by C K Williams
This is what happened to me and to many other poets during the years of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when much of the poetry being written in America seemed to have become overly formalized, self-referential, stale, and if I dare use the word, spiritually lifeless. Artists are always ranging over their own traditions, searching for viable models of inspiration, but I believe that our mostly unconscious realization during those years that we were at a dead end drove many of us to ransack literatures other than our own, no matter how grand our own surely was. We needed, desperately, it felt then, other cultures, other histories, other poetries in order to discover aesthetics that would disrupt those we’d inherited. We wanted new models that would make unfamiliar demands and offer new freedom, new inspiration.
And the poems from other languages that came into English then brought with them much that became immediately essential to me. As I’ve noted, English literature is certainly one of the richest, if not the richest, in the world in the sheer number of great poets and great poems; we have somehow managed since the Renaissance to produce astonishing poets in just about every period of our history. I could very well have spent my life reading nothing but English-language poets and been gratifyingly recompensed, but I was searching for something then that without my ever quite understanding it had less to do with the greatness of the poems themselves than with quite other matters.
For many of those poets I read in translations seemed to offer clues to my own poetic identity in a way that very few American or English poets had. Of course I labored to digest my own tradition, but though the poets of that tradition would ultimately have to be the models for much of my own work, in those starting-out days, they were my masters only in matters of technique: I was learning from them essential matters of language and sound. But what the poets from other cultures offered were varieties of what I’ll call poetical-spiritual identities, ways of conceiving of myself in poetry that weren’t available to me from the poets in English, either because they were too far removed from me historically or because the model they offered was too predetermined, too much a part of a culture I felt only marginally a part of and quite intimidated by. There would come a time later on when I could conceive of myself as being in a poetic cosmos with the English masters, perhaps because my own poetic identity had become firmer, but back then, I needed poets who arrived on my desk without my having any literary or cultural preconceptions about them: they were, in a sense, as naked as I was, as unencumbered—as, in some odd way, vulnerable. They were merely the sum of the matter of their poems, and their presence in the universe of my poetic attention seemed as contingent as my own. This of course is beside the quite astounding variety of aesthetic possibilities they brought with them. I was particularly taken then with the use of nonrational modes of association and figuration, discoveries that had been made in delightful, if rather whimsical embodiments by the French Surrealists but that were given a moral and metaphysical edge, especially by the great Spanish and Latin American poets of the thirties: particularly, García Lorca, Hernandez, Vallejo, and Neruda.
Of course this wasn’t the only time in English and American literature when there was this kind of reaching out to other sources. At the turn of the century, when the self-consciously decadent pre-Raphaelite and late Victorian poets were setting the aesthetic standards of their day, the early modernists turned from them, finding in French poetry, poetry from Asia, even early Provençal poetry, new visions and new styles. Similarly, in the early English Renaissance, many of the best poets of the time translated Petrarch and other Italian and Latin poets as a way of broadening the scope of what they experienced as a limited range of stylistic possibility. Some of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard’s most famous poems are actually translations, though often our anthologies don’t even remark the fact. And similar things happened in the visual arts: in the late nineteenth century, Monet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, among others, turned to the Japanese print; Manet went to Goya; Picasso and the other cubists to African art.
In retrospect, needless to say, there were at the time of which I’m speaking poets who were doing serious, significant work, but each of them seemed to have something about them that kept them, at least for me, from becoming the inspiration and examples they were later to be. Ginsberg wrote “Howl” in the fifties, and though it’s now almost universally considered a great poem, when it was published it was received by many poets, including me, I’m embarrassed to say, as a work that had more to do with the propagation of a worldview than a new kind of poetry. Perhaps because there was so much publicity hysteria around the publication and attempted censorship of the poem, it was difficult to see what its real virtues were. Also during that period, William Carlos Williams was still writing, better than he ever had—Pictures from Brueghel, his greatest book, appeared in the early sixties. But for a young poet, Williams seemed to be more of an ancestor: he, along with Frost, who was also still alive though not writing at his best, were poets from the definite past, to be revered, certainly, but whose work didn’t possess that thrust of the unexpected as did poems coming from other languages. Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur were writing then as well, but until Lowell published Life Studies, he and Wilbur seemed to me only the very best of the poets working in the conservative conventions of the fifties: admirable, but not the powerful innovative influence Lowell would become with Life Studies—and, even more explosively, with Imitations.
Imitations arrived near the middle of that golden age of translation I’ve been describing that transformed American and English poetry in the late fifties and early sixties. As I’ve said, there seemed in those days to be an endless supply of unfamiliar and crucial poems being delivered to us across language barriers.
