American Acmeism : an Improvisation

... & so what do I mean exactly by "American Acmeism"? Here are some free-form disorganized top-of-the-head answers to that question.

1

What is/was Acmeism? The Acmeists were a small informal group of mostly St. Petersburg poets in pre-Revolutionary Russia, led by Nikolai Gumilev, and expounded/expanded-upon in a couple of interesting essays by Osip Mandelstam. There's a brief Wikipedia entry here. The Acmeists emphasized craft, clarity, neo-classicism, respect for history and cultural tradition, a suspicion of mysticism and vague other-worldliness (Symbolism), as well as of radical nihilism or a-historicism (as in some flavors of Futurism).

Mandelstam built a very baroque and imaginative superstructure on this simple platform, which involved both a "longing for world culture" and a kind of Bergsonian or Nietzschean enthusiasm for ana-chronism, the Eternal Return, a Renaissance-like sense of the infinite possibility of renewal through ancient texts and poets (Ovid, Villon, Dante...).

Mandelstam's this-world optimism, his gusto for reviving the Classic - a kind of millennialist desire for a new Golden Age - can be usefully compared to the "New America" enthusiasm of Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, & in particular the Hart Crane of The Bridge : this was a neo-classicism with a folk-America, nationalist strain, a very deliberate counter to TS Eliot's Anglophile, reactionary & disillusioned stance. However, at least in Crane's case, it was also different from the radicalism of some of the more "futurist" moderns like Pound, Stein, WC Williams. Crane, as with Stevens, put less weight on the "experimental" surface of style.

2

Lots of things have changed since the heady days of the early 20th century; in fact the entire "climate of reception" of today, and literary culture as a whole, might be fairly unrecognizable to those antique Twenties scriptonauts.

But history in the larger view is still history; Reality with a capital R is still Reality, however mysterious; and some of the underlying philosophical and artistic ground remains similar to what it was in those days, if not exactly the same. And if history and Reality are relatively unchanged benchmarks, then it would, I think, be possible to reconstruct, reconfigure, and restore, in some ways, an Acmeist literary approach.

In other words, if I call myself an Acmeist, what do I wish this to mean? What would "my Acmeism" be?

An American Acmeism - my Acmeism - would be a name, for one thing, for a certain set of general beliefs about nature, culture, art, poetry, history, religion... a working philosophy, a pragmatics. We live in a polyvalent and polyvocal world, where poetry means different things to different people - and in many cases, poetry involves a reflection of very diverse and variant worldviews and ideologies.

For me, anyway, this notion of "worldview" is important, because I think poets participate in the broader activity of culture-making. Nothing happens in a vacuum; art is original because it is aware of its conditions and the context of its making - it is, actually, the process of reflecting, and reflecting on, those conditions.

Basically, the model of Russian Acmeism appeals to me, because in my reading of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others who followed them (such as Joseph Brodsky), I find a harmony between basic cultural-historical attitudes, artistic allegiances, and the artworks themselves. In other words, the worldview and the poetry mutually support and guarantee one another; the "ideas" are manifested and "proven" in the works.

Scholars (& Russians!) might not find my reception of these writers to be sufficiently critical; but then, to be critical is their calling and business. For me, these writers serve as benchmarks, models and inspiration. Indeed, it is Mandelstam's "longing for world culture", and the poetic models he derives from that longing, which in turn provide a new lens for perceiving the weights and values of American poetry - the affinities and differences which impinge on the understanding of our own (American) cultural history and poetic developments (for example, the affinities and differences between the "classicism" of Frost and Crane and H.D., and the visions and allegiances of Akhmatova and Mandelstam).

3

In thinking about the appeal which M's "longing" has for me, I am brought unavoidably to certain philosophical or religious underpinnings of my own - my own "worldview". But I hesitate to dilute or debase the concepts themselves, by way of a glib summary, a reduction to tags and slogans.

So in sketching this out, I want to say that I seem to hold two contrary attitudes in suspension. Let's say that Eliot and [Crane/Stevens/Joyce] stand as figures for the two ends of this spectrum.

On the "Eliot" end, I believe in a supreme order or logos in-forming Time, Nature and History : what Mandelstam referred to, obliquely, as "the Christian calendar". History itself is a story : incarnational, actual, irrevocable, ineluctable. As such, the vocation of Israel, and the Christian Incarnation and Redemption - no matter how confused and in the dark we may be about their "final" meaning(s) - are the pivotal points of reference for human knowledge and experience.

This is a cultural order, which immediately contextualizes the meaning of more local or national historical events and artistic developments. Culture as such fuses and transmutes the ordinary and "natural" growth of poetic making and artistic activity. This is one way of representing M's "longing for world culture", his (very Petersburgian) desire to unite Russian destiny with European and world culture as a whole. Eliot, in this sense, represents a somewhat similar impulse in relation to the culture of the United States, though their personalities and underlying vision of things could hardly be more different.

Then, on the (so-to-speak) "Crane/Stevens/Joyce" end of my view of things, stands the role of the poet as original maker, as Orphic-Romantic visionary. Here the poet (and reader) is a free and independent interpreter of the given : that is of the historical given, of the script of history. Nothing means anything without interpretation : I take very seriously the Gospel statement that "the Truth shall make you free". There is a playful spiritual optimism lurking in these three writers, a whiff of absolute freedom - something that was snuffed out in Eliot and Pound, as a consequence (or a symptom) of their authoritarianism and reactionary world-weariness (post-WW I). This optimism is also in Mandelstam and Akhmatova (despite her grief-filled, elegiac sensibility) : a spirit of confidence and endurance. There is no poetry at all without this point of absolute, self-sufficient, spiritual originality : only for me this is complicated by an underlying "Trinitarian" understanding of the human person (that is, we are, in the most basic sense, the children of God : the living images of God : and we depend on the "Spirit of the Creator" in the very substance of our being). So it's a "relational" notion - not a Renaissance-ubermensch-Romantic idea - of creative originality. This is why, in my mind at least, I situate myself spiritually between Eliot and Crane/Stevens/Joyce.

4

So what would American Acmeism be about, besides representing a sort of boilerplate for my own poetry? It would be about re-reading and re-valuing the American poetic inheritance in the light of its affinities with the Russian Acmeists and their own allegiances (to world culture, to Hellenism, to historical memory). It would read Stevens' celebrations of this-world and of poetry itself ("the poetry of life"; "poetry is the sanction of life"; etc.) in the light of Acmeist culture-making. It would hear Mandelstam in Frost's line about "one could do worse than be a good Greek"; it would read M's "domestic Hellenism" in Crane's renovation of Pindar. It would see the devotion to craft and the spiritual optimism of the Acmeist ethos in some of the early American modernists. And these readings, in turn, would provide a new ground for understanding where we are in American poetry now. It would go to the neo-Aristotelianism of the Chicago Critics, and find affinities with Gumilev's concept of the poem as a dramatic-cultural act (as opposed to simply a "verbal construct", in the too-familiar terms of the Russ. Formalists and the New Critics and the Language Poets and the post-structuralists etc.). In Aristotelian fashion, it would re-think "form" as something far deeper and more elusive than the surface elements of meter, rhyme or stanzaic design : something much more closely interfused with both "meaning" and "plot".

The consequences of these basic orientations call for much more, and more imaginative, exploration : here I'm just re-formulating and restating ideas the readers of this blog have encountered before. But as they well know, I never tire of re-affirming my allegiance to those famous Petersburgians.

The Poet and the Name

As everyone knows, we take language for granted. There's a reason for this. A lad carting a wheelbarrow doesn't want to stop & contemplate the invention, design, and special virtues of the wheelbarrow's wheel. In a world of struggle and necessity, we have to get on with things as efficiently as we can.

But life is more than work. As Welsh poet David Jones liked to point out, our aptitude for making non-utilitarian aesthetic objects (art) is what distinguishes the uniquely human from the generally animal. Poetry, too, is situated within that magic (playground) circle. And play itself grants access to otherwise disregarded elements of reality.

Goofing around with words, the poet stumbles upon a hidden treasure : language's native spring - the substance of naming itself. Who among the professional linguists and philologists has comprehended the intellectual wonder of Adamic naming?* When human mind, heart, lungs, throat and mouth first formed the intelligible signs for things? And gathering these signs and keeping them in mind, ordering them by imaginative precedent and law, began to articulate the grand, vast logical-rhetorical sea-going vessel of human speech?

What the poet does, in playing with words, is strike those original sparks of imaginative apprehension - the first (& prehistoric) Promethean fire. Thus the poet reiterates verbal representation with the flavor, the sharp scent of that first encounter. This primal imaginative-intellective labor is what accounts for poetry's famous vividness; what Mallarme (and Eliot) meant when they spoke of their vocation as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu (to render a purer sense to the words of the tribe).

Mankind the Word-Maker, the Playing Animal... one could go so far as to say that the poet, through free verbal play, recapitulates the human image - polishes it, in order to shine - a kind of microcosm of the human essence.

The poet must walk a tightrope between prosaic, utilitarian usage (which manacles naming under the sign of Necessity), and that arrogant artistic egoism and vanity which treats words as building material, as means not ends (splitting off words from their original naming function, and in doing so, deforming them).

*Giambattista Vico, for one.

The Garden of the Forking Ideologies

Ten years ago, after a furious email melodrama, I along with a few others was expelled from the Buffalo Poetics Discussion List (SUNY Buffalo). At the time this was interpreted by Kent Johnson et al. as a free speech/censorship issue (while others debunked it as a ridiculous tempest in a teapot). However, underlying those events, for me, was a kind of agonistic relationship which I was maintaining, against what seemed to be the stance of both the founders & the majority participants of that list. There was a difference of opinion, of approach, of "poetics", if you will.

