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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A History of American Poetry presents a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their pre-Columbian origins to the present day.
- Offers a detailed and accessible account of the entire range of American poetry
- Situates the story of American poetry within crucial social and historical contexts, and places individual poets and poems in the relevant intertextual contexts
- Explores and interprets American poetry in terms of the international positioning and multicultural character of the United States
- Provides readers with a means to understand the individual works and personalities that helped to shape one of the most significant bodies of literature of the past few centuries
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Seitenzahl: 1407
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 The American Poem
The United States … the Greatest Poem
The Poem is You
The Breaking of the New Wood
Forging the Uncreated Conscience of the Nation
2 Beginnings
In My Beginning is My End
The word and the Word: Colonial Poetry
Towards the Secular: Colonial Poetry
Writing Revolution: The Poetry of the Emergent Republic
Across the Great Divide: Poetry of the South and the North
To Sing the Nation: American Poetic Voices
To Sing of Freedom: African American Voices
Looking Before and After: Poetic Voices of Region and Nation
3 The Turn to the Modern
The Revolution is Accomplished
The Significance of Imagism
From Imagism to Objectivism or Dream
From Imagism to the Redemption of History
From Imagism to Contact and Community
From Imagism to Discovery of the Imagination
4 In Search of a Past
The Precious, the Incommunicable Past
The Significance of the Fugitives
Traditionalism and the South
Traditionalism Outside the South
Traditionalism, Skepticism, and Tragedy
Traditionalism, Quiet Desperation, and Belief
Traditionalism, Inhumanism, and Prophecy
5 The Traditions of Whitman
Make this America for Us!
Whitman and American Populism
Whitman and American Radicalism
Whitman, American Identity, and African American Poetry
Whitman and American Individualism
Whitman and American Experimentalism
Whitman and American Mysticism
6 Formalists and Confessionals
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket
From the Mythological Eye to the Lonely “I”: A Progress of American Poetry since the War
Varieties of the Personal: The Self as Dream, Landscape, or Confession
From Formalism to Freedom: A Progress of American Poetic Techniques since the War
The Imagination of Commitment: A Progress of American Poetic Themes since the War
The Uses of Formalism
The Confessional “I” as Primitive
The Confessional “I” as Historian
The Confessional “I” as Martyr
The Confessional “I” as Prophet
New Formalists, New Confessionals
7 Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes
Who Am I?
Rediscovering the American Voice: The Black Mountain Poets
Restoring the American Vision: The San Francisco Poets
Recreating American Rhythms: The Beat Poets
Resurrecting the American Rebel: African American Poetry
Reinventing the American Self: The New York Poets
And the Beat Goes On: American Poetry and Virtual Reality
8 The Languages of American Poetry and the Language of Crisis
What is the Language of American Literature?
The Actuality of Words: The Language Poets
The Necessity of Audience: The New Formalists
Remapping the Nation: Chicano/a and Latino/a Poetry
Improvising America: Asian American Poetry
New and Ancient Songs: The Return of the Native American
Legends of the Fall: American Poetry and Crisis
Works Cited
Poems Cited
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Also by Richard Gray:
A History of American Literature, Second Edition
A Brief History of American Literature
After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South
(edited with Owen Robinson)
A HISTORY OF american poetry
RICHARD GRAY
This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Richard, 1944–A history of American poetry / Richard Gray. pages cm Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-79534-7 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-118-79535-4 (pbk.) 1. American poetry–History and criticism. I. Title. PS303.G73 2015 811.009–dc23
2014040569
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea, 1951, oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903, 1961.18.29
ToSheona
Preface and Acknowledgments
In this history of American poetry, I have tried to be faithful to the sheer range and plurality of the American poetic tradition. I have also attempted to focus on both individual poets and the poetic communities to which they variously belong, and to anchor my discussion in specific, significant or symptomatic poems, and the imaginative journeys on which they take us. It is, after all, the experience of reading the single poem and encountering the voice of a singular poet that fires the reader’s imagination into life; and so it is to this that any study of poetry must eventually return, no matter how detailed or protracted its investigation may be of poetry’s social and ideological underpinnings.