But Imitations brought its own unique revelations and released something in me I hadn’t grasped had been keeping me from moving ahead in my own work. It wasn’t that the book “influenced” me—what happened was much fiercer than that. I didn’t know or care then exactly what about it inspired me so, but I realize now it surely had to do with the audacity with which Lowell approached and poached on and cannibalized so many sacrosanct canonical poets and made their work so thoroughly his own. As a translator myself now, and a teacher of translation, I sometimes disapprove of much of what Lowell perpetrated on the original poems, the distortions, the amputations, the mutations. Other times, when I come to the book I again find myself rapt.
On those first readings, though, when I saw what Lowell had dared to do, the presumptuousness with which he had turned poems by everyone from Victor Hugo to Montale to Rilke to Pasternak into grist for his own poetic identity, I had no reservations at all: Imitations was a book I needed, the book that without even knowing it I’d longed for. What Lowell had done seemed to strip away the last of the intimidating barrier of sanctity that proscribed the world of poetry from me. I always felt I’d arrived too late to poetry to be a real poet, and besides, I never seemed to feel anything like the “inspiration” other poets spoke of; my composing always felt more laborious, more dogged, more willed than they made it sound. How could I ever hope to place myself among those geniuses? Lowell was a member of that Parnassus, clearly, but he had done something I’d been taught simply shouldn’t be done—he had dared to usurp the inspirations of other poets, modifying them, altering, hacking at them, really, making them his own in a way I could never have conceived possible. It was his impertinence, his temerity, more than anything he did with the individual poems that made the book mean so much to me: he had brought poetry down to the earth on which I actually lived.
Needless to say, there were poems in the book that were wonderful in themselves, especially Montale’s, whose work hadn’t yet come to me and which I still admire. And occasionally, when Lowell would go almost completely “free,” as he did in “Heine Dying in Paris,” he would come up with poems all but unrelated to the original, but splendid in their own right. His recastings of Rimbaud are always fascinating: a fusion of two not dissimilar sensibili
ties, whose experience couldn’t have been more disparate. There are some, too, which I find quite awful; what he did to Rilke is a disaster, unmitigated by any virtue, tonal, interpretive, or otherwise, and “Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes” is all but perverse in its distortions of the original’s metaphoric grace.
I realize now, though, that more than any particulars in the poems, it was that other thing, the sheer presumptuousness with which Lowell attached those various poetic souls to his own that so enfranchised me and was so crucial to my perception of my own possible place in the world of poetry. All this went beyond the mere study of verse, with which I was already feverishly involved, and beyond my being affected by the poems themselves. The poet I wanted to be, the poems I was trying to write, trying, really, to imagine writing, all at once seemed feasible, if not right away, then someday. Lowell apparently conceived and wrote Imitations to get past a dry period in his work, which it certainly did; for me, the book simply gave me the right to begin to be myself.
These days, there has been what has come to be called a globalization of art and a nearly instantaneous awareness, especially in the market-driven visual arts but in literature as well, of what is happening in other aesthetics. Whether this is all for the good I’m not certain. While I was reading the anthology of contemporary European poetry I mentioned before, I was struck by how many of its poems tended to sound alike: in too many cases, I couldn’t really tell what country or language a poetry had come from until I checked. I thought at first that perhaps the almost universal commitment to free verse was the reason for this apparent homogenization, which is a rather distressing thought. It may have been, instead, because all the translators of the poems in the book were working in American English and hadn’t sufficiently taken into account the subtleties of the original languages.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are entering in, or are already immersed in, an age in which the singular glories of the poetic traditions in each language are being subtly undermined by a too easy accessibility to other sources. That would be sad for young poets now who are battering against the untranslatability of reality itself and who won’t have the revelatory experience of coming across, the way the poets of my generation did, a Wole Soyinka, a Yehuda Amichai, a Zbigniew Herbert—each utterly unique, each embodying his own culture in a way we’d never suspected could be done.
Lowell Later
I. A. Richards wrote but apparently never sent a letter to Robert Lowell that was quoted by William Pritchard in his New York Times review of Lowell’s Collected Poems. Richards is explaining to Lowell (or complaining about) the fact that he can’t “understand justly” the poems in Lowell’s first publication of his long sequence of free-verse sonnets in Notebook. “The tone,” Richards says, “the address, the reiteration, the lacunae in convexity, the privacy of the allusions, the use of references which only the PH. D. duties of the 1990’s will explain, the recourse to contemporary crudities, the personal note” (and now the most damning, and probably the reason why he never sent the letter), “the ‘it’s enough if I say it’ air, the assumption that ‘you must sympathize with my moans, my boredom, my belches’ . . . puzzle me.”
The key terms here are “understand justly” and “sympathize,” the first stating the not unreasonable lament of a critic confronting unfamiliar and difficult work, the second posing what is actually an ethical demand on an aesthetic issue. Lowell’s poems—finally really anyone’s poems—don’t ask primarily for “sympathy,” anymore than music does. Certainly Mozart wasn’t asking sympathy for the very bizarre variations on Masonic mythology that are an integral part of the plot of The Magic Flute. There are no moral propositions being offered. What Mozart is presenting to us is music, his music, the music that Mozart heard in his mind and brought into the world; it’s a music that no other mind in the history of humanity had produced before or ever would again.