I had developed a deep suspicion and dislike of the phenomenon known as "language poetry" and related strands of experimental writing. What I sensed was a particular motivation rooted in the language school : an attack on the ontological status of the individual, of the person. This attack included what seemed (and seems) to me a paradoxical consequence - a parallel attack on, or degradation of, poetic language itself. The very term "language poetry" seemed like a frivolous affront to the poetic word. Though the language poets themselves denied originating this label for their movement, they went on to adopt it - which was, in a sense, for them, a validation of its use.

It seemed like the application of ideology to poetics. Now, as everyone knows, the current notion of ideology is that everyone has one (or many). It's inescapable. Nevertheless I want to consider some of its characteristics.

Ideology is like a mental mold or crust, a reification - a hardening of the mind along specific channels of vocabulary, definition, identification. Once this hardening process takes place, the resulting loaf or dry crust can be applied as a kind of template - an overlay for interpreting phenomena. It can also be used as an intellectual club, to force the mind in certain directions. The club or weapon stands outside of the object to be forced. It's a tool - a powerful one, an Archimedean lever, providing a useful alienation from the object under consideration.

Poetry's elusiveness, its waywardness, its ad hoc, improvisatory quality, its ex nihilo creative rawness - all these aspects help protect it (and the other arts) from the automatic or utilitarian, the ideological uses of language. At least this is the wished-for ideal.

As I pointed out in another essay (Integral Poetry), the history of poetry reveals an oscillation around the crucial problem of subjectivity and solipsism. In American poetry, we witnessed one of those watershed shifts, around 1980, when the somewhat standardized "Life Studies" model of the personal, anecdotal lyric was attacked, from two directions : first, by the proponents of "identity literature", for whom the self is fundamentally the product of an embattled socio-cultural group identity, rather than the sum of familial characteristics or universal human qualities; second, by the language school and related postmodern trends, which denied any essential ontological status to the individual self, the person.

As Carol T. Christ makes clear (Victorian & Modernist Poetry), these oscillations were a consequence of the Romantic foregrounding of the unitary subjective self, as source and end of consciousness, perception, art. Here, of course, I am oversimplifying. Coleridge's position, for example, was far more nuanced in this regard. For Coleridge the unity of the self was ultimately rooted in the unitary ground of the Spirit, the Godhead, the great "I Am", with which the creative Imagination fused. But the development, in Western culture (and not just in poetry), of self-reflexive human subjectivity, was the paramount factor in the dilemma (of solipsism) we are considering.

The problem was that the Romantic Self seemed grounded on the void. When the autotelic self came to the fore, in modern, Enlightenment culture, the seeds of its inevitable disintegration were already planted. Wordsworth's Egotistical Sublime prefigured T.S. Eliot's ritualistic religious self-renunciation, his formal (and ceremonial) return to a medieval ideology.

I would locate my own attitude, however, somewhere between these poles - close to Coleridge's dual concept. The person is neither a phantasmal construct of ideological/historical determinisms, nor the embattled tribal-social being of identity politics, nor the imperial Self of modern scepticism. Reality as we know it is fundamentally structured by Personhood; but human personhood is rooted in some utterly mysterious spiritual Personhood. It is essentially relational; it is inter-personal. (Akin to the Byzantine notion of the icon, the Imago Dei.) What for the Language Poets is an obstacle to the abstract and impersonal mechanism of an ideal (Marxist) social justice, is for me the ground of a spiritual life : that is, a moral and political life, devoted (ideally, anyway) to truth and to the common good, rather than to merely materialist and opportunist ends. This is the moral vision underlying our literature, going back to Langland and Chaucer, & probably long before.

Integral Poetry

I

One of the advantages for the rank amateur and dillettante is that there is no professional compulsion to keep up with the intellectual Joneses, or track contemporary trends assiduously out of a sense of duty. Instead one can go on whim down odd paths, and find valuable things in out-of-the-way places.

One such find for me is a slim book published in 1984 by Carol T. Christ, titled Victorian & Modern Poetics (Univ. of Chicago Press). The author grounds her comparison of these two literary periods in a consideration of some primary qualities of the preceding Romantic era, to which the Victorians and the Moderns responded, as she shows, in quite similar ways (despite the polemic effort of the Moderns to distance themselves from their immediate predecessors). Christ argues that the main problem for poets of both periods involved trying to find a way out of the cul-de-sac of Romantic subjectivity and solipsism - inevitable dark twin to the latter's firm commitment to individual consciousness, perception and experience. And the technical solutions the poets of both eras found show some remarkable similarities. The dramatic monologue, the mask or persona, the striking or picturesque image, and the scaffolding of myth or history : all these techniques were taken up by the Victorians, and then borrowed (and tweaked) by the Moderns. All were designed, more or less, "to separate the poet from the poem" : to restore some kind of impersonality and objectivity - a common ground on which to outgrow the purely individual and subjective.

Today we find ourselves situated on the other side of the Modern era, among the "postmoderns" : an era characterized by at least two sharp swings of the stylistic pendulum. Both can be understood as effects of the great vitality and power of the Modern era in poetry. The first, in the mid-1950s, was a sharp turn away from what had become a kind of dogmatic crystallization of Modernist precepts of impersonality, formal autonomy, and tradition (sponsored by the post-Eliot, New Critical poets). It was felt that by following these precepts to their logical conclusion, poetry had become lifeless : no longer in touch with the imperfections, the contingencies, the mixed weakness and strength which constitutes ordinary social life. Poetry's rarified air had lost the human touch and the personal voice. Robert Lowell's post-Life Studies career exhibits the familiar paradigm for this mid-century turn; and in their different ways, the Beats, the New York School, the Objectivists, and the followers of the Olson/Williams "local epic" approach, all took part in this sea-change, toward the inchoate, the provisional, the imperfect, the personal. It was the beginning of what we call the postmodern era, and its effects were visible not only in literature, but in visual art, music, architecture : a willingness to express the idiosyncratic, the peripheral, the eccentric; a dismissive attitude toward "finish" or traditional form; an emphasis on human experience over impersonal aesthetics.

Ironically, this sharp pendulum-swing prepared the ground for its own reversal, back in the other direction. This happened roughly a generation later, in the 1970s and 80s. The personal, anecdotal lyric began to seem stale and contrived - to exhibit all the the old solipsism and what might be called "generic" individualism which had shadowed the Romantic movement from the beginning. Furthermore, the new intellectual forces of "identity politics" and postmodern critical theory both worked to dissolve, as in an acid solution, the narrated individual of the previous generation. The new style emphasized "textuality" and semantic/syntactical distortions. The self and its stories were either thrown out altogether, or subjected to a kind of lexical filter, a phase distortion, resulting in newly impersonal, autotelic documents. The poem was an object, existing independently from its maker and subsisting upon its own internal, verbal logic. The poet's business was not personal expression, but a kind of political challenge to coercive modes of social speech. This "impersonal" manner was exhibited in its (polemically) pure form in Language Poetry, but the latter shared similar postmodernisms with poets of the New York School, post-Objectivist, and other trends.

After a while, these pendulum swings start to resemble rotations of a merry-go-round. The autotelic remoteness of the "language school" and related styles mimics the "rigor" of the New Critical manner, as well as (in a funhouse mirror) the self-enclosed solipsism of the Confessionals. Aside from positing a general (very postmodern) End of History, how can we interpret these shiftings in a way that might help us get off the merry-go-round?

Let's recall the linchpin of Carol Christ's presentation : the motive for experiment for both the Victorians and the Moderns was the impasse of Romantic individualism and subjectivity. But Romanticism itself didn't arise from nowhere : it subsists in a continuum of developments and repetitions much like the later periods. That is, Romanticism is rooted both in Medieval poetics and in Renaissance individualism; both the Renaissance and the Medieval eras were, in turn, rooted in the Ancients. And if we look again at the general pattern of intellectual eras, we see that Romantic subjectivity was in part a reaction against the generalizations and laws - the objectivity - of Enlightenment Neo-Classicism, which was, in turn, a reaction against the baroque and eccentric excesses of Renaissance individualism. Our contemporary American paradigm shifts are reflected in these earlier oscillations. We can draw a simple tripartite graph of this history, as follows :

Ancient - Medieval - Renaissance
Baroque - Neoclassical - Romantic
Victorian - Modern - Postmodern

Examining this series, we notice not only a dialectic of mutuality and reversal, but several of the names of eras have a provisional or dependent quality : "neo", "middle", "post"… "ancient", of course, is the twin of "modern", "baroque" the challenge to "classical", etc. We note, also, a progressive foreshortening in the timespans of each era, as we approach the present, so that the recent oscillations in American poetry seem to be only the latest, briefest examples of a phenomenon of chronological perspective - an angle of acceleration.

From these observations, we can propose a couple of preliminary hypotheses : first, that the next mini-pendulum swing will probably be a return in the direction of the personal and the subjective; second, that the progressive periodic foreshortening suggests the approach of a time when we will be able to transcend this entire polarity. The Ancients resolved the difficulty by means of separate modes (epic, lyric, dramatic); the Moderns by means of particular techniques (masks, myths, histories). Both of these were partial "solutions" to the conundrum of subjectivity - that human mystery, or mystery of humanism, which came to the fore during the Renaissance and Romantic eras, and was most systematically sidelined during the Neo-Classical and Modern eras.