“One is the Population –,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most frequently quoted poems, “/ Numerous enough – / This Ecstatic Nation / Seek – it is Yourself.”1 As in so many American poems, there is a subtle negotiation going on here between “one” and “nation,” the notion of “Yourself” and the equally compelling idea of “Population,” the community to which any self must irrevocably belong. In writing this history, I have attempted a similar, if far less adventurous, negotiation by placing my accounts of individual poets and poems in the context of dialogue. As I see it, texts exist intertextually, just as people exist interpersonally. Every poem we encounter is in conversation with other poems; every poet is engaged, whether he or she is aware of it (although they usually are), in talking back to other poets, talking with and, it may be, talking against them. This is what we mean when we refer to a poetic tradition, local, regional, national or transnational: that a work, any work, draws its strength and depth, ultimately, from being situated in a constantly changing, constantly expanding series of circles; each poetic utterance is enhanced, enriched, and given meaning by its connection to a complex if often fragile web of other poetic utterances from other times and places. Each poem, in short, is part of a greater conversation – what Mikhail Bakhtin called a great dialogue.2
In the opening chapter of this book, and in the first section of the second chapter, I expand on this idea of any poetic tradition – and, in this particular instance, the American poetic tradition – as a great, open dialogue that, strictly speaking, never reaches an end. I also suggest what I hope are other useful contexts for looking at, understanding, and appreciating American poetry. After that, the structure of this book is basically chronological and probably needs no further explanation. It might be worth adding, however, that the final chapter is longer than the others, in part because it is here I discuss, not just American poetry of the last few decades, but also Chicano/a and Latino/a poetry, Asian American poetry, and Native American poetry of the contemporary period and their antecedents. This, after all, seemed the appropriate place to emphasize both the growing importance of these poetic traditions and their specific histories, the ways in which they have added to the rich cultural mosaic that is America and American poetry.
All that remains is for me to thank the people who have helped with this book. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Essex. When the Department of Literature was established at Essex by the poet and critic Donald Davie, it had a special intellectual investment in American poetry. That was signaled, among other things, by the number of distinguished American poets who taught in the Department in its first twenty or so years, among them Ted Berrigan, Ed Dorn, and Robert Lowell, and the even greater number of equally distinguished American poets who visited for shorter or longer periods to give readings and classes. That interest in American poetry attracted a large mix of lively and talented students at both undergraduate and graduate levels, many of whom have become well-known poets themselves; and although Essex – like all British universities, unfortunately – has become increasingly bureaucratized, over-managed, and less intellectually committed to the study of subjects such as poetry, the investment has still not been exhausted; the interest in poetry, the energy and the commitment are still there, and there is still a lot of exciting work being produced and discussed. I owe an immense debt both to the Department and to those in the Department who have fostered and encouraged my interest in this subject; this book would not have been possible, quite frankly, if I had worked and taught anywhere else.
I cannot mention everyone who has helped me, but it would be wrong not to mention my friend and colleague of over forty years, Herbie Butterfield, my former colleagues, the late Joe Allard, the late Francis Barker, Gordon Brotherston, the late George Dekker, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Clive Hart, Jack Hill, Peter Hulme, Tom Raworth, the late Arthur Terry, Phil Terry, Dudley Young, and a former student who is now my colleague, Owen Robinson. I also need to thank friends at the British Academy who share my passion for poetry, among them Michael Bell, Andrew Hook, Jon Stallworthy, and Wynn Thomas, particular friends and colleagues at other universities in Great Britain and elsewhere, including Sacvan Bercovitch, Kasia Boddy, Bob Brinkmeyer, Susan Castillo, Richard Ellis, the late Kate Fullbrook, Mick Gidley, Paul Giles, Richard Godden, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Fred Hobson, Lothar Honnighausen, the late Stuart Kidd, Burt Kimmelman, Pearl McHaney, Tom McHaney, Sharon Monteith, Peter Nicholls, the late Peter Nicolaisen, Marjorie Perloff, the late Noel Polk, Michael Rothberg, Hans Skei, the late Charles Swann, Helen Taylor, Nahem Yousaf, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. There are also present and former doctoral students to whom I owe a particular debt, some of them poets, others now academics, and still others both, including Katya Alkhateeb, Abdul Atteh, Alaa Barhoom, Emily Barker, Michael Broek, Sophie Cansdale, John Cant, Kate Charlton-Jones, Chin-Jau Chyan, Pip Dandy, Rebecca Degler, Yamina Deramchia, Carl Dimitri, Veronique Eich, Ruth Frendo, Mike Gray, Iman Hami, Paul Harper, Roger Haydon, Teri Hill, Daniel Jupp, Hamada Kassam, Brian Marley, John Muckle, John Murphy, Chris Nawrat, Brendon Nicholls, Sawsan Qashgari, John Rabbetts, Theo Savvas, Robert Snell, James Stannard, Mick Stevens, Helen Turner, Theresa Welford, Luke Whiting, Andrew Wilson, Aoi Yamada, and Rouhollah Zarei.
These acknowledgments risk the danger of sounding like the very worst of Oscar acceptance speeches, but thanks are due, too, to Ginny, Helen, Laurie, and Sue at the Wivenhoe Bookshop for their prompt, cheerful, and endlessly patient responses to my requests for often obscure individual texts and collections. And I need especially to thank Jordan Savage for being such a supremely knowledgeable help with the preparation of the manuscript and the compilation of the index. Sincere thanks are also due to all those at Wiley Blackwell who have helped me so thoroughly, efficiently, and with such good grace with this book – and, in some cases, with several of my other books for Wiley Blackwell: Emma Bennett, Deirdre Ilkson, Bridget Jennings, and Ben Thatcher. I am also immensely grateful to Brigitte Lee Messenger who, as usual, made such a first class job of preparing the manuscript for publication.
