honeymoon, a cook’s bible,” in which we are asked not to imagine
the globe as a honeymoon, but to witness a speaker reining or redeining the
image.11 Jarman reads the poems thematically – in light of his well-publicized
commitment to narrative poetry and his participation in the heated polemics

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of the period – rather than attending to the shifting poetic focus and to what
the shifts per se might signify; he thus does not hear how the images replacing
one another might form neither careless writing nor Language poetry’s new
sentences but something closer to an image anthology, a traditional trope
related to the Latin use of the nonexclusive “or” (familiar in the English tradi-
tion from, among other places, Milton’s “Il Penseroso”) used to call attention
to the creativity, and interiorized perspective, of a speaker. Instead, for Jarman,
Moss’s poems seem badly written and therefore diicult to read.
As Michael Warner has noted in a somewhat diferent context, diiculty is
not necessarily synonymous with lack of clarity, and charges of a lack of clar-
ity beg the obvious question: “Clarity for whom?”12 Still, Jarman’s judgment
was not unique; many critical assessments of Moss’s work seem to rest on a
sense that Moss’s use of mixed registers – what she herself later and arguably
in response to her critics called “multiple actualizations of self and mergers of
what is believed disparate” – were either opaque or a betrayal of the African
American heritage she was expected to represent.13 My point here is not to pro-
pose a rereading of Moss’s poems so much as to point out that clarity rests in
part on readers’ expectations, and readers’ expectations are in turn informed
by cultural and literary politics, as well as coming from what is on the page or
what is brought to poems from past reading experiences.
Moss was born in 1954; her parents, originally from the American South,
moved to Ohio, where her father worked as a recapper for Cardinal Tire
Company and her mother worked as a maid. Raised in Cleveland, after grad-
uating from high school Moss enrolled in Syracuse University for two report-
edly unhappy years, from 1971 to 1973, before she withdrew from college. After
working at clerical jobs, she entered and won a poetry competition spon-
sored by the Cleveland Public Library, after which she returned to college,
to Oberlin, from which she graduated in 1981, having won an Academy of
American Poets Prize. She completed her master of ine arts degree at the
University of New Hampshire in 1983 just as her irst book, Hosiery Seams on
a Bowleged Woman, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry
Center, the editors having seen and admired the poem (“Coming of Age in
Sandusky”) that earlier received the Cleveland Public Library’s prize.
Given how and where Moss’s early poetry circulated and was recognized,
her work would have been read when it irst appeared as scenic lyric or main-
stream and at the same time as giving voice to a marginalized social iden-
tity – whence the expectation of speakerly poems. Hosiery Seams on a Bowleged
Woman features photographs of Moss reading her poems publicly; the pic-
tures reinforce the invitation to read the poems as part of identity politics in

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that they clearly register Moss as African American and suggest the speakerly
quality of her work.
Hosiery Seams does contain mostly short-lined, irst-person dramatic mono-
logues, a style inl uenced by the poet Ai, whose subject matter and mixed eth-
nic background appealed to Moss. Moss has looked back on her discovery of
Ai’s irst book, Cruelty, saying: “Ai herself was me, of fragmented identity. . . .
Ai was dark epiphany and . . . for ten years my writing exclusively erected
bleak monuments, recognizing authenticity nowhere but in the brutal” (TSB,
pp. 207, 235). Indeed, the poems in Hosiery Seams are spoken by narrators who
most often testify to traumatic lives or events. Moreover, most of the voices
are identiiably African American or Native American, although in retrospect
the range of voices might have suggested to readers that the poem’s voices are
dramatized character studies. Alvin Aubert did say of Moss’s voice in Hosiery
Seams that “it allows for the representation of diverse personae,” but even
Aubert’s early, and positive, review takes the poetic voice less as polyvocal per-
formance than as reairming the artistic worth of African American, folk, and
popular cultural voices.14
In her next book, Pyramid of Bone, Moss drew on yet more disparate voices,
Anglo-American as well as African American, exploring how cultural icons
and languages are understood diferently from diferent cultural positions,
as in “A Reconsideration of the Blackbird,” a poem in dialogue not only with
popular culture (ilm, educational pieties, nursery rhymes) but also with
Wallace Stevens (including but not limited to his “Thirteen Ways of Looking
at a Blackbird”). The poem opens, “Let’s call him Jim Crow” (PB, p. 10). At the
same time that she argues with Stevens, however, Moss’s poems display a
Stevensian sense of language – in particular, his linguistic playfulness and, the-
matically, his turn to poetry for comforts comparable to those ofered by reli-
gion. And there is also a less obviously Stevensian religious resonance increas-
ingly present in Moss’s work. Although several of the poems in the irst book
do draw on biblical stories, the very title of Pyramid of Bone echoes the image
of a valley of bones in Ezekiel 37:1. Moreover, the book not only opens with
a poem about treating God badly but ends with a stark refusal of obedience
and a challenge: “Being in God’s hand doesn’t mean being in a full house”;
the same poem, “Doubts During Catastrophe,” includes the quotation from
Ezekiel as an epigraph: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and set me down
in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones” (PB, p. 41).
Both this increasing focus on spirituality and Moss’s continued interwoven
uses of African American and Anglo-American cultural and literary predeces-
sors can be seen throughout the volume, as in “Fisher Street,” the title and

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irst line of which place us in an urban, African American neighborhood (“I

like to walk down Fisher Street”), but which also operates in a biblical register
(reminding readers of the “isher of men”) (PB, pp. 37–38). In the poem, “song
rises like vapor . . . white and bleached / like all that laundry waving on the line
. . . struggling like all of us to be free.” Moss continues, “I don’t expect to see /
any other angels” (PB, p. 38).
Anticipating what Roger Gilbert calls “a plague of angels” in poetry of
the 1990s, at the same time that Moss’s poem places its speaker in a neigh-
borhood scene, it engages other voices, perhaps Stevens’s “Evening Without
Angels,” but most explicitly “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”(1956),
by Richard Wilbur: “The morning air is all awash with angels.”15 She thus
invokes even as she repudiates, or at least resituates, Wilbur’s well-known
trope. What we might call Moss’s signifying – or dialectical doubled visions –
becomes increasingly characteristic of her poetry. Some of this double voicing
is reminiscent of what Charles Bernstein, albeit in the context of defending
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, also claimed for his early poetry in a 1981
interview, namely “polyentendres.”16 But Moss’s early poems are at least as
clearly in conversation with Wilbur’s or Stevens’s lyricism and with social real-
ities – settings in which white sheets would call to mind the violent history of
lynchings, not angels – as with Language poetry.
Stylistically, most of the poetry in Moss’s third volume, At Redbones, works
even more insistently with shifting subject positions and mental landscapes
(and longer lines), even as a quotation from Marilyn Hacker on the back cover
continues to contextualize the work as a representative poetry of witness,
naming “black truths behind white lies” but still “informed with a sense of the
sacred . . . [making music out of] bitterness.”17 The images in At Redbones once
again are of the sacred, frequently framed in terms of nourishment, from
the opening poem, “Fullness,” through images of lunch counters, provolone,
baking, sugar, potatoes, biscuits, and bread. Typically, the images do double
duty. The bread is consistently Eucharistic; a lunch counter menu is described
by a woman involved in an antisegregation sit-in. As Moss emphasized in a
later comment, “hunger” for her is both physical and spiritual: “What makes
us human . . . keeps us hungry. . . . But since hunger demands feeding and what
we want to be are gluttons, I have every faith that we will seek answers to eat.”
She has also described poetic sight (which in context is both physical sight
and insight) as “a kind of a hunger to see as much as I can.”18 In other words,
Moss marks the work of poetry as involving sight – and the process of seeing.
While she also describes how she reevaluated the early inl uence of Ai, whose
“bleakness” she says she replaced with a “sense of joy,” there is nonetheless a

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consistency to Moss’s poetic project throughout her irst three books, linking
poetry not only with the social project of representing multiple voices and
perspectives from diferent cultural communities but (as insistently) with less
worldly forms of desire or hunger, with both sight and insight.19
I have been trying to sketch how Moss’s style and her individual thematic
concerns developed while also attending to the contexts in which her poetry
circulated. Continuing this, I want quickly to glance at Rainbow Remnants in
Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, which appeared in 1991, and even more quickly at
the 1993 Small Congregations. The irst was selected by Charles Simic for the
National Poetry Series. Also in 1991, Moss won a Whiting Writers’ Award and
a Witter Bynner Prize, suggesting her growing reputation, at least in poetry
circles; the winners of such competitions were advertised and prominently
featured in journals such as Poets & Writers or The Writer’s Chronicle, that is, in
trade publications that would have been considered mainstream.
Not surprisingly, Rainbow Remnants was more widely reviewed than Moss’s
earlier books; most critics agreed that Moss’s poems embodied contradictory
motions and were increasingly complex, even if evaluations difered sharply,
with divergent judgments identifying complexity with meaningful diiculty
(Aubert distinguished Moss’s “abstraction” from Language poetry’s “non-
referentiality”), with error or incompetence (as in Jarman’s review, discussed
earlier), and even with an abdication on the part of a poet whose work was
expected to represent African American experience.20 Critical expectations and
the rhetorics available to describe the signiicance of poetic styles more gener-
ally were equally in l ux. And Moss’s work was not only read in light of shifting
cultural and poetic frameworks but also written in part in response to both her
critics and her own ear for changes in the larger poetic culture. Among other
things, by 1993, the arrangement of even previously published poems in her
ifth book, Small Congregations, seems designed to address her critics’ questions
about what it meant to assume multiple subject positions or voices.
In 1998 Stephen Burt was asked to introduce recent American poets to
British readers and challenged “to coin a term for a school”; half tongue in
cheek, he introduced the term “Elliptical poets” to characterize younger
American poets, primarily those who came of age as writers in the mid-1980s.21
On Burt’s account, Elliptical poets are those centrally concerned with ques-
tions of epistemology and language, who avoid straightforward narratives or
confessional lyrics, and yet who use an experimentalist style – or at least “a
‘Stein tradition’ of dissolve and fracture” – as a resource, rather than to bolster
or embody a theoretical position.22 When Burt’s essay titled “The Elliptical
Poets” appeared in American Letters & Commentary in 1999, it circulated widely,

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not so much because it announced a new school but because it seemed to

many to airm what most readers of journals featuring American poetry in
the 1990s already heard, namely a shift in younger poets’ practices. Moss is
included among Burt’s Ellipticists. And Moss herself would have been hearing
the same changes as Burt.
Yet the very title of Small Congregations is not so Elliptical, returning as it
does to the sense of small social and linguistic communities igured in the
earlier books. The title also is almost an insider’s joke, given that the title
poem appeared irst in Rainbow Remnants under the title “Congregations”: as
reprinted, it is quite literally a “small” version of “Congregations,” with only
half of the irst section of the earlier poem retained.23 Apparently responding
to her critics, Moss refashioned many of the poems, using more regularized
stanzaic forms, more conventional punctuation, and in places changing both
typeface and titles in order to emphasize her shifting poetic speakers. In other
words, many of the revisions in Small Congregations appear to respond to criti-
cal puzzlement over the voices and mixed cultural references in Moss’s earlier
volumes. The volume does also contain some poems with more fractured syn-
tax – what Burt was hearing as an increasingly common practice – although
these poems may suggest a turn to what theorists like Kimberly W. Benston
found particular to the work of younger contemporary African American
poets. As Benston puts it, we “need to see Afro-American poetry not as a static
alignment of proclamations . . . but rather as a performative activity that sees
itself in struggle with other practices. . . . More speciically, we need to investi-
gate further the nature of ‘textuality’ in black poetry.”24 While not about syn-
tax per se, Benson’s reference to textuality suggests among other things that
the style (including the use of vernacular imagery and idiom) typically taken
to represent spoken, irst-person testimony was being rethought by younger
African American poets; Moss’s use of nonstandard syntax, like her range of
intertextual references, can thus be read at times as giving voice to African
American speakers, but also as performative in its rewriting of standard modes
of representing spokenness. Benston’s formulation, then, ofers a theory of
the self-consciousness that increasingly characterized Moss’s work, suggesting
another shifting cultural expectation, in efect a questioning of the assump-
tion that African American writing should be – and of how as well as whether
black poetry might be marked as – speakerly.
By the late 1980s, Moss was writing prose pieces that also responded both
to early reviews of her work and to what those around her were writing. She
defended what others saw as laws in her poetry, saying she was trying for,
among other things, a “poetry of struggle in which [she sought] to discover

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meaning – perhaps by creating it,” and she deined desire (including the hun-
ger for revelation) not only as the motive for art but as that which art reveals;
as Moss put it: “The products of struggle and striving are made of the grace
sought” (TSB, p. 251). In particular, Moss explicitly aligned her associative leaps
and sudden shifts of direction or diction with acts of the mind, speciically
with spiritual questing. From one perspective, Moss’s work moved from a
poetics representative of the accessible scenic lyric to an insistence on dii-
culty, but for her, diiculty was associated with the spiritual and, more tacitly,
with ethnic identity or, more precisely, with changing ideas about the repre-
sentation of ethnic identity. Throughout, however, Moss characterizes poetry
as a way to connect (and an examination of the connection between) individ-
ual selves and something larger – a social world, a smaller community within
a mass cultural society, or a numinous sense of grace.
I hope this examination of Moss’s poetry and poetics helps to underline
some of the problems with characterizing poetry as either mainstream lyric,
meaning broadly accessible, or, alternatively, experimental, meaning theory
driven and diicult. Moreover, revisiting what has already been said, how
Moss’s work circulated further complicates the question of how to charac-
terize her poetic project, highlighting the multiple ways her poems could be
heard. As mentioned, the presses that published Moss’s work and reviews of
her work were prestigious or at least highly visible in poetry writing commu-
nities; she worked with known older poets from her student days through
her appointment to the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1993. Moss
has expressed skepticism about the cultural institutions that mark and mar-
ket literary success, but her work has nonetheless gathered support and pub-
licity from the literary and larger cultural institutions that in 1983 Charles
Bernstein dubbed “oicial verse culture” (CD, pp. 246–48). At the same time,
Moss’s subject matter and biography identiied her as growing up in a work-
ing-class, African American family, while mainstream poetry was usually seen
as describing privileged white speakers, as well as addressing privileged white
audiences. Moreover, some readers continued to fault her for not being as
accessible as they thought a speaker for minority culture should be, meaning
by “accessible” writing that was both scenic lyric and speakerly. Moss’s own
descriptions of her work, on the other hand, suggest that her move to more
demanding and process-oriented poems was fueled by her quest for “grace,”
and for accuracy – speciically for accurate seeing. As she would write in 1998,
“I’m nothing but language,” and “I am a namer, assigning words, and there-
fore also value, to what is beheld; my real work is taxonomy . . . acknowledg-
ing the complexity”(TSB, pp. 243, 246). I have been arguing that the claim to be

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“nothing but language” does not make Moss a Language poet. Her not-fully-
articulated link between “what is beheld” and “complexity” underlines her
view of how poetry negotiates the l uid boundary between selves and worlds
and also reveals the diiculty of characterizing “diiculty,” which is inally a
matter of contemporary public rhetoric, of readers’ expectations, of context
and text. Yet for all the diferences between Moss and Bernstein, they can seem
oddly similar in some respects.
In 1983, the same year that Moss’s irst chapbook appeared, Bernstein – four
years older than Moss – published his ifth chapbook, Resistance, as well as
his seventh full-length book, Islets/Irritations. It is harder to chart the crit-
ical response to Bernstein’s irst volumes than to Moss’s. His 1975 Asylums
appeared from Asylums Press (a press Bernstein helped launch) in an edition
so limited there appears to be no record of how many were printed; the same
press issued the 1976 Parsing, which was set on a manual typewriter, xeroxed,
and staple-bound. When reprinted in the year 2000 by Sun & Moon Press in a
volume called Republics of Reality, Parsing – by then listed and often referred to
as Bernstein’s irst book – did receive more critical notice. But by 2000 Parsing
was, in efect, a diferent book, seen in hindsight after seventeen more chap-
books and full-length books by Bernstein had appeared.25
More to the point, not only had Language poetry been widely publicized
and heatedly debated for almost two decades by 2000, but electronic exchanges
between readers in places such as the Electronic Poetry Center were circulat-
ing responses to Bernstein’s poetry in new ways. That is, the context in which
the texts were read had shifted. As Susan Schultz has nicely detailed, Bernstein
helped to orchestrate how his work was received.26 By 1995, Bernstein noted:
“One day I woke up and found myself metamorphosed into a tiny business-
man. . . . For poetry, after all, is the ultimate small business. . . . I have wanted to
bring poetry into the ‘petty, commercial,’ indeed material and social world of
everyday life” (MW, p. 234). The comment insists on poetry’s embeddedness
in the “material and social” world, but it also half-ironically addresses the fact
that Bernstein’s anti-institutional writing had become something else – having
formed its own institutions – by the turn of the century. Indeed, ten years ear-
lier Bernstein had been appointed to his irst named chair at SUNY, Bufalo,
and had become director of the Poetics Program there, although he contin-
ued to reairm his interest in “experimental” poetry (MW, p. 29).
One should add that, by 2000, the contexts in which Bernstein’s work was
received were not all of his own making, nor all from the self-consciously
formed, often personalized communities of readers and writers forming what
twenty years earlier had been a newly constituted avant-garde associated with

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L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Part of why it is diicult to trace the recep-

tion of Bernstein’s earliest work is that the responses that have circulated most
widely tend to be later responses, often responses to reissued editions of his
early work. Yet one can at least say that if Moss’s irst poetry prizes and pub-
lications were from better-known, more visible literary institutions even as
her background and subject matter were not those of the dominant culture in
America, almost the opposite was true of Bernstein.
Bernstein was born in Manhattan, of Russian Jewish immigrant back-
ground; he describes his father as a dress manufacturer who worked for and
eventually became co-owner of Smartcraft Corporation, which sold imita-
tions of designer dresses. While the family experienced inancial diiculties
in the early 1960s, his father recovered, going to work as the American con-
sultant to Teijin, Ltd, Japan’s largest textile manufacturer, and moving the
family to Central Park West, which is to say to a fashionable neighborhood
(MW, pp. 229–52). From there, Bernstein went on to earn an undergraduate
degree from Harvard but did not attend graduate school aside from a one-year
fellowship at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Moss, given her midwest-
ern, mixed-race, nonal uent family background, might be called upwardly
mobile, while Bernstein persuasively describes how his “choice, at least ini-
tially, [was] toward downward social mobility” (MW, p. 234). In short, Moss’s
literary career was shaped by and in literary communities associated for the
most part with academic institutions, and with what might be called public or
even mainstream cultural entities, while the circles in which Bernstein began
shaping himself as a writer were not speciically literary (he graduated from
Harvard with a concentration in philosophy) and not initially associated with
any long-standing literary institutions (although he did receive a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts as early as 1980). But Moss’s fam-
ily background and subject matter were hardly socially mainstream, while
Bernstein’s family background was more privileged; more importantly, to
draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cutting-edge artistic practices, so was
Bernstein’s early avant-gardist stance.27
In 1995, Bernstein gave a paper called “Warning – Poetry Area: Publics under
Construction,” in which he looked at the academy’s deinition and adoption
of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that framed and probably helped pro-
mote some of Moss’s earlier work; Bernstein proposed that “the trend toward
a representative poetry is as much market or consumer-driven, not to say
demographic, in origin as it is ideological,” qualifying this statement by add-
ing that “contemporary poetry remains an indispensable site for the explora-
tion of the multiplicities, and multiplicitousness, of identities” (MW, p. 305).

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 L is a M . S te i nma n

A focus on the l uidity of identity has been a constant in Bernstein’s writings,

as in Moss’s, and, indeed, in Wilbur’s description of what poetry ofers read-
ers. Admittedly, when Wilbur writes that poems try “to produce models of
inclusive reaction,” the claim is not quite Bernstein’s. Wilbur, that is, proposes
that poems (and poets) can respond to or include apparently unpoetic images
and language; his example is having found a way to use “the words ‘reinforced
concrete’ ” in a poem (CFP, p. 476). Bernstein, on the other hand, talks about
poems as part or even constitutive of, not references to, the material world,
and he mistrusts descriptive language. Still, when Bernstein speaks in the pas-
sage just quoted of the “multiplicitousness of . . . identities,” or mentions else-
where his own engagement with “exploring and realizing alternative identity
formations,” we ind something close to Wilbur’s claim that poetry is related
to self-discovery and even closer to Moss’s statement that she enjoys adopting
“aliases” or “multiple actualizations of self and mergers of what is believed
disparate” (MW, p. 233; TSB, pp. 123, 9).
Moss’s and Bernstein’s poems, as well as their careers, nonetheless seem,
and certainly in the 1980s seemed, at irst reading to set them at odds. The irst
piece in Bernstein’s 1976 Parsing, called “Sentences,” in fact seems to mock
poetry like Moss’s, certainly as her early work was irst received, although the
voices and diction in “Sentences” are multiple, and the tone diicult to parse
(to use Bernstein’s image). Take, for example, the following passage:

I ind it very discouraging.

I get no word from her.
I don’t like all this waiting.
I feel she’s not very considerate of me.
I feel left out.28

The passage can be read as a catalogue of examples of the rhetoric of anxi-

ety. Early reviews suggest that “Sentences” also allowed readers to imagine
a narrative (of some failed relationship). It may even thereby have moved
readers, although it also underlines the impoverished therapeutic vocabulary
used to present or dramatize the self. As Paul Quinn – a sympathetic reader of
Bernstein’s work – concluded, noting the title’s pun on prison sentences, such
poetry may “suggest a subject, or a number of subjects, coming to awareness
of their own subjection, yet unable to express this in anything other than the
language that enchains them.”29
Bernstein himself said in an early interview, “I think of some of my poems as
a series of remarks, either in the aphoristic sense or in the sense of observations,

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constructed items, etc., occurring at the level of phrases or sentences. These

can be interpreted in multiple ways: they are each, perhaps to say, polyenten-
dres . . . suggest[ing] the continuous choices of interpretation that confronting
the world involves” (CD, p. 396). It is worth pausing to note three features of
Bernstein’s remarks (written roughly ive years after “Sentences”). First, he
seems to authorize almost any interpretation; indeed, he explicitly says his
polyentendres might be read multiply as “true, ironic, false, didactic, satiric,
fantastical, inscrutable, sad, funny, my view, someone else’s view” (CD, p. 396).
Second, he characterizes the style of his poems as particularly open to readerly
interventions, which has led to criticism like that voiced by Vernon Shetley, who
argues that in poems like Bernstein’s there “is no meaning hiding behind any
other, all are equally available,” so that reading or writing such poems is “too
easy.”30 Third, however, Bernstein’s claims for his poetry ultimately emphasize
the way his poems do not invite simple or singular interpretations but rather
call attention to how acts of interpretation are always involved in “confronting
the world.” He seems, then, most interested in how higher-order readings of
his work underline the way selves encounter worlds.
Moss’s view of the work poetry does is not all that diferent, but Bernstein
privileges higher-order readings over interpretations that might, for example,
hear – or even be moved by hearing – in poems like “Sentences” the language
or speech of ordinary people (the kind of speech with which Moss’s early
work was irst associated). While Bernstein does insist that he wants multiple
interpretations of his poetry, many of his poems are diicult to read without
hearing them primarily as parodies that invite a reexamination of ordinary
language, that is, without hearing them as poems that aim for what I have
called higher-order readings. For instance, the title of Bernstein’s 1989 chap-
book, The Nude Formalism, obviously parodies and so undermines the New
Formalists’ calls for traditional forms.31 Similarly, the later (2001) “Thank You
for Saying Thank You” includes the lines, “This is a totally / accessible poem.
/ There is nothing / in this poem / that is in any / way diicult / to under-
stand,” which cannot easily be read except as a parody of calls for authentic
voices – and thus as unmasking the accepted rhetoric of sincerity or the con-
ventions of self-representation – in accessible lyric poems.32
At the same time, Bernstein does not deny there are representations of
voices even in poems like “Sentences.” In 1983, he wrote approvingly of a
poetry “that takes as its task inding and inhabiting origins and voices,” and
as early as 1976 he noted that voice “is a possibility for poetry [just] not an
essence” (CD, pp. 250, 45). The “voices” speaking in poems like “Sentences”
are not all middle class, however. Bernstein’s earlier-mentioned suspicion of

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calls for “representative poetry” – by which he means both poems using con-
ventional descriptive language and poems that are seen to represent ethnic
and cultural diversity (like Mullen’s “representative blackness”) – suggests that
his project is to debunk both kinds of representation. The issues potentially
attending this punning conlation of the linguistic and the political can be seen
by looking at a second passage from “Sentences”: “I came up the hard way. We
was treated pretty rough / We come up at the hind and get what we can to
live on. / We was just children.”33 The passage marks the beginning of a short
piece that has the look of a prose poem, and, like much of “Sentences,” it
appears without narrative setting or characterization of a speaker or speakers;
it is, as the title suggests, a series of sentences. The question is whether readers
are authorized to take this as a parody of literary conventions or more specii-
cally a parody of the language of poets like Moss. Apparently, they are, at least
in theory. Certainly, from the early books through the more recent, Bernstein
consistently uses fractured idioms to (as he said when asked about his early
poetic project) debunk usual “notions of voice, self, expression, sincerity, and
representation” (MW, p. 249). Yet ethical and interpretive diiculties arise
when the voices Bernstein targets are like Moss’s, something Bernstein’s later
essays acknowledge.
Even in his 1990 “State of the Art” one can see Bernstein trying to distin-
guish between a laudable “idealized multi-culturalism: the image of poets
from diferent communities reading each other’s work” and the “supericial”
idea of diversity; he adds that he is all in favor of “radical alternatives to paro-
chial and racist reading habits.”34 There seems to be a growing recognition in
his essays that polyvocality and polyentendres are not quite the same, and that
the latter might be particularly problematic when poetic style is claimed as a
form of resistance (Bernstein’s word), at least insofar as it is implied that resis-
tance is possible only for those to whom meta- or higher-order readings are
available. The distinction between supericial diversity and actual social difer-
ence seems to revisit just this question. My primary point is that Bernstein’s
early description of his polyentendres calls for an open-ended poetry (to model
our interactions with the world), but he also not so open-endedly, if tacitly,
privileges higher-order readings and insists on the intrinsic value of disrupting
“normal” reading habits or ordinary speech, even for those whose speech or
norms are not culturally mainstream.
If Moss came to seem less recognizably a poet of the personal lyric,
Bernstein’s poems increasingly emphasize moments reviewers have variously
called “lyrical,” “Romantic,” or (a bit more precisely) “utopian” (as in R. D.
Pohl’s, Ethan Paquin’s, and Paul Quinn’s reviews of Republics of Reality).35 As

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early as 1981, Bernstein spoke of “how reading and writing can partake of non-
instrumental values and thus be utopian formations,” which is to say (follow-
ing Theodor Adorno, not to mention William Carlos Williams) that the use of
poetry may be its uselessness, which Bernstein insists serves a social purpose –
nothing less than the “transformation of society” (CD, p. 386). Such statements
again suggest that poetry’s function is to model the self ’s possible engage-
ment with the world – described by Bernstein in terms of sight in poems such
as “Artiice of Absorption,” in which he speaks of how “envisionment” and
ofering “a vision-in-sound” involve redirecting “the gaze of consciousness” –
whereby poetry might change the individual self ’s relationship with the actual
world.36 Bernstein more or less explicitly says that his poetry models the self ’s
engagement with both real and possible worlds (enacting or requiring recog-
nition of “the continuous choices of interpretation that confronting the world
involves” [CD, p. 396]). It seems the self ’s or individual’s connections with the
world, posed in terms of sight, are as central to Bernstein’s project for poetry
as to Moss’s. As Christopher Beach has put it: “If the individual is no longer
seen as [an] active historical force . . . or as [a] ‘self ’ in the process of relating to
his or her immediate environment . . . the concept of a clearly demarcated and
particularized ‘individual’ is still in evidence in Bernstein’s writing.”37
Moreover, it seems that afect is also central to Bernstein’s poetics.
Admittedly, this is not a straightforward matter. Although a sympathetic critic
like Paul Quinn reads the last line of the 1981 “The Occurrence of Tune” –
“desire projected & recast, to unmake the borders of logic” – as a recurring,
even obsessive, igure for Bernstein of language as desire, it is not always easy
to talk about the tone of such lines.38 To take another example, in the 1984
poem “The Only Utopia Is in a Now,” Bernstein addresses the question of
emotion, saying that “people here who talk about emotion don’t really want
to experience it, they only want simulations of it in patterns of words they’ve
already heard,” and he goes on to discuss the need for a new language for “the
syntax of the heart.”39 This appears to be a straightforward, even late Romantic,
defense of feeling or afect, but the voice represented in this passage is clearly
marked as someone else’s voice, enclosed in quotation marks and said to
emerge from “amidst” – and to some degree out of – “the blue,” a voice we
are told “almost seemed to sing.” The suspicion of emotion (as opposed to a
new “syntax of the heart”) does sound like a defense of poetry like Bernstein’s.
Yet by redeining afect, he is in efect also reclaiming the centrality of feeling
in poems. Not allowing readers to hear the disembodied voice in “The Only
Utopia” as personal may not so much disclaim the self as gesture toward a
desired utopian “oneness,” described as the unity of “our communal body,

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[which is] language.”40 Even so, the diction (words like “amidst” and the word
“voice” itself ) makes it more diicult to read this as an earnest claim rather
than a parody, despite the resonance with Bernstein’s later, more straight-
forward claims for poetry, as when in 1995 he says that poetry “sings of values
not measurable as commercial sums,” or when, even later, he proposes “that
the thirst for knowledge can only be quenched if one learns how to remain
hungry,” a trope of desire very much like Moss’s (CD, p. 240).41
I am not arguing that the experience of reading Bernstein’s work is or was
or should be similar to that of reading Moss’s; among other things, Bernstein’s
style – his emphasis on discontinuity at the level of the sentence and his studied
avoidance of dramatized speakers – distinguishes his poems from Moss’s. Still,
stylistic diferences notwithstanding, Moss’s and Bernstein’s claims for poetry –
that poems explore, model, or negotiate the connection between individuals
and worlds; that they involve feeling; and that poetry is connected and connects
readers to something that might be called the “real” – are remarkably similar.
I want to conclude by underlining two or three points. First, I am sug-
gesting (to borrow a term from the anthropologists) that we need a “thick”
description of literary history and that statements of poetics from apparently
opposed camps reveal similar descriptions of poetry’s project. In particu-
lar, I have suggested that the apparently opposed poetry camps of the 1980s
reveal in efect a continuing late Romantic understanding of poetry’s purpose,
namely that, however the self and the world are deined, poetry expands or
recasts the borders between self and world, a process seen to require accuracy
of seeing and feeling.
My inal point may seem almost contradictory, although I do not think it is
a contradiction so much as a suggestion that we may have misidentiied where
diferences and similarities lie. I have been suggesting that the rhetoric used
to deine and defend poetry, like poetic practices, shifted over time in relation
to larger cultural changes (including the slippery dynamics of interactions
between literary and other communities and the marketing or visibility of
literary communities) as well as to individual poetic projects. Speciically, in
the 1980s the rhetorics used to defend diferent poetic styles drew on larger cul-
tural debates involving identity politics or political and social representation,
as well as more theoretical analyses of identity formation under late capital-
ism and sometimes less theorized responses to the growth of consumer cul-
ture and new media. A self-consciousness about the efects and implications of
how language was used – that is, about poetic style – thus inlected Language
poetry and lyric poetry written by poets from a range of socioeconomic
backgrounds diferently. At the same time, the debates heard in and between

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various poetry circles helped to sharpen writers’ articulations of their poetics

and led to what might be called cross-fertilization, so that the way poetry was
being written and read did not long remain all one thing or another. Thus,
one might read Moss’s stylistic development as a post-Bernstein strategy, an
Elliptical poet’s uses of disjunction as a resource and not a theorized choice,
as well as in light of redeinitions of African American literary practices. One
might equally hear Bernstein’s qualiications of his early and deiant diiculty
as an awareness brought to light by work like Moss’s of how cultural practices
inform readers’ and writers’ ears as well as in light of what one might call the
mainstreaming of the stylistic features of Language poetry. That is, we may
read the styles of poems written in the 1980s as contextualized by conversa-
tions between writers as well as by the often internalized, if shifting, responses
of larger reading communities. What matters is both text and context. In
other words, deining poetic camps per se may not be all that easy or useful a
project for critics. Camps are by deinition temporary places.

Notes
1. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 10–15.
2. Donald Hall (ed.), Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1982), pp. 470–71, 476, 480. This collection will be cited in the text as CFP.
3. Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), p. 250; Christopher Beach, ABC of Inluence: Ezra Pound and the
Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), p. 241. My Way will be cited in the text as MW.
4. Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary
America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
5. Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell, The Reaper Essays (Brownsville, Ore.:
Story Line, 1996), p. 2.
6. Thylias Moss, Hosiery Seams on a Bowleged Woman (Cleveland, Ohio:
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1983); Thylias Moss, Pyramid of Bone
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Thylias Moss, At Redbones
(Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1990). Pyramid of
Bone will be cited in the text as PB.
7. Review of Pyramid of Bone by Thylias Moss, Publishers Weekly, January 20, 1989,
p. 143; review of Pyramid of Bone by Thylias Moss, Virginia Quarterly Review 65
(1989), p. 100.
8. Harryette Mullen, “Poetry and Identity,” in Mark Wallace and Steven Marks
(eds.), Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s: Telling It Slant (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2002), pp. 27–31, 28–29.

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 L is a M . S te i nma n

9. Mark Jarman, “The Curse of Discursiveness,” Hudson Review 45 (1992), pp.

158–66, 163–65.
10. Thylias Moss, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (New York: Persea,
1991), p. 63; Jarman, “The Curse of Discursiveness,” pp. 164–65.
11. Moss, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, p. 64.
12. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), p. 138.
13. Thylias Moss, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (New York: Avon, 1998), p. 9. This collec-
tion will be cited in the text as TSB.
14. Alvin Aubert, review of Hosiery Seams on a Bowleged Woman by Thylias Moss,
Epoch 36 (1987), pp. 91–94, 92.
15. Roger Gilbert, “Awash with Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry,”
Contemporary Literature 42 (2001), pp. 238–69, 238; Richard Wilbur, The Poems of
Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 65.
16. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (1986; Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 396. This collection will be cited in
the text as CD.
17. Moss, At Redbones, back cover.
18. Jorie Graham (ed.), The Best American Poetry 1990 (New York: Collier, 1990), p.
261; Sean Thomas Dougherty, “Interview: Thylias Moss,” Onthebus 4–5 (1992),
pp. 296–301, 297.
19. Daugherty, “Interview,” p. 299.
20. Alvin Aubert, “Bountiful Tension,” American Book Review 13 (1992), p. 29.
21. Stephen Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters & Commentary 11 (1999),
pp. 45–55, 46.
22. Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” p. 46.
23. Moss, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, pp. 63–67; Thylias Moss,
Small Congregations (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1993), pp. 43–44.
24. Kimberly W. Benston, “Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American
Poetry,” in Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond (eds.), Afro-American
Literary Study in the 1990s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp.
164–93, 182–83.
25. Charles Bernstein, Republics of Reality: 1975–1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon,
2000).
26. Susan M. Schultz, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American
Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), pp. 199–200.
27. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
28. Bernstein, Republics of Reality, p. 17.
29. Paul Quinn, “Bernstein’s Republics: The Horizon of Language” (2000),
http://epc.bufalo.edu/authors/bernstein/reviews/pn-quinn.html.
30. Shetley, After the Death of Poetry, p. 151.
31. Charles Bernstein, The Nude Formalism (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1989).

1046
 American Poetry of the 1980s

32. Charles Bernstein, Girly Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2006), p. 7.
33. Bernstein, Republics of Reality, p. 21.
34. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992), p. 4.
35. Ethan Paquin, review of Republics of Reality by Charles Bernstein, Boston
Review 26:2 (2001), http://epc.bufalo.edu/authors/bernstein/reviews
/bostonreview.html; R. D. Pohl, “A Strong Focus on the Language,” http://epc
.bufalo.edu/authors/bernstein/books/republics.html; Quinn, “Bernstein’s
Republics.”
36. Bernstein, A Poetics, pp. 75, 77.
37. Beach, ABC of Inluence, p. 248.
38. Bernstein, Republics of Reality, p. 232; Quinn, “Bernstein’s Republics.”
39. Charles Bernstein, The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987), pp. 35–36.
40. Bernstein, The Sophist, p. 36.
41. Bernstein, Girly Man, p. 10.

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 Chapter 46
Black and Blues Conigurations: Contemporary
African American Poetics
W a lton M u y u m ba

For much of the twentieth century, critics, scholars, writers, and readers often
set American literature’s parameters to exclude African American literary art-
ists. For much of that century, African American writers produced art designed
to represent and airm black humanity as part of a larger, unscripted, mul-
tilateral efort to win citizenship and political, sociocultural, and economic
equality for all black Americans. Along the way, African American writers,
critics, and scholars began theorizing and deining the aesthetic practices and
critical techniques used in generating black literary art. A large portion of the
theorizing and deining was drawn from the body of African American expres-
sive practices. Whether considering Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropologically
driven essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” or Hortense Spillers’s
dynamic deconstruction of American English’s gendered grammatical struc-
tures, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” one inds African American artists and
critics demonstrating how black aesthetics reinvent forms and genres while
expressing America’s sociopolitical realities.1
The tradition’s wide array of poetic voices and approaches has forced
poetry critics and scholars to develop various interpretive modes. Although
the African American literary tradition has its impetus in earlier poets such
as Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, George Boyer Vashon, and Benjamin
Banneker, not until the mid-twentieth century did critics begin reading black
poets as, say, literary modernists, rather than walling them within racialized
or sociological categories. Gwendolyn Brooks’s and Robert Hayden’s poems
widened the possible formal and intellectual lanes African American poets
could traverse. Space emerged for Bob Kaufman and Ted Joans, urban and
urbane Surrealists; Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti, political poets and
Black Arts theorists; Jay Wright, Audre Lorde, and Carl Phillips, modernist
antiessentialists; and Sherley Anne Williams and Yusef Komunyakaa, blues-
idiom experimentalists. During the twentieth century’s second half, poets as
diverse as Melvin Tolson, Etheridge Knight, June Jordan, Al Young, Ai, Toi

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 Black and Blues Conigurations

Derricotte, Thylias Moss, Cornelius Eady, Elizabeth Alexander, and Thomas

Sayers Ellis deined an improvisational modernist poetics that emphasized
African American aesthetics while redescribing America’s literary history.
The story of contemporary African American poetics begins with
Gwendolyn Brooks and her collection A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945.
Brooks’s clearly envisioned poems detail African American lives on Chicago’s
South Side while calling attention to structural racism.2 Brooks is the “queen
of the poetic tableau”; her poems interweave black life in public with the
intimate interior lives of black folks.3 Raised in Chicago, Brooks (1917–2000)
began writing poems as a middle schooler, publishing her earliest eforts in
the Chicago Defender. Although she was a student in integrated educational
environs, Brooks’s literary eforts exhibited her exclusive, close attention to
the speciic practices of African American life. Brooks is a central igure in the
story of “the Indignant Generation.” Made up of black writers who were part
of the massive black population shift from America’s rural south to its urban
north and west, known as the Great Migration (1915–1970), these artists came
of age during the period between 1934 and 1960.
Brooks documented both the Great Depression and the Great Migration
as they lowed on Chicago’s South Side in the inal years of World War II.
Early on, Brooks polished her modernist aesthetic in the house magazines
for the NAACP and the Urban League, the Crisis and Opportunity. Her style
evolved in part from her personality – she was naturally curious and sensi-
tive. Brooks’s participation in an artist/intellectual group that included writ-
ers like Theodore Ward, Fern Gayden, Frank Marshall Davis, and Edward
Bland also enhanced her poetry. Bland, a student of dialectical materialism,
helped Brooks evade racially idealizing the black voices in her poems. Rather
than connecting her characters according to ephemeral self-conscious race
values, Brooks devoted closer attention to the way that the material experi-
ence afected her characters psychologically and emotionally.4
Brooks focuses on lives in kitchenettes, among the street hustlers and
ruined youths, among poor mothers, and in blighted tenement buildings. In
inely tuned poems like “a song in the front yard,” “The Sundays of Satin Legs
Smith,” and “mentors,” Brooks yokes her social observations to her modern-
ist formal arrangements. In “a song in the front yard” Brooks ofers the voice
of a young girl who wants to explore the backyard, alleyway dangers of the
“bad woman” lifestyle: “And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace /
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.”5 “The Sundays of Satin
Legs Smith” is a rambling ballad about a South Side playboy whose “ances-
tors lean against / Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity,” interrupting his

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 W alton Muy umba

hedonist foray through life. Brooks can also turn macabre, as in “mentors,” a
sonnet spoken by a young man whose “best allegiances are to the dead.”6
Among Brooks’s inl uences are Emily Dickinson, John Crowe Ransom,
James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Merrill Moore, Robert Frost, and
Langston Hughes. With all these artists Brooks shares the ability to control
structure tightly, present detail precisely, and highlight the pleasures of the
English language.7 Although these literary ancestors all ofered Brooks mod-
els for using older forms in new ways, it’s Hughes who presents a model for
Brooks’s desire to express black experience through the absorption of blues-
idiom music and African American vernacular speech into modern lyrical
forms. In fact, Brooks’s sense of the blues is pervasive throughout this col-
lection. The collection even boasts a blues poem dressed as a ballad, “Queen
of the Blues,” Brooks’s homage to the spirits of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
Although Hughes’s blues lyrics did not inl uence Brooks’s poems formally, she
did want A Street in Bronzeville to illustrate the poetics of Chicago’s ordinary
black working people, as Hughes had done for Harlemites, Washingtonians,
and Kansans.
One of Robert Hayden’s strongest early poems, “Middle Passage,” was irst
published in the journal Phylon in 1945. “Middle Passage” is a poetic dramatiza-
tion of the traumatic journey of African slaves across the Atlantic. The poem’s
formal movement and multivocal sound evokes a narrative of African victory:
it tells the story of Joseph Cinque’s seaborne slave revolt. Drawing on biblical
narratives, looping funereal black wailing throughout, and riing on historical
evidence, Hayden formed an antiphonal exchange between the voices of the
Christian slavers and the rebellious Africans. The poem’s speaker shepherds
readers through the narrative, pointing out signiicant historical details with
the refrain “to lower stubbornly.” Stubborn lowering was the new fate of the
descendants of the stolen tribe, a new anchor for black identity. Hayden’s mas-
terpiece also marks his awareness of black artists and intellectuals’ precarious
cultural position at midcentury; they, too, were trying to lower stubbornly in
a place without mentoring or succor.8
Brooks and Hayden did not receive extensive literary mentoring from
established poets. Both poets believed that African American history and
culture were inextinguishable artistic founts able to instruct and advance
their literary works. During the 1940s, those reservoirs fed a new revolution-
ary African American music: bebop. Bebop is special within the context of
American arts and, speciically, African American aesthetics because the black
musicians who developed it presented ways of taking up various modernist
traditions (visual art, dance, literary arts, and music), revising and reorienting

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their elements improvisationally. While Brooks and Hayden had crafted their
poetics with their ears attuned to the innovations of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey,
Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington, the black poets com-
ing of age in postwar America created a new poetics that corresponded with
Thelonious Monk’s, Dizzy Gillespie’s, and Charlie Parker’s inventions.
Parker, Gillespie, and Monk, along with Coleman Hawkins and Max Roach,
theorized progressive musical concepts that emerged both from inherited
American and European musical traditions and from the conditions of urban
African American life during the 1940s. Developed in a range of locations
from Kansas City dance halls to Harlem jam session parlors like Minton’s
Playhouse, bebop accentuated solo improvisation during group performance.
Jam sessions featured house rhythm sections (piano, bass, and drums) that cre-
ated improvisational space by layering generous chord sequences over angu-
lar, second-line bomb beats and pedal point or strutting bass lines.
The music’s accelerated pace made the “cutting sessions” – battles that
anchored the jamming by pitting soloists against each other – seem primal.
Emulating its mother tongue, the blues, bebop is a matrix, adapting other
styles (New Orleans syncopation, Ellingtonia, southwestern swing, rags,
gospel, Broadway show tunes, popular songs, and classical music) through
melodic quotation or technical integration. Although not a racially exclusive
music, bebop’s politically engaged avant-garde responded to the terrible real-
ities of America’s racial history by producing an aesthetic practice meant to
stave of eforts by the mainstream, white-controlled music industry to co-opt
and contain revolutionary black music.9
The most signiicant poets bridging New Negro/Harlem Renaissance mod-
ernist poetics and midcentury high modernism, Langston Hughes and Melvin
Tolson, are also the key connectors between the high modernists and the
experimental poets. Tolson is especially important because his late collections,
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery (1965), demonstrate
his modernist revision of the canto and the epic poetic forms; allusive, impro-
visational sensibility; and scholarly renderings of African diasporic history.10
The African American poets who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as the literary
avant-garde not only referenced black music in their works but also shaped
their poems through bebop.11 For example, the poet Bob Kaufman followed
Hughes’s and Tolson’s concepts, adopting blues-idiom music as an inspira-
tion and bebop as an aesthetic and poetic model for his own New American
poetics.
Bebop’s revolutionary impulse informed Bob Kaufman’s lineation and
phrasing, and, like Lester Young or Charlie Parker, he grouped images or

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linked them as if arranging an improvised solo around a set of sonic licks or

rifs. In the middle of “Walking Parker Home,” for example, Kaufman works
a lyrical groove as he writes to join his opening (“Sweet beats of jazz impaled
on slivers of wind”) and closing (that ierce dying of humans consumed / In
raging ires of Love) sound images together:
New York altar city/ black tears / secret disciples
Culture gods / mob sounds / visions of spikes
Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions
Heroin nights of birth / and soaring / over boppy new ground.
Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding12
Kaufman’s poem expands on Hughes’s imagist inclination, but it veers sharply
from the solid modernist elements of Hayden’s or Brooks’s poetry. Kaufman’s
images compound, edging his bebop-inlected poetics into avant-garde
experimentation.
European, Latin American, and Caribbean Popular Front–associated
artistic radicals such as Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Nicolas
Guillén, Federico García Lorca, and Tristan Tzara inspired Kaufman to create
a cosmopolitan, lyrical poetics that emerged from black American experiences
but wasn’t bound by racial categorization. Although he was too young to have
participated in the Popular Front, Kaufman was attracted politically and aes-
thetically to the movement’s continual, simultaneous address of American
culture’s “high / low” products – “popular / literary” genres, folk idioms/
mass consumed forms, and cross-pollinated media and genres.13 Kaufman
was also attentive to the Popular Front’s concerted focus on racial and ethnic
identities.
Although the poet and jazz critic Amiri Baraka was born nine years after
Kaufman, he shares with the older poet similar inl uences (William Carlos
Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Langston Hughes) and literary communities
(Beats and Black Mountain poets). In his musicological works Blues People and
Black Music, Baraka argues that bebop and avant-garde jazz are rooted in the
African American experiential continuum but still ofer listeners and other art-
ists routes toward surreal, experimental, modern, and revolutionary practices.
Additionally, Baraka’s and Kaufman’s lyrical innovations helped initiate the
Black Arts Movement (BAM). Baraka’s diverse literary skill set – he was also
a top-shelf essayist and playwright – made him, arguably, the most signiicant
BAM artist/theorist and an essential igure in twentieth-century American
literature.

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Across his irst three collections, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961),
The Dead Lecturer (1964), and Black Magic (1969), Baraka grapples with the prob-
lems of identity, identity-in-transition, and blackness. In early poems such as “In
Memory of Radio” and “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today,” Baraka
turns to the representative heroes of his youth for guidance, the radio and literary
heroes who might save him from falling prey to postwar, middlebrow/middle-
class American life. Baraka’s lineation in these poems shifts between long and
short phrases, with some ideas broken and drifting down and across the page. In
“Look for You,” for example, Baraka shoves some stanzas hard against the right
margin in order to create internal asides to the ongoing work:
Descriptions of celibate parties
Torn trousers: Great Poets dying
with their strophes on. & me
incapable of a simple straightforward
anger.14
In the same poem, Baraka breaks an image-idea mid-phrase – “old envious
blues feeling / ticking like a big cobblestone clock” – emphasizing the ticking
measurements of the clock while referencing a surreality similar to Kaufman’s.
Baraka eventually sheds this questioning pose and the desire for straightfor-
ward anger in favor of presenting his “self ” as lyrical invention – the poet
becomes the heroic interrogator of American ideals. He learns inally “what a
poem is) / A / turning away” (BT, p. 41).
As Baraka turned away from his associations with white American poets
and their literary movements, he turned toward jazz’s improvisational prac-
tices and soul music’s radical spirituality in order to narrate his changes. The
Dead Lecturer is a dramatic testament to these transitions. While he does not
eschew the technical inl uence of his Beat and Black Mountain contemporar-
ies, Baraka does begin ofering poetic resolutions for his philosophical changes.
In “The Liar,” Baraka ponders these transitions and the possibility of identii-
cation through self-naming. Although calling attention to his own fears about
change and self-realization, the speaker relinquishes his “lesh” in search of
his spiritual self. As the speaker changes, so does the poem. This transition
plays out publicly and on the page, the poem disintegrating down the page
toward the speaker’s re-collected inal thoughts: “When they say, ‘It is Roi /
who is dead?’ I wonder / who will they mean?”15 The “Roi” mentioned here is
some version of Le Roi Jones – the name the poet relinquished when he tran-
sitioned away from liberalism toward the leftist/radical black nationalism and

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the moniker Imamu Amiri Baraka. Rather than essentializing Le Roi, Baraka
announces that lesh or skin cannot count outside of its contextualization,
that the improvisations of the soul begin a process of continuously othering
the self.
Baraka’s poetic concept of othering the self makes improvisation a meta-
phor for both intellectual work and African American identity. Baraka’s “con-
tinual alteration,” his changing sameness, is what has made his theory of liter-
ary improvisation an inl uential element of contemporary criticism of African
American culture from avant-garde jazz to hip-hop. For Baraka, black music
is held together by long-standing African sensibilities that survived the middle
passage, slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow to form gospel, blues, ragtime,
jazz, bebop, free jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul. Even as we parse black
music into separate styles with difering performance ideals, Baraka argues
that the music’s improvisational imperative connects these styles while main-
taining the core of African American aesthetics. Thus, at the core of African
American identity – blackness – is a need to change and shift while remaining
wedded to foundational African sensibilities.16 As the titles of his collections
suggest, Baraka’s transitions are attempts to kill of the old selves in favor of
newer, improvised selves. It is a progression, if you will, that moves toward a
“blacker” American sensibility.
Baraka’s poems ofered initial ideas for the founding principles of the BAM.
In the mid-1960s, when “black power” became the rallying cry among some
young, radical intellectual participants in the civil rights movement, they had
begun constructing a nationalist ideology. By developing a uniied, conscious
black proletariat – a black nation – the argument went, American apartheid
could be ended forcefully. The artists among the intellectuals in the Black
Power Movement argued that the best route for creating this collective black
pride was through the arts, most notably music and poetry.
In the early 1950s, like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton, Baraka was
an undergraduate at Howard University. While there, Baraka studied with
Sterling Brown, the author of the powerful poetry collection Southern Road
(1932). Brown inl uenced Baraka to think seriously about mining the blues
and jazz for both aesthetic and political concepts. The riches of these explora-
tions are present in Baraka’s sociomusicological study Blues People (1963) and
his essay collection on avant-garde jazz, Black Music (1968). Baraka explains
African American musical tradition as the expression of African American
experience. Blues-idiom music communicates African Americans’ history of
oppression and marginality in the West; that music alters the way Western
history is narrated, once it’s invoked as a frame of reference.17 Embedded in

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the various blues-idiom styles, especially in bebop, are constituent elements

of African American nonconformist social protest.18 The best jazz criticism,
Baraka maintains, will illustrate that the music is as much the emotional
expression of a culture as it is a technical style of music making. Baraka’s
objective is to bring black cultural tools to bear on the criticism of black art –
if white critics are to continue writing about jazz or any other black art, they
must know African American history and culture and incorporate black cul-
tural theories into their critical vernaculars and practices.19
Baraka’s arguments about black music are useful for understanding the
objectives of Black Arts poetry. Critics ought to read the poems in relation to
the cultural systems that Black Arts poets negotiate. But Black Arts theorists
like Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Sarah Fabio, Hoyt Fuller, and Don L. Lee
(Haki Madhubuti) wanted even more: they wanted to deine a black aesthetic
that was separate, exclusive from mainstream American culture, and unique to
the African American condition and political agenda. Although the aforemen-
tioned writers used critical essays to crystallize and disseminate the principles
of the black aesthetic, it was Baraka’s poem “Black Art” that initially profered
the tenets. Beginning with images – “Poems are bullshit unless they are /
teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step” – Baraka launches a poetic assault
against both the political and the literary status quo (BT, p. 142). Constructed
from long thoughts enjambed so as to create a chant-like efect when recited,
Baraka’s poem layers combative, violent, surreal scenes, like Charlie Parker’s
twittering blues quotations in the midst of an improvised solo, or like John
Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” improvisational technique. At the poem’s end,
Baraka calls for a “Black World” created lyrically and spoken by all black peo-
ple “Silently / or LOUD” (BT, p. 143). While the ideological desire and ethic
meet the demands of the black aesthetic, Baraka’s formal choices illustrate his
collaboration with modernist and Black Mountain techniques rather than an
alienation from them.20
One of the most compelling and pervasive innovations of the BAM is the
“Coltrane poem.”21 As more poets came to view poetry and jazz combined
as a powerful artistic weapon, they searched for heroic voices and igures to
design their armaments around. If poets were to lead the assembly of black
consciousness, they believed that formal and typographical evocations of
Coltrane’s sound and ethos were crucial to this community building. Baraka
was one of Coltrane’s most ardent and signiicant critics. His close listening
led him to argue that Coltrane embodied both the emergence of new black
expressive possibilities and the complete eradication of white thinking, white
art. Coltrane’s music communicated the nonverbal, musical theses of Black

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Arts ideology. One urgent, strident example of this kind of writing is Sonia
Sanchez’s “a/coltrane/poem.”
Born in 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sonia Sanchez was reared in
Harlem. Her cultural and political instruction began there, watching African
American activists and cultural workers such as Jean Hudson, a curator at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Lewis Micheaux, owner and
operator of the National Memorial African Bookstore (1933–1975); and John
Henrik Clarke, the renowned historian and pioneer of black studies. These
Harlem luminaries provided Sanchez with models for merging aesthetic prac-
tices with collective community action.
Across her earliest collections, Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People
(1970), Love Poems (1973), and A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973),
Sanchez displays a dexterous use of both free verse inventions and the
strictures of haiku. Writing about love and politics, these poems are infused
with blues thinking and blues-idiom musicality. As a young reader, Sanchez
took in Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Margaret
Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks. A student of Louise Bogan’s at New
York University, Sanchez absorbed modernist formal ideals. Among those
styles, E. E. Cummings’s lineation, lowercase typography, and meander-
ing formal arrangements asserted the most inl uence on Sanchez’s early
poems like “homecoming” and “for our lady.” At the end of We a BaddDDD
People she urges these technical elements into her crafting of “a/coltrane/
poem.”
For Sanchez, Coltrane’s sound and musical approach is best represented
by lines that power down the page as if they are musical sounds descending
a notational scale. The speaker hears in the saxophonist’s music the murder
and massacre of “all blk/musicians. planned / in advance.” Coltrane clears
space for the New Thing – both experimental black music and Sanchez as an
avant-garde, revolutionary black female poet represent the new here. Sanchez
contracts words to single letters or expands words by several letters through-
out the poem, attempting simultaneous representation of the black vernacu-
lar voice, the voice of the political consciousness, and Coltrane’s multivocal
soloing:
. . . u blew away our passsst
and showed us our futureeeeee
screech screech screeeeech screeech
a/love/supreme, alovesupreme a lovesupreme.
A LOVE SUPREME
scrEEEccCHHHHH screeeeEEECHHHHHHH22

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Late in the poem Sanchez links Coltrane’s “SOLO / SOUND OF YO / FIGHT

IS MY FIGHT / SAXOPHONE” to African American freedom. Coltrane’s
screeching and screaming meant to communicate African Americans’ righ-
teous indignation and demands for full citizenship.23 Sanchez’s poem converses
with and references poetic connections to other Black Arts Coltrane poems,
like A. B. Spellman’s “Did John’s Music Kill Him?” and Haki Madhubuti’s
“Don’t Cry, Scream.”
While Black Arts poets used the Coltrane poem to demonstrate their bona
ides, many African American poets who were not strict adherents to the Black
Arts ideology still turned to Coltrane for his modernist artistic proile. Take
Michael Harper’s poems “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” (a poem also inspired
by Coltrane’s composition “A Love Supreme”) and “Brother John,” both
from the collection Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970). Born in Brooklyn in 1938,
Harper spent his teenage years in Los Angeles; his poems draw together New
York bebop heat and Los Angeles’ cool modernism. Harper’s conception of
Coltrane’s import turns away from sonic homage in favor of an elegant, for-
malized rendering of the musician’s art. In the inal stanza of “Brother John,”
Harper catalogues a set of interpretive angles on the line “I’m a black man”:
I’m a black man; I am;
Black; I am; I’m a black
Man; I am; I am;
I’m a black man;
I’m a black man;
I am; I’m a black man;
I am:24
Using semicolons to delineate the series of ideas he inds within the open-
ing statement of identiication, Harper plays through the concept in a fash-
ion similar to Coltrane’s style of stating a musical theme at the beginning
of a solo, chopping the rif into bits, examining each claim thoroughly, and
rebuilding the idea as an open, ever-evolving notion. Harper works this vein
again in the penultimate stanza of “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” by mimicking
Coltrane’s habit of building call and response into his solos, one rif respond-
ing to another lick’s call: “why you so sweet? / cause I am / why you so black? /
cause I am / a love supreme, a love supreme.”25
Harper’s controlled, brief, sharp lineation and sculpted free verse forms in
Dear John, Dear Coltrane display his extension of the Brooks-Hayden-Tolson
poetic lineage. By the early 1970s however, after the historic Black Arts writers’
conferences at Fisk University (1966 and 1967), Brooks had reshaped her aes-
thetic to align with Black Arts criteria; Melvin Tolson had died sympathizing

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with some elements of the younger poets’ agenda, but without adjusting his
literary subjects or personal poetics in alignment with the BAM; and Robert
Hayden – recognized as a signiicant black poet but chastised for his lack of
sympathy with Black Power/Black Arts theories – held fast to his personal
modernism, refusing to politicize it explicitly. And yet it is important to
acknowledge that Hayden’s interpretations of African American experiences
were politically oriented, even though his formal arrangements were not.
Take, for example, Hayden’s participation in Dudley Randall’s collection
For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1969), which arose from
those Fisk conferences. Hayden’s contribution, the poem “El-Hajj Malik
El-Shabazz,” is a four-section, elegiac poem about Malcolm X. Each move-
ment has ive parts, some parts as short as one line. In the third movement,
for instance, Hayden exclaims Malcolm’s rise in the Nation of Islam and as a
national igure with the opening greeting “Asalam alaikum!” followed by two
stanzas; an individual line; and an ending, unrhymed couplet.26 Although the
lines and stanzas are not governed by any speciic metrics or rhyme scheme,
Hayden is still able to plot Malcolm’s character development through each
instance, across the four movements.
While the poet illustrates awareness of both Malcolm X’s cultural signii-
cance and African America’s political reality, he refuses hagiography. Instead,
Hayden argues that when Malcolm became “his people’s anger,” his iconic
status ushered in faulty intelligence and faith, both. Hayden explains that,
“Rejecting Ahab, he was of Ahab’s tribe”27; rejecting white racist constructs
for black racist ones made Malcolm (and his tribe) into the kind of racist he
battled to defeat.28 Ahab, here, is both the biblical king and Herman Melville’s
questing captain. But Hayden also sees some semblance between Malcolm X
and the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas. All three
literary characters resound in the poem’s epigraph, “O masks and metamorpho-
ses of Ahab, Native Son.”29 At the third section’s ending, when Hayden exhorts,
“Strike through the mask!” he’s commanding his Black Arts contemporaries
to “look beyond a dogma that only transposed racial terms within an inher-
ently oppressive ideological formulation.”30 In fact, the poem’s inal move-
ment might best be read as Malcolm’s unmasking. Those inal stanzas describe
Malcolm on the hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, on the road to his inal
conversion to Sunni Islam, en route to becoming the pilgrim Malik. Hayden
envisions not an icon but rather a man bowing before a raceless Allah, in
the process of self-revision and self-renewal, who, in that moment, became
“much more than there was time for him to be.”31

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And yet, on the surface, it may be diicult to distinguish between Hayden’s

personal poetics and Black Arts aesthetics. In his mission statement, “The
Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal exclaims that the movement “eschews
‘protest’ literature” in order to speak “directly to Black people.”32 Although
this argument seems to include most African American poets, Neal clariies
his directive, stating that this black aesthetic emerges from both the African
American cultural tradition and the “useable elements of Third World cul-
ture”; charging through Third World culture and black American/diasporic
experiences, the Black Arts poet inds herself addressing the demand “for a
more spiritual world.”33 Once she’s entered this realm of awareness, the poet
will be creating and extending the movement’s ethical tenets. Neal explains,
inally, that “the Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aes-
thetics are one.”34
Stephen Henderson’s anthology, Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972),
illustrates in its long introduction how postwar black poetics is the merger
of African American musical traditions and oral expressive practices such as
naming, interpolating blues-idiom rhythms, freestyle rhyme schemes, evok-
ing experience through surreal image making, developing metaphysical ideas,
signifying, coupling blues feelings with references to black musical igures,
name checking or implying song titles, adapting song forms to lyrical forms,
and invoking black vernacular tonalities in lyric forms to create Black Arts
poetry.35 Both Neal’s manifesto and Henderson’s critique were developed to
guide poets (and other artists) toward deining the essence of black identity/
experience. Once the Black Arts establishment had grounded blackness aes-
thetically and metaphysically, then they could describe a speciic black audi-
ence whose members could identify themselves through poems emerging
from their cultural traditions and, thus, could identify themselves as a con-
scious collective, spiritually and politically.
One of the places readers can see the aesthetic at work is in Gwendolyn
Brooks’s collection In the Mecca (1967). The collection announced Brooks’s
turn to Black Arts poetics and her departure from the Harper and Row pub-
lishing house. Subsequently, Brooks began producing books solely through
African American publishers, including Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press.
Brooks’s style changed, but her clearest goals never did: “Brooks never wrote
directly or explicitly for a white audience. She was always concerned to repre-
sent, to speak to, and to sanctify Black life as she knew it.”36 “In the Mecca,”
the collection’s eponymous, epic poem, is about African American families
living in the apartment complex called the Mecca, at 34th and State Streets on

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Chicago’s South Side. Brooks uses the poem to demystify sociological and cul-
tural claims made against African Americans. In so doing, the poet also “issues
a prophetic call for radical reader-response and responsibility – even across the
very lines of race and culture, time and place.”37 Brooks’s blues-idiom speaker
delineates these lines, illustrating how oppressive systems operate on inhabit-
ants while naming routes to liberation. The speaker signals modernist tech-
niques while developing a speciic African American referential network.
With “In the Mecca” Brooks modeled a lyric mode that younger poets like
Audre Lorde, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, Jayne Cortez, Jay Wright, and
Lucille Clifton could retroit for their own personal poetics. This group of
poets illustrate that the BAM has at least two main waterways. One branch, the
Baraka-Sanchez-Madhubuti stream, ofers the strictest articulation of Black
Arts poetics, while the other branch, the Reed-Cortez-Wright-Clifton rivulet,
extends Brooks’s combination into various aesthetics tributaries rather than
adhering to Neal’s and Henderson’s shorelines.38
Although most often read as a postmodern novelist and passionate cultural
critic, Ishmael Reed became prominent when his novel Mumbo Jumbo and his
poetry collection Conjure were both inalists for 1973 National Book Awards.
Like Baraka and Kaufman before him, Reed’s early poems are drawn from
American popular culture, African American cultural particulars, and various
mythological systems. Reed’s experimentation developed in part through his
time in the Umbra Poets Collective, which included writers and musicians
such as Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, David Henderson, Archie Shepp, Lorenzo
Thomas, and Askia Touré. In those workshops, Reed shaped poems that arose
from what Aldon Nielsen calls the “Africanity of international modernism.”39
In “I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Reed retells an ancient Egyptian
myth of divine conl ict as a wild West showdown. Invoking Osiris, Horus,
Set, and Isis, Reed plots his narrative of chaos and cultural regeneration as
an exile’s return. Reed’s poetics are born of Western poetic traditions and
textual representations of African American countercultural aesthetics. For
instance, when Sonny Rollins appears in “I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,”
he’s an avatar of Egyptian/West African spiritual practices, vodun, gnosti-
cism, and Western mythology simultaneously. Here, “Ra” references both the
Egyptian sun god and the time- and space-traveling, avant-garde composer
Sun Ra.40 However, for all his polytheistic invocations, the base elements of
Reed’s blues-idiom aesthetic are speciically American.
Reed’s prose poems “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” and “Neo-HooDoo
Aesthetic” detail this American amalgam as well as counterclaims to the
Baraka-Sanchez aesthetic and Larry Neal’s deinition of the BAM. Rather

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than forwarding the Black Arts determination of a politically conscious, col-

lected black public, Reed translates African spiritual life into speciic African
American practices such as dance – “the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo.”41
“Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.
You can bring your own creative ideas to Neo-HooDoo. Charlie ‘Yardbird
(Thoth)’ Parker is an example of the Neo-HooDoo artist as an innovator and
improviser” (IRC, p. 27). For Reed, the ibis-faced Egyptian god has a cognate
in Parker and his trilling bebop progressions – “Neo-HooDoo is a Church
inding its lyrics” (IRC, p. 32). If the incantatory “I am a Cowboy in the Boat
of Ra” announces the spirit’s return, then “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” states
the agenda: “Almost 100 years ago HooDoo was forced to say / Goodbye
to America. Now HooDoo is / back as Neo-HooDoo / You can’t keep a good
church down!” (IRC, p. 33).
Reed’s poetic practice allows African Americans to position themselves
as “cowboys” and “priests” in the tradition. As “Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic”
instructs, “The proportions of ingredients used depend upon the cook!” (IRC, p. 34).
Reed ampliies this notion at the beginning of “The Reactionary Poet,” from
A Secretary to the Spirits (1978). Exclaiming, “If you are a revolutionary / Then
I must be a reactionary,” Reed’s speaker pushes against the strictures of a so-
called revolutionary art:

Enchantment will be found

Expendable, charm, a
Luxury
Love and kisses
A crime against the state
Duke Ellington will be
Ordered to write more marches
“For the people,” naturally. (IRC, pp. 197–98)

For the speaker, the Black Arts revolution is unappealing: “If you are what’s
coming / I must be what’s going”; his departure, his turn to hoodoo lyric, will
happen on a sauntering steamboat because, he tells us, “I likes to take it real
slow” (IRC, pp. 197–98). Sardonic and humorous, Reed eschews punctuation,
allowing the chain of thoughts to become a long chant, pulsing in the inal
couplets, stalled by the end (near) rhymes. Reed’s mocking code switch into
southern dialect (“likes”) dramatizes his desire for the past’s pleasures rather
than the regulations of the revolutionary future.
Like Reed, Jay Wright challenges essentialist conceptions of African
American literary expression by rereading African American intellectual and

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spiritual traditions as a complex mixture of sources without foundation. One

version of this antiessentialist vision appears in Wright’s second collection,
The Homecoming Singer (1971), in “The End of an Ethnic Dream.” After taking
in a musical performance, the jazz bassist at the poem’s center notes that his
ingers were too soft “to rattle / rafters in second-rate halls. / The harmo-
nies I could never learn / stick in Ayler’s screams. / An African chant chokes
us. My image shot.”42 Here the saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler is a
sign for revolutionary Black Arts. After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, Ayler
became the torchbearer for the free/avant-garde jazz sometimes called the
New Thing. The apogee of black improvisational music, Ayler’s angular sound
recalled Coltrane’s honking, screeching multitonality (think of Sanchez’s ear-
lier typographical representation of the Coltrane sound) and was said to bring
forth African ancestral spirits. The speaker’s soft sound and his inability to rise
into Ayler’s screaming ruins his reputation as a participant on the avant-garde
music scene: “My image shot.” But just as signiicant is the claim that the
music’s Africanity chokes the listeners.
Unable to perform, the bassist takes an imaginative l ight over New York
City’s Hudson River. The poem takes its shape from the l ight – shifting from
the opening eight-line stanza to three consecutive three- and two-line stanzas,
each one darting away from a speciic meter or lineation. It is possible to read
this opening musically, as a kind of eight-measure statement, deconstructed
improvisationally in the next eight bars. Interestingly, this attempt at musi-
cality ends the speaker’s “ethnic dream.” Here, blackness, Africanness, and
African Americanness do not merge into a seamless ethnic identity. Rather, the
speaker’s turn away from performing such completion allows him to “shoot
of / every day to new horizons.” At the poem’s opening, the speaker calls
his bass a “ine piece of furniture” and attempts to “puncture the blisters”43 in
his brain by smoking cigarettes. When the poem ends, the bass still has not
become a musical instrument, and the speaker’s brain is riddled with sores.
Wright’s poem marks both the failure to accomplish a black/ethnic whole and
the failure to make the mind whole through performance or accomplishment
of the African/avant-garde sound.
We might say that Wright’s subsequent poetry is an attempt to rectify or
redescribe this blistered failure. Part of this efort has included an encompass-
ing knowledge of West African linguistic/cultural systems, speciically Dogon
and Bambara. In the mid-1970s Wright began describing the arc of his ongo-
ing exchange between West African, Western, and African American cultural
traditions; he achieved this transformative mixture by “developing and artic-
ulating a new kind of spiritual vision.”44 For instance, in The Double Invention

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of Komo (1980), Wright lines out a complex Afro-Western poetic interaction

that anticipates wholeness but avoids solidity, instead intricately shifting shape
into more and more expression. Wright claims that his deinition of spiri-
tuality arrives from attention to and reconciliation with what he calls the
African American’s “double / exile.”45 Feeling alienated from both African and
American traditions, Wright’s poetry attempts to announce and airm his
tenuous relation to both. Having no culture to call his own, Michael Manson
explains, Wright turns to the Komo ritual in order to heal his “battered body
with a care for belonging.” So, in Wright’s case, one way of healing the blis-
tered brain and battered body is by producing an improvisational poetry that
is steeped in and that embraces African, Western, and African American tradi-
tions at once.46
Wright’s encompassing poetics, Reed’s neo-hoodooism, and Nielsen’s con-
ception of international modernism’s Africanity help give contexts to Jayne
Cortez’s poetics in performance. Cortez was a major participant in what
Daniel Widener calls “Black Arts West.”47 During the 1960s, performing with
various Los Angeles–based BAM groups, Cortez developed her poetics in the-
ater, dance, and experimental jazz settings. Cortez merged text and music
as “interdictions within American musical and political discourse, as ‘gifts’
designed to prevent America from hearing what it had intended and desired of
black people.”48 A strong example of Cortez’s gift giving is the blues poem for
John Coltrane, “How Long Has Trane Been Gone.” Cortez’s speaker charts
Coltrane’s rise from black music’s deep well, tracing the saxophonist’s route
to becoming a representative igure for black manhood. Sharing poetic traits
with Sanchez and Kaufman, Cortez’s one-hundred-line poem draws together
a Surrealist vision of the black experience with what Tony Bolden calls
Cortez’s revolutionary blues. For instance, when Cortez calls for black people
to hear their experiences and histories in Coltrane’s music, she implores her
audience:

Rip those dead white people of

your walls Black people
black people whose walls
should be a hall
A Black Hall Of Fame
so our children will know
will know & be proud
Proud to say I’m from Parker City – Coltrane City – Ornette City
Pharoah City living on Holiday street next to
James Brown park in the State of Malcolm49

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Building a momentum through internal rhyme and repetitions that cross the
enjambed clauses, Cortez approximates Coltrane’s style of repeating rifs and
creating dialogical runs within his improvised solos. Cortez describes a future
time and place where “our children will know” representative Americans as
black heroes, not Anglo-American ones. Coltrane announces that imminent
tense, participating in both a jazz saxophonist genealogy – Charlie Parker,
Ornette Coleman, and Pharoah Sanders – and the gamut of African American
musical tradition from “[Billie] Holiday street” through “James Brown park,”
out toward a black nation, a separate (physical or psychological) “State of
Malcolm [X].” A secular blues priestess, Cortez blends the Coltrane poem and
the Malcolm X poem into a dynamic whole.50
Just as jazz artists extend blues-idiom concepts by improvising on them, we
can better appreciate Cortez’s achievement, as Tony Bolden explains, by “com-
paring the poet’s artistic method to common practices in blues culture,” from
the black preacher to the blues singer.51 With Scariications (1973) and Mouth on
Paper (1977), Cortez began producing simultaneously poetry collections and
long-play recordings with her improvisational musical group, the Firesplitters.
In her role as blues priestess, Cortez performs on the bridge between African
American and Afro-diasporic poetics.
Writing about Cortez’s recording There It Is (1982) and her poem “I See
Chano Pozo,” from Coagulations (1984), Aldon Nielsen inds the poet express-
ing a sonic history of black Atlantic aesthetic practices. Chano Pozo was a
bongo and conga master who, working with Dizzy Gillespie, helped develop
cu-bop. In Cortez’s poem, Pozo’s igure and sound embody the return of an
African/Caribbean anterior already echoed in the structures of jazz. When
Cortez and her band chant “olé okay / Oye I say / I see Chano Pozo,” they
return to a repeated, percussive internal rhyming similar to the kind in “How
Long Has Trane Been Gone.” However, here, Cortez has grafted Spanish,
English, and African-derived words into an onomatopoetic line that carries the
rhythm of Pozo’s drumming. Additionally, this New World linguistic chain
becomes a “technology of newness” that links “Nicolás Guillén to Langston
Hughes and William Carlos Williams, that brings Chano Pozo together with
Dizzy Gillespie, that Charlie Haden hears in Gonzalo Rubalcaba.”52 These
priestly expansions express African American poetics’ atomic nucleus:
cosmopolitanism.
Malin Pereira suggests that readers think of African American poetic cos-
mopolitanism as a “revisionist universalism” that values the “racial and cul-
tural particulars” of African American–invented forms as expressive of human
experience.53 By the late 1970s, even Baraka, whose poems often chafed against

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Black Arts essentializing even as they promoted it, had recalibrated his literary
and political positions. Practicing his own brand of Third World Marxism,
Baraka produced two demanding, large-scale blues-idiom poems: his Coltrane
biography “Am/Trak” (1979) and his history poem (inspired by the Arthur
Blythe tune of the same title) “In the Tradition” (1980). Baraka’s poems (as
well as those of Cortez, Reed, and Wright) articulate New World black his-
tory as international history and African American aesthetics – speciically
blues-idiom improvisational practices – as the ultimate systems of modern,
international experience.
Although her early collections, Good Times (1969) and Good News about
the Earth (1972), it loosely within the Black Arts intellectual vision, Lucille
Clifton’s poems ofered alternatives to long forms, clearing more routes away
from essentialist thinking and poetics. Clifton captured the spirit and attitude
of the late 1960s and early 1970s using short lyrics presented in fragmented,
epigrammatic style, such as “malcolm” (about Malcolm X), “after kent state,”
and “the meeting after the savior gone: 4/4/68” (about Martin Luther King):

we was going to try and save you but

now i guess you got to save yourselves
(even if you don’t know
who you are
where you been
where you headed54

Her formal idiosyncrasy – sparse punctuation and no capitalization – demon-

strates a willingness to draw from referential systems both within and without
African American literary reservoirs. On one hand, Clifton presents a careful
distillation of Black Arts poetry: the political subject; the direct address of a
black audience; and dropping the copula or using irregular conjugation, thus
producing the black vernacular voice. On the other hand, Clifton’s invocation
of modernist, free verse forms suggests some aesthetic indebtedness to poets
like E. E. Cummings, H.D., and William Carlos Williams. Clifton could be
read productively and provocatively as a cosmopolitan, epic miniaturist.
Clifton has used her family’s speciic story to initiate her cosmopolitan pro-
ject. She claims that “all of our stories become The Story. . . . I am a black
human being, and that is part of The Story.”55 Clifton places this family narra-
tive in and on her body. Clifton’s genealogical poems invoke the blues idiom,
aiding her illuminating black life as human and diverse.56 Clifton’s corpo-
real concentration is an argument for “the special properties of the female
spirit and body,” placing her body and poems in “the long tradition of poets

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mythologizing womanhood.”57 In the untitled poem that begins, “I was born

with twelve ingers,” Clifton explains that she; her mother, Thelma Sayles; and
her irstborn daughter, Sidney, were all “born wearing strange black gloves.”58
However, fears of witchcraft and spell casting led consecutive parental genera-
tions to have the extra digits, these “wonders,” amputated. Yet those “invisible
ingers,” powerful with the “memory of ghosts,” connect, Clifton explains,
“my dead mother my live daughter and me / through our terrible shadowy
hands.”59 The spatial gaps on the page between the three linked subjects are
the invisible ingers.
In another poem about absence and death, “speaking of loss,” Clifton
returns to her inger narrative, extending the myth as an explanation of her
poiesis: “someone has stolen / my parents and hidden my brother. / my extra
ingers are cut away. / i am left with plain hands and / nothing to give you
but poems.”60 Clifton’s terrible shadowy hands are made plain but still deliver
spells through her poetry. During the 1980s, in praise poems such as “poem
in praise of menstruation,” “poem to my uterus,” and “to my last period,”
Clifton’s bodily focus becomes singing for her “body electric” and its aging,
while reaching for the cosmopolitan female ethos, those “animals / beauti-
ful and faithful and ancient / and female and brave.”61 Using the solidity of
her personal and familial narratives, Clifton’s poetics turn away from BAM
notions of a large, amorphous black consciousness/collective.
Whether considering Clifton’s bodily concerns, Brooks’s intimate tour of
Chicago’s black South Side, Hayden’s Malcolm X, or Reed’s avenging cowboy,
the nomadic blues subject speaks the poetic vision and triggers the “cosmo-
politan interplay” among the various cultural streams black poets draw from
in developing their poetic narratives.62 These connected concepts – cosmopol-
itanism and blues subjectivity – are especially useful when taking up African
American poetry at the end of the twentieth century.
When the 1980s opened, African American poets who’d been practicing as
apprentice artists adjacent to but not within the BAM aesthetic rubric began
advancing various black aesthetics. That is, rather than hewing to the BAM
ideologies, poets born during the 1940s and 1950s, like Toi Derricotte, Rita
Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Nathaniel Mackey, began forwarding per-
sonal aesthetics to correspond to their varied experiences of blackness and
American life. A second wave of post–Black Arts poets, including Harryette
Mullen, Cornelius Eady, Carl Phillips, and Elizabeth Alexander, were born in
the 1950s and early 1960s and emerged on the heels of the irst shift. Rather
than advance a totalizing black aesthetic, these poets developed “a multifari-
ous, contingent, non-delimited complex of strategies [for negotiating] gaps or

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conl icts between their artistic goals and the operation of race in the produc-
tion, dissemination, and reception of their writing.”63 Their negotiations of
the gaps and conl icts still relied on their abilities to integrate the blues idiom
into their aesthetic processes.
Dove is a quintessential post-BAM poet: her aesthetic leans on an array of
European inl uences and classical references far away from what she’s called
the BAM’s essentialist ideologies and “poetics of rage.” Her open rejection is
best described in “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream.” Dove contextual-
izes her rebuke with sly references to the BAM’s masculinist, Afrocentric, and
Surrealist tendencies. Approaching the speaker with “lashless eyes” and “ists
clenched,” Lee (Haki Madhubuti) embodies black poetic rage.64 With robed
and beaded women stretching their arms to him and chanting “in wooden
cadences,” Lee begins to declaim within the poem – “ ‘Seven years ago . . .’ ” –
but the speaker cuts him of: “ ‘Those years are gone – / What is there now?’ ”
The speaker’s questioning ignites fury: “He starts to cry; his eyeballs / Burst
into lame” (RDS, p. 12). Dove’s poem is also a deft critique: rather than accept-
ing Lee’s exhortation or inheriting the BAM’s free-form, free verse, free-
improvisational styles, Dove guides the speaker’s irregularly metered lines
into ive quatrains, wresting aesthetic control from one of the BAM’s leading
igures while formalizing her rejection.
But Dove is a learned student of African American poetics, including blues-
idiom poetics. For example, see Dove’s poem “Lightnin’ Blues” from her
Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Thomas and Beulah (1986). The poem recalls
one of Thomas and Beulah’s family trips, a Friday jaunt to the country for
ishing and relaxation. Dove, like an apt student of the tradition, can distill the
blues in a simple line: “On the radio a canary bewailed her luck” (RDS, p. 157).
The poet doesn’t need to conjure like Reed or name-check a black pantheon
like Cortez in order to establish her blues context. The bird calling out her
bad luck announces and initiates the blues. At the poem’s ending, however,
the idiomatic voices coming from the car’s radio have turned “trickster,” as
if devilish blues gods had made sport with their experience: “Turned around,
the car started / meek as a lamb” (RDS, p. 157). Malin Pereira argues that
“Lightnin’ Blues” is an instance of Dove’s negotiating “the racial particular
and the unraced universal.”65
“Lightnin’ Blues” has a cousin in “Canary,” from Grace Notes (1989), a poem
dedicated to Michael S. Harper. Dove displays a BAM revisionist sensibility:
instead of a Coltrane poem, Dove builds a Billie Holiday poem, and she wants
to debunk Holiday mythologies rather than reify them.66 Although listeners
are conditioned to think of Holiday’s “burned voice” and “ruined face” as