With this general scheme and my two hypotheses as preliminaries, I would like to outline something I'm calling integral poetry. By this I mean something more than a simple synonym for "good poetry", and something less than a polemic for a particular manner or technique. Rather, my term, as I will define it, offers a basic context (by way of the traditional revolutionary method - the return to first principles) for the appreciation of the new poetry on its way.

II

These are some definitions of "integral" which I would recognize as functions of the evaluation of new poetry. Stemming from the latin adjective integer - "whole, entire" - an integer (in English) is either, in mathematics, a natural number, or, more generally, a "whole entity". The adjective integral, then, is defined as (among other things) "essential to completeness", or "composed of integral parts" (ie., integrated). Integral poetry, then, is in some sense complete, or whole - because it is an integration of essential parts (themselves "integers" - ie. integral, whole).

This wholeness is, basically, the integration of two integrities : subjective and objective. Integration requires synthesis, rather than those excisions or rejections evident in the periodic (and polemical) oscillations we have described. In other words, we will renounce neither end of the polarity, but find a way to unite the two. We can do this by way of an analysis of each.

First, then, what do we mean by "subjective integrity" in relation to poetry? But in our times, what term has been more "problematized "(in tandem with the relativizing of all terms) than subjectivity? To begin with, I would simply state as axiomatic that subjectivity and personhood are fundamental values or qualities of experience, which are reflected in fundamental characteristics of poetry. In this context, however (and perhaps in every context), the personal itself is inherently relational in nature. The personal is a paradoxical both/and : both unique and inter-personal. This important corollary allows us, for the time being, to set aside all the sharp disputes over the status of social and individual identity, which seemed so important for the American literature during the previous two decades. If the personal is a function of both uniqueness and relationship, then the expressive arts have a basis - in the personal itself - for transitive social interaction and mutuality. There is an element of equality or kinship with others, in everything we call individual and personal.

Consequently, the art work - the poetic "object" - is always shaded, qualified, surrounded, suffused, in its objectivity, by the subjective and the personal. This, as we know, is the familiar centerpiece of the Renaissance and Romantic eras. Shakespeare (after Chaucer) inwove inimitable individuals within the fabric of his verse. Wordsworth and Keats, in turn, transported the scale of moral and emotional types into interior dramas of psyche and personality. But we do not have to return inevitably to the usual opposition of subjective and objective, of epic impersonality and lyric "I". If the personal is in a certain respect the interpersonal, then even dramatic poetry - traditionally the most "impersonal" and social of poetic modes - is also shaded or qualified by the subjective. Aristotle's analysis (in the Poetics) of the interest or appeal of dramatic poetry describes three paths by which this interest flows : ethos, pathos, and logos. These are the avenues of subjective response and audience reception, respectively moral, sensible (via empathy), and intellectual. In ancient times they were understood in a framework far less individualistic than they are today; yet even the anti-personal, collectivist attitude of Brechtian "epic" theater relies on a foundation of subjective response.

A poetry of "subjective integrity", then, would integrate, and reflect, aspects of personal engagement or response. The personal inhabits and shades the art work; the art work presents a provisional synthesis of human invention and personality.

What do I mean, on the other hand, by "objective integrity"? Here I am thinking of the poem not as personal testament or social experience but as aesthetic object. Integral, remember, is defined as "essential to completeness". Let us say that a poem exhibits "objective integrity" if, and only if, it is beautiful. Beauty is the substance of aesthetic value. In Aquinas's presentation, the integral elements of beauty are : consonantia (proportion), claritas (clarity, brilliance), and integritas (wholeness).

Again : for Aquinas, integrity (wholeness) is one of the integral qualities of beauty. But if we're going to follow Aquinas with regard to our definition of beauty (which thus requires wholeness), then we cannot achieve integrity in our definition of "integral poetry", unless we can synthesize its objective aspect (beauty) with its subjective (inter-personal) aspect. Thus our logic runs into a kind of Chinese finger-puzzle. Aquinas's objective wholeness requires the integration of an aspect which is not in itself objective.

I would resolve this, paradoxically, by a reminder that beauty, as anatomized by Aquinas, is not necessarily pleasing, ie. merely pleasant (ingratiating, entertaining). The "charm" of beauty, which leads us on, may be severe, sublime, tragic. It may be critical and purgative; in fact, according to Aristotle, the deep interest which poetry holds for us consists in its power to balance and purge the passions. Here we arrive again at the crux of the problem which divided the postmoderns from the moderns, the Confessionals from the New Critics, the Language Poets from the Confessionals. Life is not a work of art or a beautiful poem. On the other hand, life without art is less than human. Still, art separated from life is empty, vain, dead. These are the contraries on which the epochs of literary style waver back and forth.

But when we recognize that the beautiful work of art is not exactly the same thing as the pleasing, the sentimental, or the comforting diversion - that the pleasure it provides may be rigorous, severe, critical, purgative, ethically scrupulous - then we can understand how subjective, personal experience (at the root of our interest in and response to art) might fuse and reside together with objective beauty. We can recognize how the postmodern dismissal of great and perfect modernist works - on behalf of the fragmentary, the abject, the middlebrow, even the ugly - was itself part of the struggle to find, in Stevens' words, "what will suffice" (and, moreover, what suffices in strictly aesthetic terms). Yet on the other hand, if we are willing to accept the notion of the personal as integral to the art work, we can see that the attempt to divest poetry of the subjective, the individual, the experiential - on behalf of (ethically) depersonalized formalisms - was also an example of an oscillation to the extreme, since the result was only to establish a new form of dissociation (into two halves) of one whole.

Thus an integral poetry requires the integration of these two fundamental categories of human experience. An integral poetry is suffused with the personal, the subjective, and the individual. The register of its integrity is the degree to which, in its characterizations and symbols, it deepens and complicates our sense of "identity" as ethical beings. Paradoxically, the subjective integrity of an integral poem will depend in part on the (subjective) qualification of its aesthetic objectivity - and vice versa. An integral poem is the record of a unique consciousness and personality; it reflects, simultaneously, the impersonal (sometimes severe and painful) justice of objective beauty.

Thus, in the integrity of the poem, the polarities of stylistic change, once in balance, become the irreducible values of its design.

* Addendum :

I should probably try to clarify one of the leaps (or lurches) of logic in the second half of this essay. I talk about aspects of beauty which are not simply pleasing, charming, well-ordered. Beauty can be severe, critical - the way Beatrice treats Dante in the Paradiso. "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" - as Keats's ode has it. But what exactly does this have to do with the subjective/objective dilemmas of recent American poetry?

What I'm trying to suggest is that beauty's "severity", its image of justice, its kinship with truth, is the very aspect which grants license to poetry's personal, experiential modes, its individual voices. It's what goads us as poets and readers to get beyond detached, self-enclosed formalism : beyond those artworks which seem to require an absolute distinction between beauty & life.

3D-Poetics

The relation of beauty (of an image) to its model is such that beauty is in the image as well as in what it is an image of. From this one may conclude that beauty is two-fold... an image is said to be beautiful when it is well painted, and also it gives a good representation of the object.
- St. Bonaventure


According to Bonaventure, then, beauty involves both construction ("well painted") and mimesis ("representation of the object"). Aquinas later specified three elements of such beauty : integrity (wholeness, perfection), proportion (consonance), and clarity (brightness). As Heywood Maginnis points out (in his book Painting in the Age of Giotto), there is another element which underwrites all these and which the two Scholastics do not mention : invention, or originality.

As is well known, the logical architecture of Aquinas stemmed from Aristotle. I noted in an earlier essay ("Art and Ethos") how the Chicago Critics of the mid-20th century drew on two important Aristotelian approaches : first, his method of empirical analysis, which begins with the unique integrity of individual objects, and distinguishes carefully between the object itself and the different tools of analysis and classification used to investigate its various aspects; second, his concept of aesthetic form (in the Poetics) - which can be understood as the opposite of the current received notion. For Aristotle, the form of the poem is the configured whole, the conceptual-intelligible shape or trail left by the action represented (in dramatic poetry, this would be the plot). Nowadays we tend to assume that form involves the rhetorical surface aspects of the poem : diction, figuration, stanzaic design, etc. For Aristotle, such verbal surface is the matter (the building materials). What we today tend to call content (the subject-matter, the plot) is what Aristotle thinks of as form. Applying this Aristotelian perspective was one way the Chicago Critics tried to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, the New Critics, and to ground poetics on a broader critical foundation.

What would happen if these various elements were combined and applied in a sustained way toward contemporary poetry? They imply a sort of sculptural sense : substantial, dimensional. Concept and action shape the wholeness of the form; language, rhetoric and design contribute to that wholeness, but they don't identify or define the work. Applied retrospectively to the "golden age" of the early Moderns (American poetry from Whitman and Dickinson to about 1950), they would foreground the unique excellences (and limitations) - the particular originality and quiddity represented in the work of those poets.

In contrast, today's poets and critics seem to inhabit a sort of Flatland environment. Differences in style and approach are assigned (by both poets and critics) to the historico-genetic development of rival groups and schools. The mannerisms of each school fulfill the same role as brands do in marketing - quick identifiers, amenable to snap evaluation. Style and form are surface elements - artificial literary dialects, as a matter of fact, which can be absorbed by osmosis in the various MFA programs tending in one direction or another.

And what would happen to poetry, if such "sculptural" elements were part of the poet's awareness and practice? The Aristotelian concept of integrity as a "whole action" - a complete conceptual/enacted gesture - brings to mind the live sculpture of dance. But the masks of stylistic dialects - what we think of as opposing trends or schools in American poetry - are insufficient in themselves; the masque should be informed by plot, and by plot's thematic resonance.