On a more personal level, I would like to thank my family for (among many other things) tolerating my preoccupation with poetry. I would like to thank my older daughter Catharine, for her cheerfulness, enthusiasm, her good sense and sense of commitment and, not least, for providing us with a perfect son-in-law, Ricky, and two equally perfect grandsons, Izzy and Sam. I would also like to thank my older son Ben for his strength of spirit, his good humor, his reliability, and for the sheer pleasure of his company. My younger daughter Jessica I need to thank for helping me so much with the preparation of this book (without her expertise and skilled help, it would never have been finished), for her thoughtfulness, sensitivity, her intelligence and lively wit, and for always being there to talk about life and literature – and to put me right on both. My younger son Jack I also need to thank for his vitality, warmth of personality, his clarity of spirit, and for teaching me there are things that are more important than words and other ways of communicating than by speech.
Finally, and especially, there is my wife Sheona, to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude. Her sense and sensitivity have been a constant source of strength, so have her kindness and emotional generosity; her humor and comic timing are second to none (although I sometimes try to claim, wrongly, that they are second to mine); and she has made the last twenty or more years of my life easily the best. Without her, this book would never have been written: which is why, quite naturally, it is dedicated to her.
Richard GrayBerrideneWivenhoe
Notes
1
Emily Dickinson, poem 1354, lines 5–8.
2
See Mikhail Bakhtin,
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
, translated by Vern McGee (Austin, Texas, 1986), p. 84.
1The American Poem
The United States … the Greatest Poem
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”1 The words are those of Walt Whitman, from the Preface to Leaves of Grass. Whitman was, in a sense, echoing something Ralph Waldo Emerson had said eleven years earlier, in 1844, in his essay “The Poet.” “America is a poem in our eyes,” he declared; “its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”2 Both remarks distill an idea that has captured the imagination of so many Americans, and especially American poets: the idea, or rather the compelling belief, that the New World (as Europeans saw it) could and should be turned into words. America could be written into existence, given not just a local habitation and a name but an identity by a poem. America seemed strange from the very first days of white colonization, to those who crossed the Atlantic to settle or simply exploit it. This was a “silent country,” observed one settler, conveniently ignoring those aboriginal inhabitants who had lived there for perhaps thirty thousand years; and it seemed to need language to fill the void. Some saw it as a wilderness. So the New England cleric Cotton Mather began his epic account of Puritan settlement, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702) by announcing:
I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand. And, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do … Report the Wonderful Displays of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian Wilderness.3
Others saw America in more paradisiacal terms. “Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies,” Christopher Columbus recalled towards the end of his life,
I reached the point when the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed … I do not find any Greek or Latin writings which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise, and I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here.4
Either way, those who encountered this strange new world firmly believed that one, and possibly the only way to come to terms with and begin to understand it was to give it verbal shape. To name America was to know it.
After the founding of the republic, language was called on to perform another task as well, which was to help the infant American nation articulate its destiny. “We have yet had no genius in America,” declared Emerson:
which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admired in Homer…5
That genius would come, Emerson and others believed, to turn the disparate facts of American historical experience into a coherent story, a heroic narrative with a beginning, middle, and a millennial end. In creating this epic of a new republic such a genius would, it was hoped, do something still further, perhaps more pressing and certainly more personal: he or she would tell Americans something about their individual selves. “The American is a new man,” St. Jean de Crèvecoeur proclaimed in 1782, “who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.”6 The idea was simple and radical: in committing themselves to what they perceived as a promised land, each and every single person had been altered by the commitment; they might change the land, certainly, but the land would change them. An additional purpose of the new poetry followed from this: it would describe this change, this process of psychic transformation. It would show each reader how, why, and in what manner he or she had become “an American.” “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” Whitman insisted in 1855.
In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.7
So the American explored, announced, and maybe even invented by the poem would be not only new but ample, a curious and compelling hybrid. Responding to and even mirroring the syncretic character of a “teeming nation of nations,” he or she would occupy a liminal space, a proliferating chain of borders; they would fathom and perform a nature that was multiple as well as original; to borrow a phrase from Whitman’s most famous poem, “Song of Myself,” they would be large, containing multitudes.