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descriptions of the blues, Dove argues that the blues arrive with as “many
shadows as lights.”67 Rather than dwelling in those shadows, angling toward
an ideological deinition of blackness or feminine weakness, Dove faces the
lights in order to speak a cosmopolitan truth about art and freedom: “Fact is,
the invention of women under siege / has been to sharpen love in the service
of myth. / If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”68 Holiday turned blues and bad
luck into art; she played the trickster, feigning fragility as style in order to
communicate her human complexity. In blues-idiom musical expression and
African American history Dove hears classical tonalities; we can ind her chim-
ing these tonalities in collections like Mother Love (1995), in which she rifs on
the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (2000),
in which she works through the civil rights movement.
Yusef Komunyakaa has concocted his own cosmopolitan blues-idiom blend-
ings. Like Dove’s sensibility, Komunyakaa’s aesthetic emerges from his mix-
ture of African American history, Greek mythology, European modernism,
postmodern linguistics, and jazz and blues music, and of his memories of the
Vietnam War. Komunyakaa is indebted to the tradition: three of his earliest
poems are entitled “Mississippi John Hurt,” “Langston Hughes,” and “Blues
Tonality.” Derricotte argues that his layered lyrics interrogate “the most com-
plex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life” in
order to illustrate in “deeper ways what it is to be human.”69
Komunyakaa’s aesthetic turns away from the BAM but refutes the sugges-
tion “that the primary ideal of the artist is to articulate some putative ‘univer-
sal’ that transcends the limits of race into models of cultural homogeneity.”70
In post-BAM poetry, as Komunyakaa demonstrates, blues-idiom markers don’t
need to be represented with the names of musicians or with lexical or formal
arrangements that mimic the blues or improvisation. Komunyakaa’s innova-
tion has been to describe blackness as improvisational rather than as political
loyalty or a pure cultural lineage. Komunyakaa’s poetic improvisations express
the individual mind’s psychological, emotional, and cultural churnings.
Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947, Komunyakaa was coming of age when
exclaiming black beauty and chanting “black power” was in vogue. When
he began his army service in 1968, the decade-long sociopolitical revolu-
tions had forced many young Americans to reevaluate their deinitions of
Americanness. In poems like “Tu Do Street” and “Facing It,” both from Dien
Cai Dau (1988), Komunyakaa shifts between racial and national identities, writ-
ing as a Vietnam War veteran, an American, and an African American. From
these tense, contingent subject positions, Komunyakaa’s poetic vision arises.
He can improvise on these oppositions, eschewing hierarchical arrangements

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in favor of palimpsests. “Tu Do Street,” for instance, is a poem about black sol-
diers entering a Vietnamese bar that white soldiers have claimed as their turf.
In keeping with southern American ways, the white soldiers want to main-
tain racial segregation even at the Far East Asian front. Toggling between his
memories of his southern childhood – “I am a small boy / again in Bogalusa.
White Only / signs & Hank Snow” – and his attempt to order a beer in this
“segregated” bar – “the mama-san / behind the counter acts as if she / can’t
understand, while her eyes / skirt each white face, as Hank Williams / calls
from the psychedelic jukebox” – the speaker layers these moments against
each other, using the two Hanks and country music to improvise a statement
about the ironies of American blackness. Snow and Williams are blues-idiom
white country musicians – they’re both sonic signiiers of segregation and
American music’s biracial (at the least) roots.71
Komunyakaa ampliies the claim at the poem’s end when the speaker
notes how the music and the Vietnamese prostitutes connect these soldiers
intimately and mythologically:
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.72
Komunyakaa’s earlier palimpsest plays out logically as the black and white
soldiers touch and taste each other through shared lovers. Noting the sol-
diers’ “tunneling” among the bar’s back rooms, their merger into “more than
a nation,” the speaker ofers a subtle, deft improvisation on Derek Walcott’s
supposition in “The Schooner Flight”: “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.”73
For Komunyakaa, the Americans soldiers and Vietnamese sex workers repre-
sent more than nation-states. His idea silences the notion that racial essences
identify these participants clearly. There is an orphic quality to the poem’s last
image, drawing our ears to the sound of music, as the poet-speaker searches
for beauty and entertainment in war’s hellish underworld. In “Facing It,”
an equally intense and beautiful poem, Komunyakaa generates a nuanced,
ambivalent response to Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington,
D.C. The polished, black granite walls, engraved with the names of fallen war-
riors, ofer Komunyakaa’s speaker the possibility to “watch himself look,” as
he relects and as his relection blends with the white visitors around him.74

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In “February in Sydney,” Komunyakaa’s looking, relecting, and imagin-

ing blends Bob Kaufman’s Surrealist bebop poetics with metaphysical mod-
ernist statement. Set in Sydney, Australia, the speaker rides a city bus home
after watching Dexter Gordon’s lead performance in the ilm ’Round Midnight
(1981). The speaker hears in bebop humiliation and pain distilled to jubilant art:
“Bud, Prez, Webster, & the Hawk, / their names run together rifs. / Painful
gods jive talk through / bloodstained reeds & shiny brass / where music is
anesthetic.”75 Naming Bud Powell, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Coleman
Hawkins, the speaker generates a musicological pantheon and a sonic history.
Thinking through bebop triggers an “old anger” as the musical memories
merge with the speaker’s recollection of an incident that occurred on his exit
from the movie theater: “Another scene keeps repeating itself: / I emerge
from a dark theater, / passing a woman who grabs her red purse / & hugs it to
her like a heart attack.” No simple emotion rises from this scene; instead the
speaker feels “a loneliness” lingering “like a silver needle” beneath his black
skin as he tries to “feel how it is / to scream for help through a horn.”76 The
speaker’s desire to “scream for help” “is important not for its sound or greater
authenticity but for its model of improvisational self-constitution.”77
Komunyakaa’s “tonal logic” is produced through his alternating accents,
three or four per line, thus lengthening and shortening lines “to mirror the
process of consciousness.”78 Ultimately, Komunyakaa’s musical or poetic
representation of self-relection holds the possibility of unifying the self in
the process of becoming and the self ’s various communities into a useful
whole: “Jazz discovers the emotional mystery behind things; it provides a spir-
itual connection to the land, reconnecting us to places where its forms origi-
nated.”79 In later poems like “Changes; or Reveries at a Window Overlooking a
Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen,” “Palimpsest,”
“Testimony,” and “No Good Blues,” Komunyakaa has designed an array of
original formal structures for presenting blues-idiom improvisation as the
spiritual link between individual consciousness and group reconnection.
Nathaniel Mackey has explained that post-bebop jazz has inspired his poet-
ics.80 Mackey has developed an improvisational literary aesthetic that even he
admits could be called “experimental, avant-garde, vanguard or diicult.”81 It
derives from the “intersection of the African American vernacular and Euro-
American ‘open form’ poetics,” making him the inheritor of Baraka, Robert
Creeley, Robert Duncan, Clarence Major, Charles Olson, Wilson Harris, and
Jay Wright. Like Wright, Mackey has been exploring Dogon culture, in works
such as his serial poem Song of the Andoumboulou. Mackey also has been delin-
eating the conl uence of cultures in his second ongoing poem, “Mu.”82 Of

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these two extended poetic works, Mackey explains, “the two now under-
stood as two and the same, each the other’s understudy. Each is the other,
each is both, announcedly so.”83 Both works are generated from Mackey’s
listening to the Dogon funeral dirge “Song of the Andoumboulou” and Don
Cherry’s “Mu”– the intersection of West African song and African American
experimental jazz.
Since Four for Trane (1977) – the title of which references Archie Shepp’s van-
guard recording honoring Coltrane – and Eroding Witness (1985), in which Song
of the Andoumboulou debuted, Mackey has been improvising, insistently and
radically, a poetic/musical system. In Mackey’s poetics, black music doesn’t
cohere as a singular individual voice. Rather, the music is “a igure for a pursuit
of voice that questions, and is questioned by, the very limits of its expressive
capacity.”84 Mackey’s serial art presents poetry as an “irresolvable process of
‘root-work’ ” – each series session ofers a further excavation of language and
origin.85 “Song of the Andoumboulou: 13” opens, for example, with the speak-
er’s bottom lip against his teeth “like a rock but unsteady,” stuttering, “ ‘Fa . . .’/
as in fox, as in Fon, as in fate.”86 As these lines skitter down the page, readers
might imagine the speaker’s stuttering as an afterefect of his attempt to play a
“Song so black it / burnt” his lip, in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 12.”87
In songs 12 and 13, Mackey invokes Eshu Elegba or Legba, the West African
and voodoo deity standing at the crossroads between the heavens and earth,
issuing passage and determining destinies. Importantly, Eshu also speaks all
human languages. In the speaker’s “fa” we hear the root sound for a perfo-
rated line of contingent connections: the fox in several Native American tribal
mythologies is a cognate for Eshu Elegba; Fon, the Niger-Congo language,
people, and religion, is a founding cultural system for voodoo and the black
Atlantic diaspora; fate, in this human cycle described in Mackey’s work, is yet
to be announced. In fact, Mackey’s admixture of Native American, Dogon,
and African American cosmologies is a hoodoo healing concoction for the
speaker, who tore his throat raw in his “green / attempt to sing the blues.”88
Mackey, too, has made a jazz record, Strick (1995), with the avant-garde musi-
cians Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh. Reciting sessions 16–25 from Song
of Andoumboulou in conference with the musicians, Mackey’s singing plunges
toward Federico García Lorca’s deep songs, duende, cante jondo, and cante
moro. For Mackey, deep singing is the poet’s calling: “World hollowed out, the
Andoumboulou / beckoned. Echoed aboriginal / cut, / chthonic spur.”89
Harryette Mullen is also a deep blues singer. Her underground, aborigi-
nal poetics ofer ways of thinking through gender and racial concerns that
acknowledge the BAM aesthetic while holding BAM ideologies at bay. As a

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poet and critic, Mullen has forged an oeuvre dedicated to innovating dexter-
ous claims about African American womanhood and identity. Mullen’s earliest
collections – Tree Tall Woman (1981) and Baby Blues: Early Poems (2002) – display
BAM traits and are spoken by somewhat coherent black voices. In Trimmings
(1991) and S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Mullen worked through her interests in
Language poetry, critical theory, and poststructuralist linguistics.
By the mid-1990s, with the publication of Muse & Drudge (1995), Mullen
was working from the premise that “to be black is to be innovative.”90 Written
in a terse, pun-driven style, Muse & Drudge is a long, epic poem measured in
quatrains, printed four to a page and rhymed irregularly. In these 320 stanzas,
Mullen plays across languages and styles, mixing African American vernacular,
urban slang, colloquial sayings, standard English diction, and Spanish phrases.
Mullen’s blues-idiom knowledge aids her seamless merging of her black lyri-
cal voices and her formal innovations. Her ability to invent arrangements that
work “black cultural material into an investigation of the particular question
of black women’s identity” sets her work in lively discourse with Cortez’s,
Clifton’s, and Mackey’s poems.91 Each stanza could stand alone as short, weird
epigrams. But in sequence, the collection builds momentum as if Mullen were
a soloist, riing new ideas into her in-progress improvisation.
Early in Muse & Drudge Mullen’s speaker names herself: “random diva
nation of bedlam / headman hoodlum doodling / then I wouldn’t be long
gone / I’d be Dogon.”92 Mullen’s Dogon Sapphire, whose “lyre styles / pluck
eyebrows,” refers playfully and caustically to the ancient poetess Sappho
and the negative American stereotype of black femininity. “Sapphire” sig-
niies Mullen’s literary history – Western literature, women’s writing, and
African American poetics – and initiates her recycling of those traditions.
Mullen’s quatrains are exploded and redescribed blues stanzas, and Sapphire
is a “random [blues] diva,” improvising on her lyre. As with Mackey’s Song
of the Andoumboulou, Mullen’s drawing the Western/Greek reference into
the blues context positions her as part of the Dogon practice, rather than as
“long gone” down the road, blues hellhounds on her trail. Rejecting a single-
voiced, linear narrative in Muse & Drudge, Mullen’s Sapphire becomes many
women’s voices throughout the poem. As Evie Shockley argues, “Mullen . . .
presents us with a collective hero, the great ‘tribe’ of black women who lived
in the U. S.”93
Mullen thinks diasporically through these traditions. When Mullen’s
speaker suggests restoring “lost nature / with hoodoo paraphernalia,” it’s
the charming Cuban “shaman in an urban turban” who ofers “seven / pow-
ers of Africa la mano / ponderosa ayudame numeros sueños.”94 The Spanish

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invocation calls on the mighty hand of the seven African powers to fuel the
speaker’s dreams with the key numbers. Those numbers “help souls in misery
/ get to the square root / of evil and render it moot.”95 Allison Cummings sug-
gests that Mullen’s improvising is linguistic play literally: her “text rephrases
black orality as aurality. The wordplay takes place not in a conceptual realm
of denotation and connotation, but over airwaves” between the page and the
mind’s ear.96
Many of the strongest voices of the post-BAM third wave participated in
the Dark Room Collective during the late 1980s and 1990s. Thomas Sayers
Ellis and Sharan Strange founded the Dark Room reading series in 1987, while
still Harvard undergraduates. When Ellis and Strange began inviting estab-
lished writers to read in their Cambridge, Massachusetts, meeting space, they
wanted to develop a black literary community that could include exchange
and mentorship without being bound or determined by speciic political ideol-
ogies or aesthetic agendas. As undergraduates or graduate students, Natasha
Trethewey, Kevin Young, John Keene, and Major Jackson all participated in
the collective.97 By 2001 Dark Room poets had begun achieving national rec-
ognition. In Young’s renewal of elegiac and blues poetry, Trethewey’s lyrical
explorations of southern history and African American culture, and Jackson’s
urbane, formal sophistication, blues-idiom poetics are extended, and readers
can see the African American poetic tradition’s inl uence on contemporary
American poetry.
Over the past several decades, African American literary artists have intro-
duced an array of new techniques and styles to Anglophone poetics. While
some poets hew closely to modernist poetry, they have also innovated practices
that allow them to balance African American expressive modes and blues-idiom
tropes with formalist desires. Others’ palettes are multicultural, multilingual,
and postmodern, allowing them free improvisational range in length, versii-
cation, lineation, form, voice, and musicality. It’s possible to read this lineage
without thinking about groupings – modernists versus postmodernists, the
BAM versus the post-BAM – because these artists all use the blues idiom as a
touchstone. And when a poet invokes that idiom, she’s also explaining that her
aesthetic approach necessitates invention, improvisation, and innovation.

Notes
1. Angelyn Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American
Literary Criticism, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 79, 254.

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2. Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 2011), p. 205.
3. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 2004), p. 15.
4. Jackson, The Indignant Generation, pp. 205–06.
5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987), p. 28.
6. Brooks, Blacks, pp. 42, 69.
7. D. H. Melham, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1987), pp. 20–21.
8. Jackson, The Indignant Generation, p. 212.
9. Walton Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz
Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), pp. 25–27.
10. As David Moore explains in the present volume, it’s useful to read Hughes’s
poetry as one exemplary consequence of the African American literary line-
age hatched before him – Phillis Wheatley to Paul Laurence Dunbar – and
of his awareness of his immediate African American contemporaries – Jean
Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. Tolson’s poetry might be read
as one wellspring for future works by Jay Wright and Rita Dove. See Diane V.
Cruz’s astute comparison of Tolson and Dove in Cruz, “Refuting Exile: Rita
Dove Reading Melvin Tolson,” Callaloo 31:3 (2008), pp. 789–802.
11. Meta DuEwa Jones, “Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes
and His Critics,” Callaloo 25:4 (2002), pp. 1145–75. Although literary histori-
ans often attribute the combination of jazz and poetry to the poets of the
Beat Movement, Hughes was most likely the irst writer to develop a new
American poetics from bebop aesthetics, as in his composite poem Montage of
a Dream Deferred (1951) and in Ask Your Mama (1961).
12. Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions,
1965), p. 5.
13. James Smethurst, “Remembering When Indians Were Red: Bob Kaufman,
the Popular Front, and the Black Arts Movement,” Callaloo 25:1 (2002), pp.
146–64, 148–49.
14. Amiri Baraka, Transbluesency: Selected Poems 1961–1995 (New York: Marsilio,
1995), p. 17. This collection will be cited in the text as BT.
15. Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Basic, 1999),
p. 75.
16. Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act; see also Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant
Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
17. Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New
York: Morrow, 1963), p. 70.
18. Jones, Blues People, p. 23.
19. Amiri Baraka, Black Music (1968; New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 20.

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20. James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005); Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from
the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2011).
21. On John Coltrane and the Coltrane poem, see Kimberley Benston, Performing
Blackness (New York: Routledge, 2001), throughout but in particular pp.
145–86, 313–30, and Jones, The Muse Is Music, pp. 85–128.
22. Sonia Sanchez, We a BaddDDD People (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970), pp. 70–
71; reprinted in Stephen Henderson (ed.), Understanding the New Black Poetry
(New York: Morrow, 1973), p. 275.
23. Henderson (ed.), Understanding the New Black Poetry, p. 276.
24. Michael S. Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1970), p. 4.
25. Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, p. 75.
26. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher, rev. ed. (New York:
Liveright, 1996), p. 88.
27. Hayden, Collected Poems, p. 88.
28. Derik Smith, “Quarreling in the Movement: Robert Hayden’s Black Arts Era,”
Callaloo 33:2 (2010), pp. 449–66, 461–62.
29. Hayden, Collected Poems, p. 86.
30. Smith, “Quarreling in the Movement,” p. 462.
31. Hayden, Collected Poems, p. 89.
32. Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle, p. 185.
33. Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle, p. 186.
34. Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle, p. 186.
35. See Stephen Henderson, “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown,” in
Henderson (ed.), Understanding the New Black Poetry, pp. 1–70.
36. Sheila Hassell Hughes, “A Prophet Overheard: A Juxtapositional Reading of
Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca,’ ” African American Review 38:2 (2004), pp.
257–80, 257.
37. Hughes, “A Prophet Overheard,” p. 258.
38. Charles Rowell, “The Editor’s Note,” Callaloo 27:4 (2004), pp. vii–ix.
39. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of Afro-American Postmodernism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 7.
40. See Zamir Shamoon, “The Artist as Prophet, Priest and Gunslinger: Ishmael
Reed’s Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Callaloo 17:4 (1994), pp. 1205–35.
41. Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems 1964–2007 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth,
2007), p. 25. This collection will be cited in the text as IRC.
42. Jay Wright, The Homecoming Singer (New York: Corinth, 1971), p. 22.
43. Wright, The Homecoming Singer, p. 22.
44. Michael Tomasek Manson, “The Clarity of Being Strange: Jay Wright’s The
Double Invention of Komo,” Black American Literature Forum 24:3 (1990), p. 474.

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45. Charles Rowell, “The Unraveling of the Egg: An Interview with Jay Wright,”
Callaloo 6:3 (1983), pp. 3–15; Jay Wright, The Double Invention of Komo (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1980), p. 22.
46. Manson, “The Clarity of Being Strange”; Wright, The Double Invention of Komo,
p. 23.
47. Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Strugle in Postwar Los Angeles
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
48. Nielsen, Black Chant, p. 7.
49. Jayne Cortez, Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares (New York: Phrase
Text, 1969), p. 42.
50. Tony Bolden, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 121–22.
51. Bolden, Afro-Blue, pp. 62–63.
52. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of Afro-American Innovation
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 184.
53. Malin Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003), p. 11.
54. Lucille Clifton, Two-Headed Woman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1980), p. 31.
55. Charles Rowell, “An Interview with Lucille Clifton,” Callaloo 22:1 (1999), pp.
55–72, 58.
56. Sherley Anne Williams, “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American
Poetry,” Massachusetts Review 18:3 (1977), p. 552.
57. Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2004), p. 65.
58. Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 (Brockport, N.Y.:
BOA, 1987), p. 166.
59. Clifton, Good Woman, p. 166.
60. Clifton, Two-Headed Woman, p. 174.
61. Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (Brockport,
N.Y.: BOA, 2000), p. 64.
62. Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism, p. 94.
63. Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African
American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), p. 9.
64. Rita Dove, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 12. This collection will
be cited in the text as RDS.
65. Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism, p. 105.
66. Rita Dove, Grace Notes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 64.
67. Dove, Grace Notes.
68. Dove, Grace Notes.

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69. Toi Derricotte, “The Tension Between Memory and Forgetting in the Poetry
of Yusef Komunyakaa,” Kenyon Review 15:4 (1993), p. 222.
70. Keith Leonard, “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon
Vernacular,” Callaloo 28:3 (2005), p. 826.
71. Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 209–10.
72. Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome.
73. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1986) p. 345.
74. Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer, “Memorial Poems and the Poetics of
Memorializing,” Journal of Modern Literature 34:1 (2010), pp. 162–81, 176.
75. Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome, p. 254.
76. Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome, p. 254.
77. Leonard, “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Blues,” p. 832.
78. Leonard, “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Blues,” p. 832.
79. Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, ed.
Radiciani Clytus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 4.
80. Robert L. Zamsky, “A Poetics of Radical Musicality: Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘-mu’
Series,” Arizona Quarterly 62:1 (2006), pp. 113–40.
81. Craig Morgan Teicher, “A Conversation with Nathaniel Mackey,” PW Daily,
November 22, 2006, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors
/interviews/article/725-a-conversation-with-nathaniel-mackey-.html.
82. Mackey is also the author of an ongoing, serialized iction project, From a
Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, which includes the novels Atet
A. D. (2001), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), and Bedouin Hornbook (1986).
83. Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (San Francisco: New Directions, 2006), p. ix.
84. Brent Hayes Edwards, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Mackey’s ‘Song,’ ” Callaloo
23:2 (2000), p. 575.
85. Zamsky, “A Poetics of Radical Musicality,” p. 113.
86. Nathaniel Mackey, School of Udhra (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), p. 11.
87. Mackey, School of Udhra, p. 10.
88. Mackey, School of Udhra, p. 10.
89. Nathaniel Mackey, Whatsaid Serif (San Francisco: City Lights, 1998), p. 13.
90. Farah Griin, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, “A Conversation
with Harryette Mullen” (1997), http://epc.bufalo.edu/authors/mullen
/interview-new.html.
91. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, p. 85.
92. Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge
(St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 2006), p. 109.
93. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, p. 93.

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94. Mullen, Recyclopedia, p. 126.

95. Mullen, Recyclopedia, p. 126.
96. Allison Cummings, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of
Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers 26:2 (2005),
p. 28.
97. Walton Muyumba, “The Dark Room Collective,” in Stephen Cushman and
Roland Greene (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed.
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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 Chapter 47
Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and
the Neobaroque
W i l la r d S p ie g e l m a n

Amy Clampitt (1920–1994) holds a unique position in American poetry of the

late twentieth century. Although technically a member of the generation that
goes from Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (born in 1911 and 1917, respec-
tively) to Howard Nemerov (1920), Richard Wilbur (1921), Anthony Hecht
(1923), and, slightly later, James Merrill (1926) and John Ashbery (1927), she
did not appear on the literary scene until the late 1970s, when Howard Moss,
poetry editor at the New Yorker, began accepting her poems. Her irst volume,
The Kingisher (1983), brought her to national prominence. In the next decade,
four more books appeared – illed with poems of complex syntax and ornate
diction, and on themes of travel, history, natural science, contemporary poli-
tics, and “high” culture – before her death from ovarian cancer. In many ways,
her work bridges the divide between the poetry of her actual contemporaries,
who came of age during the Depression and World War II, and that of her
fellow “young” poets in the 1970s and 1980s. Many poets of her generation
shared her aesthetic, while the poets who got their publishing start when she
did shared her political and social concerns. Like the younger ones, she rel-
ished the hopeful conidence of the early civil rights movement, and she then
shared with them the disillusionment of the Carter and Reagan eras. The
assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, marked the start
of a new era and a new, more anxious national spirit. Clampitt had just turned
forty-three. For the next decade and a half she became enmeshed in political
activism. Poetry, at least the publication of poetry, had to wait.
Because of Clampitt’s odd position – she was born in one era but lourished
in another – reading her work is not only a pleasure in itself but also a means
of surveying the landscape from 1945 to the present. Her intense style, her
inclination to decorative embellishment, and, above all, her elaborate syn-
tactic structures might be termed baroque (or neobaroque), in the sense of
“irregularly shaped” or “odd.” We might also call it rococo, suggesting a spun,

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fanciful iligree quality rather than the iercely melodramatic hardness we

associate with the baroque. In either case, “ornate” certainly applies, as does,
perhaps, “indispensable.” She provides a link between 1950 and 1990. (The
label “neobaroque,” or “neobarroco,” also refers to ways of writing, and ways
of reading, crucial to twentieth-century Latin American iction, poetry, and
literary theory, and to some present-day U.S. and Canadian writers inl uenced
by it, although those authors and their approach to the term do not seem to
afect the U.S. poetry discussed here.1)
Clampitt’s subjects were in many ways out of fashion when she came to
prominence in the 1980s. Her devotion to the dead white males (and females)
of both Europe and America, in fact to the entire Western canon from Homer
through the nineteenth century, seemed quaint or antique. The nineteenth
century especially (the English Romantic poets, Emily Dickinson, George
Eliot, Margaret Fuller, and Gerard Manley Hopkins) came alive, almost vicar-
iously, in her. The combination of style and subject matter did not please
all of her readers, especially those who harbored a suspicion of ornament,
and a preference for the plain over the fancy. They found Clampitt’s style
overburdening, turning her poems into “a parody of the Victorian silk that
Pound sought to unravel.”2 Or they mocked the “bathetic enthusiasm” that
emerges from the “forced accumulation of her details.”3 But in her subjects,
if not entirely her style, Clampitt resembled her (mostly male) well-educated
contemporaries, who knew, often irsthand, the deprivations of the 1930s and
the horrors of warfare. These were people as hungry for Europe as she was.
Any cultural history of American poetry must consider the importance
of the closing of the European continent for almost two decades. Following
the expatriate years of the Roaring Twenties, when Hemingway, the Steins,
and other American artists lived well and cheaply in France, in the 1930s few
Americans except the wealthy could even aford passage. And from 1939 until
several years after the war had ended, tourism was never a real possibility.
Even people with some money, Lowell and Merrill most prominently, did
not visit the Continent until 1950. By the early 1950s, Europe had opened up.
Artists and writers and recent college graduates – many of them veterans
who had gone to college courtesy of the G.I. Bill of Rights – were able to see
sites they had known about only through books or as servicemen in battle. In
1952 James Wright won a Fulbright to Vienna. Richard Howard studied at the
Sorbonne. In 1955 John Ashbery arrived in Paris and stayed for a decade, writ-
ing poetry and journalism. The advantages of peacetime and postwar plenty
were bolstered by fellowships, government-sponsored programs, and clear,
easy passage across an Atlantic free of peril.

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The poet Karl Shapiro, another World War II veteran, coined the phrase
“culture poetry” more than a half century ago to describe the work of many
of these poets, always reined and didactic, which “dives back into the histor-
ical situation, into culture, instead of lowering from it.”4 A quarter century
later, the scholar Robert von Hallberg picked up the phrase and looked from
a farther distance at the tourist poems of “taste, sophistication, intelligence,
and inventiveness” like those of the young Adrienne Rich, and Mona Van
Duyn, W. S. Merwin, Richard Howard, John Hollander, and especially James
Merrill.
Although much of the European terrain – urban and rural – still lay in
ruins, and although living conditions in the great cities were far from lavish
(the British had rationing through the mid-1950s), Americans locked abroad.
Aesthetic pleasure, and the glories of art and architecture, superseded per-
sonal discomforts. The writers were young. Their eyes and ears were hungry.
Here is the opening of Richard Wilbur’s early poem “A Baroque Wall-Fountain
in the Villa Sciarra”:

Under the bronze-crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet
A serpent has begun to eat,
Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down
Past spattered mosses, breaks
On the tipped edge of a second shell, and ills
The massive third below. It spills
In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes
A scrim or summery tent
For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.
Happy in all that ragged, loose
Collapse of water, its efortless descent
And latteries of spray,
The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,
Watching, about his shaggy knees,
The goatish innocence of his babes at play.5

The quatrains, ifteen in all, continue. The poem’s middle section contem-
plates another, diferent fountain – Carlo Maderno’s upward-spouting master-
piece in front of St. Peter’s Cathedral – and ends with an elegant application
to our human lives of the measure of water, rising or falling, which Wilbur
says is “a shade of bliss . . . the dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap,
all pleasures pass.”6

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From the start Wilbur had mastered the art of inding an appropriate form
for his subjects. Other poets of the 1950s imitated, but few ever exceeded,
his gracefulness.7 Everything above is coolly spoken, although the fountain
Wilbur describes has properties both voluptuous and grotesque. Phrases
like “efortless descent” and “latteries of spray” possess a disarmingly sweet
appeal. The “efortless” Renaissance quality known as sprezzatura (we might
call it “cool”) applies equally to the fountain and to Wilbur himself. His abba
quatrains, with their un-twentieth-century metric (trimeter and tetrameter
odd lines, alternating with pentameter even ones) airm the poet’s mastery of
an intricate craft and match the complex l uidity of the baroque fountain. So
does Wilbur’s use of enjambment: notice that none of the preceding stanzas
is end-stopped.
From a similar poetic sensibility comes the early work of Anthony Hecht.
Here is the opening of “The Gardens of the Villa d’Este”:

This is Italian. Here

Is cause for the undiminished bounce
Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit
To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, to spread
Friction upon the air, cause to sing loud for the bed
Of jonquils, the linen bed, and established merit
Of love, and grandly to pronounce
Pleasure without peer.
Goddess, be with me now;
Commend my music to the woods.
There is no garden to the practiced gaze
Half so erotic: here the sixteenth century thew
Rose to its last perfection, this being chiely due
To the provocative role the water plays.
Tumble and jump, the fountains’ moods
Teach the world how.8

Wilbur’s poem seems positively chaste, even plain, set beside Hecht’s bravura
performance, with its echoes of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and its quasi-
Renaissance formalities (“commend”) and diction (“thew”) mixed in with
contemporary lingo (“bounce / Of sex”), as well as its even more elaborate
expanding and diminishing lines, an homage to Donne or Herbert.
It was not surprising that war veterans like Hecht, Nemerov, and Wilbur
should seek their poetic subjects, as well as some spiritual respite, from among
“aesthetic” monuments, objects, and occasions. But even a younger poet like
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), with her freshly minted Radclife College diploma,

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W. H. Auden’s choice for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award of 1951,
could share their predisposition. Aestheticism was a form of politeness and
precocity, homage to Rich’s academic background and the decision to devote
her life to “art.” Auden, citing Eliot, praises the precocious poet in his intro-
duction to A Change of World, for her “craftsmanship” that gives “evidence of
a capacity for detachment from the self.”9
A withdrawal from turbulent emotions, a reluctance to display merely per-
sonal concerns, and a “detachment from,” rather than an unfolding of, “the
self ” represent one legacy of Eliot’s own hold over much Anglo-American
poetry until his death in 1965, or at least until Allen Ginsberg and the other Beat
poets began to shake the doors from their jambs in the mid-1950s. Until then,
however, restraint rather than explosiveness characterized the tones, forms,
and subjects of the young poets. In her second book, The Diamond Cutters (1955),
composed largely in Europe thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952–1953,
Rich – still in her early twenties – performs the same meticulous maneuvers of
homage, maneuvers that she would gradually but completely abandon within
the following decade, as she “came out” (in many senses) from the delicacies of
her juvenilia. Von Hallberg has correctly observed that, for the most part, the
poets of the 1950s, with the exception of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,
wrote with little “sense of imperial doom . . . there was mainly earnest opti-
mism among intellectuals about the expansion of American industry and the
obvious accomplishment of the military.”10 Rich, who became increasingly
more political in the following decades, was as earnest as the others.
Clampitt’s poems of the 1980s are more politically and historically alert than
those of her contemporaries written in the Eisenhower or even the Kennedy
years. Although some of her hostile critics have found her work self-indulgent,
inattentive to the cultural realities of her day, she proved herself one of the
inest political poets of that decade. Her earlier involvement in Vietnam era–
protests, as well as a lifelong Quaker commitment to principles of social jus-
tice and paciism, resulted in strong socially conscious work: “A Procession
at Candlemas,” “Amaranth and Moly,” “Beethoven, Opus 111,” “Or Consider
Prometheus,” “Letters from Jerusalem,” “The Dahlia Gardens,” “A Hedge of
Rubber Trees,” “Nothing Stays Put,” “Mataoka,” and her masterpiece and lon-
gest poem, “The Prairie,” which tackles problems of history, migration, and
invasion, all the patterns of American life that depend on the vastness of our
geography.11 Art, she would agree with André Malraux and Max Weber, is the
real history of nations.
Consider “A Procession at Candlemas,” which is both ornate and politi-
cally engaged. In two sections, each composed of twenty-four tercets, the

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poem tackles American history and geography; the nature of nomadism and
“transhumance” (a term from the historian Fernand Braudel); protests against
the Vietnam War; the presentation of the Virgin Mary at the temple on the
holiday now known as Candlemas; Mary’s associations with Pallas Athena,
another “virgin” goddess; childbirth and motherhood; and, the subject with
which the poem begins and ends, a trip across America on Interstate 80 to visit
the poet’s dying mother in Iowa.
It is a remarkable tour de force; I call attention here to only two of its fea-
tures. The irst is its circular construction. This is a poem about many sorts of
journeys. Its opening sounds like an updating of Frost’s “Directive”:
Moving on or going back to where you came from,
bad news is what you mainly travel with:
a breakup or a breakdown, someone running of
or walking out, called up or called home:
death in the family. . . .
. . . Sooner or later
every trek becomes a funeral procession.
The mother curtained in Intensive Care –
a scene the mind leaves blank, leeing instead
toward scenes of transhumance. (ACP, p. 21)

One thing leads naturally to another, and Clampitt is of and running. At the
end, she circles back to where she had begun:
. . . the mother
curtained in Intensive Care: a Candlemas
of moving lights along Route 80, at nightfall,
in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow
of things moving back to where they came from.
(ACP, p. 25)

The language is easy; the pace is slow. But in between come the other 100 lines
of historical, political, social, and geographical meandering; thoughts about
the condition of women giving birth, women dying; and religious ceremonies
and political vigils. Clampitt casts a wide net.
Another, far from gratuitous, aspect of the poem is something an unfriendly
critic would object to: a sumptuous description of the contents of a cafete-
ria and a vending machine at a “nowhere oasis” called “Indian Meadows.”
Clampitt asks a question and proceeds to answer it:

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. . . What is real except

what is fabricated? The jellies glitter
cream-capped in the cafeteria showcase;
gumball globes, Life Savers cinctured
in parcel gilt, plop from their housings
perfect, like miracles. Comb, nail clipper,
lip rouge, mirrors and emollients embody,
niched into the washroom wall case,
the pristine seductiveness of money. (ACP, p. 22)
Like the painter Wayne Thiebaud, Clampitt lavishes loving care on mundane
things. From high to low, nothing is beneath attention. Her poem tries to
answer the important question about reality and fabrication, the given and
the made in our lives as individuals and cultures. This is a poem by a mature
poet, not a novice but someone who understands that “reality” depends on
what we make of it.

*
Clampitt found her vocational reality – or, if not her vocation, her genre – late.
She always knew she was a writer. Bookish and eccentric, the eldest of ive chil-
dren of Quaker farmers in Iowa, she made a beeline to Manhattan following
graduation from Grinnell College in 1941. After a very brief graduate career at
Columbia, she worked in a series of editorial jobs for Oxford University Press,
and in 1949 she won a Press-sponsored essay contest, for which the irst prize
was a trip to England. It quite literally changed her life. On her return from
seeing places she had only read and dreamed about, she quit her job to write
a novel. No publisher accepted it, nor two subsequent novels. She went back
to work as a reference librarian for the National Audubon Society. Engaged
in antiwar activity, and soliciting votes for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, she met
Harold Korn, a law professor, who remained her partner for the next quarter
century. They married several months before her death.
Clampitt had been toying with poems since the 1950s, but twenty years
later, she rose like a comet. In the 1970s she began taking poetry-writing clas-
ses at the New School in Manhattan and developed enough self-conidence
to read at open mic evenings in Greenwich Village bars and cofee houses.
Her irst important poems – sent to Howard Moss at the New Yorker without
her knowledge by her editorial boss at Dutton – were accepted and began to
appear in the late 1970s. The Kingisher, her irst book, appeared when she was

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sixty-three. Submitting poems to literary journals, Clampitt found a soul mate

in Mary Jo Salter, a recent Harvard graduate who was reading the slush pile for
Peter Davison at the Atlantic Monthly. Salter incorrectly assumed that Clampitt
was, like her, a young, unknown, aspiring poet. They began a close friendship,
exchanging letters and manuscripts for the next ifteen years. Other young
friends and acolytes surrounded her: Salter’s husband, Brad Leithauser; Alfred
Corn; Dana Gioia; William Logan and Debora Greger (another poet couple);
and J. D. McClatchy. Some of these people, along with Moss, Marilyn Hacker,
Mark Jarman, and X. J. Kennedy, have been gathered under the heading of the
“New Formalists,” often derided in avant-garde circles for their commitment
to strict poetic strategies, to rhyme and conventional meter, and even to – of
all things! – sonnets. Hilton Kramer’s neoconservative journal New Criterion
has prominently displayed the work of these poets, which represents a kind of
right-wing populism. Clampitt, however, always aligned her complex aware-
ness of political, cultural, and literary history with the left-of-center.
She was nothing like the New Formalists. Her poems – rich in assonance,
alliteration, and metric “efects” – for the most part do without conventional
metrical forms and end rhyme. But they are loaded with musical and syntactic
complexities, which complement the subject matter that remains more or less
constant through her ive individual volumes. Clampitt resists the cool per-
fection of Wilbur, Hecht, and early Rich, but she also refrains from imitating
the “confessional” poets, who lourished between the 1950s and the 1970s. She
makes a place for her own voice not by focusing solely on her self, especially
her inner self, but by weaving with fervor as well as ingenuity references to
her life into her experiences as a tourist, reader of books, and looker at paint-
ings. Her poems exhibit the same energy and capacity to be pleased evident in
her letters, and the same blend of Quaker severity, or austerity, and Keatsian
lushness. She combined her old-fashioned commitment to high culture with
the patience and attentiveness necessary for deep reading, looking, and lis-
tening. Clampitt’s subjects and diction were out of step with the zeitgeist of
the 1980s and its insistence, especially within university circles, on what were
called “political correctness” and “identity politics.” Now that the so-called
culture wars of the 1980s have faded, it is easier to take the measure of her
achievement.
Clampitt writes about other writers, intellectuals, paintings, music, travel
sites, politics, and history. Her second book, What the Light Was Like (1985),
contains her longest poem about a predecessor, the sequence “Voyages: A
Homage to John Keats,” a poetic biography in the form of a reimagining of
Keats’s inner and external life based on a full absorption of his poems and

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letters. Clampitt had been moved by Keats’s poems ever since her girlhood
on her Iowa farm. She once said that only a person who knew in her bones
what coldness really was could fully appreciate “The Eve of Saint Agnes.” (See
her early poem “On the Disadvantages of Central Heating” [ACP, p. 17].) “On
Seeing the Elgin Marbles” nimbly interweaves Keats’s responses to the newly
acquired sculpture in the British Museum – which he called “A sun – a shadow
of a magnitude” – with facts of his life in 1818, when he made his fateful walk-
ing tour through Scotland, during which he came down with the irst signs of
the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. Clampitt could identify with
Keats in many ways. Hunger for a place in the poetic pantheon was the most
important, coupled with a fear that vocational ambition might never be satis-
ied. “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” wrote Keats
in one letter, but, in another, “If I should die . . . I have left no immortal work
behind me.”12 Likewise, Clampitt, at the age of thirty-ive, well before she
had published a single poem, wrote to her youngest brother, Philip: “I feel as
if I could write a whole history of English literature, and know just where to
place everybody in it, with hardly any trouble at all. The reason being, appar-
ently, that I feel I am in it.”13 But twenty years later, to Salter, she admits to her
own vocational loneliness: “I’ve yearned secretly for a poet I could write to.”14
Unlike Hecht, Lowell, Merrill, Nemerov, and Wilbur – and even Elizabeth
Bishop, who in spite of her early orphancy had suicient income to go to col-
lege and live afterward on a modest inheritance – Clampitt was born neither
to privilege nor on the East Coast. Like Keats, but for diferent reasons, she felt
herself an outsider. Although she lived as a New Yorker for more than half a
century, she remained attached to her Iowa farm roots. Her interest in high
culture did not come from a sense of entitlement or belonging. Exile, loneli-
ness, and deracination igure as much in her poems as the worship of, and the
sense of attachment to, what Yeats called “monuments of unaging intellect.”15
She is a poet of places and of displacement; she is equally a poet of the book.
Clampitt loved botanical and zoological nomenclature. She was attentive
to landscape wherever she happened to be. She learned such attention both
in life – looking at things on the farm – and from her reading. Marianne
Moore, another poet deeply versed in science, was as great an inl uence as
Hopkins and the Romantics. “The Cove,” the irst poem in The Kingisher,
begins with an of hand reference to Moore and Mozart (ACP, p. 5). This is not
poetic showing of. Clampitt lived with music and literature; they became
part of her. “The Reedbeds of the Hackensack” uses the sestina, that dii-
cult form, as the basis for a contemplation of urban detritus and garbage in
northern New Jersey (ACP, p. 165). It makes its ecological points via allusions

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to Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, proving that we can understand

the contemporary natural scene best by folding it into a larger literary land-
scape. Similarly, “John Donne in California” imagines a landscape through a
triple remove: one poet looking through the eyes of another, from a difer-
ent age and from a diferent place. Donne, who never crossed the Atlantic to
the newfound land, asked famously, in his “Hymn to God, My God, in My
Sickness,” “Is the Paciique Sea my home?”16 With that line, Clampitt begins a
contemplation of place that includes other adroitly planted echoes. Although
Donne never saw California’s richness and strangeness, she allows in her con-
clusion that he

. . . would have been more at home

than the frail wick of metaphor I’ve brought
to see by, and cannot, for the conlagration
of this nightfall’s utter strangeness. (ACP, p. 279)

Seeing through another poet’s eyes and language afords the twentieth-century
poet access to a truth diferent from what her own naked vision might allow.
One exemplary poem among many that dramatize how the intersection of
life and culture can inspire a full range of reportorial and emotional responses
is “Losing Track of Language” (ACP, pp. 182–83). Clampitt was – as I have
noted – a poet of both journeys and stasis, aware of loss and dislocation in her
own life and that of others.17 She wrote a whole series of poems detailing her
travel, by ship, by train, and by – her favorite conveyance in the States – bus.
This poem recounts a train trip from the south of France into Italy and uses
the resources of culture, history, and language to make deeper, more personal
points about human communication and understanding.
Clampitt’s energetic enthusiasm for human encounters inds apposite
expression in her signature style. Her subtle puns, literary echoes, and long,
sinuous sentences maintain a speed comparable to that of the train on which
she and her companion sit, wedged among strangers as they hurtle from the
Vaucluse in Provence into northern Italy. The poem adopts one of literature’s
oldest similes, Homer’s image of the generations of men as “fallen leaves,”
and plays with the words “falls,” “falling,” “fallen,” “descended,” “leeing,”
and “losing,” and with Homer’s “leaves”: “leaf,” “bloom,” “laurel,” and “left”
(i.e., “leaves” as a verb as well as a noun). The rush of the train inspires an
equally eager and rapid conversation of its polyglot passengers. The babble of
language creates solidarity as well as confusion, communication rather than
the lack of it. (See “Babel Aboard the Hellas International Express” for another
version of the same trope [ACP, p. 255].)

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Clampitt expects the reader to catch her literary references: to Petrarch,

himself an exile in the Vaucluse, where he loved and immortalized his Laura,
at the same time virtually inventing the tradition of the sonnet, and to Sappho,
the early Greek lyric poet whose work exists almost entirely in fragments.
All that is left of her leaves is frustratingly incomplete. We must always ill in
the blanks. “What are words?” the traveling poet asks, as she contemplates
Petrarch’s beloved:
What is left of her is language;
and what is language but breath, leaves,
petals fallen or in the act of falling, pollen
of turmoil that sifts through the ingers? (ACP, p. 182)
As the conversation with her Italian cabin mate extends to the subject of
Sappho, whose work he also knows, she admits: “Though I don’t understand
a word, what are words?” And she concludes that, with language, as with
travel in T. S. Elliot’s aphorism, the journey rather than the arrival matters.
Everything moves; words are air; we are all in transit:
The train leaps toward Italy; words fall away
through the dark into the dark bedroom
of everything left behind, the unendingness
of things lost track of – of who, of where –
where I’m losing track of language. (ACP, p. 183)

The poem inally and paradoxically commemorates and solidiies an expe-

rience all about loss, remembrance, and the efort to recollect (regather and
remember) what has been left behind.
The richness of Clampitt’s signature diction and syntax – along with
her commitment to European culture – appealed to some of her younger
contemporaries in the 1980s and 1990s precisely because it went against the pre-
vailing grain. Much American poetry in the wake of William Carlos Williams,
especially in the creative writing programs that have proliferated over the past
half century, hews to the virtues of simplicity, syntactic straightforwardness,
and a turning away from ornament. Poetry like Clampitt’s that prefers lorid
diction and expansive phrasing might seem like a hothouse lower, suspect to
some, welcome to others.
Our default mode from the 1960s onward is the plain koine of ordinary
speech and straightforward sentence structure. Clampitt never wrote this
way. She had the singular distinction of writing more one-sentence poems,
and indeed very long sentences of all sorts, than any other contemporary
poet except, perhaps, those whom we label radically experimental, like Allen

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Ginsberg and Jorie Graham (discussed subsequently). Complex syntax, and

a reliance on hypotaxis rather than parataxis (on subordination rather than
simple lists or compound sentences), is a staple of earlier poetry in English,
especially after Milton reimagined his native tongue within a tighter Greco-
Latin frame. To readers with no Latin, or no Milton, and especially to those
who prefer plainness of articulation, Clampitt’s long and often reticulated
sentences can seem like syntactic thickets, or a return to an antiquated prefer-
ence for the baroque.
Take, for instance, the opening of “Thermopylae”:

Where the bay lashed, and an unrecorded number

of the Persian troops, whip-l icked into the spear-
clogged hourglass of the pass, were impaled and fell
screaming from the precipice to drown, the mirror
clogs: geography too gathers dust, though busloads
of us (sandaled Germans mostly), hankering for
an attar or a foothold, a principle that still
applies, a cruse of oil, a watershed no rain erodes,
ind small inkling of what was staved of here,
or saved. (ACP, p. 205)

This is history, tourism, high culture, and ecology mixed together in a style
that imitates a tourist’s breathless pace. It imitates, too, the poet’s engagement
with a real landscape as well as the heroic sacriice of Leonidas and his noble
Spartans in 480 B.C.E . We notice that the sentence falls into two parts, divided
by a colon, and that each half has its own subordinate divisions. The onrush
is contained by a sense of balance and repetition. “Clogs” matches “clogged,”
and the press of the Persian troops prepares us for the stampede of the mod-
ern tourists. Antithesis and division also exist. The irst part of the sentence
contains many phrases dividing the subject and verb: “Where the bay lashed
. . . the mirror clogs.” Everywhere obscurity threatens to interfere with revela-
tion. You can’t be sure what is happening, just as in warfare no certainty exists,
because you can’t be everywhere at once.
Style conveys meaning; it is not merely something added. Clampitt’s dic-
tion, her references, and her syntax, which owes a great deal to Hart Crane
as well as to Milton, bear the weight of her thought. Clampitt was not alone.
Her kind of style, and of learning, relects the bookish and cultural heritage
she shared with Wilbur and Hecht. Hecht, especially, grew as a poet, taking
on increasingly darker themes and tones, but he never abandoned the glit-
tering surfaces and formal properties of his earliest poems. He never felt a

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tension between human tragedy, what he witnessed as a foot soldier in World

War II, or the horrors of civilization, and the elegant – one might call them
“civilizing” – stanzas and rhymes he used to present them. His style both
conveyed and also countered the bleakness of his subjects. “The Feast of
Stephen,” a scene of locker room romping, in which “Boys for the irst time
frankly eye each other, / Inspect each other’s bodies at close range,” even
includes a witty pun, “Mens sana in men’s sauna,” before launching into a
scene of sadomasochistic terror redolent of Nazi storm troopers. That scene
then merges into the torture “of a young man whose name is Saul” (the Jew
who became St. Paul); all of this is handled in four exquisitely patterned,
unrhymed sonnets.18
In The Venetian Vespers (1979) we ind another poem of exquisite cruelty in
an exquisitely subtle style. “The Deodand” (a technical term for a forfeiture to
expiate a crime) opens artfully as a description of Renoir’s painting Parisians
Dressed in Algerian Costume and then investigates George Santayana’s famous
aphorism: those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
Hecht wonders about the “crude imperial pride” within the “exploitation of
the primitive / Homages of romantic self-deception, / Mimes of submission
glamorized as lust.”19 His poem’s inal stanzas describe a French Legionnaire
who, in the inal months of the French-Algerian War, is captured and dressed
grotesquely as a woman. His captors cut of his ingers, and he must take
his food literally from their hands. They lead him from town to town on a
leash. The lesson is simple: cruelty begets cruelty, and the innocent sufer.
The poem’s meter is a kind of loose pentameter, clear within bounds but
never rigid. Its diction is crisp, sometimes learned. The deliberate rhythmic
l uctuations within conventional forms, the way the poem begins with what
appears to be innocent description, the reminder of art’s social contexts and
consequences, and the pairing of scenes and uncertain time schemes: all of
these relect Hecht’s fascination with the moral ambiguities that lie beneath
apparent simplicities.
Hecht’s great theme throughout his distinguished career was, in fact, a
religious one: the question of unde malum. Where does evil come from? The
fact that his verse forms always conveyed an aesthetic conservatism in no way
means that his moral, political, and religious stances are equally conservative.
One chilling later poem is “The Book of Yolek.” It is a sestina, that most dif-
icult of conventional forms, but its subject is the death of a small boy at the
hands of the Nazis in 1942. The pleasures of repetition, in the end words of
the sestina, are surpassed by the reader’s gradual realization of the poem’s
true subject.20

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One other major poet of the second half of the century shared with Hecht
a deep learning, a fondness for formal experimentation, and a commitment to
the entire range of Western civilization and art. John Hollander (b. 1929) had
a distinguished career as both poet and scholar at (for the most part) Yale
University. The epithet “academic” is often used derogatorily, but poetry has
always had an attachment to the academy, from the early Greek lyric poets con-
nected to the library in Alexandria during the third century B.C.E. to contem-
porary poets who ind a haven in the “creative writing” sections of American
university English departments. Hollander is one of the rare ones who wrote
major books of scholarship and criticism, including Rhyme’s Reason (1981), the
best introduction to poetic forms, done in a performative show-and-tell way
that not only describes iambic pentameter or Petrarchan sonnets but also han-
dles the description and analysis through and within the forms themselves.
For Hollander, elaborate verse forms, syntactical arrangements, and a com-
mitment to the library and high culture were never in rivalry with investiga-
tions of private life. (He wrote movingly about the breakup of his irst mar-
riage in the 1978 In Time and Place.) Hollander’s poetry has ranged from the
diicult subject matter of Jewish Gnosticism to the sheer fun of “shaped”
poems (see the new and expanded edition of Types of Shape [1991]). Tales Told
of the Fathers (1975) and Spectral Emanations (1978) demonstrated the deepening
as well as the expanding of his themes, repertoire, and techniques. But the
poems of In Time are written in the simple abba stanzas favored by Tennyson
in In Memoriam. In other words, Hollander has been able to accommodate
many styles, many subjects.
To prove my point that wit and high seriousness can go hand in hand, as
can the inner life and the literary one, consider “To Elizabeth Bishop” (from
the 1988 Harp Lake). Written in easy rhyming tercets (aaa, bbb, ccc), the poem
records Hollander’s 1977 eforts to track down the French word for “moose.”21
Finding out that the word was “original” ushers in a rif on the nature of
poetic originality. But then, after Bishop’s death two years later, Hollander
looks again and discovers his earlier misreading: the French word for “moose”
is not “original” but “orignal,” and he’s of on another rif, this time on the
subject of the missing, or added, i and the relationship of human subjectivity
to acts of reading and misreading, repeating, and revising, and to the whole lit-
erary and linguistic debt that one poet owes to another, the lineage that keeps
literary history in some kind of order.
Hollander’s playfulness, as well as his baroque sensibility, was evident from
the start. In the title poem of Movie-Going (1962), he writes an elegiac ode to the
movies and the movie theaters of his Manhattan boyhood. What amazes in the

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poem, and what keeps it fresh well after all the Broadway theaters of Hollander’s
youth have been destroyed or replaced, is the combination of wit and wonder
with which the poet treats his subject. As he would go on to prove in Rhyme’s
Reason, “poetry” is made of tropes, or igures of speech, while “verse” consists of
“schemes” and patterns, all of the nonlinguistic or nonsemantic musical, rhyth-
mic, and syntactic units that make up an utterance. And these two aspects of a
single poem need never be at odds. Notice how the poem’s opening lines end:
One needs to feel
That the two empty, huddled, dark stage-boxes keep
Empty for kings. And having frequently to cope
With the abominable goodies, overlow
Bulk and (inally) exploring hands of l ushed
Close neighbors gazing beadily out across the glum
Distances is, after all, to keep the gleam
Alive of something rather serious, to keep
Faith, perhaps, with the City.22

The rhyme is prodigious and unexpected: the long vowel of “feel” is repeated
in “keep” and then in “frequently,” while “keep” links up to “cope,” “cope”
lends its vowel twice to “overlow,” “neighbors” to “gazing,” “glum” and
“keep” combine in “gleam,” and so forth. Everything matches, but nothing
is predictable. We move through the experience with surprise and gratitude.
And on it goes for more than four pages. The end, a nine-line stanza followed
by a single line, asks us to “honor” the stars, the ilms, and moviegoing itself,
that quintessentially American experience. The poem turns out to be a cul-
tural as well as a personal reminiscence. America is always moving westward,
waiting for a revelation
Of something diferent from Everything Here, Now, shine
Out from the local Bijou, truest gem, the most bright
Because the most believed in, staving of the night
Perhaps, for a while longer with its l ickering light.
These fade. All fade, Let us honor them with our own fading sight.23

From part rhymes, interlocking and onward moving, to a static conclusion

with a inal purely rhymed quatrain (“bright,” “night,” “light,” “sight”),
“Movie-Going” pays homage to, among other things, a relationship between
vision and music, between what we see at the cinema and what we hear rising
from the poem’s sounds. This is a “talkie” in the best tradition.
Rhymes can exist in full sight (or at full volume) or as partially hidden.
Both kinds exist in “Movie-Going.” Hollander’s Powers of Thirteen (1984) is an

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ingenious stylistic experiment: 169 poems, each composed of thirteen lines

with thirteen syllables. Thirteen: the eccentric, unlucky number, the num-
ber of Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And
169 is also, of course, 13 squared. Hollander’s poems are more than ingenious
web spinning. They experiment with both form and fable. One ine exam-
ple is number 9, “Hidden Rhymes,” a variation on the Parable of the Talents
(Matthew 25 and Luke 19) and a homage, as well, to Milton’s sonnet on his
blindness (“When I consider how my light is spent”). Because the parable of
the talents concerns hiding, using, investing, and earning, it makes sense for
the poet to make his own contribution to a tradition by hiding his rhymes, his
echoes of his talents and those of his forerunners. The irst line announces a
legacy: “One evening in the early spring Father gave us dimes.” There follow
one long Miltonic sentence and a shorter conclusion: in the poet’s pocket, “my
dime could rhyme with its own echoes, / Down inside a buried sound it was
no death to hide.”24 The whole poem alludes to the New Testament, to Milton,
and to Wordsworth, in Hollander’s internal rhyme: groupings of “hard,”
“yard,” and “card”; “kind” and “blind”; and “dime” and “rhyme” itself.
Salter (b. 1954) became Clampitt’s literary executor as well as her friend.
Although not as stylistically dense as Clampitt’s work, her poems exhibit a
genteel sense of learning and a dedication to high art and domesticity. J. D.
McClatchy (b. 1945), a poet in the tradition of Auden and Merrill, earlier gay
mentors, maintains a similar aestheticism without the syntactic tangles and
the emotional exuberance of Clampitt’s tones. Kay Ryan (b. 1945) was, like
Clampitt, a relative late starter, or at least someone who came to public notice
only in middle age. Her irst widely reviewed volume, Flamingo Watching, was
published in 1994; there followed three others, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010). Ryan is not a culture poet, although
plenty of the epigraphs to individual poems give evidence of her wide and
deep reading. Nor is she a poet of heavily subordinated sentences. Unlike
Clampitt, Ryan writes with simple diction and an often Emily Dickinson–like
syncopated meter. All of her poems are short, often less than a page long,
with plenty of surrounding white space. And unlike Clampitt, but like Hecht,
Hollander, Wilbur, and most of the so-called New Formalists, she enjoys
rhyming. But she rhymes in an of beat, of-kilter way; the rhymes are often
jagged, unexpected, or “hidden,” that is, internalized (again, see Hollander).
Take, for example, “Dew”:
As neatly as peas
in their green canoe,
as discretely as beads

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strung in a row,
sit drops of dew
along a blade of grass.
But unattached and
subject to their weight,
they slip if they accumulate.
Down the green tongue
out of the morning sun
into the general damp,
They’re gone.25
These are three prim little sentences, which open with an easy simile (dew is
like peas). The novelty is the fact that Ryan’s genius allows her to make her
comparisons through sound as well as trope: the of rhymes of “peas” and
“beads”; the full rhyme of “canoe” and “dew” surrounding the semirhym-
ing “row”; the full rhyme of “weight” and “accumulate” (the poem’s longest
word, and therefore its weightiest); and then the disappearing triple rhyme
in “tongue,” “sun,” and “gone.” As in the cliché “Now you see it, now you
don’t,” we have found that Ryan has virtually told us, “Now you hear it, now
you don’t.”
The wit inherent in rhyme generates poetic revelation. Ryan is a poet who
never writes about her “lived” life; we learn almost nothing about it, or her,
through these objective lyrics, part Marianne Moore, part Ogden Nash. An
even more rococo poet is Heather McHugh (b. 1948), who reveals more of her-
self than Ryan does, but whose style and rhythms are more distinctly jazz and
pun inlected. See, for example, “The Trouble With ‘In,’ ” whose irst eleven
lines follow:
In English we’re in trouble.
Love’s a place
we fall into, so
sooner or later they ask
How deep? Time’s a measure
of extent, so sooner or later
they ask How long? We keep
some comforters inside a box,
the heart inside a chest,
but still it’s there the trouble with the dark
accumulates the most.26
Hollander wrote an essay titled “Of ‘Of ’: The Romance of a Preposition,”
and McHugh is clearly bound to the same fascination with the peculiarities

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of English speech, its duplicities and the oddness of its easiest colloquialisms.
Why are we in trouble? Why fall in love, rather than rise to it? “In” is where
we ind our innermost thoughts, recesses, fears, and selves. Darkness resides
always within, never without.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg (b. 1953) and Jorie Graham (b. 1950) now live in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their work often gives of a whif of the library,
the concert hall, the museum, and the university. Both are poets of high cul-
ture, although Graham has increasingly turned away from an earlier inter-
est in ekphrasis (most prominently displayed in Erosion, her second volume
[1983]), toward more speculative, philosophical, political, and scientiic con-
cerns. Schnackenberg’s chiseled spiritual poems mingle autobiographical
reminiscences with historical and literary references. Each volume contains
pages of notes, as do many other volumes of culture poetry written dur-
ing the past four decades. T. S. Eliot’s disingenuous notes for The Waste Land
spawned an entire progeny of annotations and poetic annotators since 1922.
Schnackenberg’s third volume, A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), intricately sets
the creation of art against the catastrophes of world history. Like Clampitt,
Schnackenberg has no problem with incorporating learning, from the book or
the museum, into her work, and she coolly mixes formal dexterity with strong
feeling. Adam Kirsch has called her verse “dense and musical, anchored in the
pentameter even when it veers into irregularity; behind it are formidable mas-
ters, Robert Lowell most notably, but also Yeats and Auden.”27
Schnackenberg is prone to economic tightness, to repetition – even conser-
vation – of materials. As in Clampitt, art and history are mediums of thought,
not easy delections from meditation or self-analysis. “Supernatural Love”
appears in The Lamplit Answer (1982). The volume’s title comes from a phrase
in this poem, and the poem’s title reappears later as the title for a 2000 selection
of poems from her irst three volumes.28 In tightly rhymed tercets (aaa, bbb,
ccc) that low delicately into one another with little end-stopping (sentences
tend to end in the middle of lines), Schnackenberg tenderly recalls a moment
from her childhood during which her professor father scans the dictionary for
the meaning and etymology of the word “carnation.”
The poem looks at the world through several lenses: the dictionary; the
actual “magnifying glass” with which the father is scanning it; the young
girl’s sewing needle, through which she scans her father’s looking; and, at
least implicitly, William Blake’s aphorism from Auguries of Innocence: “To see
a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Ininity
in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour.”29 The poem opens up:
the carnation is identiied as “Christ’s lowers” because, in part, of etymology

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 Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and the Neobaroque

(from the Latin word for “lesh”). One pink variety of the lower is called the
clove. So the father turns the dictionary’s page to “clove” (related to the word
for nail): “The incarnation blossoms, lesh and nail.” Here is the poem’s last
sentence, in which many tropes are woven back together:
I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn,
The lesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,
I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, “Daddy daddy” –
My father’s hand touches the injury
As lightly as he touched the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The lowers I called Christ’s when I was four.30

The snaking sentence uses literary and cultural echoes as well as repeated
sounds. Christ calls on God the Father when he is dying on the cross (“Why
hast thou forsaken me?”). “Roots” are those of the earth and of the Latin
language through which carnations come to embody, or “incarnate,” many
meanings and associations. And if a Christian is to embark on an imitatio
Christi, then the young Trudie has already, at four, taken on herself a religious
vocation by shedding her blood.
All good poets are concerned with sentence structure. Louise Glück has
always used clear-cut syntax that complements her equally straightforward
diction. The subject-verb-object paradigm of the simple English sentence has
become one pole of contemporary poetic usage. The other, exempliied in
the work of the high culture poets in this chapter, is the densely compacted or
sinuous sentence of which I have cited examples. Style constitutes, as well as
represents, meaning; a craving for expressive syntax matches any poet’s search
for the mot juste and the right tropes. Roland Barthes used the term “layered-
ness” (feuilleté), as in the image of an onion, for certain styles: “A construction
of layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains, inally, no heart, no ker-
nel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the ininity of its own
envelopes – which envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces.”31
Such an idea was more popular during the heyday of “deconstructive” literary
criticism, which tried to undermine old-fashioned notions of purposefulness
and meaning in literary texts; it is still useful for understanding what I call the
content of style on which all poems depend.
I have called the long sentences of Schnackenberg, Clampitt, and their pre-
decessors “baroque.” These complex articulations demand a mental journey
on the part of both writer and reader. A century ago, the critic Morris Croll,

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whose work Clampitt read in college, outlined some varieties of seventeenth-

century baroque prose, attending to matters of symmetry and asymmetry,
grammar, parallelism and its absence, and punctuation. He concludes: “[The]
purpose [of his baroque writers] was to portray, not a thought, but a mind
thinking, or, in Pascal’s words, la peinture de la pensée.”32 “A mind thinking” ech-
oes Emerson’s 1837 essay “The American Scholar” as well as Pascal.33
Clampitt loved the English Romantic poets. In her last decade, she worked
on an ill-conceived play about the intersecting lives of the Wordsworths and
Coleridge. More important, she learned how to write what the critic M. H.
Abrams labeled the “greater Romantic lyric,” a long poem – like “A Procession
at Candlemas” – with a circular structure.34 She also learned her syntax from
her Romantic predecessors. Of long, hypotactic sentences, Coleridge said it
best, in a letter to his friend Thomas Poole:
Of parentheses I may be too fond, and will be on my guard against them.
But I am certain that no work of impassioned and eloquent reasoning
ever did or could subsist without them. They are the drama of
reason, and present the thought growing, instead of a mere
Hortus siccus.35

A thought can grow through sentence structure as well as diction. “Baroque,”

“rococo,” or even “ramifying,” when applied to syntax, means the opposite of
“simple,” “balanced,” or “straightforward.” Still, a long sentence in the man-
ner of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is not quite the same as the sentences favored by
the neobaroque poets I have mentioned. Ginsberg, like Whitman, works by
principles of breath and association and pays less attention to syntax per se
than to the onward rolling, rather than reticulating, of his sentences.
Jorie Graham, on the other hand, has moved from the artful, reasonably
condensed lyrics of her irst two volumes to a Whitmanian swirling energy
in her later work. She has also moved from being an art and culture poet to a
political and philosophical one. In Materialism (1993), she sounds like Coleridge
in his description of “the drama of reason,” and of the relationship of nature
to sentence structure:
. . . Reader,
wind blowing through these lines I wish were branches,
searchlight in daylight, trying as I
am trying
to ind a ilament of the real like some twist of
handwriting glowing in the middle
distance – somewhere up here, in the air – .36

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At the start, Graham had a simpler style, but then her sentences began
branching out in order to relect both her subjects and her mind contemplat-
ing them. This may have had something to do with her own transatlantic
moves. Born in New York, she was raised by American parents in France and
Italy. When she returned to the United States for university, English was the
weakest of her three languages; she grew into it slowly, and her poems became
more forceful and original, as well as odd, as she settled paradoxically into her
native language and country. In some of her poems from the 1990s and later,
she seems to forgo conventional grammar altogether. Her metaphysical “ila-
ments” become more “twisted” as her poems become longer.
Her “art” book, Erosion (1983), has poems about the Renaissance Italian
painters Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Luca Signorelli; the Viennese
expressionist painter Gustav Klimt; and the unicorn tapestries in Paris’s Cluny
Museum, in addition to other poems centering on Keats and Plato. Graham
carved out a niche for herself as a culture poet, a poet of dense syntax. Here,
for example, is an earnest of the richer, more diicult poems that followed, the
opening sentence of “Masaccio’s Expulsion,” about the painter’s frescoes in
Florence’s Brancacci Chapel:
Is this really the failure
of silence,
or eternity, where these two
sufer entrance
into the picture
plane,
a man and woman
so hollowed
by grief they cover
their eyes
in order not to see
the inexhaustible grammar
before them – labor, judgement,
saints and peddlers –
the daylight hopelessly even
upon them,
and our eyes.37
Although it lacks Clampitt’s enthusiasm and Schnackenberg’s sparkle, many
kinds of ambiguity ill this sentence. Graham takes a long look at Masaccio’s
picture of Adam and Eve leaving Eden in tears. The opening question, pos-
ing as a declarative sentence, deals with the fresco, its placement on a wall,

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its relation to the ongoing human activity outside the church, and our own
position as viewers. It engages us at the level of abstraction (“the failure /
of silence” and “eternity” in the opening lines), and it also explicitly com-
pares human activity and modes of speech (“inexhaustible grammar”). As
she does throughout her work, Graham starts with a speciic visual provoca-
tion and moves outward, or inward, from it. Looking and wondering become
synonymous.
For Clampitt, Hecht, Merrill, Nemerov, Rich, Wilbur, and other poets who
came of age during and immediately after World War II, “culture” had some-
thing of what hostile critics might label “elitism.” Hungry for high art and the
assurances of continuity and endurance that it ofered to young people weary
of war, these poets – who were of largely secular temperaments – adapted the
aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and devoted themselves to the study, even the
worship, of art objects. Poets of the following generation, even Jorie Graham
(who in 1966 as a teenager helped to save Italian artifacts during the raging
loods in Florence), have tended to look at art, indeed to deine “art,” some-
what diferently. It is anything that meets the eye, is well made, or ofers an
opportunity for contemplation. And while the earlier poets often thought of
art as an escape from history, the younger ones have embedded the art objects
they write about into history, and also into contemporary events.

Notes
1. On the Latin American neobaroque, see, for example (in English), Lois
Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American
Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Rolando Perez, Severo
Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts (West Lafayette,
Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2011); Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neo-
Baroque,” Descant 17:4 (1986), pp. 133–60. For another way of seeing the neoba-
roque in late twentieth-century culture, especially ilm, see Angela Ndalianis,
Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and 20th Century Entertainment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2004).
2. Mary Karr, “Against Decoration,” Parnassus 16:2 (1991), pp. 277–300, 277.
3. Robert McDowell, “The Wilderness Surrounds the Word,” Hudson Review 43
(1991), pp. 669–78, 672.
4. Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 22.
5. Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943–2004 (New York: Harcourt, 2004), p. 344.
6. Wilbur, Collected Poems, p. 346.
7. See John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 267–75, for a brief analysis of
this poem.

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 Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and the Neobaroque

8. Anthony Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 92.
9. Adrienne Cecile Rich, A Change of World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1951), p. 10.
10. Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 83.
11. Amy Clampitt, The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 21, 34, 50, 89,
93, 96, 334, 339, 369, 343. This collection will subsequently be cited in the text
as ACP.
12. John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 199, 422.
13. Amy Clampitt, Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, ed. Willard
Spiegelman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 53.
14. Clampitt, Love, Amy, p. 199.
15. William Butler Yeats, Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan,
1989), p. 193.
16. John Donne, Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1978), p. 50.
17. For further discussion, see Willard Spiegelman, How Poets See the World: The
Art of Description on Contemporary Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 57–81.
18. Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems, p. 150.
19. Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems, p. 188.
20. Anthony Hecht, The Transparent Man (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 73.
21. John Hollander, Harp Lake (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 75–77.
22. John Hollander, Movie-Going and Other Poems (New York: Atheneum,
1962), p. 2.
23. Hollander, Movie-Going, p. 6.
24. John Hollander, Selected Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 10.
25. Kay Ryan, Elephant Rocks (New York: Grove, 1996), p. 93.
26. Heather McHugh, Hinge and Sign: Poems 1968–1993 (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 159.
27. Adam Kirsch, “All Eyes on the Snow Globe,” New York Times Book
Review, October 29, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/29
/reviews/001029.29kirscht.html.
28. Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992 (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 129–31.
29. William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 490.
30. Schnackenberg, Supernatural Love, p. 131.
31. Roland Barthes, “Style and Its Image,” in Seymour Chatman (ed.), Literary
Style: A Symposium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 3–15, 10.

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 W il lar d S pi e ge l m an

32. Morris Croll, Style Rhetoric and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J.
Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 210.
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library
of America, 1983), p. 54.
34. M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in
Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (eds.), From Sensibility to Romanticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 527–60.
35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest
Hartley Coleridge (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1895), vol. 2, pp. 558–59.
36. Jorie Graham, Materialism (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1993), p. 137.
37. Jorie Graham, Erosion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983),
p. 66.

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 Chapter 48
Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry
J o s e ph T. T h o m a s , J r .

Angela Sorby begins her contribution to this collection with a claim as seem-
ingly radical as it is true: “Children’s poetry is . . . a marginal subield within
the already-somewhat-marginal ield of poetry. It is barely studied and barely
taught. . . . And yet, ironically, nineteenth-century verses for children . . . are
among the best-known and most culturally inl uential texts in American lit-
erary history.” With but one change (“nineteenth-century” to “twentieth-
century”) these words could – and I suppose shall – work as an introduction
to the topic of this chapter. Children’s poetry is the popular poetry of the
twentieth and twenty-irst centuries. David Russell suggests, and rightly so,
“that few American children ever move far beyond the joyous nonsense of
Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky in their elementary classroom experiences,”
and yet poems for children (to echo Sorby) number among the most culturally
inl uential texts in American literary history, and the most readily recogniz-
able poets in our nation are those who have made a career writing for chil-
dren.1 Add Dr. Seuss to the pair of poets Russell mentions, and you have a triad
equally if not more well known than Robert Frost, and Frost owes much of his
broader fame to his secret second life as a children’s poet. Furthermore, the
best-selling collections of poetry today are invariably those marketed and sold
to children (or, more precisely, to their gift-giving caretakers), and our shared
tradition of folk poetry – “Miss Suzy Had a Steamboat” and “Miss Mary Mack,
Mack, Mack,” to cite two obvious examples – is irmly centered in the domain
of childhood.
However, to note that children’s poetry is a marginal area within the already
marginal ield of poetry is only half the story. Yes, those who study poetry for
adults largely ignore children’s poetry as an academic subject. Frost’s reputa-
tion as a children’s poet may not really be a secret, but it does seem an embar-
rassment, and Theodore Roethke’s rigorous study of nursery rhymes and his
own collections of children’s poetry (I Am! Says the Lamb [1961], Party at the Zoo
[1963], and the posthumous Dirty Dinky and Other Creatures [1973]) are largely

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 Jo se ph T . Th o mas, Jr .

ignored by the ample scholarship surrounding his life and work. Likewise, John
Ciardi’s still-declining reputation lies solely on the perceived inadequacies of
his adult poetry, although he is one of the most successful and talented of late
century children’s poets. And Randall Jarrell’s reputation still rests – despite
the work of Richard Flynn and Stephen Burt – on his extraordinary criticism
rather than his poetry for children or for adults.2 Russell insists, “American
poetry for children has long sufered from neglect, and occasional abuse, from
scholars, teachers, and, indeed, from poets themselves.”3 His claim is born out
by even a cursory survey of American poetry anthologies and syllabi, in which
children’s poetry is woefully underrepresented – if there at all. Yet this neglect
comes not only from scholars and teachers and writers of adult poetry (and
here is the other half of the story) but also from colleagues within the fairly
marginalized study of children’s literature itself.
This anxiety informs even the writing of this chapter: to treat in a single
essay the subject of twentieth-century American children’s poetry is a daunt-
ing task, for the endeavor suggests the subject is more homogenous than it is.
As Flynn writes, U.S. children’s poetry is, “like poetry for adults[,] . . . a clouded
battleground for competing camps.”4 And yet, as I suggested previously, chil-
dren’s poetry today is not limited to literary poetry – that is, poetry printed up
in books and sold in stores – but extends to playground poetry, a l uid body
of traditional folk rhymes shared by children (and later by adults) of nearly all
social classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds. For these reasons, the subject
of children’s poetry can be more vexing than its adult counterpart, for we can-
not be sure even what a children’s poem is. Limiting ourselves momentarily
to the literary variety, a systematic look at the kinds of poetry ofered up to
children in our most celebrated children’s poetry anthologies (including The
Golden Treasure of Poetry [1959], Relections on a Gift of a Watermelon Pickle [1966],
Knock at a Star [1982], The Random House Book of Poetry for Children [1983], and
A Child’s Anthology of Poetry [1995]) demonstrates immediately the problem:
the poets most commonly featured in these collections are known chiely for
their adult work, and the poems that represent these poets are only tentatively
children’s poems: E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Carl
Sandburg, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams top the list of the
most commonly anthologized poets, and their poems, for example, “In Just –”
(Cummings), “The Road Not Taken” (Frost), “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke),
“Fog” (Sandburg), “Dreams” (Hughes), and “The Red Wheelbarrow”
(Williams), are poems written for an adult audience and published irst in col-
lections and poetry magazines marketed to adults.5

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 Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry

In Poetry’s Playground I argue that the history of contemporary American

children’s poetry is the history of poetry for adults.6 However, as Sorby (and
Donald Hall, if less thoroughly) demonstrates, the history of these two genres
has been interwoven since the beginnings of our nation.7 Poetry for children
and adults branched away from each other signiicantly in the early twentieth
century, only after the wild success and popularization of what Sorby calls
“schoolroom poetry,” but even then there was overlap. Schoolroom poetry
was a fundamental part of middle-class life from the nineteenth to the early
twentieth century, in competition with “comic strips or silent ilms,” not the
developing avant-garde.8 But as we began to draw the line between adult and
child more starkly, the “tremendous popularity” of children’s poetry began
to suggest “(and perpetuate) a ‘natural’ connection between children and
poetry,” especially narrative poetry and “verse” that employs self-consciously
regular rhyme and meter.9 This connection between form and childhood is
doubtlessly one of the reasons so much “adult” twentieth-century poetry
deemed appropriate for children displays traditional form. (The work of
Robert Frost is a salient example.) If there was a conl ict between modernism
and schoolroom poetry, it existed primarily in the minds of poets like Ezra
Pound, who, even as a champion of Frost, sought to distance himself from
the kind of verse found in primers like the McGufey or Appleton readers
(the latter of which, as Jarrell’s Uncle Wadsworth reminds us in “The Schools
of Yesteryear,” contained not only poems by the usual schoolroom poets but
also work by John Milton, William Wordsworth, “Addison, Bishop, Berkeley,
Bunyan, Byron, Coleridge, Carlyle, Cervantes, Coleridge,” and a host of oth-
ers besides).10 Therefore, when Ezra Pound urged poets “To break the pen-
tameter,” he was really breaking away from a tradition of schoolroom poetry
(and prosody) that efectively infantilized meter and, Sorby might add, that
infantilized popular poetry in general.11 (I should note that the vast number
of books of poetry published for children, even in these early years of the
twenty-irst century, regularly feature rhymed, anapestic meter, a meter still
shunned by even the most conservative of formalist adult poets.12) Of course,
more than a few U.S. modernists tried their hand at children’s poetry: T. S.
Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats [1939]), Langston Hughes (The Dream
Keeper [1932]), Carl Sandburg (Early Moon [1930]), and even Gertrude Stein (The
World is Round [1939]), among others.
However, most children’s poets writing during the irst quarter of the twen-
tieth century shared the aesthetic sensibilities of those in the previous century.
Although their reputations have since declined, Elizabeth Coatsworth, David

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McCord, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Sara Teasdale are just a handful of
the popular poets enjoyed by literate Americans in the irst half of the twen-
tieth century. Their poems joined what Sorby calls the “hit singles” of nine-
teenth-century giants of schoolroom poetry like Elizabeth Akers (“Rock Me
to Sleep”), Sarah Josepha Hale (“Mary’s Lamb”), Joyce Kilmer (“Trees”), and
Walt Whitman (“O Captain! My Captain!”). These poems functioned as “an
archive of popular memory” sustained by schools, “museums, lyceums, the-
aters, newspapers, and children’s magazines and clubs.”13 Among these poets,
the most popular – remaining so until Frost unseated him in the 1960s – was
Carl Sandburg, famous for his long, Whitmanesque lines. Unlike his major
poetic competitors, Sandburg eschews meter and rhyme, as we see in his most
enduring contribution to children’s literature, Early Moon (1930). One of the
collection’s typical celebrations of the working class, “Fish Crier,” is com-
posed of three sentences, each a single, long line. It begins, “I know a Jew ish
crier on Maxwell Street with a voice like a north wind blowing over stubble in
January.”14 In “Street Window,” another of his city poems, we ind an unusu-
ally tender example of Sandburg’s tendency to depict unl inchingly social ills:
“The pawn-shop man knows hunger, / And how far hunger has eaten the
heart / Of one who comes with an old keepsake.”15 Early Moon is also remark-
able for its “Short Talk on Poetry,” which opens the collection:

We have heard much in our time about free verse being modern, as though it
is a new-found style for men to use in speaking and writing, rising out of the
machine age, skyscrapers, high speed and jazz. Now, if free verse is a form
of writing poetry without rime, without regular meters, without established
and formal rules governing it, we can easily go back to the earliest styles of
poetry known to the human family – and the style is strictly free verse.16

This dedication to addressing pertinent debates in twentieth-century poetry

is typical: Sandburg addresses his child readers as an intellectually curious and
capable audience.
Langston Hughes’s The Dream Keeper (1932) similarly resists the common-
places of popular poetry, in terms of both content and form. While Hughes
does use rhyme and meter, he is freer in their application, writing in traditional
poetic forms, free verse, and the blues, all to great efect. The inal stanza of
“Wide River” illustrates his command of the blues form and his fearlessness in
employing an African American dialect uncommon to the print culture of his
time: “Got to cross that river / An’ git to ma baby somehow. / Cross that river,
/ Git to ma baby somehow – / Cause if I don’t see ma baby / I’ll lay down an’
die right now.”17 In The Dream Keeper Hughes engages topics traditional to lyric

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poetry – youth, old age, death, poverty, and love – but manages them with
more nuance than most twenty-irst-century children’s poetry. Consider, for
instance, these lines, which describe how the speaker’s lover, a “beauty [in] red
/ Burns in my heart a love-ire sharp like pain.”18 Or note the striking candor
evident in the inal pair of couplets (an apt formal choice) in “Passing Love.”
Addressed to the speaker’s paramour, it is a moving meditation on a love afair,
all the sweeter for its clandestine evanescence:
Because you are to me a prayer
I cannot say you everywhere.
Because you are to me a rose –
You will not stay when summer goes.19
The darker poems (“Parisian Beggar Woman,” for example, a cruel medita-
tion on old age and that which it leaves behind) are tempered by the light (the
title poem, for instance). In addition to its formal inventiveness and range of
subject, The Dream Keeper’s diverse speakers (some men and some women,
some children and some adults) and linguistic diversity (Hughes writes in sev-
eral dialects, including standard English) make for a fresh and arresting book.
The populist politics shared by Hughes and Sandburg lent itself to the pro-
ject of writing for youngsters. However, many of the high modernists had
a more troubled relationship with children’s literature. Stein demonstrates
this discomfort when she insists, on the one hand, that “children themselves
are poetry. . . . My poetry was children’s poetry,” while, on the other, banning
William Carlos Williams from her home for saying in essence the very same
thing: “I hope it pleases you, but the things that children write have seemed to
me so Gertrude Steinish in their repetitions. Your quality is that of being slowly
and innocently irst recognizing sensations and experience.”20 This modernist
ambivalence about children’s poetry, however, was short lived. A more inte-
grated understanding of children’s poetry returned in the 1950s, although the
modernist (and New Critical) discomfort with seemingly easy, popular poetry
lingered, especially in the academic world.
By midcentury, many U.S. poets who previously wrote exclusively for
adults – including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, William Jay Smith, May
Swenson, Richard Wilbur, and the aforementioned Ciardi, Frost, Jarrell, and
Roethke – began writing for children as well. This turn to children’s poetry –
and, importantly, the fact that these writers saw their work in this area as
both artistically and professionally acceptable – signals a broader interest in
childhood and its literature in the United States (an interest academics have
been slow to cultivate). Stephanie Coontz notes that the years immediately

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 Jo se ph T . Th o mas, Jr .

following the war brought with them the “youth market” and a concomitant
“institutionaliz[ation]” of “youth culture.”21 After World War II, the United
States saw a precipitous rise in birthrates, and as these children grew, so did
the market for children’s texts.22 Frost exempliies American poetry’s return to
the child audience, for although he got his start in children’s poetry (three of
his early poems were irst published in The Youth’s Companion: “Ghost House”
[1906], “October” [1912], and “Reluctance” [1912]), Frost did not publish a col-
lection marketed for children until 1959, when his well-known You Come Too:
Favorite Poems for Young People was released.23
In the years between 1959 and his death in 1963, Frost became “the American
school poet,” unseating Carl Sandburg, Frost’s “popular rival.”24 Frost’s poems
are regularly collected in children’s poetry anthologies and commented on in
education textbooks, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for example,
remaining the most anthologized poem in the English language; according to
Donald Hall, “Stopping by Woods” has “become a poem for children,” one of
the most commonly taught poems in U.S. schools.25 The 1978 picture book ver-
sion of the poem, illustrated by Susan Jefers, remains a winter favorite, but it
is far from the only edition of his children’s work regularly trotted out by pub-
lishers looking to court buyers with a recognizable name on the cover. Frost’s
turn to children’s poetry paved the way for adult poets closely associated with
him to do the same. For instance, around the time You Come Too was published,
Hall, one of the three co-editors of the rather traditional anthology New Poets
of England and America (1957) – for which Frost wrote an introduction – also
tried his hand at children’s literature, although his contributions over the years
have been mostly prose (such as Andrew the Lion Farmer [1959] and The Ox-Cart
Man [1979], a prose revision of an adult poem by the same name). Hall also
edited the impressive Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (1985), a work
he later refashioned into a collection marketed to young children: The Oxford
Illustrated Book of American Children’s Poems (1999). X. J. Kennedy, whose work
was featured in the “second selection” of Hall and Pack’s New Poets of England
and America (1962) also became (and continues to be) a strong advocate for
and writer of children’s literature; however, unlike Hall, he has focused his
talents on children’s poetry speciically (his most recent collection, City Poems,
was released in 2010). Additionally, Kennedy has commented on children’s
poetry in essays and has edited with his wife, Dorothy Kennedy, two success-
ful anthologies of children’s poetry.26 Again, the worlds of adult poetry and its
children’s counterpart overlap far more than most realize.
This overlap is not limited, however, to the more traditional poetic com-
munity. Since the 1960s, poets associated with Donald Allen’s controversial