If we think of the poem as a three-dimensional object, and the poet as a maker rather than a performer, then our concept of the poet's social role begins to shift as well. If we relegate the surface elements to the poem's matter, and think of the poem's formal integrity as its thematic-mimetic wholeness, its conceptual gesture - then we are starting to move in the direction of rhetorical moderation. That is, the surface elements of style and manner are moderated, subsumed and synthesized by a more general aim. The poet's literary-mimetic action is analogous to other kinds of social action, and participates in the spheres of shared history and culture. This sounds obvious; but it does not seem so obvious how current (and contrary) assumptions about the role of the poet (ie. as an inspired medium of aesthetic self-expression, or as an experimental participant in collective stylistics) fulfill the architectonic, thematic gesture as outlined by Aristotle and the Chicago School.

A 3-D poetics, in which form equals (narrative or conceptual-thematic) plot - by way of a middle style, capable of absorbing and reflecting all kinds of discourses and events - would confirm affinities between the artistic gesture of the poem and the multifarious aspects of the world. The aim of the poet as maker would be to frame such makings, so as to explore and engage that world as fully and accurately as possible.

How to Read a Long Poem

A long poem is not like a short poem. It’s more like a novel. In his essay “Conversation about Dante”, Osip Mandelstam describes the poetic process as a sort of seismic crisis or dislocation, through which reading becomes writing, and writing becomes reading, and the reader discovers a kinship with the writer in the new reality of the text. Thus, a long poem is not a transparent film or glass placed over “the real world” : it’s a set of signals drawing the reader into an alternate reality, the fabric or texture of which is verbal, sonic, painterly... distinct.

*

In a classic, magisterial study, The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy traced the history of the idea of cosmic-spiritual “plenitude”, from Plato and Aristotle through the medieval Scholastics down to the modern era. He analyzed the inner contradictions which arose in the attempt to define the nature of God : for, in order to be perfect, the Prime Mover – the infinitely powerful and good and self-sufficient, the ultimate desired subject/object of all created beings – this Being has to disperse herself, divest herself, expend herself in the full cosmic scale of finite creation. And so to know or understand or achieve God, the contemplative is drawn in two contrary directions : either the renunciation of this world, or the compassionate embrace of same. “The way up is the way down.” Different ages and personalities have emphasized one or the other (the Middle Ages the former, the Renaissance the latter).

The maker of long poems is caught in the matrix of these two impulses. There is a powerful urge to integrate the Many into One, to discover the inner rationale, the cataloging method, for the cosmic Encyclopedia. At the same time, there is the artist’s recognition that unless the artwork reflects the individuality, the quiddity of things, on every level of the “ladder” of nature, the artwork slips into pale abstraction – discourse and philosophy rather than landscape or portrait. This productive, contradictory matrix is what generates the poem’s (often exasperating) longevity.

*

Many religious and philosophical traditions reflect various forms of what in Christian doctrine is called kenosis : God’s self-humbling for the sake of saving the world : the King of the Universe “taking the form of a servant”. (Plato’s characterization of the god of Love as a homeless waif comes to mind.) If one considers the long poems since Wordsworth’s Prelude through the lens of this concept, one discovers an aspect contrary to their frequent evaluation as arrogant, prideful, sometimes infernal (viz. Pound's politics) exercises in egotism and megalomania. Perhaps all the long-poem efforts after Paradise Lost are marked, to some degree, with the sign of Milton’s Satan – efforts to supplant orthodox theology with a contrary, antinomian, heretical vision. On the other hand, if we can accept the notion that the basic poetic impulse participates, in some fashion and to some degree, with an overarching spiritual activity – ie., history as kenosis – then we might recognize the long-poets’ agonizing efforts as partial, imperfect reflections of that activity. Thus Pound’s obsession with economic justice, or William Carlos Williams’ efforts to advance “the local”, or Crane’s attempt at a lyrical Myth of America, or H.D.'s hellenic psychomachia, or Eliot’s enfoldment of earthly Time within cyclic Eternity (Four Quartets), or Olson’s scheme to absorb reality into microcosmic Maximus, or Zukofsky's plangent, all-absorbing interiority ("A"), or Jay Wright's West African Orphism (Dimensions of History, et al.), or (the most orthodox and explicit example) David Jones’s model of history as poised forever between Roman Empire and Catholic Mass... these 20th-century poems play out, enact, forms of literary kenosis. The poet suffers in giving birth to a cosmic totality – a totality which, as such, must reflect the complete scale (from highest to lowest, from heaven to hell, from fame and greatness to poverty and nonentity).

*

& I suppose it goes without saying that the poet's kenosis is representative of the creative turmoil of all writers & artists; & also stands, on a wider scale, for the ordinary mute behavior of everyone - all who express themselves in daily (serious and trivial) acts - gestures of hands, the semaphore of face and eyes.

My Quietude

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.
Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.

- from Psalm 131 (King James version)


In 1972, when I was 20 years old, I underwent a series of psychic shocks (which I have described elsewhere). My inner world and intellectual perspective changed dramatically. Since then, my life as a poet has been motivated by two sometimes contradictory impulses : first, the desire to continue writing poetry, and second, the drive to express and share this new perspective.

This experience can be described, roughly, as the shock of being seized by God. I have spent many decades since then attempting, in various ways, to synthesize this inner crisis with a reasonable and persuasive explanation for it. Part of this effort has meant trying to filter my sense of it through poetry.

But poetry does not persist in a vacuum or autonomous space : it reflects the cultural and intellectual concerns and knowledge of peoples in history. If one of the most basic elements of a culture’s worldview is a belief in the existence of God, then the characteristics of every other element of that view will be shaded by this primary belief. The history of Western modernity bears witness to a continual shifting and change in the dominant forms of philosophical metaphysics and theology - for the most part in the direction of secularization, rationalism, materialism, scientific positivism, individual subjectivity, psychology, and the de-centering of the spiritual. Consequently, the experience of being “seized by God” would be given, in most intellectual contexts, some kind of rationalist, materialist, or psychological interpretation.

Poets, however, are stubborn creatures, prone to invent their own explanations. Their antennae may, as often as not, lead them in directions contrary to the dominant trends. The Romantics moved away from the rational commonplaces of the Enlightenment era. The Moderns (some of them, anyway) sought to counter the technological impersonality of the Industrial Age. The Postmoderns challenged the political-ideological suprematism of the 20th century. Where does that leave a late-20th-century poet who believes he has been seized by God?

Many poets and scholars, most notably Northrop Frye, have recognized that a few strictly literary problems seem to re-appear in every culture and in every artistic era. The problem, for example, of extending poetry beyond the mode of the brief lyric : how much discursive or narrative freight can verse (successfully) carry? And how should this be done? When I was setting out, in the late 1970s, to revive my own writing, I was confronted, as mentioned above, by two sometimes contrary problems of my own. First, how to get going again? And second, how to express the momentous new experiences?

Isaiah Berlin once began a famous essay as follows : “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'.” Since Archilochus’s time (and before), the epic or long poem has provided poets a means to play both animals – to unite the Many and the One. Now for a poet who has felt himself seized by God, there is an overwhelming consciousness of the One : call it the Prime Mover, the divine Intellect, or the first Person of the Trinity, there is no getting around or away from some mysterious presence of Unity and the Absolute. For several years, in fact, this knowledge inhibited my ability to write poetry. It was only during the late 1970s, after reading the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda, that I began to find my own way again. The Mandelshtams, together, somehow mediated a sense of things which was the right balance of the strange and the familiar. (It should be noted, I suppose, that Nadezhda’s memoir shapes an image of her husband which has overtones of both Judaism and Christianity. Nadezhda's Osip is simultaneously Jewish outcast, Russian-Christian holy fool, and sacrificial lamb.)

So I started writing again. My early poems of this second phase were dreamy, symboliste - a stew of American “deep images” and Mandelshtamian allusions. But I found myself severely limited in range. And I was beginning, in the late 70s, to become more socio-politically active. I became interested in the topical and documentary aspects of long poems – Pound’s Cantos, Williams’ Paterson. And then I also discovered a tremendous new poet, closer to home. Hart Crane had forged a dense style (akin to Mandelshtam’s), "freighted with ore" - and cast down his "Pindaric" gauntlet to the rangy, ragged long poem - in The Bridge.

These new interests took me a long time to assimilate. I didn’t begin attempting my own long poems until the late 1980s. And it was only until the late 1990s, after three or four separate long poems, that I began to write in this mode in ways that seemed really effective. This was in the long poem Stubborn Grew, which grew unexpectedly into a trilogy (The Grassblade Light, July), which, with a coda titled Blackstone’s Day-Book, I called, in toto, Forth of July.

What, in all this long effort, was I trying to do? Briefly, I was attempting to fulfill a vocation. For the person who acknowledges a metaphysical absolute – call it God – the order of literary modes and forms parallels, in some way, the order of nature. The motive of ancient epic – to narrate (in Pound’s term) “the tale of the tribe” – is to represent a culture as a whole, a vision of totality. The large poem embraces everything, so as to apprehend or represent its intellectual order. Behind the long poems of the second half of the 20th century – Paterson, “A”, Maximus Poems – stood Pound’s similar effort toward inclusive, encyclopedic relevance. And hidden far behind Pound (and the Romantic and Victorian poets) lay Milton’s Paradise Lost. And Milton was a kind of Dante-Virgil-Homer redivivus : the bard who re-shaped ancient and medieval cosmic poetry for a new age (or the cusp of a new age). (One could argue, however, that the best exemplar of this mode in the 20th century is not American, but Welsh-English : the poet-painter David Jones.)