So, according to this vision of things, the American landscape was a series of texts that could be read, and understood, with the aid of the American poem; American history was a sequence of disparate facts waiting for the American poet to give them narrative shape; the American republic was a rich cultural mix, a tangled series of threads requiring both poet and poem to weave them into a meaningful pattern; and the American people, collectively and individually, were psychically and morally embryonic beings whose birth into full knowledge of themselves depended on their being (poetically) written and named. The vision was undoubtedly an apocalyptic one but it was widely shared; and it could be seen as an echo and extension of the utopian dreams that accompanied the early settlement, the millennial visions of the Puritans, and the idealism of the founding fathers of the republic. If America was a New Eden, or, alternatively, a new Canaan, then it surely required its own prophetic voices to announce it. If the United States of America was a new phenomenon, a nation deliberately founded by a few people at a particular moment in time and according to certain specific principles, then it positively demanded someone who could articulate those principles in a measured and memorable way. The American poet was to tell the tale of the tribe: not, perhaps, in the primitive sense of preserving myths of origin but to the extent that he or she was to offer to their readers some intimation of who they were and where they stood. The prophetic voice is not, of course, peculiar to American poetry, even in modern times, but it has sounded there more frequently, emphatically, and resonantly than elsewhere. From the early celebrations of Divine Providence in allowing the colonizers to come safe to land, through Walt Whitman’s annunciation of a manifest destiny, to the visionary speech of Hart Crane and then, later, Allen Ginsberg: through all this and many metamorphoses, the millennial impulse has survived.
Two examples of that impulse, divided by two centuries, might help to illustrate this longevity. Here, first, is a passage from a poem called “The Rising Glory of America” by Philip Freneau, published at the end of the eighteenth century:
And when a train of rolling years are past…A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,Shall grace our happy earth … … Paradise anewShall flourish, by no second Adam lost,No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow,No tempting serpent to allure the soulFrom native innocence. – A Canaan here,Another Canaan shall excel the old…
* * *
– Such days the world,And such America at last shall haveWhen ages yet to come have run their round.And future years of bliss alone remain.8
Towards the end of the twentieth century, in turn, Tato Laviera from Puerto Rico ended a poem titled simply “AmeRícan” like this:
AmeRícan, defining the new america, humane america admired america, loved america, harmonious america, the world in peace, our energies collectively invested to find other civili -zations, to touch god, further and further, to dwell in the spirit of divinity!
AmeRícan, yes, for now, for I love this, my second land, and I dream to take the accent from the altercation, and be proud to call myself american, in the u.s. sense of the word. AmeRícan, America!9
Both these poems will be discussed in a little more detail later. For the moment, the crucial point to make about them, and the pairing of them, is a matter of both change and continuity. Laviera resists the Anglocentrism implicit in the Freneau poem in favor of a new kind of ethnic identity, “AmeRícan” rather than “American,” the product of a convergence with other minority groups: with New York City as an exemplary space in which cultural mixing, or “mestizaje,” occurs. “We give birth to a new generation,” Laviera declares at the beginning of his poem; and he uses the accents of many cultures, a hybrid language that he and other American poets of Hispanic origin call “Spanglish,” the oral tradition and the language of the street, all to describe what it is that is about to be born. What the lines by Freneau and Laviera share, however, is just as significant as their differences. It is also what they share with so many other American poets: the belief in and, following on that, the announcement of a new dispensation in the New World.
From the beginnings of European settlement, however, the millenarian impulse in American poetry has had to do battle with something else that grows directly out of the national inheritance – or, to be more accurate, derives immediately from the freight of cultural assumptions that many of the colonists brought with them across the Atlantic. That something is a suspicion, a distrust of the fictive, the “made” or “made-up” quality of literature in general and poems in particular. “Be not so set upon poetry,” Cotton Mather warned, “as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages.” Verse fed the sensuous appetites, no matter what its ultimate, higher aims might be, and besides it told tales; it depended, at least in the first instance, on human invention, on men’s and women’s lies rather than God’s truth. And to the Puritan injunction against fiction-making could subsequently be added a distrust of anything that was not immediately useful, functional, that did not help in the clearing of woods or the building of farms, shops, schoolhouses, and churches. “To America,” insisted one of the founding fathers of the republic, Benjamin Franklin,
… one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael … Nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful…10
Certainly, Franklin looked forward to a more “refined state of society” when “poetry, painting, music (and the stage as their embodiment)” might be “necessary and proper gratifications.” But his demotion of such activities to the level of the elegantly decorative hardly implied that they would even then be central, vital to the life of the culture; and many other commentators, lacking Franklin’s intelligence and wit, have somehow contrived to suggest that to be a poet is not to be useful in any conceivable circumstances, and that not to be useful is not to be American. So to the roles of prophet and teller of tales are added those of misfit and trickster: much of what is fruitful and energetic in American poetry – as well as much of what is confusing and self-contradictory – grows out of the tensions generated by this discrete series of different roles.