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anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960) also have grown increas-
ingly interested in writing for children and teaching them to write. New York
School poets Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett, for example, were active in
the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, a landmark poets-in-the-schools pro-
gram. Koch, Padgett’s teacher at Columbia, wrote a pair of seminal works
about teaching children poetry: Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970) and its compan-
ion anthology of poetry by children, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973).
Over the next several decades, these books sparked a great deal of debate
on the issue of creative writing pedagogy – particularly concerning how
(and whether) to teach young people to write poetry. Poet-critic Myra Cohn
Livingston critiqued Koch’s double thesis that children are “natural poets” and
have a natural connection to poetry in her two-part essay “But Is It Poetry?”
(1975, 1976), the arguments therein developed in Livingston’s contentious but
undeniably important book The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality?27 Koch did not
limit himself to teaching, however, and in 1985 he and his regular collaborator
Kate Farrell, founding member of the New York Art Theater Institute, would
put together the beautiful Talking to the Sun (1985), a collection notable not
only for its superb reproductions of visual art from the Metropolitan Museum
but also for including poems by often-ignored twentieth-century avant-garde
poets like Stein, Tristan Tzara, and Guillaume Apollinaire, poems the editors
believed perfect for a child audience.28
The perceived connection Koch and Farrell found among the historical
avant-garde, children’s literature, and childhood is not as unusual or as radical
as one might think. Kennedy, a poet not known for his experimental tenden-
cies, includes in Knock at a Star some strikingly unusual selections. For instance,
in addition to poems by concrete/visual poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (work orig-
inally published for adults), he includes his own visual poem “Concrete Cat,”
poetry by Koch, Myra Cohn Livingston’s visual/found poem “Four Way Stop,”
and poems by Charles Reznikof, Sandburg, and Stein. This interest in avant-
garde and experimental literature has continued into the twenty-irst century:
Robin Hirsch’s grotesquely beautiful 2002 collection FEG: Stupid Ridiculous
Poems for Intelligent Children (strikethrough in original) alludes to New York
School poet Frank O’Hara, Stein (again), and even Oulipian Georges Perec,
turning his child readers on to both Perec’s “5,000 letter palindrome” and his
lipogrammatic novel La Disparition (“an entire novel,” Hirsch tantalizingly
explains, composed “without using the letter e”).29 The Oulipians are also sum-
moned by JonArno Lawson, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada: in
his 2008 book A Voweller’s Bestiary, from Aardvark to Guineafowl (and H), Lawson
makes explicit his debt to the avant-garde by choosing the lipogram as a formal

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constraint (the poems use only the vowels found in their title, and no others).
For instance, the poem “Turtle” charts the “luckless” yet persevering reptile of
its title, ending with the lipogrammatic lines
Turtle gurgles, unnerved.
Blunders rudderless,
sufers, unsure.
Fumbles, tumbles,
returns,
endures.30
(Note that each word uses both the e and the u of the title.) Voweller’s is a
virtuoso performance. Lawson isn’t, however, some soulless technician, as
the understated “Deer” demonstrates, with this concluding observation:
“Whenever we freeze, / then lee – / Whenever we’re tender, / then severe –
// we resemble deer.”31 Lawson links himself to the historical and contempo-
rary avant-garde in his extraordinary afterword, in which he acknowledges
“the direct inspiration” of Christian Bök’s experimental tour de force Eunoia
(2001), Richard Wilbur’s The Disappearing Alphabet (1998), and Dr. Seuss’s On
Beyond Zebra (1955). Additionally, on the back cover we ind a blurb authored
by none other than the Language writer Charles Bernstein.
But the historical avant-garde has had a less obvious inl uence on American
children’s poetry. Lawson is not the irst writer to suggest the avant-garde ped-
igree of the ever-popular Dr. Seuss (the pen name of Theodor Geisel). Philip
Nel argues convincingly that as “a painter and cartoonist living in New York
from 1928 through 1942, Seuss felt the inl uence” of Dada and Surrealism.32
Noting the visual echoes of Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada in Seuss’s adult
paintings reproduced in The Secret Art of Doctor Seuss (1998), Nel also points
out their Dada-inlected titles, particularly The Rather Odd Myopic Woman
Riding Pigyback on One of Helen’s Many Cats and The Joyous Leaping of Uncanned
Salmon.33 The avant-garde spirit also informs Seuss’s writing, most obviously
the naked, eponymous black cat of his Cat in the Hat books. The Cat, Seuss’s
most popular creation, debuted in The Cat in the Hat (1957), which shares the
sensibility of Oulipian writers like Perec and Harry Mathews – namely, the
crafting of art while shackled by diicult and seemingly arbitrary procedural
constraint (in this case, limiting his vocabulary to a 348-word list). “I can hold
up the cup,” the Cat says, “And the milk and the cake! / I can hold up these
books! / And the ish on a rake!”34 These verses exude an anarchic, aleatory
energy, Seuss’s formal constraint encouraging their surreal juxtapositions. Nel
makes much of the collage-like efect of these juxtapositions. Seuss’s love of

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chance – ish and rake just happening to appear on his vocabulary list and thus
engendering the ine, nonsensical line I cited above – was one he shared with
André Breton (chance, of course, is a key element in both Surrealism and
Dada). In The Annotated Cat, Nel takes great pains to trace the recurrence of
the cat image – especially one that wears clothes, gloves in particular – in the
visual and literary art important to Seuss, and in Seuss’s own oeuvre, besides.
Yet the rhyming pair cat and hat’s chance appearance on his vocabulary list
may very well have crystalized Seuss’s inl uences and artistic habits into the
cat we know and love.35 And there are certainly other less speculative cases of
a surreal serendipity: Horton Hears a Who (1954) was inspired when (in Seuss’s
words) a “sketch of an elephant . . . happened to fall on top of a sketch of a
tree. . . . An elephant in a tree! What’s he doing here?”36
Of course, Seuss’s cartoony, lively art plays a central role in his success as
a children’s author, while his poetry, with its inventive nonsense, infectious
rhythms, and gripping narrative, has largely been discounted by academics.
Nel works to recuperate Seuss’s reputation as a poet, placing him alongside
titans of nonsense and light verse like Walt Kelly and Spike Milligan, Ogden
Nash and James Thurber, part of the “newer generation of nonsense-writers
who popularized and developed the form for twentieth-century readers.”37 Nel
notes that Seuss’s nearly exclusive use of the anapest, forever associated with
the limerick, has much to do with “why Seuss is rarely studied as a poet.”38 The
limerick, he acknowledges, is “the punch line of poetic forms,” and as such,
even a line as memorable as “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” is
often thoughtlessly dismissed as doggerel, despite its being at least as impor-
tant to the history of American verse as “ ’Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the house.” Yet unlike so many of his imitators, Seuss uses
meter to do more than propel his narratives forward. For instance, Nel notes
that “although the Cat in the Hat will later speak in anapestic dimeter, his
irst line [‘Why do you sit there like that?’] reverses that meter – dactylic dim-
eter” – concluding with a single, Manx tail of a syllable: “Since he will soon
reverse the order of the house, his irst line very aptly reverses the rhythm of
the verse.”39 This sort of rhythmic nuance is not uncommon in Seuss’s poetry,
as Nel demonstrates through the metrical analysis of poems like The Cat in
the Hat and Yertle the Turtle (1958). As Nel puts it, “to examine the poetics [of
Dr. Seuss] is to understand that meter matters.”40
The Cat in the Hat and Ciardi’s irst children’s book, The Reason for the Pelican
(1959), signaled a crucial change in both the market for and perspective on
U.S. children’s poetry. Along with poet and illustrator Maurice Sendak, these
poets added some much-needed heat to the rather bland midcentury nature

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poem. Their poetry began in the United States what John Rowe Townsend
has dubbed the school of “urchin verse.”41 This poetic mode eschews “social
or literary pretension” while focusing on “family life in the raw, with its back-
chat, fury and muddle.” It is a poetry more apt to treat “disused railway lines,
building sites and junkheaps” than the “woods and meadows” so common to
the midcentury nature lyric.42 Characterizing the midcentury nature poem –
of the kind written by David McCord and Elizabeth Coatsworth – as a “gar-
den,” Myra Cohn Livingston laments its “invasion” by poets who “glori[fy]
the unconscious . . . with a sort of ‘garbage delight’ that assaults literature
itself ”; she warns that these poets (including the Canadian Dennis Lee) pro-
duce a poetry akin to “werewolfs [sic] and ghouls . . . creeping into the garden
where children play.”43 Seuss, Ciardi, and Sendak anticipated by ten to ifteen
years the British poet Michael Rosen’s supposed invention of urchin verse, as
well as his irreverent, disobedient, and back-talking kids (a perfect example of
the latter is Max, the naughty young hero of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things
Are [1963], and his infamous, iambic yawp: “I’ll eat you up!”).44
Like Seuss, Sendak is praised primarily for his inimitable visual art, but
his liltingly rhythmic free verse is as memorable as it is popular, challeng-
ing dominant notions of childhood and children’s poetry. Aimed at a very
young readership, the poetry in Wild Things is as overlooked as it is remark-
able. Consider, for example, this single sentence describing the beginning of
Max’s adventure:
That very night in Max’s room a forest grew
and grew –
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed of through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.45
The long, wending sentence’s paratactic litany of ands suggests the language of
childhood (and I did this and I did that and I did this and I did that) while formally
echoing our hero’s epic journey (the subtle quirkiness of almost over a year is
characteristically delightful). Although the odyssey’s exact perils are left to the
illustrations, once Max arrives at his titular destination, the poetry becomes
horrifyingly vivid, Sendak’s description of Max’s initial encounter with the
wild things directly contradicting the art, the illustrated beasts less terrifying
than cuddly. Note how the meter in the irst line rocks along sweetly – this is a

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bedtime story, after all – two iambs, two anapests, and a concluding spondee
(“where the wild things are”):
And when he came to the place where the wild things are
they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Max said “BE STILL!”
and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him the king of all wild things.46

The verses of In the Night Kitchen (1970) also demonstrate Sendak’s signa-
ture, paratactic syntax, while recalling the nursery rhyme with their loose,
accentual rhythms and irregular rhyme:
Did you ever hear of Mickey,
How he heard a racket in the night
And shouted “Quiet down there!”
And fell through the dark, out of his clothes
Past the moon & his mama & papa sleeping tight
Into the light of the night kitchen?47

The rhythmic music of the chant, “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! Stir
it! Scrape it! Make it! Bake it!” (to which Mickey replies, “I’m not the milk and
the milk’s not me! / I’m Mickey!”), is unmistakably poetry. Its neglect in the
academic treatment of children’s poetry is an embarrassing oversight.
While Sendak and Seuss are best known for their visual art, Ciardi’s poetic
bona ides are unquestioned. Known primarily as a poet and critic, Ciardi was
popular on the lecture circuit, his audience swelled by readers of his regular
column in the Saturday Review and fans of Accent, “a weekly cultural magazine
show” that he hosted for CBS television.48 Ciardi’s fame as a public intellectual
during the 1950s and 1960s cannot be overstated. As X. J. Kennedy writes in his
afterword to Ciardi’s The Reason for the Pelican, the well-respected Ciardi was
“responsible to a large extent for [the] change in climate” that allowed “a poet
to publish a collection of children’s verse without being exiled from the liter-
ary republic.”49 (Ciardi’s fame has long since cooled, however, and outside the
world of children’s poetry, he is largely neglected these days.)
Kennedy celebrates the vigor with which Ciardi “threw open the musty old
parlor of American children’s poetry, with its smell of rose petals and cam-
phor, and . . . let in a blast of fresh air.”50 In The Monster Den (1963), for instance,
Ciardi caricatures the elevated, mannered diction so common to midcentury

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children’s poetry. In lines like these, spoken by a father to his children, Ciardi
playfully satirizes the myth of the happy middle-class family: “your Mummy
[and I] thought we were / Living happily ever after, sir, / As the stories say.
We didn’t know then / We were only starting a MONSTER DEN. / But that’s
what we did.”51 His poetry’s tone is similar to that which Edward Gorey (his
former student) made famous in collections like The Wugly Ump and The
Vinegar Works, both also published in 1963.52 Many of Ciardi’s books are illus-
trated by Gorey, whose connection to the world of children’s poetry extends
to a masterfully illustrated and regularly republished 1982 edition of Eliot’s Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. (Nota bene: this edition played no small role in
resuscitating Old Possum’s reputation; couple it with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
immensely popular adaptation, Cats, which ran for eleven years in London
and eight in New York, and one realizes that Eliot, alongside more obvious
choices like Seuss and Silverstein, may have written one of the most proitable
and inl uential single books of children’s poetry in American history.)
Ciardi grew up poor, in a working-class neighborhood noted for its Old
World Italian values, and his hardscrabble childhood may be at the root of his
children’s poetry’s dark humor. Ciardi began writing for children when irst
his nephews and then his own children began reading, publishing, between
1959 and 1966, nine books for children, among them the aforementioned The
Reason for the Pelican, The Man Who Sang the Sillies (1961), and You Know Who
(1964). Like Seuss, Ciardi tried his hand at poetry constrained by an early
reader vocabulary list. In Ciardi’s case, this experiment was prompted by his
daughter’s diiculty with reading. The result was I Met a Man (1961), an easy
reader based on a irst-grade vocabulary. Urged on by the success of Seuss –
and perhaps Ciardi too, as they regularly corresponded throughout the if-
ties – Roethke also wrote a book using this constraint: Party at the Zoo, which
contained a vocabulary of only 268 basic words. Similarly, in You Read to Me,
I’ll Read to You (1962), Ciardi alternates poems written with a basic vocabulary
with those using a more advanced vocabulary, his aim being to encourage
parents and children to read poetry together.
Ciardi was outspoken about his frustration with midcentury poetry – for
children and adults – condemning a great deal of it for what he character-
ized as an unfortunate Victorian overseriousness. Several years before turn-
ing to children’s poetry, Ciardi would write, “The nineteenth century was a
great literary achievement, but it began with one dreadful law: it tended to
take itself much too seriously.”53 Much of his children’s poetry, coupled as it
was with Gorey’s oddly anachronistic illustrations, undercuts that seriousness
while summoning it with anapestic meters and intricate form. Consider, for

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instance, the easy low of iamb to anapest in the opening stanza of The Man
Who Sang the Sillies, a master class in the music of poetry:

I met a man with a triple-chin.

Whenever he smiled, his chins would grin.
The strangest sight that ever I saw
Was a smile with three grins in its jaw.54

The result of this blend of irreverence and technical virtuosity is a body of

poetry that, while sometimes criticized for its obscurity and dark humor,
reminds readers that kids are complexly motivated people who can delight in
intricately formed, accomplished poetry, especially when it’s cut with more
than a little sly, subversive humor.
Humor, or, as Flynn puts it, “comedy,” is one of the major categories of
contemporary children’s poetry, along with the other Cs he enumerates in
“Consolation Prize”: cute, classic, and consoling.55 Nel points to Seuss’s words
about the political import of humor: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And
it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and
age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a
matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how
things can be in whack.”56 Although Seuss and Ciardi and even Roethke (the
irst half of his wonderful book I Am! Says the Lamb is labeled, rather directly,
“The Nonsense Poems”) set the commercial and aesthetic stage for nonsense
and light verse, from the early 1970s that stage has been dominated by the
comedic poetry of Prelutsky and Silverstein.57 Borrowing from the gross-out
traditions of playground rhyme (which we’ll get to in a moment), these poets
have developed the more gentle irreverence of Seuss and Ciardi into a ine art,
although they temper their irreverence with just enough didacticism to appeal
to the adults who so often do the book buying. Nevertheless, Silverstein, who
irst made his name drawing cartoons for Playboy, is often challenged for devel-
oping inappropriate themes in his work, despite such ostensibly didactic verses
as “Jimmy Jet and His TV Set,” which tells us “the story of Jimmy Jet” who
“watched all day, he watched all night / Till he grew pale and lean . . . And his
bottom grew into his chair. / And his chin turned into a tuning dial, / And
antennae grew out of his hair.”58 This poem’s success lies less in its warnings
about excessive television viewing and more in the delight with which the nar-
rator describes Jimmy’s uncanny transformation.
Likewise, “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out,”
which ends with the didactic message, “always take the garbage out!” wins
the hearts of its child readers through the narrator’s lavish and extended

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descriptions of Sarah’s funky pile of garbage: “Greasy napkins, cookie

crumbs, / Globs of gooey bubble gum, / Cellophane from green baloney,
/ Rubbery blubbery macaroni, / Peanut butter, caked and dry, / Curdled
milk and crusts of pie,” and so forth and so on.59 One can detect in both of
these pieces Silverstein’s history as a songwriter (in fact, “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia
Stout” appears on Silverstein’s album, Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball [1969] – on
which he was backed by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show). Indeed, in some
circles Silverstein is better known for his hundreds of songs (“A Boy Named
Sue,” “On the Cover of The Rolling Stone,” and “Queen of the Silver Dollar,”
just to name a few). Ruth K. MacDonald suggests “that a poet who comes to
written verse from writing rock and roll or blues lyrics is more used to com-
posing and revising out loud than drafting and redrafting on paper,” and the
immediate, draft-like efect of Silverstein’s accentual folk meter is as infectious
as the steadier Seussian anapest, if more roughly hewn.60 Silverstein died in
1999, at the close of a century whose inal quarter was dominated by his hand-
ful of children’s poetry collections. Unlike Prelutsky (as we’ll see), Silverstein’s
success as a poet rests on the broad shoulders of a mere three books: Where
the Sidewalk Ends (1974), A Light in the Attic (1981), and Falling Up (1996), which
were joined by two posthumous (and ultimately weaker) books: Runny Babbit
(2005), a collection of spoonerisms, and Every Thing on It (2011), a miscellany of
previously unpublished poems and drawings.
Silverstein is joined by (as Flynn calls him in “Consolation Prize”) “his evil
twin Prelutsky,” the two poets who “occupy most of the small area allotted to
children’s poetry” in bookstores.61 Prelutsky has published a great deal more
poetry than Silverstein – some ifty collections – and has edited a slew of
anthologies, including Poems of A. Nonny Mouse (1989), For Laughing Out Loud
(1991), and The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983), his most pop-
ular anthology. Prelutsky’s best-known book of original poetry is The New
Kid on the Block (1984), notable for its winking, naughty-but-not-scandalous
humor – typiied by “You Need to Have an Iron Rear” (“to sit upon a cactus,”
we discover) – as well as its participation in the gross-out traditions of play-
ground rhymes, as in “Drumpp the Grump” (who informs his audience: “I
never wash, and like to squash / my ingers into worms, / I’m full of leas and
smelly cheese / and ifty million germs”).62
Prelutsky is also a musician, and, as he reports to Karin Snelson, “I knew
[Silverstein] before either of us had ever written any children’s poems, when
we were both in Greenwich Village in the late ’50s and early ’60s. . . . We were
both involved with the folk music scene.”63 Their familiarity with folk tradi-
tions explains their debt to the folklore of childhood, speciically playground

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rhyme. Silverstein and Prelutsky ofer children a kind of “defanged” play-

ground rhyme, cleaning up the much dirtier playground poetry for parents
and guardians.64 Playground poetry is a received oral tradition lexible enough
to allow for modiication and revision by the children who perform it daily on
playgrounds and street corners, its verses – sometimes chanted, sometimes
sung – often engaging literary poetry (children’s and adult) through parody
and appropriation. Playground poetry refers to many forms of childhood folk
poetry, each playing a variety of aesthetic and social roles. Some rhymes are
sung while skipping rope (“Cinderella dressed in yellow / Went upstairs to
kiss her fellow”), and others chanted when choosing players in games (“Eeny
meeny miney-moe / Catch a tiger by the toe”); other pieces serve as the basis
of hand-clapping games (Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, / All dressed in black,
black, black), and still others ridicule (“Hate to talk about your mama. / She’s
a good old soul. / She’s got a ten-ton pussy and a rubber asshole”) or defend
against ridicule (“Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will
never hurt me”). Children also employ them to condemn peers who violate
the cultural mores of childhood (“No cuts, no butts, no coconuts”) and to
mock authority (“We have tortured every teacher, / And we broke the golden
rule. / We have torn up all the math books, / And the principal’s a fool”).65
Playground poetry is also remarkable for its engagement with social and
linguistic taboos (as some of the preceding examples suggest). For instance,
this poem, a rif on Jane Taylor’s “The Star” (from her 1806 collection Rhymes
for the Nursery) ends with language stronger than any even Silverstein would
dare employ in his children’s poetry:

Twinkle, Twinkle, little star,

Who the hell do you think you are?
Up in heaven you think you’re it;
Down on earth you’re full of shit.66

Playground poetry’s tendency to engage taboo can be troubling, as in these

racist but well-known rhymes: “Me Chinese, me play joke, / Me go pee-pee in
your Coke” and “Eeny meeny miney-moe / Catch a nigger by the toe.” Other
poems are homophobic (“You don’t go out with boys anymore, / You don’t
like Elvis Presley. / You sit in the corner and play with yourself. / Oops, you’re
a lesie”), describe rape (“He pushed me to the loor. / He lifted up my skirt. /
He said it wouldn’t hurt”), attack racism (“Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want
to integrate. / Eight, six, four, two, bet you sons a bitches do!”), and, on the
whole, unsettle adults while reminding them that children have a rich and var-
ied – if sometimes troubling – poetic tradition of their own. Common to this

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tradition is a glossolaliac exuberance and irrepressible catchiness: playground

poetry is the most popular and present poetry in the United States, and also
the most readily dismissed and underappreciated.
Although the most popular literary poetry of the contemporary scene is
predominantly of the nonsense and light verse variety, a sort of domesticated
playground poetry, other poets look back to the socially conscious poetry of
Sandburg and Hughes for their inspiration. For instance, Arnold Adof ’s visu-
ally and aurally arresting poetry is marked by an interest in identity politics as
well as formal experiment. His Black Is Brown Is Tan (1973), for instance, is the
irst picture book to feature an interracial couple, while his collection of poems
Slow Dance Heart Break Blues (1995) develops his earlier visual experiments,
typographic puns, and other visual cues into resonant poetry. A capable poet
and outspoken advocate for poetry and childhood, Adof is best known for his
anthologies, among them I Am the Darker Brother (1968).
Like Adof, Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and anthologist with her feet in the
worlds of children’s and adult poetry. Preoccupied with cultural diference
and ethnic identity, Nye endorses the need for cross-cultural and intergen-
erational empathy. Nye’s single-author collection A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
(2005), especially, speaks powerfully from a young girl’s perspective. Adof and
Nye’s insistence on social relevance in children’s poetry is by no means rare in
contemporary children’s poetry, although their high aesthetic standards are,
recalling the children’s poetry of June Jordan and Nikki Giovanni. Jordan’s
Who Look at Me (1969) is a touchstone of a book. Its speaker returns the gaze of
the adult – perhaps white – reader, and it ends with a direct challenge: “Who
see the roof and corners of my pride / to be (as you are) free? / WHO LOOK
AT ME?”67
Another trend in contemporary children’s poetry is the novel in verse.
Unlike traditional long-form narrative poetry given to children (such as Alfred
Noyes’s The Highwayman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of
Hiawatha and Paul Revere’s Ride), the verse novel’s narrative emerges over the
course of many, fairly short poems, often lyrics. As teachers look for efective
ways to entice youngsters into reading, poetry (cynically, one thinks, because
of all the white space) appeals to both teachers and publishers. Yet when it
comes to “serious” (that is, not comic) poetry, slapping the word “novel” on
the cover appears to make books instantly more marketable. Regardless of the
reasons behind their publication, many in this new form have been quite good,
and the turn of the century has seen a proliferation of these largely free verse
“novels.” Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust (1997) and Witness (2001) are among
the most successful, artistically and poetically. Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life

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in Poems (2001) – perhaps better characterized as a biography in verse – stands

out as one of the inest collections of its kind, setting a new standard for well-
crafted narrative poetry.
The editors of Poetry and Childhood insist that children’s poetry is “the
Cinderella of children’s literature.”68 They may be right, just as Sorby is right
to remind us that it remains marginalized within the study of poetry itself. But
whether chanted on playgrounds when teachers aren’t around or read from
books provided by well-meaning relatives or librarians, children’s poetry remains
the most popular poetry in the United States. Indeed, it is a kind of holdout from
the nineteenth century, a time when poetry was read widely by citizens who
were neither poets nor academics. Why children seem so prone to growing out
of poetry – leaving it behind with other childish things, only to take it up again
when they or their loved ones have children – is a question for others to address.
But as one of the last truly popular poetries left to us, children’s poetry warrants
more attention than it receives. Those of us invested in the future of poetry
should take children’s poetry and its rich traditions seriously.

Notes
1. David Russell, “Review: Poetry’s Playground, by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.,” The
Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature 33:3 (2009), pp.
401–05, 401–02.
2. See Richard Flynn, Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990); Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.,
Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), particularly chapters 1, 2, and 4,
on Frost, Jarrell, and Roethke and Ciardi, respectively.
3. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. 401.
4. Richard Flynn, “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn: A
Critical Journal of Children’s Literature 17:1 (1993), pp. 37–44, 40.
5. See Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, pp. 105–32.
6. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. xv.
7. Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American
Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005); Donald
Hall (ed.), The Oxford Book of Children’s Poetry in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
8. Sorby, Schoolroom Poets, p. 187.
9. Sorby, Schoolroom Poets, p. 189.
10. Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp.
50–52.

1119
 Jo se ph T . Th o mas, Jr .

11. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 532.
12. For recent examples of this anapestic tendency, see Laura Purdie Salas,
BookSpeak: Poems about Books (New York: Clarion, 2011); C. M. Millen, The Ink
Garden of Brother Theophane (Watertown, Mass.: Charlesbridge, 2010); Diane
Z. Shore and Jessica Alexander, This Is the Dream (New York: Amistad, 2005);
and the lamentable The Legend of Messy M’Cheany (New York: Running Press,
2011), by none other than Kathie Lee Giford.
13. Sorby, Schoolroom Poets, p. xiii.
14. Carl Sandburg, Early Moon (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), p. 84.
15. Sandburg, Early Moon, p. 90.
16. Sandburg, Early Moon, p. 24.
17. Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1996),
p. 41.
18. Hughes, The Dream Keeper, p. 38.
19. Hughes, The Dream Keeper, p. 42.
20. Gertrude Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed.
Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), pp. 11–34, 18;
John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), p. 274.
21. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia
Trap (New York: Basic, 1992), p. 38.
22. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. xiv.
23. Robert Frost, You Come Too: Favorite Poems for Young Readers (New York: Holt,
1959).
24. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. 2; Jefrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography
(Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1996), p. 81.
25. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. 3; Hall (ed.), The Oxford Book of Children’s Poetry
in America, p. xxvi.
26. X. J. Kennedy and Dorothy Kennedy, Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to
Poetry (New York: Little, Brown, 1982); X. J. Kennedy, Talking Like the Rain: A
Read-to-Me Book of Poems (New York: Little, Brown, 1992).
27. Myra Cohn Livingston, The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality? (Boston: Horn Book,
1984).
28. Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell (eds.), Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology
of Poems for Young People (New York: Henry Holt, 1985).
29. Robin Hirsch, FEG: Stupid Ridiculous Poems for Intelligent Children (Boston:
Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 10, 20, 22–23.
30. JonArno Lawson, A Voweller’s Bestiary (Erin Village, Ontario: Porcupine’s
Quill, 2008), p. 32.
31. Lawson, A Voweller’s Bestiary, p. 10.
32. Philip Nel, “Dada Knows Best: Growing Up ‘Surreal’ with Dr. Seuss,” Children’s
Literature 27 (1999), pp. 150–84, 152.

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 Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry

33. Nel, “Dada Knows Best,” p. 154.

34. Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (New York: Houghton Mil in, 1957), p. 18.
35. Philip Nel, The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (New York:
Random House, 2007), pp. 34–37.
36. Philip Nel, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks
( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), p. 47.
37. Philip Nel, Dr. Seuss: American Icon (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 22.
38. Nel, Dr. Seuss, p. 20.
39. Nel, Dr. Seuss, p. 37.
40. Nel, The Annotated Cat, p. 31.
41. John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Lippincott,
1987), p. 300.
42. Townsend, Written for Children, p. 300.
43. Myra Cohn Livingston, “David McCord’s Poems: Something Behind the
Door,” in Perry Nodelman (ed.), Touchstones: Relections on the Best in Children’s
Literature (West Lafayette, Ind.: Children’s Literature Association, 1987), vol.
2, pp. 157–72, 157–58.
44. Morag Styles, From the Garden to the Street (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 262–
63; Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper & Row,
1963), n.p.
45. Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, n.p.
46. Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, n.p.
47. Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (New York: HarperCollins, 1970), n.p.
48. Edward M. Cifelli, John Ciardi: A Biography (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1997), p. 263.
49. John Ciardi, The Reason for the Pelican (Honesdale, Pa.: Boyds Mill Press, 1994),
p. 61.
50. Ciardi, The Reason for the Pelican, p. 63.
51. John Ciardi, The Monster Den: Or Look What Happened at My House – and to It
(Honesdale, Pa.: Wordsong, 1991), p. 15.
52. Kevin Shortsleeve convincingly argues that both of these works – as well as
other unfortunately mischaracterized Gorey collections – ought to be con-
sidered children’s poetry: see Kevin Shortsleeve, “Edward Gorey, Children’s
Literature, and Nonsense Verse,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 27:1
(2002), pp. 27–39.
53. John Ciardi (ed.), Mid-Century American Poets (New York: Twayne, 1950), p.
xviii.
54. John Ciardi, The Man Who Sang the Sillies (New York: Lippincott, 1961), p. 9.
55. Richard Flynn, “Consolation Prize,” Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books 100
(2003), pp. 66–83, 66.
56. Nel, Dr. Seuss, p. 68.
57. Theodore Roethke, I Am! Says the Lamb (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961).

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58. Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends (New York: HarperCollins, 1974),
p. 28.
59. Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, p. 71.
60. Ruth MacDonald, Shel Silverstein (New York: Twayne, 1997), p. 66.
61. Flynn, “Consolation Prize,” p. 66.
62. Jack Prelutsky, The New Kid on the Block (New York: Greenwillow, 1984),
pp. 15, 12.
63. Karin Snelson, “Pure Poetry: A Talk with Jack Prelutsky,” Amazon.com,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=6200.
64. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground, p. 18.
65. As an understudied form of folk poetry, these rhymes are collected in only a
few works, largely by folklorists. See Josepha Sherman and T. K. F. Weisskopf,
Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood (Atlanta, Ga.:
August House, 1995); Roger D. Abrahams, Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969); Roger D. Abrahams, Positively Black
(Englewood Clifs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970); and Francelia Butler, Skipping
Around the World (Hamden, Conn.: Library Professional Publications, 1989).
66. Sherman and Weisskopf, Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, p. 177.
67. June Jordan, Who Look at Me: Illustrated with Twenty-Seven Paintings (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969), p. 91.
68. Morag Styles, Louise Joy, and David Whitley (eds.), Poetry and Childhood (Stoke
on Trent: Trentham, 2010), p. xv.

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 Chapter 49
Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry
Ju l ia na S pa h r

“What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degra-
dations, shifts and upheavals in identiications of gender and labor? . . . What
are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this ‘America’?”1
These questions are asked by Myung Mi Kim, a poet of the disquieting linguis-
tic disorientation brought on by immigration, in her book Commons. They are
questions that haunt much contemporary U.S. poetry. And many of the poets
who have taken these questions and embraced them in the late twentieth and
early twenty-irst century have written a poetry in English that includes other
languages and/or is written mainly in the pidgins and creoles that resulted
from English-language colonialism.
I use the unwieldy phrase “literature in English that includes other lan-
guages” because I am not in this chapter talking about the U.S. literature writ-
ten in other languages that Werner Sollors and Marc Shell have collected.2
What I am talking about is poetry written in English for English-speaking
readers who may or may not have l uency in the languages of the poem. I
am talking about the “bilingual,” also known as the “multilingual,” and also
known as the “intralingual” traditions that so deine the literature of the U.S.-
Mexico border, such as that written by Juan Felipe Herrera and Alurista. And I
am also at the same time talking about a poet such as Kim, who brings into her
work, as do many writers associated with multiculturalism and/or identity
poetries, her heritage language (a language that is not the speaker’s dominant
language but that is learned because of a cultural connection) of Korean, and
about Craig Santos Perez, who includes Chamorro, and about Anne Tardos,
who includes Hungarian, German, and French. And I am also talking about
writers who include through appropriation and quotation languages that
are unrelated to them in terms of heritage or location, or perhaps even lu-
ency, such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who includes not only Spanish but also
Nahuatl, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who includes Greek and French. Like
Doris Sommer and many other scholars of the bi-, the multi-, and the inter-,

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I am interested in how this work is often full of “invitations to engage, to

delay and possibly redirect our hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and
fuse horizons.”3 But at the same time, I argue against the idea that poetry is
best served by seeing the sociocultural speciicity of these various poetries
as constitutive diferences. And I refuse to deine this literature in English
as marginal. It is, I argue, central to U.S. poetry. If we categorize the use of
polyglot elements in poetry as a similarity (rather than assuming that poetry’s
distinctive sociocultural traditions are constitutive diferences), it is easy to
recognize a long and broad history of literature in English that includes other
languages.
For the signiicant number of U.S. poets who use languages other than
English in their work, whether their motives are a form of realism or a pointed
resistance to globalizing English varies from poet to poet. But these writers
are inevitably writing out of an awareness of the changing role of English as it
becomes a global language. By the 1990s, English was the dominant or oicial
language in more than sixty countries and is represented on every continent
and on three major oceans. Because of English’s ties with colonialism and
globalization, as Alastair Pennycock writes, it

poses a direct threat to the very existence of other languages. More generally,
however, it poses the less dramatic but far more widespread danger of what
we might call linguistic curtailment. When English becomes the irst choice
as a second language, when it is the language in which so much is written and
in which so much of the visual media occur, it is constantly pushing other
languages out of the way, curtailing their usage in both qualitative and quan-
titative terms.4

And yet, at the same time, it is wrong to represent English as monolithic

or simplistically dominant. Even within the United States, where English
has an unchallenged dominance, and where the consistent underfunding of
language-acquisition programs in schools makes this unlikely to change any-
time soon, the story is complicated. Around 162 languages are now spoken in
the United States. The U.S. government does not have an “oicial” language.
And in some parts of the United States, English’s dominance is maintained by
institutional iat, such as in Hawai‘i, where if it were not for the insistence of
the Department of Education, Pidgin might dominate. (“Pidgin” is the word
commonly used for what linguists call Hawai‘i Creole English, a language that
was created by linguistically separated plantation workers in Hawai‘i so they
could communicate with one another; it includes vocabulary and syntaxes
from English, Korean, Hawaiian, Chinese, and a few other languages.) Similar

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to how globalization provokes localism, the growth in English and the eco-
nomic rise of the United States meant that in the 1990s, as more and more
words were spoken in English in places new to English, more and more words
that were not a part of English were being spoken within the United States.
The number of U.S. residents who declare that they speak a language other
than English at home has increased dramatically, from 32 million in 1990 to
47 million in 2000.
As an example of how these two oppositional yet related tendencies – the
expansion of English globally and the expansion of languages other than
English within the United States – shape U.S. poetry, I want to start by discuss-
ing two oddly similar works written in English that include Narragansett:
James Thomas Stevens’s Tokinish (1994) and Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Key into
the Language of America (1994). These two works – both written in English but
pointedly including the indigenous language Narragansett, both suggesting
that the lyric’s intimacy is inlected and even enriched by global histories –
function like indicator species in that they deine something distinctive about
the ecosystem of contemporary poetry and also announce a mutation in the
part of this ecosystem in which “multilingual” or “macaronic” forms turn
from an almost relentless exploration of a heritage language to a question-
ing investigation of what it means to be a writer in English when English is a
global and imperial language. Both books were published in the early 1990s;
both poets have lived in Providence, Rhode Island; and both poets are aligned
with the lyric’s more innovative moments. That two writers of such disparate
cultural identities – Stevens is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation;
Waldrop is a German immigrant – wrote such similar books should be read
not as a lack of imagination but rather as one of the interesting ways poetry
takes up questions and investigates them in dialogue. (Although Stevens and
Waldrop know each other, each claims not to have known that the other was
working with Narragansett material.)
Both poets take their Narragansett from Roger Williams’s 1643 book A Key
into the Language of America, a work that is very much a sort of primer on
how to negotiate the beginnings of the globalization of the continent that
is now America, a book very much aware that English is not the “natural”
language of the continent.5 Stevens’s Tokinish is a series of page-long sections
spread out over forty-two pages. It begins with four epigraphs: two quotes
from John Donne and two deinitions of Narragansett words quoted from
Williams. In the irst set of paired epigraphs, Stevens contrasts a translation
of the Narragansett tokinish – “wake him” – with a passage about sleep from
Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In the second, he juxtaposes

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Donne – “But yet the body is his booke” (from “The Extasie”) – with two more
translations:
Awaunkeesitteoúwincohòck? Who made you?
Wússuckwheke. The book6
These epigraphs obviously literalize the doubled view that is Tokinish’s concern.
And they also point to how this is a work that is, despite its lyric interiority, some-
what about globalization. Donne’s Devotions was written at the beginning of this
current wave of colonial expansion. Among other things, it is a work about con-
nection, about the idea that no man is an island. This is the global Donne, poet
of empire, advocate of connective intimacy. This is the Donne who, in “To His
Mistress Going to Bed,” calls his beloved “my America, my new found land.”7
Although it might be easy to argue that beside the global Donne Stevens places
the local Narragansett, I think it is otherwise, as he takes his Narragansett from
Williams’s Key, a work that should be required reading in any globalization stud-
ies class. Williams is, like Donne, constitutive of seventeenth-century globaliza-
tion. Along with some nine thousand others, he immigrated to Boston in 1631.
He was expelled from Massachusetts in 1635 for nonconformism. He bought
land from the Narragansett and established Providence Plantation in what is
now called Rhode Island. He was an outspoken advocate of Native American
rights (as the Rhode Island tourist bureau likes to remind visitors), and yet in
1672 he also sold a number of Native Americans into involuntary servitude (a
fact overlooked by that same Rhode Island tourist bureau). And his A Key into
the Language of America is both a unique work and a product of its time. For
its contemporary readers, it served as a how-to manual for contact and trade.
And for many years it was considered a key anthropological work, providing
an unusually detailed record of Narragansett culture in the mid-seventeenth
century. The book has played a crucial role even among the Narragansett.
Although there is some debate about the continued use of the language among
those who identify as Narragansett (some say the Narragansett language has
been extinct since 1810), Narragansett Dawn, a journal started in the 1930s, has a
lesson in Narragansett in each issue that draws extensively from Williams. The
editor, Princess Red Wing, argues that she includes the lessons “because it is
generally believed that nothing remains of the Narragansett tongue.”8
Stevens frequently engages with colonialism, with indigenousness, and
with queerness in his poetry. So the complicated uses of Williams’s Key would
not have been lost on him. But unlike Williams, he is not writing something
with a dictionary’s desire for l uency or an immigrant’s desire for cataloguing
explanation. And although Narragansett is not a heritage language for him,

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his interest in Narragansett culture is not entirely arbitrary; in 1992 Stevens

worked as a data collector at the Narragansett Community House, working
with inner-city children on a program called Whateanuonk that was designed
to counter Providence gang and drug culture.
Stevens, though, is, like Donne, writing a lyric poem. And one productive way
to read the English that is interrupted by Narragansett in Tokinish is as suggestively
reiguring lyric intimacy as necessarily always in dialogue with global exchanges.
Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, says that a decolonized Caliban might
reply to Prospero “through the individual ardor of lyricism and the collective
practice of politics.”9 While there is no suggestion of the Narragansett being
decolonized anytime soon in this poem, there is no better way of describing the
negotiations between the individual and the collective that motivate a work such
as Tokinish. The bulk of the poem uses lyric’s possible metaphors of contact –
both cultural and sexual – to discuss how often-conlicting frames and traditions
meet. Even the most intimate of moments, Tokinish suggests, are riddled with
global histories. Sexuality is igured as contiguous with other relations. “To walk
the periphery of islands,” reads the irst line, “as if knowing the border of body”
(CSH, p. 107). In this poem, the genders of both lover and beloved are indetermi-
nate, and while the beloved is marked as white, the lover is not directly marked.
Stevens uses the age-old Petrarchan tradition of listing the beloved’s body parts,
but none of them are gender speciic. At only one point is there an indication that
the beloved might be male: “In him I have found a House, a Bed, / A Table, Company
. . .” (CSH, p. 140). The contiguity and ambiguity Stevens enacts works to trouble
Donne’s language of desire and, by extension, the tropes of European impe-
rialism and its accompanying racial and sexual categorical tendencies. Tokinish
critiques Donne’s erotics not directly but by dismantling the Petrarchan tradi-
tion – by, for instance, dividing its body parts into a multilingual duality:
Néepuck. The blood.
Wunnícheke. The hand.
Wunnáks. The bellie.
Mapànnog. The breast.
Apòme. The thigh.
Sítchipuck. The necke.
Wuttòne. The mouth.
Wuskeésuckquash. The eyes.
Mscáttuck. The fore-head. (CSH, p. 142)
This list is not in Williams’s Key. Stevens has instead cobbled it together from
various parts of the Key to create an erotic subtext, an exploration of desire’s
separated conjunctions, multiplicities, and variable points of view.

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 J uli ana Spah r

On the surface, Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America is structured very
much like Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (and less like Stevens’s
Tokinish). She collages a great deal of text from Williams. Yet Waldrop is, as
Susan Vanderborg notes, an unreliable and tricky collager; she will do things like
substitute “white men” for Williams’s “Englishman.” Still, in her Key, Waldrop
uses Williams’s chapter titles, beginning with “Salutations” and ending with
“Of Death and Buriall.” Each chapter is divided into four sections, a form that is
indebted to Williams, although Waldrop adapts it to her own ends. The chapters
begin with lyrical prose blocks that are mainly about Narragansett traditions
and tend to contain most of the collaged language from Williams. The irst sec-
tion of the irst chapter begins with words from Williams (in bold) and imme-
diately alludes to the frame of language, to the inclusion of two languages with
very diferent histories. The title, or word printed as a title, is “Salutations”; the
following text begins “Are of two sorts and come immediately before the body.
The pronunciation varies according to the point where the tongue makes con-
tact with pumice found in great quantity.”10 After the prose block comes a loose,
associational list of words. In most chapters, these words are in English, but in
this irst chapter Waldrop starts of with Narragansett:
Asco Wequassunnúmmis. Good morrow.
sing
salubrious
imitation
intimate (KLA, p. 3)
The lists are followed by irst-person monologues. The one in the irst chapter
begins: “I was born in a town on the other side which didn’t want me in so many”
(KLA, p. 4). Throughout the book, these sections involve an unspeciied narra-
tional “I.” Finally, each chapter ends with a passage that most closely adheres
to the conventions of a free verse poem (with its ragged right margin and lines
halfway across the page), but these poems are not syntactically conventional.
The irst chapter’s reads:
the Courteous Pagan
barefoot and yes
his name laid down
as dead
one openness
one woman door
so slow in otherwise
so close (KLA, p. 4)

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As with the word lists, these poems are associational and ofer themselves to
varied and unconventional readings.
Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935 and moved to the United States after
World War II “as a white, educated European who did not ind it diicult to
get jobs, an advanced degree, a university position” (KLA, p. xix). Her introduc-
tion to Key begins with the story of her arrival from Germany, how she came
“expecting strangeness, expecting to be disorientated” but experienced little
culture shock – except for the Narragansett place names (KLA, p. xiii). It was
these that brought her to Williams’s Key.
Waldrop’s work is frequently lyrical, quietly elliptical, and full of collaged
language, and the tendency has been to read her work as feminist and/or
experimental, as loosely associated with Language poetry. Although Waldrop’s
work is important to these discussions, what is distinctive about A Key into the
Language of America is the way it remains both an immigrant and an experi-
mental work and yet also addresses continuing colonialism within the United
States and immigrant complicity with that colonialism. Her Key interests me
because, rather than relying, as many North American “experimental” works
do, on modernist forms such as repetition or fragmentation or parataxis to
disrupt the conventional syntaxes of English, she includes an indigenous and
local language.
It would be easy to say something dismissive here about Waldrop as yet
another Native American–obsessed German. It would also be easy to continue
to insist that Waldrop’s work is immigrant and/or experimental and avoid
noticing the linguistic recognitions within her work, to take them as only inci-
dental not constitutive. And it is not that Waldrop completely avoids some of
the endless diiculties of cross-cultural contact. Waldrop’s Key only touches
on the political and economic issues that are more directly engaged by explic-
itly anticolonial poets who see poetry as having a part to play in struggles
to regain land or cultural uplift. And yet she does not take Native American
knowledge and present herself as a guide for a mainly Anglo audience. She
doesn’t present a nostalgic view of the Native past as a time of innocence
before a current fall from grace. And her work is not a tale of ethnopoetic
mastery. It is crucial here instead to notice that Waldrop’s turn to Narragansett
is through Williams. Her narrative is, like his, rooted in the shared history of
contact, of globalization. And her Key is an attempt to recover place names
rather than true, pure cultures.
Both Stevens and Waldrop in their works dwell with the peculiar and con-
tradictory relationship that writers have to their medium of language. These
are works that explore how languages have geographies and how they can

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layer on top of one another; how one can be invasive and another can be at
risk or disappear as a result; how they can feel personal and intimate and yet
are clearly cultural, created by groups of individuals over time, requiring con-
sensus; how they are full of political uses and valences, often carrying nation-
alisms; and how they are somewhat permeable for those who want to do the
work and learn them.
This emerging formation of a poetry in English that includes other lan-
guages includes not only Stevens and Waldrop but also Kim. The title of Dura,
her third book, is one of the more resonant examples of this.11 “Dura” can be
the dense, tough, outermost membranous envelope of the brain and spinal
cord, literally “hard mother” in the Arabic, al-‘umm al-jalīda or al-jāiya. It can
be derived from durare, “to last, endure” in Italian; durer, “to last, to run, to go
on” in French; or durar, “to last” or, in its feminine form, “hard, stale, tough,
stif,” in Spanish. It can be “a door” in Faroese; it can be “to spit” in Filipino; it
can be “to build” in Romanian; it can be the name of an ancient city in Syria;
it can be the Romanized transcription of the phrase “listen up” in Korean; it
can be the name of the group of people who in live in the hills of Dura Danda,
Turlungkot, Kunchha Am Danda of Lamjung District, and some adjacent vil-
lages of Tanahun District in Nepal; it can be the language of the Dura; it can
be duras, a variety of sorghum in southern Asia and northern Africa; and so on
. . . Whether or not (and my guess is not) Kim intended all of these meanings,
the word is interestingly meaningful in a variety of languages.
Furthermore, throughout her work, rather than suggesting that Korean
(Kim was born in Seoul and came to the United States when she was nine)
or English is constitutive of any sort of identity, Kim returns again and again
to question the naturalness of English. Language lessons and bureaucratic
questions about language repeatedly show up in her work. In Under Flag, for
instance, she asks, “Can you read and write English? Yes _____. No _____.”12
In The Bounty, the poem “Primer” announces, “This is the study book” as an
epigraph and charts comparisons between Korean and English:

mostly translations of
the Scriptures into Chinese to learn
which educated Koreans inculcate its shame the English
could read of a Midwest town13

In “Thirty and Five Books” in Dura she writes: “9.8 One of the irst words
understood in English: stupid.”14 Also in Dura, “Cosmography” includes a sec-
tion that looks like the short answer part of a language quiz; the deinitions

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are in English and the answers that ill in the blank are in Hangul (the script
used for Korean). “Hummingbird” also begins with what looks like a quiz: a
somewhat diicult and impossible-to-imagine quiz, but still one that begins
with the request for a name.
I will briely continue listing works in English that include other languages
just to give a hint of the linguistic and geographic diversity of what I am talk-
ing about, for among these writers are not only Stevens, Waldrop, and Kim,
but also Joe Balaz, a poet whose work uses many diferent forms – from perfor-
mance poetry to lyric poetry to spoken word poetry to rap and to wordplay –
for anticolonial intent. In Ola he writes a series of teasing visual poems that
pun in Hawaiian and English at the same time.15 The poem “‘Elua Pololia”
shows two jellyish (or ‘elua pololia), one labeled “maoli” (or “native”) and the
other “haole” (or “white person”). They are linked by tentacles that spell out
“hapa” (or “mixed blood”). And one cannot read this poem without moving
between languages. However, his poems are not like those optical illusions
in which one looks at the black space and sees two faces, and one looks at
the white space and sees a vase, but one can never see both at the same time.
Rather, one must be open to seeing both the Hawaiian and the English mean-
ings unmixed yet side by side for the poem to make any sense.
Francisco X. Alarcón, in Snake Poems (1992) – in a move that is eerily
similarly to that of Stevens and Waldrop – writes a personal, lyric history
in dialogue with a seventeenth-century colonial text: Hernando Ruiz de
Alarcón’s Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que oy viven
entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (Treatise on the Superstitions
and Heathen Customes That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New
Spain).16 Ruiz de Alarcón wrote his treatise as a denunciation of Native reli-
gious and medical beliefs and in the process transcribed a number of spells
and invocations in Nahuatl. The introduction and the back cover present
Alarcón’s decision to use Ruiz de Alarcón’s treatise as a personal one (the
back cover states that Alarcón was “intrigued by the manuscript and by the
disquieting possibility that Ruiz de Alarcón might be a distant relation”),
and the poems are short, quiet lyrics, often elliptical in their personal refer-
ence. The poems are in English and include both Spanish and Nahuatl. The
poem “Songs,” for instance, reads in its entirety, “xochitl / lower / lor.”17
What seems telling about Snake Poems is that it is yet another example of a
contemporary U.S. poet who makes a pointed gesture to include an indige-
nous language in a book written in English and who does so, very similarly
to Waldrop, in order to place himself as part of a global history, perhaps a
history that is less than heroic.

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Mark Nowak’s Revenants (2000) is an exploration of the Polish American

communities of his childhood around Bufalo, New York. In a reversal of uni-
versalism’s tendency to speak the dominant language, Nowak uses Polish as
a point of complicated speciicity to explore what are often abstract concepts.
The poems are built around concepts such as zwyczaj (custom), zakorzenić się
(get roots in, take root), rozum (reason, wisdom), and Grzech Pierworodny (orig-
inal sin). The poem “Zwyczaj” literalizes this by having the Polish interrupt a
quote from a scholarly article in the book Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes:
“With immersion the ield
researcher sees
from inside
how people lead their lives
[zakorzenić się]
how they carry out their
daily rounds of activities
[zakorzenić się]
what they ind
meaningful [zakorzenić się]
and how they do . . . ”18

As might be obvious, I am performatively grouping together writers that

might not be recognized as having anything to do with one another.
I want to suggest that these writers – and I have discussed merely six here of
a long possible list – might be part of not minority traditions but rather a sig-
niicant political-aesthetic formation of U.S. literature, if considered together
as the emergence of a literature in English that includes other languages. It
would be easy to place these somewhat messy, big, book-length projects in
the tradition of modernism. But to consider them only as modernist risks
overlooking the complicated relation of this poetry to U.S. identity categories
and to speciic sociopolitical histories. This literature in English that includes
other languages that I am talking about here is under the inl uence of the
hothouse of the poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s that is associated with
minority cultural activist movements. Many of these movements see poetry
as one genre among many that can be used for cultural representation, cul-
tural uplift, and preservation of the culturally disenfranchised. The creation
of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in 1965 by Amiri Baraka is often
seen as a foundational moment here. But that is just one moment among
many. Bamboo Ridge, a workshop and press that publishes mainly literature
written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i and that has preserved and cultivated a

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literature in Pidgin, was founded in 1978. Arte Público, with its claim to “pro-
viding a national forum for Hispanic literature,” was founded in 1979.19
But this hothouse is not just limited to small arts institutions. Cultural
movements in the 1970s often saw poetry as a part of their activism. The
Hawaiian Renaissance, the Native American movement, the Chicano/a move-
ment, and the various activisms around feminist and queer issues – all con-
sider poetry as one possible genre in which to propose, examine, and cultivate
cultural change. Hawaiian sovereignty activist and poet Haunani-Kay Trask,
for instance, succinctly explains that poetry is one arena in which she explores
Hawaiian struggles to regain land, when she writes of poetry as “both de-
colonization and re-creation. It is creativity in the Hawaiian grain and, there-
fore, against the American grain. Part of an encompassing Hawaiian cultural
expression, my writing is exposé and celebration at one and the same time; it
is a furious, but nurturing aloha for Hawai‘i.”20 This interest in poetry as a pos-
sible arena for change by cultural activist movements, combined with a lack
of interest in publishing poetry on the part of increasingly proit-driven mul-
tinational publishing conglomerates, dramatically changes the social forma-
tions around poetry and the institutions that preserved and promoted it in the
United States in the last half of the twentieth century. The members of these
cultural activist movements develop community-based patronage systems in
which they create distribution networks for poetry such as publishing houses,
journals, anthologies, and reading series that support themselves and others
in the group.
At the beginning, these activist poetries were often written in English only
or English mainly. (There are, of course, exceptions, such as the work of
Alurista.) But eventually many came to see language usage as part of their
cultural politics. This is not surprising, because, as Walter Mignolo notes,
numerous language-preservation movements came to activist prominence in
the last third of the century, along with a “clear and forceful articulation of a
politics and philosophy of language that supplants the (al)location to which
minor languages had been attributed by the philosophy of language underly-
ing the civilizing mission and the politics of language enacted by the state both
within the nation and the colonies.”21 English-language activist poetries began
to develop a series of somewhat distinctive – even as there are formal areas of
overlap – language practices in which the language other than English that is
included in the work is the author’s heritage language. Gloria Anzaldúa sums
up this position in 1987 in Borderlands: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic
identity – I am my language.”22 Hawai‘i Pidgin writer Darrell H. Y. Lum notes
similarly: “The persistence of Pidgin in the islands . . . suggests that it is less

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a matter of Pidgin speakers being unable to speak standard English but their
choosing it as a symbol of local identity.”23
As a result of its colonial occupation by the United States and the migration
patterns that fed its plantation system during the sugar boom, Hawai‘i has
extraordinarily complex linguistic, political, and cultural situations. It is a place
of many languages and many arguments about languages. Three languages –
English, Pidgin, and Hawaiian – have their own, often warring but just as often
amicable, literary traditions. Writers of Hawai‘i thus make decisions about
whether to write in any or all or some of three languages, one with a precon-
tact history, one colonially imposed, and one a mixture of many languages
that comes out of the labor history of the plantation system. As long as there
has been the Hawaiian language, there has been a literature composed (and
later written) in Hawaiian. But the development of what one might call, per-
haps problematically to some, Hawaiian American literature – or literature
written by those who identify as Hawaiian but write mainly in English using
the formal conventions of a U.S. poetry of identity (free verse, approximate
lineation that goes two-thirds of the way across the page, a irst-person point
of view, etc.) – did not really develop until about 1980. Much of this literature
is provocatively anticolonial, calling for Hawaiian sovereignty. When this liter-
ature began, it featured work that was mainly in English with at most a sprin-
kling of Hawaiian words. By the end of the century, however, a very diferent
picture of Hawaiian literature developed. And a glance at anthologies from
the 1980s such as Seaweeds and Constructions: Anthology Hawaii (1979), Mālama:
Hawaiian Land and Water (1985), and Ho‘omanoa: ̄ An Anthology of Contemporary
Hawaiian Literature (1989) next to the Native Hawaiian journal ‘Ōiwi (which
began publication in 1999) shows an intensiication in the use of Hawaiian
language within the literature. While the earlier anthologies feature work that
is mainly in English with the occasional Hawaiian word often marked as “for-
eign” by italics, in ‘Ōiwi English-only poems are the rare exception.
At the same time that Hawaiian literature turned more and more to the
Hawaiian language, there was a parallel move in the literature in Pidgin writ-
ten by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i. The irst literary book in Pidgin might be
1972’s Chalookyu Eensai by Bradajo ( Jozuf Hadley), but literature in Pidgin did
not really gather much momentum until closer to the end of the century.24 At
the beginning, if Pidgin showed up, it showed up as accent or local color in
works with a standard English omniscient voice. For instance, the irst issue
of Bamboo Ridge, the journal and press that has done the most to argue for
Pidgin as an important literary language, has only one work that obviously
includes Pidgin (Philip K. Ige’s “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” a short story

1134
 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

with a Pidgin voice embedded in a standard English omniscient narrative).25

And although 1978’s Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers is often
mentioned as the beginning of the local and Pidgin literary renaissance, most
of the Pidgin in this anthology, and there is not a whole lot of it, is also embed-
ded in a standard English narrative frame.26 But in the 1990s, Bamboo Ridge
Press published a number of books in which Pidgin is a compositional lan-
guage for entire poems, and sometimes even for the entire book, such as Eric
Chock’s Last Days Here and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala
Theatre.27 And a quick look through back issues of the journal Bamboo Ridge
shows more and more work in Pidgin (and in Hawaiian, although less so, and
this has been a constant point of contention) as time goes by.
Because the literary scene in Hawai‘i is vibrant, community supported,
and fairly isolated, one would expect a lot of cross talk and coalition build-
ing among its various poets, no matter their identity ailiation. But there is
remarkably little overlap between the writers published in ‘Ōiwi and those
published in Bamboo Ridge. Rodney Morales portrays “a contentious commu-
nity, a community divided by degree of familiarity with place; a community
as divided as it is united by ethnicity, gender, and race, a community that has
historically privileged the colonizer spirit.”28 Among the distinct and thought-
ful diferences are ones as to whether Pidgin can be a language of resistance or
whether it is limited to being a language of accommodation; whether the cate-
gory of “local” is colonial or neocolonial or possibly resistant; whether Pidgin
literature, as exempliied by Bamboo Ridge, erases Native Hawaiian concerns
and questions of sovereignty with its attention to “local identity” and its lyric
poems that celebrate local childhood; and about who “owns” Pidgin.
The conl icts between Pidgin and Hawaiian literature (and also, although I
have not discussed it much here, the English-only literature written in Hawai‘i)
are a sort of microexample of what Charles Bernstein is talking about when
he calls his book A Poetics (“a,” as in one among many) and writes in it that “the
state of American poetry can be characterized by the sharp ideological dis-
agreements that lacerate our communal ield of action.”29 Although there is
still a claim to dominance for lyric free verse in standard English made by both
higher education and many of poetry’s institutions, such as the Poetry Society
of America, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Foundation,
the genre of poetry as it is practiced in the whole of U.S. culture is deined
by a series of “schools” or linguistic practices, in which it is presumed that
these various poetries have more in common with the various communi-
ties that support them than with one another. For both scholars and writers
themselves, when they consider the literature of the late twentieth century, it

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has made more sense to talk about Chicano/a literature and the connections
between a poet like Alarcón and other Chicano/a writers such as Anzaldúa
than it does to talk about Alarcón with Stevens and Waldrop under the frame
of “American poetry.”
No major anthology has yet grouped all of these writers together. (The only
place in which I think such connections are recognized and explored are within
the pages of Nowak’s journal XCP.) And it would be unusual for their work to
appear together in the sort of course called “U.S. poetry.” The tendency is to
keep the identity categories separate, to read Stevens as exemplary of Native
American literature, Waldrop as experimental (presuming that “experimen-
tal” is mainly white Euro-American), Kim as Asian American, Balaz as Paciic
Islander, and Alarcón as Chicano. And in the process, scholars tend to present
these literatures as marginal or counter to not only some imagined dominant
U.S. tradition but also one another. This is not only true of how literature
functions in the academy – which it did in the late twentieth century through a
series of ethnic/racial formations such as African American, Asian American,
Native American, and Chicano/a literature – but it is also true of how poets
group themselves. As Steve Evans notes,
Anyone acquainted with contemporary American poetry, for example, is
aware that certain basic positions organize the ield, that these draw in their
wake speciic kinds of position-takings, and that what constitutes a viable pos-
sibility from the standpoint of one position may well be strictly ruled out with
respect to another. If Bob Perelman and Maya Angelou switched curricula
vitae and a month’s worth of reading engagements, publication venues, and
institutional functions, no one would not notice.30
Both Bernstein’s “ideological disagreements” and Evans’s “position-
takings” are observations that are very much local and very much of the
moment. But what they notice in the moment is very much related to what
Pascale Casanova notices in her more historically and geographically wide-
ranging The World Republic of Letters. In this work she charts out with impres-
sive international scope how various national literatures attempt to gather
resources through the “inescapably political instrument” of language.31 And
as she points out, one of the stories that is often told about poetry again and
again is of poets freeing their work from ossiied national traditions by either
using a vernacular or misusing the national language. This story can be told
with many examples. It is the story of Dante, and the story of the English
Romantics, and the story, as Casanova tells with great detail, of the Euro-
American modernists. And then the story that comes after is usually one in

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which these literatures, written in resistance, become the new national tradi-
tion. It is, as she notes, this very constant process of resistance and recupera-
tion that deines the written word as literature:
Literature is invented through a gradual separation from political obligations:
forced at irst to place their art in the service of the national purposes of the
state, writers little by little achieved artistic freedom through the invention of
speciically literary languages. The uniqueness and originality of individual
writers became apparent, indeed possible, only as a result of a very long pro-
cess of gathering and concentrating literary resources.32
Casanova ends her study with a claim that she has wanted to write “a sort
of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the
periphery of the literary world.”33 And although it would be easy to dismiss
this as naïve, the claim embedded here – that literature criticism upholds or
dismisses certain literary formations while pretending to be neutral – is worth
remembering. The tendency to particularize the various literatures that fer-
ment in the various hothouses of identity politics (Casanova’s “periphery of
the literary world”) is almost a cliché at this point. Long dismissed by detrac-
tors for being overly speciic, particular, and self-involved, even defenders of
this type of literature tend to argue using an assumption of its marginality
and to place it in resistance to that imagined dominant national literary for-
mation that had itself also collapsed by the end of the twentieth century.
Mark McGurl, for instance, in his book about U.S. literary institutions, does
not spend much time on the heyday of cultural activist movement literature
that I have just described. But he does discuss it when it enters the academy.
And what he describes are literatures of institutional individualisms. In his
discussion of Chicano/a literature, for instance, McGurl ends up suggesting
that Chicano/a literature might have been created for “the increasingly para-
mount value of cultural diversity in U.S. educational institutions” and might
be yet another example of something that is more “a new way of accumulat-
ing symbolic capital in the fervently globalizing U.S. academy, pointing schol-
ars toward valuable bodies of expertise they might claim as their own and
ofering a rationale for the inclusion of certain creative writers in an emergent
canon of world literature.”34
Whether one buys Auden’s line that “poetry makes nothing happen” or
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s that one must “smash to smithereens the myth of an
apolitical art,” it is worth noting that there is a moment when literary cultures
in the United States decentralize, and as they do, they refuse the more uni-
versalist content of American literary nationalism and align themselves with

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various speciic forms of resistant activism.35 While McGurl is using Chicano/a

literature as exemplary of institutional individualisms, it is worth remember-
ing that this was not always so. One of the foundational poems of Chicano/a
literature is “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. It
was originally published with Spanish (translated by Juanita Domínquez) and
English versions in parallel columns. “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” could
be read as a literal statement of individualism, with its “I am . . .” refrain, but
it is also written, as Rafael Pérez-Torres notes, as “an organizing tool”: it was
“written in 1967 for the Crusade for Justice, distributed by mimeographed
copy, recited at rallies and strikes.”36 It is also a poem that uses the singular and
heroic identity of its subject, “Joaquín,” for Whitman-inl uenced multitudes.
Joaquín is many things. He rides with Don Benito Juarez; he is “the black-
shawled / Faithful women”; he is “Aztec prince and Christian Christ.”37 It is
a poem that echoes and one-ups in homage Langston Hughes’s “Negro,” a
poem that begins, “I am a Negro” and then goes through a series of diferent
qualifying identities such as slave, worker, singer, and victim; it is a poem that
perhaps also draws from Carl Sandburg’s poem that begins “I am the peo-
ple – the mob – the crowd – the mass.”38 All of these are poems of a collective,
permeable identity with activist desires.
“Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” is just one example among many possible
examples. Kaplan Page Harris, for instance, in “Causes, Movements, Poets,”
discusses another larger example of poetry’s one-time cultural activism – the
“beneit” readings that were advertised in the 1970s in the Bay Area journal
Poetry Flash.39 Harris’s list contains around twenty-two beneit readings that he
noted between 1973 and 1980 in the Bay Area alone. It is a telling list. There were
readings for farm workers, for women, for the People’s Community School,
for the Greek resistance, for stricter regulation of nuclear power plants, for
the prisoners of San Quentin, and so on. However, as Harris notes, beneit
readings more or less faded away from the listings in the 1980s. Similarly, I
keep thinking here of how the “I am . . .” poem has mutated from the inclusive
and activist drive of “I am Joaquín” in the early days to something like Marilyn
Chin’s “How I Got that Name,” which begins, “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin”
and is all about Chin, not all about “the people” or a speciic group of people
within “the people.”40
But my desire here is to suggest that it would be insistently ahistorical to read
a poem like “I am Joaquín” as merely individualist and that, at the same time,
to read a poem such as Marilyn Chin’s as an organizing tool would probably
also be just as ahistorical. The “I am . . .” diferences here are yet another exam-
ple of the closeness between poetry and cultural activism that was so present

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in the 1970s and that was no longer so by the end of the century. And yet to
give adequate attention to the histories of connection between the commu-
nity formations that supported the activist language politics of various litera-
tures of the 1970s and the more contemporary poetry in English that includes
other languages feels especially important, as this literature keeps returning to
this issue of individualism again and again, but in really complicated ways. Let
us take as an example the long, established tradition of literature in English
that includes Spanish: while Anzaldúa writes, “I am my language,” Edwin
Torres, even as he, like Anzaldúa, moves between Spanish and English in his
writings, questions the untroubled representation of Spanish – an imposed
and colonial language – as marginal and as a crucial marker of anyone’s iden-
tity in the Americas. Torres can claim Spanish as a heritage language, as his
parents were Puerto Rican. And like Anzaldúa and Gonzales, Torres wrote a
manifesto that is in part about language and identity. But his is called “A Nuyo
Futurist Manifestiny,” and it is full of a poking, joking “I” and a critique of
“knowing” this “I” through languages: “I yo NEO-why KNOW who say NO
you say ME I see WHY Know NUYO know YOU . . .”41 In a perhaps less jokey
but no less interesting moment, Alarcón’s Snake Poems keeps returning to the
phrase “nomatca nehuatl,” which Alarcón translates as “I myself ” (a provoc-
atively doubled singularity). Every time this phrase appears, it shows up as
complicated by two languages. One poem, called “Nomatca Nehuatl,” begins
with “I myself:” as its irst line; the rest of the poem is a list that begins “the
mountain / the ocean / the breeze / the lame.”42
To return to Kim’s work, Zhou Xiaojing quotes Kim at a reading in Bufalo
in 1998 talking about Dura as “a kind of strange autobiography.”43 The phrase
“a kind of strange autobiography” sums up what makes Kim’s work so res-
onant. Her work is notably sprawling and insistently places the self next to
various histories. Kim’s work, for instance, returns again and again to how
the legacies of colonialism are connected. In Dura, she again and again orders
her readers to “Translate”; “Translate: 38th parallel. Translate: the irst ship-
load of African slaves was landed at Jamestown.”44 The 38th parallel, the line
that separates North and South Korea, is also the line that crosses the San
Francisco Bay (the line on which Kim was living in California when she wrote
Dura) and the line that crosses the continent, including the Chesapeake Bay
and Jamestown. In “Lamenta,” in the book Commons, she includes notes on
vivisection from Vesalius, passages from Da Vinci’s notebooks, retellings of
conditions in war-torn regions, locust plagues, and environmental crises. In
one especially moving passage, the poem juxtaposes a irst-person account of
the 1980 Kwangju uprising in South Korea with the 1992 bombing of Sarajevo.

1139
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The piece is clearly attempting to put disparate moments in dialogue with

one another, to suggest something about the diiculties of understanding the
events of the contemporary. Much of Kim’s work avoids the “I.” Here it is,
buried toward the end of Dura, tellingly meta-deleted: “[the irst deleted me
written over.”45
I keep thinking here of the attention to linguistic recognition called for
by Judith Butler’s most recent work. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler’s
interest is in how our complicity in the violence done to others, even when
we are not the doer of the violence, deines us; how we have an obligation
to give an account of this; and how this accounting – if it is to be something
like ethical – has to be disorienting, full of the languages of others. She
puts it this way: “We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange
is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimenta-
tion of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective
of those involved in the exchange.”46 In Frames of War, Butler extends these
concerns with how we deine ourselves into how we deine others into and
out of the category of the human. Among the things to be recognized are
claims of language and social belonging: “If we are to make broader social
and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persis-
tence and lourishing, we will irst have to be supported by a new bodily
ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability,
injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and
the claims of language and social belonging.”47 Butler asks, “What might
be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability?
What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recogniz-
ability in order to produce more radically democratic results?”48 It is with
an interest in the claims of recognizability, in recognition, that I began this
discussion with two books that include Narragansett by writers who do not
claim Narragansett as part of their identity. Both these books take up the
question of the implications of writing in English; both acknowledge the
presence of other languages and the complicated histories that language use
carries. Both these works suggest that literary representations of the self
in their most intimate moments beneit from including relations to others,
even those not present in the room; and both argue for recognition of inter-
relations, and of interdependency.

Notes
1. Myung Mi Kim, Commons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
p. 108.

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 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

2. Werner Herzog and Marc Shell (eds.), The Multilingual Anthology of American
Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (New York: New
York University Press, 2000).
3. Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the
Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. xv.
4. Alastair Pennycock, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 14.
5. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643; Bedford, Mass.:
Applewood, 1997).
6. John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin,
1996), p. 53; James Thomas Stevens, Combing the Snakes from His Hair (Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2002), p. 107. Stevens’s collection will be cited
in the text as CSH.
7. Donne, Complete English Poems, p. 125.
8. Princess Red Wing, “Lesson in Our Native Tongue,” The Narragansett Dawn 1:1
(1935), p. 18.
9. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 54.
10. Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America (New York: New
Directions, 1997), p. 3. This collection will be cited in the text as KLA.
11. Myung Mi Kim, Dura (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1999).
12. Myung Mi Kim, Under Flag (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey Street, 1991), p. 29.
13. Myung Mi Kim, The Bounty (Minneapolis: Chax, 1996), p. 23.
14. Kim, Dura, p. 79.
15. Joseph P. Balaz, Ola (Honolulu: Tinish Network, 1997).
16. Francisco X. Alarcón, Snake Poems (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992);
Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas
que oy viven entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (1629; Mexico City:
Secretária de Educación Pública, 1988), and in English translation, Treatise
on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This
New Spain, trans. J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1983).
17. Alarcón, Snake Poems, p. 19.
18. Mark Nowak, Revenants (Minneapolis: Cofee House, 2000), p. 83.
19. “About Arte Público Press,” http://artepublicopress.uh.edu/arte-publico-wp
/about-arte-publico-press/.
20. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Writing in Captivity: Poetry in a Time of Decoloniza-
tion,” in Cynthia Franklin, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke (eds.), Navigating
Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Paciic
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 51–55, 55.
21. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowl-
edges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000),
p. 296.

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22. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 81.
23. Darrell H. Y. Lum, “Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” in Eric Chock
et al. (eds.), Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry from Hawai‘i
(Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1998), p. 13.
24. Bradajo ( Jozuf Hadley), Chalookyu Eensai: Three Poems in Pidgin English
(Honolulu: Sandwich Islands, 1972).
25. Philip K. Ige, “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer’s
Quarterly 1 (1978), pp. 56–59.
26. Eric Chock et al. (eds.), Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers
(Honolulu: Petronium Press/Talk Story, 1978).
27. Eric Chock, Last Days Here (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1990); Lois-Ann
Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge
Press, 1993).
28. Rodney Morales, “Literature,” in Michael Haas (ed.), Multicultural Hawai‘i:
The Fabric of a Multiethnic Society (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 107–29, 108.
29. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992), p. 1.
30. Steve Evans, “The Dynamics of Literary Change,” The Impercipient Lecture
Series 1:1 (1997), p. 23.
31. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 115.
32. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 45–46.
33. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 354–55.
34. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 332, 333.
35. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern
Library, 2007), p. 246; Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? with A Cloud
in Trousers and To Sergey Esenin, trans. G. M. Hyde (Bedminster: Bristol Press,
1990), p. 88.
36. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (Houston: Arte
Público Press, 2001), p. 12; Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry:
Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p. 47.
37. Gonzales, Message to Aztlan, pp. 21, 29.
38. Langston Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage,
1995), p. 24; Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, ed. Archibald
MacLeish (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), p. 71.
39. Kaplan Page Harris, “Causes, Movements, Poets” (unpublished manuscript).
40. Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Minneapolis: Milkweed
Editions, 1994), p. 16.

1142
 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

41. Edwin Torres, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (New York: Roof, 2001),
p. 109.
42. Alarcón, Snake Poems, p. 27.
43. Zhou Xiaojing, “ ‘What Story What Story What Sound’: The Nomadic Poetics
of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura,” College Literature 33:4 (2007), pp. 63–91, 64.
44. Kim, Dura, pp. 97, 68.
45. Kim, Dura, p. 98.
46. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), p. 28.
47. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso,
2009), p. 2.
48. Butler, Frames of War, p. 6.

1143
 Chapter 50
American Poetry at the End of the Millennium
S t e ph e n B u rt

Writing literary history for one’s own time “is like overlaying a constellation
on a bunch of stars in the heavens; a good opportunity to inscribe one’s own
mythology on the sky but also ideology-bound and hegemonic, arrogant and
inaccurate.”1 So the poet and critic Joshua Clover warned in the irst issue of
the magazine Fence in 1998. If that sky represents American poetry, by that
year it held more stars than ever before. One thousand to three thousand
books of new poetry (depending on how one counts chapbooks and the pub-
lications of small presses) came out per year over that decade; the number of
U.S. graduate programs in creative writing nearly doubled between 1985 and
2005.2 A more crowded landscape for American poetry brought increased dis-
sensus about its landmarks. The editors – eminent poets all – for the annual
Best American Poetry often remarked on the ield’s extent. John Ashbery praised
in 1988 “the exciting diversity of American poetry right now” and then apolo-
gized for “using this hoary phrase”; Charles Simic decided, after compiling the
1992 volume, “Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of
anything doesn’t work.”3 By 2006 Craig Dworkin could claim that “surveys,
broad synoptic claims, arguments based on norms,” and “strong accounts of
large-scale historical change . . . can no longer be maintained.”4
There is something dispiritingly uninformative about attempts to charac-
terize anything by its resistance to characterization, or by its diversity; there
is, on the other hand, something peculiarly contemporary about our insis-
tence on our diversity, our resistance to sweeping characterizations, conclu-
sive arguments, and large-scale claims. Such resistance itself says something
about recent times; it is the same resistance to closure, to authoritative tones
and statements, and to simulations of a uniied argument or a conident, con-
sistent voice that we can see within the developed styles of so many late-in-
the-century poems. What the poet Lyn Hejinian calls, in the title of her most
inluential essay, “the rejection of closure” marks some of the most charac-
teristic – and most imitated – achievements in American poetry at the end of

1144
 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

the twentieth century; skepticism as to whether we can say anything clearly or

irmly might also mark an attempt to write the history of that poetry in those
years, and to connect that history to previous verse.5
We might connect that rejection to what other critics have taught us to
call the postmodern, which, if it meant anything by the late 1990s, connoted
a coy resistance to master narratives and truth claims beyond its own. Yet the
poet and scholar James Longenbach, in Modern Poetry After Modernism (1997),
mounted convincing attacks on accounts of “postmodern American poetry,”
especially on “ ‘breakthrough’ narratives,” about heroic works (such as Robert
Lowell’s Life Studies or Donald Allen’s New American Poetry) that supposedly
left older paradigms behind.6 Instead, Longenbach argued, the best poets
of the late century – from Richard Wilbur to Ashbery and Jorie Graham –
continued the projects of modernism, itself a dialectical development from
Wordsworthian Romanticism. The prominent critic Marjorie Perlof also con-
cluded, in 21st-Century Modernism (2002), that “ours may well be the moment
when the lessons of early modernism are inally being learned.”7 Perlof and
Longenbach difer as to what those lessons are, as they difer in their tastes
among present-day writers. Both, however, admire Ashbery; and both valo-
rize varieties of skepticism, modes of canny or overt resistance to certainties
about society, emotion, and truth. Thus Longenbach regards Wilbur’s “undog-
matic openness,” Graham’s “repeated condemnations of narrative closure,”
and Ashbery’s “healthy distrust of what seems natural,” while Perlof lauds
Ashbery’s “refusal to spell out what sort of ‘received vision’ [he] might pro-
duce” along with Hejinian’s “room for contingency.”8 Their shared validation
of styles that leave room for doubt, their distrust of clear speakers and clean
endings, makes one robust story about American poetry just before the year
2000, a story with Ashbery at its ever-receding center, and a few midcareer
poets at the fore.
Another story inextricable from the irst (with Ashbery, once again, near its
center) involves the dialectic common to many accounts of change in the arts.
In it, supposedly opposing tastes, styles, and institutions come together after
a generational divide, generating syntheses in the work of younger poets,
who themselves provoke new forms for dissent. The stories turn out to rein-
force each other, and to leave room for a third story about the poet as inspired
seer rather than self-conscious maker, about Romantic, intuitive, vatic surviv-
als in a skeptical, self-analytical, and disillusioned age. The irst two stories
describe the 1990s, or at least an important part of those years; the third will
conclude the present chapter by looking back almost a century, at one poet
whose signiicance seemed to change even as this book was being created, and

1145
 St e ph e n B urt

another who seemed almost as anomalous – and as brilliant – to his peers as

he seems now.
All three stories might begin with an ending: the last issue of the jour-
nal Antaeus, in 1994. Started in Morocco in 1970 by Paul Bowles and Daniel
Halpern, relocated to New York and New Jersey, and shepherded through the
1980s by Halpern, who also ran Ecco Press, Antaeus was never as prominent as
the New Yorker, but its heft and consistency made it an incomparable guide to
a so-called mainstream, associated with New York City and with trade presses,
at the last moment when its participants could regard it as the single important
literary domain.
The inal Antaeus included poetry by Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Lucie
Brock-Broido, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass
(“Dragonl ies Mating”), Brenda Hillman, Richard Howard, Galway Kinnell,
James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky (his magniicent
elegy on his mother, “Poem with Refrains”), and Gary Snyder; it also ofered
such non-American poets as Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes,
and Czeslaw Milosz. Among the prose writers were then-president Bill
Clinton, with notebook entries from 1987 (“We have put of progress in favor
of survival”); Helen Vendler, known for her studies of Keats and Stevens and
for reviews in the New Yorker, with a rare autobiographical relection, “One
Reviewer’s Beginnings”; and iction by Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates,
and Stephen King.9
Wordsworthian models of meditative and elegiac lyric govern a plurality
of the Antaeus poems; at least ten mourn named individuals, beginning with
Bidart’s concise memorial to the New York School writer Joe Brainard, “A Coin
for Joe in the Image of a Horse.” Deborah Digges contributes an anguished,
long-lined elegy for her past self: “Such were the serial exhaustions of my
beliefs.” Chase Twichell’s poem “Recorded Birds” applies its nostalgia instead
to literary history, asking whether the poetry of the past can surmount the
audiovisual present: “watching the sufering on TV,” Twichell wishes she could
hear, instead, “Keats, Jesus . . . Whitman, Dickinson.” Wordsworthian models
of introspective sincerity also guide Stephen Dunn’s “The Living,” which takes
place during an ice storm: “Will the mail get through? What is uppermost / and
most deep down? / I’d like to feel, once again, what I know.”10
Pulitzer Prizes for poetry during the 1990s went to Glück, Graham, Yusef
Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Liesl Mueller, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James
Tate, Mona Van Duyn, and Charles Wright. All but Komunyakaa, Mueller,
and Tate had already published with New York trade houses (Tate moved to
Ecco afterward); all but Komunyakaa, Mueller, and Van Duyn appeared in

1146
 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

Antaeus. Returning to all ten in 2001, Willard Spiegelman noted that almost
all relied on “autobiographical reminiscence,” on “transformations of nostal-
gia,” and on “Romantic nature lyric,” in which the poet’s psychological his-
tory seeks correspondence in the spirit of a place (the same structure Charles
Altieri, in 1982, decried as a cliché).11 Spiegelman also complained about the
plain or conversational diction that most poets chose: such Antaeus poems as
Dunn’s and Wright’s point back to the clearest, simplest goals of the personal
lyric in the 1970s.
Graham’s poem in the last Antaeus points forward instead. Using the fast,
accretive, lengthy sentences and irregular lines that had become one of
Graham’s trademarks, “Flood” produced a vision of apocalypse, the end of
“the private life” and of cities and “schools,” a vision that resonated through-
out Graham’s next book, The Errancy (1997). In it the unpredictability and insta-
bility of perception become almost as salient as the ruin of visible things:
(It is an honor) (this carrying what is being said)
Sun ingers down, weakening, to the city-park
below;
row-houses; fencing; schools turning abruptly, catching
the light –
the private life, what is the private life, what is it
that is nobody’s
business
through this glassless display-case,
through this length of hallway holding corridors of water?12

Graham’s turn to long lines, long sentences, and elaborate, sometimes unin-
ished syntax helped her new poems it a millennial zeitgeist. “Confused rather
than weary, screen-mobile rather than painting-static, jump-cut rather than
continuous, interrogative rather than declarative, and ambiguous rather than
conclusive,” as Vendler put it, Graham’s poems could now show how “the
events of history are mentally and textually constructed into acts and scenes
rather than ‘objectively’ recorded.”13 Graham’s irregular, often very long lines
represent self-revision and inconclusiveness in thought, and Heraclitean l ux
in nature:

The war is over says the river, the stars are all in me.
I peer from the bank, forgotten things seem to ly by.
There is novelty, feel its blades, says the river, rippling,
push into perdition, your fault is eternal, exciting, exciting with seeming –
(TE, p. 96)

1147
 St e ph e n B urt

Although Graham’s poems can take in the largest possible subjects – God,
for example, or genocide – they tend to begin from leeting perceptions: for
example, “one bloodshot / cardinal call” or a glimpse across a shopping mall
parking lot (TE, p. 59). Only those percepts, at times, seem clearly real; every-
thing larger or longer lasting might be mere epiphenomenon, or illusion.
Graham’s lines (as Fiona Green put it) “wear themselves out and hold them-
selves in check by perpetual commentary on their own meanings.”14 “The
Guardian Angel of the Swarm,” also from The Errancy, decides that “the soul
is what has folds and is full of folds,” going on to ask, “does what is folded exist
only / in something that envelops it? – / it is not exactly point of view that
includes?” (TE, p. 83).
Such language draws on Continental philosophy from Blaise Pascal to Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari: it also echoes, in substance although not in tone,
Ashbery’s earlier images for the paradoxical, hard-to-grasp self, “built out of
the meshing of life and space / At the point where we are wholly revealed /
In the lozenge-shaped openings.”15 If the self is a fold, a garment, a negative
space (“openings”), an efect created by the concealments of garment-like
phenomena (biology, society, intellection), then ideas about the self are like
clothes, like a frame, like the hat in the rapturous invitations of Graham’s
“Manteau,” with its

theory emerging like a lowery hat,

there, above the head,
descending,
while outside, outside, this coat –
which I desire, which I, in the tale,
desire – as it touches the dream of reason,
which I carry inevitably in my very shoulders, my very carriage, forgive me,
begins to shred like this, as you see it do, now . . . (TE, p. 73)

If Graham wants a valid starting point for her passionate epistemological

inquiry, she also wants to ind out whether she can be guilty, whether almost
everyone capable of reading her poems can be guilty, of a masculinist and Euro-
American “Imperialism” (a title from her 1987 volume The End of Beauty) that
appropriates objects for interpretation just as it appropriates land and water,
plants and animals, for destructive and nonrenewable use. In a pun that links
philosophy to real estate, The Errancy speaks against “the nationstate of my
premises,” premises she may have no right to hold; and if Graham shows the self
attempting to hang together, she also depicts it as it dissolves, revising Psalm 22
by inserting quotation marks: “‘I’ am poured out like water” (TE, pp. 62–63).