I was aiming at something similar. I took Crane (along with Mandelshtam) as a model : someone somewhat aslant from the main 20th-century (Poundian) stream. Forth of July tries to combine a sense of American vastness, with local and personal particulars of the smallest state in the Union. If I were to paraphrase its argument in a nutshell, it would go something like this : metaphysical Love leads to rebirth and transformation; it is the hidden pivot of earthly and cosmic history. As for the modes, structures, style and stories I used to make this argument... I would rather leave all that for others to judge.

The public (non)reception of this big project was disappointing to me. My life turned another drastic corner when the poem was finished in 2000, and seven years have passed since then. I’m only now beginning to think that maybe I comprehend a little more clearly what might be the true (intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual) grounds of that “shock” I underwent 35 years ago. An American writer, apparently I inhabit a sort of limbo between the activist poetry subcultures, and the established, “professional” poetry world. I feel I’ve made a contribution to a particular vein in poetry in English, yet so far it has gone (mostly) unrecognized. There’s nothing I can do about that, finally – which is probably a good thing. So I’ve tried to move on.

The Value of Quietude & the Need for Roots

Toward the end of his life, in a forward to the New Directions edition of his Selected Prose, Ezra Pound wrote : “re USURY. I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”

Is it possible that our advanced poetry schools of today – both academic and fringe – for whom Ezra Pound is an originary daimon – have somehow missed the import of this statement?

What Pound’s acknowledgement amounts to, is that his career-long jeremiad against the political economy of the West was... not so much wrong, as misdirected. He doesn’t retract his assertion that there is a problem: he says that he analyzed the problem on the wrong basis, at the wrong level, with the wrong tools.

What he’s admitting is that the crisis of his world is not what he used to think it was – that is, an obvious engineering problem, which only a little political tinkering will put to rights.

Instead, the roots of the problem are moral. The roots are planted deep in human nature. To put it an old medieval way – the roots have to do with a propensity for one of the mortal sins (and perhaps by implication, a propensity for them all).

The condition of poetry these days reflects that of the arts in general, only in more concentrated form (because poetry is such a “specialty market”). The atmosphere shifts between radical discouragement, high (frustrated) political dudgeon, and artificial giddiness.

We appear to inhabit a late-modern era, which parallels – in shapes of grotesquery and burlesque, of shriveled civic hopes, of forebodings of plague and war – the late medieval period of the 14th-15th century. The satires of Swift and Orwell have nothing on the comic inversions of language and conscience found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner, the Summoner and the Wife of Bath would feel right at home in the stews of current Celebrity, and the epicurean, post-Christian society it reflects.*

The Modern World, of course, views everything as an engineering problem. The United States (which I know best) produces its political partisans, facing each other down with mutual sloganeering. Now we have Red and Blue Americas, resembling the color-coded riot system of ancient Byzantium. Each team works up its smug (and self-serving) manuals for systemic tweakage, blaming the other for All Existing Irritations.

And with so many semi-employed software engineers, who needs poets? Poetry’s backed into a corner, seething with pent-up vanity and papered with its own mildew. The causes are many. Some blame the hegemony of prose fiction; others blame the movies. Some blame American Puritanism and its workaholic ethic (even San Francisco no longer offers much reprieve). Poets are not recognized players in the vita activa of private enterprise, so a special farm has been established for them in academia, with its own degree programs and publications. (This works well, if you don’t mind being domesticated and part of a stable.) The rich, fat, happy middle class gets the minor verse it has always deserved, in the odd margins of its magazines.

The Venting Avant-Garde just hates this situation, but plays along as best it can – making sure that it flaunts its own distinguishing colors in the byzantine one-upmanship races. American poet and blogger Ron Silliman, for one, has made a specialty of this color-coding operation. With him, it’s the New Americans vs. the School of Quietude. It’s Red-Blue political pigeonholing on a smaller, aesthetic scale. And pigeonholing, of course, is a technical term drawn from Civil Engineering.

But what’s on the other side of the moon from vita activa? Why, it’s the vita contemplativa. Another name for “quietude”. Chaucer – like Dante before him – constructed elaborate, elegant and searing models of the social world. Within their sustaining spine lurks a Christian-Platonic concept of the Whole Good, the common good – that goodness which surpasses all private and partial and worldly and epicurean goods (on behalf of which Chaucer’s pilgrims hilariously condemn themselves out of their own mouths). A design which depends on, and from, the vision of a dual cosmos – an architecture which the contemporary world has trouble visualizing.

In the dual cosmos, there is Spirit and Flesh, Soul and Body, Heaven and Earth. And History is an undertaking from on high to reconcile the two, by way of those values which diametrically oppose the values of the worldly Epicurean : humility & good works for pride; poverty & charity for greed; chastity & compassion for lust. And this vision of the Whole Good is not an intellectual prize or academic acquisition – it is, rather, an inward product of contrition and penitence.

Simone Weil, a curiously medieval person of the 20th century, summarized this missing reality in her book’s title phrase : “the need for roots.” By which she meant: spiritual roots.

When the modern world dismissed monasticism and its disciplines, the social role of the vita contemplativa was also displaced. The new scripturally-infused individual was supposed to have everything needful right there in the family Bible. And certainly there was something true and liberating about this change. But something was lost as well: the imaginative efflorescence of spiritual contemplation. And when this was gone, the underlying rationale or ground for a certain (medieval) kind of social critique and literary engagement also dissipated in the West. Eliot, Pound, Joyce – to name only a few of the most prominent modern exponents – give evidence, in their nostalgic re-workings of Dante, of an awareness of some missing factor.

It is a concept of cosmic natural law and divine Providence – emanating from what Chaucer calls heaven’s “stability”. Sustained in a prophetic debate or dialectic with the world – the world mired in those three malign arch-vices, given various names, anatomized by John the Evangelist long ago as “the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life” (avaritia, luxuria, vanitas). These are the spiritual enemies – the complex of human foibles – which Chaucer descried and anatomized as the real source of the “engineering problems” stirring the ideological conflicts and debates of his age.

Today, it is novelists who engage in this kind of imaginative-sympathetic-satirical anatomy. The unread poets are left with their various second or third choices – whining political rants, private aesthetico-psychic-symbolic mystagogy, drug-enhanced persiflage, sit-down comedy routines, and so on. Or, one can join a promotional subculture-team, and find some minimal ego relief and career advancement there.

Or, perhaps... one can choose... that old rocky road to Quietude. And human relevance.



*see Paul A. Olson’s study, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), for a remarkable presentation of these issues.

Reading the Breeze : a review of John Latta

Breeze, by John Latta
Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame Press, 2003
115 pp.

Mountains and mountains of words have been applied to the poetic productions which began to surface about 100 years ago and have come to be known by labels usually containing some variation on, or some extension of, the word "modern". Most of these many phenomena share one characteristic : they exhibit the self-conscious awareness, on the part of their makers, of their status as art works. In their unfolding they reflect on themselves. Wallace Stevens offers one of the clearest and most programmatic examples of this tendency. The record of a chaffing conversation with Robert Frost is apropos. Stevens is said to have remarked, "You write on subjects." (Frost countered, "And you write on bric-a-brac.") Poetry, for Stevens, is not "about" things : it is something in its own right. Poetry "celebrates itself".

Much poetry of the last century is a record of the problematic consequences of this "supreme" (Stevens' term) self-authorizing maneuver. The poet who obliges it is immediately confronted with at least two big problems : first, the danger of solipsism (what is self-reflecting may not reflect anything else); second, a confusion about where, exactly, are the boundaries between the artwork and everything that is not artwork. (Is the "poem itself" only the aesthetic object, in strict isolation? Is it the state of mind or knowledge or feeling suggested or evoked by the poem? Is it the poem as received by its reader, or does it exist prior to that? etc.)

These issues have been chopped to a fine gruel - and I have little to add, except to say that John Latta's book of short poems, Breeze, plays a definite (if latter-day) role in that history. The breeze figures out how to turn self-consciousness in a direction which affirms both poetry's independence and life's infinite correlations.

Latta's kinship with the Hartford insurance man is clear. A glance at the table of contents reminds one of Stevens’ first book : "Chants of a Myrmidon", "Blank, with Blandishments", "Dirty Weather", "Noting it is Nothing", etc. Yet the volume's title marks its distance from Harmonium (natural phenomenon vs. musical artifact). A breeze is neither organ-pipe nor aeolian harp nor spiritual "wind" - it is something more natural and ordinary. Situated between Stevens' sometimes baroque blank verse and Whitman's variable lines, Latta writes (most often) in a free verse corralled into modulating triplet stanzas :

"So we stop talking
Just as the rain,
In a lengthy diminuendo, thins itself to a temporary halt.

Though we hardly notice it:
Our feet, unbeknownst to our feet, move
Now in easy reiteration,

Now in cumbersome jest, speaking
The gone rain's story, happy
Geniuses of the story of the gone rain."

These stanzas were chosen at random, but they are typical. They exhibit a balance between syntax and line, between self-conscious diction and casual phrasing, between life’s contingency and a pattern of construction. Observe the three topoi from the first stanza of the opening poem : flowers, noise, and philosophy. As you read on, you discover that these are recurrent motifs - as though part of an old-fashioned "garland". This is a book shaped in deliberate response to Harmonium, one of the indubitably great moments in modern poetry.