There are, basically, two potential answers to this charge of uselessness: the accusation that poetry fails to pay homage to the cult of the fact. One is illustrated, in the early history of American poetry, by Edgar Allan Poe, who took the scarlet letter of shame and turned it into an emblem of pride. Poe not only accepted the charge of uselessness, he positively reveled in it. Poe played many roles in his life – the courtly charmer with the ladies, the fastidious dilettante in many of his reviews and essays, the bold verbal fencer in literary disputes – but all of them revolved around his resistance to the notions of use and profit. In answer to what he saw as the predominant emblems of national character, the enterprising Yankee, the energetic Westerner, the ruminative and moralistic New Englander, he embraced an aristocratic model, the idea of leisurely and learned gentility. “During a rainy afternoon,” begins one of his essays, “being in a mood too listless for continuous study, I sought relief from ennui in dipping here and there, at random, among the volumes of my library – no very large one, certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous; and, I flatter myself, not a little recherché.” Playing the part of elegant dandy, living at ease but at odds with the bourgeois culture of the early American republic, Poe argued that it was the special merit of art in general, and poetry in particular, that it had no use value, no moral and – at least, in the commonly accepted sense – no meaning. The notion that poetry should provide instruction was something he dismissed as “the heresy of The Didactic.” The idea that “every poem … should inculcate a moral” he described as misguided, adding sardonically, “we Americans especially have patronized this happy idea.” “Would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls,” Poe insisted,
we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified – more supremely noble than the very poem – this poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.11
This is about as far from the world of use, the realm of pulpits, schoolmasters, “barbarism and materialism,” as anyone could go. But as an aim to be pursued, or perhaps a temptation to be feared, the notion of “the poem written solely for the poem’s sake” has remained as seminal in American poetry as those other, more substantial and tangible urges described by Mather, Franklin, and Emerson.
Not many other American poets have played the flâneur quite so assiduously as Poe did, or been quite so insistent on seeing poems as, to borrow a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu’s account of what he calls “postaristocratic” society, a series of “refined games for refined players.”12 But many have been drawn towards a similar resistance to meaning of any utilitarian kind or the whole principle of use. “What does it mean??????????????” John Ashbery asks of one of his poems, during the course of writing it; and the fourteen question marks slyly subvert the assumptions, the need for cause and explanation, that lie behind that question. Ed Dorn is more direct. Asked the meaning of the actions of Dorn’s hip poetic epic, Slinger, the eponymous hero of the poem laughs at his questioner. “You got some strange / obsessions,” he tells him; “you want to know / what something means after you’ve / seen it, after you’ve been there.”13 Which is, after all, a hipper way of saying what Poe said: that what matters is the experience – of the poem, a place, a person – not some nugget of supposed wisdom or significance that can somehow be elicited from it. Dorn’s friend and fellow Black Mountain poet, Robert Creeley, puts it another way: talking about life and poetry being “interesting” to the extent that they lack “intentional ‘control.’” The Language poet Charles Bernstein talks about using “opaque & nonabsorbable elements” in his work in order to make it resistant to interpretation. Another poet, a precursor of the Language school, Clark Coolidge, declares simply: “There’s no question of meaning, in the sense of explaining and understanding the poem. Hopefully, it’s a unique object, not just an object.” These are all, as we shall see, (relatively) contemporary echoes of Poe’s insistence that a poem must not mean but be. Not many poets after Poe have cared to imitate his pursuit of the (post-) aristocratic role – although some as otherwise different as John Peale Bishop and James Merrill surely have – but quite a few have embraced his notion of the poem as a free play of textuality. And the resistance to functionalism of form and content that lies at the core of Poe’s poetic principles and practice, that is one of the driving forces in the story of American poetry: as an act of defiance to a culture devoted to the notion of use.
There is, however, a polar opposite to this, another response to the accusation that poetry has no practical point or purpose. And, in the nineteenth century, the significant and symptomatic figure here is Whitman. Whitman’s position was to insist on the functional nature of poetry. To the charge that a poem was an object far less useful than an axe or a shovel, he responded again and again that it performed essentially the same function as those implements. It cleared the ground; it laid the foundations; it helped, crucially, in the making of a new nation. Others had more or less said this before Whitman, but never with such passion and conviction. There were many reasons for this, some of which will be explored in the next chapter, but one that should not be ignored has to do with the origins of Whitman’s own poetic practice. For Poe, the emergent cities of the new republic were a site of danger, and a dangerous premonition of the direction in which the United States was heading. For Whitman, however, they were sites of possibility, paradigms of the booming, buzzing possibilities of the New World, not least because of their rich mix of peoples and voices. Whitman spent many of his early years as a newspaper journalist and editor. Having left school at the age of eleven, he learned his trade as a writer in the print shop. And, as he wandered around New York City, taking in its sights, observing the people on its streets, then writing essay after essay about his wanderings and observations, he was, without necessarily knowing it, serving an apprenticeship for his poetry. “City of orgies, walks and joys!” Whitman declares in one of his poems, “… as I pass, O Manhattan! Your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love, / Offering response to my own – these repay me.”14 How Whitman was repaid for his wandering around the city is clear enough in the expansive rhetoric, his long, ambulating lines and delight in the spectacle of the people. It is also clear enough from his willingness to immerse himself in the life of the streets. As Whitman saw it, it was his destiny as a poet to build on his early years as a journalist: to attend to the way Americans were living and heading, to tell them what he has learned from attending to their lives and, if at all possible, to head them in the right direction.