1148
 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

The Errancy (like The End of Beauty) can indict literary traditions, habits
of thoughts, or the history of “the West,” but it cannot escape them: it can
even present itself (like the last Antaeus) as the end of a cultural line. The poet
Forrest Gander called The Errancy “a kind of echo chamber of Western literary
culture.”16 In “Sea-Blue Aubade,” the sea is “an icy thing, even in its l uency,”
ofering only “more days, more nights, more roads, shouts, lowers, / all mak-
ing towards what pebbled shore, / each changing place with that which went
before,” in a long echo of Shakespeare’s sonnet 60 (TE, pp. 42, 29); “Untitled
Two” takes phrases and plot points from E. A. Robinson’s “George Crabbe,”
“The Mill,” and “Reuben Bright,” while “Flood” itself adapts Ashbery’s
“Parergon”: “We are so happy in our way of life.”17
Graham’s work in turn would echo through many younger poets’ work
in the 1990s, not least because they encountered her at the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, where Graham taught from 1983 to 1999. With her unpredict-
ably extensive sentences ending in unanswered guilty inquiries, her ways of
stretching out perceptual time, Graham by The Errancy had found ways to it
what Hejinian called “the incapacity of language to match the world,” “the
gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say)
and what one can (what is sayable).”18 Those qualities made her seem like a
poacher, or an invader, for readers committed to antiestablishment solidarity,
and a puzzle or a betrayer for readers (such as the formally conservative young
critic Adam Kirsch) committed to Frostian notions of explicit coherence and
metrical contract.19 For still other readers, those qualities made her work cen-
tral. “If anyone can unify the disjointed ields of contemporary discourse,”
the poet David Baker mused when reviewing Materialism (1993), “it might
well be Jorie Graham.”20 “Like the Language poets, she resists paraphrase,”
Spiegelman decided, “but unlike them she is – however unconventionally –
autobiographical, lyrical and descriptive . . . sometimes simultaneously.”21
During the 1990s, that simultaneity became a frequent goal. We can ind it
regularly in Fence: the magazine started in New York in 1998, edited by the poet
Rebecca Wolf (who holds an M.F.A. from Iowa) along with other iction writ-
ers and poets with links to Iowa and to Columbia University. “These writers
are fence-sitters,” Wolf explained in the irst issue; “each of them occupies a
distinguished grey area in the literary ield.” Fence promised both to cross and
to describe a boundary, to facilitate traic among competing schools, espe-
cially between the diicult poetry represented by Language writers such as
Hejinian and the trade publisher–oriented “mainstream.”22
Poets in Fence 1:1 included Rae Armantrout, Anne Carson, Fanny Howe,
Heather McHugh, Mark Levine, Thylias Moss, Paul Muldoon, Twichell, John

1149
 St e ph e n B urt

Yau, and the Slovenian émigré Tomaz Salamun, along with younger writers
who had yet to publish a book (myself among them). Their poems often sought
immediacy and shock, along with fragmentation and open-endedness: some
poets pursued both the puzzling and the risqué. Catherine Wagner in “Three
Love Poems” portrayed herself as a conundrum, a minx and a man-trap: “I
am in my lucky phase, am solvent, / i.e. where can you hit me? / Not getting
out of bed I lime my edges . . . Mind everything, missy.”23 Yau l irted with signs
of “bad” taste, as well as with nonsense verse, in “Lucubration”: “I’m the fan
leaning on the spongy / red ledge of the Egyptian motel.”24 Such evasions of
prose sense looked back to Surrealism, to the vivid juxtaposition of dreamlike
images, rather than to the drier interrogations of a U.S. avant-garde.
Nonetheless, Fence remained conscious of that avant-garde: Clover, for exam-
ple, tried to provide “a lineage of Language poetry, and its essence,” although
“any lineage is lawed, and essence more so.”25 Clover drew all his quotations
from Michael Palmer (discussed subsequently). The only member of the
Language group who contributed new poems to the irst Fence was Armantrout,
with “Falling: 1” and “Falling: 2.” The former warns against the routinization
of the new and shocking, “the new / old / binary // exhibitionism,” while the
latter appears to criticize a confessional poet, or an attention-seeking acquain-
tance, whose life and work wrongly assume that true selves and real lives exist
and can be revealed: “it is exactly / your relation to exposure / which comprises
your act,” “a familiarity that threatens / to melt // into uniform poignance.”26
Armantrout grew up in San Diego, amid the stultifying suburbia described
in her pithy memoir True: she began to write and publish poetry in Berkeley
during the late 1960s, where she encountered Ron Silliman and other Language
writers, although her irst book did not come out until 1978. Soon afterward
she moved back to San Diego, where she remained, publishing more fre-
quently, and gathering more attention, each decade. Sometimes her poems
begin from “a few particulars of the San Diego landscape,” as Bob Perelman
put it; sometimes they begin from degraded commercial phrases, or from the
poet’s dreams.27
Armantrout’s intellectual goals, her unstable takes on perception and cogni-
tion, resemble Graham’s – together they might present a zeitgeist. And yet the
experiences of reading the two poets remain far apart. With their clipped lines
and compact stanzas, Armantrout’s poems stop short over and over, whereas
Graham’s try not to stop at all. The title in Armantrout’s “Retraction” (from
Made to Seem [1995]) refers both to the impossible taking back of language
already used (a quip uttered, a memo sent) and to the back-and-forth motion
of branches and leaves:

1150
 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

Interest disguises hope.

Out the window
two junipers are twitching
back and forth in sync
behind the palm which,
I now see,
is also moving.28
Made to Seem, like most of Armantrout’s volumes, includes a parade of bitterly
comic miniatures:
The extra-terrestrial
is made to appear
as a ballerina,
a lamenco dancer
and a disco stud
in succession. (MTS, p. 25)
What, or who, is she “really”? Who knows?
Armantrout’s poems remind her, and her readers, that Wordsworthian, or
confessional, ideals of sincerity, truth to feeling, consistency, and experience
seem (to her) compromised by their dependence on received – and commer-
cially useful – ideas (the same ideas that Graham’s works apologize for hav-
ing used, for having shared). The two lovers in Armantrout’s “Covers,” for
example, realize that their sex life owes its stories to a pornographic ilm: “If
only either one of them believed in the spontaneity of the original actors and
could identify with one” (MTS, p. 11). Because meaning depends on use, use
on learning, and learning on habit and acculturation, the poems, like their
characters, realize that they can say nothing meaningful if they try to assert
something new: “Die Mommy scum! // To come true, / a thing must come
second” (MTS, p. 14). Armantrout wrote about this poem, “The Creation,” in
her essay “Cheshire Poetics,” the closest she has ever come to a statement of
principles: its “declarative statements have a ‘truth-efect,’ like a false bottom,
which gives way on second thought. There is, in fact, no voice which can be
trusted in this poem.”29 Nor is there such a voice in many other poems by
Armantrout; their lines seem to see through us as we see through them.
Armantrout’s poems can undermine not only notions of time and memory,
notions of self, and notions of accuracy but also notions of artistic quality,
which may consist only of adherence to norms:
Not just light
at the end of the tunnel,

1151
 St e ph e n B urt

but hearts, bows, rainbows –

all the stickers
teachers award if pleased.

Her poems also confound her own relations to memory: they make, as she put
it, “a quick trip back / to mark the spot / where things stop / looking famil-
iar” (MTS, p. 24). For Wordsworth and his successors, up to the present day of
Pinsky or Dunn, memory teaches us who we are and have been by connecting
present to past, thus shaping experiences that imagined persons then share.
Armantrout’s jagged shapes, too short for their speakers – as Graham’s shapes
in The Errancy seem too fast, or too long – prevent and undermine those sto-
ries; “ ‘When names perform a function,’ ” warns a “stubborn old woman” in
Made to Seem, “ ‘that’s iction’ ” (MTS, p. 42).
Graham and Armantrout, read side by side in the 1990s, demonstrate the
erased and reconstituted, dispelled and reassembled value of such contested
terms as “lyric,” “voice,” and “self.” The two poets – and their reception – also
testify in the domain of poetry to the process that Mark McGurl describes
in recent American iction, a “struggle between a dominant ‘conventional
realism’ and a minority ‘radical experimentalism’ mediated in part by the
academy . . . in which opposing sides begin, despite themselves, to interpen-
etrate.”30 Such struggles generate, from the “conventional” side, defenses of
old techniques and, from the “radical” side, accusations of selling out, or of
stealing (thus “fence”). Steve Evans duly attacked Fence in 2001 as a kind of
third way in poetry, akin to Bill Clinton’s or Tony Blair’s third way in politics.
Inspired and promoted (Evans alleged) by Graham, Hass, and Hillman, with
their “top-down taste,” Fence was “by tendency eclectic and apolitical, allergic
to commitment and against principles on principle,” because it severed inter-
est in anticlosural rhetoric, post-Surrealist imagery, and epistemological skep-
ticism from “radical social projects and values.”31
David Kellogg – whose essay appeared in Fence 3:2 – also noted the recent
emergence of “lyric poets . . . fond of innovative technique”; he noted, too,
“new literary journals” that emerged around them: “Chain, COMBO, Explosive,
Rhizome, Samizdat.”32 Because the Language writers proved so adept at theo-
rizing themselves, and because their stated objectives could mesh with the
goals of advanced literary academics, discussions of poetic hybridity, synthe-
sis, or “new lyric” in the 1990s and afterward sometimes treated that syn-
thesis as a collision or merger of one Wordsworthian, descriptive, or lyri-
cal “mainstream” with one discrete body of Language writing: Where Lyric
Tradition Meets Language, as one conference (later an anthology) put it. Yet

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

the New American, post-Stein, and post-Williams traditions that became

broadly available to younger writers during those years had many sources,
not only the writers who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Hills, or This
but also the countercultural, sometimes visionary writers associated with the
Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, such as Bernadette Mayer,
Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan; the aggressive, sometimes theatrical styles of
Amiri Baraka and other poets of the Black Arts Movement; and the legacies of
Continental Surrealism.
Critics saw these changes as they took place. “The bifurcation of the poetry
world into square versus hip, oicial versus renegade, metropolitan versus
provincial, was rapidly eroding,” Jed Rasula claimed in 2004.33 Christopher
Beach asked whether the supposed split “between an academic mainstream of
‘workshop’ orientation . . . and an experimental, oppositional, or countercul-
tural poetry” no longer it the facts. Roger Gilbert agreed: “The nineties saw a
decided softening of the boundaries between competing poetic modes.”34
The end of Antaeus and the founding of Fence might be two points (form-
ing one line) where the boundaries softened. Other such points, where old
binaries fail, schools mingle, and ascendant ideas about present-day poems
become clear, might be the irst annual National Poetry Slam, held in San
Francisco in 1990; the founding of the Bufalo-based magazine Apex of the
M (1994), with its “ecstatic . . . millennial utopian program,” presented as a
successor to Language writing; the start of the annual West Chester con-
ference, devoted primarily to rhymed or metered verse, in 1995; the irst
annual Cave Canem retreat, a week-long workshop for African American
poets, held in 1996; or the irst online-only poetry magazine (there are several
candidates).35 Beach himself picks “the publication of Paul Hoover’s Norton
anthology Postmodern American Poetry and the production and broadcast of
Bob Holman’s television series The United States of Poetry.” The irst, in 1994,
made Language writers and their allies widely available in the academy; the
second, in 1996, made spoken word and performance poetry widely visible
outside it.36
Graham and Armantrout both found whole styles, and kinds of poetic line,
appropriate for an end-of-the-century skepticism. Other poets founded not
styles but subgenres and modes. One such mode was the unstable or canceled
epistolary poem, which uses the rhetoric of a personal letter (salutations, for
example, and reference to prior letters and to envelopes) but does not main-
tain the consistent iction that it is a letter to another human being. That lack
of consistency is, in Hejinian’s terms, another rejection of closure: we cannot
decide who the poet pretends to be, nor to whom she speaks, in salutations

1153
 St e ph e n B urt

such as “Dear You: Accuser” (Geof Nutter), “Dear Evasive Precaution” (Amy
Catanzano), or “Dear Errant Kid . . . Dear Dying Town” (C. D. Wright).37
This new mode governed entire collections. Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s
(2000) collects prose poems purportedly written on customer-comment cards
from Wendy’s fast-food restaurants (“Wendy is not a girl; she is a sign”); the book
attracted improbably widespread notice, including a review in Rolling Stone.38
The poems in Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters (1995), derived very loosely
from Emily Dickinson, address a mysterious “master” in elaborate couplets and
prose poems distinguished by salutations (“Revd Sir,” “My Most Courteous
Lord”) or sign-ofs (“Your Gnome,” “Your Lodestar, Your – / Andromeda”).39 Here,
as Ann Keniston suggests, “the prose letter . . . functions both as an alternative
to and an extreme version of lyric.” These canceled ictions of presence and of
speaking persons repeat at the level of subgenre the insistence on skepticism and
on broken-up, constantly interrogated, or split-up selves and voices that we have
seen in Armantrout, and in Graham, as matters of line-by-line style.
The popularity of this new, self-undermining epistolary subgenre might
also relect the inl uence of Palmer, whose quasi- or semiepistolary pages
play with the idea of personal address while deleting the signals that say who
speaks to whom, as if “to unlearn them.”40 Such poetry asks (to quote Palmer
himself ) “how the pronouns, how the I and the we, the you and the they, the
he and she are spoken, invoked and meant.”41 Sun (1990) includes epistles to
aspects of language:
Dear Lexicon, I died in you.
as a dragonly might
or a dragon in a bottle might
Dear Lexia, There is no mind42
In Palmer’s 1997 “Letters to Zanzotto,” Andrea Zanzotto (a real contempo-
rary Italian poet) becomes another of Palmer’s impersonal presences: “Dear
Z,” he writes, in “Letter 6,” “So we accused mimesis, accused // anemone
/ and the plasma of mud.”43 Such merging of alphabetical with epistolary
letters, unsettling ictions of address and person, also turns up in other late-
century poets: Juan Felipe Herrera, for example, writes in “explode this letter
w/ this” (1999):
X is for fancy tacos sold w/ Mayan Rebellion
J is for the irst White God initially meant for burial in Juarez. . . .
J is for never enter the Nirvana Joke Tree.
T is simple. Ten glove will mark your dishes, in eternal
service boy, jackal. This bean dish is familiar isn’t it?44

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

Future readers may look for a self-skeptical, anticlosural zeitgeist in Graham,

in Armantrout, in Brock-Broido or Palmer, and in the journals to which they
contributed and the lines or subgenres that they invented. They may look
as well to major writers whose long careers ended during the 1990s, such
as James Merrill; they may focus on irst and second books by poets whose
nationwide inl uence on other writers became apparent only after 2000, such
as Herrera, Terrance Hayes, Laura Kasischke, or D. A. Powell. Future readers
should also cherish such unfashionable singletons as the persistent miniatur-
ist Samuel Menashe, a Jewish veteran of World War II, whose careful stanzas
meditate on mortality and eternity:
Keep your ear to the ground
I was told without fear
Now I am hollowed for sound
And it is my heart I hear45

This poet once tried to listen to the ground (to his contemporaries, to his
time); now (perhaps older and lonelier, or wiser) he hears instead the Abgrund,
the subject of mortality, the void that stands below and beyond the merely his-
torical questions that other poets – and literary critics – ask.
Yet the questions remain. The poetry of the American 1990s, taken en
masse, might leave us suspicious of any story we can tell about it, not just
because there’s so much of it (who read it all?) but because so many of the
poets, and so many of its arbiters (excluding those invested in “conservative”
narratives about decline) seemed to argue for diversity, for democracy, or (as in
Armantrout’s quip about “stickers”) for self-conscious resistance to judgments
of value. Skeptical poets tried to register these arguments, that resistance, as
matters of style.
Attempting to make sense of “the conl icting principles by which poetry is
currently valued,” Kellogg came up with four: “self, community, tradition and
innovation.” John Ashbery’s poetry, as Kellogg explained, had such prominence
(as of 2001) because it could be very plausibly “claimed by powerful critics for
all four poles: Helen Vendler views him as a poet of the self, Harold Bloom as a
reviser of [Romantic and Stevensian] tradition, Marjorie Perlof as a formal inno-
vator, and John Shoptaw [among others] as a writer of ‘encrypted’ gay poems.”46
To contemplate Ashbery’s work, with its “extraordinarily wide range of precur-
sors” as well as its range of inheritors, is to contemplate the insuiciency of any
single narrative about the historical line of American verse.47 Ashbery’s poem
in the inal Antaeus, “Dangerous Moonlight,” made fun of the idea that poems
could support claims about the zeitgeist, or about anything else:

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 St e ph e n B urt

Well that’s
poetic argument for you. It stands on its own (“the cheese stands alone”)
but can at the drop of a speculation be seen again as a part,
a vital one, of the mucus cloud that is generalized human thought aimed at
a quarrel or a rebus in the lining. And that’s the way
we get old with poetry.48
Not all poets resigned themselves as readily as Ashbery to “the way / we
get old,” to “failed,” incomplete, or inevitably cloudy representation. While
many sought ways to represent a prevailing skepticism within, or among,
prevailing styles, others put forward alternatives to that skepticism, and to
the versions of literary history that it entailed. The magisterial poet and
critic Allen Grossman imagined in poems and in philosophical prose how the
trope of a person, the iction of consistent utterance, might overcome mod-
ern doubts; indeed, his signature poem “The Piano Player Explains Himself ”
depicts a kind of orphic resurrection, in which traditional goals and models
for lyric come back triumphant – yet irreparably damaged, and dissonant –
from the dead:
When the corpse revived at the funeral
The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul
Of the revenant passed into the body
Of the poet because it had more to say.
He sat down at the piano no one could play
Called Messiah, or The Regulator of the World,
Which had stood for ifty years . . . The musician was
Skillful but the Messiah was out of tune
And bent the time and the tone.49
Grossman revives not only clear line and clear argument, not only vision-
ary and consistent scene setting, but also the tradition of blank verse, which,
according to his own theorizing, could represent “the fate of social man.”50
Not by coincidence, Graham in her typical very long line and Armantrout
in her short one both ind an almost unprecedented distance, not just from
accentual-syllabic English meter (other patterns propel them instead), but
from the mere count of a decasyllabic norm.
Still other poets of the 1990s allowed skepticism to inform their syntax and
their external form, while seeking conidence, ecstasy, and authenticity in topic
and tone. C. D. Wright, as Lynn Keller put it, “combines . . . language-centered
skepticism with faith in what she sees with her own eyes and experiences in
her own female body.”51 Wright’s Tremble (1997) was widely believed to be the
last book of poetry published by Ecco as an independent press (Ecco survives

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

as an imprint of HarperCollins). Tremble begins with “Floating Trees,” a poem

of married love:

a bed is left open to a mirror

a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed
light ingers the house with its own acoustics
one of them writes this down
one has paper
bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils
bed of eyes and leaky pens52

Such evocative lines may unsettle our sense of who speaks, of what we
know about who is speaking (the poem includes no pronominal “we” nor “I”),
but they do not hold back in their strongly embodied emotion. Wright’s lines
thus join a tradition of ambiguity less postmodern than Pindaric, both self-
abasing and self-exalting: her work at the limits of sense is also work toward
ecstasy.
Wright grew up, and started publishing her poems, in Arkansas, part of
a 1970s circle that also included the proliic and self-mythologizing Frank
Stanford, commemorated in Wright’s irst full-length book, Translation of the
Gospel Back into Tongues (1983). She evolved her recognizable styles after her
move to San Francisco in 1979, where she encountered Language writers such
as Ron Silliman (who has also collaborated with Armantrout); there Wright
also met her husband, the poet, critic, and translator Forrest Gander (both now
teach at Brown University in Rhode Island). Although Wright learned much
from the Language writers, she remained more Romantic than skeptic, more
realist than nominalist. Indeed, Wright tries to become at once Romantic,
realist in the philosophers’ sense (ideas are to her real things), and realist in
the journalistic and novelistic sense – her other works include a book-length
poetic travelogue in rural Georgia (Deepstep Come Shining [1998]), sequences
about her native Ozarks (String Light [1991]), and hybrid verse-and-photogra-
phy about prisons in Louisiana (One Big Self [2001]).
This unusual, ambitious merger of realist and Romantic goals with tech-
niques drawn from antirealist writers helped to make Wright’s poems sud-
denly and broadly inl uential as the century closed. And if we look for precur-
sors when we look at Wright, if we look in earlier literary history for poets
who aspired at once to Romantic heights, to American chronicle, and to open,
broken forms, we might return to Gertrude Stein, an inl uence on all the
Language writers and on Ashbery, with her “diiculty . . . at once intellectual

1157
 St e ph e n B urt

and afective,” as Emily Setina writes. A minority taste for most of the twen-
tieth century, Stein may be a wider inl uence in the twenty-irst, as poets try
to ind rationales for poetry that do not depend on older ideas about purpose
and about audience: her most demanding prose and verse show “how it is
that it does not make any diference / To please them or not or not,” with an
orneriness, a determined idiosyncrasy, akin to what Wright would praise in
her later prose.53
To read American poetry with Stein, rather than (say) Williams, Moore,
Hughes, Eliot, or Stevens, as the center of an enduring modernism is to make
it hard or impossible to segregate poetry from other things called experimen-
tal writing, or prose. (For most of the twentieth century, Stein’s efect on
modern American iction, through Ernest Hemingway and others, remained
more widely known than her poems.) Indeed the most widely inl uential
work of Stein’s poetry at this point might be her irst book of prose poems
(or experimental, narrative prose), Tender Buttons (1913). That book, with its
short, supposedly descriptive passages about “objects,” “food,” and “rooms,”
presents a Stein whose language seems opaque, material, and proudly distant
from the semantic functions of language in other hands. It is that Stein of
materiality and opacity – the Stein whose “genius” declares its independence
both from the semantic functions of prose and from older verse forms – who
appealed irst to the Language writers, to Ashbery (who has cited “Stanzas
in Meditation” as a particular inl uence), and to the Harryette Mullen of
Trimmings (1991) and S*PeRM**K*T (1992).
Yet Stein’s demanding poetry of the 1910s through the 1930s – from Tender
Buttons to Lifting Belly (1915–17) or “As a Wife Has a Cow” (1926) – can also
(to quote Elisabeth Frost) “create a private language of lesbian experience,”
whose “sound play . . . suggest[s] Stein’s intimate erotic life.”54 This version of
Stein for decades eluded readers who had not sought it out, but it now seems
inescapable in such passages (from Tender Buttons) as “A cool red rose and a
pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot . . . Please could, please
could, jam it not plus more sit in when,” as “Feeling or for it, as feeling or for
it, came in or come in, or come out of there . . . As a wife has a cow.”55 And that
Stein seemed newly available, and newly imitated, during the 1980s and 1990s,
not in place of but alongside the Stein of materiality and resistance.
This dual Stein of queer sexual permission and reinvented cognition, a
Stein through whose polyvalent language “Patriarchal poetry might be with-
stood,” informed Mullen and C. D. Wright and Juliana Spahr, among many
others, in the 1990s.56 Tender Buttons itself became widely available, in Spahr’s
own words, as “an optimistic demonstration of how possible it is to read, of

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

how, luckily, our imaginations are impossible to regulate.”57 And the same
powerful, dual Stein, not so much newly discovered as inally widely visible,
increasingly informed non-“mainstream” institutions of poetry as they devel-
oped toward the end of the century, from marathon readings of Stein’s books
to newly founded independent publishers (such as Lee Ann Brown’s press
Tender Buttons), new poetry written and circulated by those publishers, and
new editions of Stein’s individual works (Lifting Belly among them).58
It may be that Stein will emerge as the modernist writer who became more
important to a twenty-irst-century future than to much of the twentieth-cen-
tury past. And yet if we want to ind a modernist writer whose work anticipates
the 1990s, containing within himself both the line of Romantic lyric and the
desire to be fractured, without a single voice, we can no longer overlook Hart
Crane (1899–1932). Crane, Grossman wrote, “lived in and through the logic of
the poetic principle” and “wrote poems that told stories about the impossibility
of its imperatives.”59 The inal Antaeus concluded with ten texts by Crane never
published in his lifetime. One fragment aspired to “altitudes, / Abstractions . . .
Pure heights – Ininity resides below”; another announced, “I have seen my ghost
broken / My body blessed / And Eden / Scraped from my mother’s breast.”60
Along with Langston Hughes, Crane was the irst signiicant American poet
to begin writing after American modernism (or “the New Poetry,” as it was
sometimes called) had established itself in the 1910s. Raised in Ohio by a candy-
company entrepreneur, his soon-estranged wife, and her mother, Crane moved
to New York in 1916 to establish himself as a writer; for the next decade he
migrated among Cleveland, New York City, and upstate New York, taking and
leaving clerical and advertising jobs, as he wrote the poems that entered his
two completed books. Crane’s many friends and correspondents included the
cultural critics Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank, the modernist writer Jean
Toomer, and the poets and critics Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, both of whom
would turn against his extravagant poems. Crane pursued and fell in love with
men, including the sailor Emil Oppfer; his writings can exalt their romance.
By the time he inished his signature long poem, The Bridge (published in 1929),
Crane had become a trial to some of his friends, as well as an alcoholic: months
in southern California, in France, and in Mexico produced the rest of the poems
gathered posthumously as Key West: An Island Sheaf. Crane died by leaping, or
falling, from a passenger ship of the coast of Florida in 1932.
In the irst poem in his irst book, White Buildings (1926), “tremorous . . .
Kisses are, – / The only worth all granting” (HCLA, p. 3). White Buildings also
granted access to elevated, concentrated diction, along with attempts to renew
the heroic quatrain:

1159
 St e ph e n B urt

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons

Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence – to travel in a tear
Sparkling alone, within another’s will. (HCLA, p. 17)
Crane here praises drinking wine, or becoming drunk (“when wine redeems
the sight”), in service to an ecstatic, sense-defying ideal. His essay “General
Aims and Theories” (1925), possibly written for the playwright Eugene
O’Neill, now looks like a program for The Bridge: Crane declared that he “was
really building a bridge between our so-called classic experience and . . . our
seething, confused cosmos of today, which has no formulated mythology yet”
(HCLA, p. 160). In its nine parts, The Bridge presents an idiosyncratic survey of
American geography and history, encompassing Virginia, Indiana, Louisiana,
the Mississippi River, “Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures,” the whole
of the East and West Coasts, the global reach of American nautical power
(“round the Horn / to Frisco, Melbourne”), the early colonial past (Columbus,
“Powhatan’s Daughter”), and technology: the Wright brothers’ l ights inspire
delight and yearning and the New York City subway, despair (HCLA, p. 55). He
planned but could not complete another section, “Calgary Express,” attentive
to African American life, and to the career of John Brown.
The Bridge is also a poem for New York, inding in the Brooklyn Bridge a
symbol for unions political, spiritual, and erotic. Its “bound cable strands”
and “arching path / upward” bring to America both the Homeric lyre and
the Romantic Aeolian harp (HCLA, pp. 72–74). They also uphold the promise
of union that Whitman saw in Lincoln. “Cape Hatteras,” which praises the
Wright brothers’ l ight, ends with the famous hope “never to let go / My
hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman – / so – ” (HCLA, p. 60). Like T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land, to which it attempts an optimistic answer, The Bridge becomes
a cyclopedia of verse forms, among them cut-up conversational free verse,
Dickinsonian ballad stanzas, blues, sheet-music-era popular song, quasi-Ho-
meric unrhymed hexameters, and variations on the heroic quatrain, as in the
proem “To Brooklyn Bridge”:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty –
Then with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of igures to be iled away;
– Till elevators drop us from our day. . . . (HCLA, p. 33)

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

“Crane endeavored to ind a way to combine . . . self-conscious modernity

of technique . . . with . . . the exuberant expression of a particularly [American]
continental heritage,” writes Robert K. Martin, who adds that Whitman
“helped Crane understand the sexual origin of his own art.”61 Yet Crane never
emulated Whitman’s technique; instead, his “near childlike delight in the full
battery of traditional poetic artiice” (as Brian Reed put it) drew staunchly on
the European past.62 If other, more widely inl uential modernists – Stein most
of all – invite contemporary readers to start again, as if from scratch, to do
something that looks as little as possible like the poetry of the past, The Bridge
invites readers to claim the whole of poetry (not only American poetry) for
ourselves. “What Emerson proposed the poet should do,” wrote Grossman,
“Crane really does.”63 He is at the least a bridge, if not indeed the bridge,
between Emerson and C. D. Wright, Whitman and J. F. Herrera, and Emily
Dickinson and D. A. Powell.
Not coincidentally, Crane’s poetry includes – by name and by implica-
tion and allusion – the nineteenth-century canon, centered on Whitman,
Dickinson, and Melville, that was just coalescing in Crane’s day. He wrote
an exultant sonnet “To Emily Dickinson” and a monody set “At Melville’s
Tomb” (HCLA, pp. 87, 24).64 Crane aspired to unite in his own voice, or in a
cable of transigured voices, American social and literary history. Later read-
ers such as Winters and Tate believed Crane’s “failure” inseparable from the
“failure” of something else – of his life, because it ended in apparent suicide;
of Emersonian, Romantic optimism and individualism; of modernism; or of
same-sex desire and love. Langdon Hammer explains that Crane’s “pursuit of
a major, culturally central poetry” has remained “anomalous, hard to place,”
and “always outside the paradigms that govern the ield.”65
If Stein often stands for a radical discontinuity, for modernism as a way of
starting again, Crane stands for the modern and the contemporary as con-
tinuations-with-a-diference of what came before. Crane has for some later
poets thus come to stand for the American poet generally: poets have tended
to put their own words in his mouth. Robert Lowell’s “Words for Hart Crane”
denounces American inattention to poetic vocation: “Who asks for me, the
Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”66 Melvin
Tolson paid homage to Crane through choice of forms, modeling Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia (1953) to some extent on The Bridge; Tate, who had
written a preface for White Buildings, did the same for Tolson, dubbing him
“in the direct succession of Crane.”67 The former U.S. poet laureate Philip
Levine opened his collection The Simple Truth (1992) with a tormented, self-
undermining poem called “On the Meeting of García Lorca and Hart Crane”:

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the “two . . . poetic geniuses’ ” homosexual desires, and their foreshortened

lives, seem to Levine inseparable from “the visionary powers of the human, /
the only animal that’s got it.”68
Other poets ind in Crane more hopeful models. Clayton Eshleman’s “sev-
eral poems about Hart Crane” and “imagined conversations with him” make
Crane a kind of martyr for the ecstatic self of poems, resurrected and multi-
plied “to wander under Dionysus and to sufer Dionysus in the lesh.”69 Powell
pays homage to Crane in Tea (1997), quoting him twice, and making him a
pivot point in the countercanon of gay men’s writing and music that Tea con-
structs.70 Charles Wright’s “Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane” imagines
poetry in general, and Crane’s brand of American poetry in particular, as an
uninishable, inexplicable vocation: “I’ve been writing this poem for weeks
now,” Wright admits, “With a pencil made of rail, smudging my face / And
my friend’s face, making a language where nothing stays.”71 Adrienne Rich in
1999 gave pride of place to Crane in a poem about artists who remade them-
selves in New York: with “deadweight trophies borne / through interboro is-
sures of the mind . . . Hart Miles Muriel Julia Paul / you will meet the eyes you
were searching for.”72
To contemplate Crane’s afterlife is also to contemplate how we narrate –
or fail to narrate – the procession of poets that leads up to our own day:
The Bridge remains a monument and an argument (in John Irwin’s words) for
“the possibility that every American poet, no matter how late he [sic] comes
in the tradition, can enjoy an original relationship with the muse.”73 Harold
Bloom’s neo-Romantic model of poetic succession, by which each strong poet
“misreads” and therefore surpasses a poetic father, provided from the 1970s
into the 1990s a standing alternative to versions of literary history (such as
Perlof ’s) that highlight modernism as innovation, as well as to the pluralist
version put forward by the book you are reading right now. Behind Bloom’s
model, as Bloom has said, stands Crane, “a religious poet without even a faith-
less faith,” whose “gifts for vision and rhetoric . . . surpassed all his American
forerunners and those who have come after in the Age of Ashbery.”74 Where
Graham and Armantrout, and Ashbery, and (at least) the early Hejinian would
emphasize the slipperiness, the resistances and doubts, intrinsic to even the
most intuitively musical circuits of supposed communication, Crane launts
instead – like Keats and like Dickinson – “the poet’s power to speak to readers
from beyond the grave.”75
To conclude with Crane – with Crane’s voices, and with Crane’s would-
be heirs – at the end of the century is to see how hard it might be, even in a
time (like Crane’s) when many fewer books of poems were published, to it

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 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

everything important about a period into any one story about it – to see both
the necessity (built into The Bridge) and the inadequacy of literary history as
such. Crane’s projects and his reputation may even have become a synecdoche
for literary inheritance in general – unpredictable, ramifying, uninished if not
forever uninishable, and often unsettling too. He is at once a bearer of orphic
modes and a cause for continued skepticism, hard to pin down as to where he
stands, what he can mean: his verse seems both to summarize and to surpass
American literary history, and hence to call for ways of reading that only the
future can know.

Notes
1. Joshua Clover, “The Rose of the Name,” Fence 1:1 (1998), pp. 35–41, 37.
2. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between
Community and Institution (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1999), p. 22; Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of
Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 25.
McGurl’s bar graph counts fewer than 150 programs in 1985, about 225 in 1995,
and 300 in 2005.
3. Harold Bloom (ed.), The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988–1997 (New York:
Scribner, 1998), pp. 349, 351.
4. Craig Dworkin, “Seja Marginal,” in Craig Dworkin (ed.), The Consequences of
Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (New York: Roof, 2008), pp. 7–24, 13.
5. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), p. 40.
6. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 5.
7. Marjorie Perlof, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), p. 200.
8. Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism, pp. 83, 166, 100; Perlof, 21st-Cen-
tury Modernism, pp. 8, 189.
9. Bill Clinton, “Notebook,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994), p. 345; Antaeus 75–76 (1994),
passim.
10. Deborah Digges, “Rune for the Parable of Despair,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994),
p. 250; Chase Twichell, “Recorded Birds,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994), pp. 325–26;
Stephen Dunn, “The Living,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994), p. 255.
11. Willard Spiegelman, “The Nineties Revisited,” Contemporary Literature 42:2
(2001), pp. 206–37, 210, 213; Charles Altieri, “Sensibility, Rhetoric and Will:
Some Tensions in Contemporary Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 23:4 (1982),
pp. 451–79.
12. Jorie Graham, The Errancy (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1997), p. 32. This collection
will be cited in the text as TE.

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 St e ph e n B urt

13. Helen Vendler, “Fin-de-Siècle Lyric,” in Elaine Scarry (ed.), Fins de Siècle
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 123–40, 130, 131.
14. Fiona Green, “Reading Lyric in Jorie Graham’s Aubades,” Genre 45:1 (2010), pp.
121–42, 129.
15. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 237.
16. Forrest Gander, “Listening for a Divine Word,” in Thomas Gardner (ed.), Jorie
Graham: Essays on the Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005),
pp. 75–81, 75–76.
17. Ashbery, Selected Poems, p. 107.
18. Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, p. 56.
19. Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp.
25–40.
20. David Baker, Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. 83.
21. Spiegelman, “The Nineties Revisited,” p. 233.
22. Rebecca Wolf, “Editor’s Note,” Fence 1:1 (1998), p. 1.
23. Catherine Wagner, “Three Love Poems,” Fence 1:1 (1998), p. 95.
24. John Yau, “Lucubration,” Fence 1:1 (1998), p. 97.
25. Clover, “The Rose of the Name,” p. 37.
26. Rae Armantrout, Veil: New and Selected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2001), pp. 115, 116.
27. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 136.
28. Rae Armantrout, Made to Seem (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995), p. 8. This
collection will be cited in the text as MTS.
29. Rae Armantrout, Collected Prose (San Diego, Calif.: Singing Horse, 2007),
p. 58.
30. McGurl, The Program Era, p. 33.
31. Steve Evans, “The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises,” Third Factory (2004),
http://www.thirdfactory.net/resistible.html.
32. David Kellogg, “The Self in the Poetic Field,” Fence 3:2 (2001), pp. 97–108,
106–07.
33. Jed Rasula, Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American
Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 6.
34. Beach, Poetic Culture, p. 8; Roger Gilbert, “Awash with Angels: The Religious
Turn in Nineties Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 42:2 (2001), pp. 238–69, 245.
35. Rasula, Syncopations, p. 36. For the history of Cave Canem, see especially Meta
DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to
Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 168–208.
36. Beach, Poetic Culture, p. 18.
37. Geof Nutter, A Summer Evening (Fort Collins: Colorado State University
Center for Literary Publishing, 2001), p. 17; Amy Catanzano, “Anti-Guardian

1164
 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

6:7:9,” American Letters & Commentary 13 (2001), pp. 8–10; C. D. Wright, Steal
Away: Selected and New Poems (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon, 2002),
pp. 222–23.
38. Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s (Northampton, Mass.: Verse Press, 2000).
39. Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 37, 38, 4, 62,
10, 53.
40. Michael Palmer, The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–95 (New York: New
Directions, 1998), p. 87.
41. Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks (New York: New
Directions, 2008), p. 105.
42. Palmer, The Lion Bridge, p. 151.
43. Palmer, The Lion Bridge, p. 204.
44. Juan Felipe Herrera, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1999), p. 43.
45. Samuel Menashe, New and Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York:
Library of America, 2005), p. 153.
46. Kellogg, “The Self in the Poetic Field,” p. 99.
47. Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism, p. 88.
48. John Ashbery, “Dangerous Moonlight,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994), p. 235.
49. Allen Grossman, The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected 1979–1991
(New York: New Directions, 1991), p. 3.
50. Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992), p. 279.
51. Lynn Keller, Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory
Poetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), p. 42.
52. Wright, Steal Away, p. 148. Kirsch rejects this style of writing, too, for its “sur-
face confusion”; see Kirsch, The Modern Element, pp. 113–24.
53. Emily Setina, “From ‘Impossible’ Writing to a Poetics of Intimacy: John
Ashbery’s Readings of Gertrude Stein,” Genre 45:1 (2012), pp. 143–66, 144;
Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, ed. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 172; C. D. Wright, Cooling
Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon,
2005).
54. Elisabeth Frost, “Signifying on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette
Mullen and Leslie Scalapino,” Postmodern Culture 5:3 (1995).
55. Gertrude Stein, Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), pp. 138–39; Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings, ed. Carl Van Vechten
(New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 544.
56. Stein, Selected Writings, p. 226.
57. Juliana Spahr, “Afterword,” in Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: The Corrected
Centennial Edition, ed. Seth Perlow (San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights, 2014),
pp. 107–29, 113.

1165
 St e ph e n B urt

58. For example, M. H. Jensen, “Gertrude Stein All the Time, Time, Time, and
Time,” Hyperallergic, February 1, 2014, http://hyperallergic.com/106247
/gertrude-stein-all-the-time-time-time-and-time/; Gertrude Stein, Lifting
Belly, ed. Rebecca Mark (Tallahasee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1989); Gertrude Stein,
The Making of Americans (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1995); Bernadette
Mayer, Sonnets (New York: Tender Buttons, 1989); Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
(Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1999).
59. Allen Grossman, The Long Schoolroom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), p. 85.
60. Hart Crane, “Ten Poems,” Antaeus 75–76 (1994), pp. 352–55; Hart Crane, Complete
Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of
America, 2006), pp. 137, 144. This collection will be cited in the text as HCLA.
61. Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, rev. ed. (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), pp. 138, 148. The irst edition of Martin’s
book appeared in 1979.
62. Brian Reed, Hart Crane: After His Lights (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2006), p. 26.
63. Grossman, The Long Schoolroom, p. 110.
64. Edward Brunner, Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 96.
65. Langdon Hammer, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. xiv, 124, 127.
66. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 157.
67. Allen Tate, “Preface to Libretto for the Republic of Liberia,” Poetry 76:4 (1950), pp.
216–18, 216.
68. Philip Levine, The Simple Truth (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 3.
69. Clayton Eshleman, “Stanza by Stanza Gloss of Hart Crane’s ‘Lachrymae
Christi,’ ” Fascicle 2 (2007), http://voltagepoetry.com/2014/02/20/1355/.
70. D. A. Powell, Tea (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), pp.
47, 67, 71.
71. Charles Wright, The Southern Cross (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 38.
72. Adrienne Rich, Midnight Salvage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 50. The
irst names refer to Crane, to the jazz musician Miles Davis, to the poets
Muriel Rukeyser and Julia de Burgos, and to the cultural critic and poet Paul
Goodman.
73. John T. Irwin, Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire Lived in Paris, I Live in Cleveland,
Ohio” (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 53.
74. Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Inluence: Literature as a Way of Life (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 266, 279.
75. Bloom, The Anatomy of Inluence, p. 163.

1166
 Selected Bibliographies

Introduction and General Literary History

Ashton, Jennifer (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Bauer, Dale (ed.). The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Bercovitch, Sacvan (general ed.). The Cambridge History of American Literature. 8 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995–2006).
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future
of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Fredman, Stephen (ed.). A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005).
Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
Graham, Maryemma, and Jerry W. Ward (eds.). The Cambridge History of African American
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Haralson, Eric (ed.). Encyclopedia of American Poetry. 2 vols. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn,
1998–2001).
Kreymborg, Alfred. Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (New York: Coward
McCann, 1929).
Larson, Kerry (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Nelson, Cary (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
Parini, Jay, and Brett Millier (eds.). The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1961).
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry. 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1976, 1987).
Roberts, Neil (ed.). A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

1167
 Selected Bibliographies

Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2007).
Staufer, Donald. A Short History of American Poetry (New York: Dutton, 1974).
Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1984).
Wolosky, Shira. Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Palgrave, 2010).

1 Remembering Muskrat: Native Poetics and the

American Indian Oral Tradition
Astrov, Margot (ed.). The Winged Serpent: American Indian Prose and Poetry (Boston: Beacon,
1947).
Bahr, Donald, Lloyd Paul, and Vincent Joseph. Ants and Orioles: Showing the Art of Pima
Poetry (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997).
Brandon, William (ed.). The Magic World: American Indian Songs and Poems (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1971).
Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Day, A. Grove (ed.). The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indians (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1951).
Donohue, Betty Booth. Bradford’s Indian Book: Being the True Roote & Rise of American
Letters as Revealed by the Native Text Embedded in Of Plimoth Plantation (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2011).
Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird (eds.). Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native
Women’s Writings of North America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
León-Portilla, Miguel. Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, trans. Grace Lobanov and Miguel
León-Portilla (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969).
Lerner, Andrea (ed.). Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest
Native American Writing (Tucson, Ariz.: Sun Tracks, 1990).
Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Parker, Robert Dale. Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of Early American Indian Poetry to
1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
Rothenberg, Jerome (ed.). Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North
Americas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).
Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999).

2 Rhyming Empires: Early American Poetry in

Languages Other Than English
Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel,
Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Bauer, Ralph, and José Antonio Mazzotti (eds.). Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas:
Empire, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

1168
 Selected Bibliographies

Castillo, Susan. Colonial Encounters in New World Writing: Performing America, 1500–1786
(London: Routledge, 2006).
Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzer (eds.). A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
———. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008).

3 The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry

Colacurcio, Michael J. Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
Daly, Robert. God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
Davis, Thomas M. A Reading of Edward Taylor (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1992).
Gatta, John. Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1989).
Hammond, Jefrey A. Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1993).
Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
Rosenmeier, Rosamond. Anne Bradstreet Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1991).
Rowe, Karen E. Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor’s Typology and the Poetics of Meditation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
White, Peter (ed.). Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory
and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985).

4 Confronting Death: The New England Puritan Elegy

Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Elliott, Emory. “The Development of the Puritan Funeral Sermon and Elegy: 1660–1750,”
Early American Literature 15 (1980): 151–64.
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England (New York: Knopf, 1989).
Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-
Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
Hammond, Jefrey A. The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
———. Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993).
Leverenz, David. The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and
Social History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980).

1169
 Selected Bibliographies

Meserole, Harrison T. (ed.). American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1968; University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985).
Pettit, Norman. The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).
Piercy, Josephine K. Studies in Literary Types in Seventeenth Century America (1607–1710) (1939;
Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969).
Silverman, Kenneth (ed.). Colonial American Poetry (New York: Hafner, 1968).
Stannard, David E. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
White, Peter (ed.). Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory
and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985).

5 The Emergence of a Southern Tradition

Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585–1763. 3 vols. (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1978).
Egan, Jim. Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2011).
Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1954).
Lemay, J. A. Leo. A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines and
in the Major English Magazines through 1765 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian
Society, 1970).
———. Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972).
Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997).
———. Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Spengemann, William C. A Mirror for Americanists (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New
England, 1989).
———. A New World of Words: Redeining Early American Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1994).
Warner, Michael. Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century
America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Wroth, Lawrence C. The Colonial Printer (New York: Dover, 1965).

6 Poetry in the Time of Revolution

Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native
American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2011).
Hayes, Kevin J. A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1996).
———. The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2008).

1170
 Selected Bibliographies

——— (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
———. The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jeferson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
Howard, Leon. The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).
Leary, Lewis. The Literary Career of Nathaniel Tucker, 1750–1807 (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1951).
Shields, David S. (ed.). American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York:
Library of America, 2007).
Walser, Richard. “Alexander Martin, Poet,” Early American Literature 6 (1971): 55–61.

7 Asserting a National Voice

Brown, Charles H. William Cullen Bryant (New York: Scribner, 1971).
Gado, Frank. William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice (Hartford, Vt.: Antoca Press, 2006).
Hallock, John W. The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).
Howard, Leon. The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).
Hunter, Doreen M. Richard Henry Dana, Sr. (Boston: Twayne, 1987).
McWilliams, John P., Jr. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre 1770–1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Muller, Gilbert H. William Cullen Bryant: Author of America (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2008).
Overmyer, Grace. America’s First Hamlet (New York: New York University Press, 1957).
Widmer, Ted. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
Woodress, James L. A Yankee’s Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958).

8 The Emergence of Romantic Traditions

Baym, Nina. Feminism and American Literary History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1992).
Bennett, Paula Bernat (ed.). Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1998).
———. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–
1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Bennett, Paula Bernat, Karen L. Kilcup, and Philipp Schweighauser (eds.). Teaching
Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (New York: Modern Language Association, 2007).
Brennan, Matthew C. The Poet’s Holy Craft: William Gilmore Simms and Romantic Verse
Traditions (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).
Chai, Leon. The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1987).
Larson, Kerry C. Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Richards, Eliza. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).

1171
 Selected Bibliographies

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., Blyden Jackson, Rayburn S. Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, and Thomas
Daniel Young (eds.). The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1990).
Walker, Cheryl (ed.). American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
———. The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982).
Watt, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1977).

9 Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field: Emerson and

His Contemporaries
Bloom, Harold. Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).
Buell, Lawrence. Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
———. “The Transcendentalist Poets,” in Jay Parini (ed.), The Columbia History of American
Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 97–119.
Clayton, Sarah T. The Angelic Sins of Jones Very (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
Folsom, Ed. “Transcendental Poetics: Emerson, Higginson, and the Rise of Whitman and
Dickinson,” in Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls
(eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), pp. 263–90.
Gittleman, Edwin. Jones Very: The Efective Years, 1833–1840 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1967).
Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography. New ed. (1970; Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
Marshall, Meghan. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Boston: Houghton Mil in
Harcourt, 2013).
Morris, Saundra. “ ‘Metre-Making’ Arguments: Emerson’s Poems,” in Joel Porte and
Saundra Morris (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 218–42.
New, Elisa. The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Richardson, Robert. Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995).
Stula, Nancy, Barbara Novak, and David M. Robinson. At Home and Abroad: The
Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (New London, Conn.: Lyman
Allyn Art Museum, 2007).
Sullivan, Robert. The Thoreau You Don’t Know (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Emerson as Poet (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).
Witherell, Elizabeth. “Thoreau as Poet,” in Joel Myerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 57–70.

1172
 Selected Bibliographies

10 Edgar Allan Poe’s Lost Worlds

Carlson, Eric W. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1966).
Felman, Shoshana. “On Reading Poetry: Relections on the Limits and Possibilities of
Psychoanalytical Approaches,” in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (eds.),
The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 133–56.
Fried, Debra. “Repetition, Refrain, and Epitaph,” ELH 53:3 (1986): 615–32.
Frye, Stephen (ed.). The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2011).
Hofman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1998).
Johnson, Barbara. A World of Diference (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987).
McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Miller, John Carl (ed.). Poe’s Helen Remembers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1979).
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941; Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Richards, Eliza. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
———. “Outsourcing ‘The Raven’: Retroactive Origins,” Victorian Poetry 43:2 (2005): 205–21.
Thomas, Dwight. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849, ed. David
Kelly Jackson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987).
Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics, ed. Oral Sumner Coad (1860; New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949).

11 Longfellow in His Time

Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems (New York:
Penguin, 1988).
Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
Fletcher, Angus. “Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American Poet,” Raritan
10:4 (1991): 131–45.
Gale, Robert A. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
2003).
Gioia, Dana. “Longfellow and the Aftermath of Modernism,” in Jay Parini (ed.), The
Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
———. Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2009).
Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2007).

1173
 Selected Bibliographies

12 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the

New England Tradition
Baym, Nina. “Early Histories of American Literature: A Chapter in the Institution of New
England,” American Literary History 1:1 (1989): 459–88.
Bennett, Whitman. Whittier: Bard of Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1941).
Cohen, Michael. “Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century
Poetry,” Arizona Quarterly 64:3 (2008): 1–29.
Dowling, William C. Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006).
Gibian, Peter. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Hoyt, Edwin P. The Improper Bostonian: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Morrow,
1979).
Mordell, Albert. Quaker Militant: John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton, 1933).
Rodríguez, J. Javier. “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers,”
Arizona Quarterly 63:3 (2007): 1–33.
Smith, Henry N. “That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens’s.” Harvard Library Bulletin 9
(1955): 145–80.
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry,
1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).
Stokes, Claudia. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Tilton, Eleanor M. Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York:
Schuman, 1947).
Wagenknecht, Edward. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967).

13 Other Voices, Other Verses: Cultures of American

Poetry at Midcentury
Bennett, Paula Bernat (ed.). Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998).
———. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–
1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Cavitch, Max. “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty,” in Meredith L. McGill (ed.), The
Traic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 97–122.
Diehl, Joanne Feit. Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
———. “Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry,” in Martha Nell Smith and Mary
Loefelholz (eds.), A Companion to Emily Dickinson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008),
pp. 205–21.

1174
 Selected Bibliographies

Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Morris, Timothy. Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1995).
Sherman, Joan R. (ed.). African American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Williams, Gary. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore (1962; New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
Winters, Yvor. “A Discovery,” Hudson Review 3 (1950): 453–58.
———. Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1938).

14 American Poetry Fights the Civil War

Barrett, Faith. To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1993).
Hutchison, Coleman. Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of
America (Athens: University of Georgia, 2012).
Maslan, Mark. Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
Morris, Roy, Jr. The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
Richards, Eliza. “Weathering the News in US Civil War Poetry,” in Kerry Larson (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth Century American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), pp. 113–34.
St. Armand, Barton Levi. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1984).

15 Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

Allen, Gay Wilson, and Ed Folsom (eds.). Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1995).
Aspiz, Harold. So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2004).
Bauerlein, Mark. Whitman and the American Idiom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1991).

1175
 Selected Bibliographies

Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-
Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
Ceniza, Sherry. Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1998).
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth M. Price (eds.). The Walt Whitman Archive (1995–present).
http://www.whitmanarchive.org.
Genoways, Ted. Walt Whitman and the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009).
Greenspan, Ezra. Walt Whitman and the American Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style in Leaves of Grass (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983).
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
Klammer, Martin. Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
LeMaster, J. R., and Donald D. Kummings (eds.). Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).
Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2010).
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Perlman, Jim, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion (eds.). Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song
(Duluth, Minn.: Holy Cow!, 1998).
Pollak, Vivian. The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Price, Kenneth M. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1990).
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995).
Robertson, Michael. Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1987).

16 Emily Dickinson: The Poetics and Practice

of Autonomy
Cody, John. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Belknap, 1971).
Franklin, Ralph W. The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1967).
Fuss, Diana. The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (New York:
Routledge, 2004).

1176
 Selected Bibliographies

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York:
Modern Library, 2002).
Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson. Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).
Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Little, Brown,
1960).
———. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1955).
———. The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986).
Juhasz, Suzanne (ed.). Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1983).
Keller, Karl. The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
———. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
Messmer, Marietta. A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1987).
———. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2012).
Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” Parnassus: Poetry in
Review 5:1 (1976): 49–74. Reprinted in Adrienne Rich, Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979).
Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1984).

17 The South in Reconstruction: White and

Black Voices
Bain, Robert, and Joseph M. Flora (eds.). Fifty Southern Writers Before 1900: A Bio-
Bibliographical Sourcebook (New York: Greenwood, 1987).
Boyd, Melba Joyce. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper,
1825–1911 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1994).
Cisco, Walter Brian. Henry Timrod: A Biography (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2004).
Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, Gavin Jones, Meta DuEwa Jones, Arnold Rampersad, and Richard
Yarborough (eds.), “Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Special issue, African American Review
41:2 (2007).
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Uninished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1988).
Gabin, Jane S. A Living Minstrelsy: The Poetry and Music of Sidney Lanier (Macon, Ga.: Mercer
University Press, 1985).

1177
 Selected Bibliographies

Griin, Martin. Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
Harris, Trudier, and Thadious M. Davis. Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance
(Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1986).
Kerkering, John D. The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Moore, Rayburn S. Paul Hamilton Hayne (New York: Twayne, 1972).
———. “Poetry of the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Blyden Jackson,
Rayburn S. Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, and Thomas Daniel Young (eds.), The History
of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp.
188–98.

18 The “Genteel Tradition” and Its Discontents

Barrineau, Nancy Warner (ed.). Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1996).
Beatty, Richmond Croom. “Bayard Taylor and George H. Boker,” American Literature 6:3
(1934): 316–27.
Bennett, Paula Bernat (ed.). Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998).
———. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–
1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Cary, Edwin H. “Introduction,” in William Dean Howells, Pebbles, Monochromes, and Other
Modern Poems, 1891–1916, ed. Edwin H. Cary (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp.
xi–xlvi.
Cary, Richard. The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His New York Friends (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1952).
Cohen, Michael. “E.C. Stedman and the Invention of Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Poetry
43:2 (2005): 165–88.
DeMille, G. E. “Stedman, Arbiter of the Eighties,” PMLA 41:3 (1926): 756–66.
Fenn, William Purviance. “Richard Henry Stoddard’s Chinese Poems,” American Literature
11:4 (1940): 417–38.
Haralson, Eric L. (ed.). Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago:
Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).
Hollander, John (ed.). American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. (New York: Library
of America, 1993).
McGill, Meredith (ed.). The Traic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic
Exchange (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Newcomb, John Timberman. Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of
Modernity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed. Paula Bernat
Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Renker, Elizabeth. “The ‘Twilight of the Poets’ in the Era of American Realism, 1875–1900,”
in Kerry Larson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135–53.

1178
 Selected Bibliographies

Spengemann, William, with Jessica Roberts (eds.). Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (New
York: Penguin, 1996).
Walker, Cheryl (ed.). American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

19 Disciplined Play: American Children’s Poetry to 1920

Crain, Patricia. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to
the Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal
of Children’s Literature 17:1 ( June 1993): 37–44.
Gray, Janet. Race and Time: American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
Hall, Donald (ed.). Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990).
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America
(1984; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Mintz, Stephen. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2006).
Philips, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (State College: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2004).
Smith, Kate Capshaw. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006).
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry,
1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).

20 Dialect, Doggerel, and Local Color: Comic

Traditions and the Rise of Realism in Popular Poetry
Harrell, Willie J., Jr. (ed.). We Wear the Mask: Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Politics of
Representative Reality (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2010).
Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black (1939; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry,
1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).
Stanley, David, and Elaine Thatcher (eds.). Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Sloane, David E. E. “In Search of a Realist Poetic Tradition,” American Literary Realism,
1870–1910 5 (Fall 1972): 489–91.
———. The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830–1890 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983).
———. “Will Carleton as Realist Poet,” Markham Review 4 (October 1975): 81–85.
Van Allen, Elizabeth J. James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999).

1179
 Selected Bibliographies

21 Political Poets and Naturalism

Bendixen, Alfred. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘Toolbox’: The Value of Satiric Poetry and
Social Reform,” in Paula Bernat Bennett, Karen Kilcup, and Phillipp Schweighauser
(eds.), Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (New York: MLA, 2007), pp. 161–71.
Blair, John. “The Posture of a Bohemian in the Poetry of Stephen Crane,” American
Literature 61 (1989): 215–29.
Cavitch, Max. “Stephen Crane’s Refrain,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54:1–4
(2008): 33–53.
Dooley, Patrick K. The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993).
Goldstein, Jesse Sidney. “Edwin Markham, Ambrose Bierce, and ‘The Man with the Hoe,’ ”
Modern Language Notes 58:3 (1943): 165–75.
Halliburton, David. The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Hofman, Daniel. The Poetry of Stephen Crane (New York: Columbia University Press,
1957).
Kessler, Carol Farley. “Brittle Jars and Bitter Jangles: Light Verse by Charlotte Perkins
Gilman,” in Sheryl L. Meyering (ed.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her
Work (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp. 133–43.
Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
O’Donnell, Thomas F. “A Note on the Reception of Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders,”
American Literature 24 (1952): 233–35.
Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1966;
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
Rudd, Jill, and Val Gough (eds.). Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1999).
Scharnhorst, Gary. “Reconstructing Here Also: On the Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman,” in Joanne B. Karpinski (ed.), Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1992), pp. 249–68.

22 The Twentieth Century Begins

Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-
Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies
of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Churchill, Suzanne W., and Adam McKible (eds.). Little Magazines and Modernism (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007).
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1995).
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry,
1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

1180
 Selected Bibliographies

Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern
Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Marek, Jayne. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1995).
Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception,
1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
Newcomb, John Timberman. How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
———. Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2004).
Thurston, Michael. Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Van Wienen, Mark W. Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

23 Robert Frost and Tradition

Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996).
Costello, Bonnie. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Faggen, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
———. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997).
Hass, Robert Bernard. Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conl ict with Science (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2002).
Hofman, Tyler. Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College
Press, 2001).
Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age (1953; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).
Kearns, Katherine. Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
———. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1975).
New, Elisa. The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1990).
Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984).

1181
 Selected Bibliographies

Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1997).
Wilcox, Earl J., and Jonathan N. Barron (eds.). Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

24 T. S. Eliot
Bush, Ronald (ed.). T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
Chinitz, David E. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
Habib, M. A. R. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
Moody, A. David (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
Ricks, Christopher. True Friendship: Geofrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under the
Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).
———. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).

25 William Carlos Williams: The Shock of the Familiar

Altieri, Charles. The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Copestake, Ian (ed.). The Legacy of William Carlos Williams (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
Corn, Wanda, and Tirza True Latimer. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011).
Crawford, T. Hugh. Modernism, Medicine and William Carlos Williams (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
Cushman, Stephen. William Carlos Williams and the Meaning of Measure (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1985).
DeKoven, Marianne. A Diferent Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
Dydo, Ulla P. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2003).
Halter, Peter. William Carlos Williams and the Revolution in the Visual Arts. Rev. ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981).
Meyer, Steven. Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Newcomb, John Timberman. How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).

1182
 Selected Bibliographies

Perlof, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1983).
Sayre, Henry. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983).
Tichi, Cecilia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977).

26 Finding “Only Words” Mysterious: Reading

Mina Loy (and H.D.) in America
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1996).
Churchill, Suzanne. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American Poetry
(London: Ashgate, 2006).
Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry,
1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
———. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Friedman, Susan Stanford, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (eds.). Signets: Reading H.D. (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Goody, Alex. Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude
Stein (Hampshire: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007).
Kinnahan, Linda. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos
Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
Kuenzli, Rudolf E. (ed.). New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986).
Miller, Cristanne. Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schüler:
Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2005).
———. “Tongues ‘Loosened in the Melting Pot’: The Poets of Others and the Lower East
Side,” Modernism/Modernity 14:3 (2007): 455–76.
Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson (eds.). The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Cambridge:
Salt, 2010).
Shreiber, Maeera, and Keith Tuma (eds.). Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine:
National Poetry Foundation, 1998).
Vetter, Lara. Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientiic Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (New
York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010).

27 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page

Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).

1183
 Selected Bibliographies

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1981).
Holley, Margaret. The Poetry of Marianne Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987).
Kineke, Sheila. “T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and the Gendered Operations of Literary
Sponsorship,” Journal of Modern Literature 21:1 (1997): 121–36.
Miller, Cristanne. Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995).
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
Rotella, Guy. Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne
Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991).
Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

28 The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent

Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan
Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987).
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Collins, Martha (ed.). Critical Essays on Louise Bogan (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry,
1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Freedman, Diane P. (ed.). Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1995).
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth Century. 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988, 1989, 1994).
Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random
House, 2001).
Nelson, Cary. “The Fate of Gender in Modern American Poetry,” in Kevin J. H. Dettmar
and Stephen Watt (eds.), Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 321–60.
———. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory,
1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women
Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008).

1184
 Selected Bibliographies

29 The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of

Wallace Stevens
Bloom, Harold. The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).
Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House,
1977).
Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London:
Routledge, 2005).
Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
Fisher, Barbara. Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1990).
Leggett, B. J. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1992).
Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
Lensing, George. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1986).
———. Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2001).
Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
Miller, J. Hillis. The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985).
Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens (New York: Beech Tree, 1988).
Serio, John (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1969).
———. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1984).

30 Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the

East Coast Projectivists
Armand, Louis (ed.). Contemporary Poetics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
2007).
Beach, Christopher. Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Tradition (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992).
Butterick, George F. A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980).
Davie, Donald. Studies in Ezra Pound (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991).
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Makin, Peter. Pound’s Cantos (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Maud, Ralph. Charles Olson at the Harbor: A Biography (Vancouver, B.C.: Talon, 2008).
Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

1185
 Selected Bibliographies

Nadel, Ira (ed.). Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1978).

31 Langston Hughes and His World

Dace, Tish (ed.). Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
De Santis, Christopher (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 315, Langston Hughes: A
Documentary Volume (Detroit, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2005).
Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance (1971; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Jones, Meta DuEwa. “Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and His
Critics,” Callaloo 25:4 (2002): 1145–75.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986, 1988).
Santos, Irene Ramalho. “Langston Hughes: The Color of Modernism,” in Sacvan Bercovitch
(ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5, Poetry and Criticism 1900–1950
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 311–42.
Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
Tracy, Steven. Langston Hughes and the Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
Young, Kevin. “ ‘If You Can’t Read, Run Anyhow!’: Langston Hughes and the Poetics of
Refusal,” in The Grey Album (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2012), pp. 169–88.

32 The Objectivists and the Left

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, and Peter Quartermain (eds.). The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in
Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
Filreis, Alan. Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Heller, Michael. Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Knopf,
1975).
Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural
Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
———. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
Nicholls, Peter. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).

1186
 Selected Bibliographies

Penberthy, Jenny (ed.). Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine: National Poetry
Foundation, 1996).
Scroggins, Mark. The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Emeryville, Calif.:
Shoemaker and Hoard, 1997).
Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American
Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Teres, Harvey. Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Zukofsky, Louis (ed.). “Objectivists.” Special issue, Poetry 37:5 (1931). http://www
.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc/221.

33 “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”:

Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and
the Middle-Generation Poets
Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
Bell, Vereen. Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983).
Blake, David Haven. “Public Dreams: John Berryman, Celebrity and the Culture of
Confession,” American Literary History 13:4 (2001): 716–36.
Hafenden, John. The Life of John Berryman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982).
Haralson, Eric (ed.). Reading the Middle Generation Anew (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2006).
Kirsch, Adam. The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008).
London, Michael, and Robert Boyers (eds.). Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time
(New York: David Lewis, 1970).
Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
Rudman, Mark. Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983).
Tillinghast, Richard. Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1995).
Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995).
———. Last Books, Last Looks: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2010).

34 Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World

of Real Feeling
Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Cleghorn, Angus, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano (eds.). Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st
Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).

1187
 Selected Bibliographies

Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1993).
———. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal,” American Literary History 15:2 (2003):
334–66.
Ferguson, Suzanne (ed.). Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 2003).
Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1990).
Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
Kinzie, Mary. The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
Pickard, Zachariah. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description (Montreal: McGill University
Press, 2009).
Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1990).
Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1999).

35 Writing the South

Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997).
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism,
1930–1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
Burt, John. Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1989).
Gioia, Dana, and William Logan (eds.). Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald Justice
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997).
Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).
Hart, Henry. James Dickey: The World as a Lie (New York: Picador, 2000).
Mofett, Joe. Understanding Charles Wright (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2008).
Suarez, Ernest. Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1999).
Young, Thomas Daniel. Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

36 San Francisco and the Beats

Allen, Donald (ed.). The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (1960; Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).

1188
 Selected Bibliographies

Duncan, Michael, and Kristine McKenna (eds.). Seminal Culture: Wallace Berman and His
Circle (Santa Monica, Calif.: Santa Monica Museum, 2005).
Ellingham, Lewis, and Kevin Killian. Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco
Renaissance (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Fredman, Stephen. Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a
Revolution (San Francisco: Conari Press, 1996).
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the North
Cascades (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002).
Vincent, John Emil (ed.). After Spicer: Critical Essays (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2011).

37 The New York School

Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of
Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Dubois, Andrew. Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
2006).
Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001).
Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York:
Doubleday, 1998).
Nelson, Maggie. Women, the New York School, and Other Abstractions (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 2007).
Perlof, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997).
Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2006).
Vincent, John Emil. John Ashbery: His Later Books (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2007).
Ward, Geof. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. Rev. ed. (New York: Palgrave/
Macmillan, 2001).
Wilkinson, John. “ ‘Couplings of Such Sonority’: Reading a Poem by Barbara Guest,”
Textual Practice 23:3 ( June 2009): 481–502.

38 The Uses of Authenticity: Four Sixties Poets

Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960s
(Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979).
Bly, Robert. American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (New York: Harper and Row,
1990).

1189
 Selected Bibliographies

Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987).
Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997).
Hedley, Jane. I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of
Poetic Address (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009).
Jarnot, Lisa, and Michael Davidson. Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Johnston, Devin. Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
Smith, Dave (ed.). The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1982).
Williamson, Alan. Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984).

39 James Merrill and His Circles

Berger, Charles, and David Lehman (eds.). James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1983).
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
Gwiazda, Piotr. James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Inluence (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Howard, Richard. Alone with America (New York: Atheneum, 1980).
Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Labrie, Ross. James Merrill (Boston: Twayne, 1982).
McClatchy, J. D. Twenty Questions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Mofett, Judith. James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984).
Phillips, Siobhan. The Poetics of the Everyday (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011).
Polito, Robert. A Reader’s Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1994).
Sastri, Reena. James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Wasley, Aidan. The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2011).
Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1987).

40 Science in Contemporary American Poetry:

Ammons and Others
Brown, Kurt (ed.). The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2001).

1190
 Selected Bibliographies

Crawford, Robert (ed.). Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
Halpern, Nick. Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
Holmes, John (ed.). Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2012).
Schneider, Steven P. A. R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1994).
——— (ed.). Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems (Madison, N.J.:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999).
Scigaj, Leonard. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1999).
Steinman, Lisa M. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).
Tifany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
Walpert, Bryan. Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (London: Routledge,
2011).

41 The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

Archambeau, Robert. Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (South Bend,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
Davis, Dick. Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1991).
Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition
(New York: Harper, 1976).
Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1979).
Spiegelman, Willard. The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary Poetry
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
Yenser, Stephen. A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2002).

42 Latino Poetry and Poetics

Algarín, Miguel, and Bob Holman (eds.). Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (New
York: Holt, 1994).
Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).

1191
 Selected Bibliographies

Cruz, Victor Hernández, Leroy Quintana, and Virgil Suárez (eds.). Paper Dance: 55 Latino
Poets (New York: Persea, 2000).
Falconer, Blas, and Lorraine López (eds.). The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular
Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myth, Against Margins (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Somers-Willett, Susan B. A. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the
Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2009).

43 Asian American Poetry

Chang, Juliana (ed.). Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970
(New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996).
Hongo, Garrett (ed.). The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (New York: Doubleday,
1993).
Jeon, Joseph. Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012).
Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung (eds.). Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (1980; Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1991).
Marx, Edward. “A Slightly Open Door: Yone Noguchi and the Invention of English Haiku,”
Genre 3 (2006): 107–26.
Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Uba, George. “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry,” in Shirley Geok-
lin Lim and Amy Ling (eds.), Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 33–48.
Yao, Steven. Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
Yu, Timothy. “ ‘The Hand of a Chinese Master’: José Garcia Villa and Modernist Orien-
talism,” MELUS 29:1 (2004): 41–59.
———. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).

44 Psychoanalytic Poetics
Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Diehl, Joanne Feit (ed.). On Louise Glück: Change What You See (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2005).
Forbes, Deborah. Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-
Century American Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Gill, Jo (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).

1192
 Selected Bibliographies

Gray, Jefrey. “ ‘Necessary Thought’: Frank Bidart and the Postconfessional,” Contemporary
Literature 34:4 (1993): 714–39.
Harrison, DeSales. The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin,
Plath and Glück (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).
Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
Keniston, Anne. Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
Lerner, Lawrence. “What Is Confessional Poetry?” Critical Quarterly 29:1 (1987): 46–66.
Rector, Liam, and Tree Swenson (eds.). On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991).
Sewell, Lisa. “ ‘In the End, the One Who Has Nothing Wins’: Louise Glück and the Poetics
of Anorexia,” Literature Interpretation Theory 17 (2006): 49–76.
Vendler, Helen. Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995).
Williamson, Alan. Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984).

45 American Poetry of the 1980s: The Pressures

of Reality
Benston, Kimberly W. “Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry,” in
Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond (eds.), Afro-American Literary Study in the
1990s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 164–93.
Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (1986; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2001).
Burt, Stephen. Close Calls with Nonsense (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2009).
Caplan, David. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
Hall, Donald (ed.). Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982).
Jarman, Mark, and Robert McDowell (eds.). The Reaper Essays (Brownsville, Ore.: Story
Line Press, 1996).
Perlof, Marjorie. Radical Artiice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991).
Schultz, Susan M. A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1995).

46 Black and Blues Conigurations: Contemporary

African American Poetry
Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 2004).
Anderson, T. J. Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2004).

1193
 Selected Bibliographies

Bentson, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of Afro-American Modernism (London:

Routledge, 2000).
Cummings, Allison. “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn
Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers 26:2 (2005): 3–36.
Gabbin, Joanne V. (ed.). The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1999).
Henderson, Stephen (ed.). Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York: William Morrow,
1973).
Holladay, Hilary. Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2004).
Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2011).
Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken
Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental
Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Melham, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1987).
Naylor, Paul (ed.). “Nathaniel Mackey: A Special Issue.” Special issue, Callaloo 23:2 (2000).
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of Afro-American Postmodernism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997).
———. Integral Music: Languages of Afro-American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2004).
Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American
Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).
Smethurst, James. “Remembering When Indians Were Red: Bob Kaufman, the Popular
Front, and the Black Arts Movement,” Callaloo 25:1 (2002): 146–64.
Smith, Derik. “Quarreling in the Movement: Robert Hayden’s Black Arts Era,” Callaloo 33:2
(2010): 449–66.
Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth Century
American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000).
Widener, Daniel. Black Arts West: Culture and Strugle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2010).
Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry,”
Massachusetts Review 18:3 (1977): 542–54.

47 Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and the Neobaroque

Brunner, Edward. Cold War Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Costello, Bonnie. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Hollander, John. The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995).
Karr, Mary. “Against Decoration,” Parnassus 16:2 (1991): 277–300.

1194
 Selected Bibliographies

Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
McDowell, Robert. “The Wilderness Surrounds the Word,” Hudson Review 43 (1991):
669–78.
Quinn, Justin. American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity and Modern Poetry (Dublin: University
College Dublin Press, 2005).
Spiegelman, Willard. How Poets See the World: The Art of Description on Contemporary Poetry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1988).
Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985).

48 Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry

Cifelli, Edward M. John Ciardi: A Biography (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,
1997).
Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal
of Children’s Literature 17:1 ( June 1993): 37–44.
———. “Consolation Prize,” Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books 100 (2003): 66–83.
Hall, Donald (ed.). The Oxford Book of Children’s Poetry in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
Livingston, Myra Cohn. The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality? (Boston: Horn Book, 1984).
———. “David McCord’s Poems: Something Behind the Door,” in Perry Nodelman (ed.),
Touchstones: Relections on the Best in Children’s Literature. Vol. 2 (West Lafayette, Ind.:
Children’s Literature Association, 1987), pp. 157–72.
MacDonald, Ruth. Shel Silverstein (New York: Twayne, 1997).
Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: American Icon (New York: Continuum, 2004).
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry,
1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).
Styles, Morag. From the Garden to the Street (London: Cassell, 1998).
Styles, Morag, Louise Joy, and David Whitley (eds.). Poetry and Childhood (Stoke on Trent:
Trentham Books, 2010).
Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s
Poetry (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2007).

49 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

Balaz, Joseph P. (ed.). Ho‘omanoa:
̄ An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature
(Honolulu: Ku Pa‘a Incorporated, 1989).
Franklin, Cynthia, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke (eds.). Navigating Islands and Continents:
Conversations and Contestations in and around the Paciic (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2000).
Morales, Rodney. “Literature,” in Michael Haas (ed.), Multicultural Hawai‘i: The Fabric of a
Multiethnic Society (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 107–29.

1195
 Selected Bibliographies

Pennycock, Alastair. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (New York:
Addison-Wesley, 1995).
Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2001).
Stein, Gertrude. Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008).
Xiaojing, Zhou. “ ‘What Story What Story What Sound’: The Nomadic Poetics of Myung
Mi Kim’s Dura,” College Literature 33:4 (2007): 63–91.