Latta's strategy, in part, is to take a step back from Stevens' elaborate finish. He leans toward Whitman, by foregoing cryptic ellipsis for more prosaic effects - more inclusive, ragged, and plain. Take, for example, the opening of the second poem, "Noise" :

"Off in the distance, the sound of
A truck backing up to unload a cargo
of roofing material…"

In fact, Breeze is built upon a notion of "interference." The book's organization rests on this polarity - a pervasive stress-interference-symbiosis, operating simultaneously within the prose/poetry of writing and within the prose/poetry of experience. The first poem, "In the Margins of a Book by Heidegger", encapsulates the theme, beginning with:

"Daily chores impinge, poking
Little subsets of clarity into the unutterable
Stink of thinking just as a philodendron,
Flexing, furls its tame blue fingers around a newel post"

These lines compact both processes (interference and synthesis). Latta's yen to unite contraries is grounded in the understanding that they remain contrary. Chords are suspended : tensions unresolved : affirmations are hopeful, or rueful, rather than resounding. Furthermore, The affirmations are 'impure' : they do not conclude neatly in favor of either self-contained art or idealized nature. Still, paradoxically, the affirmations are there :

"And if I say unreasonable things to you now and again
And conjure up makeshift desires dedicated to you
Whom I have lost, it is because the world

Is no fragment, no soap chip,
And with these words I am sudsing up a speculation and a return,
We could clabber something together together -

For I am a fragment, too."

This is from "Hazy Days", one of the volume's best, and representative, poems. Latta shares with Stevens an affinity for things French, one aspect of which is a willingness to engage in quasi-philosophical speculation - but with aphoristic brevity. Neat quips are leveled with the American bent toward rambling, open-ended, prosaic extension. The fact that Latta can articulate such a polarity is part of what distinguishes his work from run-of-the-mill anecdotal verse. His poems are often both anecdotal and philosophically engaged :

"No contrail scratches remain.
And I means I only by dint of this perfect mock-
Up of myself I's got sitting here

Socializing with the twentieth century, its dirt
Outlining the nail of a finger
Wagging emphatic an accusation

And pointing to the likes of words like you,
Unlikely though it is in such surroundings
To be you." ("The Wag of the Inconsequent")

Thus, and in similar playful flourishes, Latta combines a judgement on the limits of artifice with the grace of a (convincing) impression of personal presence. He unites what Stevens called the "the imagination's latin" with the vulgate of ordinary experience - the "lingua franca et jocundissima". These compounds, moreover, do not avoid painful and discouraging realities. In both happy and gloomy moods, the poet turns toward the natural world:

"For one short period you lived up there
In a shack and burned firewood. The need
To say something - anything - caught

In the terrible middle of you.
In the uptake, in the winch, in the draft.
Something about two

Bluebirds nesting in a box out back.
Something about the box tilting crazy
Against the fence post."
("Explication de texte")

What saves Latta from ruminative garrulity (always frisking the edges of his spangled phrasing) - and from the dated quandaries of fin-de-siecle theory - is the acumen of the artist. A rueful modesty allows for fusions of the personal and the intelligible, the literary and the natural. Humility makes for directness, accessibility. Latta is never simply performing. Even his ostensibly more-frivolous poems have a substantial feeling, rooted in a tendency to try say something to us about the nature of things. The results of this ratio between conversationalist and literary show-off are consistently charming. The poems have no extra-literary axe to grind : they celebrate their own fragmentary and companionable selves, and the peripheral goodness of their happening, their making. In doing so, they discover wider spaces. Can you hear the affable shades of Stevens and Whitman in these lines? -

"Hurrah for us wiseacres, us
earthlings who pout in the glamorous soup
Of airs we never put on with any success, democratic

As trees though.
Thorough our thought is though
Not exactly filling, our maneuvres those of mules

Hugging the sure contours of the map's bumps
And bridges, anything that divides land
Up into the here and there." ("Wisdom Terrestrial and Nigh")

Book vs. Talk

The story of 20th-century American poetry. Oh joy! What more can be said? Perhaps something new can be extrapolated from something very old : say, the battle between text and oral performance.

In the first decade of that famous late-lamentable century, change was in the air. Mallarmé and Flaubert, in their respective modes, had introduced a fascination with textual effects. Revolutions in physics and psychology (not to mention good old socio-political revolutions) brought pressure to bear on the ways and means of mimesis : hence, “stream-of-consciousness”; thus, imagism, futurism, Vorticism, Dada, and so on.

Manipulations of poem-as-text went hand-in-hand with the spread of vers libre. Ironically, experimental writing licensed new freedoms in recitation : the new possibilities on the page sanctioned a more informal approach to performance. It was suddenly recognized that traditional meter (as with Yeats and Frost, for example) was only one possible technique among others.

After that, well... what more could there be? Once free verse is split off from metrical verse, and the main focus of attention shifts to the page... then, paradoxically, technical options become more simplified and limited. It becomes a question of algorithms rather than metrical choices.

The decades sleepwalked along... the jazzy 20s, the social 30s, the military 40s, the techno-streamlined 50s... the century in poetry assumed its familiar hour-glass (or, in Yeatsian terms, gyroscopic) outline. Eliot’s neo-classical historicism, and the spreading influence of New Critical pedagogy, supported an arch, mandarin style – the glassy bubble of which soon burst with the onset of anti-academic rebels of various stripes (out of NY, SF, and Kansas, mostly), bringing along their epic pretensions, their global imitations (haiku, surrealism, primitive chants, translations from Spanish et al.), their wacky lifestyles, and so on. Attendance at collegiate Writing Programs became the norm for would-be poets, complete professional beehives were installed, a new relaxed free verse style became the norm in the latter decades. Impatience with same, mixed with the impact of continental-Yale literary theory, brought along the Language Poets, who furthered the emphasis on poem-as-text by simultaneously severing the connection between text and speech and language and meaning. This was fun for a while, and (in the 80s and 90s) brought a lot of elliptical non-sequiturs into academic normal style.

One area of poetics which went under-understood, during this epic century-long battle between Book and Talk, was the umbilical relation between poetic measure (whether strictly metrical or more loosely musical) and spoken language. It was not so much free verse which reduced the importance of metrics : it was the fixation on the written text, the page. Poets as distinct and Eliot and W.C. Williams recognized that no poetry – whether metrical or free – could afford to rid itself of measure, rhythm. But the substance of such is not on the page, but in recitation. Aristotle may have had a slightly different definition, but in our contemporary idiom, prose fiction is described as “poetic” when its syntax and imagery become rhythmic. A poem is in some sense or other an incantation.

Some implications of all this for contemporary practice are not without irony. For instance, those we label today as the more traditionalist poets amongst us – those who write verse grounded either in antique forms & metrical patterns or (if they happen to produce free verse) in ordinary sequential logic and syntax – may be more aligned, stylistically, with oral performance. Hence, they may be less constrained by the limitations of script-based “experiment”, which was in such vogue at the very beginning and the very end of the last century. If you are producing verse for recitation (as opposed to the subset now known as “visual poetry”), there is only so much you can do with moving words around on a page : the options are quite limited. And if so, the situation entails further consequences. The shifting vocational “positions” among so-called traditionalists, mainstreamers, “School of Quiet(ud)ists”, rebels, experimentalists, “post-avants”, and so on – yoked as they are to 20th-century phenomena and fast-fading polemics – show a steady decline from even the minimal quotient of meaning with which they began.

Aristotle famously defined poetry as the representation of character-in-action. We can extrapolate a definition of lyric poetry as the representation of a speech act. Prose fiction and drama surround speech acts with different subsidiary and ornamental elements of presentation – spectacle, story, explanatory asides, etc. The lyric poem, on the other hand, is the art of the speech act in its most direct and naked form. Prose shades into poetry where discourse becomes incantation. And where there is incantation, there the presence of an actor : of the one-who-chants. The aesthetic effect of such personal presence – as distinct from the impersonality, the object-quality of the text, the book, the "writing" – has, perhaps, its philosophical corollaries. I have written elsewhere about how some of the greatest works of prose fiction seek to simulate or adumbrate the experience of personal presence, of “nowness” (Proust’s epiphanies; Joyce’s acrobatics; the various techniques of flashbacks & framing tales) – the presence, the immediacy, which recitation or incantation offers in a less diluted form.

American poets, I suppose, will continue to cluster in groups of various kinds. But I would guess that these groupings in future will have more to do with feelings of kinship stemming from political, class, ethnic, religious, or other kinds of social allegiance, than with a sense of kinship based on chosen literary styles or theories of poetry. Because the stylistic and theoretical allegiances which evolved in the 20th-century – based, so emphatically, on text rather than performance – are already irrelevant to contemporary practice. The new/old poetics must take the measure, not of text, but of incantation.

Art and Ethos

It seems a narrow choice the age insists on.
How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn't offered this year.
- Robert Frost, "New Hampshire"

The beginnings of what we call "literary criticism" predate the advent of literacy itself. As Andrew Ford describes in his superb study, The Origins of Criticism (Princeton U.P., 2002), the judgement of song was an integral part of the ancient Greeks' public festivals, as well as their elite "dinner parties" (symposia). But both archaic song and its critique were transformed, about 2400 years ago, by two new forces : literacy and democracy.

The spread of writing introduced a new medium for "song". Suddenly there was a rivalry between memorized-improvised oral performance on the one hand, and poems-as-texts on the other; new questions were raised about the nature and purposes of poetry, which are reflected in the oral/textual dialectics of poet-performers like Simonides and Pindar.

Meanwhile, the movement (in Athens and other cities) from tribal tyranny to elite democracy, with the concomitant rise in the importance of public oratory, helped create a new class of educators and rhetoricians devoted to the craft of writing. This laid the groundwork for Plato's idealist critique of art in general, and for Aristotle's empirical-scientific analysis of poems as specifically aesthetic objects, different in kind from works of either science or oratory.