“I will teach you my townspeople,” a poem by William Carlos Williams begins. And the pedagogical note sounded here is one commonly heard in American poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following on from Whitman, many American poets have insisted, or suggested, that their work offers lively instruction, that their poems are things of use because they show their “townspeople,” their fellow Americans and perhaps their fellow human beings as well, how to think, how to feel, how to behave or believe – in short, how to understand themselves and their world. Allen Ginsberg said as much when he argued that poetry offers us the discontinuities of “actual mind,” a mind in process or rather a mind that is process, how we really are rather than how we “would like other people to think” we are.15 Poetry, according to this formulation, is useful because it peels away the false identity – of a person, a community, a nation – and exposes the raw actuality of the true. And in showing us who we are, it also offers a signpost as to how we might and maybe should act. The useful, to this extent, bleeds into the political. A poetry that is deeply personal, sometimes confessional or even downright embarrassing in its degree of self-exposure, can bleed into history, revealing with a kind of documentary accuracy the secret impulses and repressed myths of a larger community or even of a nation. In this delicate balancing act between revelation of self and society, exposing the sores of both, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell – two otherwise profoundly different poets – do have something, and something significant in common. The personal can bleed into the political, and the useful into the socially and historically instructive in the work of both. And not only in their work. “The problem is to control history,” Kenneth Rexroth insists in one of his poems, “We already understand it.”16 “We want poems that kill,” Amiri Baraka has proclaimed, “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot / guns … / Poems that wrestle cops into alleys / and take their weapons … // Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets.”17 While Adrienne Rich has claimed that “the words” of her poetry “are purposes. / The word are maps,” enabling her to reveal “the thing itself and not the myth.” Not all poets who seek to offer useful maps of the thing itself, the world and its ways, have the particular investment in class war, racial conflict or gender troubles that, respectively, Rexroth, Baraka, and Rich do. Louis Simpson, for instance, sets himself the rather more modest task of trying to find out, for himself and his readers, how to “live peacefully in the suburbs / and not be bored to death.” But “how to live” remains the question, the consideration for all those poets, following on Whitman, who insist that poetry can make something happen, and should.
Poetry as pedagogical or political agency leads us back into poetry as prophecy: the belief that poems can, as Hart Crane believed, allow us to cross “new thresholds” and offer us “new anatomies” of the human condition. Crane has not been alone, among poets of the twentieth century and later, in calling on Whitman to assist in prophecy. “Walt, tell me Walt Whitman,” Crane implores in one poem, “if infinity / Be still the same as when you walked the beach / Near Paumanok.” “O Walt!” he cries out later, “Ascensions of thee hover in me now / … / … O, upward from the dead / Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound / Of living brotherhood!”18 And Crane has been even less alone in seeing whatever prophecies his poetry can voice as having a specific address to America. “I am concerned with the future of America,” Crane once explained, “… because I feel persuaded that there are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities … not to be developed so completely elsewhere.”19 This, as Crane well knew, echoes Whitman’s call to search out “the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas” of the New World and then transform them into “new words, new potentialities of speech.” But what were these new words? How was the New World to be named? Perhaps as succinct an answer as any to these questions was given by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, which was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. “In democracies,” Tocqueville declared, “men never stay still: a thousand random circumstances continually make them move from place to place, and there is almost always something unexpected, something … provisional about their lives.” More to the point, he argued, “each man is for ever driven back upon himself alone.” Whereas “aristocracy brings everyone together, linking peasant to King in one long chain,” one thoroughly articulated, hierarchical framework, “democracy breaks the chain and separates each link.” As a result, people “become accustomed to thinking of themselves in isolation, and imagine that their entire fate is in their own hands.”20 What the consequences of this were for Tocqueville lead us in another direction, and into another chapter of the story of the American poem.