50 American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

Altieri, Charles. Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts (State College:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
Beach, Christopher. Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and
Institution (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
Gardner, Thomas (ed.). Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005).
———. Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999).
Grossman, Allen. The Long Schoolroom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Irwin, John T. Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire Lived in Paris, I Live in Cleveland, Ohio”
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
Keller, Lynn. Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2010).
Kellogg, David. “The Self in the Poetic Field,” Fence 3:2 (2001): 97–108.
Keniston, Anne. Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979; Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1998).
Nealon, Christopher. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Perlof, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Rasula, Jed. Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).
Reed, Brian. Hart Crane: After His Lights (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
Vendler, Helen. Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995).
Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks (eds.). Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s: Telling It Slant
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

1196
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“A” (Zukofsky), 736–37, 742–43 Asian American poetry as, 987–88

“ABC” ( Justice), 809–11 “beneit” readings, 1137–138
abolitionism. See also slavery multilingual poetry and, 1133–134
in African American poetry, 293–95, 324 Adam, Helen, 823–24
in Longfellow’s poetry, 241–42, 249–52 Adams, Charles Follen, 468
in mid-nineteenth-century poetry, Adams, Charles Frances, 468
290–95 Adams, John, 140, 148–49
in Whittier’s poetry, 261–67 Adams, Léonie, 645, 1012–1013
in women’s poetry, 185–86, 290–95 Adcock, Betty, 811–13, 814
Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode “Address to James Oglethorpe, An”
(Stoddard), 405 (Kirkpatrick), 122–23
Abrams, M. H., 1003–1004, 1098 “Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley,
academic verse Ethiopian Poetess, Who Came
literary canon and, 2 from Africa at Eight Year of Age,
southern poetry and inl uence of, 795–96 and Soon Became Acquainted with
Academy for Negro Youth (Baltimore), the Gospel of Jesus Christ, An”
293–95 (Hammon), 138–39
“Academy in Peril: William Carlos “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and
Williams Meets the MLA, The” Jean-Paul” (O’Hara), 858–60
(Bernstein), 571–72 Admirable Crichton, The (Barrie),
Academy of American Poets, 856–64, 790–91
1135–136 Admonitions (Spicer), 836–37
Bishop’s fellowship from, 775 Adof, Arnold, 1118
prize to Moss by, 1032 “Adonais” (Shelley), 88–90
Acadians, poetry about, 37–38, 241–42, Adorno, Theodor, 863, 1042–1043
252–54, 264–65 Adulateur, The (Warren), 134–35
Accent (television show), 1113–115 Adventure (Bryher), 613–14
“Accountability” (Dunbar), 394 Adventures of Daniel Boone, The (Bryan),
Ackerman, Diane, 932–33 157–58
Ácoma people, in Spanish epic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain),
poetry, 49–50 183–86
Active Anthology (Pound), 679 funeral elegy ridiculed in, 102–04
activist poetry. See also politics, poetry and; racism in, 450–52
social movements women’s poetry ridiculed in, 456–57

1197
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Advertisements for the Experienced Planters of Lanier’s exclusion of, 386–89

New-England (Smith), 111–12 “African Elegy, An” (Duncan), 877–78
“Advice to a Raven in Russia” (Barlow), African poetry
156–57 Hughes and, 712, 713, 719–20
Advice to the Privileged Orders of Europe Mackey’s poetry and, 1070–1071
(Barlow), 156–57 Mullen’s poetry and, 1071–1073
“Aeneas at Washington” (Tate), 798–99 Wright’s poetry and, 1061–1063
Aeneid (Virgil), 47, 49–50, 155–56 African Treasury (Hughes), 719–20
African American poetry. See also race and Afrika Singt (Hughes), 709
racism; slavery; speciic poets Afro-Latino poetry, 975–76
abolitionism and, 307–08 “After Apple-Picking” (Frost), 524, 534
absence in colonial South of, 109–10 “After Dark” (Rich), 883
Beat Movement and, 831–33 “After-Dinner Poem, An” (Holmes), 270–71
Black Arts Movement and, 701 “after kent state” (Clifton), 1065–1066
Brooks’s inl uence in, 1049–1050 After Lorca (Spicer), 834–38
Cave Canem retreat for, 1153 After Strange Gods (Eliot), 555–56
children’s poetry, 438–42, 1118 “After the Supper and Talk” (Whitman),
in Civil War, 318–19 354–55
contemporary poetics in, 1048–1073 “After the Teacups” (Warren), 799–800
Crisis magazine and, 508–11 “After Twenty Years” (Taylor), 815
cultural legacy of, 468 After We Lost Our Way (Mura), 987
current trends in, 6–7 “Afterword for the American Reader”
dialect poetry, 462–64, 703 (Davie), 940–44
early modernist poetry, 506–07 “Afterword: On ‘Confessional’ Poetry”
elegies for Lincoln and, 316–18 (Bidart), 1016–1017
freeborn poets, 293–95 “Again, dawn” (Eigner), 695–96
in Harlem Renaissance, 636, 645, 701–23 “Again for Hephaistos, the Last Time”
historical background, 1048–1049 (Auden), 908–09
Hughes’s legacy in, 701–23 Agee, James, 731–32
in literary canon, 2 Age of Auden, 4–6
Moss and, 1031–1038, 1045 Age of Lowell, 4–6
in newspapers and magazines, 300 Ages, The (Bryant), 172–73, 174–75
nonblack poetry and, 8, 712 Agrarians, 800–01, 817
racialized collectives of, 701 Agüeros, Jack, 968–69
in Reconstruction era, 390–94 Ai, 1033, 1048–1049
by slaves, 136–39, 292–93 Aiiieeeee! anthology, 979–83, 986–87
social movements and, 290–95 Aiken, Conrad, 562–63
southern poetry by, 795–96, 814–18 Ainslee’s Magazine, 420–21
in twentieth century, 4–6 Aion magazine, 988
Wheatley’s inl uence on, 136–39 Akers, Elizabeth, 1105–106
women poets in, 136–39, 293–95, 636, 645, “Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100”
1049–1050, 1056–1057 (Espada), 970–71
African Americans. See also race and Alamo and Other Verses (Gray), 468
racism; slavery Alarcón, Francisco X., 964–65, 1131, 1136,
as Civil War soldiers, 315, 396, 503–04 1138–139
Dunbar on music of, 398–400 Albany Evening Journal, 192–94

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Alberti, Rafael, 809–11, 1052 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan), 985

“Alchemist, The” (Bogan), 642–43 American Academy of Arts and Letters,
Alcott, Bronson, 183–86, 270–71 484–85
Alcott, Louisa May, 372–73 “American Aloe on Exhibition, The”
Alden, John, 98–101 (Melville), 417–18
Aldington, Richard, 672 An American Anthology 1787–1900 (Stedman),
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 404–10 406–08, 498
anti-immigration poetry of, 414 A Maze Me: Poems for Girls (Nye), 1118
dialect poetry scorned by, 409–10 American Copyright League, 274–75
Alexander, Elizabeth, 438–42, 1048–1049, American Federationist magazine, 482
1066–1067 American Federation of Labor, 481
Alexander, Meena, 998–99 American Hybrid (St. John and Swensen),
Alfred A. Knopf publishers. See Knopf 1021–1023
(Alfred A.) publishers American Independence (Freneau), 143–44
Algarín, Miguel, 967–68 American Indian Poetry (Cronyn), 32–33
Ali, Agha Shahid, 992 Americanisms (DeVere), 431–34
Ali, Kazim, 999 American Letters & Commentary journal,
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 798–99 1035–1036
All Aboard (internment camp publication), American Literary Anthology (Plimpton), 878
985–86 American Magazine, 116, 123–25, 508–11
Allen, Donald, 571–72, 824, 829, 844–45, American Poems (Smith), 139–42
870–71, 1108–109, 1145 “American Portrait: Old Style” (Warren),
Allen, Hervey, 223 806–07
Allen, Paula Gunn, 38–39 American pragmatism, 803–06
Allerton, Ellen P., 448–49 American Revolution
Allman, John, 933 Freneau as poet of, 143–44
Allston, Washington, 163–66, 178 poetic circle in era of, 133–42
“All the Dead Dears” (Plath), 1008–1009 poetry in time of, 3–4, 129–49
All the King’s Men (Warren), 801–02, 803–06 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 270,
Almagro, Diego de, 47–51 1097–1098
“Alnwick Castle” (Halleck), 169–71 American Sign Language (ASL), 9
Alsop, George, 113–14 American Writers Against the Vietnam
Altieri, Charles, 542–56, 880–81, 989–90, War, 886
1027–1028 America’s First Hamlet (Overmyer), 176
Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia), Ames, William, 96, 99–100
961–62, 966, 1123–124, 1133–134 Amherst Academy, 362–64
Alvarez, Al, 1006–1007 Amirthanayagam, Indran, 992
Alvarez, Julia, 975–76 Ammons, A. R., 6, 536–37, 894, 895, 1154–155
“Amaranth and Moly” (Clampitt), science and poetry of, 917–27
1083–1085 “Am/Trak” (Baraka), 1064–1065
America (Martin), 133, 143–44 Analysis of Innoculation (Kirkpatrick), 122–23
“America” (Simpson), 307–08 anaphoric phrasing, in Romantic
“America” (Whitman), 330–31 poetry, 225
“America, Heroica” (Loy), 598–99 “Anarchiad, The” (Humphreys), 147
“America * A Miracle” (Loy), 584, 598–99 Anderson, Jon, 938–39
America Delivered (Tucker), 146 Anderson, Karen Leona, 933

1199
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Anderson, Margaret, 508–11, 605–06 Apess, William, 34–35

Andre (Dunlap), 186 Apex of the M magazine, 1153
Andrews, Bruce, 865–66, 1028–1030 “Aphorisms on Futurism” (Loy), 584,
Andrew the Lion Farmer (Hall), 1107–108 587–89
And the Stars Were Shining (Ashbery), 861 apocalyptic imagery, Poe’s use of, 217–18,
“Andy-Diana DNA Letter” (Weiman), 223, 225, 232–33
928–29 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 844–46, 1108–109
“Angel and the Nightingale, The” (Allston), Apologia (Sepulveda), 45–47
163–65 “Apology of Genius” (Loy), 592–93, 596
Angel in the House (Patmore), 361–62 Apparatus (Cha), 995–96
Angelou, Maya, 8, 1136 “Appeal for Sufering Genius, The” (Bryan),
“Angelus, The” (Markham), 483 157–58
“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (Loy), 584, “Appeal to the American People, An”
587–89, 593–97 (Harper), 390–94
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 635 Appleton, Nathanael, 96–98
Anglo-Saxon poetry, southern poets’ Appleton Readers, 1105
reverence for, 387–88 “April” (Field), 465–68
“Annabel Lee” (Poe), 183, 188, 232–33, 234–36 April Galleons (Ashbery), 861
Annie Allen (Brooks), 716 “Arachne” (Cooke), 416–17
Annotated Cat, The (Nel), 1110 Aragon, Louis, 712
another time in fragments (Eigner), 695–96 “Arapaho Verse” (Whiteshirt), 27–28
Antaeus journal, 1146, 1153, 1157–159 Ararat (Glück), 1019–1020
antebellum literary culture Ara vos Prec (Eliot), 547–48
children’s poetry in, 425–26 Archambeau, Robert, 937–38
Poe and, 218–19 Archila, William, 975–76
“Ante-Bellum Sermon, An” (Dunbar), 397, Arching in the Afterlife (Medina), 973
462–64 architecture, Whitman’s inl uence in,
Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Pound), 330–31
678–79 Arenal, Electa, 56–60
Anthology of Magazine Verse (Braithwaite), Ariel (Plath), 776–77, 1006–1008, 1009–1010
506–07, 508 Ariel: The Restored Edition (Plath), 1007–1008
Anthony, Susan B., 372–73 Aristotelian theory, Spanish colonial poetry
antiessentialist poetry and, 45–47
of Asian American poets, 986–93 ARK ( Johnson), 883
contemporary African American poetry Armantrout, Rae, 7, 1149–152, 1153–156
and, 1048–1049, 1061–1063 Armory Show of 1913, 586–87
antimodernist poets, 8 Armstrong, Donald, 807–08
anti-Semitism, Pound accused of, 686–87 Armstrong, Louis, 1050–1051
antiwar poetry, 629, 747. See also speciic wars “Arrival at the Waldorf ” (Stevens), 655
by Lowell, 761–63 Arroyo, Rane, 971–72
of 1960s poets, 886–89 “Art” (Allston), 163–65
poetry of the center and, 939 “Art and the Human Economy” (Ransom),
poets of 1960s and, 869 800–01
Ants and Orioles (Bahr), 32–33 Art Chronicles (O’Hara), 844–46
Anvil magazine, 616–17 art criticism
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 1133–134, 1136, 1138–139 by New York School poets, 844–46

1200
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by Yau, 996–97 As Umbrellas Follow Rain, 861

“Arthur Selwyn” (Carleton), 457–59 As We Know, 861
“Artiice of Absorption” (Bernstein), Can You Hear, Bird?, 861
1042–1043 “Clepsydra,” 860–61
Art in America magazine, 844–46 “Dangerous Moonlight,” 1155–156
Art in Cinema Society, 823–24 Double Dream of Spring, The, 860–61
artists “Europe,” 860
American poetry by, 166–67, 173–74, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in
175–76, 178 a Landscape,” 860–61
Beat Movement and, 838–41 Flow Chart, 861, 894
culture poetry and, 1098–1100 Girls on the Run, 861
Loy on, 592–93 “Grand Galop,” 856
New York School poets ailiation with, The Heroes, 844–46
844–46 Hotel Lautréamont, 861
Whitman’s poetry and, 330–31 Houseboat Days, 861
Art News, 844–46 “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” 849–50
Art of Exile, The (Archila), 975–76 “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” 845
Art of Poetry, The (Gay), 137 Nest of Ninnies (Ashbery and
Arts Magazine, 844–46 Schuyler), 844–46
artwork “The Other Tradition,” 851–52
in children’s poetry, 436–37 “Parergon,” 1147–149
as poetic inspiration, 480 Planisphere, 861
Asalto al tiempo (Braschi), 967–68 “Rain,” 850–51
“As a Wife Has a Cow” (Stein), 1158 Rivers and Mountains, 860–61
Asbaje, Juan de, 56–60 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,”
Ash, John, 865–66 846–47, 860–61
Ashbery, John Some Trees, 860–62
in Antaeus, 1146, 1155–156 “Soonest Mended,” 860–61
Auden and, 906 The Tennis Court Oath, 850–51, 860,
avant-garde poetry and, 4–6, 404 864–66
Bishop and, 775–76, 790–91 “These Lacustrine Cities,” 860–61
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 Three Poems, 536–37, 860–61
in France, 1080 The Vermont Notebook, 860–61
Graham and, 1147–149 “Vetiver,” 853–54
literary reputation of, 856–64, 866, 1144, A Wave, 861
1145, 1155–156 A Worldly Country, 861
Merrill and, 894 Ashton, Dore, 829
New York School and poetry of, 844–46, “Ash Wednesday” (Eliot), 555–56
860–62 Asian American Heritage (Hsin-fu Wand),
pop culture in poetry of, 852–53 986–87
postmodernism of, 853–54 Asian American poetry, 6–7, 978–99
tone in poetry of, 851–56 activist-antiessentialist dialectic in,
Williams and, 560–61 986–93
works avant-garde syntheses and transnational
And the Stars Were Shining, 861 reconiguration in, 993–99
April Galleons, 861 Chinese immigration in, 983

1201
 Index

Asian American poetry (cont.) “At the Dentist” (Lowell), 762–63

historical background, 979–83 “At the Door of the House” (Loy), 584–85
multilingual poetry in, 1130–131 “At the Executed Murder’s Grave”
postidentity in, 999 (Wright), 871–74
social poetics of labor and internment “At the Old Place” (O’Hara), 858–60
in, 983–86 Attucks, Crispus, 831–33
Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 999 Atwood, Margaret, 1146
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (Hughes), Aubert, Alvin, 1033
720–22 Auden, W. H.
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” African American poetry and, 701
(Williams), 568 Berryman and, 768–69
assimilation, in Asian American poetry, Bogan and, 640
989, 992–93, 999 on Freud, 1003
Association for Asian American Howard and, 908–09
Studies, 999 Hughes’s poetry and, 628–29
Associated Negro Press, Hughes as McClatchy and, 909–11
journalist for, 710–11 Merrill and, 894
“Astrophel” (Spenser), 91–93 in Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover,
Astrov, Margot, 32–33 903–08
As Umbrellas Follow Rain (Ashbery), 861 modernist poetry and, 755
“As Weary Pilgrim” (Bradstreet), 75 national poetry and, 8
As We Know (Ashbery), 861 New York School poetry and,
Asylums (Bernstein), 1038 844–46, 860
Asylums Press, 1038 on poetry, 1137–138
Atalantis: A Tale of the Sea (Simms), 188–89 Rich and, 874–75, 1082–1083
“At Devil’s Lake” (Stanton), 464–65 Wright and, 871–74
Atlantic Monthly “Auden’s OED” (McClatchy), 909–11
Aldrich as editor of, 414 Audubon, James, 737–39
Clampitt’s poetry in, 1085–1086 Audubon: A Vision (Warren), 803–06
Dickinson’s poetry in, 431 Auguries of Innocence (Blake), 1096
Fireside Poets and, 259, 267, 273 “August” (Wylie), 646–47
Higginson as editor of, 370–72 Augustan poetry
literary culture and, 508–11 American poetry and conventions of,
mid-nineteenth-century poetry culture 130, 177
and, 282, 287–89, 299–300, 307 inl uence on Wheatley of, 136–37
Moore’s poetry in, 605–06 poetry of the center and, 937–38
Piatt’s poetry in, 410–11 Augustine (St.), 76–77
poetic parody in, 302–03 Aunt Chloe (poetic sequence) (Harper),
review of Melville’s poetry in, 319 293–95, 390–94
Spanish-American War coverage in, 503 “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (Rich), 874–75
Stedman’s poetry in, 408–09 “Auroras of Autumn, The” (Stevens),
Atlas of the Diicult World, An (Rich), 950–52 660–61
“At Melville’s Tomb” (Crane), 1161 Austin, Mary, 35–36, 533
atomic bomb, science in poetry and, 918 authenticity, in American poetry of 1960s,
At Redbones (Moss), 1030–1031, 1034–1035 869–91
“At the Center” (Stone), 927–28 “Author to His Book, The” (Alsop), 113–14

1202
 Index

autobiographical poetry Bad Alchemy (Martínez), 974

evolution of, 6–7 Bad Boys (Cisneros), 964
Glück’s discussion of, 1017 “Bagel Shop Jazz” (Kaufman), 831–33
Lowell’s inl uence on, 751 Bahr, Donald, 32–33
“Autobiography” (Brock-Broido), 1021–1023 Baker, David, 1149
Autobiography (Williams), 558, 684–85, 692 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 245–47
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), Balanchine, George, 844–46
576–78 Balaz, Joe, 1131, 1136
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Baldwin, James, Hughes and, 711, 719,
( Johnson), 398–400 722–23
Autobiography of Red (Carson), 8 Ball, Caroline, 313–15, 321
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The “Ballad of Billie Potts, The” (Warren),
(Holmes), 267, 271–73 801–02
autonomy, in Dickinson’s poetics, 360–80 “Ballad of Lager Bier, The” (Stedman),
“Autumn Chant” (Millay), 634–35 408–09
“Autumn Leaves” (Very), 206–09 “Ballad of the Gallows Bird, The”
“Autumn Refrain” (Stevens), 660 (Markham), 484
avant-garde poetry “Ballad of the Harp Weaver” (Millay), 632
American poetry and, 4–6 “Ballad of Trees and the Master, A”
in Asian American poetry, 987–88, 992, (Lanier), 388–89
993–99 ballads
in children’s poetry, 1109–110 in early southern poetry, 111–12
Depression-era poetry and, 728–29 by Longfellow, 247–48
in Fence magazine, 1149–150 by Poe, 234–36
Loy and, 584, 586 in southern Romantic poetry, 186–89
modernist poetry and, 499–500, 670 Ballads and Other Poems (Longfellow),
in New York School poetry, 856–64 247–48, 249–52
projectivism and, 741 “Ballads of Lenin” (Hughes), 710–11
Averno (Glück), 1018 Ballads of the Black Hills (Green), 468
Awakening Thoughts on the Sleep of Death Bamboo Ridge journal, 1134–135
(Mather), 94–95 Bamboo Ridge Press, 978–79, 1132–133
“AWFUL,” and Other Jingles (Strong), 453–55 “Banjo Song, A” (Dunbar), 397
Axelrod, Steven Gould, 755–56 Banneker, Benjamin, 1048–1049
Ayler, Albert, 1061–1063 Banque Générale Privée, 53–56
Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 719–20 Baraka, Amiri
Beat poets and, 1052–1056
“Babel Aboard the Hellas International Black Arts Movement and, 701, 722,
Express” (Clampitt), 1088–1089 1132–133, 1152–153
Baby Blues: Early Poems (Mullen), 1071–1073 Mackey and, 1070–1071
Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 964–65 works by, 1064–1065
Back Country Poems (Foss), 462 “Barbara Frietchie” (Whittier), 261–62
“Back-Log Song, A” (Dunbar), 398–99 “Barefoot Boy” (Whittier), 431–34
Backwoodsman, The (Paulding), 159–63 “Barefoot Boy, The” (Riley), 465–68
Bacone College, 27–28 Barker, George, 879–80
“Bacon’s Epitaph” (Cotton), 115 Barker, James Nelson, 186
Bacon’s Rebellion, 114–15 Barlow, Joel, 139–42, 147–49, 156–57, 447–48

1203
 Index

Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), 230–31 in African American poetry, 1050–1051

“Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Baraka and, 1052–1056
Sciarra, A” (Wilbur), 1081–1082 Hughes’s poetry and, 1074
Barrett, Faith, 306–27 in Kaufman’s poetry, 1051
Barrineau, Nancy Warner, 420–21 in Komunyakaa’s poetry, 1070
Barrymore, John, 979–83 Beckett, Samuel, 83
Barthes, Roland, 998–99, 1097 Bedient, Calvin, 940–44
Basement Workshop, 978–79 Beers, Ethelinda, 313–15, 321, 326–27
Bass, George Houston, 718 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 552
Bates, Clara Doty, 435–36 “Beethoven, Opus 111” (Clampitt),
Bat-Poet, The ( Jarrell), 789 1083–1085
Battle for Christmas, The (Nissenbaum), Befo’ de War (Gordon and Page), 462–64, 468
427–28 “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Howe), (Bradstreet), 74
282, 296–97, 307, 310–11, 322 “Before the Mirror” (Stoddard), 405
“Battle of Niagara” (Neal), 177 Before the War: Poems as They Happened
“Battle of the Bards” (Taylor), 300–03 (Inada), 991
“Battle of the Kegs, The” (Hopkinson), “Beginning, The” (Stevens), 660–61
134–35, 461 “Beginning and the End, The” ( Jefers), 917
“Battle of the Summer-Island, The” Belcher, Jonathan (Governor), 141
(Waller), 145–46 belief systems
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War elegy as reairmation of, 88–90
(Melville), 319, 324–27, 417–20 in Native American poetry, 23–26
Baudelaire, Charles, 217–18, 586 Bellamy, Edward, 473
Bay Psalm Book, 66, 248–49, 426 belles lettres, in staples colonies, 115–16
Beach, Christopher, 877–78, 1042–1043, 1153 “Belles of Williamsburg, The”
Beard, The (McClure), 831 (McClurg), 146
“Bearded Iris” (Zukofsky), 742–43 Bell Jar, The (Plath), 1006–1007
Beardsley, Aubrey, 586, 589–90 “Bells, The” (Poe), 233–34
“Bear, The” (Kinnell), 952–53 “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”
“Bear Story, The” (Riley), 438–42 (Ransom), 796–98
“Beat! Beat! Drums” (Whitman), 320, Bending the Bow (Duncan), 877–78
350–51 Bendixen, Alfred, 1–10, 177–89
Beat poets, 6 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 8
Asian inl uences on, 838–41, 978–79 Benfey, Christopher, 533
Baraka and, 1052–1056 Benjamin, Walter, 229–30
launching of movement by, 825–27 Ben King’s Verse (King), 468
modernist poetry and, 629, 757–59, Benn, Gottfried, 871–74
775–76 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 636
New York School and, 846–51 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 179–81, 316–18,
San Francisco School and, 823–41 410–11, 429, 430–31
southern poetry and, 802–03, 817–18 Bennett, Whitman, 263–64
“beauty disease” Benston, Kimberly W., 1036
Melville on, 418 Bent to the Earth (Luna), 962
Whitman on, 409–10, 418 Beppo (Byron), 169–71
bebop music Bercovitch, Sacvan, 701

1204
 Index

Bergman, David, 894–911 Best of It: New and Selected Poems, The
Bergson, Henri, 529, 543–44 (Ryan), 536–37, 1094–1095
Berkeley Renaissance, 823–24 “Betsy and I Are Out” (Carleton), 457–59
Berman, Wallace, 838–41 “Between Two Prisoners” (Dickey), 807–08
Bermudian, The (Tucker), 145–48 “Beyond the Alps” (Lowell), 753
Bernard of Clairvaux, 68 Biard (Father), 33–34
Bernstein, Charles Bible
on American poetry, 1135–136 early African American poets’ allusions
autobiographical poetry and, 6–7 to, 136–39
on children’s poetry, 1109–110 as source of Puritan elegies, 91–93,
early career of, 1039 99–100
Language Movement and, 742–43, “Bible Defence of Slavery” (Harper),
1028–1030, 1038–1045 293–95
Moss and, 1033–1034 Bidart, Frank
New York School and, 865–66 in Antaeus, 1146
on oicial verse culture, 1037 on Bishop, 776–77
on Williams, 571–72 confessional poetry of, 1012–1013
Berrigan, Ted, 864–65, 1152–153 hybridity in poetry of, 1021–1023
Berry, Wendell, 8 on Lowell, 751, 1014
“Berry Feast, A” (Snyder), 838–41 on Pinsky, 940–44
Berryman, John psychoanalytic poetics and, 752–53, 1006,
Brock-Broido and, 1021–1023 1013–1017
Chin’s poetry and, 992–93 works
early life of, 768 “Afterword: On ‘Confessional’
on Eliot, 1018 Poetry,” 1016–1017
Glück and, 1019–1020 The Book of the Body, 1015–1016
Justice and, 809–11 “Borges and I,” 1012
literary reputation of, 775–76 “California Plush,” 1014–1015
Lowell and, 753–54, 765–67, 770–71 “Confessional,” 1013, 1016–1017
as middle-generation poet, 750–51, “Ellen West,” 1015–1016
756–57, 768–69 Golden State, 1014–1015
psychoanalytic poetics of, 1003–1004, “Herbert White,” 1014–1015
1005 The Sacriice, 1016–1017
suicide of, 765–68 “The Second Hour of the
works Night,” 1012
Delusions, Etc., 770–71 “Self-Portrait, 1969,” 1014–1015
The Dispossessed, 768–69 Biedrzycki, Miłosz, 866
Dream Song 29, 770–71 Bierce, Ambrose, 299–300, 481–82, 484–85
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 770–71 Bierds, Linda, 933
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 756–57, “Bight, The” (Bishop), 785–87
769–70 Biglow Papers, The (Lowell), 273, 275–77,
Love and Fame, 770–71 282, 448
77 Dream Songs, 762–63, 767–68, Big Sea, The (Hughes), 706–07, 711
769–71, 1003–1004, 1005, 1019–1020 bilingualism. See multilingualism
Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 933, 997 “Billet Doux [sic]” (Horton), 292–93
Best American Poetry, 1017, 1144 “Birches” (Frost), 188–89, 530–31

1205
 Index

Bird, Robert Montgomery, 186 “Black Art” (Baraka), 722, 1055–1056

Bird Eating Bird (Naca), 975–76 Black Arts Movement
“Bird Language” (Cranch), 211–13 African American poetry and, 6–7
birds, in Native American poetry, 27 Baraka and, 1052–1056
“Birthday Verses to a Little Girl” Brooks and, 1059–1060
(Sigourney), 429 Clifton’s poetry and, 1065–1066
Bishop, Elizabeth, 4–6, 8, 759 “Coltrane poem” in, 1057–1058
on American culture, 783–87 contemporary African American poetry
Bidart and, 1012–1013 and, 1048–1073
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 Hayden and, 1058–1059
criticism by, 787–89, 790–91 Hughes and, 722
culture poetry and, 1083 Kaufman and, 1052–1056
early life of, 778 lyric poetry and, 1152–153
Hughes and, 712, 722–23 modernist poetry and, 8, 629
Jarrell and, 775–91 New York School and, 846–51
literary reputation of, 775–77, 784 poetry in, 701, 1055–1056
Lowell and, 752–53, 759, 767–68, 778–80 in Wright’s poetry, 1061–1063
as middle-generation poet, 750–51 Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School,
New Criticism and, 871 1132–133
personal life of, 780–81 Black Arts West, 1063–1064
works blackface minstrelsy, 309–10
“The Bight,” 785–87 Black Is Brown Is Tan (Adof ), 1118
“Crusoe in England,” 790–91 Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, 44–45
“Darwin Letter,” 789 Black Mountain poets
“Elegy,” 785–87 as avant-garde, 4–6
“First Death in Nova Scotia,” 785–87 Baraka and, 1052–1056
Geography III, 785–87, 790–91 Beat poetry and, 824, 829
“Gwendolyn,” 785–87 Duncan and, 877–78
“In the Village,” 758 Johnson and, 883
“In the Waiting Room,” 785–87, Levertov and, 880–81
790–91 modernist poetry and, 670, 695–96
“Manners,” 777–78 New York School and, 846–51
“The Map,” 778, 790–91 Objectivism and, 693
“The Moose,” 785–87 southern poetry and, 802–03, 817–18
North & South, 775, 778–80 Wright and, 874
“One Art,” 785–87 Black Mountain Review, 824, 877–78
Questions of Travel, 785–87, 789 Black Music (Baraka), 1052–1056
“Sestina,” 777–78, 780–81, 785–87 Black Nativity (Hughes), 722–23
“Songs for a Colored Singer,” 712 Black Power Movement
“Where are the dolls who loved me Baraka and, 1054
so,” 785–87 Komunyakaa and, 1068–1069
“Bitter River, The” (Hughes), 713–14 “Black Regiment, The” (Boker), 315
“Bivouac on a Mountain Side” (Whitman), Black Riders and Other Lines (Crane), 300–01,
320–21 485–88
Black and White (ilm), 710 black studies theory, 1056–1057
Black Armour (Wylie), 646–47 “Black Virginity, The” (Loy), 584–85

1206
 Index

Blackwood, Lady Caroline, 752–53, 764–67 Bluhm, Norman, 844–46

Blair, John, 489 Bly, Carol, 884–86
Blake, William, 223, 712, 876–77, 1096 Bly, Robert
“Blameless Prince, The” (Stedman), 413 antiwar eforts of, 807–08, 886, 887–88
Blanco, Richard, 973–74 Deep Image poetry and, 771–73
Bland, Edward, 1049–1050 Levertov and, 880–81
blank verse nature poetry of, 913–14
Markham’s use of, 480–82 O’Hara and, 858–60
Romantic plays in, 186 Wright and, 871–74, 884–86
Blaser, Robin, 823–24, 825–27 Blythe, Arthur, 1064–1065
Duncan and, 877–78 Boas, Franz, 31–32
Spicer and, 836–37 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 508–11
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 853–54 Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas (Alarcón),
BLAST journal, 605–08, 675 965–66
Bleecker, Ann Eliza, 134–35 Body of This Death, The (Bogan), 642
Blessingway (Navajo sacred chant), 22–23 Bogan, Louise, 4–6, 628
Blind Man journal, 592 formal poetry of, 640–45, 647–48
Blood for a Stranger ( Jarrell), 777–78, 802–03 poetic criticism of, 640, 641–42, 647
Blood Wedding (García Lorca), 712 Roethke and, 771–73
Bloom, Harold Sanchez and, 1056–1057
on Ashbery, 860–61, 1155–156 sexuality in poetry of, 631
on avant-garde poetry, 4–6 Bök, Christian, 933, 1109–110
on Crane, 1162 Boker, George Henry, 313–15, 322, 326–27
on Poe, 223, 226–27 New York School of poetry and, 404–06
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1005–1006 Romantic poetry by, 186, 405
on Warren’s poetry, 803–06 Bolden, Tony, 1063–1064
“Bluebeard” (Millay), 632–33 Bolling, Robert, 126–27, 140
“Bluebeard’s Closet” (Cooke), 185–86 Bollingen Prize
Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968, The to Ashbery, 856–64
(Bogan), 641 to Koch, 856–64
“Blue Ghazals, The” (Rich), 883 to Merrill, 894–95
Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, A to Moore, 623–24
(Sanchez), 1056–1057 Bonaparte, Marie, 217–18
“Blues Chant Voodoo Revival” “Bondage” (Dreiser), 420–21
(Komunyakaa), 816–17 “Bond and Free” (Frost), 530–31
Blues People (Baraka), 1052–1056 Boni & Liveright publishers, 508–11, 612–15
blues rhythms Bontemps, Arna, 438–42, 711–12, 713
in Brooks’s poetry, 1049–1050 Bookman magazine, 508–11
in Clifton’s poetry, 1065–1066 Book of American Negro Poetry, The
in Cortez’s poetry, 1063–1064 ( Johnson), 706–07
in Hughes’s poetry, 519, 628–29, 704–06, Book of Coming Forth by Day, The (ancient
713–17 Egypt), 731–32
in Kaufman’s poetry, 1051 “Book of Ephraim, The” (Merrill), 903–08
in Komunyakaa’s poetry, 816–17 Book of Negro Folklore, The (Hughes), 711–12
Blue Stairs, The (Guest), 862–64 Book of Negro Humor, The (Hughes), 711–12
“Blues Tonality” (Komunyakaa), 1068–1070 Book of the Body, The (Bidart), 1015–1016

1207
 Index

Book of the Dead (ancient Egypt), 731–32 “Meditations Divine and Moral,”
Book of the Dead, The (Rukeyser), 731–32 67–68, 70
Book of the East, The (Stoddard), 405 The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
“Book of Yolek, The” (Hecht), 1090–1091 America . . . by a Gentlewoman in
Boone, Daniel, 157–58 Those Parts, 67–76
Borderlands (Anzaldúa), 1133–134 “To My Dear and Loving
Borges, Jorge Luis, Whitman’s inl uence Husband,” 74–75
on, 329–30 “To My Dear Children,” 71
“Borges and I” (Bidart), 1012 “Verses upon the Burning of Our
Bornstein, George, 612–15, 620–21 House,” 75
Boston Daily Advertiser, 268 Brady, Andrea, 863
Boston Evening Transcript, 256–57, 506–07, Braid (Leonin), 974
606–08 Brainard, Joe, 864–65, 1146
“Boston Hymn” (Emerson), 282 Braithwaite, William Stanley Beaumont,
Boston Post Boy newspaper, 129–33 506–08
Boston Tea Party, 140–41 Brakhage, Stan, 825–27
Botanic Garden, The (Darwin), 914–15 Branch Will Not Break, The (Wright),
“Botany” (Miles), 926–27 884–86
Botteghe Oscure journal, 781–82 “Branded Hand, The” (Whittier), 261–62
“Bottled” ( Johnson), 638–39 Brandon, William, 32–33
Bottoms, David, 811–13 Braschi, Giannina, 967–68
“Bound No’th Blues” (Hughes), 704–06, Brazeau, Peter, 654–55
718–19 Bread and Imagined (Pau-Llosa), 974
Bounty, The (Kim), 1130–131 Breaking Silence (Bruchac), 986–87,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 287–89 988–89, 997
Bowles, Gloria, 640–41 “Breaking Silence” (Mirikitani), 988–89
Bowles, Mary, 370 Brendin Publishing Company, 618
Bowles, Paul, 1146 Brescia, Cinina, 803–06
Bowles, Samuel, 370–72, 375–79 Breslin, James E. B., 871
Boyd, Theodore, 427–28 Breslin, Paul
Boy’s Will, A (Frost), 519–20 on antiwar poetry, 886, 887–89, 939
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 143–44 on authenticity, 869
Bradajo ( Jozuf Hadley), 1134–135 on ecopoetics, 948
Bradford, William, 22, 33–34, 141–42 Breton, André, 733–35, 844–46, 1110
Bradley, F. H., 545–46 Brett, George P., 508
Bradley, George, 953 “Briar Patch, The” (Warren), 800–01
Bradstreet, Anne, 65–66, 67–76, 78, 87 “Bridal of Pennacook, The” (Whittier),
Berryman’s poem about, 769–70 261–62
works “Bridal Torch” (Selyns), 61–63
“As Weary Pilgrim,” 75 Bridge, The (Crane), 769–70, 1159, 1160
“Before the Birth of One of Her Brinkmeyer, Robert, 800–01
Children,” 74 Brinton, Daniel, 31–32
“Contemplations,” 68–69, 71, 73 British poetry
“In Honour of That High and American poetry of the center and,
Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth 938–39
of Happy Memory,” 73 children’s poetry and, 427

1208
 Index

colonial southerners’ identiication with, “Brother John” (Harper), 1057–1058

109–11, 122–23 Brother to Dragons (Warren), 801–02
elegiac tradition in, 91–93 Broughton, James, 829, 877–78
inl uence in America of, 177, 290–92 Brown, James William.
linguistics and lexicography in, 130 See Komunyakaa, Yusef
Lowell’s inl uence in, 751 Brown, Joan, 838–41
New York School of poetry and, 404 Brown, Lee Ann, 576–78
Poe’s knowledge of, 217–18 Brown, Margaret Wise, 442–43
Romantic tradition in, 163–65, 177 Brown, Sterling, 707–08, 795–96, 806–07,
British Prison-Ship, The (Freneau), 143–44 1054–1055
Broadside Press, 1059–1060 Browne, Thomas, 876–77
Broadway Journal, 182–83, 218–19, 222–23, Brownies series (Cox), 437
231–32 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 217–18, 230–31,
Brock-Broido, Lucie, 1021–1023, 1146, 232, 366–67, 408–09
1154–155 Browning, Robert, 410–11, 712, 753–54,
Brodsky, Joseph, 536–37, 1146 980
“Broken Home, The” (Merrill), 901–02 Bruchac, Joseph, 986–87, 988–89, 997
Broker of Bogota, The (Bird), 186 Brunner, Edward, 937–55
“Brontolivido” (Loy), 587–89 Bryan, Daniel, 157–58, 159–63
Brooke Farm, 211–13 Bryant, Peter, 172
Brooks, Charles T., 183–86 Bryant, William Cullen, 102–04, 165–66,
Brooks, Cleanth, 871 171–75
Brooks, Francis, 500, 502–03 Civil War poetry of, 316–18
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 137–38 Fireside Poets and, 260–61, 497
African American poetry and, 1048–1049 Poe and, 217–18
Black Arts Movement and, 1057–1058, works
1059–1060 The Ages, 172–73, 174–75
children’s poetry by, 438–42, 1107–108 The Embargo, 172
contemporary African American poetry “I Cannot Forget with What Fervid
and, 1049–1050 Devotion,” 174
Frost and, 536–37 “Inscription for the Entrance to a
Hughes and, 716 Wood,” 173–74
modernist poetry by, 628–29, 701 “Lines to a Waterfowl,” 173, 174,
Sanchez and, 1056–1057 431–34
works “Noon,” 174–75
Annie Allen, 716 Poems, 173–74
“The Children of the Poor,” 716 “The Prairies,” 174–75, 194–98
In the Mecca, 1059–1060 “Summer Wind,” 174–75
“mentors,” 1049–1050 “Thanatopsis,” 102–04, 173, 174
“Queen of the Blues,” 1049–1050 “A Winter Piece,” 173–74
“a song in the front yard,” 1049–1050 “The Yellow Violet,” 174
A Street in Bronzeville, 1049–1050 Bryher, H. D., 612–13, 618–24
“The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith,” “Buccaneer, The” (Dana), 165–66
1049–1050 Buck, Dudley, 386
Brooks, Maria Gowen, 179–81 Buckdancer’s Choice (Dickey), 807–08
Brother Antonius, 829 “Bucket, The” (Woodworth), 179

1209
 Index

Buddhism, Beat Movement and inl uence California School of Fine Arts, 823–24,
of, 838–41 825–27
Buell, Lawrence, 183–86, 198, 214–15 Callas, Maria, 1015–1016
Bulosan, Carlos, 985 call-to-arms poetry, in Civil War, 311–12
Burckhardt, Rudy, 844–46 Calvert, Benedict Leonard, 118–20
Bureau of American Ethnography, 31–32 Calvin, John, 67
Burgess, Gelett, 437 Cambridge History of American Literature
“Burial of Moses” (Harper), 294–95 (Bercovitch), 701
Burke, Carolyn, 593–97 “Cameleon Lover, The” (Grainger), 125–26
Burke, Thomas, 132–33 “Cameleon’s Defence, The” (Grainger),
“Burning Mountain” (Merwin), 947–50 125–26
“Burning the Christmas Greens” Camera Work (Stieglitz), 586–87
(Williams), 567–68 Campana, Dino, 813
Burns, Robert, 707–08 Camp Notes and Other Poems (Yamada),
Burnshaw, Stanley, 616–17, 666–67, 729–30 985–86
Burroughs, William, 825–27 Campo, Rafael, 974
Burt, John, 803–06 Campomanes, Oscar V., 985
Burt, Stephen, 1–10, 775–76, 788–89, 802–03, “Canary” (Dove), 1067–1068
1035–1036, 1103–104, 1144–163 canceled epistolary poems, 1154–155
“Bus Stop” ( Justice), 809–11 Cane (Toomer), 706–07
“But Is It Poetry?” (Livingston), 1108–109 Can Grande’s Castle (Lowell), 514–15
Butler, Judith, 1140 Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Poems
Butler, William Allan, 450, 468 1975 (Warren), 806–07
Butterick, George, 690–91 Canning, Josiah D., 448–49
B. W. Huebsch publisher, 508–11, 612–15 Cannon, Steve, 1060–1061
Bynner, Witter, 507 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 551
Byron, George Gordon Noel (Lord), “Canton Soviet” (Tsiang), 984
163–65, 169–71 Cantos, Blood and Honey (Castro), 974–75
inl uence on southern poets, 186–89 Cantos, The (Pound), 148–49
Poe and, 217–18, 219, 223–27 Hartmann mentioned in, 979–83
works legacy of, 755
Beppo, 169–71 as modernist poetry, 677–78, 733
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 163–65, Objectivist poetry and, 736–37
223 Paterson compared with, 569–70
Don Juan, 169–71 projectivism and, 690–91
“By the Swanannoa” (Simms), 188–89 Spicer’s poetry compared with, 834–38
success of, 563
“Cabin Tale, A” (Dunbar), 398 Canto y grito mi liberación (Sánchez), 961–62
Cady, Edwin H., 413 Can You Hear, Bird? (Ashbery), 861
Caesar’s Gate (Duncan), 833–34 “Cape Hatteras” (Crane), 1160
“Café: 3 A.M.” (Hughes), 716–17 Capital (Marx), 736–37, 742–43
“Café du Néant” (Loy), 589–90 Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems,
Cage, John, 809–11, 844–46 1960–2008 (Taylor), 815
Calendar of Dust (Sáenz), 964 “Captured Goddess, The” (Lowell),
“Calf Path, The” (Foss), 462 513–15
“California Plush” (Bidart), 1014–1015 Cardif, Gladys, 30–31

1210
 Index

Caribbean Cavitch, Max, 88–90, 102–04

Beat poets and inl uence of, 831–33 Celestial Seasonings herbal teas, poetry on
colonial poetry of, 125 boxes of, 248–49
modernist poetry of, 712 “Centennial Meditation of Columbia,
Nuyorican Movement and, 967–72 The” (Lanier), 388–89
Carleton, Will, 438–42, 448–49, 457–59, 462 “Central Park” (Lowell), 761–62
Carlyle, Thomas, 366–67 Century magazine (also known as Century
Carman, Bliss, 501–02 Illustrated), 274–75, 407–08, 508–11,
“Carmen Seculare” (Lewis), 118–20, 383–84 605–06
“Carolina” (Timrod), 383–84 Ceravolo, Joe, 864–65
“Carolina, a Young Lady” (anon.), 117 ceremonial ire, Native American poetry
Carroll, Lewis, 254–56, 438, 459–60, 798–99 and, 30–31
Carson, Anne, 8, 1149–150 Cervantes, Lorne Dee, 964–65
Carter, Jimmy, 1079–1080 Cervantes, Miguel de, 49–50
Carter, Robert, 273 Césaire, Aimé, 712, 831–33, 1052
Carver: A Life in Poems (Nelson), 1118–119 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 987, 994, 995–96,
Cary, Alice, 183, 185–86, 406–07, 429 1123–124
Cary, Phoebe, 183, 185–86, 300–01, Chadwick, Jerah, 38–39
406–07, 429 “Chair Gallows” (Komunyakaa), 816–17
Cary, Richard, 405 Chalookyu Eensai (Bradajo [Jozuf Hadley]),
Casanova, Pascale, 1136–137 1134–135
“Cascadilla Falls” (Ammon), 921 “Chambered Nautilus, The” (Holmes),
“Case against Mr. Frost, The” (Cowley), 271–73
536 chance poems, 809–11
“Casey’s Table D’Hote” (Field), 465–68 Chang, Juliana, 991
Cassady, Neal, 825–27 Chang, Young-Hae, 999
“Cassandra Southwick” (Whittier), 264–65 Change of World, A (Rich), 874–75, 1082–1083
Castillo, Ana, 964–65 “Changes of Home, The” (Dana), 165–66
Castillo, Sandra M., 974 “Changes; or Reveries at a Window
Castro, Adrian, 974–75 Overlooking a Country Road,
Castro, Fidel, 972 with Two Women Talking Blues
Castro, Michael, 35–36 in the Kitchen” (Komunyakaa),
“Casualty” (Hughes), 714–17 816–17, 1070
Catanzano, Amy, 1153–154 Changing Light at Sandover, The (Merrill),
Cather, Willa, 488 876–77, 894, 897–98, 903–08, 929–30
Cat in the Hat, The (Seuss), 1110–112 Channing, Anne, 163
Cats (play), 1113–114 Channing, William Ellery, 183–86,
Catullus, 939–40 249–52, 343
Caupolicán (Araucanian leader), 48–49 chant
“Causes, Movements, Poets” (Harris), Native American poetry as, 19–20
1137–138 Navajo chants, 19, 20–21, 22–23, 33
Cavafy, Constantine, 894, 903 Chants (Mora), 964
Cavalcanti, Guido, 680–81, 736–37, 742–43 Chappell, Fred, 811–13
Cavalier panegyric, elegy as, 91–93 Char, Rene, 871–74
Cave Canem retreat, 1153 “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
Cavell, Stanley, 533 (Hurston), 1048

1211
 Index

Character of the Province of Mary-land, A Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron),

(Alsop), 113–14 163–65, 223
“Charge of the Light Brigade, The” Child Is Introduced to the Cosmos at Birth, The
(Tennyson), 306–07, 315 (Omaha chant), 23–24
Charles V (emperor of Spain), 44–45 child labor, poetry about, 477, 484, 490–91
charm poetics, in Native American “Child Labor [No. 2]” (Gilman), 477
poetry, 29–30 “Childlessness” (Merrill), 897–98
Chattarji, Subarno, 939 Child-Life: Poetry (Whittier), 431–34
Chaucer, Geofrey, 71, 551 “Children of Adam” (Whitman), 347–49
Chauncy, Charles, 96–98 Children of Bondage (Markham), 484
Chávez, Denise, 964–65 Children of the Night, The (Robinson),
Chax Press, 1028–1030 504–06
Chelsea magazine, 926–27 “Children of the Poor, The” (Brooks), 716
cheng ming principle, 677–78 children’s poetry
“Cherokee Charm” (Cherokee artwork with, 436–37
poem), 29–30 canonical revision and, 3
“Cherokee Mother, The” (Sigourney), in early America, 427
290–92 educational expansion and, 427
Cherokee people ethnography and folklore and, 438–42
ethnographic research on, 31–32 by Field, 465–68
Jackson’s dislocation of, 161 by Fireside Poets, 431–34
poetry of, 29–30 historical review of, 425–43
Cherry, Don, 1070–1071 by Hughes, 711–12
“Cherrylog Road” (Dickey), 807–08 humor in, 1115–116
“Cheshire Poetics” (Armantrout), 1150 in magazines and newspapers, 434–35
“Chet Golder and His Whale” (Foss), 462 market forces in, 436–37
Cheung, Floyd, 984 in modern and contemporary eras,
“Chevy Chase” (song), 118–20 1103–119
Chicago Defender newspaper, 711–12, modernism and, 442–43
1049–1050 narrative poetry, 1118–119
Chicago Poems (Sandburg), 490–91, 508, nature in, 435–36
515–16 naughtiness in, 437
Chicago Review, 878 nonsense poetry as, 438
Chicano Movement, 960–67 playground poetry, 1116–118
contemporary multilingual poetry in, in Puritan era, 426
1133–134, 1136 by Riley, 465–68
McGurl on literature of, 1136–137 by women poets, 429–31
Chicano poetry, 960–67 “Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,
Child, Francis, 250 The” (Gould), 429–30
Child, Harold, 613–14 Child’s Anthology of Poetry, A (Sword), 1104
Child, Lydia Maria, 428–29, 434–35 “Child’s Reminiscence, A” (Whitman), 346
Child, Mary Fairbanks, 462–64 Chills and Fever (Ransom), 796–98
“Child and the Prol igate, The” Chin, Frank, 997
(Whitman), 331–32 Chin, Marilyn, 991–93, 1137–138
Child as Poet: Myth or Reality?, The “Chinaman, Laundryman” (Tsiang), 984
(Livingston), 1108–109 Chinatown Ballads (Irwin), 468

1212
 Index

Chinese immigration, in Asian American Vietnam War and, 886

poetry, 983, 984, 992–93, 1137–138 Civil War. See also English Civil War;
Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Reconstruction era
Poetry, The (Fenollosa and Pound), American poetry during, 306–27
675–76 black soldiers in, poetry about, 315, 396
Chivers, Thomas Holley, 187, 188, 217–18, call-to-arms poetry during, 311–12
230–31 Dickinson’s poetry during, 319, 368–69
Chock, Eric, 1134–135 Dickinson’s poetry of, 319, 322–24
Choice, The (Church), 131–32 in Lowell’s poetry, 273, 277–79, 282
Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Melville’s poetry during, 319, 324–27
Songs (Occom), 139 military poetry in, 312
“Chrismus Is a-Comin’ ” (Dunbar), 398 nationalist poetry during, 316–18
“Chrismus on the Plantation” printing technology during, 307
(Dunbar), 398 satiric poetry about, 461
Christianity Whitman’s hospital work during, 350,
in African American slave poetry, 136–39 351–52
and Dickinson, 362–64 in Whitman’s poetry, 319, 320–21, 341–43,
in Eliot’s The Waste Land, 550–54 350–51
in Puritan elegies, 95–98 Whittier’s support for, 261–62
“Christ in Alabama” (Hughes), 718–19 women poets during, 185
Christographia (Taylor), 82–83 women’s contributions during, 311–12
Chronister, Jan, 38–39 Claims for Poetry (Hall), 1027–1028
Church, Benjamin, 131–32 Clampitt, Amy, 1079–1080
Church, Henry, 654 culture poetry and, 1083–1085
Churchill, Susanne, 587–89 early life and career of, 1085–1090
Churchyard, Thomas, 91–93 later work of, 1098
Ciardi, John, 1103–104, 1107–108, 1111–112, works
1113–115 “Amaranth and Moly,” 1083–1085
Cinque, Joseph, 1050 “Babel Aboard the Hellas
Cisneros, Sandra, 962, 964 International Express,” 1088–1089
“City in the Sea, The” (Poe), 217–18, 223–27, “Beethoven, Opus 111,” 1083–1085
232–33 “The Cove,” 1087–1088
City in Which I Love You, The (Lee), 987 “The Dahlia Gardens,” 1083–1085
City Lights Bookstore, 827–28 “A Hedge of Rubber Trees,”
City Lights Pocket Poets series, 827–28 1083–1085
“City Limits, The” (Ammons), 925–26 “John Donne in California,”
City of a Hundred Fires (Blanco), 973–74 1087–1088
“City of the Silent, The” (Simms), 188–89 The Kingisher, 1079–1080, 1085–1086
City Poems (Kennedy), 1107–108 “Letters from Jerusalem,” 1083–1085
“Civil Rights” (Lanier), 386 “Losing Track of Language,” 1088
civil rights movement “Nothing Stays Put,” 1083–1085
in African American poetry, 816–17 “On the Disadvantages of Central
Asian American poetry and, 979, 991–92 Heating,” 1086–1087
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 “Or Consider Prometheus,”
poets of 1960s and, 869 1083–1085
southern poetry and, 795–96 “The Prairie,” 1083–1085

1213
 Index

Clampitt, Amy (cont.) Cold War

“A Procession at Candlemas,” Beat poetry and, 824–25
1083–1085, 1098 New York School of poetry and, 856–64
“The Reedbeds of the Hackensack,” science in poetry and, 918
1087–1088 Cole, Nat King, 1050–1051
“Thermopylae,” 1089–1090 Cole, Thomas, 175–76, 178
“Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,” Coleman, Ornette, 1063–1064
1086–1087 Coleman, William, 167–69, 172
What the Light Was Like, 1086–1087 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 69–70, 163–65
Clapp, Henry, 346 Clampitt’s poetry and, 1098
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Duncan and, 876–77
Land (Melville), 148–49, 417–20 Poe and, 217–18, 219
Clark, Eleanor, 803–06 works, 194–98
Clark, Jane, 83–84 “The Rime of the Ancient
Clark, Suzanne, 628, 630–31 Mariner,” 250
Clarke, John Henrik, 720–22, 1056–1057 “Collapse of James Dickey, The” (Bly),
Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature 807–08
(Dauenhauer), 32–33 Collected Poems (Guest), 863
“Clean Curtains” (Sandburg), 515–16 Collected Poems ( Justice), 809–11
“Clearing the Title” (Merrill), 536–37 Collected Poems (Lowell), 752–53, 1016–1017
“Clear Night” (Wright), 813 Collected Poems (O’Hara), 858–60
Cleghorn, Sarah N., 490–91 Collected Poems (Plath), 1006–1007
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. Collected Poems (Stevens), 656, 740–41
See Twain, Mark Collected Poems (Wylie), 646–47
“Cleopatra” (Story), 186 Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
“Clepsydra” (Ashbery), 860–61 (Hughes), 718–19
“Clerks, The” (Robinson), 505 Collection of Psalm Tunes, with a
Cleveland State University Poetry Few Anthems and Hymns, A
Center, 1032 (Hopkinson), 135–36
Clifton, Lucille, 38–39, 1054–1055, 1059–1060, collective self, in New England Puritan
1065–1066, 1071–1073 elegies, 93–95
climate change, poetry and, 9 Collins, Billy, 8
Clinton, Bill, 330–31, 1146 Collins, Jess, 877–78
“Clouds, The” (Williams), 567–68 Colman, Benjamin, 83–84
Clover, Joshua, 1144, 1149–150 colonialism and conquest. See also staples
club culture. See social clubs colonies, poetry from
Coady, Robert, 508–11 Caribbean colonies, poetry of, 125
Coatsworth, Elizabeth, 1105–106, contemporary Latin American poetry
1111–112 and, 1131
Cocktail Party, The (Eliot), 555–56 Francophone epic poetry and, 51–53
Cocteau, Jean, 834–38 lyric poetry and, 56–60
Coexistence Bagel Shop, 831–33 mock-epic of Dumont de
Coin, William Sloane, 886–87 Montigny, 53–56
Cohen, Michael C., 259–79, 407–08 multilingualism and, 1125–127
“Coin for Joe in the Image of a Horse, A” Native American poetry in context of,
(Bidart), 1146 18–19, 33–34

1214
 Index

non-English early American poetry communism

and, 43–63 Depression-era poetry and, 728–29,
poetry in era of, 3–4 731–32
in pre-Revolutionary period, 129 Oppen and, 740–41
promotion of, in poetry, 111–12 comparative literature, Longfellow’s
Puritan funeral elegy in context of, contributions to, 240–42, 252–54
102–04 “Complaint of New Amsterdam, The”
southern poetic tradition in, 109–27 (Steendam), 61–63
“Color – Caste – Denomination –” Complete Poems (Dunbar), 394–400
(Dickinson), 323–24 “Composition as Explanation” (Stein),
“Colored Soldiers, The” (Dunbar), 396 576–78
“Color That Suits Me Best, The” (Field), Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 844–46
465–68 “Concrete Cat” (Kennedy), 1109–110
Colossus, The (Plath), 1006–1008 Concrete River, The (Rodríguez), 964–65
Coltrane, John, 1055–1057, 1063–1064 Coney Island of the Mind, A
Coltrane poem, 1055 (Ferlinghetti), 831
Columbiad, The (Barlow), 147–48, 156–57 Confederacy. See also Civil War;
Columbia History of American Poetry Reconstruction era; southern poets
(Parini), 701 nostalgia for, 316–18
Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), “Confessional” (Bidart), 1013, 1016–1017
400–01 confessional poetry, 751, 795, 817–18
“Columbine, The” (Very), 206–09 contemporary examples of, 1011–1021
Columbinus (Barlow), 147–48 hybridity in, 1021–1023
Columbus, Christopher, 44–45, 156–57 New York School and, 846–51
“Comedy Entombed” (Williams), psychoanalytic poetics and, 1005–1006
575–76 Confessions (St. Augustine), 1016–1017
Come Hither (de la Mare), 790–91 Congo and Other Poems, The (Lindsay), 508,
Comes One with a Song (Stanton), 464–65 511–13
“Come Up from the Fields Father” “Congregations” (Moss), 1036
(Whitman), 321 Conjure (Reed), 1060–1061
comic poetry. See humorous poetry Conley, Robert, 38–39
Coming to Light (Swann), 32–33 Connecticut Gazette, 131
“Commander Lowell” (Lowell), 757–59 “Connecticut River” (Sigourney), 290–92,
comma poems, of Garcia Villa, 982–83 294–95
“Commemoration Ode” (Lowell), Connecticut Wits (poetry group), 139–42,
277–79 145, 147
Commentaire (Cha), 995–96 Conner, Bruce, 838–41
commerce, southern colonies’ focus on, Conolly, Horace, 252–54
109–11 Conquest of Canaan, The (Dwight), 147–48,
Commission on Wartime Relocation and 156–57
Internment of Japanese American “Consolation Prize” (Flynn), 1115–116
Civilians, 988–89 Constant, Paul, 471
commodiication of poetry, 604–08 “Constant Symbol, The” (Frost), 522–23
“Common Plaint, A” (Dunbar-Nelson), Constituents of Matter (Leahy), 933
500–01 “Contemplations” (Bradstreet), 68–69,
Commons (Kim), 998–99, 1139–140 71, 73

1215
 Index

Contempo magazine, 709, 718–19 in Native American poetry, 26–27

Contemporary Literature journal, 742 in staples colonies poetry, 117
Contemporary Verse magazine, 606–08 Courtship of Miles Standish, The
Continental philosophy, 1147–149, 1152–153 (Longfellow), 241–42
“Contrary Theses (I)” (Stevens), 667 “Cove, The” (Clampitt), 1087–1088
Cook, Mercer, 712, 727 “Covers” (Armantrout), 1149–152
Cooke, Ebenezer, 114–15, 140, 461 cowboy poetry movement, 468, 471
Cooke, Philip Pendleton, 187, 188, Cowley, Malcolm, 536
217–18, 220 Cowper, William, 217–18
Cooke, Rose Terry, 185–86, 406–07, 416–18 Cox, Palmer, 437
“Cool Dark Ode” ( Justice), 809–11 Coyote tales
Coolidge, Clark, 864–66 in modern Native poetry, 31
Coontz, Stephanie, 1107–108 in Native American poetry, 21–22
Cooper, Anna Julia, 706–07 “Crab-Angel” (Loy), 592–93
Copac, Manco, 156–57 Cradock, Thomas, 118
Copway, George, 34–35 Crain, Patricia, 426
Corbett, E. T. (Mrs.), 455–56 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 183–86, 197,
Corman, Cid, 688–90, 741 211–13, 214, 316–18
“Corn” (Lanier), 388–89, 462 Crane, Hart
Corn, Alfred, 940–44, 1085–1086 Beat Movement and, 824, 831–33
Cornell, Joseph, 846–47 Clampitt and, 1090–1091
Cornhuskers (Sandburg), 515–16 contemporary poetry and inl uence of,
Corning, A. Elwood, 457–59 1159–162
Corn Planting Song (Osage poem), 25 Hughes and, 712
Corpse and Mirror (Yau), 996–97 Lowell and, 757–59
Corpus Juris legal encyclopedia, 735–36 Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30
“Correlation Methods of Comparing Williams’s poetry and, 571
Idiolects in a Transition Area” Crane, Louise, 785
(Spicer), 837–38 Crane, Stephen, 300–01, 473, 484–90, 493
Correspondence between Stonehaulers Berryman’s biography of, 768–69
(Agüeros), 968–69 Berryman’s poetry and, 769–70
Corso, Gregory, 831 journalism career of, 299–300
“Corsons Inlet” (Ammons), 922–23 legacy of, 701
Cortez, Jayne, 1059–1060, 1063–1064, modernist poetry and, 500
1071–1073 works
“Cosmography” (Kim), 1130–131 Black Riders and Other Lines, 300–01,
Cosmopolitan magazine, 473, 484 485–88
Cosmos Poems, The (Seidel), 929 “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” 485
Costello, Bonnie, 534–35, 785–87 “A man adrift on a slim spar,” 489–90
Cotton, John, 66, 98–101, 115 The Red Badge of Courage, 485–86
counting-out rhymes, 438–42 “To the Maiden,” 489
Country Music (Wright), 813 Crashaw, Richard, 858–60
country surrealism, 808–09 Cravan, Arthur (Fabian Lloyd), 583–84, 592
Country without a Post Oice, The (Ali), 992 Crazy Gypsy (Salinas), 961–62
“Courtin’, The” (Lowell), 448 Creation, in Native American poetics, 15–39
courtship. See also marriage rituals “Credences of Summer” (Stevens), 663–64

1216
 Index

“Creditor to His Proud Debtor, The” Crystallography (Bök), 933

(Horton), 292–93 Cuban American poetry, 972–75
Creeley, Robert, 681–82 Cuban négrismo poetry, 709
antiwar eforts of, 886 “Cubes” (Hughes), 710–11
Duncan and, 877–78 Cubism
Imagist Movement and, 672 Seuss and, 1110–112
Levertov and, 880–81 Williams’s poetry and, 566–67
Mackey and, 1070–1071 cu-bop music, 1063–1064
Merrill and, 894 Cullen, Countee, 628–29, 701, 704–06, 707,
modernist poetry and, 670 1056–1057
Objectivism and, 693, 741 Harlem Renaissance and, 706–07
Olson and, 678–79, 687 Culprit Fay, The (Drake), 169–71
poetry of, 690–93 culteranista style, Mexican lyric
Pound and, 675–76, 687 poetry, 56–60
projectivism and, 747 culture poetry, 1079–1100
Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30, 354–55 “Cumberland, The” (Melville), 325
Williams and, 563–64, 677, 684–85 “Cumberland Station” (Smith), 811–13
“Cricket, The” (Tuckerman), 284–87, 288, Cummings, Allison, 1071–1073
290–92 Cummings, E. E., 982–83
Crisis magazine, 508–11, 702–03, 1049–1050 children’s poetry by, 1104
Criterion magazine, 554–55, 616–17 Clifton’s poetry and, 1065–1066
critical multiculturalism, 991–92 Hughes and, 708–09
Croakers (poetic collaboration), 169–71 Sanchez and, 1056–1057
Crockett, Davy, in American poetry, 158–59 visual form in poetry of, 8
Croll, Morris, 1097–1098 Williams and, 574
Cromwell, Oliver, 91–93 “Cupola, The” (Bogan), 643–44
Cronyn, George W., 32–33 Curbelo, Silvia, 974
crop cultivation, in Native American Curie, Marie, 916
poetry, 25 Current Opinion magazine, 507–11
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (Whitman), Curry, Patrick, 952–53
344–46 Curtis, Natalie, 31–32
Crossing Canal Street (Yau), 987 Cusack, John, 232
Crossing the Water (Plath), 1006–1007 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 31–32
Crow igure, in Native American poetry, “Custard” (Stein), 1028–1030
21–22, 29–30 “Cut” (Plath), 1008–1009
“Crows, The” (Bogan), 642–43 Cuthand, Beth, 31
Crozier, Andrew, 741–42
Cruelty (Ai), 1033 Dadaism
Crumbley, Paul, 431 avant-gardism and, 586
“Crusoe in England” (Bishop), 785–87, Loy and, 592
790–91 New York School poets and, 844–46
Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature Seuss and, 1110–112
of Social Protest, The (Sinclair), Williams’s poetry and, 566–67
490–91 “Daddy” (Plath), 1007–1009, 1010
“Cry from the Ghetto, A” (Rosenfeld), Daddy Do-Funny’s Wisdom Jingles (Stuart),
490–91 462–64

1217
 Index

“Daemon, The” (Bogan), 644 Davis, Richard Beale, 127

Dahlberg, Edward, 693 Davis, Thomas, 78
“Dahlia Gardens, The” (Clampitt), Davis, Virginia, 78
1083–1085 Davison, Peter, 1085–1086
Daily Crescent newspaper, 332–34 Dawes, Kwame, 438–42
Daisies of Verse (Oberholtzer), 456–57 Dawson, Frank, 47–51
Daly, Robert, 65–84 Dawson, William, 116, 118
Damas, Léon, 712 Day, A. Grove, 32–33
Dana, Edmund, 163, 165–66 Day, Holman F., 468
Dana, Martha, 163 Day by Day (Lowell), 752–54, 765–67
Dana, Richard Henry, 165–66 “Day Lady Died, The” (O’Hara), 858–60
Dan Bryant’s Minstrels, 309–10 Daylight, Larry, 27–28
dance, poetry as, 682–83 Day of Doom (Wigglesworth), 77–78, 426,
“Dance, The” (Williams), 682–83 427–28
Dancer’s Workshop (San Francisco), 823–24 Days Going/Days Coming Back (Taylor), 815
“Dancing with Rex” (Cuthand), 31 “Days of 1964” (Merrill), 903
“Dangerous Moonlight” (Ashbery), “Deacon’s Lament, The” (Corbett),
1155–156 455–56
Dangerous Music (Hagedorn), 994–95 “Deacon’s Masterpiece, The” (Holmes),
Daniels, Kate, 811–13, 814 270–71
Dante Alighieri, 330–31 “Deacon’s Wonderful One-Horse Shay,
Dante Club, 256–57 The” (Holmes), 448
“Daphne” (Millay), 634–35 “Dead, The” (Very), 206–07
Darger, Henry, 861 Dead Lecturer, The (Baraka), 1052–1056
Darío, Ruben, 960–67 “Deaf Seeing Dancing, The” (Payne), 169
“Darius Green and His Flying-Machine” “Dear Evasive Precaution” (Catanzano),
(Trowbridge), 461–62 1153–154
Dark Room Collective, 1073 “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” (Harper),
Dark Summer (Bogan), 643 1057–1058
Darnton, Robert, 603–04 “Dear M” (Palmer), 1154–155
Darrow, Clarence, 800–01 “Dear You: Accuser” (Nutter), 1153–154
Darwin, Annie, 200–01 death and dying
Darwin, Charles, 200–01, 914–15 in Civil War poetry, 313–15, 350–51
Darwin, Erasmus, 914–15 in Dickinson’s poetry, 377–79
“Darwin Letter” (Bishop), 789 in Emerson’s poetry, 200–01
Dauenhauer, Nora, 32–33 English elegiac tradition in, 91–93
“Daughter” (Dickey), 808–09 in Frost’s poetry, 532–33
Davidson, Cathy, 427–28 in Poe’s work, 226–29
Davidson, Donald, 798, 807, 815 pragmatism in elegies concerning,
Davidson, Lucretia, 183 88–90
Davidson, Michael, 739–40, 875–79 in Ransom’s poetry, 796–98
Davie, Donald, 938–39, 940–44 as ritual repentance, 98–101
Davie, Edmund, 98–101 Death at an Early Age (Kozol), 708–09
Davies, Samuel, 118 deathbed speech, in Puritan elegies,
Davis, Arthur P., 716 98–101
Davis, Frank Marshall, 711, 1049–1050 “Death of a Toad, The” (Wilbur), 778–80

1218
 Index

death songs, in Native American poetry, Demuth, Charles, 560–61

28, 31 De Namin’ ob de Twins (Childs), 462–64
Debs, Eugene V., 481 Denby, Edwin, 844–46
debt peonage, Dunbar’s poetry about, Densmore, Frances, 31–32
396–97 Dent, Tom, 1060–1061
“Dec. 28, 1974” (Schuyler), 854–55 “Deodand, The” (Hecht), 1090–1091
Declaratory Act, 132–33 Departures ( Justices), 809–11
De Cristoforo, Violet Kazue, 985–86 “Der Blinde Junge” (Loy), 592–93
Dedications and Other Darkhorses Der Distelvink (Steendam), 61–63
(Komunyakaa), 816–17 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), 914–15
Deep Image poetry Derricotte, Toi, 1048–1049, 1066–1067, 1068
American poetry of the center and, Derrida, Jacques, 890
938–39 Descending Figure (Glück), 1018–1019
antiwar movement and, 887–89 Descent of Winter, The (Williams), 558,
Bly and, 771–73 565–66, 580, 677, 684
legacy of, 890 “Description of Charles Town in 1769, A”
Levine and, 944–47 (Martin), 133, 141–42
in 1980s, 1027–1028 “Deserted Plantation, The” (Dunbar), 398
southern poetry and, 802–03, 817–18 “Deserted Village, The” (Goldsmith),
Wright and, 871–74, 884–86 145–48, 290–92
Deepstep Come Shining (Wright), 1156–158 “Desert Music, The” (Williams), 568, 684
“Deer” (Lawson), 1109–110 “Desert Places” (Frost), 522
“Defence of Poetry, A” (Shelley), 482–83 “Design” (Frost), 527–28, 536–37
“Defense of Poetry” (Ammons), 918, Des Imagistes (Pound), 591, 670–72
924–25 determinism, in Warren’s writing, 803–06
Defensive Rapture (Guest), 862–63 Deutsch, Babette, 716
DeFeo, Jay, 838–41 DeVere, Maximillian, 431–34
de Kooning, Willem, 844–45 DeVere, William, 465–68
de la Luz, Caridad (“La Bruja”), 969–70 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Donne),
de la Mare, Walter, 790–91 1125–127
de la Selva, Salomón, 635 “Dew” (Ryan), 1094–1095
Deleuze, Gilles, 1147–149 Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 825–27,
Delgado, Lalo, 960–61 829–31, 838–41
“Deliverance, The” (Harper), 391 dialect poetry
Delusions, Etc. (Berryman), 770–71 African American poetry and,
Deming, Alison Hawthorne, 933 462–64, 703
democracy by African American poets, 462–64
Beat Movement and principles of, 824–25 American experience relected in, 445–69
role of American poetry in, 1–10 by Carleton, 457–59
in women’s poetry, 294–95 children’s poetry and, 438–42
“Democracy and Poetry” (Warren), 803–06 criticism of, 450–52, 453–55
Democrates II (Sepulveda), 45–47 by Dunbar, 394–400
democratic poetry, Whitman’s invention hooligan dialect verse, 468
of, 329–56 local color genre and, 409–10
Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 347–49, 352–54 in popular verse, 445–69
Democritus, 914–15 of southern poets, 464–65

1219
 Index

dialect poetry (cont.) Niedecker compared with, 745–46

Western poetry as, 465–68 poetics of, 360–80
“Dialogue, A” (Harper), 393–94 preceptors of, 370–72
Dial magazine religious skepticism of, 362–64
literary culture and, 498–99, 508–11 Rich and, 874–75
Loy’s poetry in, 592 seclusion embraced by, 366–67
Moore’s editorship of, 586–87, 615–16 social independence of, 365–66
Moore’s poetry in, 610–11, 612 Stedman and, 406–07
Sandburg’s poetry in, 515–16 Tuckerman compared with, 284–87
The Waste Land published in, 799–800 women’s rights issues and, 369–70
Dial Press, 612, 614–15 works
Diamond Cutters, The (Rich), 874–75, 1083 “Color – Caste – Denomination –,”
“Diamond Wedding, The” (Stedman), 323–24
408–09 “Further in Summer,” 283–84, 287–89
Dickey, James, 795, 802–03, 807–09 “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,”
Komunyakaa and, 816–17 370–72
narrative verse by, 811–13 Master Letters, 370–72, 375–77
Wright and, 874 “My Life had stood – a Loaded
Dickinson, Austin, 361–62, 367–70 Gun –,” 323–24
Dickinson, Edward, 361–62, 366–67, 369–70, “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ –,”
377–79 322–24
Ryan and, 1094–1095 “The nearest Dream recedes –
Dickinson, Emily, 1–2, 179–81, 302–03 unrealized,” 370–72
aesthetic innovations in poetry of, 373 “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,”
artistic autonomy of, 374, 375–77 370–72
avant-garde elements in work of, 373–74 “The Sky is low – the Clouds are
Brock-Broido and, 1021–1023, 1154 mean,” 364–65
Brooks and, 1049–1050 “The Soul selects her own Society,”
canonical revision and, 2–3 366–67
children’s poetry and, 425–26, 429, 431 “They dropped like Flakes –,” 322–23
Civil War poetry of, 319, 322–24, 326–27, “We play at Paste,” 370–72
368–69 “What is – ‘Paradise,’ ” 362–64
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 “When I was small, a Woman
collections and editions of poems by, 381 died –,” 323
Crane’s poetry and, 485–86, 1161 “Wild Nights,” 179–81
dating of poetry, 381–82 Dickinson, Emily Norcross, 361–62, 377–79
death in poetry of, 377–79 Dickinson, Lavinia, 361–62, 366–67, 369–70
early life of, 361–62 Dickinson, Susan Gilbert, 361–62, 364,
family relationships of, 367–68 367–68, 370, 375–77
friendships of, 370 Dickson, Samuel Henry, 309
herbarium of, 283 DICTEE (Cha), 987, 995–96
Hooper and, 214–15 “Did John’s Music Kill Him?” (Spellman),
illness and death of, 379–80 1056–1057
literary legacy of, 701 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa), 1068–1069
nature in poetry of, 364–65 Diferent Beat, A (Knight), 823–24
New England Primer and, 426 Diferent Person, A (Merrill), 895–96

1220
 Index

Digges, Deborah, 1146 “Domestic Mysticism” (Brock-Broido),

digital technology, poetry and, 9 1021–1023
“Dime” (Hughes), 714–17 domestic space, in children’s poetry,
Dinh, Linh, 999 428–29, 434–35
Dinwiddianae group, 118–20 “Donelson” (Melville), 325–26
Dinwiddie, Robert (Governor), 118–20 Don Juan (Byron), 169–71
Di Prima, Diane, 823–24, 838–41 “Donna mi pregha” (Cavalcanti), 680–81,
Directions to the Beach of the Dead (Blanco), 736–37
973–74 Donne, John
“Directive” (Frost), 537–38, 1083–1085 Bradstreet and, 67
Dirty Dinky and Other Creatures (Roethke), in Clampitt’s poetry, 1087–1088
1103–104 Eliot and, 544–45
Disappearing Alphabet, The (Wilbur), Lowell and, 755
1109–110 Merrill and, 898–900
discordia concors, 78–83 Puritan elegies and, 91–93
Discrete Series (Oppen), 739–40 Stevens and, 1125–127
Dispossessed, The (Berryman), 768–69 Donohue, Betty Booth, 15–39
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 992 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 49–50
“Diversions of the Echo Club” (Taylor), “Don’t Cry, Scream” (Madhubuti),
296–97, 300–01, 411 1056–1057
Divina Commedia (Dante) Doody, Terence, 953–55
Longfellow’s translation of, 241–42, Dooley, Patrick K., 493
256–57 Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Wright’s poetry and inl uence of, 813 Door in the Hive, A (Levertov), 890–91
Diving into the Wreck (Rich), 889 Doors (band), 831
divorce rituals, in Native American Dorn, Ed, 8
poetry, 26–27 Doten, Lizzie, 233–34
Dix, Dorothea, 461 Doty, Mark, 751
“Dixie.” See “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” double consciousness, Du Bois’s concept
(Emmett) of, 395–96
DJ Spooky, 576–78 Double Dream of Spring, The (Ashbery),
DJ Wally, 576–78 860–61
Dlugos, Tim, 865–66 Double Image, The (Levertov), 879–80
“DNA Molecule, The” (Swenson), 928–29 Double Invention of Komo, The (Wright),
Doctor Williams’ Heiresses (Notley), 1061–1063
568–69 “Doubts During Catastrophe” (Moss),
Dodge, Mabel, 586–87, 588 1033
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. Douglass, Frederick, 262, 292–93, 400–01
See Carroll, Lewis Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 307–08
“Doesticks, Q. K. Philander.” See Thomson, Dove, Rita, 1067–1068
Mortimer Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 967–68
doggerel. See also nonsense poetry “Dragonl ies Mating” (Hass), 1146
in popular verse, 445–69 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 169–71
Dolphin, The (Lowell), 762–63, 764–65 Draper, John, 91–93
Domesday Book, The (Masters), 511–13 “Dream, The” (Bogan), 644
“Domestic Life” (Emerson), 200–01 “Dream Boogie” (Hughes), 714–17

1221
 Index

Dream Keeper, The (Hughes), 711–12, 1105, O’Hara and, 858–60

1106–107 Stein and, 576–78
“Dream-Land” (Poe), 217–18, 223–27, 232–33 Williams and, 558–59, 560–62
Dream of a Common Language, The Duché, Jacob, 133–42
(Rich), 889 Dudley, Thomas, 67–76
Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung “Duel, The” (Field), 434–35
Cha, The (exhibit), 995–96 Dumont de Montigny, Jean-François,
“Dream on the Stamp Act, A” (Church), 53–56, 61–63
131–32 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 2–3, 391, 394–400
“Dreams” (Hughes), 1104 aesthetics of sound in poetry of, 400–01
Dreams in Homespun (Foss), 462 children’s poetry and, 425–26, 438–42
Dream Song 29 (Berryman), 770–71 at Columbian Exposition, 400–01
Dream Songs, The (Berryman), 762–63, dialect poetry of, 394–400, 409–10, 462–64
767–68, 769–71, 1003–1004, 1005, Harlem Renaissance view of, 398–400
1019–1020 modernist poetry and, 500, 501–02
Dreiser, Theodore, 420–21, 799–800 prose writing of, 397–98
poetry by, 490–91 protest poems of, 395–96
Drive (Cervantes), 964–65 regional speech in poetry of, 398–99
“Drowned Mariner, The” (Oakes Sanchez and, 1056–1057
Smith), 181 slavery in poetry of, 398
Drowning with Others (Dickey), 807–08 works
Dr. Seuss. See Seuss, Dr. “Accountability,” 394
Drum magazine, 719–20 “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” 397,
“Drummer Boy of Shiloh, The” (Hays), 462–64
313–15, 326 “A Back-Log Song,” 398–99
“Drumpp the Grump” (Prelutsky), 1116–117 “A Banjo Song,” 397
Drum-Taps (Whitman), 320–21, 341–43, “A Cabin Tale,” 398
351–52, 353–54 “Chrismus Is a-Comin’,” 398
“Drunkard’s Child, The” (Harper), 293–95 “Chrismus on the Plantation,” 398
Drunk in the Furnace, The (Merwin), 947–50 “The Colored Soldiers,” 396
Drury, Elizabeth, 91–93 Complete Poems, 394–400
“Dr. Williams’ Position” (Pound), 672–73 “The Deserted Plantation,” 398
Dryden, John, 67, 78–79, 130 “The Fourth of July and Race
Du Bartas, Guillaume, 67, 87 Outrages,” 394–95
DuBay, John Baptiste, 737–39 “The Haunted Oak,” 396
Du Bois, W. E. B. “James Whitcomb Riley,” 398–99
double consciousness concept of, 395–96 “Lullaby,” 398
early African American poetry and, “Morning,” 501–02
392–93 “Negro Music,” 398–400
Harlem Renaissance and, 702–03, 706–07 “Noddin’ by de Fire,” 397
Hughes and, 711 Oak and Ivy, 395–96
Rampersad’s biography of, 718 “Ode to Ethiopia,” 395–96
on spirituals, 398–400 “The Old Cabin,” 398
Duchamp, Marcel “The Old Homestead,” 397
Dadaism and, 592 “The Party,” 398
Futurism and, 928–29 “A Plantation Portrait,” 397

1222
 Index

“Possum Trot,” 398–99 “Pages from a Notebook,” 878

“The Race Question Discussed,” Passages, 883
394–95 Roots and Branches, 875–79
“Scamp,” 397 “The Up-Rising,” 888–89
“To the Eastern Shore,” 398 “What Is It Have You Come to Tell
“To the South; On Its New Slavery,” Me, García Lorca,” 833–34
396–97 “Dunciad, The” (Pope), 122, 147
“We Wear the Mask,” 395–96, 462–64 Dunlap, William, 186
“When de Co’n Pone’s Hot,” 397 Dunn, Stephen, 1146, 1152
“When Malindy Sings,” 397, 398–400 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 568–69, 595, 638–39,
“When Sam’l Sings,” 397 694, 733, 747
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 500, 636 Dura (Kim), 1130–131, 1139–140
Duncan, Robert Dwight, Timothy, 139–42, 147, 156–57
antiwar movement and, 888–89 Dworkin, Craig, 1144
authentic poetry and, 870 Dyer, John, 914–15
Beat Movement and, 823, 825–27, 829 “Dying Raven, The” (Dana), 165–66
Deep Image poetry and, 890 Dylan, Bob, 831, 886
on Eigner, 696 Dymock poets, 523–24
H.D. and, 875–79, 881, 890 Dynamo magazine, 616–17
Levertov and, 874, 875–79, 880–81, 887–88
Lorca and, 833–34 Eady, Cornelius, 1048–1049, 1066–1067
Mackey and, 1070–1071 Eagle’s Mile, The (Dickey), 808–09
modernist poetry and, 677–78 Eakins, Thomas, 330–31, 895–96
New Criticism and, 871 early American poetry, 3–4
Objectivism and, 741 in American Revolution, 129–49
O’Hara and, 858–60 children’s poetry, 427
poetry in 1960s by, 875–79 doggerel, dialect, and local color in,
Rich and, 883 447–48
Semina culture and, 838–41 Francophone epic poetry, 51–53
Spicer and, 836–37 lyric poetry in, 56–60
works mock-epic of Dumont de
“An African Elegy,” 877–78 Montigny, 53–56
Bending the Bow, 877–78 Native American poetry in context of,
Caesar’s Gate, 833–34 18–19, 33–34
Faust Foutu (Faust Fucked), 825–27 New England Puritan elegy, 86–104
Fictive Certainties, 876–77 New Netherland lyric poetry, 61–63
Ground Work: Before the War, 890 non-English early American
Ground Work: In the Dark, 890 poetry, 43–63
The H.D. Book, 876–77 poetic circles and, 133–42
Heavenly City, Earthly City, 877–78 Puritan elegiac tradition in, 86–104
“The Homosexual in Society,” 877–78 southern poetic tradition in, 109–27
Medieval Scenes, 877–78 Early Moon (Sandburg), 1104, 1105–106
“Night Songs,” 876–77 “Early Poems” ( Justice), 809–11
“Often I Am Permitted to Return to earth, people as, in Native American
a Meadow,” 878–79 poetry, 22–23
The Opening of the Field, 875–79 Eastburn, James Wallis, 161–63

1223
 Index

East India Company, 61–63 Eldridge, Charles, 347–50

Eastman, Max, 729 “Electra on Azalea Path” (Plath),
“Ebb and Flow, The” (Taylor), 78–79 1007–1008
“Eccentricity” (Allston), 163–65 Electronic Poetry Center, 1038
Ecco Press, 1146–147, 1156–158 “Elegy” (Bishop), 785–87
“Echo-Song” (Osgood), 222–23 elegy(ies)
ecopoetics in American Revolutionary poetry,
Ammons’s poetry and, 922–23, 925–26 143–44
ecofeminism and, 952–53 in Civil War poetry, 313–15
emergence in 1970s of, 947–48 death as ritual repentance, 98–101
of Merwin, 947–50 in early modern England, 91–93
Snyder and, 931–32 English tradition of, 91–93
Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected immanence and transcendence
Poems, Drafts and Fragments in, 88–90
(Bishop), 785–87 legacy of, 102–04
Edge (Andrews), 865–66 New England Puritan tradition, 93–95
“Edge” (Plath), 1007–1008 New England revisions to, 93–95
“Edge of the Swamp, The” (Simms), Puritan funeral elegies, 102–04
188–89 in Puritan poetic tradition, 3–4, 86–104
Edict of Nantes, 51–53 sin of grief and exemplary deceased
education in, 95–98
children’s poetry and, 427, 431–34 by Wheatley, 136–39
Dickinson’s desire for, 362–64, 369–70 by Whitman, 88–90, 102–04, 352–53
mid-nineteenth-century poetry and Elegy on the Times, An (Trumbull), 140–41
advances in, 290–95 “Elegy Written in an Country Churchyard”
“Education by Poetry” (Frost), 522–23 (Gray), 290–92
“Edward Taylor’s Elegy on Deacon David Elemental Odes (Neruda), 962–63
Dewey” (Taylor), 87–88, 96, 99–100 Elements (Poe), 933
“Efectual Marriage, The” (Loy), 587–89 Elements of San Joaquín, The (Soto), 962–63
egalitarianism, in popular poetry, 445–46 Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (Warren),
Egan, Jim, 109–27 801–02
Egoist magazine, 589–90, 606–08, 609 “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” (Hayden),
Egoist Press, 618 1058–1059
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 750 “El Hombre” (Williams), 659–60
“Eighteen Sixty-One” (Whitman), 320 Eliot, George, 366–67, 1079–1080
80 Flowers (Zukofsky), 742–43 Eliot, T. S., 4–6, 7–8
Eigner, Larry, 8, 670, 677–78, 695–96 American print culture and poetry of,
“Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott” (Whittier), 604–08
261–62 annotations for The Waste Land, 1096
Einstein, Albert, 916 Berryman’s poetry and, 769–70
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 665 Bidart and, 1013
ekphrasis Brooks and, 1049–1050
American Romantic poetry and, 178 children’s poetry by, 442–43, 1105
in Graham’s poetry, 1096 conservatism of, 549
New York School and, 846–51 culture poetry and, 1083
“El Dorado” (Poe), 223–27 early life of, 542–43

1224
 Index

editorial work of, 562–63, 615–17 Notes towards a Deinition of Culture,

expatriate existence of, 583 555–56
family support for, 632 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,
Frost and, 521–22 442–43, 1105, 1113–114
Ginsberg and, 827–28 “Opera,” 543–44
Glück’s comments on, 1018 Prufrock and Other Observations, 543–44
Gold’s criticism of, 729 “Second Thoughts about
graduate work of, 545–46 Humanism,” 554–55
Harvard poetry of, 543–44 “Tradition and the Individual
high modernism and, 750–51 Talent,” 521–22, 548–49
Hughes and, 708–09, 722–23 The Waste Land, 148–49, 442–43, 537–
impersonality and, 549, 551–52, 629–30 38, 543–44, 550–54, 555–56, 558–59,
Kenner’s criticism of, 676–77 729–30, 733, 736–37, 769–70, 798–99,
leftist criticism of, 729–30 827–28, 1006, 1018, 1020–1021, 1160
literary criticism by, 555–56, 755 Eliot, Valerie, 827–28
modernism and poetry of, 519, Eliot, William Greenleaf, 542–43
542–56, 628 “Ellen Learning to Walk” (Osgood), 182,
Moore and, 618 198–200
objective correlative and, 163–65 “Ellen West” (Bidart), 1015–1016
Objectivism and, 733–40 Ellery, William, 163
at Oxford University, 546–47 Ellington, Duke, 1050–1051
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1003–1004, Elliptical poetry, 1035–1036, 1045
1006, 1012 Ellis, Thomas Sayers, 1048–1049, 1073
Lowell and, 750 Ellison, Ralph, 722–23, 801–02
science and poetry of, 916 Ellman, Richard, 4–6
on Stein (Gertrude), 576–78 “Elm” (Plath), 1009–1010, 1020–1021
Stevens and, 653–54, 657–58, 661–62 “El Molcajete” (Soto), 962–63
on Stravinsky, 730–31 El Museo del Barrio, 968–69
on traditional poetry, 548–49 Elohi fragment, 19, 33
Warren and, 799–800 “Eloise to Abelard” (Pope), 135–36
Williams and, 542, 560–62, 569–70, 683 “Elsewheres” ( Justice), 809–11
works Elsie Venner (Holmes), 267
After Strange Gods, 555–56 El Sol y Los De Abajo and Other Royal Chicano
Ara vos Prec, 547–48 Air Force Poems (Montoya), 961–62
“Ash Wednesday,” 555–56 “Elua Pololia” (Balaz), 1131
The Cocktail Party, 555–56 Eluard, Paul, 871–74
The Family Reunion, 555–56 Emancipation Proclamation, in poetry, 282,
Four Quartets, 555–56, 1006 290, 293–95
“Gerontion,” 547–48 Embargo, The (Bryant), 172
“Hamlet and His Problems,” 549 Embury, Emma, 183
The Idea of a Christian Society, Emerson, Claudia, 814
555–56 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 183–86
“The Love Song of J. Alfred American poetry and, 4
Prufrock,” 544–45, 546–47, Atlantic Monthly and, 282
548–49, 550 children in poetry of, 200–01, 431–34
Murder in the Cathedral, 555–56 critical assessment of, 198

1225
 Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (cont.) Endocrinology (Berssenbrugge), 933, 997