Ford depicts, with great acuity, the shifting grounds of influence, synthesis and debate between, on the one hand, the ethos of public speaking and oral song, and on the other, the ethos of textual independence, aesthetic autonomy, and philosophical critique. The technology of writing was transforming Greek notions of art.

We, too, have been undergoing two or three centuries of comparable change in the technology of art and writing. This reality, of course, presents vast perspectives for the study of comparative literature. But here I am concerned with lessons that might be drawn for the practice of poetry criticism. Two large themes, among several others, emerge from Ford's study. The first is that the sense of a self-standing, autonomous art work was never a given, but was postulated by sophists and philosophers in partial or complete opposition to the traditional notion of song as a function of collective identity (fitting seamlessly into ritual festivals, forms of collective self-affirmation). The second theme represents the gradually-sharpening differentiations which emerged between oral performance, written poetry, rhetorical discourse in general, and literary criticism per se. What kind of landscape becomes visible, when we superimpose the Ford model of ancient Greece on the contemporary scene?

We might notice immediately that the dialectic between ethics and aesthetics has never gone away. Poetry criticism is still shaped by the most varied chemical compounds of evaluation, mixing questions of social relevance, fitness and morality, with responses to the aesthetic aspect of poems. Ethical or political judgements are determined by the critic's own stance, allegiances, and interest in those realms; aesthetic judgements are shaped by the critic's prior likes and dislikes, background knowledge and affinities. The critic may impress an audience with an idiosyncratic blend of ethos and aesthetic, since notions such as "moral beauty" may involve rankings of various sorts, based on ideology, or questions of "seriousness" of treatment in relation to subject-matter, etc.

If the dialectic between ethics and aesthetics is irresolvable, and continually shifting, is it possible to develop any firm critical criteria whatsoever? In the middle of the last century, the group known as the Chicago critics suggested three complementary responses to this problem. First, they proposed a theory of "critical pluralism" : ie., there could be many equally-valid critical approaches (they were careful, meanwhile, to distinguish pluralism from both relativism and scepticism). Second, they asserted the need for a "para-criticism", or the criticism of criticism : tools with which critics could clarify their own assumptions and those of others (ie., what, exactly, are the social or aesthetic premises behind a particular critique?). Third, they promoted a new reliance on the method of Aristotle, whose categorical approach implemented a proto-scientific analysis of artworks : poems were distinct objects, with ends unique to themselves, which were to be differentiated sharply from those of science, politics, philosophy, and related discourses.

Would such a "neo-Aristotelian", categorical approach simply instaurate an a-political, merely technical criticism - a sort of Mandarin literary engineering, divorced from ethical and historical concerns? Not necessarily. In fact a clear political ethos might require the kind of exactitude which would distinguish between literary effects which involve our recognition of beauty (aesthetics), and their logical or ethical implications. Thus we might be able to acknowledge the technical ingenuity involved in works of kitsch, melodrama, bombast, propaganda - which would only sharpen the argument for their ugliness with respect to a different scale of values. The same exactitude with regard to aesthetics would sharpen our awareness of misplaced criticism as well : praise or derogation of the aesthetic quality of poems, based not on the supposed ideological bent of the artist or the art work, but on that of the critic.

*

It would seem, then, that a criticism or poetics flowing from the general approach of the Chicago critics, would be one which is grounded in an evaluation of the poem as a "self-standing" aesthetic object (or act). But the Chicago schema is, as they themselves admitted, a set of preliminaries. For one thing, as I have mentioned elsewhere, it is not obvious how Aristotle's theory of the tragic or epic poem applies to other modes. It seems more applicable to film, prose fiction, and drama than it does to lyric, didactic or satirical poetry. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile to try to extend the model, and toward that end I would offer the following premilinaries of my own.

A poem, then, of whatever mode or genre, is a work of art, an aesthetic creation : which means that its main effect is to please us with its beauty. We respond both immediately and with circumspection to the beautiful. By this I mean that taste and judgement become involved as a result of our immediate response, leading us to accept or reject the work based on an increasingly acute scale of values : a scale in which the aesthetic and the ethical cannot easily be distinguished from each other. The role of the critic is to explore the character and formal qualities of the work, in order to determine more clearly how its elements and effects move us in such a particular way. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam put it, "the logos or logical meaning is just one (among others) of the poem's building blocks". If such logos illustrates most directly the ethical aspect of an art work, then one of the critic's tasks is to analyze just how meaning interacts with the other building blocks of the poem.

And what are these other building blocks? Aristotle would argue that the pleasure of tragic poetry depends on a unity of effect, stemming from the representation of one "whole action" (the plot). The poetic technique involves the selection and organization of materials so as to embody that one whole action to best effect. What, then, conveys the pleasing beauty of other modes of poetry? Let us assume that the substance of any poem's effect involves a unity of impression : just as in a play or a novel, a lyric poem has a beginning, middle and end, and the aim is to shape them into a unity. The basic elements of the lyric whole can be outlined as follows:

1. texture (sound, rhythm, diction, imagery)

2. representation (story, reality, plausibility)

3. sense (pathos, emotional effect)

4. implication (argument/logos; meaning/ethos)

It will be seen that #3 and #4 stem most directly from, or are implied by, #1 and #2, respectively. This may have further implications for the poem's architecture. The critic's effort is to illuminate how the poet's motive and ingenuity - purpose and technique - whether through inspiration or invention - draws these building blocks into a unique whole. As Aristotle showed, and as the Chicago critics reasserted, that unity is not to be defined by or equated with the poem's diction alone. The Chicagoans decisively dismantled the 20th-century cliché that (verbal) form is merely an extension of (logical) content : for them, as for Aristotle, the words are just one of the materials (one of the elements) out of which the holistic form (the plot, the action, the impression) is shaped. This, again, is the pivot on which hinges the generic distinction between poetry and rhetoric : words are material for a beautiful shape, rather than the medium for a persuasive argument. Truth may be unitary; but the beautiful persuades or moves us toward truth not through logic or reasoning, but through something Plato called "charm" (the effect of a "fine" union of ethos and art).

It could be argued that such an "elementary table" is a pedantic exercise, burdening the would-be critic with categories which are both vague and unnecessary. Perhaps, for many, it is just that. Still, I would add : these elementary distinctions, these "building blocks", are a simple map of what is, nevertheless, a real landscape : a minefield of problems which, sooner or later, will face anyone engaged in the critical evaluation of poetry. And a map, even a very simple one, might be the beginning of an adventure.

Whittling, Whistling

Lately much of my spare time has been whittled away by the writings of R.S. Crane and Elder Olson, leading members of the mid-20th century group of scholar-critics known as the Chicago School. From the perspective of 50 years later, theirs appears to have been a valiant effort to expand the hermetically-sealed horizons of the (contemporary) New Critics - whose pedagogical dicta regarding poetry (through such media as the best-selling text, Understanding Poetry) threatened to turn poets into crafters of refined ships-in-bottles, flimsy bric-à-brac.

I have written elsewhere about one of the pivotal arguments in their polemic, based on a distinction between discourse (argument, rhetoric) and mimesis (representation). However, as ancient Philo pointed out somewhere, the divine Logos divides only in order to bring into harmony (unite); and if we are to do likewise, it behooves us to strive for some kind of synthesis. Listen to the comedian Aristophanes (from his play Frogs) :

Aeschylus : Why do we marvel at a poet?

Euripides : For cleverness and advice; we make men better citizens.

Cleverness and advice : deixotetos and nouthesias. These details courtesy of an acute, well-grounded study by Andrew Ross, titled The Origins of Criticism : literary culture and poetic theory in classical Greece (Princeton U.P., 2002). Here is a sample:

"The contrast here is ethical and stylistic at once : deixos characterized a speaker or saying as striking, memorable, bold, and witty : Aristophanes used it especially of Euripides... and his Dionysus uses deixos for the 'fecund' (gonimos) poet who is capable of producing 'noble' (gennaion) and 'bold' (parakekinduneumenon) expressions. Nouthesia, a word made by compressing old gnomic formulas for 'putting a wise thought in the heart,' implied gravity, moral authority, concern for the other's well-being. Aristophanes is combining two styles of using poetry : the one offers sophistication, diversion, and wit - for example, the ridiculous but modern 'Aether, Zeus' bedroom'; the other promises moral soundness. The opposition between nouthesia and deixotes is between 'the time-honored, traditional' education bent on inculcating courage and moderation, and the new, based on science and sophistication." [Ross, op.cit., p. 200]

Ford's book steeps us in the milieu of 6th-4th century Athens. He provides a brilliant context for Plato's obsession with poetry (The Republic) and Aristotle's response (The Poetics). In this regard, I direct your attention to the quote from Elder Olson, in a previous essay, regarding the ethical and political power of poetry. How, exactly, does poetry "inculcate values"? Plato famously asserts the opposite. He argues that the vague, gnomic utterances of poetry make free with ambiguity : that they can be interpreted to support any argument whatsoever : that they are specious authorities, grist for every mill. Olson and R.S. Crane attempt a counter-offensive, by way of their distinction between mimesis and discourse : poetry is not didactic at all, it is iconic. But this argument is doubly double-edged : it both distances them from the New Critics and aligns them with them; it aligns them with authoritative Aristotle, and separates them from him.