It’s the same thing with Lowell’s music, or Milton’s, or Whitman’s, or Donne’s, or any other truly major poet’s. Lowell’s was a great poetical musical voice. To read the hundreds of poems in History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (the successors of Notebook, which include most of its poems) is to be immersed in that voice, even if the matter of a poem can increase or decrease our enjoyment. Lowell’s genius, and the genius of poetry, is that we can listen attentively and with pleasure, for so many pages, no matter how apparently incidental the matter or theme or story of any single poem might be. I’m not sure how many of the poems of the three books I can say I love whole-heartedly, and there are many I might wish—as did Elizabeth Bishop—hadn’t been written, or at least published, because of their outrageous intimacy, their embarrassing indiscretions about other people’s intimate business. But when I’m in the book, none of that finally matters; the poems are there, I listen to them, they’re the productions of an enormous musical talent, and that’s sufficient: that there are elements in the poems I don’t care for, or even have to forgive, is incidental to the elemental experience of being taken again by Lowell’s singularly gratifying music.
Any poem has its music, of course, though with less accomplished poets the music can be less efficient, and the unity of music and matter more questionable. Even poems with a striking musical identity can end up lacking the fusion of voice, character, and substance we find in poets as masterful as Lowell. John Berryman’s long sequences of poems in 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest were surely the model (never quite acknowledged) that Lowell used for the Notebook sequences. Lowell acquired from Berryman the right, we might say, to compose poems that are, in fact, rather well described in Richards’s critique: they do reiterate, they do have “lacunae,” and they can be terribly private. But Lowell’s music lifts his sonnets to a level that makes them continue to be fascinating, while for myself I can’t read Berryman’s books with nearly the satisfaction I did when they first appeared, and I think this is because of limitations of the music in Berryman’s poems.
Berryman’s music at first can seem as compelling as Lowell’s, perhaps even more so, but the poems depend very much on idiosyncratic devices, unorthodox word order, odd violations of grammatical conventions, minglings of conversational tone, even of dialects, most commonly of African American speech (though it isn’t the speech of actual black America Berryman uses; he devises riffs, instead, from the reconfigured language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century minstrel shows). It’s true that when the poems do work, they’re unforgettable: “Life friends is boring . . . ,” “There sat down, once, a thing // on Henry’s heart . . . ,” and a dozen others remain central to my view of American poetry. But already by the end of the first book of seventy-seven, there seems to be more than a breath of repetition and tedium. The poetry’s music often seems to be being played for its own sake, which is all well and good, but it also begins to feel that it isn’t an ample enough music to bear so much sheer usage. By the end of the several hundred poems of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, it’s almost impossible to find anything like a satisfying single poem: the poetry has been overwhelmed; there’s the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in one self-indulgent aria after another.
Lowell’s music, in contrast, by the time he came to write the poems in Notebook, had modulated many of the more flagrant idiosyncrasies of his earliest work, very likely because of the influence of Bishop, whose poems’ precise conversationality Lowell recognized could carry a broad range of theme and emotion. If Lowell had tried to compose the tonnage of poems in History with the percussive—we might say symphonic—music of “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” the poems would very likely have ended up seeming now as nearly unreadable as Berryman’s. As it is, there isn’t any single poem whose music wasn’t stirring to read the first time and very few that don’t continue to be satisfying to listen to again, no matter how slight or merely personal their material.
Still, problems arise when we consider Lowell’s work during the period when he was exclusively writing his sonnets. Those years represe
nt quite a large portion of Lowell’s entire career, and it’s hard not to ask whether during that time Lowell put his talent to its best use. Like all truly great artists, Lowell is finally to be measured only against himself, but it’s not unfair to wonder whether the work of that period fulfilled as much as it might have the potentials of his enormous gifts.
No poet, even a genius, can be asked to write only hugely significant poems. Nonetheless, we have expectations of poets that to one degree or another can be disappointed. Frost’s last decades didn’t bring anything like the number of marvelous poems his earlier career did; one doesn’t value him less for that, but it’s impossible not to remark it. With Lowell, although during the period of the sonnets there was never the slackening of output there was with Frost, there are still questions. What I keep wondering is whether during that time Lowell may have become too engrossed in his instrument—as singers like to call their voices—so that exercising it became an end in itself. Anyone who has worked for a period in a single form knows how generative that kind of formal commitment can be, how it can draw forth so many unexpected epiphanies. As Lowell put it, “I don’t find fourteen lines a handcuff. I gained more than I gave.” Furthermore, all poets well know that writing poetry is seductive, not only in that it’s difficult to stop doing once you’ve begun but also because the act of composing brings with it such a sense of excitement that when it’s not happening, when inspiration fails, there can come to pass what might well be described as withdrawal symptoms.