Dickinson and, 370–72, 373 “End of an Ethnic Dream, The” (Wright),
Fireside Poets and, 259–61, 404, 497 1061–1063
Frost and, 529 End of Beauty, The (Graham), 1147–149
in Holmes’s writing, 270–71 “End of the Line, The” ( Jarrell), 802–03
Lazarus’s poetry and, 297–99 Enemyway (Navajo chant), 19
Lowell and, 751 “Enfans d’Adam” (Whitman), 347–49
Persian poetry and work of, 201–06 English and Scottish Popular Ballads
Poe and, 217–18, 227–28 (Child), 250
poetry of, 192–213 English Civil War
Romantic poetry and, 177–78 elegies during, 91–93
on science, 915–16 in staples colonies poetry, 113–14
Stedman and, 406–07 English poetry. See British poetry
Twain’s parody of, 259–61 “En l’An Trentiesme de Mon Eage” (Koch),
Very and, 206–09 852–53
Warren’s tribute to, 803–06 Enlightenment, science and poetry during,
Whitman and, 202–03, 337, 343, 344–45, 915–16
347–49 “En Route to Southampton” (Schuyler),
works 854–55
“The American Scholar,” 270, environmental poetry
1097–1098 early Romantic poetry as, 179
“Boston Hymn,” 282 ecofeminism and, 952–53
“Domestic Life,” 200–01 ecopoetics and, 922–23, 925–26, 931–32
“A Fable,” 431–34 emergence of, 947–48
“Hamatreya,” 203–06 of Hass, 953–55
“Merlin I,” 194–98 epic poetry
“Merlin II,” 205–06 in American Revolutionary era, 145–48
Nature, 196, 197 Columbus in, 156–57
“The Over-Soul,” 227–28 in early America, 43–51
Poems, 198 frontier heroes in, 157–58
“The Poet,” 194–98, 227–28, in popular verse, 459–60
344–45 in Puritan tradition, 65–66
“Saadi,” 201–06 Epicurus, 914–15
“The Snow Storm,” 205–06 “Epidemic of Strikes and the Remedy,
“Threnody,” 200–01 The” (Markham), 482
“Emigrant’s Story, The” (Trowbridge), Epistle to Alexander Pope, Esq. from South
461–62 Carolina, An (Kirkpatrick), 122–23
Emmett, Dan, 309–10, 318–19 “Epistle to Laura, on Her Parody, An”
Empathy (Berssenbrugge), 997 (Evans), 135–36
empire, early American epic poetry and “Epistle to the Hon. Arthur Dobbs, Esq.,
sense of, 43–51 An” (Sterling), 123–25
Emplumada (Cervantes), 964–65 Epstein, Daniel Mark, 895–96
Empson, William, 87, 88–90 Equal Rights Amendment, 950–52
Empty Kettle (Oliver), 31 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso, 47–51, 61–63
“Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme” Erdrich, Louise, 38–39
(Aldrich), 406 Eroding Witness (Mackey), 1070–1071

1226
 Index

“Eros” (Glück), 1018–1019 Eve, Alice, 232

Erosion (Graham), 1096, 1098–1100 Evening-Post, 169–71, 174–75
“Eros Turannos” (Robinson), 504–06 “Evening Revery, An” (Whitman), 174–75
Errancy, The (Graham), 1147–149 Evening Song (Tohono O’odham medicine
Eshleman, Clayton, 1162 song), 21
Eshu Elegba (Legba) (West African deity), “Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ,
1070–1071 with Penitential Cries, An”
Eskimo poetry, 26 (Hammon), 138–39
Espada, Martín, 970–71 “Evening without Angels” (Stevens),
“Essay on Man” (Pope), 130, 459–60 1033–1034
“Essay on Poetics” (Ammon), 923–24 “Eve of Saint Agnes, The” (Keats),
“Essay on Psychiatrists” (Pinsky), 940–44 1086–1087
“Essay on the Virtues of the Word Virtue Everett, Edward, 161–63
or Virtual, An” (anon.), 129–33 Evergreen Review, 829
“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” Everson, William, 823–24, 829
(Kerouac), 829–31 Everybody’s Magazine, 606–08
Essex, Earl of, elegies for, 91–93 Every Thing on It (Silverstein), 1115–116
Estéves, Sandra María, 967–68 evolution, theory of, 800–01, 914–15
“Esthétique du Mal” (Stevens), 666–67 Ev’ry Month magazine, 420–21
Ethics (Spinoza), 742–43 “Examination of the Hero in a Time of
“Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (Whitman), War” (Stevens), 654
332–34, 342, 389–90, 395–96, 712 “Excelsior” (Longfellow), 249–52
“Ethnogenesis” (Timrod), 311–12 Executive Order 9066, 985–86
ethnography, children’s poetry and, 438–42 “Exhibition of a School of Young Ladies”
ethnopoetics. See also Asian American (Sigourney), 290–92
poetry; Latino poetry and poetics exile culture, in modern poetry, 497–517
in children’s poetry, 1118 Exiled Memories (Medina), 973
minority poets in literary canon, 2 Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works
modernist poetry and, 629 (Cha), 995–96
multilingualism in contemporary poetry existentialism, in Dickey’s writing, 808–09
and, 1123–140 experimental poetry
Eunoia (Bök), 1109–110 children’s poetry as, 1109–110
Eureka (Poe), 227–28, 233–34 New York School poetry as, 856–64
“Europe” (Ashbery), 860 in 1980s, 1028–1030
European culture psychoanalytic poetics and, 1021–1023
Clampitt’s commitment to, 1089–1090 Explanation of America, An (Pinsky), 940–44
in Longfellow’s poetry, 241–42, 245–47 Expressions of Sea Level (Ammons), 919–21,
in postwar era, 1080 933–34
European magazine, Pound’s poetry in, 679 “Expressions of Sea Level” (Ammons),
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (Longfellow), 922–23
37–38, 241–42, 252–54, 301–02 “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy
Evans, Florence Wilkinson, 490–91 of Fine Ideas” (Stevens), 664
Evans, Luke, 232 “Eye and Tooth” (Lowell), 760–61
Evans, Nathaniel, 133–42
Evans, Steve, 1136, 1152 Faber and Faber publishers, 562–63, 618
Evans, Walker, 731–32 “Fabergé” (Schuyler), 853–54

1227
 Index

Fabio, Sarah, 1055–1056 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 508–11, 636

“Fable, A” (Emerson), 431–34 Faust (Goethe), 297–99
Fable for Critics, A (Lowell), 273, 275 Faust Foutu (Faust Fucked) (Duncan), 825–27
“Face, The” ( Jarrell), 787 “Fearful Traveller in the Haunted Castle,
“Face Lift” (Plath), 1008–1009 The” (Horton), 292–93
“Face to Face with Death” (Payne), 169 Fearing, Kenneth, 730–31
“Facing It” (Komunyakaa), 1068–1069 “Feast at Waycross, The” (Stanton), 464–65
“Factitious Life” (Dana), 165–66 “Feast of Stephen, The” (Hecht), 1090–1091
“Factory, The” (Dreiser), 490–91 “February in Sydney” (Komunyakaa), 1070
“Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” Federalists, 165–66, 172
(Poe), 228 Federal Writers’ Project, 731–32
Fahs, Alice, 313–15 FEG: Stupid Ridiculous Poems for Intelligent
Fair Realism (Guest), 862–63 Children (Hirsch), 1109–110
fairy tales, in women’s Romantic poetry, Feldman, Morton, 844–46
185–86 Female Poets of America, The (Griswold),
“Falling” (Dickey), 808–09 179–81
“Falling: 1” (Armantrout), 1149–152 feminism. See also gender; women poets
“Falling: 2” (Armantrout), 1149–152 Chicana poetry and, 960–67
Falling Up (Silverstein), 1115–116 in children’s poetry, 1118
Family Reunion, The (Eliot), 555–56 Dickinson’s poetics and, 360–61
Famous American Negroes (Hughes), ecofeminism and, 952–53
711–12 in Gilman’s poetry, 473–80
“Fanny” (Halleck), 169–71 Guest’s poetry and, 862–63
“Fantasia” (Cooke), 416–17 in Hagedorn’s poetry, 994–95
“Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother, The” in Loy’s poetry, 587–89
(Whittier), 261–67 Loy’s poetry and, 584–85
Farewell to Manzanar (Houston), modernist poetry and, 629
985–86 Nuyorican poetry and, 969–70
“Farewell to the Aged” (Sigourney), Plath’s poetry and, 1008–1009
429 poets of 1960s and, 869
Far Field, The (Roethke), 771–73 Rich’s poetry and, 889, 950–52
Farm and City series (Carleton), 457–59 scientiic poetry and, 932–33
Farm Ballads (Carleton), 457–59 southern women’s poetry and, 795–96
“Farmer Stebbins” (Carleton), 457–59 in women’s Romantic poetry, 181, 185–86
Farm Festivals (Carleton), 457–59 in Wylie’s poetry, 646–47
“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a “Feminist Manifesto” (Loy), 587–89
Landscape” (Ashbery), 860–61 Fence magazine, 1144, 1149–150, 1152
Farrell, Kate, 1108–109 Fenollosa, Ernest, 675, 978–79, 981
fascism Fergusson, Hugh, 135–36
Agrarian tradition and, 800–01, 817 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 823–24, 825–28,
allegation of Ransom’s writing as, 795 829, 886
Pound’s admiration for, 733–40 performance poetry by, 831
Fatal Interview (Millay), 632 Fern, Fanny, 372–73
“Fate of an Innocent Dog, The” (Horton), Fernández, Teresa (“Mariposa”), 969–70
292–93, 302–03 “Festival of Reminiscence; or, The Pioneer
Fate’s Kite (Smith), 811–13 Meeting, The” (Carleton), 457–59

1228
 Index

“Few Days in the South in February (A First World War. See World War I
Hospitality for S. K. Wightman, “Fish Crier” (Sandburg), 1105–106
1865), A” (Taylor), 815 “Fisher Street” (Moss), 1033–1034
Few Figs from Thistles, A (Millay), 633, 635 Fitch, Elizabeth, 96–98
Feynman, Richard, 933–34 “Fitting, The” (Millay), 634
Ficke, Arthur Davison, 507 “5,000 letter palindrome” (Perec), 1109–110
Fictive Certainties (Duncan), 876–77 Five Years of Solitary (Torres), 969
Field, Eugene, 299–300, 434–35, 465–68 Flagg, John H., 468
“Field Asters” (Melville), 417–18 Flamingo Watching (Ryan), 1094–1095
“Field Flowers” (Glück), 1020–1021 “Flammonde” (Robinson), 504–06
Field Guide (Hass), 953 Flaubert, Gustave, 998–99
Fields of Learning (Miles), 926–27 “Flea, The” (Donne), 898–900
“Fiend, The” (Dickey), 807–08 Fletcher, Alice, 24–25, 31–32
Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (León- Fletcher, Angus, 239–40
Portilla), 32–33 Fletcher, John Gould, 514–15
“Fifteenth Amendment” (Harper), 390–94 “Flight of Fancy, A” (Osgood), 182
“Fifty Years of American Poetry” ( Jarrell), Floating Island, The (Medina), 973
784–85 Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry
“Figure a Poem Makes, The” (Frost), 522–23 (Smith), 811–13
“Figured Wheel, The” (Pinsky), 940–44 “Floating Trees” (Wright), 1156–158
Filipino literature, 978, 982–83, 985, 994–95 “Flood” (Graham), 1147–149
Filson, John, 157–58 “Florence Vane” (Cooke), 188
Fine Clothes to the Jew (Hughes), 702–03, 713 loricantos, Chicano poetry at, 960–61
Finkelstein, Norman, 747 “Flotsam” (Lowell), 514–15
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 1109–110 Flow Chart (Ashbery), 861, 894
Firbank, Ronald, 844–46 “Flower Factory, The” (Evans), 490–91
“Firebombing, The” (Dickey), 807–08 Flowers for Children (Child), 428–29
Fire Bringer, The (Moody), 503 “Flowers of the Fallow” (Larcom), 179–81
Fireside Miscellany magazine, 434–35 Flynn, Richard, 425, 775–91, 1103–104, 1115–116
Fireside Poets, 1–2, 4, 259–61, 404 Foerster, Norman, 409–10
children’s poetry by, 431–34 “Fog” (Sandburg), 1104
cultural legacy of, 497 Folding Clifs, The (Merwin), 949
doggerel, dialect, and local color poetry Foley, James, 468
by, 448 folk life and culture
legacy of, 468–69 in children’s poetry, 438–42, 1103, 1116–118
Firesplitters (music group), 1063–1064 folk verse genre, 468
Firstborn (Glück), 1018 Loy on, 592–93
“First Death in Nova Scotia” (Bishop), in Niedecker’s poetry, 737–39
785–87 in Whittier’s poetry, 261–67
“First Fig” (Millay), 632 Folsom, Ed, 329–56
“First Love” (Dana), 165–66 “Font of Type, A” (Whitman), 332
irst narrative, in Native American “Food for Criticks” (Lewis), 118–20
poetry, 22–23 “Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic,
First Poems (Merrill), 895–96 A” (Moore), 606–08
“First Settler’s Story, The” (Carleton), “For a Freshman Reader” ( Justice), 809–11
457–59 Ford, Mark, 866

1229
 Index

“Foreclosure of the Mortgage, The” Frank, Waldo, 1159

(Corbett), 455–56 Frankenstein (Shelley), 915–16
Forerunner magazine, 473 Franklin, Benjamin, 86–87, 88–90, 98–101,
“Forgotten Flea Powder, The” (Ige), 132–33
1134–135 musical performances by, 135–36
“For Hephaistos, with Reference to the versiications by, 141
Deaths in a Dry Year of Cocteau, Franklin, Ralph W., 370–72, 381
Roethke, and MacNeice” Franklin Evans (Whitman), 331–32
(Howard), 908–09 Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (Perlof ),
“For John Duf ” (Creeley), 692 858–60
For Laughing Out Loud (Prelutsky), 1116–117 Frazier, Sir James, 550
For Lizzie and Harriet (Lowell), 762–63 Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball (Silverstein),
For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of 1115–116
Malcolm X (Randall), 1058–1059 Fredman, Stephen, 823–41
formal verse “Freedman’s Triumphant Song, The”
by Lowell, 753–54 (Whitman), 400–01
modernist poetry and, 628–29 Freedomways journal, 720–22
by women poets, 628–48 Freely Espousing (Schuyler), 845
For My People (Walker), 795–96 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 435–36, 505
“For Once, Then Something” (Frost), Freeman newspaper, 332–34
528–29 free verse
“for our lady” (Sanchez), 1056–1057 in Crane’s poetry, 485–88
“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” by Lowell, 753–54
(Crane), 1159–160 by Millay, 634–35
“For the Union Dead” (Lowell), 503–04, performance of, 629–30
752–53, 760–61 Whitman’s inl uence on, 504–06
Fortress Monroe Civil War site, 811–13 Freewoman magazine, 589–90
Forum magazine, 498–99, 508–11 Freilicher, Jane, 844–46
Foss, Sam Walter, 462, 465–68 Fremont, John, 263–64
Foster, Frances Smith, 390–94 Freneau, Philip, 37–38, 143–44, 155–56
Foster, Sesshu, 999 Freud, Lucien, 765
Fountain (Duchamp), 558–59 Freud, Sigmund, 217–18, 234–36.
Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte, 169–71 See also psychoanalytic poetics
Four for Trane (Mackey), 1070–1071 Auden on, 1003
Four Quartets (Eliot), 555–56, 1006 in Glück’s poetry, 1019–1020
“Fourth of July and Race Outrages, The” Loy and H.D.’s admiration of,
(Dunbar), 394–95 591
“Fourth of July in Maine” (Lowell), 761–62 Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von, 560–61
“4404 Stanford” (Schuyler), 854–55 Friar, Kimon, 623
“Four Way Stop” (Livingston), 1109–110 Friday and the Year That Followed (Morales),
Four Young Women: Poems (Rexroth), 975–76
994–95 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 597–98
Fowler, Lorenzo, 343–44 “Friendly Door, The” (Markham), 483–84
Fowler and Wells publishers, 343–44 “Frightened Man, The” (Bogan), 642
Francesca Da Rimini (Boker), 186, 405 Froissart’s Ballades and Other Poems
Francophone epic, 51–53 (Cooke), 188

1230
 Index

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still “Home Burial,” 524, 532–33
Emanate (Mackey), 1077 “Hyla Brook,” 526–27
“From North and South” (Piatt), 413 “In the Home Stretch,” 534–35
From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love “Into My Own,” 519–20, 521–22
and Hunger (Cervantes), 964–65 “Letter to The Amherst Student,” 522,
“From the Dark Tower” (Cullen), 707 534–35
frontier, in American epic poetry, 157–58 “The Master Speed,” 534
Frost, Isabelle, 174–75 “Mending Wall,” 520–21, 524, 525
Frost, Robert, 4–6, 165–66, 462 “The Most of It,” 527
academic career of, 535–36 Mountain Interval, 524
Brooks and, 1049–1050 “Mowing,” 525–27, 529, 532, 534
Bryant’s inl uence on, 174–75 “The Need of Being Versed in
children’s poetry by, 1103, 1105, 1107–108 Country Things,” 527
criticism of, 536 “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be
early life of, 523–25 the Same,” 534–35
Jarrell and, 789 New Hampshire, 524
legacy of, 701 North of Boston, 508, 524
Millay compared with, 632 “October,” 1107–108
modernist poetry and, 500, 522–23 “The Onset,” 534–35
Opportunity contest judged by, 637 “Provide, Provide,” 535
performances of poetry by, 525, 535, “Putting in the Seed,” 530–31
551–52 “Reluctance,” 1107–108
poetic legacy of, 536–37 “The Road Not Taken,” 462,
political views of, 525 536–37, 1104
prose writing of, 522–23 “A Servant to Servants,” 524, 531–32
Rich and, 874–75 “Spring Pools,” 534
Robinson and, 504–06 “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” 528–29
scientiic knowledge of, 527–28 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Stevens and, 664 Evening,” 534, 536–37, 1107–108
subject matter in work of, 511 “To Earthward,” 529, 530–31
traditional poetry of, 519–38 “The Trial by Existence,” 529–30
works, 531–32 “Two Look at Two,” 530–31
“After Apple-Picking,” 524, 534 “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” 522
“Birches,” 188–89, 530–31 West-Running Brook, 524
“Bond and Free,” 530–31 “West-Running Brook,” 533, 534–35,
A Boy’s Will, 519–20 536–37
“The Constant Symbol,” 522–23 A Witness Tree, 524
“Desert Places,” 522 “The Wood-Pile,” 524
“Design,” 527–28, 536–37 You Come Too: Favorite Poems for Young
“Directive,” 537–38, 1083–1085 People, 1107–108
“Education by Poetry,” 522–23 “Fugitive-Agrarian ‘Myth,’ The” ( Justice),
“The Figure a Poem Makes,” 522–23 809–11
“For Once, Then Something,” 528–29 Fugitive magazine, 799–800, 807
A Further Range, 524 Fugitive Slave Act, 263–64
“Ghost House,” 1107–108 “Fugitive’s Wife, The” (Harper), 293–95
“The Gift Outright,” 525, 535 “Fulillment” ( Johnson), 637–38

1231
 Index

Fuller, Henry Blake, 468 Gayden, Fern, 1049–1050

Fuller, Hoyt, 1055–1056 Gayle, Addison, 1055–1056
Fuller, Margaret gay poetry. See also homosexuality; queer
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 studies; speciic poets
Holmes’s writing on, 270–71 Chicano poetry, 964–65
Hooper and, 214–15 by Crane, 1159
legacy of, 196–98, 372–73 Cuban American poetry and, 972–75
on Longfellow, 242–43, 244–45 modernist poets and, 858–60, 877–78,
Native American poetry and, 183–86 889, 894–911
Fulton, Alice, 926–27, 932–33 New York School and, 856–64
Funarof, Sol, 729–30 Nuyorican Movement and, 967–72
funk art, 838–41 by Stein, 1158–159
Furness, William H., 183–86 Geisel, Theodore. See Seuss, Dr.
“Further in Summer” (Dickinson), 283–89 Gelpi, Albert, 881, 888–89
Further Range, A (Frost), 524 Gems from the Tailings (Smith), 453–55, 468
Futurism gender, 8, 286–87
avant-gardism and, 586 Bogan’s discussion of, 640–41
Loy and, 587–89 Bradstreet’s disregard of, 73
Pound and, 514–15 Civil War poetry and concepts of, 313–15,
“Fuzzy Equations” (Herrera), 966 316–18
in Dickinson’s poetry, 372–73
Gado, Frank, 155–75 Jarrell’s exploration of, 776–77, 781–82
Gage, Thomas (General), 141, 143–44 in Lowell’s poetry, 514–15
Gallagher, Tess, 771–73 in Loy’s poetry, 584–85, 592–97, 599
games in Millay’s poetry, 632
in New York School poetry, 849–50 in modernist poetry, 605–06, 630
in Stein’s poetry, 881 in Osgood’s poetry, 182, 198–200
Games and Songs of American Children in Spanish colonial poetry, 56–60
(Newell), 438–42 in Whitman’s poetry, 340
Gander, Forrest, 933, 1147–149, 1156–158 women poets and issues of, 183, 185, 405,
Gaps and Verges (Hofmann), 932–33 417–18, 630–31
Garbage (Ammons), 925–26 “General Aims and Theories” (Crane),
Garcia Villa, José, 982–83 1160
“Garden, The” (Pound), 673 General Gage’s Confession (Freneau), 143–44
Gardener, The (Tagore), 508 General Gage’s Soliloquy (Freneau), 143–44
Garden of Exile (Rodríguez), 974 “General William Booth Enters into
“Gardens of the Villa d’Este, The” Heaven” (Lindsay), 507–08, 511–13
(Hecht), 1082 Geneva Bible, 66–67
Garland, Hamlin, 465–68 “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” (Yau), 996–97
Garrison, William Lloyd, Whittier and, “Genius of Freedom! Whither Art Thou
261–62 Fled?” (Martin), 133
Garvey, Marcus, 706–07 genteel tradition, 403–21
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 964 African American poetry and, 703
Gates, Henry Louis, 438–42 Geography III (Bishop), 785–87, 790–91
Gay, E. Jane, 459–60, 461 George, Stefan, 836–37
Gay, John, 137 “George Crabbe” (Robinson), 1147–149

1232
 Index

George Washington Crossing the Delaware Asian inl uences on, 838–41, 978–79
(Koch), 844–46 Auden and, 906
Georgics (Virgil), 742–43, 914–15 authenticity in poetry of, 870–71
German-language lyric poetry, 60–61 Beat Movement and, 823, 824–25,
Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 902–03 829–31, 1083
“Gerontion” (Eliot), 547–48 Clampitt and, 1098
“Gertrude Stein” (Loy), 592–93, 916 experimental poetry of, 1089–1090
ghazal poetry, 992 Lorca and, 833–34
“Ghost House” (Frost), 1107–108 Merrill and, 894
Ghost Tantras (McClure), 831 performance poetry by, 827–28, 831
Ghostway (Navajo chant), 19 psychoanalytic poetics and, 1005
Gibbons, James Sloan, 311–12, 320, 324–25 Spicer and, 838–41
“Gift Outright, The” (Frost), 525, 535 Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30
Gilbert, Roger, 913–34, 1033–1034, 1153 Gioia, Dana, 239–40, 425, 1085–1086
Gilbert, Sandra, 630–31, 1027–1028 Giovanni, Nikki, 701, 1118
Gilded Lapse of Time, A “Giovanni Franchi” (Loy), 587–89
(Schnackenberg), 1096 Girls on the Run (Ashbery), 861
Gillespie, Dizzy, 1050–1051, 1063–1064 Girl’s Reading-Book, The (Sigourney),
Gilman, Caroline, 434–35, 456–57, 484–85 290–92
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (Stetson), Girmay, Aracelis, 975–76
473–80 Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler), 1140
works glam slam, 969–70
“Child Labor [No. 2],” 477 Glasgow, Ellen, 500
“Homes: A Sestina,” 474–75 Glauca (Araucanian woman), 48–49
“A Hope,” 478 Gleason, Ralph J., 829
“The Housewife,” 475 Glissant, Édouard, 1127
“How About the Man?,” 479 globalization, multilingualism in poetry
“In Duty Bound,” 474–75 and, 1125–127
“I Would Fain Die a Dry Death,” 479 Glück, Louise, 751, 1006, 1097
“The March,” 473–74 in Antaeus, 1146
“The Mother’s Charge,” 477–78 confessional poetry of, 1012–1013
“Nature’s Answer,” 479–80 hybridity in poetry of, 1021–1023
“One Girl of Many,” 477–78 psychoanalytic poetics of, 1017–1021
“Similar Cases,” 476 works
“The Survival of the Fittest,” 478 Ararat, 1019–1020
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” 456–57 Averno, 1018
“To Labor,” 478 Descending Figure, 1018–1019
“To the Indiferent Women,” 475–76 “Eros,” 1018–1019
“To the Packer,” 479 “Field Flowers,” 1020–1021
“The Wolf at the Door,” 478 Firstborn, 1018
“Woman,” 473–74 “Gretel in Darkness,” 1018
“Work and Wages,” 478 The House on Marshland, 1018
“The World,” 473–74 “Lamentations,” 1018
Ginsberg, Allen Meadowlands, 1019
in Antaeus, 1146 “Psychiatrist’s Sestina,” 1018–1019
antiwar eforts of, 886 “The Red Poppy,” 1020–1021

1233
 Index

Glück, Louise (cont.) Gorman, Herbert, 614–15

“Telemachus’s Detachment,” 1019 Gould, Hannah Flagg, 429–30, 434–35, 468
“The Untrustworthy Speaker,” Grace Notes (Dove), 1067–1068
1019–1020 “Graduate Leaving College, The”
The Wild Iris, 1018, 1020–1021 (Horton), 292–93
Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine, 300, 434–35 Graeme, Elizabeth
Godfrey, Thomas Jr., 133–42, 186 editing of Evans’s work by, 135–36
God’s Determinations Touching His Elect poetic salon organized by, 134–35
(Taylor), 80–81 Graham, Jorie
God’s Trombones ( Johnson), 706–07 Armantrout and, 1149–152, 1153–154
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 240–41, 297–99 Clampitt and, 1089–1090
Gold, Mike, 711, 729 contemporary poetry of, 1147–149,
Goldbarth, Albert, 933 1155–156
Goldberg, Michael, 844–46 culture poetry and, 1098–1100
Golden Bough, The (Frazier), 550 ekphrasis in poetry of, 1096
Golden Legend, The (Longfellow), 241–42 Frost and, 536–37
Golden State (Bidart), 1014–1015 literary reputation of, 1145, 1154–155
Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 519–20, 1104 Lowell and, 751
Goldman, Emma, 979–83 pluralism in poetry of, 7
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 580, 697 Graham, W. S., 778–80, 938–39
Goldsmith, Oliver, 145–48, 290–92 Graham’s Magazine, 218–20
“Golf Links, The” (Cleghorn), 490–91 Grainger, James, 125
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 1123–124 “Grandfathers, The” ( Justice), 809–11
Gompers, Samuel, 481 “Grand Galop” (Ashbery), 856
Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 56–60, 858–60 “GrandPa, Goodbye” (Olson), 687
Gonzales, Rodolfo (“Corky”), 961–62, Grant, Ulysses S., 386
1137–138 “Grape Vine Swing, The” (Simms), 188–89
González, Rigoberto, 959–76 “Grass Gypsies” (Bates), 435–36
Gooch, William (Governor), 141 Graveyard Poets, 163–65, 219
“Goodbye Christ” (Hughes), 710–11, 719 Gray, Asa, 739
Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, The Gray, Edward McQueen, 468
(O’Connor), 353 Gray, Janet, 429–30
Good Housekeeping magazine, 605–06 Gray, Richard, 800–01
Goodman, Mitchell, 879–80, 886–87 Gray, Thomas, 290–92
“Good Man, Bad Woman” (Stevens), 655 Gray’s Manual of Botany (Gray), 742–43
Good News about the Earth (Clifton), Great American Novel, The (Williams), 558,
1065–1066 565–66
Good News from New England Great Concern, or, A Serious Warning to a
( Johnson), 65–66 Timely and Thorough Preparation for
Goodnight Moon (Brown), 442–43 Death, The (Pearse), 94–95
Goodrich, Samuel, 434–35 Great Divide, The (Moody), 503
Good Times (Clifton), 1065–1066 Great Migration, African American poetry
Goops and How to Be Them (Burgess), 437 and, 1049–1050
Gordon, A. C., 462–64, 468 Great Panic of 1837, 196
Gordon, Caroline, 815 “Great Problem to Be Solved, The”
Gorey, Edward, 1113–114 (Harper), 293–95, 392–93

1234
 Index

Greek poetry, science and, 914–15 Moscow Mansions, 862–64

Green, Charles P., 468 “Mysteriously Deining Mystery:
Green, Henry, 844–46 Byzantine Proposals for Poetry,”
Green, Jonas, 118–19 853–54
Green, Joseph, 141 The Oice, 844–46
Greenbaum, Leonard, 806–07 “On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks,”
Greenield, Kent, 806–07 855–56
“Green Plant, The” (Stevens), 660–61 The Open Skies, 862–64
Green Wall, The (Wright), 871–74 “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry
Greger, Debora, 1085–1086 Us Higher,” 863
Gregory, Alyse, 615–16 “Poetess,” 847
Grenier, Robert, 571–72, 690–91, 890 “Red Lilies,” 863
“Gretel in Darkness” (Glück), 1018 Selected Poems, 862–63
grief. See also death and dying; elegy(ies); “Shifting Personas,” 862–63
mourning Guest, Edgar, 468
in Dickinson’s poetry, 377–79 Guevara, Che, 762–63
in Emerson’s poetry, 200–01 Guevara, Maurice Kilwein, 975–76
as sin, in Puritan elegies, 95–98 Guide to Kulchur (Pound), 686–87, 980
Griin, Martin, 394 Guillén, Nicolás, 709, 712, 1052
Griith, D. W., 330–31 Guillory, John, 286–87, 288
Griitts, Hannah, 134–35 Gunn, Thom, 759, 940–44
Griswold, Rufus, 165–66, 179–81, 183 “Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate
Grossman, Allen, 1155–156, 1157–159, 1161 Swings” (Lowell), 514–15
“Ground-Vine Intercedes with the Queen Gunslinger (Dorn), 8
of Flowers for the Merited Guthrie, Woody, 330–31, 711
Recognition of Clover, A” “Guystarde and Sygysmonde” (Boccacio),
(Melville), 418–20 465–68
Ground Work: Before the War (Duncan), 890 “Gwendolyn” (Bishop), 785–87
Ground Work: In the Dark (Duncan), 890 Gwiazda, Piotr, 907
Group, The (Warren), 134–35 Gypsy Ballads (García Lorca), 712
Grove Press, 829
“Guardian Angel of the Swarm, The” Habegger, Alfred, 368–69
(Graham), 1147–149 Hacker, Marilyn, 950–52, 1034–1035,
Guattari, Félix, 1147–149 1085–1086
Gubar, Susan, 630–31 Hagedorn, Jessica, 994–95
Guest, Barbara Hahn, Kimiko, 933, 998–99
as New York School poet, 846–51, 853–54 Haigh-Wood, Vivien, 546–47
works haiku
The Blue Stairs, 862–64 history of, 979–83
Collected Poems, 863 in Japanese American poetry, 985–86
Defensive Rapture, 862–63 Haile, Berard, 31–32
Fair Realism, 862–63 Haines, John, 884–86
Herself Deined: The Poet H.D. and Her Hains, Raymond, 860
World, 862–64 Haitian indigenous poetry, 709
“Knight of the Swan,” 862–64 Hale, Edward Everett, 476
The Location of Things, 862–64 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 300, 434–35, 1105–106

1235
 Index

“Half-Deity” (Moore), 619–20 “Harlem Shadows” (McKay), 703–04,

Halfway Covenant, 77–78 706–07
Hall, Donald Harmonium (Stevens), 656, 664–65, 666–67
antiwar eforts of, 886 Harp and Plow, The (Canning), 448–49
on children’s poetry, 1105, 1107–108 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 2–3, 307–08,
Deep Image poetry and, 1027–1028 315, 394
Duncan and, 874 Harlem Renaissance view of, 398–400
on Lowell, 870–71 works
Wright and, 884–86 “An Appeal to the American People,”
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 165–66, 169–71, 219 390–94
Halpern, David, 1146 Aunt Chloe (poetic sequence),
Halpern, Nick, 869–91 293–95, 390–94
Halpine, Charles Graham, 315, 468 “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” 392
Halprin, Anna, 823–24 “Burial of Moses,” 294–95
“Halsted Street Car” (Sandburg), 515–16 “The Deliverance,” 391
“Hamatreya” (Emerson), 203–06 “A Dialogue,” 394–400
“Hamlet and His Problems” (Eliot), 549 “The Drunkard’s Child,” 293–95
Hammer, Langdon, 775–76, 1161 “Fifteenth Amendment,” 390–94
Hammon, Jupiter, 138–39, 1048–1049 “The Fugitive’s Wife,” 293–95
Hammond, Jefrey, 86–104 “The Great Problem to Be Solved,”
“Handbook of Suring, A” (Guest), 293–95, 392–93
862–64 “Jesus,” 393–94
“Hand That Swept the Sounding Lyre, “Learning to Read,” 392
The” (Osgood), 182 “Lines to Hon. Thaddeus Stevens,”
Hansberry, Lorraine, 716 390–94
Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (Leland), 452–53 “Lines to Miles O’Reiley,” 315
“Hans Breitmann’s Party” (Leland), 452–53 Moses: A Story of the Nile, 293–95, 302,
Hansford, Charles, 109–11 390–94
Harcourt, Alfred, 612–15 Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects,
Harding, Walter, 209–11 293–95, 390–94
Hardison, O. B., 88–90 “Retribution,” 393–94
Hardwick, Elizabeth, 752–53, 756–57, 761–63, “The Reunion,” 392
764–65 Sketches of Southern Life, 293–95,
Hardy, Thomas, 631–32, 788–89, 799–800, 390–94
871–74 “To the Cleveland Union-Savers,”
Harjo, Joy, 38–39 307–08, 390–94
Harlan, James, 353 “Truth,” 302
“Harlem” (Hughes), 716 Harper, Michael S., 1057–1058, 1067–1068
Harlem Gallery (Tolson), 1051 Harper and Brothers publishers (also
Harlem Renaissance, 398–400 known as Harper’s), 247–48, 508–11
contemporary African American poetry Harper’s Magazine
and, 1051 Carleton’s poetry in, 457–59
Johnson (Georgia D.) and, 645 Howells’s poetry in, 413
Johnson (Helene) and, 636–39 Moore’s poetry in, 605–06
Hughes and, 702–03, 706–07 Harper’s Weekly, Civil War poetry in, 313–15
women poets in, 636, 645 Harp Lake (Hollander), 1092–1094

1236
 Index

“Harriet Hutch” (Richards), 438 Hays, Will, 313–15

Harrington, Joseph, 628 Hazlitt, William, 165–66
Harris, Benjamin, 426 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 5
Harris, Kaplan Page, 1137–138 American print culture and poetry of,
Harris, Thomas Lake, 233–34 604–08
Harris, Wilson, 1070–1071 Bogan’s criticism of, 640
Harrison, Tony, 751 British citizenship of, 583
Harrison, Victoria, 789–90 Clifton’s poetry and, 1065–1066
Harte, Bret, 301, 409–10, 450–52, 465–68 Duncan and, 875–79, 881, 890
Hartford Accident and Indemnity editorial work by, 589–90
Company, 651 family support for, 632
Hartigan, Grace, 844–46 gender identity in poetry of, 585–86
Hartley, Marsden, 560–61 Guest’s study of, 862–64
Hartmann, Sadakichi, 979–83 imagiste movement and, 514–15
Hartshorne, William, 332 language play and poetics of, 589–90
Harvard poets, 502 legacy of, 871
“Harvest Song, A” (Markham), 482 Loy and, 585, 591
Harvey, David, 952–53 magazine publications and poetry of,
Harwood, Lee, 866 586–87
Hass, Robert, 751, 937–38, 953–55, 1011–1012, modernist poetry of, 5, 583–99, 628
1146, 1152 Moore and, 618–24
Hastings, Selina, 136–39 Swinburne’s inl uence on, 590–91
“Hasty-Pudding, The” (Barlow), 147–48, Taylor’s poetry and, 815
156–57, 447–48 Williams and, 560–61, 564, 672
“Haunted Oak, The” (Dunbar), 396 H.D. Book, The (Duncan), 876–77
Have Come, Am Here (Garcia Villa), 982–83 “Health, A” (Pinkney), 187
“Having a Coke with You” (O’Hara), Heaney, Seamus, 536–37, 751, 1146
858–60 Heap, Jane, 605–06
Hawaiian poetry “Hearing the Battle, July 21, 1861” (Piatt),
by Balaz, 1131 316–18, 322
cultural movements and, 1133–134 Heart’s Needle (Snodgrass), 1003–1004
hole-hole bushi labor songs, 984 “Heathen Chinee, The” (Harte), 409–10,
Pidgin-language poetry, 1134–135 450–52
Hawaiian Renaissance, 1133–134 Heavenly City, Earthly City (Duncan), 877–78
Hawkins, Coleman, 1050–1051, 1070 “Heaven of Animals, The” (Dickey),
Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster, 731–32 807–08
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 252–54 Heavenward Bound: Words of Help for Young
Hay, John, 301, 450–52 Christians (Wadsworth), 438–42
Hayden, Robert, 708–09, 750–51, 1048–1049, “He Bade Me Be Happy” (Osgood), 182
1050, 1058–1059 Hecht, Anthony, 1079–1080, 1082, 1090–1091
Hayes, Kevin J., 129–49 “Hedge of Rubber Trees, A” (Clampitt),
Hayes, Terrance, 1154–155 1083–1085
Hayford, Gladys May Casely (Aquah “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’ ” (Moore),
Laluah), 636, 712 622–23
Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 384–86 Hedrick, Wally, 825–27
Hayot, Eric, 981–82 Hegel, G. F. W., 296–97

1237
 Index

Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson, 370–72 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 283–84,

Heidegger, Martin, 743–45 343, 375–77, 379–80
He Is Gone (Ojibwe poem), 26–27 Dickinson and, 370–72, 373
Hejinian, Lyn, 742–43, 862–63, 1144–145, 1149, Higher Vaudeville poetics, 511–13
1153–154, 1162 high modernism
Helen in Egypt (H.D.), 597–98 contemporary African American poetry
“Hellenist” (Reznikof ), 735–36 and, 1051
Heller, Michael, 733, 747 history of poetry and, 1–2
Helmbold, George, 446–47 Millay and, 632
Helmets (Dickey), 807–08 Objectivist Movement and, 729–30, 741
Helms, Jesse, 878 Highwayman, The (Noyes), 1118–119
Hemans, Felicia, 217–18, 219 Hijo del Pueblo: New Mexico Poems
Henderson, Dave, 1060–1061 (Quintana), 961–62
Henderson, Stephen, 1059 Hijuelos, Oscar, 972–73
Henley, Samuel, 145–48 Hill, Geofrey, 751
Henry Holt publishers, 508–11 Hill, Thomas, 287–89
Hentz, Caroline Lee, 292–93 Hillman, Brenda, 1146, 1152
Heraclitus, 876–77 Hills journal, 1152–153
Herbert, George, 67, 80–81, 771–73 Hillyer, Robert, 8
“Herbert White” (Bidart), 1014–1015 Hindemith, Paul, 330–31
“Her Child Playing with a Watch” Hine, Daryl, 938–39
(Osgood), 182 Hirsch, Edward, 944–47
Hereford, Oliver, 438 Hirsch, Robin, 1109–110
“Here in Katmandu” ( Justice), 809–11 Historia de la Nueva México (History of New
“Heritage” (Cullen), 707 Mexico) (Pérez de Villagrá), 49–50
Herland (Gilman), 473 Historia de las Indias (Las Casas), 44–45
“Hermes of the Ways” (H.D.), 590–91 Historical and Statistical Information
Herms, George, 838–41 Concerning the History, Condition,
Hernández Cruz, Victor, 968–69 and Prospects of the Indian Tribes
“Hero, The” (Moore), 617 of the United States (Schoolcraft),
Heroes, The (Ashbery), 844–46 254–56
heroic couplet, in American poetry, 177 History (Lowell), 752–53, 762–63
Herrera, Juan Felipe, 964–65, 966, 1123–124, “History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon’s
1154–155 Rebellion, The” (Cooke), 114–15
Herself Deined: The Poet H.D. and Her World History of My Heart, The (Pinsky), 940–44
(Guest), 862–64 History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination
Hesperia (Wilde), 187–88 of the American Revolution (Warren),
Hesse, Karen, 1118–119 134–35
Hewitt, Mary E., 179–81 His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Berryman).
Hiawatha. See Song of Hiawatha See The Dream Songs (Berryman)
(Longfellow) Hofer, Matthew, 670–97
“Hiawatha’s Photographing” (Carroll), Hofman, Charles Fenno, 183
254–56 Hofman, Daniel, 493
Hickory Hill Club, 118–20 Hofman, Tyler, 472–91
“Hidden Rhymes” (Hollander), 1092–1094 Hofmann, Roald, 932–33
Hiegel, L. C., 468 Holdsworth, Edward, 118–20

1238
 Index

hole-hole bushi labor songs, 984 homophobia, in playground poetry,

Holiday, Billie, 1067–1068 1116–118
Holland, Elizabeth, 370 homosexuality. See also gay poetry; queer
Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 282 studies; sexuality
Hollander, John, 1081, 1092–1094 in Chicano poetry, 964–65
Holley, Marietta, 456–57 cowboy poetry movement and, 471
Holman, Bob, 1153 Duncan’s discussion of, 877–78
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 256–57, 384–86 in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 827–28
Atlantic Monthly and, 282 in Hughes’s poetry, 716–17
Fireside Poets and, 259–61, 404, 497 in Lorca’s poetry, 833–34
poetry and career of, 267–73 in Lowell’s poetry, 513–15
works in McClatchy’s poetry, 909–11
“An After-Dinner Poem,” 270–71 in Merrill’s poetry, 894–911
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 267, in O’Hara’s poetry, 858–60
271–73 in post-Revolutionary poetry, 169–71
“The Chambered Nautilus,” 271–73 Rich’s poetry and, 889
“The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” 270–71 in “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 340
“The Deacon’s Wonderful One- in Stein’s poetry, 1158–159
Horse Shay,” 448 in Whitman’s work, 330–32, 349–50
Elsie Venner, 267 “Homosexual in Society, The” (Duncan),
“Old Ironsides,” 268 877–78
“The Physiology of “Homunculus” (Bogan), 643–44
Versiication,” 270 Hong, Cathy Park, 999
“Poetry, a Metrical Essay,” 268–70 Hongo, Garrett, 986–87, 989, 992
Holmes, Richard, 915–16 Hood, Thomas, 217–18
Holocaust, Plath’s references to, 1008–1009 Hook, Sidney, 803–06
“Holy Innocents, The” (Lowell), 756–57 Hooker, Samuel, 98–101
Hom, Marlon K., 984 hooligan dialect verse, 468
“Homage to Emerson, on Night Flight to Ho‘omānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary
New York” (Warren), 803–06 Hawaiian Literature (Balaz),
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Berryman), 1134–135
756–57, 769–70 Hooper, Ellen Sturgis, 183–86, 202–03,
“Homage to Theodore Dreiser” (Warren), 214–15
803–06 Hoosier Lyrics (Field), 465–68
“Home” (Lowell), 765–67 “Hoosier Lyrics Paraphrased” (Field),
“Home, Sweet Home” (Payne), 167–69, 179 465–68
“Home after Three Months Away” Hoover, Paul, 1153
(Lowell), 1005 “Hope, A” (Gilman), 478
Home Book of Verse, The (Stevenson), 247–48 Hope of Liberty, The (Horton), 292–93
“Home Burial” (Frost), 524, 532–33 Hopi people, poetry of, 25
Homecoming (Sanchez), 1056–1057 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 174, 753–54, 771–73,
Homecoming Singer, The (Wright), 1061–1063 1079–1080
“Homes: A Sestina” (Gilman), 474–75 Hopkinson, Francis, 133–42, 461
Home to Harlem (McKay), 706–07 Hopper, Dennis, 838–41
homology, in New York School poetry, Horace, inl uence in southern poetry
846–51 of, 118

1239
 Index

Horton, George Moses, 292–93, 294–95, Piatt and, 410

302–03, 316–19 realist poetry of, 413–15
Horton Hears a Who (Seuss), 1110 How(ever) newsletter, 862–63
Hosiery Seams on a Bowleged Woman “How Everything Happens (Based on a
(Moss), 1030–1031, 1033 Study of the Wave)” (Swenson),
Hotel Lautréamont (Ashbery), 861 928–29
Houghton, H. O., 259 “How I Got That Name: An Essay on
Houghton Mil in Company, 499, 508–11 Assimilation” (Chin), 992–93,
Houghton Mil in Literary Fellowship, 778 1137–138
Hound and Horn magazine, 616–17, 806–07 “How I See Things” (Komunyakaa), 816–17
“House Below the Hill, The” (Piatt), 413 “Howl” (Ginsberg), 824–25, 827–28
Houseboat Days (Ashbery), 861 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg),
“House by the Side of the Road, The” 827–28, 1098
(Frost), 462 “How Long Has Trane Been Gone”
“House Fly, The” (Merrill), 898–900 (Cortez), 1063–1064
household poetry, children’s poetry as, “How Old Brown Took Harper’s Ferry”
428–29 (Stedman), 408–09
House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 964 How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
House on Marshland, The (Glück), 1018 (Scalapino), 838–41
“House on the Hill, The” (Robinson), 505 Hsin-fu Wand, David, 986–87
“Housewife, The” (Gilman), 475 Hubbell, Jay B., 115
Houston, James, 32–33 Huck’s Raft (Mintz), 425–26
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, 985–86 Hudgins, Andrew, 811–13
Hovey, Richard, 500, 501–02 Hudibrastic verse, 118–20, 126–27, 140
“How About the Man?” (Gilman), 479 Hudson, Jean, 1056–1057
Howard, Richard, 815, 908–09, 1081, 1146 Hudson Review, 947–48
Howard, William Meredith, 536–37 Hudson River School, 166–67, 173–74,
“How Betsy and I Made Up” (Carleton), 178
457–59 Hughes, Frieda, 1007–1008
Howe, Fanny, 8, 1149–150 Hughes, Langston
Howe, Julia Ward African connections of, 719–20
Civil War and poetry of, 282, 295–97 Baraka and, 1052–1056
legacy of, 372–73 birth and early life of, 702
Romantic poetry of, 186 Black Arts Movement and, 722
works, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Brooks and, 1049–1050
307, 310–11, 322 children’s poetry by, 438–42, 1104, 1105,
Howe, Susan, 790–91 1106–107, 1118
Howells, William Dean, 256–57 contemporary African American poetry
on Carleton’s poetry, 457–59 and, 1051, 1074
on Crane’s writing, 485–86 contemporary poetry and inl uence
on Dunbar’s dialect poems, 394 of, 1159
on Fireside Poets, 468–69, 497 early poetry of, 702–03, 704–06
Gilman and, 473–74 free verse by, 551–52
on Markham’s poetry, 481 Harlem Renaissance and, 645, 706–07
Melville’s poetry reviewed by, 319 and homosexuality, 716–17
New England tradition and, 259 international activism of, 709, 719–20

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jazz and blues in poetry of, 519, 628–29, Montage of a Dream Deferred, 714–17,
704–06, 713–17 720–22, 1074
journalism of, 710–12 “Mother to Son,” 704–06, 714–17
Kaufman and, 831–33 “Mulatto,” 704–06
literary criticism by, 708–09 Mule Bone (Hughes and Hurston),
Millay and, 632 711
modernist poetry of, 628, 701–23 “Negro,” 1137–138
opera librettos by, 713 “The Negro Artist and the Racial
politics of, 711 Mountain,” 708–09
prose writing of, 711 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”
Rampersad’s biography of, 718 702–03, 704
Sanchez and, 1056–1057 Not Without Laughter, 711
theater productions by, 711, 713, 722–23 “Parisian Beggar Woman,” 1106–107
translations by, 712 “Passing Love,” 1106–107
Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30 Poems from Black Africa, 719–20
works The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1749,
African Treasury, 719–20 712, 727
Afrika Singt, 709 Popo and Fiina (Hughes and
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Bontemps), 711–12
720–22 “Scottsboro,” 709
“Ballads of Lenin,” 710–11 Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a
The Big Sea, 706–07, 711 Play in Verse, 718–19
“The Bitter River,” 713–14 Selected Poems, 718–19
Black Nativity, 722–23 Street Scene (Hughes and Weil), 711
The Book of Negro Folklore, 711–12 “Theme for English B,” 714–17
The Book of Negro Humor, 711–12 “Trumpet Player: 52nd Street,” 714
“Bound No’th Blues,” 704–06, 718–19 The Ways of White Folks, 711
“Café: 3 A.M.,” 716–17 The Weary Blues, 702–03, 704–06, 716,
“Casualty,” 714–17 718–19
“Christ in Alabama,” 718–19 “Wide River,” 1106–107
Collected Poems, 718–19 “Youth,” 719–20
“Cubes,” 710–11 Hughes, Ted, 1007, 1146
“Dime,” 714–17 “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (Pound), 591
“Dream Boogie,” 714–17 Hugo, Richard, 771–73, 939, 1027–1028
The Dream Keeper, 711–12, 1105, works, “On Hearing a New
1106–107 Escalation,” 939
“Dreams,” 1104 Huguenots, Francophone epic poetry
Famous American Negroes, 711–12 and, 51–53
Fine Clothes to the Jew, 702–03, 713 Huidobro, Vicente, 949
“Goodbye Christ,” 710–11, 719 “Human Cylinders” (Loy), 587–89
“Harlem,” 716 humanism
I Wonder as I Wander, 711 Eliot’s writing on, 554–55
Jericho Jim Crow, 722–23 Stevens’s writing about, 654
Langston Hughes Reader, 719 humorous poetry
“Let America Be America Again,” 711 children’s poetry as, 1115–116
“Letter from Spain,” 710–11 criticism of, 450

1241
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humorous poetry (cont.) idealism

dialect, doggerel, and local color in, Harvard poets and, 502
445–69 New York School of poetry and, 406,
by Dunbar, 394–400 409–10
genre and local color poetry, 468 in Warren’s writing, 803–06
by New York School poets, 849 Idea of a Christian Society, The (Eliot), 555–56
Humphrey, Hubert H., 886–87 “Idea of Order at Key West, The”
Humphrey, Jane, 370 (Stevens), 656–57
Humphreys, David, 139–42, 147 Idle Man, The (Dana), 165–66
Hungarian Revolution, 829–31 Idyl of the South, An (Whitman), 400–01
Hunger, A (Brock-Broido), 1021–1023 “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of
“Hunter’s Moon – Eating the Bear” Picasso” (Stein), 576–78
(Oliver), 952–53 “If We Must Die” (McKay), 703–04
“Hunters of Men, The” (Whittier), 292–93 Ige, Philip K., 1134–135
hunting songs, in Native American poetry, Ignatow, David, 884–86
26, 31 “I Have Seen Black Hands” (Wright), 729
Huntsman, What Quarry? (Millay), 634 Iliad (Homer), 174–75, 798–99
Hurd, Clement, 442–43 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the
Hurricane Katrina, 9 Agrarian Tradition (Ransom), 795,
Hurston, Zora Neale, 637, 706–08, 1048 800–01
“Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day” “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose”
(Whitman), 351–52 (Dickinson), 370–72
Huyssen, Andreas, 605–06, 630–31 “Il Penseroso” (Milton), 1031–1032
“Hyla Brook” (Frost), 526–27 imagination, in Stevens’s poetry, 656–57
“Hymn” (Ammons), 918–19, 933–34 Imagist Movement, 8, 514–15
“Hymn of the Sea” (Whitman), 174–75 Levertov and, 879–80
“Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” Pound and, 670–72, 673–75, 733–35
(Donne), 1087–1088 I Met a Man (Ciardi), 1114
Hyperion: A Romance (Longfellow), 243–47 Imitations (Lowell), 759–60
immanence, in elegiac poetry, 88–90
“I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra” (Reed), Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, The (Espada),
1060–1061 970–71
“I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: Immigrants in Our Own Land (Baca),
The Natural History of a Vision” 964–65
(Warren), 803–06 immigration. See also Latino poetry and
I Am Joaquín: An Epic Poem (Gonzales), poetics
961–62 Aldrich’s poetry deploring, 414
I Am! Says the Lamb (Roethke), 1103–104 in Asian American poetry, 978–99
I Am the Darker Brother (Adof ), 1118 Chicano poetry and, 960–67
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head Executive Order 9066, 985–86
(Komunyakaa), 816–17 Jewish poetry concerning, 297–99
“I Cannot Forget with What Fervid poetry about, 290–95
Devotion” (Bryant), 174 Puerto Rican poetry and, 967–72
Iceworker Sings and Other Poems, The impersonality, Eliot’s poetics of, 549, 551–52,
(Montoya), 962 629–30
“Ichabod!” (Whittier), 263–64 Inada, Lawson Fusao, 981, 985–86, 987, 991

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In Advance of the Broken Arm (Duchamp), “In the Wilderness” (Boker), 313–15, 322
576–78 In Time and Place (Hollander), 1092–1094
“In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 674 “Into My Own” (Frost), 519–20, 521–22
“Inauguration Day: January 1953” (Lowell), “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” (Ashbery),
757–59 849–50
indentured servants, in staples colonies Into the Stone (Dickey), 807–08
poetry, 112–13 “Invisible Avant-Garde, The”
Independent March, The, 507–11 (Ashbery), 845
“Indian Names” (Sigourney), 290–92 Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 8, 962, 966,
“Indian Summer” (Teasdale), 645–46 1149–150
indigenous poetry. See Native American Irish Americans
poetry poetry about, 264–65
Indignant Generation, African American racism of, 315
poetry and, 1049–1050 Irmscher, Christoph, 192–213
“In Duty Bound” (Gilman), 474–75 “Ironman’s Song” (Menes), 974–75
Infelicia (Menken), 179–81 Iroquois Rite of Condolence (medicine text),
Inferno (Dante), 330–31 19, 33
Inlections of the Pen (Crumbley), 431 Irving, Washington, 173–74, 427–28
“In Honour of That High and Mighty Irwin, Wallace, 468
Princess Queen Elizabeth of “Isadore” (Pike), 230–31
Happy Memory” (Bradstreet), 73 “I See Chano Pozo” (Cortez), 1063–1064
“In Just –” (Cummings), 1104 “I Sigh for the Land of the Cypress and the
In Memoriam (Tennyson), 88–90, 1092–1094 Pine” (Dickson), 309
“In Memory of Radio” (Baraka), 1052–1056 “I Sing the Body Electric” (Whitman),
“Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” 332–34
(Bryant), 173–74 “Island, The” ( Jarrell), 790–91
internment experience, in Asian American Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
poetry, 983–86, 988–89 Immigrants on Angel Island (Lai et
“Interpretation of a Poem by Frost” al.), 983
(Moss), 536–37 Islets/Irritations (Bernstein), 1038
In the American Grain (Williams), “Israfel” (Poe), 221–22
565–66, 1160 “Italian Pictures” (Loy), 584–85, 595
In the American Tree (Silliman), 1028–1030 “Italy” (Pinkney), 187
“In the Depths of a Coal Mine” “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” (Emmett),
(Crane), 485 309–10, 318–19
“In the Evening” (Rich), 883 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes), 711
“In the Home Stretch” (Frost), 534–35 “I Would Fain Die a Dry Death”
“In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” (Gilman), 479
(Lazarus), 297–99
In the Mecca (Brooks), 1059–1060 “Jabberwocky” (Carroll), 438
In the Night Kitchen (Sendak), 1111–113 “Jacket of Gray, The” (Ball), 313–15, 321
In the Republic of Longing (Suárez), 973 Jackson, Andrew, 158–59, 161, 268
“In the Tradition” (Baraka), 1064–1065 Jackson, David, 900, 903–08
“In the Village” (Bishop), 758 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 372–73, 377–80
“In the Waiting Room” (Bishop), 785–87, Jackson, Major, 1073
790–91 Jackson, Sheldon, 622–23

1243
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Jackson, Stonewall (General), 312 “Fifty Years of American Poetry,”

Jackson, Virginia, 238–57, 283–84 784–85
Jacob’s Ladder, The (Levertov), 887–88 “The Island,” 790–91
“Jailer, The” (Plath), 1008–1009 Little Friend, Little Friend, 802–03
James, Henry, 274–75 Losses, 778–80, 802–03
James, William, 529–30, 545–46, 658, 783, “The Lost Children,” 787
803–06 The Lost World, 775–76, 777–80, 781–82,
“James Joyce’s Ulysses” (Loy), 592–93 784–85, 789, 790–91
Jameson, Fredric, 853–54 “Moving,” 778–80
“James Whitcomb Riley” (Dunbar), “Next Day,” 783, 785, 787
398–99 “The Night before the Night before
“Janet Waking” (Ransom), 796–98 Christmas,” 781–82, 787
“January Morning” (Williams), 564–65 “The One Who Was Diferent,”
Januzzi, Marissa, 588 790–91
Japanese poetry, Asian American poetry “The Player Piano,” 787–89, 790–91
and, 979–83 “The Schools of Yesteryear,” 1105
Jarman, Mark, 1030, 1031–1032, 1085–1086 Seven-League Crutches, 802–03
Jarmusch, Jim, 330–31 “Thinking of the Lost World,” 790–91
Jarrell, Randall The Woman at the Washington Zoo,
on American culture, 783–87 784, 787
Auden and, 906 World War II and poetry of, 795
Berryman and, 770–71 “Jarrell’s ‘Losses’: A Controversy”
Bishop and, 775–91 (Graham), 778–80
children’s poetry by, 789, 1103–104, Jarry, Alfred, 825–27, 831
1107–108 Jastrow, Joseph, 436–37
criticism by, 775–76, 778–80, 784–85, 871 “Jazz Fantasia” (Sandburg), 712
Dickey and, 807 jazz
early life, 777–78 Beat poetry and, 824–25, 1074
family life and teaching career of, 781 in Brooks’s work, 1049–1050
on Frost, 536 in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 827–28
literary reputation of, 776–77, 784 in Hughes’s poetry, 519, 628–29, 704–06,
Lowell and, 762–63, 777–78 713–17, 1074
mental illness of, 784–85 in Inada’s poetry, 991
as middle-generation poet, 750–51 in Kaufman’s poetry, 831–33
modernist poetry and, 4–6 in Komunyakaa’s poetry, 816–17,
national poetry and, 8 1068–1070
Pound and, 563 in Mackey’s poetry, 1070–1071
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1005–1006 “Jef and Joe: A True Incident of Creede
schoolroom poetry and, 1105 Camp, Colorado” (DeVere), 471
southern poetry and, 802–03, 817 Jefers, Robinson, 8, 838–41, 917
Taylor and, 815 Jefers, Susan, 1107–108
works Jeferson, Thomas, 145
The Bat-Poet, 789 Jenkins, Philip, 950–52
Blood for a Stranger, 777–78, 802–03 Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun, 978–99
“The End of the Line,” 802–03 Jericho Jim Crow (Hughes), 722–23
“The Face,” 787 Jess (artist), 838–41

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“Jesus” (Harper), 393–94 God’s Trombones, 706–07

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 435–36, 505 “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” 703–04
Jewish poetry “O Black and Unknown Bards,” 703–04
Levertov and, 879–81 Johnson, John Rosamond, 703–04
by Loy, 593–97 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 761–62
in mid-nineteenth century, 296–99 Johnson, Ronald, 8, 742–43, 883
Objectivist Movement and, 733–40 Johnson, Samuel (American poet), 183–86
postwar examples of, 1154–155 Johnson, Samuel (British writer), 78–79
“Jewish Cemetery at Newport, The” Johnson, Thomas, 78, 370, 375–77, 381
(Longfellow), 297–99 Johnston, Devin, 870
“Jim Bludso of the Prairie Bell” (Hay), Jonas, S. A., 313–15, 326
450–52 Jones, Angel, 879
Jim Marshall’s New Pianner and Other Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri
Western Stories (DeVere), 465–68 Jones, Rodney, 811–13
“Jimmy Jet and His TV Set” (Silverstein), Jones Act of 1917, 967
1115–116 “Jones’s Cotton Planter” (Stanton), 464–65
Jim’s Book (Merrill), 894–95 “Jones’s Private Argyment” (Lanier), 462
Joans, Ted, 1048–1049 Jonson, Ben, 91–93
Joglars journal, 1028–1030 Jordan, June, 1048–1049, 1118
John Brown’s Body (Benét), 8 Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30
“John Brown’s Body” (song), 310–11, 324–25 “Joseph Cornell” (O’Hara), 846–47
“John Brown’s Invasion” (Stedman), 408–09 “Josiah Allen’s Wife” (Bobbett), 456–57
“John Donne in California” (Clampitt), Jost, Walter, 533
1087–1088 journalism
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea- in Civil War poetry, 325–26
Pieces (Melville), 417–20 by Crane, 485, 487–88
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (Plath), mid-nineteenth-century poetry and,
1006–1007 300–03
Johns, Jasper, 844–46, 858–60 naturalist poetry and, 472–91
Yau and, 996–97 poetry and, 299–300
Johns, Orrick, 507 Whitman’s career in, 332–34, 346
Johnson, Andrew, 383 Journal of Negro History, 716
Johnson, Barbara, 231–32 “Journey from Patapasco to Annapolis, A”
Johnson, Clifton, 426 (Lewis), 118–22
Johnson, Edward, 65–66 Joyce, James
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 630–31, 636, 645 Brooks and, 1049–1050
Johnson, Helene, 636–39, 645, 647–48 Loy on, 592–93
Johnson, James Weldon, 398–400 Objectivism and, 733
barriers in South for, 795–96 psychoanalytic poetics and, 1012
Harlem Renaissance and, 637, 706–07 Joyous Leaping of Uncanned Salmon, The
literary legacy of, 701 (Seuss), 1110–112
works “Judge’s Poetic Venture, The” (Smith),
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored 453–55
Man, 399 Judith, Esther, and Other Poems (Brooks),
The Book of American Negro Poetry, 179–81
706–07 Juhasz, Suzanne, 950–52

1245
 Index

Julia (Payne), 167–69 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 283–84

junk art, 838–41 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 283–84
Justice, Donald, 795, 807, 809–11 “Ode to Autumn,” 284–85
Wright and, 813 “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,”
“Justice Denied in Massachusetts” 1086–1087
(Millay), 636 “On the Grasshopper and the
Juvenile Miscellany magazine, 434–35 Cricket,” 282–83
Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects, with Keene, John, 1073
the Prince of Parthia, a Tragedy Kees, Weldon, 750–51
(Godfrey), 135–36 Keller, Karl, 373
Keller, Lyn, 1156–158
“K, The” (Olson), 687 Kellogg, David, 1152–153, 1155–156, 1162–163
Kachel, Elsie (later Stevens), 651, 652–53, 655 Kelly, Mary, 434–35
Kaddish (Ginsberg), 1005 Kelly, Robert, 742–43
Kalevala cycle, 254–56, 459–60 Kelly, Walt, 1110
Kallman, Chester, 909–11 Keniston, Ann, 1154
Kalstone, David, 883, 897–98 Kennedy, Dorothy, 1107–108
“Kansas Emigrants, The” (Whittier), 263–64 Kennedy, John F., 330–31, 525, 535, 722–23,
Kansas-Nebraska Border War, 263–64 881–84, 1079–1080
Kant, Immanuel, 658 Kennedy, Robert, 752–53, 761–63
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 836–37 Kennedy, X. J., 1085–1086, 1107–108,
Karlof, Boris, 996–97 1109–110, 1113
Kasischke, Laura, 1154–155 Kenner, Hugh, 672, 676–77, 733
Katayama, Taro, 985–86 Kennerley, Mitchell, 508–11
“Kathleen” (Whittier), 264–65 Kenny, Maurice, 36
Kathrina (Holland), 282 “Kentucky Mountain Farm” sequence
Kaufman, Bob, 831–33, 1052 (Warren), 799–800
Asian inl uences on, 838–41 Kenyon Review, 796–98, 877–78
Beat poetry of, 823 Kerkering, John D., 383–401
blues and bebop in poetry of, 1051 Kerouac, Jack
contemporary African American poetry Asian inl uences on, 838–41
and, 1048–1049 Beat poetry and, 823, 825–27, 829–31
Semina culture and, 838–41 Ginsberg and, 827–28
Spicer and, 836–37 performance poetry by, 831
Kaya Press, 999 Key into the Language of America (Williams),
Kearny Street Workshop, 978–79 76–77, 1125–127
Kearns, Katherine, 521–22, 532 Key into the Language of America, A
Keats, John (Waldrop), 1125–130
Clampitt’s poetry and, 1086–1087 Key West: An Island Sheaf (Crane), 1159
early American poetry and, 68–69 Kilcup, Karen, 429, 519–20
inl uence on Dickinson, 283–84 Kilmer, Joyce, 1105–106
New York School of poetry and, 404, 409 Kilpatrick, Anna Gritts, 29–30
Poe and, 217–18, 219 Kilpatrick, Jack Frederick, 29–30
science and poetry of, 915–16 Kim, Myung Mi, 998–99, 1123, 1130–131, 1136,
works 1139–140
“The Eve of Saint Agnes,” 1086–1087 Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, 435–36

1246
 Index

King, Edward, 91–93 Kreymborg, Alfred, 508–11, 586–87, 606–08

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 702, 705, 762–63, Kristeva, Julia, 1008–1009
806–07, 881–84, 886–87 Kuenzli, Rudolf E., 586–87
King, Stephen, 1146 Kundiman, 999
“King Dines, The” (Howells), 414–15 Kunitz, Stanley
Kingisher, The (Clampitt), 1079–1080, authenticity and, 871
1085–1086 Deep Image poetry and, 771–73
“Kingishers, The” (Olson), 677–78, 688 Glück and, 1012–1013
“King of Harlem, The” (Lorca), 831–33 Lowell and, 760–61
“King of the Plow, The” (Haynes), 384–86 modernist poetry and, 750–51
King’s Henchman, The (Millay), 635 Kyd, Thomas, 554
King Ubu ( Jarry), 831 Kyger, Joanne, 823–24
King Ubu Gallery, 825–27, 831
Kinnahan, Linda, 599 La Araucana (Ercilla), 47–51
Kinnell, Galway, 884–86, 952–53, 1146 labor movement
Kinzie, Mary, 780–81 in Asian American poetry, 983–86
Kirkpatrick, James, 109–11, 117, 122–23 Markham’s poetry and, 480–84
Kirsch, Adam, 771–73, 1096, 1149, 1165 “La Bruja” (Caridad de la Luz), 969–70
Kirstein, Lincoln, 616–17, 806–07, 844–46 La Carreta Made a U-Turn (Laviera), 968–69
“Kiss, The” (Teasdale), 645–46 Ladies’ Home Journal, 605–06
Kizer, Carolyn, 771–73 Ladies Magazine, 434–35
Klein, Melanie, 789–90, 1008–1009 La Disparition (Perec), 1109–110
Kleinzahler, August, 8 Lady Alchemist, The (Philip), 875–76
Kline, Franz, 844–45 “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” (Browning),
Knickerbocker’s History of New York (Irving), 230–31
427–28 “Lady Laura in Bohemia” (Loy), 592–93
Knight, Etheridge, 1048–1049 “Lady Lazarus” (Plath), 1010–1011
“Knight of the Swan” (Guest), 862–64 Lafayette, Marquis de, in American poetry,
Knock at a Star (Kennedy), 1104, 1109–110 157–58
Knopf (Alfred A.) publishers, 508–11, 612–15, LaFlesche, Francis, 24–25, 31–32
702–03 Laforgue, Jules, 543–44
Koch, Kenneth “La Huelga” (Delgado), 960–61
contemporary poetry and, 1108–109 Laity, Cassandra, 590–91
literary reputation of, 856–65, 866 “Lake Superior” (Niedecker), 745–46
poetry of, 404, 559, 844–46, 848–50, 851, Lalla Rookh (Moore), 221–22
852–53 Lalley, Jim, 807–08
teaching career of, 862 La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge (Gaspar
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 751, 816–17, 1048–1049, de Alba), 964
1066–1067, 1068–1070, 1146–147 Laluah, Aquah. See Hayford, Gladys May
Kool Logic (Noel), 969–70 Casely
Kora in Hell (Williams), 558, 562, 563–64, Lamantia, Philip, 823–24, 825–27, 829, 838–41
565–66, 568–69, 670–71, 755 “Lamenta” (Kim), 1139–140
Korn, Harold, 1085 “Lamentations” (Glück), 1018
Koshy, Susan, 978 “Lament of the Captive” (Wilde), 187
Kozol, Jonathan, 708–09 “Lament of the Forest, The” (Cole), 178
Kramer, Hilton, 1085–1086 Lamplit Answer, The (Schnackenberg), 1096

1247
 Index

Lancelot (Robinson), 504–06 southern experience in poetry of, 316–18,

land narrative, in Native American 326–27
medicine texts, 22 works
Land of Unlikeness (Lowell), 755–56 “A Ballad of Trees and the Master,”
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 217–18 388–89
“Land’s End” (Teasdale), 645–46 “The Centennial Meditation of
Langham, Mackie (later Jarrell), 777–78 Columbia,” 388–89
“Langston Hughes” (Komunyakaa), “Civil Rights,” 386
1068–1070 “Corn,” 388–89, 462
Langston Hughes Reader (Hughes), 719 “Jones’s Private Argyment,” 462
language “Laughter in the Senate,” 386
in Asian American poetry, 995–96, “The Marshes of Glynn,” 388–89
997–98 The Science of English Verse, 387–88
in Chicano poetry, 960–61 “The Symphony,” 388–89, 462
in Clampitt’s poetry, 1088–1089 “Thar’s More in the Man than Thar
in Deep Image poetry, 884–86 Is in the Land,” 462
in McHugh’s poetry, 1095–1096 “Them Ku Klux,” 386
multilingualism in contemporary poetry “To Alexander Stephens,” 386–87
and, 1123–140 Lapham, Increase, 739
New York School poetics and role of, “La Piñata” (Soto), 962–63
846–51 la raza, Chicano poetry and, 960–61, 963–64
original language, in Native American Larcom, Lucy, 179–81, 183, 185, 282, 429
poetry, 20, 22–23 Lark magazine, 437
in Plath’s poetry, 1009 Larsen, Nella, 706–07
Language (Spicer), 837–38 Larson, Katherine, 933
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Andrews Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 45–47
and Bernstein), 1028–1030 Last Avant-Garde, The (Lehman), 866
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal, 865–66, Last Days Here (Chock), 1134–135
1028–1030, 1152–153 “Last Days of Alice” (Tate), 798–99
Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of “Last Walk?” (Lowell), 765–67
America, 837–38 “Latest Hotel Guest Walks over Particles
Language Movement That Revolve in Seven Other
Asian inl uences in, 838–41 Dimensions Controlling Latticed
Beat poets and, 837–38 Space, The” (Stone), 927–28
Bernstein and, 1038–1045 Latham, Harold, 618, 619, 622
Fence magazine and, 1149–150 Latham, Sean, 605–06
Guest and, 862–63 La tierra prometida (Soto Vélez), 968–69
lyric poetry and, 1152–153 Latino poetry and poetics, 959–76.
modernist poetry and, 8, 742–43, 745 See also Afro-Latino poetry;
Moss and, 1031–1038, 1045 Chicano poetry; Cuban American
Mullen and, 1071–1073 poetry; Puerto Rican poetry
New York School and, 865–66 multilingual poetry, 1131
in 1980s, 1028–1030 pan-Latino identity and, 975–76
Lanier, Sidney “La Tortilla” (Soto), 962–63
aesthetics of sound in poetry of, Laughlin, James, 686–87, 742
400–01 “Laughter in the Senate” (Lanier), 386

1248
 Index

“Laura’s Answer” (Graeme), 135–36 leftist poetry

Lauterbach, Anne, 865–66 Asian American poetry and, 983–86
Laviera, Tato, 968–69 Depression-era emergence of, 728–29
Law, John, 53–56 modernist poetics and, 729–32
Lawrence, D. H., 824 Objectivists and, 728–47
Lawson, JonArno, 1109–110 LeGarde-Grover, Linda, 15–16
“Lay of Gratitude, The” (Bryan), 157–58 Legends from Camp (Inada), 985–86, 991
Lay of the Last Minstrel, The (Scott), 158–59 Lehman, David, 866
Lay of the Scottish Fiddle, The (Scott), 158–59 Leighton, Angela, 659
Lazarus, Emma, 2–3, 297–99 Leithauser, Brad, 1085–1086
Lazer, Hank, 571–72 Leland, Charles G., 452–53
“Leaf from the Devil’s Jest-Book, A” Lemay, J. A. Leo, 116, 118–20
(Markham), 483–84 Lensing, George S., 650–68
Lealets (Rich), 882 Lentricchia, Frank, 521–22
Leahy, Anna, 933 Leonin, Mia, 974
“Leaping Up into Political Poetry” Leonora (Howe), 186
(Bly), 887 León-Portilla, Miguel, 32–33
Lear, Edward, 438 “Les Bourgeois” (Lodge), 499–500
“Learning to Read” (Harper), 392 Lescarbot, Marc, 51–53, 61–63
“Leaves-Droppings” (Whitman), 337 “Les Luths” (O’Hara), 858–60
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 344–46 “Les Plus Belles Pages” (Stevens), 656
Bryant’s inl uence on, 174–75 “Let America Be America Again”
“Calamus” poetic cluster in, 349–50 (Hughes), 711
Civil War poems in, 341–43 Le Testament (Villon), 852–53
commercial failure of, 238–39 Letter from America (Bulosan), 985
cultural legacy of, 330–31 “Letter from Spain” (Hughes), 710–11
ecological elements in, 344–46 “Letters from Jerusalem” (Clampitt),
editions of, 334–37, 340–41, 343–44, 353–55 1083–1085
elegiac poetry and, 102–04 Letters Home (Plath), 1006–1007
evolution of, 331–32 Letters to Wendy’s (Wenderoth), 1154
fantasy in, 209 “Letters to Zanzotto” (Palmer), 1154–155
“Howl” inl uenced by, 827–28 “Letter to The Amherst Student” (Frost), 522,
Hughes’s comments on, 702 534–35
manuscripts of, 332–34 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and
phrenology in, 343–44 Evans), 731–32
printing diiculties with, 336–37 Levertov, Denise
prose prefaces to, 334–36, 337 antiwar movement and, 886–89, 890–91
publication of, 254–56 authenticity in work of, 870
reviews of, 343 Duncan and, 874, 875–79, 880–81
sexuality in, 347–49 literary criticism by, 560–61, 670, 684–85
Leavis, F. R., 940–44 Objectivism and, 741
Lectures on the English Poets (Hazlitt), 165–66 poetry in 1960s by, 879–81
Lee, Dennis, 1111–112 Rich and, 874–75, 883
Lee, Don L. See Madhubuti, Haki works
Lee, Li-Young, 987, 989–92 A Door in the Hive, 890–91
Leedle Yawcub Strauss (Adams), 468 The Double Image, 879–80

1249
 Index

Levertov, Denise (cont.) “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ( Johnson),

The Jacob’s Ladder, 887–88 703–04
“Life at War,” 888–89 Lifting Belly (Stein), 1158–159
O Taste and See, 887–88 “Ligeia” (Poe), 228
“Some Duncan Letters – A Memoir “Lighght” (Saroyan), 878
and a Critical Tribute,” 880–81 Light in the Attic, A (Silverstein), 1115–116
To Stay Alive, 888–89 “Lightnin’ Blues” (Dove), 1067–1068
With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”
887–88 (Stevens), 664
Wright and, 874 Lille, Alain de, 68
Levine, Mark, 1149–150 “Lily’s Delusion, The” (Osgood), 182
Levine, Philip, 937–38, 944–47, 1146–147, Lin, Tan, 999
1161–162 Lincoln, Abraham
Levy, Julian, 594–95 black soldiers in Union Army and, 315
Lew, Walter K., 986–87 elegies for, 316–18
Lewallen, Constance, 995–96 poetry about, 311–12
Lewinsky, Monica, 330–31 Sandburg’s biography of, 515–16
Lewis, H. H., 729 Whitman’s elegies for, 352–53
Lewis, Richard, 109–11, 116, 118–22 Lincoln, Joseph C., 468
Lewis, Wyndham, 605–06 Lincoln, Kenneth, 35–36
on Stein, 576–78 “Lincoln, the Man of the People”
lexicography, British poetry and, 130 (Markham), 483
“Liar, The” (Baraka), 1052–1056 Lincoln and Other Poems (Markham), 483
Liberator (newspaper), 263–64, 703–04 Lincoln University, 702
Liberty, A Poem on the Independence of Lindsay, Vachel, 507, 511
America (Tucker), 146 Hughes and, 712
Library of Congress, poetry consultant modernist poetry of, 500, 511–13
to. See poetry consultant to the performances of poetry by, 629–30
Library of Congress self-publication by, 613–14
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (Tolson), works
806–07, 1051, 1161–162 The Congo and Other Poems, 508
Lice, The (Merwin), 947–50 “General William Booth Enters into
Lieder, Cecilia, 38–39 Heaven,” 507–08, 511–13
“Life at War” (Levertov), 888–89 Lines Long and Short (Fuller), 468
Life magazine, 605–06 “Lines Suggested by Hearing Music on
Lowell in, 756–57 the Boston Common at Night”
“Life of James Revel, The” (Revel), 112–13 (Cole), 178
Life Studies (Lowell) “Lines to a Waterfowl” (Bryant), 173, 174,
authenticity in, 870–71 431–34
autobiographical elements in, 752–53 “Lines to Hon. Thaddeus Stevens”
Bidart on, 1014 (Harper), 390–94
critical assessment of, 757–59, 775–76, “Lines to Miles O’Reiley” (Harper), 315
781–82, 784, 1145 linguistics
poetics of, 750 British poetry and, 130
psychoanalytic poetics in, 1003–1004 multilingualism in contemporary poetry
religious issues in, 753 and, 1123–140

1250
 Index

in Spicer’s poetry, 837–38 Locus Solus magazine, 844–46

lipogrammatic poetry, 1109–110 Lodge, George Cabot, 499–500, 502, 503
Literary Digest, The, 507–11, 605–06 Loefelholz, Mary, 282–303
literary history Logan, William, 1085–1086
African American poets’ status in, 701, Lomax, Alan, 707–08
1048–1049 London Critic, 235–36
American poetry of 1960s and, 869–91 London Magazine, 126–27
American Renaissance narratives, 267 Longenbach, James, 775–76, 778–80, 939–40,
children’s poetry in, 425–43 1145, 1161
genteel tradition in, 403–21 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 4, 165–66,
methodology for, 6 238–57
new additions to, 1–2 accessibility of poetry by, 249–52
New York School of poetry in, 404–10 Atlantic Monthly and, 282
response to Native American poetry children’s poetry and, 425–26, 431–34,
in, 18–19 1118–119
role of American poetry in, 1–10 diminished reputation of, 239–40
Whitman’s legacy in, 330–31 Fireside Poets and, 259–61, 404, 497
literary nationalism, emergence of, 155–75 Frost and, 519–20
Literary Review, 798–99 Fuller’s criticism of, 242–43
“Literati of New York” (Poe), 217–18 Hughes and, 712
“Literature as Symptom” (Warren), 803–06 Lazarus and, 297–99
Littell’s Living Age, 605–06 legacy of, 256–57, 701
Little Book of Modern Verse, The on Mexican War, 196
(Rittenhouse), 507–08 Native American culture in poetry of,
Little Book of Western Verse, A (Field), 465–68 37–38, 240–41
Little Friend, Little Friend ( Jarrell), 802–03 Poe and, 217–18, 243–47
“Little Lobelia’s Song” (Bogan), 644 popular success of, 240–42
Little Longfellow War, 243–47 satires of, 459–60
“Little Love, The” ( Johnson), 639 Whitman’s assessment of, 238–39, 243–47
“Little Orphant Annie” (Riley), 438–42, works
465–68 The Courtship of Miles Standish, 241–42
Little Review, The, 508–11 Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, 37–38,
Little Review magazine, 586–87, 605–06 241–42, 252–54, 301–02
Liu, Timothy, 999 “Excelsior,” 249–52
“Live Oak” poems (Whitman), 349–50 The Golden Legend, 241–42
Liveright, Horace, 612–15 Hyperion: A Romance, 243–47
Livingston, Myra Cohn, 1108–109, 1111–112 “My Lost Youth,” 239–40
local color poetry Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea,
criticism of, 450 241–42
iction and, 409–10 “Paul Revere’s Ride,” 241–42, 256–57,
historical evolution of, 468 431–34
popular verse and, 445–69 Poems on Slavery, 241–42, 249–52
of southern poets, 464–65 “A Psalm of Life,” 248–49, 431–34
Western poetry as, 465–68 “The Skeleton in Armor,” 249–52
Location of Things, The (Guest), 862–64 The Song of Hiawatha, 37–38, 238–39,
Locke, Alain, 702–03 241–42, 282, 459–60, 1118–119

1251
 Index

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (cont.) of Millay, 632

Tales of a Wayside Inn, 256–57, 282, in Native American poetry, 26–27
501–02 by Poe, 232–33
“The Village Blacksmith,” 249–52, from staples colonies, 117
431–34 by Williams, 568
“The Wreck of the Hesperus,” Love Poems (Sanchez), 1056–1057
247–48 Love Poems (Tentative Title) (O’Hara), 858–60
Longfellow, Samuel, 183–86 “Lovers, The” (Merrill), 896–97, 898–900
Long Island Patriot newspaper, 332 Love Song (Maliseet poem), 26–27
“Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Love Song (Thompson), 30–31
Today” (Baraka), 1052–1056 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 473 (Eliot), 544–45, 546–47, 548–49, 550,
Lorca, Federico García, 712 799–800
Beat Movement and, 831–33 “Love Supreme, A” (Coltrane), 1057–1058
Kaufman and, 1052 Lowell, Amy, 500
Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30 free verse by, 551–52
Lord, Otis ( Judge), 365–66, 377–79 Imagist Movement and, 672
Lorde, Audre, 889, 1048–1049, 1059–1060 Lowell (Robert) and, 752–53
Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), 750, 752–53, modernist poetry by, 511, 513–15
756–57, 870–71 works
Lorre, Peter, 996–97 Can Grande’s Castle, 514–15
“Losing Track of Language” “The Captured Goddess,” 513–15
(Clampitt), 1088 “Flotsam,” 514–15
Losses ( Jarrell), 778–80, 802–03 “Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate
Lost Cause, in Southern poetry, 316–18, Swings,” 514–15
462–64 “Orange of Midsummer,” 514–15
“Lost Children, The” ( Jarrell), 787 “Patterns,” 514–15
“Lost in Translation” (Merrill), 902–03 Pictures of the Floating World, 513–15
“Lost Pleiad, The” (Simms), 188–89 “September 1918,” 514–15
“Lost Son, The” (Roethke), 756–57, 771–73 “The Sisters,” 513–15
Lost World, The ( Jarrell), 775–76, 777–80, “Spring Day,” 514–15
781–82, 784–85, 789, 790–91 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, 508
Lott, Eric, 462–64 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,
Louisiana, in early American poetry, 53–56 513–14
Love among the Gamins, and Other Poems “Towns in Colour,” 514–15
(Proudit), 468 Lowell, Harriet, 762–63
Love and Fame (Berryman), 770–71 Lowell, James Russell, 513
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the as Atlantic Monthly editor, 282
American Working Class (Scott), Dana and, 165–66
462–64 Fireside Poets and, 260–61, 404, 497
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This Hughes and, 712
World” (Wilbur), 1033–1034 Leland and, 452–53
love charms, in Native American Longfellow and, 256–57
poetry, 29–30 Lowell (Robert) and, 752–53
love poems Poe and, 217–18, 219–20, 226–27, 233–34
Dickinson’s Master Letters as, 375–77 poetry and career of, 273–79