The Poem is You
The theme, or notion, of every American being “driven back upon himself alone” was one to which Tocqueville returned more than once in his account of the infant republic. “Each citizen in a democracy,” he insisted at one point, “usually spends his time considering the interests of a very insignificant person, namely himself.” “There is a danger,” he adds elsewhere, “that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”21 Solitude or isolation, self-reliance or egotism, freedom or loneliness, self-sufficiency or pride, self-help or solipsism: the terms may vary – and certainly do so throughout American writing – but they can all be traced back to the structure of feeling that Tocqueville perceived, a structure that has as its keystone the idea of the individual, the single, separate self. It does not take a lot of ingenuity to see how this idea had assumed such importance, since it was and is the initial assumption in American ideology, the country’s image of itself, that “the American” was someone who had opted out of society in all but its most elemental and inescapable forms. He or she had left an older world behind, and its relatively sophisticated social framework, to light out for a territory in which it was theoretically possible to determine one’s own fate. He or she had, in a sense, repudiated the past. (“Practically,” declared Thoreau, “the old have no very important advice to give the young…. Every child begins the world again.”22) Or, as later, more Freudian analysts would have it, he or she had denied the image and authority of the father. Either way, the American had, in the process, rejected those institutions, the products of history, which at once burdened those in older worlds and cultures and given them a reassuring sense of purpose and identity – and, at the same time, they had sought, discovered or devised a neutral ground, a border territory between cultures (and a conflux or mix of them) where the main task became the invention of the self. This older world or culture that the American had left, in fact (as a first-generation immigrant) or imagination (as a second- or later generation), might be Europe, as it is in, say, the fiction of Henry James or the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson and Susan Howe. It might be Latin America, Asia or Africa or some other part of the world, as it is in the work of poets such as Tato Laviera and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Janice Mirikitani, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. It might, as in the work of Native American poets like Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo or Roberta Hill Wideman, be an older America, hidden under an enormous accumulation, vast sedimentary layers of history. The fundamental binaries of thought between old and new, together with certain assumptions about what was old about the old and what is new about the new, remain, however; and they both complicate and fire into life the project of translating the new world into words – turning the cultural crossroads that is America into sound, rhythm, and speech.
No series of cultural assumptions occurs in a vacuum; and it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how this particular series came about. There was, of course, in the first place the simple, historical fact that, when the first waves of white emigration to North America began, Europeans were looking for somewhere that might answer their need for a neutral space, somewhere where the burden of the actual past could be shrugged off and the lost innocence – or, rather, the lost possibilities – of some mythological past might be recovered. People usually find what they are looking for, somehow, and what they found in their new home was precisely (in the words of one early promoter of colonization):23
a Virgin Countrey so preserved by Nature out of a desire to show mankinde fallen into the Old Age of Creation, what a brow of fertility and beauty she was adorned with when the world was vigorous and youthfull.
Once things were perfect, the argument runs: before history started, before adulthood and the shades of the prison-house began to close in, before time and the past and other people imposed their burden. Things can be perfect again, this argument continues, the past and otherness can be obliterated, the lost perfection and possibility of times gone by can be recovered in times to come. Longing for an idealized yesterday and hope for an imagined tomorrow form the basic ingredients of what has become known as the American Dream. This strange but compelling mixture of the elegiac and the optimistic characterizes early European writing about America, and it has colored American writing ever since – as these famous closing lines from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald testify:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning – so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.24
After the first waves of emigration, the frontier West with all its enthralling possibilities became the site of such nostalgic utopianism. “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” declares Huckleberry Finn at the end of another great American novel, this time by Mark Twain, “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt and civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” And when the frontier disappeared as a historical fact, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of the frontier survived – as The Great Gatsby intimates – as an appropriate space or place, a field for individual activity limited only by the demands of the imagination.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate this, the formative influence of the West and the frontier: as an historical experience that many people lived through, learning lessons of self-reliance and enduring long periods of isolation, and, even more important, as an idea shaping aims and images of the self both before and after the actual frontier vanished. Equally, it is impossible to exaggerate the seminal impact of immigration in general on American culture, both experientially and mythically, and on the writing of America: immigration, eastwards into the United States as well as westwards, since so many of the new people in the new nation, in the distant and even more the recent past, have come from places other than Europe. Not everyone could light out for the Territory during the first few years of settlement, or even perhaps wished to; nobody can now. Nevertheless, Americans have habitually perceived themselves in pioneering terms – through the language of open spaces, new horizons, personal mobility, and endless opportunity. They continue to do so, and not only themselves but the nation as a whole. As the pioneer rapidly advanced across the continent in the nineteenth century, for instance, poets like Whitman were only too eager to see the frontier gradually stretched out until it encompassed the globe:
I chant the world on the Western sea …I chant the new empire, grander than ever before – As in a vision it comes to me;I chant America, the Mistress – I chant a greater supremacy …25
At such moments, ideas of individual freedom and opportunity begin to shade, in a rather sinister fashion, into notions of personal power: without impugning Whitman’s own motives, it is possible to trace a connection here between the American pioneering spirit and American exceptionalism – something that more recent poets like Robert Lowell, Ishmael Reed, and all those involved in resisting the invasion of Iraq on websites like Poets Against the War have not been at all reluctant to do. Which is not to say that these poets have not, in turn, been touched by that spirit, quite the contrary. The idea of the frontier may now be secreted in, say, an urban location, with the anonymity of the city supplying a convenient site, the moral vacuum in which the individual can choose or invent an identity. Or it may be dislodged into the notion of inner space, a purely mental, internal freedom that survives the proximity of others and, even, living within a closed system. It may find refuge in the aim of perpetual mobility, a journey without destination that becomes an outward and visible sign of an inward quest. Alternatively, it may be transformed into a matter of creative attitude: the writer, in other words, may take upon himself or herself the role of pioneer pursuing new frontiers of vocabulary and imagination – or, as William Carlos Williams put it, seeking out “a new line” to enable and articulate “a new mind.” Whatever its transmutations, though, the idea remains alive, in both American thought and American writing. The imagery of the frontier, the idea of a world elsewhere in which self-emancipation is attainable, still exert their pressure as sources of inspiration, difficult and sometimes troubling myths.