If poetry is reduced to the iconic, the mutely representative, it becomes exactly what Plato would censor : the infinitely suggestive, multivalent text; ultimately ambiguous, essentially New Critical. And even if we accept Crane's and Olson's arguments regarding Aristotle's emphasis on the mimetic, representational (para-verbal) poetic substance, we are left with a basically aesthetic resolution (dénouement) to the creative process : the tragic poem "succeeds" by means of the craft which makes for a "self-standing", affective object. The Chicagoans successfully burst the bubble of New Critical poetic diction : but adducing the substance of poetry as affective-dramatic mimesis is not quite successful in defusing the (Platonic) charge of ethical irrelevance.

We have not quite expressed our Philovian synthesis, either. How to get at this? Let's go back to Aristophanes' Frog-quote, above. The influential poet combines cleverness and advice, Ford's "wit" and "heart", sophistication and profundity.

How? By a creative act which is itself synthetic : so synthetic as to elude theoretical-critical paraphrase. What is that Stevens passage? "The poem must evade the intelligence almost successfully..." Something like that. Oh well.

A dancer spins on her toes, and we are hypnotized. She is silent; her dance speaks for itself; the longer we dwell on that beautiful rotation, the more heart and mind become commingled, confused, intertwined.

The real and essentially theatrical protagonist of our Chicagoan-Aristotelian dramatic-mimetic poem-concept is : the words themselves ("cleverness, advice"). But these words will not be dissected and reduced to a theory of language. The words are a precipitation, a translation. They are one with their unspoken, unspeakable origin. The poem as a whole is larger : something like a song, something like a dance, something like a person : singing, dancing...

Ghost of a Renaissance Man

This book review was first published in Rain Taxi (electronic version), several years ago. The book is still available from XLibris & online vendors. When I was at Brown as an undergrad, Honig was one of my teachers (& friend, and mentor).

A review of work done by a close friend of the reviewer inevitably differs from a more independent response. There are gains & losses, probably mostly losses : nevertheless, when I re-read the poetry excerpts, it's impossible not to hear them again in Honig's wry, modulated voice.


GHOST OF A RENAISSANCE MAN

Time and Again : Poems 1940–1997, by Edwin Honig
XLibris, 2000. 600 pp. $16.


Edwin Honig has a flair for drama. His multidimensional poetry manages a speaking voice with a large, fluent vocabulary, both slangy and erudite. His poems are often staged: a dramatic situation leaps to the fore. Here are the concluding lines of “The Gift”:

Free! Free! The round voice sings,
mad as a bell swinging with joy,
then stops. Quick! Quick! before eyes

fail against the final wall, let him
know what joy is, in his heart –
the stranger’s heart that eagerly
sang out of him, and stopped.

“The Gift”, within the confines of 18 lines, sets up a dream-like encounter between the speaker and “a stranger with a baby face”, sitting naked and smiling in a locked room, in a pool of his own blood. The drama serves a symbolic function: an embodiment of the otherness of inspiration, akin to possession or speaking in tongues. The process of dramatizing brings together many of Honig’s perennial concerns: his fascination with allegory, parable, storytelling; his obsession with the self and its self-delusions (evident in his poetry, and in his translations of Fernando Pessoa); and his immersion in theater proper (his translations of Calderon, his essays on Ben Jonson and the Elizabethans, and his own short plays in prose and verse). Honig’s technique involves setting a scene, suddenly, decisively. Within that scene a voice bubbles forth: the voice of a Brooklynite whose life spanned the 20th century, and which unites the studied stateliness of Prince Hal with the rambunctiousness of Falstaff. In the short poem “Late, Late”, these opposing aspects are muted but subtly present: a restricted, iconic movement combined with an expansive vocabulary.

Late, Late

In the palehaired fields of August
sunlight gravely brushes
poppies, blackeyed daisies,

rusted roses gallivanting
up an old abandoned cellarway
into the open sky.

A peach tree, hunched and mossy,
hard fruit speckled, stiff,
grows near the absent barn.

Red chevrons flashing,
blackbird gangs swell by.
The titmouse follows idly.

Is it their passing darkens
wild mustard, carrot, parsley?
Is it daylight shadows falling?

A first nightstar trembles.
The sickle moon advances
with a special cunning.


“Late, Late” is a concise example of the strain of elegiac mourning which is pervasive in Honig’s writing, and is found in combination with two important counter-tones: a streak of bitter, black humor, and a quieter voice of metaphysical hope. This collection of over 50 years’ work shows particularly clearly how the poet’s muse is framed by death: from the death of his young brother, hit by a truck while the two boys were crossing a street (in the 1920s), to the death of his first wife (in the 1960s), to the sense of political and cultural death (during the Vietnam War era and after), to the lonely confrontation with aging and dying faced by all (in the 1990s). His young wife’s passing triggered a whole range of writing, from brief poems to verse plays, stemming from the myth of Orpheus. This section, from a sequence called “Another Orpheus”, seems especially moving:

Her Remoteness

We sat in the lamplight’s quiet estimation
of our unwavering unanswered fire, one moment
in our living brimful glass
containing each of us, each as yet untouched,
unbroken, asking, Who
will drink us if we do not drink each other?
And neither of us stirred.

*

It is a light lingering on a sill
as I lie half-awakened on a summer morning
sunk in the weighted gladness
of my beached body still awash and unreleased
by the dark tide of sleep
till I advance a hand to touch the light and it
withdraws however far I reach and disappears.

Honig sometimes frames his rueful, bittersweet intonation in large, ambitious long poems. Most powerfully in Four Springs (a book-length poem modelled in part on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal) and Gifts of Light, he expands toward impersonality and objectivity – satirical and social (Four Springs) or a Beethoven-like, metaphysical sublimity (Gifts of Light). The latter poem swells finally into hymn:

Pulsing in the eye and ear
rhythms calling
inner to outer being
are gifts bestowed by light

In the intricate tasks of day
the fishing in
and hauling up
of joys and pains
are gifts bestowed by light

In the endless castings
of the fisher’s lines
the slicing of the scalpel
into flesh
are gifts bestowed by light

All
all of these and more
are of the gifts
bestowed by light

*

This massive collection is the testament of a survivor, and a record of 20th-century American poetry. Reading Honig through fifty years, one can trace his early apprenticeships, not only to Stevens, Lowell, MacNeice, and Dylan Thomas, but also to the Spanish modernists and European surrealists. One can follow the deepening of his own idiosyncratic vision and manner, while, at the same time, his precise, consistent mastery of diction flows into looser and more flexible forms. In this process he shares the developments of his generation: yet there are ranges of shaped experience which are complementary to, but different from, those of his peers (for example, Berryman or Lowell). Honig was both more cosmopolitan and more isolated: his translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature are known and performed widely around the world; his deep kinship with a Mediterranean–Moorish–Hebraic past filters into his work in distinctive ways; and his quiet life in provincial Rhode Island tempered his poetry with a plangent, meditative quality. For example, here is the beautiful short poem which concludes the volume:

Hymn to Her

The load you take
is dense, backbreaking
and mistaken.

It can be otherwise:
and in full light
wholly undertaken,

the load is slim,
and to the one that
takes it, bracing –

owed to none but
for the life
that lifts awakened.

Note the meticulous, elegant shape of the sentence working against the stanzas, and how right the rhymes are. This lyric by an aging, ailing man sums up a lifetime’s commitment in a hopeful key, and declares it good. Hopefully Edwin Honig’s dramatic presence and inimitable voice will find new readers (and listeners) as the new century unfolds.

A Quick Nod in Words

Fifty years ago, a group of critics who came to be called the Chicago School raised questions about some of the assumptions then prevalent in the criticism of poetry. Among these was the notion of the poem as merely a verbal or textual phenomenon among other such phenomena, as simply another form of discourse. Elder Olson and R.S. Crane explored Aristotle’s insistence that at least certain forms of poetry (epic, tragic, comic) were not, essentially, discursive : rather, they were mimetic, representational.

The technical language which proliferates in the practice of criticism is useful and necessary. Nevertheless, it displays an unavoidable tendency (while appropriating endless reams of paper products) to trade the forest for the trees. The debates over the nature, function, and evaluation of poetic language, due to their intense focus on supplying evidence for close argumentation, often fail to acknowledge the larger semiotic context, within which words per se occupy only a narrow band.

Poetry along with everything else inhabits a forest of signs. Words themselves are only the most explicit and denotative (“pointy”) form which signs can take. Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” inevitably comes to mind, which begins:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

[Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
- trans. by William Aggeler]

Whether or not we agree that Nature ever sends us familiar glances, contemporary science certainly provides voluminous evidence that the living world (at least) operates by means of signals : from the sub-microscopic messages in DNA, to the festive display and camouflage exhibited by the animal world. Moreover, we cannot fail to recognize – even when we cannot succeed in understanding – that we ourselves are highly attuned to the unspoken language of sound, color, shape, gesture, and appearances in general. Such a text is not easily translatable into the verbal medium : we live in a sensorium of perception and feeling, emotion and intuition, absorbing its signs in many conscious and subconscious regions at once.

But poetry is not science : it is not primarily analytical, abstract or theoretical language, though it can incorporate these features to a limited extent. Poetry is representational. It offers a set of signs which, through evocation and mimicry, re-present experience from that wider sensorium and semiotic field which is life and nature. In so doing, poems open many and various paths for interpretation - sometimes making explicit argument, sometimes offering a kind of evidence for argument, sometimes both, sometimes neither.

From this perspective, Robert Frost’s quip that “poetry is what gets lost in translation” takes on another meaning. Each poem is an echo of a wider band of sensuous signs. A particular language-shaper’s effort to communicate this larger field in a verbal medium is itself a rather desperate act of translation.