1252
 Index

works “The Holy Innocents,” 756–57

The Biglow Papers, 273, 275–77, 282, 448 “Home,” 765–67
“Commemoration Ode,” 277–79 “Home after Three Months
“The Courtin’,” 448 Away,” 1005
A Fable for Critics, 273, 275 Imitations, 759–60
“Tempora Mutandur,” 274–75 “Inauguration Day: January 1953,”
Lowell, Percival, 752–53 757–59
Lowell, Robert, 4–6, 503–04 Land of Unlikeness, 755–56
antiwar eforts of, 886 “Last Walk?,” 765–67
authenticity in poetry of, 870–71 Life Studies, 750, 752–53, 757–59, 775–77,
Berryman and, 753–54, 765–67, 770–71 1003–1004, 1014
Bidart and, 751, 1012–1013, 1014 Lord Weary’s Castle, 750, 752–53,
Bishop and, 752–53, 759, 767–68, 775, 756–57, 870–71
778–80, 781–82 “Memories of West Street and
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 Lepke,” 758–59
as conscientious objector, 758–59 The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 756–57
culture poetry and, 1083 “Mother Marie Therese,” 756–57
European travel by, 1080 “Near the Ocean,” 752–53, 761–62
family history of, 752–53 “91 Revere Street,” 757–59
Frost and, 536–37 Notebook, 752–54, 762–63
Glück and, 1019–1020 “Notice,” 765–67
Jarrell and, 762–63, 777–78 “The Quaker Graveyard in
Justice and, 809–11 Nantucket,” 756–59
literary reputation of, 751, 767, 784, 1145 “Runaway,” 765–67
as middle-generation poet, 750–67 “Sailing Home from Rapallo,” 758–59
O’Hara and, 858–60 “Skunk Hour,” 753, 758–59
Plath and, 751, 776–77, 1007 “To Allen Tate 3. Michael Tate
poetic development of, 755–67 August 1967–July 1968,” 762–63
psychoanalytic poetics of, 644–45, 752–54, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,”
756–57, 765–67, 1003–1004, 1005–1006 761–62
Roethke and, 771–73 “Waking in the Blue,” 752–53, 758–59,
Williams and, 560–61 1019–1020
works “Words for Hart Crane,” 1161–162
“At the Dentist,” 762–63 “Words for Muin, a Guinea Pig,”
“Beyond the Alps,” 753 762–63
“Central Park,” 761–62 Lowell, Robert Sheridan, 764–65
Collected Poems, 752–53, 1016–1017 Lowery, Joseph (Reverend), 703–04
“Commander Lowell,” 757–59 Löwy, Michael, 733
Day by Day, 752–54, 765–67 Loy, Mina, 508–11, 560–61
The Dolphin, 762–63, 764–65 American view of, 592
“Eye and Tooth,” 760–61 avant-gardism and poetry of, 584, 586
For Lizzie and Harriet, 762–63 early life of, 583–84
“For the Union Dead,” 503–04, 752–53, feminism and poetry of, 584–85
760–61 Futurism and, 587–89
“Fourth of July in Maine,” 761–62 H.D. compared with, 591
History, 752–53, 762–63 modernist poetry of, 583–99

1253
 Index

Loy, Mina (cont.) “Lycidas” (Milton), 88–90, 91–93, 94, 102–04,

poetics of, 592–97 756–57, 798–99
science in poetry of, 916 Lye, Colleen, 984
works “Lynched” (Stanton), 464–65
“America, Heroica,” 598–99 lynching
“America * A Miracle,” 584, 598–99 in African American poetry, 396, 713–14,
“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” 584, 816–17
587–89, 593–97 in southern poetry, 464–65
“Aphorisms on Futurism,” 584, in Tate’s poetry, 806–07
587–89 Lyon, Richard, 67
“Apology of Genius,” 592–93, 596 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 167–68,
“At the Door of the House,” 584–85 245–47, 733
“The Black Virginity,” 584–85 lyric poetry
“Brontolivido,” 587–89 Asian American poetry as, 989–90
“Café du Néant,” 589–90 contemporary examples of, 1152–153
“Crab-Angel,” 592–93 in early America, 56–60
“Der Blinde Junge,” 592–93 German-language, 60–61
“The Efectual Marriage,” 587–89 in New Netherland, 61–63
“Gertrude Stein,” 592–93, 916 New York School of poetry and, 404–10
“Giovanni Franchi,” 587–89 in 1980s poetics, 1027–1028
“Human Cylinders,” 587–89 in nineteenth century, 245–47
“Italian Pictures,” 584–85, 595 psychoanalytic poetics and, 1017–1021
“James Joyce’s Ulysses,” 592–93 Lyrics of New England (Flagg), 468
“Lady Laura in Bohemia,” 592–93 Lyrics of the West (McMillan), 468
“Modern Poetry,” 584, 594–95 Lyric Year, The (Earle), 507–08
“Parturition,” 587–89
“The Sacred Prostitute,” 587–89 Mabbott, T. O., 221–22
“Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” “Mabel Martin, a Harvest Idyl” (Whittier),
587–89 264–65
“Time-Bomb,” 587–89 MacArthur, Marit J., 535
“To You,” 594 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 225
“Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” MacDonald, Dwight, 877–78
584–85 MacDonald, Ruth K., 1115–116
Loyalist poets, in American Revolutionary Machado, Antonio, 871–74
era, 141–42 Mackey, Nathaniel, 1066–1067, 1070–1071
“Loyal Woman’s ‘No,’ A” (Larcom), Mullen and, 1071–1073
282 Macmillan publishers, 508–11, 613–14
Lucretius, 914–15 Moore’s poetry for, 618–24
“Luke Havergal” (Robinson), 504–06 Maderno, Carlo, 1081–1082
“Lullaby” (Dunbar), 398 Made to Seem (Armantrout), 1149–152
Lum, Darrell H. Y., 1133–134 Madhubuti, Haki, 1048–1049, 1055–1057,
Luna, Blas Manuel de, 962 1067–1068
Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables (Loy), 588, “Mad Lover at the Grave of His Mistress,
589–90, 600 The” (Allston), 163–65
Lunch Poems (O’Hara), 858–60, 862 magazine publications. See also poetry
Luyck, Aegidius, 61–63 magazines

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American modernism and, 586–87 Man Who Sang the Sillies, The (Ciardi), 1114
for children, 434–35 “Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad, The”
Depression and politicization of, 616–17 (Stevens), 656–57
modernist poetry and evolution of, “Man with the Hoe, The” (Markham),
604–08 480–82, 507–08
New Poetry/New Verse Movement and, Man with the Hoe and Other Poems, The
508–11 (Markham), 482–83
nineteenth-century poetry published in, Manzarek, Ray, 831
229–30 “Map, The” (Bishop), 778, 790–91
printing technology and, 307 “March, The” (Gilman), 473–74
Magie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 485 “Marco Bozzaris” (Halleck), 169–71
Magic World, The (Brandon), 32–33 “Marginalia” (Poe), 217–18
Mailer, Norman, 752–53 Margins (Brooks), 502–03
Maine Anti-Slavery Society, 293–95 “Marguerite” (Whittier), 264–65
Maintains, The (Coolidge), 864–65 Mariani, Paul, 769–70
Major, Clarence, 1059–1060, 1070–1071 Marinetti, F. T., 519, 589–90
Makin, Peter, 679–80 “Mariposa” (Teresa Fernández), 969–70
Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Water (Naone Maritain, Jacques, 743–45
Hall), 1134–135 Markham, Edwin, 473, 480–84
Malanga, Gerard, 694 Markland, John, 116
“malcolm” (Clifton), 1065–1066 Marmion (Scott), 143–44
Malcolm X, in African American poetry, marriage rituals. See also courtship
1058–1059, 1065–1066 in Native American poetry, 26–27
Maliseet poetry, 26–27 Puritan view of, 74–75
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 837–38, 863, 979–83 Marsden, Dora, 589–90
Malraux, André, 1083–1085 Marshall, Margaret, 778–80
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” “Marshes of Glynn, The” (Lanier), 388–89
(Spillers), 1048 Martin, Alexander, 133, 141–42, 143–44
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Martin, Robert K., 1161
(Hijuelos), 972–73 Martin, Wendy, 360–80
“Mamie” (Sandburg), 490–91 Martínez, Dionisio D., 974
“man adrift on a slim spar, A” (Crane), “Martyr, The” (Cranch), 316–18
489–90 Marvell, Andrew, 526, 753–54
“Managing the Unconscious” (Bogan), 643 Marx, Edward, 981
“Man Alone” (Bogan), 643 Marxism, 728–29, 736–37.
“Manassas” (Warield), 312 See also communism
Mandan/Hidatsa poetry, 26–27 Mary Dawson Game Book, The (Dawson),
Mann, Thomas, 519 428–29
“Manners” (Bishop), 777–78 “Maryland Eclogues, The” (Cradock), 118
Man Ray, 560–61, 586–87 Maryland Gazette, staples colonies poetry
May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An in, 117, 120–22, 123–25
Anthology of Japanese American “Mary’s Lamb” (Hale), 425, 434–35, 1105–106
Concentration Camp Haiku (De “Masaccio’s Expulsion” (Graham),
Cristoforo), 985–86 1098–1100
Manson, Michael, 1061–1063 masculine heroism, southern trope of, 309
“Manteau” (Graham), 1147–149 “Mask of Anarchy, The” (Shelley), 729

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 Index

“Masks” (Moore), 606–08 McAlmon, Robert, Williams and, 560–61

Massachusetts 54th Regiment, 315, 323–24, McCarthy, Eugene, 761–62, 807–08, 1085
503–04, 760–61 McCarthy, Joseph, 719
Masses magazine, 508–11, 729 McClatchy, J. D., 907, 909–11, 1085–1086,
Master Letters (Dickinson), 370–72, 375–77 1094–1095
Master Letters, The (Brock-Broido), McClure, Michael, 823–24, 825–27, 831,
1021–1023, 1154 838–41
Masters, Edgar Lee, 490–91, 511 McClure’s Magazine, 465–68, 485
modernist poetry of, 500, 511–13 Moore’s poetry in, 606–08
Robinson and, 504–06 McClurg, James, 145, 146
works McCord, David, 1105–106, 1111–112
The Domesday Book, 511–13 McCoy, Samuel Duf, 606–08
The New Spoon River, 511–13 McCulloch, Hugh, 502
The New World, 511–13 McDowell, Robert, 1030
Spoon River Anthology, 490–91, 504–06, McGann, Jerome, 300–01, 604–05
508, 511–13 McGufey’s Reader series, 431–35, 1105
Masters of the Dew (Roumain), 712 McGurl, Mark, 1136–137, 1152
“Master Speed, The” (Frost), 534 McHugh, Heather, 1095–1096, 1149–150
Materialism (Graham), 1098–1100, 1149 McKay, Claude
Materials, The (Oppen), 743–45 Caribbean roots of, 712
Mather, Cotton Harlem Renaissance and, 703–06
elegies collected by, 96–101 modernist poetry of, 8, 628–29, 701,
Milton’s poetry admired by, 87 706–07
printing of poetry by, 94–95 McMillan, Elva Irene, 468
on Puritan poetry, 67, 71–72 Mead, Darius, 434–35
works Meadowlands (Glück), 1019
“Bacon’s Epitaph,” 115 Meat out of the Eater (Wigglesworth), 77–78
Magnalia Christi Americana, 139 “Mechanism” (Ammons), 919–21, 933–34
Mathews, Cornelius, 183 medicine texts
Mathews, Elkin, 672–73 basic principles of, 22–23
Mathews, Harry, 1110 geographical sites in, 22
Matthews, Washington, 31–32 Native American poetry as, 19
Matthiessen, F. O., 4–6 origins of, 20–21
Maud, Ralph, 693–94 Medieval Scenes (Duncan), 877–78
“Maud Muller” (Whittier), 261–62, 264–65, Medina, Pablo, 973, 975
465–68 “Meditation at Lagunitas” (Hass), 1011–1012
Maurras, Charles, 543–44 “Meditations” (Fuller), 196–98
Maximinus (Emperor), 59–60 “Meditations Divine and Moral”
Maximus (Olson), 688–90, 693–94, 695–96 (Bradstreet), 67–68, 70
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 712, 1137–138 Meditations from the Creatures (Taylor), 68
“Mayan Letters” (Olson), 678–79 Meditations in an Emergency (O’Hara),
“May Day Sermon to the Women of 858–60
Gilmer County, Georgia, by a “Mediterranean, The” (Tate), 798–99
Woman Preacher Leaving the “Medusa, The” (Bogan), 642
Baptist Church” (Dickey), 808–09 “meeting after the savior gone: 4/4/68,
Mayer, Bernadette, 576–78, 864–66, 1152–153 the” (Clifton), 1065–1066

1256
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“Melanctha” (Stein), 576–78 “Men at Forty” ( Justice), 809–11

Meltzer, David, 823–24, 831, 838–41 Mendelson, Edward, 907, 909–11
Meltzer, Milton, 711–12 “Mending Wall” (Frost), 520–21, 524, 525
Meltzer, Tina, 831 Menes, Orlando Ricardo, 974–75
Melville, Herman, 148–49, 181 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 179–81
Civil War poetry by, 319, 324–27, 417–20 “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom”
Hughes and, 712 (Bogan), 642
legacy of, 370–72 Mennonites, 60–61
poetry by, 417–20 “mentors” (Brooks), 1049–1050
Stedman and, 406–07 “Mercedes” (Stoddard), 405
works Mercer, John, 118–20
“The American Aloe on Exhibition,” Mercury newspaper, 383–84
417–18 Merlin (Robinson), 504–06
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, “Merlin I” (Emerson), 194–98
324–27, 417–20 “Merlin II” (Emerson), 205–06
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Merrill, James, 6, 536–37, 876–77
Holy Land, 148–49, 417–20 in Antaeus, 1146
“The Cumberland,” 325 Clampitt and, 1079–1080
“Donelson,” 325–26 culture poetry and, 1081
“Field Asters,” 417–18 early poetry of, 894–95
“A Ground-Vine Intercedes with the European travel by, 1080
Queen of Flowers for the Merited family background of, 894
Recognition of Clover,” 418–20 legacy of, 1154–155
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some McClatchy and, 909–11
Sea-Pieces, 417–20 poetry of, 894–911
Moby-Dick, 181, 756–57 psychoanalytic poetics and, 1003–1004
“The Portent,” 324–25 science and poetry of, 929–30
“Shiloh,” 326 works
Timoleon, Etc., 417–20 “The Book of Ephraim,” 903–08
“An Uninscribed Monument on “The Broken Home,” 901–02
One of the Battle-Fields of the The Changing Light at Sandover,
Wilderness,” 326 876–77, 894, 897–98, 903–08
“A Way-Side Weed,” 417–18 “Childlessness,” 897–98
Weeds and Wildings Chiely: With a “Clearing the Title,” 536–37
Rose or Two, 417–20 “Days of 1964,” 903
Mémoires Historiques sur la Louisiane A Diferent Person, 895–96
(Dumont), 53–56 First Poems, 895–96
Memoranda during the War (Whitman), “The House Fly,” 898–900
320–21, 350–51, 352–54 Jim’s Book, 894–95
“Memories of the Depression” ( Justice), “Lost in Translation,” 902–03
809–11 “The Lovers,” 896–97, 898–900
“Memories of West Street and Lepke” “River Poem,” 895–96
(Lowell), 758–59 “Scripts for the Pageant,” 905–06
“Memos from the Desk of X” ( Justice), “Strato in Plaster,” 898–900
809–11 “Up and Down,” 900
Menashe, Samuel, 1154–155 Water Street, 894–95, 897–98

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Merwin, W. S. “Autumn Chant,” 634–35

in Antaeus, 1146 “Ballad of the Harp Weaver,” 632
culture poetry and, 1081 “Bluebeard,” 632–33
Deep Image poetry and, 884–86 “Daphne,” 634–35
ecopoetics of, 947–50 Fatal Interview, 632
Merrill and, 894, 895 A Few Figs from Thistles, 633, 635
poetry of the center and, 937–38 “First Fig,” 632
mestizaje, Latino poetry and, 975–76 “The Fitting,” 634
Metamict State, The (Hofmann), 932–33 Huntsman, What Quarry?, 634
Metamorphoses (Ovid), Sandys’s translation “Justice Denied in
of, 112–13 Massachusetts,” 636
“Metamorphosis” (Stevens), 660–61 “Only until this cigarette has
“Metamorphosis, The” ( Justice), 809–11 ended,” 632
“Metzengerstein” (Poe), 165–66 “The Plum Gatherer,” 634–35
Mexican-American War “Recuerdo,” 635
Dickinson’s interest in, 367–68 “Renascence,” 507, 508, 632
Longfellow on, 196 Renascence and Other Poems, 508
in Lowell’s poetry, 273, 275–77, 282 “Rendezvous,” 634
Mexican poetry Second April, 634–35
Chicano poetry vs., 960–67 “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,”
lyric poetry, 56–60 633–34
“Mexico Is a Foreign Country: Five Studies “Three Sonnets in Tetrameter,”
in Naturalism” (Warren), 801–02 633–34
M’Fingal (Trumbull), 141–42 “Visiting the Asylum,” 634–35
“Miami of Other Days, The” ( Justice), Miller, Cristanne, 583–99, 622–23
809–11 Miller, Henry, 829
“Michael” (Wordsworth), 165–66 Miller, J. Hillis, 659
Micheaux, Lewis, 1056–1057 Miller, Joaquin, 299–300, 301–02, 409–10, 468
middle-generation poets, 750–73 Millet, Jean-François, 480
“Middle Passage” (Hayden), 1050 Millier, Brett, 785
midwestern poetry, 465–68, 511–13 Milligan, Spike, 1110
“Mighty Lak a Rose” (Stanton), 464–65 “Mill, The” (Robinson), 1147–149
Mignolo, Walter, 1133–134 Mills of the Kavanaughs, The (Lowell),
Miles, Josephine, 829, 926–27 756–57
military leadership, in Civil War poetry, 312 Milne, Drew, 866
Mill, John Stuart, 1021–1023 Milosz, Czeslaw, 329–30, 953–55, 1146
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 4–6, 507, 511 Milton, John, 67, 145
audience for poetry of, 631 Clampitt and, 1090–1091
Bogan’s criticism of, 640 elegies by, 88–90, 91–93, 94
lyric poetry of, 631–36 Eliot on, 555–56
modernist poetry of, 628–48 Hollander and, 1092–1094
performances of poetry by, 629–30, Lowell inl uenced by, 753–54
635–36 Markham’s poetry and, 483–84
personal life of, 632 Poe and, 217–18
Romantic poets and, 182 Puritan elegiac tradition and, 87
works works

1258
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“Il Penseroso,” 1031–1032 of Loy, 583–99

“Lycidas,” 88–90, 91–93, 94, 102–04, of Millay, 628–48
756–57, 798–99 of Moore, 603–24
Paradise Lost, 91–93, 145 New York School as precursor to, 407–08
“When I consider how my light is overview of, 4–6, 403–04
spent,” 1092–1094 poetics of, 729–32
Zukofsky and, 742–43 of Pound, 670–97
“Miniver Cheevy” (Robinson), 504–06 science and, 916
“Minor Art of Self Defense, The” of southern poets, 795–818
(Wright), 814 of Williams, 557–76, 670–97
minstrel shows, African American dialect of women poets, 628–48
poetry and, 462–64 “Modern Poetry” (Loy), 584, 594–95
Mirikitani, Janice, 981, 985–86, 987, 988–91 Modern Poetry after Modernism
Miró, Joan, 847 (Longenbach), 1145
“Misanthropos” (Gunn), 940–44 Modern Quarterly, 616–17
miscegenation Mofett, Judith, 906
in early national poetry, 161–63 Momaday, N. Scott, 15
in staples colonies poetry, 118 Moments of the Italian Summer (Yenser), 886
Miscellaneous Poems, Chiely on Divine “Moment the Two Worlds Meet, The”
Subjects (Davies), 118 (Olds), 1011–1012
“Missionary Brings a Young Native to Monk, Thelonious, 1050–1051
America, A” ( Johnson), 637–38 Monroe, Harriet, 148–49, 406–07
“Mission Tree Factory” (Soto), 962–63 Eliot’s poetry and, 546–47
Mississippi Bubble, 53–56 Moore and, 610, 616–17
“Mississippi John Hurt” (Komunyakaa), Objectivist Movement and, 733–35
1068–1070 as Poetry editor, 499, 508–11, 515–16
Mistral, Gabriela, 712 Monster Den, The (Ciardi), 1113–114
Mitchell, John, 844–46 Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes),
Mitchell, S. Weir, 379–80 714–17, 720–22, 1074
Mitchell, Verner, 637 Montale, Eugenio, 813, 894
Moby-Dick (Melville), 181 Monthly Anthology Club, 165–66
“Mock Diamonds” (Piatt), 316–18 Montoya, Andrés, 962
mock-epic, 43–51, 53–56 Montoya, José, 961–62
mockingbird, in southern Romantic “Montrachet-le-Jardin” (Stevens), 660–61
poetry, 187–88 Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed (Dreiser),
modernist poetry 420–21
children’s poetry and, 442–43 Moody, William Vaughn, 500, 501–02,
contemporary African American poetry 503–04
and, 1051 “Moon and the Yew Tree, The” (Plath),
in early twentieth century, 497–517 1008–1009
East Coast projectivists and, 670–97 Mooney, James, 31–32
of Eliot, 542 Moore, Clement Clark, 426, 427–28
Frost’s traditional poetry and, 519 Moore, David Chioni, 701–23, 1074
of H.D., 583–99 Moore, Marianne, 4–6, 589–90
of Hughes, 701–23 Bishop and, 778
leftist poetry and, 729–30, 747 Bogan’s criticism of, 640

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Moore, Marianne (cont.) Mora, Pat, 964

Clampitt and, 1087–1088 Morales, Juan J., 975–76
Depression-era repositioning of, 616–24 Morales, Rodney, 1134–135
and Dial magazine, 586–87, 610–11, 615–16 Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Sigourney),
Garcia Villa and, 982–83 290–92
high modernism and, 750–51 “More Loving One, The” (Auden), 907
Loy and, 584 More Songs from Vagabondia (Carman and
mass market and poetry of, 605–08 Hovey), 501–02
modernist poetry of, 603–24, 628 Morgan, Frederick, 947–48
printing technology and poetry of, Morgan, Robert, 932–33
603–04 Morgesons, The (Stoddard), 405
on Stevens, 664–65 Morley, Frank, 618
Stevens’s essay on, 657–58 “Morning” (Dunbar), 501–02
Williams and, 560–61, 681–82 “Morning” (Ransom), 796–98
works “Morning Song” (Plath), 1009
“A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Morris, George Pope, 179, 232
Lunatic,” 606–08 Morris, Timothy, 287
“He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’ ” 622–23 Morrison, Allan, 137–38
“Half-Deity,” 619–20 Morrison, Jim, 831
“The Hero,” 617 Morrison, Toni, 1054–1055
“Masks,” 606–08 Morrisson, Mark, 605–06
Nevertheless, 623–24 Morsztyn, Jan Andrzej, 858–60
“New York,” 611 Moscow Mansions (Guest), 862–64
“Novices,” 611 Moses: A Story of the Nile (Harper), 293–95,
Observations, 614–15 302, 390–94
“Old Dominion,” 618–24 Moss, Howard, 1079–1080, 1085–1086
“The Pangolin,” 619–20 Moss, Thylias, 1031–1038
The Pangolin and Other Verse, 618–24 African American poetry and inl uence
“The Paper Nautilus,” 622–23 of, 6–7
“Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Bernstein and, 1038–1045
Part of a Play,” 617 contemporary African American poetry
“People’s Surroundings,” 611 and, 1048–1049
“Pigeons,” 619–20 Fence magazine and, 1149–150
“Rigorists,” 622–23 Frost’s poetry and, 536–37
Selected Poems, 618–24 “Most of It, The” (Frost), 527
“Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle,” “Mother and Her Captive Boy, The”
619–20 (Simpson), 307–08
“The Steeple-Jack,” 617 Mother Goose for Grown Folks (Whitney),
“The Student,” 617 185–86
“Virginia Britannia,” 619–20 Mother Jones magazine, 880–81
What Are Years, 622–23 Mother Love (Dove), 1067–1068
Moore, Merrill, 1049–1050 “Mother Marie Therese” (Lowell), 756–57
Moore, Milcah Martha, 134–35 “Mother’s Charge, The” (Gilman), 477–78
Moore, Thomas, 217–18, 221–22 “Mother to Son” (Hughes), 704–06, 714–17
Moore, ( John) Warner, 609 Mott, Lucretia, 372–73
“Moose, The” (Bishop), 785–87 Mountain Interval (Frost), 524

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Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 362–64 music. See also blues rhythms; jazz
mourning. See also death and dying; grief in African American poetry, 1050–1051
in Civil War poetry, 313–15 in Baraka’s poetry, 1052–1056
Puritan theology concerning, 95–98 in Dunbar’s poetry, 398–400
“Mouse Trap, The” (Lewis), 116, 118–20 Eliot’s The Waste Land and motif of, 552
Mouth on Paper (Cortez), 1063–1064 in Pinsky’s poetry, 940–44
Movie-Going (Hollander), 1092–1094 in Reconstruction-era poetry, 387–88
“Moving” ( Jarrell), 778–80 Whitman’s poetry and, 330–31
“Moving Right Along” (Stone), 927–28 “Musicpula” (Holdsworth), 118–20
“Mowing” (Frost), 525–27, 529, 532, 534 “Music Swims Back to Me” (Sexton),
“Mozart, 1935” (Stevens), 656–57, 667 1019–1020
“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” (Stevens), Muskrat igure, in Native American poetry,
666–67 15–16, 36–37
“Mr. Flood’s Party” (Robinson), 504–06 “Muskrats Dancing” (Noori), 15
“Mr. Lo!” (Price), 459–60 Mussolini, Benito, 733–40
“Mr. Tubbe’s Morning Service” Muyumba, Walton, 1048–1073
(Burnshaw), 729–30 Mvskogee poetry, 31
“Mu” (Mackey), 1070–1071 “My Ambition” (Allerton), 448–49
“Muckers” (Sandburg), 490–91 “My Country’s Worth” (Hansford), 109–11
Mueller, Liesl, 1146–147 Myers, John, 844–45
“Mulatto” (Hughes), 704–06 My Father Sings to My Embarrassment
Muldoon, Paul, 536–37, 751, 1149–150 (Castillo), 974
Mule Bone (Hughes and Hurston), 711 Myles, Eileen, 865–66
Mullen, Harryette, 1031, 1066–1067, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”
1071–1073 (Dickinson), 323–24
multiculturalism “My Lost Youth” (Longfellow), 239–40
Asian American poetry and, 990 “My Mother’s Nipples” (Hass), 1011–1012
early American poetry and, 3–4 “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke), 788–89, 1104
multilingualism “My South” ( Justice), 809–11
in contemporary Native American “Mysteriously Deining Mystery:
poetry, 1125–130 Byzantine Proposals for Poetry”
in contemporary poetry, 1123–140 (Guest), 853–54
early American poetry and, 3–4 My Wicked Wicked Ways (Cisneros), 964
growth of, 1124–125
in Native American poetry, 20, 22–23 Naca, Kristin, 975–76
Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 1060–1061 Náhuatl language, 22–23, 1123–124, 1131
Munch, Edvard, 853–54 nalai zhuyi (grabbism) theory, 984
Munsey’s magazine, 508–11, 605–06 “name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ –, The”
Munson, Gorham, 1159 (Dickinson), 322–24
Mura, David, 987, 989, 991–92 names
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 555–56 in Native American poetry, 22–23
Murillo, John, 975–76 in Puritan elegies, 100–01
Murray, Judith Sargent, 372–73 Names of the Lost, The (Levine), 944–47
Muse & Drudge (Mullen), 1071–1073 “Narcissus as Narcissus” (Tate), 798–99
Museum of Modern Art (New York), Nardi, Marcia, 563, 570–71, 580
844–46 Narragansett Dawn journal, 1125–127

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Narragansett language, Native American National Poetry Series, 1035

poetry in, 1125–130 National Poetry Slam, 1153
narrative poetry National Urban League, 718–19
children’s poetry as, 1118–119 Nationhood plumaroja (Alurista), 961–62
early examples of, 177 Nation magazine
Longfellow’s narrative poems, 252–54 Hughes’s writing for, 708–09
in Native American verse, 20, 22–23 Jarrell’s work for, 778–80
Poe’s work as, 225–26 Levertov as poetry editor of, 880–81
by southern poets, 811–13 poetry in, 613–14, 623
Nash, Francis, 133 Stephen Crane’s writing for, 485–86
Nash, Ogden, 1110 Native American poetry, 3–4
Natchez Indians, revolt of, 53–56 absence in colonial South of, 109–10
National Association for the Advancement anthologies and collections of, 32–33
of Colored People (NAACP), belief systems in, 23–26
508–11, 702–03, 722–23, 1049–1050 birds and animals in, 27
National Book Award for Poetry brevity of, 28–29
antiwar protests and, 886–87 categories of, 33
to Ashbery, 856–64 colonialism and conquest in context of,
to Dickey, 807–08 18–19, 33–34
to Jarrell, 784 contemporary multilingual poetry,
to Merrill, 894–95 1125–130, 1133–134
to Moore, 623–24 courtship, marriage, and divorce rituals
to O’Hara, 856–64 in, 26–27
to Rich, 889 creative energy of, 22–23
National Book Critics Circle award, to cultural legacy of, 36
Herrera, 966 current traditions in, 33
National Era (antislavery magazine), 264–65 death songs in, 28
National Institute of Arts and Letters, earth and people as one in, 22–23
722–23 hunting songs in, 26
nationalism as medicine texts, 19
Baraka and, 1054 modern poets, 31
in Chicano poetry, 960–67 narrative in, 20, 22–23
in Frost’s poetry, 536–37 in nineteenth century, 31–32
in Latino poetry, 975–76 non-Indian experience of, 34–35, 36–38
social movement for, 476 by Occom, 139
Nationalist magazine, 476 original language, importance of,
National Memorial African Bookstore, 20, 22–23
1056–1057 as personal property, 27–28
national period, poetry during, 3–4, 155–75 poetics of, 8, 15–39
national poetry as ritual, 19–20, 23–26
children’s poetry as, 431–34 women poets in, 183–86
Civil War poetry and, 316–18 Native Americans
dialect poetry as, 450–52, 462–64 colonial defenders of, 45–47
establishment of, 155–75 in Francophone epic poetry, 51–53
Lowell’s poetry as, 273–79 imagery in Revolutionary poetry from,
popular poetry as, 445–46 141–42

1262
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in literary national poetry, 161–63 Neal, Larry, 1055–1056, 1058–1059, 1060–1061

in Longfellow’s poetry, 37–38, 240–41, “Neanthe” (Bolling), 126–27
254–56 “nearest Dream recedes – unrealized, The”
in Moore’s poetry, 620–21 (Dickinson), 370–72
New Netherlands contact with, 61–63 “Near the Ocean” (Lowell), 752–53, 761–62
in Niedecker’s poetry, 737–39 Necessities of Life (Rich), 882
in popular poetry, 459–60 “Need of Being Versed in Country Things,
Puritan contact with, 76–77 The” (Frost), 527
in Sigourney’s poetry, 290–92 Negative Blue (Wright), 814
in Whittier’s poetry by, 264–65 négritude movement, 712, 719–20, 831–33
in Williams’s Paterson, 570 “Negro” (Hughes), 1137–138
Native Son (Wright), 1058–1059 “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,
naturalism The” (Hughes), 708–09
in Crane’s poetry, 484–90 Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise
in Dreiser’s poetry, 420–21 (Talley), 438–42
in Markham’s poetry, 480–84 “Negro Music” (Dunbar), 398–400
in Niedecker’s poetry, 745–46 “Negro Speaks of Rivers, The” (Hughes),
political poetry and, 472–91 702–03, 704
postbellum poetry of, 410–17 Neighborhood Odes (Soto), 962–63
natural religion, impact on elegies of, Nel, Philip, 1110–112
102–04 Nelson, Cary, 481, 628, 644–45, 729
nature Nelson, Marilyn, 1118–119
in American Romantic poetry, 178 Nemerov, Howard, 536–37, 1079–1080
in Bryant’s poetry, 173–74 neobaroque poetry, 1079–1100
in children’s poetry, 435–36 neoclassical aesthetics
in Dickinson’s poetry, 364–65 American literary nationalism, 157–58
industry in conl ict with, 179 in early southern poetry, 109–11,
in New England poetry, 282–83 118–20
in Roethke’s poetry, 771–73 impact on elegies of, 102–04
in southern Romantic poetry, 186–89 “Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic” (Reed),
in staples colonies poetry, 120–22 1060–1061
in Very’s poetry, 206–09 “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” (Reed),
war poetry and role of, 321 1060–1061
Nature (Emerson), 196, 197 Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
“Nature” (Stevens), 653, 668 (Komunyakaa), 816–17
Nature and Elements of Poetry, The Neruda, Pablo, 871–74, 944–45
(Stedman), 407–08 Chicano poetry and, 960–67
“Nature of a Mirror, The” (Warren), Kaufman and, 1052
803–06 Puerto Rican poetry and, 970–71
“Nature’s Answer” (Gilman), 479–80 Nest (Berssenbrugge), 997
naughtiness, in children’s poetry, 437 Nest of Ninnies (Ashbery and Schuyler),
Navajo people 844–46
Coyote trickster igure, 22 “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the
ethnographic research on, 31–32 Same” (Frost), 534–35
origin of chants in, 19, 20–21 Nevertheless (Moore), 623–24
Neal, John, 177, 217–18, 219 New, Elisa, 521–22

1263
 Index

New American poetry, 694 New-Haven Gazette and Connecticut

postmodernism and, 775–76 Magazine, 147
San Francisco Renaissance and, 824 New Hypothesis, The (Philip), 875–76
New American Poetry, The (Allen), 559, New Kid on the Block, The (Prelutsky),
571–72, 824, 844–45, 870–71, 1116–117
1108–109, 1145 New Masses magazine, 616–17, 729–32
New and Selected Poems ( Justice), 809–11 “New Moon, The” (Simms), 188–89
Newbery, John, 427 New Narrative poetry, 1030
newborn children, in Native American New Negro Movement, 1051
poetry, 23–26 New Netherland, lyric poetry in, 61–63
“New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 297–99 New Poems (Moore), 623
Newcomb, John Timberman, 497–517 New Poetry/New Verse Movement
New Criterion journal, 1085–1086 contemporary poetry and inl uence of,
New Criticism 1159–162
Dickinson’s poetry and, 319 deinitions of, 4–6
genteel tradition and, 403–04 early examples of, 507
Jarrell and, 775–76 early twentieth-century emergence of,
Lowell’s poetry and, 755 499–500, 506–07
New York School rejection of, 847, popularity of, 508–11
856–64 subject matter in, 511
poets of 1960s and, 871 New Poets of England and America (Hall,
Sandburg’s poetry and, 515–16 Pack, and Simpson), 870–71,
New Directions publishers, 686–87, 741 1107–108
Newell, Peter, 436–37 New Proclamation!, A (Trumbull), 141
Newell, William Wells, 438–42 New Republic magazine, 623
New England New Romantics, 890–91
American Romanticism’s emergence in, poetry in 1960s and, 879–80
177–78 New Scene Interesting to the Citizens of the
in Frost’s poetry, 519 United States of America, Additional
genre and local color poetry of, 468 to the Historical Play of Columbus, A
in Holmes’s poetry, 267–73 (Martin), 133
midcentury poetry culture in, 282–303 “New Season” (Levine), 944–47
poetic tradition in, 259–79 “New Sentence, The” (Silliman), 1028–1030
Puritan elegiac tradition in, 93–95 Newsome, Eie Lee, 636
Robinson’s poetry about, 504–06 “New Song, A” (colonial poem), 131
Whittier as chronicler of, 261–67 newspapers
“New-England Boy’s Song about African American poetry in, 300
Thanksgiving, The” (Child), 428–29 children’s poetry in, 434–35
New-England Courant, 86–87 Dickinson’s interest in, 367–68
New England Primer, 426, 442–43 poetry in, 299–300, 604–05
New Englands Prospect (Wood), 36–37 southern colonial poetry in, 117
“Newes from Virginia” (Rich), 111–12 staples colonies poetry in, 117, 120–22
New Formalism, 1041, 1085–1086, 1094–1095 Whitman’s writing for, 332–34, 346
New Goose (Niedecker), 737–39 women poets in, 300
New Hampshire (Frost), 524 New Spoon River, The (Masters), 511–13
New Hampshire Gazette, 131 New Thing jazz, 1061–1063

1264
 Index

Newton, Benjamin Franklin, 370–72 Moore in, 614–15

Newtonian physics, 915–16 poetry criticism in, 609
New World, The (Masters), 511–13 New York Tribune, 301, 408–09
New World newspaper, 332 New York World newspaper, 636
New Yankee Doodle, The (Gay), 459–60, 461 “Next Day” ( Jarrell), 783, 785, 787
“New Year, The” (Lazarus), 297–99 Niedecker, Lorine
“New Year’s Day, 1848” (Whitman), 174–75 later work of, 741–42
New York as middle-generation poet, 750–51
American Romanticism’s emergence Objectivist poetry of, 728–29, 733–35,
in, 178 737–39, 745–46
poetry culture in, 166–75 Nielsen, Aldon, 1060–1061, 1063–1064
“New York” (Moore), 611 “Night” ( Johnson), 639
New York Art Students’ League, 486–87 “Night before the Night before Christmas,
New York Art Theater Institute, 1108–109 The” ( Jarrell), 781–82, 787
New-York Daily Tribune, 242–43 “Night Fishing for Blues” (Smith), 811–13
New Yorker nightingale, in British poetry, 187–88, 191
Bogan’s poetry criticism for, 641 Nightingale, Florence, 815
Clampitt’s poetry in, 1079–1080, Night Light ( Justice), 809–11
1085–1086 “Night Songs” (Duncan), 876–77
poetry in, 1146 Night Train to Tuxtla (Herrera), 966
Warren’s poetry in, 806–07 Niles’ Register newspaper, 262–63
New York Evening Post, 167–69, 259, 798–99 nineteenth century
New York Gazette, 129–33 American poetry in, 4
New York Herald-Tribune, 844–46 Native American poetry in, 31–32, 37–38
New York Magazine, 147–48 poetic marketplace in, 300–03
New York Mercury newspaper, 131 popular poetry in, 245–47
New York Mirror newspaper, 332 ubiquity of poetry culture in, 282–303,
New-York Review, 171–75 306–07
New York School (19th century), 404–10 “1933” (Fearing), 730–31
New York School (20th century) “91 Revere Street” (Lowell), 757–59
Beat poets and, 775–76, 824 Nissenbaum, Stephen, 427–28
children’s poetry from, 1108–109 Nobel Prize in Literature, to Eliot, 562–63
distinctive styles of, 846–51 “Noddin’ by de Fire” (Dunbar), 397
historical background, 6 Noel, Urayoán, 969–70
history and poetics of, 844–66 “No Good Blues” (Komunyakaa), 1070
Jarrell and, 802–03 Noguchi, Isamu, 980–81
literary criticism of, 856–64 Noguchi, Yone, 979–83
postmodern aspects of, 851–56 Nolan, James, 35–36
southern poetry and, 817–18 Nomad magazine, 844–45
New York Times, 388–89, 761–62 non-English poetry, in early America,
Dickey’s poetry and, 808–09 3–4, 43–63
Dunbar’s essay for, 394–95 No-No Boy (Okada), 985–86
poetry criticism in, 716 Nonsense Anthology (Wells), 438
New York Times Book Review nonsense poetry, 438. See also doggerel
criticism of Jarrell in, 784–85 “Noon” (Bryant), 174–75
Hughes in, 719 “Noon Oice” (Schuyler), 854–55

1265
 Index

Noori, Margaret, 15–16 Nuyorican Movement, 967–72

“No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” Nuyorican Poets Café, 967–68
(Stevens), 662 Nye, Naomi Shihab, 1118
Norcross, Emily, 370
Norcross, Louise, 370 “Oak, The” (Morris), 179
“Noretorp-Noretsyh” (Rexroth), 829–31 Oak and Ivy (Dunbar), 395–96
North American Review Oakes, Urian, 94–95, 96–98, 101
Bryant’s work for, 172 Oakes Smith, Elizabeth, 181, 217–18, 253
Fireside Poets and, 273 Oates, Joyce Carol, 1146
national poetry and, 161–63, 165–66 Obama, Barack, 9, 703–04, 705
Sigourney’s work reviewed in, 290–92 Oberholtzer, S. L., 456–57
North & South (Bishop), 775, 778–80 obituary prose, elegiac poetry and, 102–04
North Central (Niedecker), 745–46 objective correlative, in Allston’s poetry,
North of Boston (Frost), 508, 524 163–65
Norton, Charles Eliot, 256–57, 343 Objectivist Movement, 693
Norton, John, 101 Beat poetry and, 824
Norton (W. W.) publishers, 741, 883 cultural legacy of, 747
Not a Man and Yet a Man (Whitman), 400–01 evolution of, 733–35
Notebook (Lowell), 752–54, 762–63 leftist poetry and, 728–47
“Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack, A” poetic innovation in, 733–40
(Wright), 871–74 publications by, 740–41
Notes for Echo Lake (Palmer), 1154–155 resurgence in 1960s of, 741–46
“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” third-wave Objectivism and, 694
(Stevens), 664 “Objectivist Poet: Four Interviews, The”
Notes towards a Deinition of Culture (Eliot), (Oppen et al.), 742
555–56 Objectivist Press, 740–41
“Nothing Stays Put” (Clampitt), 1083–1085 “Objectivists” Anthology, An (Zukofsky),
“Nothing to Say” (Thomson), 450 733–35, 740–41
“Nothing to Wear” (Butler), 450 “O Black and Unknown Bards” ( Johnson),
“Notice” (Lowell), 765–67 703–04
Notley, Alice, 568–69, 864–65, 1152–153 O’Brien, Fitz-James, 183
Not Without Laughter (Hughes), 711 Observations (Moore), 614–15
nouns, in Native American poetry, 22–23 “O Captain! My Captain!” (Whitman),
“Nova” ( Jefers), 917 102–04, 352–53, 1105–106
novel, as rival to poetry, 405 “Occasioned by His Majesty’s Most
“Novices” (Moore), 611 Gracious Benevolence to His
Nowak, Mark, 1132, 1136 British Colonies in America, Lately
Now and Then: Poems 1976–1978 (Warren), Invaded by the French” (Sterling),
806–07 123–25
Noyes, Alfred, 1118–119 Occom, Samson, 34–35, 139
“Nuances on a Theme by Williams” “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An”
(Stevens), 659–60 (Bierce), 484
nursery rhymes, 427 “Occurrence of Tune, The” (Bernstein),
Nutter, Geof, 1153–154 1043–1044
“Nuyo Futurist Manifestiny, A” (Torres), O’Connor, Flannery, 753
1138–139 O’Connor, William Douglas, 353

1266
 Index

“October” (Frost), 1107–108 Collected Poems, 858–60

“October 5, 1981” (Schuyler), 854–55 “The Day Lady Died,” 858–60
“Ode in a Time of Hesitation” (Moody), “Having a Coke with You,” 858–60
503–04 “Joseph Cornell,” 846–47
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 283–84 “Les Luths,” 858–60
“Ode on Causality” (O’Hara), 858–60 Love Poems (Tentative Title), 858–60
“Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 283–84 Lunch Poems, 858–60, 862
“Ode to Autumn” (Keats), 284–85 Meditations in an Emergency, 858–60
“Ode to Coit Tower” (Corso), 831 “Ode on Causality,” 858–60
“Ode to Ethiopia” (Dunbar), 395–96 “Ode to Joy,” 858–60
“Ode to Joy” (O’Hara), 858–60 “Ode to Michael Goldberg’s (Birth
“Ode to Michael Goldberg’s (Birth and and Other Births),” 858–60
Other Births)” (O’Hara), 858–60 “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington
“Ode to Sappho” (Oakes Smith), 181 Crossing the Delaware at the
“Ode to the Confederate Dead” (Tate), Museum of Modern Art,”
760–61, 798–99 854–55
“Ode to the DiaspoRican” (Mariposa), “Personal Poem,” 858–60
969–70 “Personism,” 845
“Ode to Walt Whitman” (Lorca), 831–33 “Poem (I live above a dyke bar and
O’Donnell, George Marion, 809–11 I’m happy),” 858–60
Odyssey (Homer), 145, 174–75 “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the
Of Being Numerous (Oppen), 743–45 right day!),” 858–60
Oice, The (Guest), 844–46 “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),”
“Of Modern Poetry” (Stevens), 665–66, 667 858–60
“Of ‘Of ’: The Romance of a Preposition” “Poem (Light clarity avocado salad in
(McHugh), 1095–1096 the morning),” 858–60
Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 “A Step Away from Them,”
(Bradford), 141–42 858–60
“Of Rounds” (Swenson), 928–29 Try! Try!, 844–46
“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a “Why I Am Not a Painter,” 858–60
Meadow” (Duncan), 878–79 O’Harism, in Polish poetry, 866
O’Hara, Frank “Oh, Matchless Earth –” (Dickinson),
children’s poetry and, 1109–110 364–65
“I do this, I do that” poems of, 854, ‘Ōiwi journal, 1134–135
858–60, 864–65 Ojibwe poetry, 15–16, 26–27, 28, 29–30
literary reputation of, 856–65, 866 Oka, Francis Naohiko, 988–89
Merrill and, 894, 895 Okada, John, 985–86
modernist poetry and, 7–8, 404 Ola (Balaz), 1131
New York School and, 844–45, 851 “Old Abel’s Experience” (Corbett),
pop culture in poetry of, 852–53 455–56
Williams and, 560–61, 571 “Old Cabin, The” (Dunbar), 398
works “Old Dominion” poetry sequence (Moore),
“Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan 618–24
and Jean-Paul,” 858–60 “Olden Time, The” (Whitman), 332
Art Chronicles, 844–46 “Old Homestead, The” (Dunbar), 397
“At the Old Place,” 858–60 “Old Ironsides” (Holmes), 268

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“Old Nigger on One-Mule Car “One Girl of Many” (Gilman), 477–78

Encountered Late at Night When O’Neill, Eugene, 1160
Driving Home from Party in the “One of the Inhabitants of the West”
Back Country” (Warren), 806–07 (Stevens), 660–61
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Eliot), “One Reviewer’s Beginnings” (Vendler), 1146
442–43, 1105, 1113–114 “One Who Was Diferent, The” ( Jarrell),
Olds, Sharon, 745, 751, 1011–1012, 1146 790–91
“Old Simon Dole” (Trowbridge), 461–62 “Only a Soldier’s Grave” ( Jonas), 313–15, 326
“Old Swimmin’-Hole, The” (Riley), 465–68 Only for the Eye of a Friend (Stockton), 134–35
Ole Marster and Other Verses (Valentine), “Only until this cigarette has ended”
462–64, 468 (Millay), 632
Oliver, Louis (Little Coon), 31 “Only Utopia Is in a Now, The” (Bernstein),
Oliver, Mary, 38–39, 913–14, 952–53 1043–1044
Olson, Charles “On Hearing a New Escalation” (Hugo), 939
at Black Mountain College, 877–78 “On Meeting Several Former Pupils at the
Duncan and, 877–78 Communion Table” (Sigourney),
Levertov and, 887–88 290–92
Mackey and, 1070–1071 “On Rembrandt; Occasioned by His
modernism and, 670, 672, 677–78 Picture of Jacob’s Dream”
New Poetry and, 4–6 (Allston), 163–65
Objectivists and, 693, 694–95 “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington
O’Hara and, 858–60 Crossing the Delaware at the Museum
on open poetry, 681–82 of Modern Art” (O’Hara), 854–55
Perlof ’s criticism of, 693–94 “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (Keats),
on poetry as dance, 682–83 1086–1087
poetry of, 687–90 “On Seeing the Picture of Æolus”
Pound and, 678–79, 684–85 (Tibaldi), 163–65
on Pound’s Cantos, 678–79 “Onset, The” (Frost), 534–35
“Projective Verse” manifesto of, 675, 693, “On Speech” (Grenier), 571–72
741, 747 “On the Adventures of Tom Brainless”
Omaha people, poetry of, 23–24 (Trumbull), 140
Ommateum (Ammons), 918 On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Dove),
“On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” 1067–1068
(Moody), 503 “On the Death of President Garield”
Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 752–53 (Haynes), 384–86
Oñate, Juan de, 49–50 “On the Death of Rev. Mr. George
“On Being Asian American” (Inada), 991 Whitield” (Wheatley), 136–39
“On Being Brought from Africa to “On the Disadvantages of Central
America” (Wheatley), 136–39 Heating” (Clampitt), 1086–1087
On Beyond Zebra (Seuss), 1109–110 “On the Falling Group in the Last Judgment
On Call (Algarín), 967–68 of Michael Angelo” (Allston), 163–65
One, Two Cups (Berssenbrugge), 997 “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”
“One among Our Many Follies” (Keats), 282–83
( Jeferson), 145 “On the Invention of Letters” (Sterling), 116
“One Art” (Bishop), 785–87 “On the Luxembourg Gallery” (Allston),
One Big Self (Wright), 1156–158 163–65

1268
 Index

“On the Meeting of García Lorca and Hart “Or Consider Prometheus” (Clampitt),
Crane” (Levine), 1161–162 1083–1085
“On the Night of Departure by Bus” ordinary-language philosophy, Frost’s
( Justice), 809–11 poetry and, 533
“On the Pleasures of College Life” Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968–1974 (Warren),
(Horton), 292–93 803–06
On the Road (Kerouac), 825–27, 829–31 Origin magazine, 877–78
“On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks” Orphée (ilm), 834–38
(Guest), 855–56 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 971
On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared Osage poetry, 25
(Villatoro), 975–76 creation accounts in, 16
Open Boat, The (Hongo), 986–87, 989 Osbey, Brenda Marie, 814
open form poetics, 681–82, 693–94 Osgood, Frances, 182, 198–200, 217–18,
Open House (Roethke), 771–73 222–23
Opening of the Field, The (Duncan), 875–79 Osgood, James R., 354–55
]Open Interval[ (Van Clief-Stefanon), 933 O Taste and See (Levertov), 887–88
Open Skies, The (Guest), 862–64 Other Side/El Otro Lado, The (Alvarez),
“Opera” (Eliot), 543–44 975–76
Oppen, George Others magazine, 508–11, 586–87, 592,
later poetry of, 741, 743–45 606–08, 609
as middle-generation poet, 750–51 “Other Tradition, The” (Ashbery), 851–52
Objectivist Movement and, 733–35, 739–41 “Otto” (Roethke), 771–73
Oppenheim, James, 507 Oulipian poetry, 1109–110
Oppfer, Emil, 1159 “Our lyres by us forsaken and unstrung”
Opportunity magazine, 637, 718–19 (Turell), 83–84
oral performance of poetry, 9–10 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
by Beat poets, 827–28, 831 (Whitman), 346
Chicano poetry and, 967 Out of the Dust (Hesse), 1118–119
children’s poetry, 429–30 Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea
current trends in, 1153 (Longfellow), 241–42
free verse as, 629–30 “Over-Soul, The” (Emerson), 227–28
by Frost, 525, 535, 551–52 “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse”
hole-hole bushi labor songs, 984 (Carleton), 457–59
by Holmes, 270 Ovid, 863
by Lindsay, 629–30 Sandys’s translation of, 112–13
media technology impact on, 629–30 “Owl’s Clover” (Stevens), 666–67
by Millay, 629–30, 631–32, 635–36 Ox-Cart Man, The (Hall), 1107–108
Native and American Indian poetics Oxford Anthology of American Poetry
and, 15–39 (Lehman), 563
physicality in, 630 Oxford Book of American Verse
Puerto Rican poetry and, 967–72 (Matthiessen), 4–6
radio and evolution of, 629 Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America
spoken word/poetry slam movement, (Hall), 1107–108
969–70 Oxford English Dictionary, 909–11
“Orange of Midsummer” (Lowell), Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children’s
514–15 Poems, The (Hall), 1107–108

1269
 Index

Pack, Robert, 870–71 “Parody on the Foregoing Lines, A”

“Pact, A” (Pound), 329–30 (Graeme), 135–36
Padgett, Ron, 864–65, 1108–109 Parsing (Bernstein), 1038, 1040
“Paean to Place” (Niedecker), 745–46 Parsons, Elsie, 31–32
Paegle, Julie Sophia, 975–76 Partisan Review, 616–17
Page, Thomas, 462–64, 468 “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a
“Pages from a Notebook” (Duncan), 878 Play” (Moore), 617
Paige, Harry, 28–29 “Parturition” (Loy), 587–89
“Painted Head” (Ransom), 800–01 “Party, The” (Dunbar), 398
“Painter, A” (Cole), 178 Party at the Zoo (Roethke), 1103–104, 1114
“Paint-Kings, The” (Allston), 163–65 Pascal, Blaise, 1147–149
“Palace-Burner, The” (Piatt), 411–13, 430–31 Passaconaway (Indian Chief ), 33–34, 36–37
Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Passages (Duncan), 883
Piatt (Bennett), 410–11 Passage to India (Whitman), 352–54
Palgrave, Francis, 519–20 “Passing Love” (Hughes), 1106–107
“Palimpsest” (Komunyakaa), 1070 Passion-Flowers (Howe), 295–97
Palmer, Johnson Williamson, 312, 324–25 “Pastoral, The” (Sterling), 123–25
Palmer, Michael, 1149–150, 1154–155 pastoral verse
Palumbo-Liu, David, 991–92 funeral vs. pastoral elegies, 91–93
pan-Asian coalition, Asian American in Puritan elegiac tradition, 88–90
poetry and, 986–93 in Revolutionary America, 133–42
“Pangolin, The” (Moore), 619–20 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 60–63
Pangolin and Other Verse, The (Moore), “Pater-Daughter” (DuPlessis), 568–69
618–24 Paterson (Williams), 562, 563, 683–84
“Pan in Wall Street” (Stedman), 408–09 geographic elements in, 569–71
Papagos, medicine texts of, 20–21 Jarrell’s analysis of, 778–80
“Paper Nautilus, The” (Moore), 622–23 as modernist epic, 558
Papo Got His Gun (Hernández Cruz), Native American poetics in, 38–39
968–69 publication of, 686–87
Paquin, Ethan, 1042–1043 Wallace interview in, 574
“Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Patmore, Coventry, 361–62
Higher” (Guest), 863 “Patriot, The” (Sterling), 123–25
Paradise Lost (Milton), 91–93, 145 Patriotic Gore (Wilson), 286
“Parergon” (Ashbery), 1147–149 patriotic poetry
Parini, Jay, 536, 701 in Civil War, 311–12, 313–15
“Parisian Beggar Woman” (Hughes), dialect poetry as, 450–52
1106–107 in popular verse, 448–49
Paris Salon d’Automne, 586 “Patterns” (Lowell), 514–15
Park, Josephine, 981–82 Paulding, James Kirke, 158–59
Parker, Charlie, 827–28, 1050–1052, Paulin, Tom, 536–37
1055–1056, 1060–1061, Pau-Llosa, Ricardo, 974
1063–1064 “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Longfellow), 241–42,
Parker, Dorothy, 468 256–57, 431–34, 1118–119
Parker, Theodore, 183–86, 343 Pavese, Cesare, Whitman’s inl uence on,
Parks, William, 116, 118–20 329–30
Parley’s Magazine, 434–35 Payne, John Howard, 167–69, 176

1270
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works personal property, Native American poetry

“The Deaf Seeing Dancing,” 169 as, 27–28
“Face to Face with Death,” 169 “Personism” (O’Hara), 845
“Home, Sweet Home,” 167–69, 179 “Pessimistic Poets” (Aldrich), 414
Julia, 167–69 Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions
“Silently,” 169 (Hagedorn), 994–95
“Star Gazing,” 169 Petrarch, 145–46, 1088–1089
Peabody, Elizabeth, 206 Petrino, Elizabeth, 429
Peabody, Josephine Preston, 500–01 “Phantasy” (Stevens), 653, 668
Pearse, Edward, 94–95 Philadelphia Public Ledger, 606–08
“Peasant Bard” (Canning), 448–49 Philips, Elizabeth, 431
Penn, William, 60–61 Philips, John, 914–15
Pennsylvania Gazette, 120–22 Phillip, Fayetta Harris, 875–76
Pennycock, Alastair, 1124 Phillips, Adam, 1021–1023
“Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” Phillips, Carl, 1048–1049, 1066–1067
(Whitman), 321 Phillips, Siobhan, 519–38
people, as earth, in Native American Phillips, Wendell, 369–70
poetry, 22–23 Phillips, Willard, 172
People of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philomela, myth of, 187–88, 191
827–28 Philosophical Society for the Advancement
“People’s Surroundings” (Moore), 611 of Useful Knowledge, 145
Peppercorn, Peter. See Price, Emanuel “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe),
Perec, Georges, 1109–110 221–22, 228, 230–31
Pereira, Malin, 1064–1065, 1067–1068 Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, The (Chin),
Perelman, Bob, 557–76, 1136 992–93
Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar, 49–50, 61–63 phrenology, 343–44
Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 1137–138 Phylon journal, 1050
“Performance, The” (Dickey), 807–08 “Physics” (Miles), 926–27
performance poetry. See oral performance “Physiology of Versiication, The”
of poetry (Holmes), 270
Perkins, David, 884–86, 887, 890–91 “Piano Player Explains Himself, The”
Perlof, Marjorie (Grossman), 1155–156
on Ashbery, 1155–156 Piatt, John James, 299–300, 312, 410
on Life Studies (Lowell), 1003–1004 Piatt, Sarah, 316–18, 322, 326–27, 456–57
literary criticism of, 4–6 children’s poetry by, 429, 430–31
on O’Hara, 858–60 realist poetry of, 410–13, 414–15, 417–18
on Olson, 693–94 Stedman and, 406–07
poetic criticism by, 1145 Picabia, Francis, 592
on Pound, 563 Picasso, Pablo, 560–61
on Williams, 684–85 “Picket-Guard, The” (Beers), 313–15, 321
Perry, Matthew (Commodore), 514–15 “Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who
Perse, Saint-John, 876–77 Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan”
Persian poetry, Emerson’s reading of, (Hass), 1011–1012
201–06 Picture Bride (Song), 987
“Persimmons” (Lee), 989–91 Pictures of the Floating World (Lowell),
“Personal Poem” (O’Hara), 858–60 513–15

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Pidgin, poetry in, 1124–125, 1132–133, 1134–135 “Face Lift,” 1008–1009

Pieces (Creeley), 677, 690–93 “The Jailer,” 1008–1009
Pier Queen (Xavier), 969–70 Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,
Pietist Movement, 60–61 1006–1007
Pietri, Pedro, 968 “Lady Lazarus,” 1010–1011
“Pigeons” (Moore), 619–20 Letters Home, 1006–1007
Pigman, G. W., 88–90 “The Moon and the Yew Tree,”
Pike, Albert, 230–31, 309–10 1008–1009
“Pilgrim Songs” (Merwin), 949 “Morning Song,” 1009
Piñero, Miguel, 967–68, 969–70 “Poem for a Birthday,” 1008–1009
Pinkney, Edward Coote, 187 “Poppies in July,” 1008–1009
Pinsky, Robert, 571, 751, 938–39, 940–44, “Poppies in October,” 1008–1009
1146, 1152 “Tulips,” 1008–1009
Pioneer magazine, 273 “Words,” 1007–1008
Pisan Cantos (Pound), 685–87 Plato, 876–77, 914–15
Pizer, Donald, 472 Playboy magazine, 1115–118
“Plain Language from Truthful James” “Player Piano, The” ( Jarrell), 787–89,
(Harte), 409–10, 450–52 790–91
“Plain Sense of Things, The” (Stevens), playground poetry, 1116–118
660–61 “Play Up, Piper!” (Peabody), 500–01
Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, The (Ackerman), Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes), 998–99
932–33 Plessey v. Ferguson, 394–95
Planisphere (Ashbery), 861 Plimpton, George, 878
Plank, George, 619–20 Plotinus, 876–77
“Plantation Portrait, A” (Dunbar), 397 “Plum Gatherer, The” (Millay), 634–35
Plath, Sylvia pluralism, in American poetry, 7
autobiographical poetry of, 6–7 Pluri-bust-tah (Thomson), 448–49, 460–61
children’s poetry by, 1107–108 Podsiadło, Jacek, 866
Glück and, 1018, 1020–1021 Poe, Deborah, 933
Lowell and, 751, 776–77, 1007 Poe, Edgar Allan, 4, 139, 167–68
psychoanalytic poetics and, 644–45, contemporary critics of, 233–34
1003–1004, 1005, 1006–1011 early life of, 217–18
suicide of, 1007 inl uences on, 188
works journalism career of, 299–300
“All the Dead Dears,” 1008–1009 legacy of, 701
Ariel, 776–77, 1006–1008, 1009–1010 Longfellow criticized by, 243–47
Ariel: The Restored Edition, 1007–1008 lost worlds of, 217–36
The Bell Jar, 1006–1007 mockery of Drake and Halleck, 169–71
Collected Poems, 1006–1007 Stedman and, 406–07
The Colossus, 1006–1008 Whitman and, 346
Crossing the Water, 1006–1007 women Romantic poets and, 182–83,
“Cut,” 1008–1009 217–18, 222–23, 233–34
“Daddy,” 1007–1009, 1010 works
“Edge,” 1007–1008 “Annabel Lee,” 183, 188, 232–33,
“Electra on Azalea Path,” 1007–1008 234–36
“Elm,” 1009–1010, 1020–1021 “The Bells,” 233–34

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“The City in the Sea,” 217–18, 223–27, Poems (Gould), 429–30

232–33 Poems (Harper), 390–94
“Dream-Land,” 217–18, 223–27, 232–33 Poems (Moore), 612–13, 616–17
“El Dorado,” 223–27 Poems (Stoddard), 405
Eureka, 227–28, 233–34 Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (Warren),
“Facts in the Case of M. 134–35
Valdemar,” 228 Poems 1957–1967 (Dickey), 808–09
“Israfel,” 221–22 Poems about God (Ransom), 799–800
“Ligeia,” 228 Poems and Parodies (Cary), 300–01
“Literati of New York,” 217–18 “Poems for the Young White Man Who
“Marginalia,” 217–18 Asked Me How I, an Intelligent
“Metzengerstein,” 165–66 Well-Read Person, Could Believe
“The Philosophy of Composition,” in the War between Races”
221–22, 228, 230–31 (Cervantes), 964–65
“The Poetic Principle,” 227–28 Poems from Black Africa (Hughes), 719–20
“The Raven,” 188, 219–20, 228, Poems of A. Nonny Mouse (Prelutsky),
229–32, 431–34 1116–117
“Sonnet – To Science,” 182–83, 915–16 Poems of Governor Thomas Burke of North
“Ulalume: A Ballad,” 139, 232–33, Carolina, The, 132–33
234–36 “Poems of Our Climate, The”
“The Valley of Nis,” 217–18 (Stevens), 662
“The Valley of Unrest,” 223–27, 232–33 Poems of Passion (Wilcox), 179–81
“Poem” ( Johnson), 638–39 Poems of the Chinese Revolution (Tsiang), 984
“Poem” (Williams), 681 Poems of the River Spirit (Guevara), 975–76
“Poem (I live above a dyke bar and I’m Poems of Two Friends (Piatt and Howells),
happy)” (O’Hara), 858–60 410, 413
“Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Harper),
day!)” (O’Hara), 858–60 293–95
“Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” Poems on Several Occasions, with Some Other
(O’Hara), 858–60 Compositions (Evans), 135–36
“Poem (Light clarity avocado salad in the Poems on Several Occasions by a Gentleman of
morning)” (O’Hara), 858–60 Virginia (Dawson), 116
Poem, on the Rising Glory of America, A Poems on Slavery (Longfellow), 241–42,
(Freneau), 143–44 249–52
“Poem beginning ‘The’ ” (Zukofsky), 736–37 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
“Poem for a Birthday” (Plath), 1008–1009 Moral (Wheatley), 136–39
“poem in praise of menstruation” “poem to my uterus” (Clifton), 1065–1066
(Clifton), 1065–1066 “Poem with Refrains” (Pinsky), 1146
“Poem of the Forty-Eight States, A” “Poet, The” (Emerson), 194–98, 227–28,
(Koch), 848–50 344–45
“Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of “Poetess” (Guest), 847
the Wheat” (Whitman), 344–46 Poetical Works (Horton), 292–93
Poems (Bryant), 173–74 poetic circles
Poems (Cooke), 416–17 literary nationalism and, 165–66
Poems (Dickinson), 286 Poe and, 218–19
Poems (Emerson), 198 in Revolutionary America, 133–42

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poetic circles (cont.) “Poetry of the Future, The” (Whitman),

in San Francisco, 823–24 407–08
“Poetic Principle, The” (Poe), 227–28 Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1749, The (Hughes),
Poetics, A (Bernstein), 1135–136 712, 727
Poetics Journal, 862–63 Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War, A
Poetics of Relation (Glissant), 1127 (Bly), 886
Poet in New York (Lorca), 831–33 poetry slam. See spoken word/poetry slam
Poet-Lore journal, 498–99 movement
“Poetry, a Metrical Essay” (Holmes), Poetry Society of America, 506–07, 1135–136
268–70 Poetry’s Playground (Thomas), 1105
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse “Poets Again Best Sellers” (Brett), 508
antiwar poetry in, 939 Poets and Poetry of America, The (Griswold),
Bishop’s criticism in, 790–91 165–66, 183
Deep Image poetry and, 938–39 Poets and Poetry of Europe, The (Longfellow),
Eliot’s poetry in, 546–47 241–42, 252–56
Jarrell’s poetry in, 778–80 Poets & Writers journal, 1035
literary inl uence of, 508–11 poets-in-the-schools program, 1108–109
modernist poetry in, 148–49 Poets of America (Stedman), 406–08
Monroe as editor of, 499 Poets’ Theatre, 844–45
Moore’s poetry in, 616–17 Pohl, R. D., 1042–1043
New Poetry/New Verse Movement and, Poirier, Richard, 521–22
516–17 Poland
Objectivist Movement and, 693, 733–35 multilingual Polish-American poetry
poetic criticism in, 406–07 and, 1132
political events and poetry in, 503, poets from, 866
507–08 politics, poetry and. See also activist poetry;
Pound’s poetry in, 674 social movements
Swenson’s work in, 928–29 American Revolutionary parodies,
Zukofsky’s special issue of, 679 143–44
Poetry and Childhood (Styles et al.), 1118–119 Dickinson’s interest in, 367–68, 369–70
“Poetry and Happiness” (Wilbur), of Frost, 525
1027–1028 late nineteenth-century emergence of,
poetry consultant to the Library of 472–91
Congress (later poet laureate) in mid-nineteenth-century poetry,
Bishop’s appointment as, 780–81 295–97
Glück as, 1012–1013 in Millay’s poetry, 636
Jarrell’s appointment as, 781 Oppen’s poetry and, 743–45
Levine as, 1161–162 poetry of the center and, 937
Lowell’s appointment as, 757 Whitman’s poetry and, 330–31
Poetry Flash journal, 1137–138 politics journal, 877–78
Poetry Foundation, 1135–136 Pollock, Jackson, 844–45
“Poetry in English: 1945–62” (anon.), 784 polyphonic prose, Lowell’s experiments
poetry magazines with, 514–15
contemporary publications, 1152–153 “Pomegranate-Flowers” (Spoford),
online magazines, 1153 179–81, 282
poetry of the center, 937–55 “Pondy Woods” (Warren), 806–07

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“Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Porter, Fairield, 844–46

Sorrowful Account of His “Portrait” (Bogan), 642
Fourteen Years Transportation, at “Portrait of a Cog” (Fearing), 730–31
Virginia, in America, The” (Revel), “Portrait of a Lady” (Williams), 565
112–13 “Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane”
Pope, Alexander, 163–66 (Wright), 1162
American Revolutionary poetry and, “Possum Trot” (Dunbar), 398–99
147–48 Post-Apollo Press, 862–63
Augustan poetics and, 130, 135–36, 177 Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, The
inl uence on Bryant of, 172 (Bleecker), 134–35
inl uence on southern poetry, 109–11, 122 postidentity ethos, in Asian American
Lowell inl uenced by, 753–54 poetry, 999
neoclassical aesthetics and, 118–20 “Postlude” (Williams), 670–72
Poe and, 217–18 Postmodern American Poetry (Hoover), 1153
works postmodernism, in New York School
“The Dunciad,” 122, 147 poetry, 853–54, 856–64
“Eloise to Abelard,” 135–36 Pound, Dorothy, 687
“Essay on Man,” 130, 459–60 Pound, Ezra, 4–6, 148–49, 499–500
Popo and Fiina (Hughes and Bontemps), American print culture and poetry of,
711–12 604–08
“Poppies in July” (Plath), 1008–1009 anti-Semitism accusations against,
“Poppies in October” (Plath), 1008–1009 686–87
popular culture Asian aesthetics of, 978–83
commodiication of poetry and, 604–08 Blast magazine and, 605–06
late nineteenth-century decline of Brooks and, 1049–1050
poetry in, 497 children’s poetry and, 442–43
literary magazines and, 508–11 Creeley and, 687
in New York School poetics, 852–53 Duncan and, 876–77
novel in, 405 early work by, 507–08
Popular Front, poets of, 707–08, 1052 editorial work of, 615–16
popular song Eliot and, 546–47, 548–49, 550–54
blackface minstrelsy and, 309–10 Frost and, 524
Civil War poetry and, 307, 310–11, H.D. and, 591
313–15, 326 high modernism and, 750–51
dialect poetry and, 462–64 Hughes and, 708–09, 722–23
by Silverstein, 1115–116 Imagist movement and, 672, 673–75,
Whitman’s poetry in, 330–31 733–35
popular verse incarceration of, 686–87
children’s poetry as, 427–28, 434–35 legacy of, 701, 871
dialect, doggerel, and local color poetry Levertov and, 879–80, 881
in, 445–69 literary reputation of, 563, 670, 697
Frost’s embrace of, 519–20 Lowell and, 513–15
literary canon and, 2 Loy and, 583, 591, 594–95
“Porphyria’s Lover” (Browning), 980 modernist poetry of, 403–04, 591,
Port Bill (1774), 140–41 628
“Portent, The” (Melville), 324–25 Moore and, 594–95, 606

1275
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Pound, Ezra (cont.) “Praise of Eloquence, The”

New Directions publishing company (Wigglesworth), 77–78
and, 741 Pratt, Agnes, 31
Objectivism and, 693, 733 prayer, Puritan poetry and, 66
Olson and, 684–85, 687 Prayer at Sunrise (Zuni poem), 25
political criticism of, 729–30 pre-Columbian culture, poetry in, 18–19
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1012 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
schoolroom poetry and, 1105 (Baraka), 1052–1056
self-publication by, 613–14 Prelude (Wordsworth), 527
Snyder’s poetry and, 838–41 Prelutsky, Jack, 1116–117
Spicer’s poetry compared with, 834–38 Premonitions (Lew), 986–87
Tennyson parodied by, 657–58 Preparatory Meditations (Taylor),
Vorticism and, 514–15, 673–75 65–66, 80–81
The Waste Land edited by, 827–28 “Presence, The” (Very), 206–09
Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30 Presentation Piece (Hacker), 950–52
Williams and, 558, 560–62, 563–64, “Prettier Book, A” (Piatt), 411–13, 414–15
569–70, 670–73, 676–77 Price, Emanuel, 459–60
works Price, Leah, 245–47
Active Anthology, 679 “Primer” (Kim), 1130–131
Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, Primitive (Oppen), 743–45
678–79 Prince of Parthia, The (Godfrey), 186
The Cantos, 148–49, 563, 569–70, Princess Red Wing, 1125–127
677–78, 690–91, 733, 755, 834–38 printing technology
“Dr. Williams’ Position,” 672–73 Civil War poetry and, 307
“The Garden,” 673 Leaves of Grass and, 343–44, 347–49
Guide to Kulchur, 686–87 Moore’s poetry and, 603–04
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” 591 other media and displacement of, 629–30
“In a Station of the Metro,” 674 staples colonies poetry and, 116, 118–19
“A Pact,” 329–30 Pritchard, William H., 536
Pisan Cantos, 685–87 Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar, The
“The Seafarer,” 680–81 (Tucker), 146
Seven Lakes Canto (Canto XLIX), “Procession at Candlemas, A” (Clampitt),
679–80 1083–1085, 1098
“To Whistler, American” (Pound), “Prof. Vere De Blaw” (Field), 465–68
507–08 Progress of Dulness, The (Trumbull), 140
Poutrincourt, Jean de Beincourt de, 51–53 Projective verse
Powell, Amanda, 56–60 avant-gardism and, 741
Powell, Bud, 1070 Creeley and, 690–91, 747
Powell, D. A., 1154–155, 1162 Duncan and, 877–78
Powers of Thirteen (Hollander), 1092–1094 modernist poetry and, 670–97
powwow music, Native American poetry Olson’s manifesto and, 675, 693, 741, 747
as, 33 poetry of, 670
pragmatism, 803–06 postmodernism and, 775–76
“Prairie, The” (Clampitt), 1083–1085 Pound and, 690–91
“Prairies, The” (Bryant), 174–75, 194–98 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 675, 684–85, 693
Praise (Hass), 953–55 legacy of, 747

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Objectivists and, 741 Puerto Rican poetry, 967–72

“Proletarian Portrait” (Williams), 567 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1146–147
“Prologue, The” (Bradstreet), 71–72 to Ashbery, 856–64
“Prologues to What Is Possible” to Berryman, 767–68
(Stevens), 664 to Brooks, 716
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 223–27 to Dove, 1067–1068
Promises (Warren), 803–07, 816–17 to Frost, 524
Protestant Tutor, The, 426 to Glück, 1020–1021, 1146–147
“Protest from Italy, A” (Howe), 296–97 to Hijuelos, 972–73
Proudit, David L., 468 to Howard, 908–09
Proud Flesh (Warren), 801–02 to Justice, 809–11
Proust, Marcel, 519, 894 to Lowell, 750, 756–57
“Provide, Provide” (Frost), 535 to Merrill, 894–95
Provincetown Players, 632 to Millay, 632
“Prufrock” (Eliot). See “The Love Song of J. to Moore, 623–24
Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot) to Oppen, 743–45
Prufrock and Other Observations (Eliot), to Plath, 1006–1007
543–44, 547 to Roethke, 767–68
“Psalm of Life, A” (Longfellow), 248–49, to Ryan, 1094–1095
431–34 to Schuyler, 856–64
psalms, poetic translation, imitation, Punish Honey (Anderson), 933
adaptation, and recitation of, “Pure and Impure Poetry” (Warren),
248–49 803–06
“Psalms of David, The” (Graeme), 135–36 Puritan poetry, 3–4
“Psychiatrist’s Sestina” (Glück), 1018–1019 for children, 426
psychoanalytic poetics elegiac tradition in, 86–104
in American poetry, 6–7, 1003–1023 English Puritan elegies, 91–93
of Berryman, 767–68 legacy of funeral elegy, 102–04
Bishop’s interest in, 789–90 New England Puritan elegiac
in Bogan’s work, 644–45 tradition, 93–95
confessional poetry and, 1004–1005, physical world and religion in, 65–84
1011–1021 reality vs. iction in, 98–101
Jarrell’s interest in, 789–90, 802–03 sin of grief in, 95–98
in Lowell’s poetry, 752–54, 756–57, 765–67 “Purple Cow, The” (Burgess), 438
in Merrill’s poems, 895–96, 903–08 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 462–64
of Poe, 217–18, 234–36 “Putting in the Seed” (Frost), 530–31
of Roethke, 767–68 Puwuch Tawi (Hopi poem), 25
in Wright’s poetry, 884–86 Pyramid of Bone (Moss), 1030–1031, 1033
Publisher’s Weekly, 499
publishing industry “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The”
Depression-era repositioning of, 616–24 (Lowell), 756–59
Moore’s poetry and, 603–04, 612–15 Quakers, Whittier’s poetry about, 264–65
poetry expansion and, 499 Quantum Lyrics (Van Jordan), 933
Puella (Dickey), 808–09 Quartermain, Peter, 733
Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, 968–69 “Queen of the Blues” (Brooks),
Puerto Rican Obituary (Pietri), 968 1049–1050

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queer studies. See also gay poetry; “Race Question Discussed, The” (Dunbar),
homosexuality 394–95
New York School and, 856–64 Radclife, Ann, 163
Whitman’s inl uence in, 330–31 radio
Questions of Travel (Bishop), 785–87, 789 impact on poetry of, 629–30
Quevedo, Francisco de, 56–60 Millay’s poetry readings on, 635–36
Quill, Solitary APPARITION (Guest), 862–63 in Spicer’s poetry, 834–38
“Quince Bush, The” (Ammons), 924 Radio Symmetry (Larson), 933
Quinn, Alice, 785–87 Rahv, Philip, 1003–1004
Quinn, Kerker, 586 “Rain” (Ashbery), 850–51
Quinn, Paul, 1040, 1042–1043 Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky
Quint, David, 44 (Moss), 1031–1032, 1035
Quintana, Leroy V., 961–62 Raine, Kathleen, 879–81
Quiver (Somers-Willett), 933 Rainey, Lawrence, 580, 610–11
Rainey, Ma, 1049–1050
“Rabbits on Fire” (Ríos), 963–64 Rainhouse and Ocean (Underhill), 32–33
Rabbit tales, in Native American Rain in the Trees, The (Merwin), 949
poetry, 21–22 Rakosi, Carl, 733–35, 736, 741
race and racism. See also lynching Raleigh, Walter (Sir), 67
Agrarian tradition and, 817 Ramírez, Isabel, 56–60
in Civil War poetry, 315 Rampersad, Arnold, 710–11, 718
in dialect poetry, 450–52, 462–64 Randall, Dudley, 1058–1060
in Dickinson’s Civil War poetry, Random House Book of Poetry for Children,
322–24 The (Prelutsky), 1104, 1116–117
Dunbar’s writing about, 394–400 Ransom, John Crowe, 4–6, 796–98
in early national poetry, 161–63 Agrarian tradition and, 800–01, 817
Harper’s poetry and speeches about, Brooks and, 1049–1050
390–94 Duncan and, 877–78
in Haynes’s poetry, 386–87 family of, 795–96
in Hughes’s writing, 708–09 Justice and, 809–11
in Johnson’s poetry, 636–39 modernist poetry and, 755, 777–78
in Kaufman’s Beat poetry, 831–33 southern poetry and, 795
in Lanier’s poetry, 386–89 Warren and, 799–800
in Lindsay’s poetry, 511–13 Wright and, 813, 871–74
in local color poetry and iction, 409–10 rape, in Whitman’s poetry, 332
in Moore’s poetry, 620–21 Rape of Florida, The (Whitman), 400–01
in playground poetry, 1116–118 Rasula, Jed, 1153
in Reconstruction-era literary culture, Rather Old Myopic Woman Riding Pigyback
400–01 on One of Helen’s Many Cats, The
in Revolutionary-era poetry, 137 (Seuss), 1110–112
in southern poetry, 800–01, 806–07, “Rattlesnake Country” (Warren), 803–06
811–13 raúlrsalinas, 961–62
in staples colonies poetry, 112–13, 118, 125 Rauschenberg, Robert, 844–46, 858–60
in Whitman’s poetry, 400–01 Raven tales, in Native American
in Williams’s Paterson, 570 poetry, 21–22
in Wylie’s poetry, 646–47 Raven, The (album), 232

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Raven, The (ilm), 232 “Reedbeds of the Hackensack, The”

“Raven, The” (Poe), 188, 219–20, 228, (Clampitt), 1087–1088
229–32, 431–34 Reedy’s Mirror magazine, 508–13
“Raven, The” (Whitman), 182–83 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 501–02
Raven and Other Poems, The (Poe), 232 Relections on a Gift of a Watermelon
Raworth, Tom, 866 Pickle (Dunning, Lueders, and
Raw Silk (Alexander), 998–99 Smith), 1104
Ray, David, 886 Reid, James, 127
“Reactionary Poet, The” (Reed), 1060–1061 reincarnation, in Merrill’s poetry, 903–08
reading poetry, Whitman’s discussion of, “Rejection of Closure, The” (Hejinian),
347–49 1144–145
Reagan, Ronald, 1079–1080 religious poetry
realist poetry in early America, 8
dialect poetry as, 455–56 Eliot’s The Waste Land as, 550–54
Fireside Poets and, 468–69 by Lowell, 753
New York School idealism in reaction Puritan poetry as, 65–84
to, 406 in staples colonies, 118
poetry of 1980s and, 1027–1045 of Very, 206–09
popular poetry as, 449–50 by Wheatley, 136–37
in postbellum era, 410–17 religious skepticism
by Robinson, 504–06 in Crane’s poetry, 486–87, 490, 493
Reaper journal, 1030 in Dickinson’s poetry, 362–64
Reason for the Pelican, The (Ciardi), 1111–112, in Lowell’s poetry, 753
1113, 1114 in Melville’s poetry, 417–20
“Recipe for a Poem ‘in Dialect,’ A” in Stevens’s poetry, 653–54, 658
(Strong), 453–55 “Reluctance” (Frost), 1107–108
“Reconciliation” (Whitman), 352–53 Reminiscent Rhymes and Other Verse
“Reconsideration of the Blackbird, A” (Wilson), 448–49
(Moss), 1033 “Renascence” (Millay), 507, 508, 632
Reconstruction era Renascence and Other Poems (Millay), 508
Southern poetry in, 383–401 “Rendezvous” (Millay), 634
in Whitman’s poetry, 341–43 Renker, Elizabeth, 179–81, 403–21
“Recorded Birds” (Twichell), 1146 “Repeal, The” (Burke), 132–33
“Recuerdo” (Millay), 635 “Repetitions of a Young Captain”
Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 485–86 (Stevens), 664
Redield, J. S., 353–54 Republics of Reality, Parsing (Bernstein),
“Red Hoss Mountain” (Field), 465–68 1038, 1042–1043
Redl, Harry, 829 “Resignation” (Tucker), 146, 148–49
“Red Lilies” (Guest), 863 Resistance (Bernstein), 1038
“Red Loves Kit” (Stevens), 655 Restoration, impact in New England
“Red Poppy, The” (Glück), 1020–1021 of, 93–95
“Red Wheelbarrow, The” (Williams), Retallack, Joan, 576–78
566–67, 575–76, 686, 1104 “Retraction” (Armantrout), 1149–152
Reed, Brian, 844–66 “Retribution” (Harper), 393–94
Reed, Ishmael, 1060–1061 “Return: An Elegy, The” (Warren), 799–800
Reed, Lou, 232 Return of Félix Nogara, The (Medina), 973