“American literature, especially in the twentieth century, and notably in the last twenty years,” wrote Toni Morrison in 1992, “has been shaped by its encounter with the immigrant.”26 That is a useful reminder that the psychogeography of the frontier spreads out way beyond the European experience of America or even the imaginative gesture of stepping westwards. Any mental map of America and the writing of America has also to chart this: how the experiences and imaginative agencies of peoples from Asia, Africa, the Hispanic world, and, for that matter, the aboriginal inhabitants have thickened, enriched, and complicated things. The idea of the frontier territory, and the experience of cultural crossing that idea roughly – and, often inaccurately – transliterates, may involve, not a lighting out for the West, but a movement eastwards, northwards, southwards or, as in the case of Native Americans, African Americans, and some Hispanic peoples, a movement that is involuntary, forced. “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” writes the Japanese American author Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club. “I understood I was inventing myself,” says the eponymous heroine of Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid, who was born in Central America. The Chicano author José Antonio Villareal talks of his characters moving from Mexico to the American Southwest as part of “the ancient quest for El Dorado”; “and as they moved,” he adds, “they planted their seed.” Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, who emigrated from India to the United States, ends her story with the eponymous heroine setting out on the open road and traveling westward, “greedy with wants and reckless from hope.” And Reservation Blues by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie ends in similar vein, with its characters setting out for a fresh start in the city – “Thomas drove in the dark,” Alexie says of his central character, the leader of the group. “He drove”;27 and, as they set out in search of a new beginning, they are accompanied by the ghosts of wild horses, the emblems of their mythic past. These are all variations on the theme of a new life, the liberation and reinvention of the self in a new territory: a territory that is a rich compound of the actual and the apocryphal – and a territory that because of its interstitial status, its positioning between cultures, is neutral, a blank sheet or borderland, a place where maybe anything can happen. Thoreau talked of “self-emancipation” and insisted, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.” Profoundly different in origins, and differently inflected as these various texts by Asian American, Hispanic, Native American, and Caribbean writers are – from each other as well as, collectively and individually, from the poems of Whitman or the prose of Thoreau – there is the same fierce belief at work here, a series of convictions fired into life by the (actual or imagined) experience of crossing over, entering into another world where, to quote Toni Morrison again, it might be possible “not only to be born again but to be born in new clothes” with “new elements of self.”28
The energies at work in American culture, American writing, and, in particular, American poetry cannot, however, simply be defined in terms of the idea or experience of crossing over. What was and is at work here involves other, often quite distinct and distinctive events and systems of belief – and, for that matter, the dialectical interplay between them. Among these shaping beliefs or ideologies is Puritanism, the religious system that dominated the early history of New England and that continued to exert a powerful influence on the hearts and minds of Americans long after the Puritan hegemony ceased to exist. For the Puritan, every material fact was an emblem, a symbol of some deeper spiritual truth: every human experience could be seen as part of a moral fable, an epic narrative devised by God. An event as trivial as a mouse gnawing away a Bible, left by accident in a barn, could be interpreted allegorically – and was, by the poet Edward Taylor. For by looking at what was left in the Bible, the good Puritan could read the message sent by the Divine Being through one of its messengers; he or she could study the events of history – even the most inconsequential and apparently absurd events – and then turn them into myth.29 Few Americans after the early Puritans were willing to push the allegorizing tendency quite so far, or to interpret things in such straightforward, moralistic terms. But possibly one reason why American poets, among others, are so prone to symbolism, and so intent on endowing those symbols with an ethical dimension, is that they are part of a culture still haunted by the Puritans. Not only that, the habit of introspection, a strange belief in the potentially educative nature of pain, the tendency to see death as the defining, determining moment in life: all these are part of a complex of feeling peculiar to Puritanism that is recognizably there in the work of poets as otherwise different as Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Creeley. Like a ghost, a familiar spirit, the Puritan temper is still there in American poetry of the last two or more centuries, in however elusive or shadowy a form.