1279
 Index

“Reuben Bright” (Robinson), 504–06, The Will to Change, 882

1147–149 Rich, Richard, 111–12
“Reunion, The” (Harper), 392 Richard, Mark, 521–22
Revard, Carter, 38–39 “Richard Cory” (Robinson), 504–06
Revel, James, 112–13 Richard of St. Victor, 68
Revell, Donald, 8 Richards, Eliza, 179–81, 217–36
Revenants (Nowak), 1132 Richards, I. A., 762–63
Reverdy, Pierre, 844–46 Richards, Laura, 438
Revolution and the Word (Davidson), 427–28 “Rickshaw Boy” (Tsiang), 984
Revolutionary War. See American riddles, in Merrill’s poetry, 898, 900
Revolution Ridge, John Rollin, 34–35
Rexroth, Kenneth, 823, 825–27, 829–31, “Rigorists” (Moore), 622–23
838–41, 994–95, 1052–1056 Riley, James Whitcomb, 409–10
Reznikof, Charles, 733, 735–36, 740–41, children’s poetry by, 438–42
1109–110 current popularity of, 468
“Rhapsody, The” (Lewis), 118–20 local color and dialect poetry by, 465–68
Rhymes from a Hill Billy (Hiegel), 468 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 894
Rhymes of Childhood (Riley), 465–68 Rimbaud, Arthur, 586, 844–46
Rhyme’s Reason (Hollander), 1092–1094 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The”
Rice, Grantland, 468 (Coleridge), 250
Rich, Adrienne, 361–62, 889 Ríos, Alberto, 962, 963–64
authenticity in work of, 870, 874–75 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 559, 730–31
Crane and, 1162 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., 506–08
culture poetry and, 1081, 1082–1083 ritual, in Native American poetry,
feminist poetry of, 950–52 19–20, 23–26
Lowell and, 751, 764–65 “Rival Kings of Mohegan, Contrasted
Merrill and, 895 with the Rival Brothers of Persia”
poetry of 1960s by, 881–84 (Sigourney), 290–92
poetry of the center and, 937–38 “River Poem” (Merrill), 895–96
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1003–1004 Rivers, Larry, 844–46
works Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery), 860–61
“After Dark,” 883 Rivers to the Sea (Teasdale), 645–46
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” 874–75 Roach, Max, 1050–1051
“The Blue Ghazals,” 883 “Road, The” ( Johnson), 637–38
A Change of World, 874–75, 1082–1083 “Road-Hymn for the Start” (Moody),
The Diamond Cutters, 874–75, 1083 501–02
Diving into the Wreck, 889 “Road Not Taken, The” (Frost), 462,
Dream of a Common Language, 536–37, 1104
The, 889 “Robert Burns” (Halleck), 169–71
“In the Evening,” 883 Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished
Lealets, 882 Lifetime Work, to Guest, 862–63
“The Roofwalker,” 874–75 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, 1105–106
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 881–84 Roberts, Sarah, 431–34
“Storm Warnings,” 874–75 Robeson, Paul, Hughes and, 711
“Twenty-One Love Poems,” 889, Robinson, Edward Arlington
950–52 genre poetry and, 468

1280
 Index

Graham and, 1147–149 in southern poetry, 186–89, 309

Harvard poets and, 502 in Stevens’s poetry, 650–68
New England poetry of, 504–06 women poets in, 183–86
New York School and, 407–08 “Rome” (Howe), 295–97
poetry of, 461–62 “Rome” (Pinsky), 940–44
Rich and, 874–75 Rome, Andrew, 334–37
self-publication by, 613–14 Rongwrong journal, 592
Wright and, 871–74 “Roofwalker, The” (Rich), 874–75
Robinson, Edward G., 330–31 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 985–86
“Rock-Breaker, The” (Markham), 482–83 Roosevelt, Theodore, 330–31
“Rock Me to Sleep” (Akers), 1105–106 Root, Abiah, 283, 362–64, 370
Rodríguez, Aleida, 974 Roots and Branches (Duncan), 875–79
Rodríguez, Luis J., 964–65 Rorem, Ned, 330–31
Roessel, David, 718–19 Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (Koch),
Roethke, Theodore 1108–109
Bishop on, 788–89 Rosen, Michael, 1111–112
children’s poetry of, 999, 1103–104, Rosenfeld, Morris, 490–91
1107–108, 1115 Rosenthal, M. L., 751, 1003–1004
high modernist poetry and, 756–57 Rosset, Barney, 829
Lowell and, 753–54 Rothenberg, Jerome, 32–33
poetry and career of, 750–51, 767–68, Rothko, Mark, 844–45
771–73, 784 Roumain, Jacques, 709, 712
Wright and, 871–74 Round House Voices, The (Smith), 811–13
Rogers, John (Harvard president), 71–72 ’Round Midnight (ilm), 1070
Rogers, John (Reverend), elegy for, 93–95 Rourke, Constance, 35–36
Rogers, Pattiann, 933 Rowson, Susanna, 372–73
Rolfe, Edwin, 729 Royal Academy, 163
Rollins, Sonny, 1060–1061 Royal Society of London, 118–20
Roman, Camille, 781 Rubens, Peter Paul, 163–65
romance poetry, of Sor Juana Inés de la Rudman, Mark, 760–61
Cruz, 56–60 Ruggles, Carl, 809–11
“Romantic, The” (Bogan), 642 Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando, 1131
Romantic tradition Rukeyser, Muriel
American poetry and, 4 antiwar movement and, 890–91
Beat Movement and, 824–25 Auden and, 906
British inl uence in American poetry Frost and, 536–37
from, 163–65 Hughes and, 711
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 leftist poetry of, 731–32
emergence in American poetry of, as middle-generation poet, 750–51
177–89 Rich and, 950–52
New York School of poetry and, 404 Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30
Poe and, 220–21 Rumaker, Michael, 829
poets of 1960s and, 870 Rumba atop the Stones (Menes), 974–75
political sympathies and, 733 Rumi (Persian poet), 949
science and poetry and, 915–16 “Runaway” (Lowell), 765–67
social movement poetry and, 482–83 “Runaway Slave, The” (Whitman), 712

1281
 Index

Runny Babbit (Silverstein), 1115–116 folk inl uences on, 707–08

Runyon, Damon, 468 free verse by, 551–52
Russell, Ada Dwyer, 513–15 Hughes and, 704–06, 712
Russell, David, 1103–104 modernist poetry of, 500, 515–16
Russell, Tom, 330–31 multilingual poetry and, 1137–138
Rustic Rhymes and Ballads (Corbett), 455–56 works
Ryan, Kay, 536–37, 1094–1095 Chicago Poems, 490–91, 508, 515–16
“Clean Curtains,” 515–16
“Saadi” (Emerson), 201–06 Cornhuskers, 515–16
Sacco and Vanzetti trial and executions, 636 Early Moon, 1105–106
“Sacco-Vanzetti” (Tsiang), 984 “Fish Crier,” 1105–106
Sacks, Peter, 88–90 “Fog,” 1104
sacramental objects, in Native American “Halsted Street Car,” 515–16
poetry, 19–20 “Jazz Fantasia,” 712
“Sacred Prostitute, The” (Loy), 587–89 “Mamie,” 490–91
Sacriice, The (Bidart), 1016–1017 “Muckers,” 490–91
Sadness and Happiness (Pinsky), 940–44 “Short Talk on Poetry,” 1105–106
“Sad Story of a Little Girl, The” (Piatt), “Street Window,” 1105–106
456–57 Sanders, Pharoah, 1063–1064
Sáenz, Benjamin Alire, 964 “Sandpiper, The” (Thaxter), 431–34
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” Sands, Robert, 161–63
(Dickinson), 370–72 Sandys, George, 112–13
Sagan, Carl, 932–33 San Francisco Art Institute, 823–24
“Sailing after Lunch” (Stevens), 657 San Francisco Examiner, 480
“Sailing Home from Rapallo” (Lowell), “San Francisco Letter” (Rexroth),
758–59 829–31
“Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), San Francisco Renaissance, 6, 823–24,
1015–1016, 1082 829
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 503–04, 760–61 Asian inl uences in, 838–41
Saint Judas (Wright), 871–74 New York inl uence in, 829–31
Salamun, Tomaz, 1149–150 San Francisco School of poetry, 823–41
“Saliences” (Ammons), 922–23 “Sanine to Leda” (Creeley), 690–91
Salinas, Luis Omar, 961–62 Santa Barbara (television soap opera),
Salmagundi journal, 767 992–93
“Salmon” (Graham), 536–37 Santayana, George, 403–21, 502
Salter, Mary Jo, 1085–1086, 1094–1095 Hecht’s poetry and, 1090–1091
“Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt” (Halpine), 315 Stevens and, 658
“Samuel Brown” (Cary), 183 Santos Peres, Craig, 1123–124
Sanborn, Franklin, 343 Sappho, 1088–1089
Sánchez, Ricardo, 961–62 in women’s Romantic poetry, 179–81
Sanchez, Sonia, 814, 1048–1049, 1056–1057 “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would
Sand and Steel (Sandburg), 515–16 Not Take the Garbage Out”
Sandburg, Carl, 38–39, 490–91, 511 (Silverstein), 1115–116
Auden and, 908–09 Sargent, Epes, 183
children’s poetry by, 1104, 1105–106, Saroyan, Aram, 878
1109–110, 1118 Sastri, Reena, 1003–1023

1282
 Index

satirical poetry “En Route to Southampton,” 854–55

criticism of, 450 “Fabergé,” 853–54
popular poetry as, 448–49 “4404 Stanford,” 854–55
Saturday Evening Post, 783 Freely Espousing, 845
Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre Nest of Ninnies (Ashbery and
(Yamanaka), 1134–135 Schuyler), 844–46
Saturday Press magazine, 102–04, 346 “Noon Oice,” 854–55
Saturday Review, 1113–115 “October 5, 1981,” 854–55
Saunders, Josephine, 938–39 “3/23/66,” 854–55
Savage, Philip Henry, 502 Schwartz, Delmore, 750–51, 756–57, 770–71
Saxe, John G., 468 science
Sayre, Gordon, 53–56 in Clampitt’s poetry, 1087–1088
Sayre, Henry M., 575–76 in contemporary poetry, 913–34
Sayre, Robert, 733 Dickinson’s knowledge of, 283, 364–65
Scalapino, Leslie, 838–41 in English poetry, 387–88
“Scamp” (Dunbar), 397 evolutionary theory and, 200–01, 800–01
“Scandal” (Stein), 576–78 history of poetry and, 914–17
Scariications (Cortez), 1063–1064 Jefers’s poetry and, 917
Scar Tissue (Wright), 814 modernist poetry and, 916
Scepticism and Animal Faith (Santayana), 658 Poe on, 182–83, 915–16
Scheick, William, 93–95 Whitman on, 182–83, 915–16
Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Astrid, 98–101 “Science” ( Jefers), 917
Schnackenberg, Gjertrud, 1096–1098 “Science” (Whitman), 182–83
“Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor” Science and Other Poems (Deming), 933
(Sigourney), 290–92 Science and Steeplelower (Gander), 933
Scholem, Gershom, 881 Science of English Verse, The (Lanier), 387–88
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Scientiic American magazine, 527–28
Culture, 1056–1057 Scorpion (prison ship), 143–44
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 254–56, 459–60 Scott, Walter (Sir), 143–44, 158–59
Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, 31–32, 34–35, Scottish stanza, 163–65
183–86 “Scottsboro” (Hughes), 709
schoolroom poetry, 4, 431–34, 1105–107. Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in
See also Fireside Poets Verse (Hughes), 718–19
Schoolroom Poets (Sorby), 431–34 Scotus, John, 68
“Schools of Yesteryear, The” ( Jarrell), 1105 Scream, The (Munch), 853–54
“Schooner Flight, The” (Walcott), 1069 Scribner’s publishing company, 508–11
Schulman, Bruce J., 947–50 “Scripts for the Pageant” (Merrill), 905–06
Schulze, Robin G., 603–24 Scroggins, Mark, 728–47
Schumbergius, Tobias, 60–61 “Sea-Blue Aubade” (Graham), 1147–149
Schuyler, James “Seafarer, The” (Pound), 680–81
literary reputation of, 856–64, 866 “Sea Lilly” (H.D.), 585–86
Merrill and, 895 “Sea Marke, The” (Smith), 111–12
as New York School poet, 844–46, 851, Sea-Piece, The (Kirkpatrick), 122–23
852–53 “Sea Rose” (H.D.), 585–86, 590–91
works “Sea-Side Cave, The” (Cary), 185–86
“Dec. 28, 1974,” 854–55 “Seasons of the Soul” (Tate), 800–01

1283
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“Sea Violet” (H.D.), 585–86 sentimentalism

Seaweeds and Constructions: Anthology in children’s poetry, 429–31
Hawaii (Hamasaki), 1134–135 in Civil War poetry, 313–15
Second April (Millay), 634–35 in popular poetry, 445
“Second Avenue” ( Johns), 507 Sentinel newspaper, 427–28
“Second Hour of the Night, The” separate-but-equal doctrine, 394–95
(Bidart), 1012 September 11, 2001, attacks, poetry in
“Second Settler’s Story, The” (Carleton), wake of, 9
457–59 “September 1918” (Lowell), 514–15
“Second Thoughts about Humanism” Sepulveda, Ginés de, 45–47
(Eliot), 554–55 “Sequel to Drum-Taps” (Whitman), 352–53
Second World War. See World War II, “Serenade” (Pinkney), 187
American poetry in “Servant to Servants, A” (Frost), 524, 531–32
Secret Art of Doctor Seuss, The (Nel), 1110–112 “Sestina” (Bishop), 777–78, 780–81, 785–87
Secretary to the Spirits, A (Reed), 1060–1061 “Sestina on Six Words from Weldon Kees”
Secret History of Water, The (Curbelo), 974 ( Justice), 809–11
segregation, Dunbar’s discussion of, 394–95 Setina, Emily, 1156–158
Segue Distributing publisher, 1028–1030 Seurat, Georges, 982–83
Seidel, Frederick, 751, 929 Seuss, Dr. (Theodore Geisel), 442–43, 1103,
Seidman, Hugh, 747 1110–112, 1115
Selected Poems (Guest), 862–63 Seven Arts magazine, 508–11
Selected Poems (Hughes), 718–19 Seven Lakes Canto (Canto XLIX) (Pound),
Selected Poems ( Justice), 809–11 679–80
Selected Poems (Moore), 618–24 Seven-League Crutches ( Jarrell), 802–03
Selected Poems (Warren), 801–02 77 Dream Songs (Berryman). See The Dream
Selected Poems (Williams), 682–83 Songs (Berryman)
Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923–1966 Sewall, Ellen, 209–11
(Warren), 803–07 Sewall, Samuel, 94–95
Selected Translations 1968–1978 (Merwin), Sewanee Review, 508–11
947–50 Sex and Character (Weininger), 589–90
Select Poems (Sigourney), 429 Sexton, Anne
Select Poems (Wright), 886 Auden and, 907
“Self-Portrait” (Wylie), 646–47 Bishop’s critique of, 781–82
“Self-Portrait, 1969” (Bidart), 1014–1015 Glück and, 1019–1020
“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” Lowell and, 751
(Ashbery), 846–47, 860–61 Plath and, 1007
“Self Unseeing, The” (Hardy), 788–89 postmodernism and, 775–76
Selyns, Henricus, 61–63 psychoanalytic poetics of, 644–45,
Semi-Colon poetry newsletter, 844–46 1003–1004
Semina culture, 838–41 Wright and, 874
Semina journal, 838–41 sexuality. See also courtship; homosexuality
Sendak, Maurice, 1111–113 in H.D.’s poetry, 590–91
Seneca Falls Convention, 369–70 in Hughes’s poetry, 714
Senghor, Léopold, 722–23, 727 in Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 347–49
“Sentences” (Bernstein), 1040, 1041–1042 in Loy’s poetry, 587–90
Sentences (Grenier), 890 in men’s Romantic poetry, 186

1284
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in Millay’s poetry, 631–32, 633 “Shit List” (Ammons), 925–26

New York School poetics and, 856–64 Shockley, Evie, 1071–1073
in playground poetry, 1116–118 Shoptaw, John, 1155–156
in “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 340 “Short Eyes” (Piñero), 969–70
in staples colonies poetry, 118 “Short Talk on Poetry” (Sandburg),
in Teasdale’s poetry, 645–46 1105–106
in women’s modernist poetry, 631 “Shy One” (Fulton), 932–33
in women’s Romantic poetry, 179–81 Sibbes, Richard, 96
“Sgt. Tilman Joy” (Hay), 450–52 “Sic Vita” (Thoreau), 209–11
Shahn, Ben, 330–31 Sidney, Philip (Sir), 67, 87
Shakespeare, William elegies for, 91–93
American poets and, 165–66 Spenser’s elegy for, 91–93
Berryman and, 768–69 “Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
iambic pentameter in work of, 225 Dim, A” (Whitman), 350–51
Poe and, 217–18 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 213
Shakespeare in Harlem (Hughes), 713 children’s poetry and, 425–26, 429
Shaking the Pumpkin (Rothenberg), 32–33 education and career of, 290–92, 294,
Shall We Gather at the River (Wright), 884–86 295, 372–73
Shapiro, Karl, 781, 1081 Poe and, 183, 217–18
“Shark’s Parlor, The” (Dickey), 807–08 works
Shaw, David, 91–93 “Birthday Verses to a Little Girl,” 429
Shaw, Robert Gould, 323–24, 503–04, 760–61 “The Cherokee Mother,” 290–92
Shedding Silence (Mirikitani), 985–86 “Connecticut River,” 290–92, 294–95
Sheeler, Charles, 560–61 “Exhibition of a School of Young
“Sheep Child, The” (Dickey), 808–09 Ladies,” 290–92
Shell, Marc, 1123–124 “Farewell to the Aged,” 429
Shelley, Mary, 915–16 The Girl’s Reading-Book, 290–92
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88–90, 404, 409 “Indian Names,” 290–92
Markham and, 482–83 Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse,
Poe and, 217–18, 219, 223–27 290–92
works “On Meeting Several Former Pupils
“Adonais,” 88–90 at the Communion Table,” 290–92
“The Mask of Anarchy,” 729 “Rival Kings of Mohegan,
Prometheus Unbound, 223–27 Contrasted with the Rival Brothers
“Sheltered Garden” (H.D.), 585 of Persia,” 290–92
Shenandoah (Schwartz), 756–57 “Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor,”
Shepard, Thomas, 94–98 290–92
Shepheardes Calendar, The (Spenser), 91–93 Select Poems, 429
Shepp, Archie, 1060–1061, 1070–1071 “Teacher’s Excuse,” 290–92
Sherif, Helen McNeely, 884–86 “To a Shred of Linen,” 185, 192–94,
Shetley, Vernon, 1030, 1041 196, 213
“Shifting Personas” (Guest), 862–63 “To the First Slave Ship,” 290–92
Shillaber, Benjamin P., 468 Traits of the Aborigines of America,
“Shiloh” (Melville), 326 290–92
Ship in the Desert, The (Miller), 301–02 “Silently” (Payne), 169
Shirazi, Saadi, 201–06 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 38–39

1285
 Index

Silliman, Ron, 694, 742–43, 837–38, 1028– poetry by slaves, 136–39, 292–93, 318–19
1030, 1156–158 in staples colonies poetry, 112–13, 118
Silverstein, Shel, 442–43, 1115–118 in Whitman’s writing, 332–34, 338–40
Simic, Charles, 1027–1028, 1035, 1144, “Slave Ships, The” (Whittier), 261–62
1146–147 “Sleepers, The” (Whitman), 338
“Similar Cases” (Gilman), 476 “Sleeping Fury, The” (Bogan), 644
Simms, William Gilmore, 187, 188–89, Sloane, David E. E., 445–69
217–18, 309, 311–12, 316–19 Slow Dance Heart Break Blues (Adof ), 1118
Simple Truth, The (Levine), 1161–162 “Slow Traveller, The” (Occom), 139
Simpson, Joshua McCarter, 307–08, 326–27 “ ‘Slugging’-Match, The” (Carleton), 457–59
Simpson, Louis, 870–71 Small Congregations (Moss), 1035, 1036
Simpsons, The (television show), 232 Smart, Christopher, 206–07, 771–73, 876–77
sin, grief as, 95–98 Smart Set magazine, 508–11
Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 869 “Smile, A” (Allston), 163–65
“Sincerity and Objectiication” (Zukofsky), Smith, Bessie, 1049–1050
733–35 Smith, Budd, 918
Sinclair, Upton, 479, 490–91, 984 Smith, Dave, 795, 811–13
“Sinless Child, The” (Oakes Smith), 181, 253 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 139–42, 166–67
Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 420–21 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes. See Oakes Smith,
“Sisters, The” (Lowell), 513–15 Elizabeth
Situation of Poetry, The (Pinsky), 938–39 Smith, Jack, 844–46
Sitwell, Edith, 876–77, 982–83 Smith, John, 111–12
Six Gallery, 825–27, 829–31 Smith, Kate Capshaw, 438–42
Sixties Press, 886 Smith, Sam W., 453–55, 468
“Skeleton in Armor, The” (Longfellow), Smith, William (Reverend), 133–42
249–52 Smith, William Jay, 1107–108
Sketches of Southern Life (Harper), 293–95, “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle” (Moore),
390–94 619–20
“Sketch of a Man on a Platform” (Loy), Snake Poems (Alarcón), 1131, 1138–139
587–89 Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (Rich),
“Skipper Ben” (Larcom), 282 881–84
“Skipper Ireson’s Ride” (Whittier), 261–62 Snelson, Karin, 1116–117
“Skunk Hour” (Lowell), 753, 758–59 Snodgrass, W. D., 775–76, 781–82, 1003–1004
Sky Clears, The (Day), 32–33 “Snow” (Wright), 813
“Sky is low – the Clouds are mean, The” Snow-Bound, a Winter Idyl (Whittier),
(Dickinson), 364–65 205–06, 261–67, 447–48
Sky Woman creation narrative, 15–16 “Snow Man, The” (Stevens), 661–62
Slant Book, The (Newell), 436–37 Snyder, Gary, 8
“Slave Quarters” (Dickey), 807–08, 809–11 in Antaeus, 1146
slavery. See also abolitionism Asian inl uences on, 838–41, 978–79
African American poets’ denunciation Beat poetry of, 8, 823
of, 307–08, 318–19 environmental poetry and, 931–32,
in Caribbean colonies poetry, 125 949–50
in Dunbar’s poetry, 398 poetry of the center and, 937–38
erasure in Southern poetry of, 309 Soares, Lota de Macedo, 780–81, 783,
Longfellow’s poetry on, 241–42, 249–52 785–87

1286
 Index

social clubs early editions of, 332–34

poetry manuscript circulation from, Jarrell’s critique of, 778–80
118–20 Merrill’s poetry and, 895–96
in staples colonies, 115–16 phrenology in, 343–44
social credit theory, 686–87 printing diiculties with, 336–37
social media, poetry and, 9 sexuality in, 340
social movements, 295–97 slavery in, 338–40
Asian American activism and, 986–93 theme and technique in, 338–40
Asian American poetry and, 981, 983–86 “Song of the Exposition” (Whitman), 301
Chicano poetry and, 960–67 “Song of the Negro Boatmen” (Whittier),
in children’s poetry, 1118 261–62
Depression-era poetry and, 728–29 “Song of the South” (Simms), 309, 311–12
Gilman’s poetry and, 473–80 songs, Native American poems as, 23–26
Markham’s poetry and, 480–84 “Songs for a Colored Singer” (Bishop), 712
mid-nineteenth-century poetry and role Songs of a Semite (Lazarus), 297–99
of, 290–95 Songs of Gold Mountain (Hom), 984
Millay’s poetry and, 636 Songs of Summer (Stoddard), 405
multilingual contemporary poetry and, Songs of the Dream People (Houston), 32–33
1133–134 Songs of the Sierra (Miller), 301–02
naturalism theory and, 472 Songs of the Soil (Stanton), 464–65
poets of 1960s and, 869 Songs of the Teton Sioux (Paige), 28–29
Williams’s poetry and, 567 “Songs to Survive the Summer” (Hass),
“Society upon the Stanislaus, The” (Harte), 953–55
450–52 “Sonnet” (Robinson), 407–08
Soil magazine, 508–11 sonnets
“Soldiers’ Aid Societies” (anon.), 311–12 by Allston, 163–65
Sollors, Werner, 1123–124 American Revolutionary poetry, 145–46
“So Long!” (Whitman), 340–41 elegies for Lincoln as, 316–18
“Some Duncan Letters – A Memoir and a by Frost, 519
Critical Tribute” (Levertov), 880–81 by Millay, 633–34
Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), 513–14 “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”
Somers-Willett, Susan, 933 (Millay), 633–34
Some Trees (Ashbery), 860–62 “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” ( Johnson),
Sommer, Doris, 1123–124 638–39
Song, Cathy, 987, 991–92 “Sonnet – To Science” (Poe), 182–83, 915–16
“Song, The” (Very), 209 “Soonest Mended” (Ashbery), 860–61
“song in the front yard, a” (Brooks), Sorby, Angela, 425–43, 1103, 1105–107,
1049–1050 1118–119
Song of Andoumboulou (Mackey), 1070–1071 “Sorcery” (Hagedorn), 994–95
Song of Coyote Who Stole the Fire (Navajo Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 56–60, 61–63
poem), 22 Soto, Gary, 962–63
“Song of Day in Yosemite Valley” Soto Vélez, Clemente, 968–69
(Noguchi), 980–81 “Sot-Weed Factor, The” (Cooke), 114–15,
Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow), 37–38, 141–42, 461
238–39, 241–42, 282, 1118–119 “Sot-Weed Redivivus, The” (Cooke), 114–15
“Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 148–49 Soul Psyche (Philip), 875–76

1287
 Index

“Soul selects her own Society, The” Spenser, Edmund

(Dickinson), 366–67 inl uence on Bradstreet of, 67, 71, 73
Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 398–400 pastoral elegy and, 91–93
South Carolina Gazette, 117, 122–23, 125–26 works
“South Carolina to the States of the North” “Astrophel,” 91–93
(Hayne), 384–86 The Shepheardes Calendar, 91–93
Southern Literary Messenger, 181, 218–19 S*PeRM**K*T (Mullen), 1071–1073
southern poets. See also staples colonies, Spicer, Jack
poetry from Beat Movement and, 823, 825–27, 829
African American poets as, 814–18 Duncan and, 877–78, 888–89
Agrarian tradition and, 800–01, 817 Lorca and, 833–34
in American Revolutionary era, 145–46 poetry of, 834–38
in colonial era, 109–27 “Spicer’s Language” (Silliman), 837–38
contemporary trends of, 817–18 Spider tales, in Native American
Jarrell’s inl uence on, 802–03 poetry, 21–22
in late twentieth century, 807–18 Spiegelman, Willard, 940–44, 1079–1100,
local, dialect, and genre poetry of, 1146–147
464–65 Spillers, Hortense, 1048
Lost Cause sentimentalism and, 316–18, Spingarn Medal (NAACP), 722–23
462–64 Spirit of Japanese Poetry, The (Noguchi),
modernist poetry of, 795–818 980–81
Poe and, 217–18 spiritualism
in Reconstruction era, 383–401 fetishization of, 978–79
Romantic poetry by, 186–89, 309 in Merrill’s poetry, 903–08, 929–30
in twentieth century, 4–6 Poe’s work and, 226–27, 233–34
women poets as, 814–18 spirituals, Dunbar’s discussion of, 398–400
“Southern Refugee, The” (Horton), 318–19 Spock, Benjamin, 886–87
Southern Road (Brown), 707–08, 1054–1055 Spoford, Harriet Prescott, 179–81, 282,
Southern Rose Bud magazine, 434–35 372–73
Southey, Robert, 163, 179 spoken word/poetry slam movement, 629
Soviet Comintern, Depression-era poetry Nuyorican Movement and, 969–70
and inl uence of, 728–29 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), 490–91,
space race, science in poetry and, 918 504–06, 508, 511–13
Spahr, Juliana, 576–78, 1123–140 Sprague, Charles, 165–66
Spanish-American War, poetry and “Spring” (Timrod), 383–84
journalism about, 503 Spring and All (Williams), 337, 566–67,
Spanish Civil War, poetry and, 728–29 573–74, 736
Spanish colonialism, early American critical assessment of, 564, 568–69
poetry and, 43–51 Eliot and, 558, 562–63, 755
Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 554 Moore’s comments on, 681–82
“speaking of loss” (Clifton), 1065–1066 Pound’s comments on, 677
Specimen Days (Whitman), 352–53, 354–55 “Spring Day” (Lowell), 514–15
Spectral Emanations (Hollander), 1092–1094 Springield Republican, 282, 302–03, 323–24,
“Speech Versyied, The” (Franklin), 141 370–72, 431
Spellman, A. B., 1056–1057 “Spring Pools” (Frost), 534
Spencer, Anne, 636 “Spring Rain” (Hass), 953–55

1288
 Index

Staford, Jean, 752–53, 756–57, 765–67 Duncan and, 881

Staford, William, 884–86, 913–14 Eliot and, 576–78
Stamp Act crisis, poetry during, 129–33 as an expatriate, 583
“Standards and Paradise of the Blacks” experimental poetry and, 1028–1030, 1158
(Lorca), 831–33 homosexuality in poetry of, 1158–159
Stanford, Frank, 1156–158 language play and poetics of, 576–78,
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 372–73 589–90
Stanton, Frank L., 464–65 Lewis and, 576–78
“Stanzas for the Times” (Whittier), 262–63 Loy and, 585, 586, 592–93
Stanzas in Meditation (Stein), 576–78 modernist poetry of, 4–6, 7–8, 733, 1158
staples colonies, poetry from, 126. and modernist prose, 1158
See also colonialism and conquest New York School poets and, 844–46
club culture and manuscript circulation, science and poetry of, 916
118–20 Williams and, 560–61
emergence of printing presses, 116 works
manuscript circulation and club culture, “As a Wife Has a Cow,” 1158
poetry distribution through, 118–20 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 576–78
newspaper publication of poetry in, 117 “Composition as Explanation,”
“Star Gazing” (Payne), 169 576–78
“Star in a Stone-Boat, A” (Frost), 528–29 “Custard,” 1028–1030
State of Tennessee v. Scopes, 800–01 Lifting Belly, 1158–159
“State of the Art” (Bernstein), 1042 “Melanctha,” 576–78
states of consciousness, in Poe’s “Scandal,” 576–78
writing, 228 Stanzas in Meditation, 576–78
“Statue and Birds” (Bogan), 642 Tender Buttons, 576–78, 589–90,
Staufer, Donald, 1–2 1158–159
St. Augustine, 1016–1017 The World Is Round, 442–43, 1105
St. Catherine of Alexandria, 59–60 Steinman, Lisa M., 1027–1045
Stearns, Frazer, 368–69 “Step Away from Them, A” (O’Hara),
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 155 858–60
on dialect poetry, 409–10 Sterling, James, 109–11, 116, 123–25
Fireside Poets and, 498 Stevens, Holly, 655–56
journalism and poetry and, 299–301 Stevens, James Thomas, 1125–130, 1136
modernist poetry and, 403–04 Stevens, Wallace
New York School of poetry and, 404–06 Ashbery and, 860–61
poetic criticism by, 406–08, 409 Burnshaw and, 729–32
satirical poetry of, 408–09 career and family life of, 652
Steele, Jefrey, 183–86 early life of, 651
Steendam, Jacob, 61–63 epistemology in writing of, 658
“Steeple-Jack, The” (Moore), 617 estrangement from family of, 655
Stein, Gertrude Gold’s criticism of, 729
Bogan’s criticism of, 640 high modernism and, 750–51
children’s poetry by, 442–43, 1105, 1107, Hughes and, 708–09, 722–23
1109–110 journals of, 651–52, 653
contemporary poetry and inl uence of, legacy of, 701
1157–159 modernist poetry of, 4–6, 500, 519

1289
 Index

Stevens, Wallace (cont.) “Of Modern Poetry,” 665–66, 667

Moss and, 1033 “One,” 662
Native American poetry and, 34–35 “One of the Inhabitants of the
New Poetry Movement and, 508–11 West,” 660–61
politics of, 665–66 “Owl’s Clover,” 666–67
professional life of, 632 “Phantasy,” 653, 668
Rich and, 874–75, 883 “The Plain Sense of Things,” 660–61
Romantic and anti-Romantic in poetry “The Poems of Our Climate,” 662
of, 650–68 “Prologues to What Is Possible,” 664
Williams and, 560–61 “Red Loves Kit,” 655
works “Repetitions of a Young
“Arrival at the Waldorf,” 655 Captain,” 664
“The Auroras of Autumn,” 660–61 “Sailing after Lunch,” 657
“Autumn Refrain,” 660 “The Snow Man,” 661–62
“The Beginning,” 660–61 “Sunday Morning,” 653–54
Collected Poems, 656, 740–41 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
“Contrary Theses (I),” 667 Blackbird,” 1033, 1092–1094
“Credences of Summer,” 663–64 “Variations on a Summer Day,” 664
“Esthétique du Mal,” 666–67 “The World as Meditation,” 662–63
“Evening without Angels,” 1033–1034 “World without Peculiarity,” 655, 668
“Examination of the Hero in a Time “Yellow Afternoon,” 650–51, 652–53,
of War,” 654 656–57, 659–60, 661–62, 665
“Extracts from Addresses to the Stevenson, Anne, 782
Academy of Fine Ideas,” 664 Stewart, Susan, 1021–1023
“Good Man, Bad Woman,” 655 Stickney, Trumbull, 500, 502, 503
“The Green Plant,” 660–61 Stieglitz, Alfred, 330–31, 560–61, 586–87
Harmonium, 656, 664–65, 666–67 Stiles, Ezra, 78
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Still, William Grant, 713
656–57 “Still Life” (Creeley), 690–91
“Les Plus Belles Pages,” 656 “Stilts of Gold, The” (Victor), 446–47
“Like Decorations in a Nigger St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 865–66,
Cemetery,” 664 1152–153
“The Man Whose Pharynx Was St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls,
Bad,” 656–57 434–35, 437
“Metamorphosis,” 660–61 Stockton, Annis Boudinot, 134–35
“Montrachet-le-Jardin,” 660–61 Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow, 405,
“Mozart, 1935,” 656–57, 667 406–07
“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” Stoddard, Richard Henry, 404–06
666–67 translations by, 405
“Nature,” 653, 668 Stone, Ruth, 927–28
“No Possum, No Sop, No “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” (Palmer), 312,
Taters,” 662 324–25
“Notes toward a Supreme “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Fiction,” 664 (Frost), 534, 536–37, 1107–108
“Nuances on a Theme by Williams,” Stops of Various Quills (Howells), 413, 414–15
659–60 “Storm Fear” (Frost), 531–32

1290
 Index

“Storm Warnings” (Rich), 874–75 “Supernatural Love” (Schnackenberg), 1096

Story, William Wetmore, 186 Superstition (Barker), 186
Story of A, The (Crain), 426 Surrealism, 733–35, 737–39
Story of Al Raoui, The (Henley), 145 Bly and, 871–74
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 181, 253, 369–70, in Lorca’s poetry, 831–33
372–73, 408–09 New York School poets and, 844–46
Strand, Mark, 938–39, 1146–147 in 1980s poetry, 1027–1028
Strange, Sharan, 1073 in O’Hara’s poetry, 858–60
Strange Attractor, The (Morgan), 932–33 Seuss and, 1110–112
“Strato in Plaster” (Merrill), 898–900 “Survival of the Fittest, The” (Cleghorn),
Stravinsky, Igor, 559, 730–31 490–91
Street, Susan Castillo, 43–63 “Survival of the Fittest, The” (Gilman), 478
Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks), 1049–1050 Suyemoto, Toyo, 985–86
Street Scene (Hughes and Weil), 711 Swains of the Schuylkill, 133–42
“Street Window” (Sandburg), 1105–106 “Swamp Fox, The” (Simms), 188–89
“Stricken South to the North, The” Swann, Brian, 32–33
(Hayne), 384–86 “Swan Song of Parson Avery, The”
String Light (Wright), 1156–158 (Whittier), 264–65
Strong, Peter Remsen, 453–55 Sweet, Timothy, 320
Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 462–64 “Sweeter Our Fruits, The” (Lewis), 729
“Student, The” (Moore), 617 Swenson, Cole, 1021–1023
Studying Hunger (Meyer), 864–65 Swenson, May, 785, 928–29, 1107–108
Suarez, Ernest, 795–818 Świetlicki, Marcin, 866
Suárez, Virgil, 973 Swift, Jonathan, 431
sufragist movement “Swimmers, The” (Tate), 806–07
Dickinson’s interest in, 369–70, 372–73 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 590–91,
naturalist poetry and, 473–80 657–58, 852–53
poetry about, 185–86 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (spiritual),
“Sugar-Cane, The” (Grainger), 125 398–400
Sullivan, Louis, 330–31 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (Lowell), 508
“Summer ’67” (Pratt), 31 “Sylphs of the Seasons, The” (Allston),
Summer Anniversaries, The ( Justice), 809–11 163–65
“Summer Session” (Ammons), 925–26 symbolism, in Asian American poetry,
“Summer Wind” (Bryant), 174–75 979–83
Sun (Palmer), 1154–155 Symbolist Movement in Literature, The
Sun and Moon Press, 862–63, (Symons), 543–44
1028–1030, 1038 Symmes, Zecharia, 98–101
“Sunday Morning” (Dunbar), 438–42 Symons, Arthur, 543–44
“Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 653–54 “Symphony, The” (Lanier), 388–89, 462
“Sundays of Satin Legs Smith, The”
(Brooks), 1049–1050 Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One
“Sun-Down Poem” (Whitman), 344–46 (Komunyakaa), 816–17
Sunrise, The (Tohono O’odham medicine Taggart, John, 742–43
song), 21 Tagore, Rabindrinath, 508
Sunset Maker, The ( Justice), 809–11 “Talbot Wilson” notebook (Whitman),
Sunshine in Thought (Leland), 452–53 338–39

1291
 Index

Tale of Sunlight, The (Soto), 962–63 “Edward Taylor’s Elegy on Deacon

Tales of a Wayside Inn (Longfellow), 256–57, David Dewey,” 87–88, 96, 98–101
282, 501–02 God’s Determinations Touching His
Tales of the Trail (Foley), 468 Elect, 80–81
Tales Told of the Fathers (Hollander), Preparatory Meditations, 65–66
1092–1094 Taylor, Eleanor Ross, 795–96, 802–03, 815
“Talk about Popular Songs, A,” 462–64 Taylor, Jane, 1117
Talking to the Sun (Farrell), 1108–109 Taylor, Thomas, 68, 69
Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local works
Writers, 1134–135 Meditations from the Creatures, 68
Talley, Thomas, 438–42 Tea (Powell), 1162
Tancred and Sigismunda (Thomson), 140–41 Teachers and Writers Collaborative,
Tanga, Bibi, 330–31 1108–109
“Tanka I” (Hartmann), 979–83 “Teacher’s Excuse” (Sigourney), 290–92
tanka poetry, history of, 979–83 Teasdale, Sara, 507, 630–31, 645–46, 1105–106
Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ammons), technology, Civil War poetry and impact
922–23 of, 307
Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 183–86 Teeth (Girmay), 975–76
Tardos, Anne, 1123–124 “Telemachus’s Detachment” (Glück), 1019
Tasso, Spanish colonial poetry and “Telling the Bees” (Whittier), 261–62,
inl uence of, 47 264–65
Tate, Allen ( John Orley), 4–6 Tempers, The (Williams), 672–73
Agrarian tradition and, 800–01 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 225
Crane and, 1159, 1161 Temple, The (Herbert), 80–81
family background of, 795–96 “Tempora Mutandur” (Lowell), 274–75
Jarrell and, 776–77, 802–03 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry
Lowell and, 753, 755, 759, 760–61, 762–63 (Lowell), 513–14
New Criticism and, 871 Tender Buttons (Stein), 576–78, 589–90,
racial attitudes of, 806–07 1158–159
southern poetry and, 795, 798–99 “Tennis” (Pinsky), 940–44, 953–55
Tolson and, 1161–162 Tennis Court Oath, The (Ashbery), 850–51,
Warren and, 799–800 860, 864–66
Wright and, 871–74 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 88–90
Tate, James, 1146–147 New York School of poetry and, 404, 409
Taylor, Bayard, 296–97, 299–303 Poe and, 217–18
dialect poetry scorned by, 409–10 Pound’s parody of, 657–58
New York School of poetry and, 404–06 works
travel writing by, 405, 414 “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”
Taylor, Benjamin F., 468 306–07
Taylor, Bert Leston, 468 In Memoriam, 88–90, 1092–1094
Taylor, Deems, 635 Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America . . .
Taylor, Edward, 65–66, 78–83, 87, 94–95, by a Gentlewoman in Those Parts, The
96–101 (Bradstreet), 67–76
works Tent on the Beach, The (Whittier), 282
Christographia, 82–83 “Terror” (Warren), 801–02
“The Ebb and Flow,” 78–79 Terry and the Pirates (comic strip), 852–53

1292
 Index

“Testimony” (Komunyakaa), 1070 This Our World (Gilman), 473–80

Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) This Waiting for Love ( Johnson), 637
Recitative (Reznikof ), 735–36 Thomas, Dylan, 879–80, 938–39
“Thanatopsis” (Bryant), 102–04, 173, 174 Thomas, Edward, 523–24
“Thank You for Saying Thank You” Thomas, Joseph, 438–42, 1103–119
(Bernstein), 1041 Thomas, Lorenzo, 1060–1061
“Thar’s More in the Man than Thar Is in Thomas, Piri, 967–68
the Land” (Lanier), 462 Thomas and Beulah (Dove), 1067–1068
Thatcher, Thomas (Reverend), 139 Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (Davie),
“That Flag” (Arroyo), 971–72 940–44
“That New World” (Piatt), 456–57 Thompson, Earle, 30–31
Thaxter, Celia, 431–34, 435–36 Thompson, John, 759
Thayer, Scoield, 610–11, 612, 614–16 Thompson, Lawrance, 536
Thayer, William, 347–50 Thompson, Louise, 710
Theatre of Neptune (Lescarbot), 51–53 Thomson, James, 132–33, 140–41, 914–15
“Theme for English B” (Hughes), 714–17 Thomson, Mortimer, 448–49, 450, 460–61
“Them Ku Klux” (Lanier), 386 Thoreau, Henry David, 183–86, 209–11
Theory of Flight (Rukeyser), 731–32 Frost and, 529
Theosophical Society, 875–76 legacy of, 370–72
There It Is (Cortez), 1063–1064 Lowell and, 756–57
“Thermopylae” (Clampitt), 1089–1090 Whitman and, 343
“These Lacustrine Cities” (Ashbery), “Thought” (Allston), 163–65
860–61 Three Angels before the Tent of Abraham
“These Men Are Revolution” (Rolfe), 729 (Raphael), 163–65
“These Songs Will Perish” (Markham), “Three Hundred Thousand More”
482–83 (Gibbons), 311–12, 320, 324–25
“They dropped like Flakes –” (Dickinson), “Three Love Poems” (Wagner), 1149–150
322–23 “3 Models of the Universe” (Swenson),
They Feed They Lion (Levine), 944–47 928–29
Thiebaud, Wayne, 1085 Threepenny Review, 1018–1019
Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, Three Poems (Ashbery), 536–37, 860–61
A (Yau), 996–97 “Three Sonnets in Tetrameter” (Millay),
thing language concept, 837–38 633–34
“Thinking of the Lost World” ( Jarrell), “3/23/66” (Schuyler), 854–55
790–91 “Threnody” (Emerson), 200–01
“Thin Man, The” ( Justice), 809–11 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 798–99
third-wave Objectivism, 694 Thurber, James, 1110
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” “To Thyrsis” (Cradock), 118
(Stevens), 1033, 1092–1094 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 844–46
“Thirty and Five Books” (Kim), 1130–131 Tickler magazine, 446–47
Thirty-Six Poems (Warren), 799–800 Ticknor and Fields publishers, 286
“This Compost” (Whitman), 344–46, Tilbury Town poems (Robinson), 504–06
352–53, 571–72 Tillinghast, Richard, 758
This journal, 1028–1030, 1152–153 “Time-Bomb” (Loy), 587–89
“This Is Just to Say” (Williams), 559, Time magazine, 558–59, 776–77, 783
571–72, 573 Times, The (Church), 131–32

1293
 Index

Times Literary Supplement, 613–14 “To My Dear Children” (Bradstreet), 71

Timoleon, Etc. (Melville), 417–20 “To My Friend Ezra Pound” (Williams), 562
Timrod, Henry, 311–12, 383–85 “to my last period” (Clifton), 1065–1066
“Tipler [sic] to His Bottle, The” (Horton), “To My Muse, December 29, 1725”
292–93 (Turell), 83–84
“Tire Hangs in the Yard, The” (Smith), “To My Pen” (Reid), 127
811–13 tone, in New York School poetics, 851–56
“Titular” (Brooks), 502–03 Toomer, Jean, 701, 703–04, 706–07, 1159
“To – –” (Whitman), 182–83 Topsys and Turvys (Newell), 436–37
“To Abraham Lincoln” (Piatt), 312 Torch Song Tango Choir (Paegle), 975–76
“To Alexander Stephens” (Lanier), 386–87 Torres, Edwin, 1138–139
“To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Torres, Elliot, 969–70
Fortress” (Warren), 803–06 Tortesa the Usurer (Willis), 186
“To Allegra Florence in Heaven” (Chivers), To Stay Alive (Levertov), 888–89
188, 230–31 “To the Author: A Sonnet” (Henley),
“To Allen Tate 3. Michael Tate August 145–46
1967–July 1968” (Lowell), 762–63 “To the Cleveland Union-Savers” (Harper),
“To a Shred of Linen” (Sigourney), 185, 307–08, 390–94
192–94, 213 “To the Eastern Shore” (Dunbar), 398
“To Brooklyn Bridge” (Crane), 1160 “To the First Slave Ship” (Sigourney),
Todd, Mabel Loomis, 283–84, 288 290–92
“To Earthward” (Frost), 529, 530–31 “To the Indiferent Women” (Gilman),
“To Elizabeth Bishop” (Hollander), 475–76
1092–1094 “To the Lacedemonians” (Tate), 798–99
“To Elsie” (Williams), 564, 566–67, 573–74 “To the Maiden” (Crane), 489
“To Emily Dickinson” (Crane), 1161 “To the Memory of the Brave Americans
“To Ennui” (Drake and Halleck), 169–71 under General Greene, in South
“To His Excellency George Washington” Carolina, who Fell in the Action
(Wheatley), 137–38 of September 8, 1781” (Freneau),
“To His Mistress Going to Bed” (Donne), 143–44
1125–127 “To the Mocking-Bird” (Wilde), 187
Tohono O’odhams, medicine texts “To the Non-Political Citizen” (Rakosi), 736
of, 20–21 “To the Packer” (Gilman), 479
“To Ignorance” (Reid), 127 “To the South; On Its New Slavery”
Tokinish (Stevens), 1125–130 (Dunbar), 396–97
“To Labor” (Gilman), 478 “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”
Tolson, Melvin B., 708–09, 806–07, (Wordsworth), 712
1048–1049, 1051, 1074, 1161–162 Touch (Gunn), 940–44
Tom and Viv (ilm), 554–55 Touré, Askia, 1060–1061
Tomlinson, Charles, 682–83 “Toward Climax” (Snyder), 931–32
Tompson, Benjamin, 96–101 “To Whistler, American” (Pound), 507–08
Tompson, William, 98–101 Town down the River, The (Robinson), 504–06
“To Mr. Samuel Hastings (Ship-Wright of Townsend, John Rowe, 1111–112
Philadelphia)” (Lewis), 120–22 “Towns in Colour” (Lowell), 514–15
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” Toxic Flora (Hahn), 933
(Bradstreet), 74–75 “To You” (Loy), 594

1294
 Index

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” trickster tales

(Eliot), 521–22, 548–49 in modern Native poetry, 31
“Traique Is Earth’s Great Atlas” (Alsop), in Native American poetry, 21–22
113–14 Trilling, Lionel, 536, 579, 824–25, 869
“Tragedy in Western Woods, A” (Piatt), Trilogy (H.D.), 597–98
456–57 Trimmings (Mullen), 1071–1073
Trail of Tears, 161 Tristram (Robinson), 504–06
Traits of the Aborigines of America Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of
(Sigourney), 290–92 London (Gay), 137
Trakl, George, 871–74 trochaic tetrameter
transcendence, in elegiac poetry, 88–90 in Civil War poetry, 315
Transcendentalists in Romantic poetry, 225
Dickinson and, 373 in Song of Hiawatha, 254–56
in Holmes’s writing, 270–71 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 71
legacy of poetry by, 183–86, 194–98 Tropicalia (Trelles), 974
Lowell and, 751 “Trouble with ‘In,’ The” (McHugh),
nature in poetry of, 211–13 1095–1096
Romantic poetry and, 177–78, 182–83 Trowbridge, John Townsend, 461–62
Very’s poetry and, 206–09 “Truce of Piscataqua, The” (Whittier),
Whitman and, 343 264–65
transition magazine, 616–17 True (Armantrout), 1150
Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues “ ‘Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning, The’ ”
(Wright), 1156–158 (Auden), 909–11
translatio studii genre, 123–25 Truman, Harry S., 665
transnationalism, in Asian American Trumbull, John, 139–42
poetry, 993–99 works
Trask, Haunani-Kay, 1133–134 An Elegy on the Times, 140–41
Traubel, Horace, 473–74 M’Fingal, 141–42
Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper A New Proclamation!, 141
(Taylor), 80–81 “On the Adventures of Tom
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 963–64 Brainless,” 140
“Tree, The” (Teasdale), 645–46 The Progress of Dulness, 140
“Tree Frogs” (Talley), 438–42 “Trumpet-Flowers” (Piatt), 430–31
“Treehouse of Horror, The” (The Simpsons “Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”
television show), 232 (Hughes), 714
“Trees” (Kilmer), 1105–106 “Truth” (Harper), 302
“Trees at Night” ( Johnson), 637 Try! Try! (O’Hara), 844–46
Tree Tall Woman (Mullen), 1071–1073 Tsiang, Hsi-Tseng (H.T.), 984
Trek (internment camp publication), Tucker, Nathaniel, 145–48, 290–92
985–86 Tucker, St. George, 145–48
Trelles, Emma, 974 Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard, 284–87,
“Tremayne” ( Justice), 809–11 288, 302–03
Tremble (Wright), 1156–158 “Tu Do Street” (Komunyakaa), 1068–1069
Trethewey, Natasha, 814, 1073 Tuesday Club, 118–20
“Trial by Existence, The” (Frost), 529–30 Tule Love Song (Yaqui poem), 30–31
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ire, 731–32 “Tulips” (Plath), 1008–1009

1295
 Index

Turell, Jane Colman, 65–66, 83–84 Understanding the New Black Poetry
Turner, J. M. W., 235–36 (Henderson), 1059
“Turtle” (Lawson), 1109–110 Undine (Fouqué), 169–71
Turtle Island (Snyder), 949–50 Unguarded Gates, The (Aldrich), 414
Twain, Mark, 183–86, 450–52 “Uninscribed Monument on One of the
children’s poetry by, 431 Battle-Fields of the Wilderness,
legacy of, 370–72 An” (Melville), 326
New England tradition satirized by, 259 Union Carbide, 731–32
women’s poetry satirized by, 456–57 United States Magazine and Democratic
works, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Review, 331–32
102–04, 183–86, 450–52, 456–57 United States of Jasper Johns, The (Yau),
Twelve Moons (Oliver), 952–53 996–97
Twelve Poets of the Paciic (Levine), 944–47 United States of Poetry (television show), 1153
twentieth century University of Michigan Press, 1027–1028
American poetry in, 4–6 Untermeyer, Louis, 507
Native American poetry in, 35–36, 38–39 “Untitled Two” (Graham), 1147–149
Twenty-First Century Modernism Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras
(Perlof ), 1145 Excursiones (raúlrsalinas), 961–62
“Twenty-One Love Poems” (Rich), 889, “Untrustworthy Speaker, The” (Glück),
950–52 1019–1020
Twichell, Chase, 1146, 1149–150 “Up and Down” (Merrill), 900
“Twilight of the Poets, The” (Stedman), Up from Slavery (Washington), 392–93
407–08 Up Jump the Boogie (Murillo), 975–76
“Two Armies” (Timrod), 311–12 “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream”
Two Gentlemen in Bonds (Ransom), 796–98 (Dove), 1067–1068
“Two Look at Two” (Frost), 530–31 “Upon the Death of G. B.” (Cotton), 115
“Two Painters” (Allston), 163–65 “Up-Rising, The” (Duncan), 888–89
“Two Pendants: For the Ears” (Williams), Urban League, 1049–1050
574–75 urban poetry
Two Rivulets (Whitman), 337, 353–54 African American poetry and,
“Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Frost), 522 1048–1049
Two Years before the Mast (Dana), 165–66 by Hughes, 704–06
Tydings-McDuie Act, 985 local color and genre poetry, 468
Types of Shape (Hollander), 1092–1094 of Sandburg, 515–16
“Typographia: An Ode, on Printing” urchin verse, 1111–112
(Markland), 116 U.S. poet laureate. See poetry consultant to
“Tyrian Businesses” (Olson), 682–83 the Library of Congress
Tzara, Tristan, 844–46, 1052, 1108–109 U.S.S. Constitution, 268

Uba, George, 994–95 Vagabondians poetry, 501–02

“Ulalume: A Ballad” (Poe), 139, 232–36 “Vagabonds, The” (Trowbridge), 461–62
Umbra Poets Collective, 1060–1061 Valdivia, Pedro de, 47–51
Unbearable Heart, The (Hahn), 998–99 Valentine, Benjamin Batchelder,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 181 462–64, 468
Under Flag (Kim), 998–99, 1130–131 Vallejo, César, 871–74, 944–45
Underhill, Ruth, 32–33 “Valley of Nis, The” (Poe), 217–18

1296
 Index

“Valley of Unrest, The” (Poe), 223–27, Victor, M. V. (Mrs.), 446–47

232–33 Victorian Poets (Stedman), 407–08
Van Allen, Elizabeth J., 465–68 “Victuals and Drink” (Whitney), 185–86
Van Buren, Martin, 158–59 Vieira, Antonio, 56–60
Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae, 933 Vietnam War
Vanderbilt, Gertrude, 283–84 antiwar poets of 1960s and, 886–89
Vanderbilt University, southern poetry Dickey’s support for, 807–08
and, 795 in Komunyakaa’s poetry, 1068–1069
Van Doren, Mark, 613–14, 768–69 Lowell’s opposition to, 753–54, 758–59,
Van Duyn, Mona, 1081, 1146–147 761–63
van Gogh, Vincent, 737–39 Pinsky’s poetry and, 940–44
Van Isendoorn, Judith, 61–63 poetry of the center and, 939
Vanity Fair magazine, 508–11 poets of 1960s and, 869
Van Jordan, A., 933 Views A-Foot (Taylor), 405
Van Vechten, Carl, 586, 702–03, 716–17 “Village Blacksmith, The” (Longfellow),
variable foot, Williams’s use of, 580, 684–85 249–52, 431–34
“Variations of a Sentence by Laura (Riding) “Village Sewing Society, The” (Corbett),
Jackson” (Yau), 996–97 455–56
“Variations on a Summer Day” villancico lyric poetry, of Sor Juana Inés de
(Stevens), 664 la Cruz, 59–60
“Variations on a Text by Vallejo” ( Justice), Villatoro, Marcos McPeek, 975–76
809–11 Villeglé, Jacques, 860
“Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Villon, François, 852–53
Williams” (Koch), 559 Vinegar Works, The (Ciardi), 1113–114
Vashon, George Boyer, 1048–1049 Viramontes, Helena María, 964–65
Vaughan, Henry, 771–73 Virgil, 914–15
Vendler, Helen early American epic poetry and, 44
in Antaeus, 1146 epic poetry of, 742–43
on Ashbery, 1155–156 Spanish colonial poetry and, 47
on Bidart, 1013 Wright and, 939–40
on Bishop, 775, 785–87 “Virginia Britannia” (Moore), 619–20
on Lowell, 765–67 Virginia Gazette, 126–27, 132–33, 145
psychoanalytic poetics and, 1005–1006 “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” (Loy),
on Rich, 950–52 584–85
on Smith’s narrative poetry, 811–13 Vishnu Parana (Hindu sacred text),
on Stevens, 652–53 203
Venetian Vespers, The (Hecht), 1090–1091 Vision of Columbus, The (Barlow), 147–49,
Verdenal, Jean, 543–44 155–56
Vermont Notebook, The (Ashbery), 860–61 “Visit from St. Nicholas, A” (Moore), 425,
“Verses upon the Burning of Our House” 426, 427–28, 442–43
(Bradstreet), 75 “Visiting the Asylum” (Millay), 634–35
versiications (political parody), by visuality, poetry and, 9–10
Revolutionary-era poets, 141 “Voice of the Grass” (Roberts), 431–34
vers libre movement, 628 Voigt, Ellen Bryant, 814
Very, Jones, 183–86, 206–09 Volume Two (Garcia Villa), 982–83
“Vetiver” (Ashbery), 853–54 “Volunteer Organist, The” (Foss), 465–68

1297
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von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa, 560–61, Walrus Hunting (Eskimo poem), 26

568–69 Walt Whitman Archive, 334
von Hallberg, Robert, 937–38, 940–44, Ward, Artemis, 438–42
1081, 1083 Ward, Nathaniel, 71–72
Von Schrader, Mary, 781 Ward, Theodore, 1049–1050
Vorticism, Pound and, 514–15, 673–75 Warield, Catherine, 312
Voweller’s Bestiary, from Aardvark to Warhol, Andy, 844–46
Guineafowl (and H), A (Lawson), Waring, James, 844–46
1109–110 War Is Kind and Other Lines (Crane), 488–90
“Vox Corporis” (Teasdale), 645–46 Warner, Michael, 1032
“Voyager’s Song, The” (Pinkney), 187 “Warning – Poetry Area: Publics under
“Voyages: A Homage to John Keats” Construction” (Bernstein),
(Clampitt), 1086–1087 1039–1040
Voyage to Boston, A (Freneau), 143–44 War of 1812, 268
American literary works from, 177
Wadsworth, Charles, 370–72, 377–79 war poetry, 8. See also speciic wars, e.g.,
Wadsworth, Olive A., 438–42 Civil War
Waggoner, Hyatt, 1–2, 88–90 in Atlantic Monthly, 282
Wagner, Catherine, 1149–150 call-to-arms poetry, 311–12
Wagner, Richard, 387–88 by Howe, 296–97
Wagoner, David, 771–73, 913–14 by Lowell (Amy), 514–15
Waking, The (Roethke), 767–68 by Lowell ( James Russell), 277–79
“Waking Early Sunday Morning” (Lowell), military leadership in, 312
761–62 recruitment poems, 311–12
“Waking in the Blue” (Lowell), 752–53, Warren, Mercy Otis, 134–35
758–59, 1019–1020 Warren, Robert Penn, 4–6, 777–78
Walcott, Derek, 536–37, 751, 1069 Agrarian tradition and, 800–01
Walden (Thoreau), 209–11 family background of, 795–96
Waldman, Anne, 864–65 Jarrell and, 802–03
Waldrop, Rosemary, 1125–130, 1136 Komunyakaa and, 816–17
Walker, Alice, 889 later poetry of, 803–06
Walker, Cheryl, 179–81, 191, 646–47 narrative verse by, 811–13, 817
Walker, Margaret, 795–96, 1056–1057 New Criticism and, 871
“Walking Parker Home” (Kaufman), politics and writing of, 801–02
1051–1052 race in writing of, 806–07
Wallace, George, 881–84 southern poetry and, 795, 799–800
Wallace, Mike, 571, 574 Warren, Rosanna, 803–06
Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Warren, Vincent, 858–60
Biography (Brazeau), 654–55 “Was He Henpecked?” (Cary), 185–86
Waller, Edmund, 145–46 Washington, Booker T., 392–93, 800–01
Wallerstein, Ruth, 88–90 Washington, George
“Walls of Corn” (Allerton), 448–49 elegies for, 102–04
Walls of Corn and Other Poems (Allerton), poetry about, 137–38
448–49 Waste Land, The (Eliot)
“Wall Street Pit, The” (Markham), 483 Berryman’s poetry and, 769–70
Walrond, Eric, 706–07 The Bridge (Crane) and, 1160

1298
 Index

criticism of, 729–30 Weininger, Otto, 588, 589–90

early American poetry and, 148–49 Welby, Amelia, 217–18
European culture in, 543–44 Welch, James, 38–39
Frost’s poetry and, 537–38 Welch, Lew, 823–24, 838–41
Ginsberg’s “Howl” and, 827–28 Welcome Eumenides (Taylor), 815
Glück’s poetry and, 1018, 1020–1021 Welish, Marjorie, 865–66
legacy of, 755 Wells, Carolyn, 438
literary culture in, 555–56 Weltliteratur, 240–41, 248–49, 252–54
as modernist poetry, 442–43, 733 We Made Fire (Mandan/Hidatsa
psychoanalytic poetics in, 1006 poem), 26–27
Ransom-Tate debate concerning, 798–99 Wenderoth, Joe, 1154
religion in, 550–54 “We play at Paste” (Dickinson), 370–72
Spring and All (Williams) and, 562–63 “Were They Crickets?” (Hill), 287–89
Warren’s impressions of, 799–800 Wesleyan University Press, 862–63
Williams’s discussion of, 558–59, 562, West, Benjamin, 163
566–67 West, Dorothy, 637
Zukofsky’s parody of, 736–37 West, James L., 603–04
Water Street (Merrill), 894–95, 897–98 West, Nathaniel, 560–61
Watkins, Evan, 949 West Chester conference, 1153
Watson, J. Sibley, 610–11, 612, 614–16 West Coast Gangster Choir, 994–95
Watteau, Antoine, 863 Western poetry, local color, dialect, and
Watten, Ben, 742–43, 862–63 genre poetry as, 465–68
Watts, Emily Stipes, 179–81 West Indies, African American linkages
Watts, Isaac, 442–43 to, 712
Wave, A (Ashbery), 861 Westminster Abbey, Longfellow’s
Way Down South (ilm), 713 commemoration in, 241–42
“Way-Side Weed, A” (Melville), 417–18 Westminster Convention, 91–93
Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes), 711 Weston, Edward, 330–31
We a BaddDDD People (Sanchez), 1056–1057 West-Running Brook (Frost), 524
Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 702–03, 704–06, “West-Running Brook” (Frost), 533, 534–35,
716, 718–19 536–37
Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 612–13 westward expansion, poetry about, 161–63,
Weaver, Mike, 570–71 194–98
“Weaving” (Larcom), 185 “We Wear the Mask” (Dunbar), 395–96,
Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 1113–114 462–64
Weber, Max, 1083–1085 Whalen, Philip, 823–24, 825–27, 829–31,
Webster, Ben, 1070 838–41
Webster, Daniel, 263–64 What Are Years (Moore), 622–23
Wedge, The (Williams), 567–68, 683–84, “What Biddy Said in Police Court”
690–91 (Corbett), 455–56
Weeds and Wildings Chiely: With a Rose or Whately, Thomas, 129–33
Two (Melville), 417–20 “What Happened Here Before” (Snyder),
Weever, John, 91–93 931–32
Weill, Kurt, 711 “What Is It Have You Come to Tell Me,
Weiman, Andrew, 928–29 García Lorca” (Duncan), 833–34
Weiners, John, 823–24 “What is – ‘Paradise’ ” (Dickinson), 362–64

1299
 Index

What the Body Told (Campo), 974 Whiting Writers’ Award, 1035
What the Light Was Like (Clampitt), Whitman, Albery Allson, 400–01
1086–1087 Whitman, George, 350, 354–55
“What the Thunder Said: A Fire Sermon” Whitman, Sarah Helen, 182–83, 217–18,
(Funarof ), 729–30 233–34, 235–36
Wheatley, John, 136–37 Whitman, Walt, 68–69
Wheatley, Phillis, 136–39, 1048–1049 annex poems of, 354–55
Wheatley, Susannah, 136–37 Auden and, 909–11
Wheeler, Edward J., 506–07 Beat Movement and principles of, 824–25
Wheeler, Lesley, 628–48 beauty disease concept of, 409–10, 418
“When de Co’n Pone’s Hot” (Dunbar), 397 Bryant’s inl uence on, 174–75
“When I consider how my light is spent” Calamus poems of, 179–81
(Milton), 1092–1094 canonical revision and, 2–3
When I Think of Him (Ojibwe poem), 26–27 Civil War in poetry of, 319, 320–21,
“When I was small, a Woman died –” 326–27, 341–43, 350–51
(Dickinson), 323 Crane’s poetry and, 1159
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard cultural legacy of, 330–31
Bloom’d” (Whitman), 88–90, democratic poetry of, 329–56
102–04, 321, 352–53 Dickinson and, 373
“When Malindy Sings” (Dunbar), 397, early career of, 194–98
398–400 elegies by, 88–90, 102–04, 352–53
“When Sam’l Sings” (Dunbar), 397 Emerson and, 202–03, 337, 343, 344–45,
“When the Frost Is on the Punkin’ ” (Riley), 347–49
465–68 failing health of, 354–55
When the Sun Tries to Go On (Koch), 849–50, iction by, 331–32
864–65 Fireside Poets and, 260–61
“Where are the dolls who loved me so” Ginsberg and, 825–27
(Bishop), 785–87 Hartmann and, 979–83
“Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language” historical importance of, 1–2
(conference), 1152–153 homosexuality in poetry of, 330–32,
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Silverstein), 349–50
1115–116 hospital work during Civil War, 350,
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 1111–113 351–52
Whetstone, George, 91–93 Hughes and, 702, 704–06, 711, 712
Whifs from Wild Meadows (Foss), 462 journalism career of, 299–300, 332, 346
Whispering to Fool the Wind (Ríos), 963–64 Kaufman’s poetry and, 831–33
White, Elinor, 523–24 Lanier compared with, 389–90
White, Hayden, 978 legacy of, 370–72, 701
White, Heather, 619–20 literary independence of, 334–36
White, Maria, 273 literary reputation of, 347–49
White, Walter, 706–07 Longfellow criticized by, 238–39, 243–47
White Buildings (Crane), 1159–160, 1161–162 manuscripts, 334
Whitehead, Alfred North, 690 Merrill’s poetry and, 895–96
“White Notes” ( Justice), 809–11 Native American inl uence on, 37–38
Whiteshirt, Johnny, 27–28 parodies of, 301
Whitield, James Monroe, 290 postwar career of, 353

1300
 Index

prose writing of, 331–32, 334, 337, 407–08 “The Poetry of the Future,” 407–08
real estate speculation by, 337 “Reconciliation,” 352–53
Reconstruction era in poetry of, 341–43 “The Runaway Slave,” 712
Sandburg and, 515–16 “Sequel to Drum-Taps,” 352–53
on science, 915–16, 921 “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak
Stedman and, 406–07 Gray and Dim,” 350–51
“Talbot Wilson” notebook, 338–39 “The Sleepers,” 338
works “So Long!,” 340–41
“After the Supper and Talk,” 354–55 “Song of Myself,” 148–49, 332–34,
“An Evening Revery,” 174–75 338–40, 778–80
“Beat! Beat! Drums,” 320, 350–51 Specimen Days, 352–53, 354–55
“Bivouac on a Mountain Side,” “Sun-Down Poem,” 344–46
320–21 “This Compost,” 344–46
“Calamus” poetic cluster, 349–50 Two Rivulets, 337, 353–54
“The Child and the Prol igate,” “When Lilacs in the Dooryard
331–32 Bloom’d,” 88–90, 321, 352–53
“A Child’s Reminiscence,” 346 “The Wound Dresser,” 320–21, 350–51
“Come Up from the Fields Whitney, A. D. T., 185–86
Father,” 321 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 205–06, 247–48
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 344–46 in Atlantic Monthly, 282
Democratic Vistas, 347–49, 352–54 children’s poetry and, 431–34
Drum-Taps, 320–21, 341–43, 351–52, criticism of, 462–64
353–54 Fireside Poets and, 259–61, 404, 497
“Eighteen Sixty-One,” 320 journalism career of, 299–300
“Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” life and career of, 261–67
332–34, 342, 389–90, 395–96, 712 satires of, 465–68
“A Font of Type,” 332 works
Franklin Evans, 331–32 “Barbara Frietchie,” 261–62
“Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day,” “Barefoot Boy,” 431–34
351–52 “The Branded Hand,” 261–62
“Hymn of the Sea,” 174–75 “The Bridal of Pennacook,” 261–62
“I Sing the Body Electric,” 332–34 “Cassandra Southwick,” 264–65
“Leaves-Droppings,” 337 Child-Life: Poetry, 431–34
Leaves of Grass, 102–04, 174–75, 331–32, “Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott,”
334–37, 340–43, 344–46, 347–49, 261–62
353–54 “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave
Memoranda during the War, 320–21, Mother,” 261–67
350–51, 352–54 “The Hunters of Men,” 292–93
“New Year’s Day, 1848,” 174–75 “Ichabod!,” 263–64
“O Captain! My Captain!,” 102–04, “The Kansas Emigrants,” 263–64
352–53, 1105–106 “Kathleen,” 264–65
“The Olden Time,” 332 “Mabel Martin, a Harvest Idyl,”
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly 264–65
Rocking,” 346 “Marguerite,” 264–65
Passage to India, 352–54 “Maud Muller,” 261–62, 264–65
“Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” 321 “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” 261–62

1301
 Index

Whittier, John Greenleaf (cont.) “Wild Honey Suckle, The” (Freneau),

“The Slave Ships,” 261–62 143–44
Snow-Bound, a Winter Idyl, 205–06, Wild Iris, The (Glück), 1018, 1020–1021
261–67, 447–48 “Wild Nights” (Dickinson), 179–81
“Song of the Negro Boatmen,” Wilkinson, John, 863
261–62 Willard, Samuel, 65, 96–98
“Stanzas for the Times,” 262–63 Williams, C. K., 751, 1011–1012
“The Swan Song of Parson Avery,” Williams, Gary, 295
264–65 Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 330–31
“Telling the Bees,” 261–62, 264–65 Williams, Raymond, 220–21, 233–34
The Tent on the Beach, 282 Williams, Roger, 65–66, 76–77, 78, 1125–127
“The Truce of Piscataqua,” 264–65 Williams, Sherley Anne, 1048–1049
Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated Williams, William Carlos, 148–49, 604–08
into English Metre, The, 66 Baraka and, 1052–1056
Whole Motion: Poems 1945–1992, The Bernstein and, 1042–1043
(Dickey), 808–09 Chin’s poetry and, 992–93
Who Look at Me ( Jordan), 1118 Clampitt’s poetry and, 1089–1090
Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Clifton’s poetry and, 1065–1066
Independence (Ransom), 800–01 Creeley and, 684–85
Why Did You Cry? (Yuma poem), 25 critical reception of, 563
“Why I Am Not a Painter” (O’Hara), editorial work of, 615–16
858–60 Eliot and, 542, 560–62, 569–70, 683
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg), 886 experimental poetry and, 1028–1030
Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, free verse of, 519
The (Smith), 811–13 Ginsberg and, 825–27
Widener, Daniel, 1063–1064 Imagist Movement and, 672
“Wide River” (Hughes), 1106–107 Jarrell’s discussion of, 778–80
“Widow with a Moral Obligation” Levertov and, 879–80, 887–88, 890–91
( Johnson), 639 literary reputation of, 670, 697, 701, 871
Wigglesworth, Michael, 65–66, 77–78, 426, Lowell’s friendship with, 757–59
427–28 medical training of, 632, 916
Wightman, S. K., 815 modernist poetry of, 4–6, 557–76, 591,
Wilbur, Richard, 536–37, 778–80 628, 733
Bernstein and, 1039–1040 Native American inl uence on, 38–39
children’s poetry by, 1107–108, 1109–110 New Directions publishing company
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 and, 741
critical assessment of, 1145 New York School poets and, 844–46
culture poetry and, 1081–1082 Objectivist Movement and, 693, 740–41
lyric poetry of, 1027–1028 Olson and, 684–85
Merrill and, 895 Pound and, 558, 560–62, 563–64, 569–70,
Moss and, 1033–1034 670–73, 676–77, 679
Silliman and, 1028–1030 Robinson’s poetry and, 505
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 179–81 Snyder’s poetry and, 838–41
Wilde, Oscar, 586, 1100 social perspectives in poetry of, 567
Wilde, Richard Henry, 187 Stein and, 1107
Wilderness of Ladies, A (Taylor), 795–96, 815 Stevens and, 659–60

1302
 Index

variable foot of, 580, 684–85 Wilson, Edmund, 286

Whitman’s inl uence on, 329–30 on Civil War poetry, 306–07
women and, 568–69 Wilson, Ivy G., 400–01
works Wilson, John, 98–101
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 568 Wilson, John Byers, 448–49
Autobiography, 558, 684–85, 692 “Winged Mimic of the Woods” (Wilde),
“Burning the Christmas Greens,” 187–88
567–68 Winged Serpent (Astrov), 32–33
“The Clouds,” 567–68 Winship, Michael, 603–04
“Comedy Entombed,” 575–76 Winslow, Arthur, 756–57
“The Dance,” 682–83 Winslow, Harriet, 761–62
The Descent of Winter, 558, 565–66, Winter, William, 183
580, 677, 684 “Winter Fear” (Ryan), 536–37
“The Desert Music,” 568, 684 “Wintergreen Ridge” (Niedecker), 745–46
“El Hombre,” 659–60 “Winter Piece, A” (Bryant), 173–74
The Great American Novel, 558, 565–66 Winters, Yvor, 6
In the American Grain, 565–66, 1160 Crane and, 1159, 1161
“January Morning,” 564–65 Hass and, 953
Kora in Hell, 558, 562, 563–64, 565–66, Justice’s poetry and, 809–11
568–69, 670–71, 755 Levine and, 944–47
Paterson, 38–39, 148–49, 558, 562, 563, Pinsky and, 938–39, 940–44, 947–48
569–71, 574, 683–84, 686–87, 778–80 poetry criticism and, 286, 287
“Poem,” 681 Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children
“Portrait of a Lady,” 565 to Write Poetry (Koch), 862, 1108–109
“Postlude,” 670–72 With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
“Proletarian Portrait,” 567 (Levertov), 887–88
“The Red Wheelbarrow,” 566–67, Witness (Hesse), 1118–119
575–76, 686, 1104 Witness Tree, A (Frost), 524
Selected Poems, 682–83 Witter Bynner Prize, 1035
Spring and All, 337, 558, 562–63, 564, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 436–37, 533
566–67, 568–69, 573–74, 677, 681–82, Wojahn, David, 750–73
736, 755 “Wolf at the Door, The” (Gilman), 478
The Tempers, 672–73 Wolf, Rebecca, 1149–150
“This Is Just to Say,” 559, 571–72, 573 Wolosky, Shira, 179–81, 368–69
“To Elsie,” 564, 566–67, 573–74 “Woman” (Gilman), 473–74
“To My Friend Ezra Pound,” 562 Woman at the Washington Zoo, The ( Jarrell),
“Two Pendants: For the Ears,” 574–75 784, 787
The Wedge, 567–68, 683–84, 690–91 Woman’s Journal, 473
“The Yachts,” 567 Woman’s Poems, A (Piatt), 411
“The Young Housewife,” 560 “Women” (Bogan), 641–42
Zukofsky and, 694–95 Women of the Beat Generation (Peabody),
Williamson, Alan, 776–77, 878–79, 1005–1006 823–24
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 183, 186, 231–32 women poets. See also feminism; gender;
“Will to Believe, The” ( James), 658 speciic poets
Will to Change, The (Rich), 882 abolitionism and, 290–95
Wilmington Race Riots, 394–95 absence in colonial South of, 109–10

1303
 Index

women poets (cont.) in staples colonies, 117

African American poets, 136–39, 293–95, Stoddard’s realist poetry, 405
636–39, 1049–1050, 1056–1057, 1063– Transcendentalism and, 194–98
1064, 1071–1073 Wong, Sunn Shelley, 987
in Asian American poetry, 993–99 Woo, Merle, 987
authenticity in 1960s and, 869–91 Wood, William, 33–34, 36–37, 65–66
Beat Movement and, 823–24 works, New Englands Prospect, 36–37
Bogan’s criticism of, 640, 641–42, 647 “Wood-Pile, The” (Frost), 524
burlesque representations of, 456–57 Woods, George Bryant, 306–07
Chicana poetry by, 960–67 Woodworth, Samuel, 179
children’s poetry by, 429–31, 434–36 word power, in Native American poetry,
in Civil War, 312, 316–18, 319, 322–24 20, 22–23, 30–31
Clampitt and, 1079–1080 “Words” (Plath), 1007–1008
colonial poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la “Words for Hart Crane” (Lowell), 1161–162
Cruz, 56–60, 61–63 “Words for Muin, a Guinea Pig” (Lowell),
comic poetry by, 461 762–63
Cuban American poetry by, 974 Wordsworth, William, 69–70
dialect poetry by, 455–56 Frost and, 526, 527
Dickinson’s inl uence on, 360–80 Hughes and, 712
doggerel by, 459–60 Lowell inl uenced by, 753–54
early modernist poetry by, 500–01 Poe and, 217–18, 223
educational expansion and, 290–95 Romanticism and poetry of, 165–66,
formal verse by, 628–48 404, 409
genre poetry by, 468 works
in Harlem Renaissance, 636 Lyrical Ballads, 167–68, 245–47, 733
Jewish poets, 297–99 “Michael,” 165–66
Language poetry by, 1031–1038 Prelude, 527
legacy of Romantic poetry by, 183–86 “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 712
in literary canon, 1–2 “Work and Wages” (Gilman), 478
Longfellow and inl uence of, 253 “World, The” (Gilman), 473–74
modernist poetry by, 583–99, 628–48 “World as Meditation, The” (Stevens),
naturalist poetry by, 473–80 662–63
in newspapers and magazines, 300 World Is Round, The (Stein), 442–43, 1105
in New York School, 862–65 Worldly Country, A (Ashbery), 861
in Nuyorican Movement, 969–70 World of Ten Thousand Things, The
Plath’s psychoanalytic poetics and, (Wright), 813–14
1006–1011 World Republic of Letters, The (Casanova),
Poe and, 182–83, 217–18, 222–23 1136–137
realist poetry by, 410–17 World War I, American poetry in, 8
reform poetry by, 295–97 World War II
in Revolutionary America, 134–35 American poetry in, 8
Romantic poetry by, 179–83 in Dickey’s poetry, 807–08
seventeenth-century lyric poetry Lowell’s opposition to, 753
by, 56–60 Millay’s poetry and, 636
in South, barriers to, 795–96 science in poetry and, 918
southern poetry by, 814–18 southern poetry and, 795, 817

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Stevens’s poetry and, 667 Xavier, Emanuel, 969–70

women’s poetry during, 597–98 XCP journal, 1136
“World without Peculiarity” (Stevens), Xiaojing, Zhou, 1139–140
655, 668 Xicano Duende (Alurista), 966
Worthington, Richard, 349–50 Xun, Lu, 984
“Wound Dresser, The” (Whitman), 320–21,
350–51 “Yachts, The” (Williams), 567
Wreath of Wildlowers of New England, A Yakima poetry, 30–31
(Osgood), 198–200 Yale Review, 508–11
“Wreck of the Hesperus, The” Yale Younger Poets Prize, 731–32
(Longfellow), 247–48 to Ashbery, 860
Wright, Anne, 886 Glück as judge of, 1012–1013
Wright, C. D., 7, 814, 1153–154, 1156–158 to Rich, 874–75, 1082–1083
Wright, Charles, 795, 811–12, 813–14, to Wright, 871–74
1146–147 Yamada, Mitsuye, 985–86
on Hart Crane, 1162 Yamanaka, Lois Ann, 1134–135
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 330–31 Yamoyden (Sands), 161–63
Wright, James, 38–39, 536–37, 771–73 Yao, Steven, 983
Auden and, 907 Yaqui poetry, 30–31
authenticity in work of, 870, 871–74 Yau, John, 865–66, 987, 996–97, 1149–150
Deep Image poetry and, 884–86 Yeats, William Butler
European travel by, 1080 Berryman and, 768–69
Merrill and, 894 Bogan and, 640
nature poetry of, 913–14 Duncan and, 876–77
New Criticism and, 871 Lowell and, 750
poetry of the center and, 939–40 Merrill and, 894
Rich and, 883 modernist poetry and, 628
Wright, Jay, 1048–1049, 1059–1060, 1061–1063, psychoanalytic poetics and, 1012
1070–1071 realist poetry and, 504–06
Wright, Richard, 722–23, 1058–1059 Rich and, 874–75
Hughes and, 711 Roethke and, 771–73
political poetry of, 729 works, “Sailing to Byzantium,”
Wright, Susanna, 134–35 1015–1016, 1082
Writer’s Chronicle journal, 1035 “Yellow Afternoon” (Stevens), 650–51,
“Write What You Know” (Arroyo), 971–72 652–53, 656–57, 659–60, 661–62, 665
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes Yellow Peril discourse, in Asian American
(Nowak), 1132 poetry, 983
Writings to an Uninished Accompaniment “Yellow Violet, The” (Bryant), 174
(Merwin), 947–50 “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman), 456–57
“Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne” Yenser, Stephen, 886, 909–11, 953–55
(Bleecker), 134–35 Yerba Buena (Estéves), 967–68
Wugly Ump, The (Ciardi), 1113–114 Yertle the Turtle (Seuss), 1110–112
W. W. Norton publishers. See Norton “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” (Gonzales),
(W. W.) publishers 1137–138
Wylie, Elinor, 628–29, 630–31, 640, 645, “You and I Are Disappearing”
646–47 (Komunyakaa), 816–17

1305
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“You Bring Out the Mexican in Me” “Yucca Moth, The” (Ammons), 536–37
(Cisneros), 964 Yuma people, poetry of, 25
You Come Too: Favorite Poems for Young People
(Frost), 1107–108 Zalman, Schneur, 879
You Desire Vanity (Ojibwe poem), 26–27 Zanzotto, Andrea, 1154–155
You Know Who (Ciardi), 1114 Zaretsky, Natasha, 937
“You Need to Have an Iron Rear” “Zaydee” (Levine), 944–47
(Prelutsky), 1116–117 Zone Journals (Wright), 813–14
Young, Al, 1048–1049 Zóphiël: Or the Bride of Seven (Brooks),
Young, Edward, Poe and, 217–18 179–81
Young, Kevin, 1073 zuihitsu ( Japanese literary genre), 998–99
Young, Lester, 1051–1052, 1070 Zukofsky, Louis, 736–37, 741, 742–43
“Young America” (Halleck), 169–71 modernist poetry and, 4–6
Young America movement, 274–75 Niedecker and, 745–46
“Young Housewife, The” (Williams), 560 Objectivist Movement and, 679, 693,
“Young Rosalie Lee” (Cooke), 188 694–95, 733–35
You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You (Ciardi), Oppen and, 743–45
1114 publishing initiatives of, 740–41
“Youth” (Hughes), 719–20 Williams and, 560–61, 571
Youth’s Companion magazine, 430–31, 434–35, Zuni people, poetry of, 25
606–08, 1107–108 Zutacapán (indigenous leader), 49–50
Yu, Timothy, 982–83 “Zwyczaj” (Nowak), 1132

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