by Judy Jones
Profile: Old Granddad … most influential figure (and most headline-making career) in modern poetry … made poets write modern, editors publish modern, and readers read modern … part archaeologist, part refugee, he scavenged past eras (medieval Provence, Confucian China) with a mind to overhauling his own … in so doing, masterminded a cultural revolution, complete with doctrines, ideology, and propaganda … though expatriated to London and Italy, remained at heart an American, rough-and-ready, even vulgar, as he put it, “a plymouth-rock conscience landed on a predilection for the arts” … responsive and rigorous: helped Eliot (whose The Waste Land he pared down to half its original length), Yeats, Joyce, Frost, and plenty of lesser poets and writers … reputation colored by his anti-Semitism, his hookup with Mussolini, the ensuing charges of treason brought by the U.S. government, and the years in a mental institution.
Motto: “Make it new.”
A colleague begs to differ: “Mr. Pound is a village explainer—excellent if you were a village, but, if you were not, not.”—Gertrude Stein
Favorite colors: Purple, ivory, jade.
Latest books read: Confucius, Stendhal, the songs of the troubadours, the memoirs of Thomas Jefferson.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Pound:
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
The prestige Pound (for extra credit):
Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom
Taishan is attended of loves
under Cythera, before sunrise
and he said: “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded catolithismo)
y muy poco reliHión”
and he said: “Yo creo que los reyes desaparecen”
(Kings will, I think, disappear)
That was Padre José Elizondo
in 1906 and 1917
or about 1917
and Dolores said “Come pan, niño,” (eat bread, me lad)
Sargent had painted her
before he descended
(i.e., if he descended)
but in those days he did thumb sketches,
impressions of the Velásquez in the Museo del Prado
and books cost a peseta,
brass candlesticks in proportion,
hot wind came from the marshes
and death-chill from the mountains….
from Cantos, LXXXI (one of the Pisan Cantos, written after World War II while Pound was on display in a cage in Pisa) T. S. (THOMAS STERNS) ELIOT (1888-1965)
Profile: Tied with Yeats for most famous poet of the century … his masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), which gets at the fragmentation, horror, and ennui of modern times through a collage of literary, religious, and pop allusions … erudition for days: a page of Eliot’s poetry can consist of more footnotes and scholarly references than text … born in Missouri, educated at Harvard, but from the late 1910s (during which he worked as a bank clerk) on, lived in London and adopted the ways of an Englishman … tried in his early poetry to reunite wit and passion, which, in English poetry, had been going their separate ways since Donne and the Metaphysicals … his later poetry usually put down for its religiosity (Eliot had, in the meantime, found God); likewise, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral, his plays … had a history of nervous breakdowns; some critics see his poetry in terms not of tradition and classicism, but of compulsion and craziness.
Motto: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A subtle conformist,” according to William Carlos Williams, who called The Waste Land “the great catastrophe.”
Favorite colors: Eggplant, sable, mustard.
Latest books read: Dante, Hesiod, the Bhagavad Gita, Hesse’s A Glimpse into Chaos, St. Augustine, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Baudelaire, the Old Testament books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes, Joyce’s Ulysses, Antony and Cleopatra, “The Rape of the Lock,” and that’s just this week.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Eliot: The opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the let-us-go-then-you-and-I, patient-etherised-upon-a-table, women-talking-of-Michelangelo lead-in to a poem that these days seems as faux-melodramatic and faggy—and as unforgettable—as a John Waters movie. (We’d have printed these lines for you here, but the Eliot estate has a thing about excerpting.)
The prestige Eliot (for extra credit): Something from the middle of the The Waste Land, just to show you’ve made it through the whole 434 lines. Try, for example, the second stanza of the third book (“The Fire Sermon”), in the course of which a rat scurries along a river bank, the narrator muses on the death of “the king my father,” Mrs. Sweeney and her daughter “wash their feet in soda water,” and Eliot’s own footnotes refer you to The Tempest, an Elizabethan poem called Parliament of Bees, the World War I ballad in which Mrs. Sweeney makes her first appearance (ditto her daughter), and a sonnet by Verlaine. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)
Profile: Uncle Bill … at the center of postwar poetry, the man whom younger poets used to look to for direction and inspiration … smack-dab in the American grain … determined to write poetry based on the language as spoken here, the language he heard “in the mouths of Polish mothers” … avoided traditional stanza, rhyme, and line patterns, preferring a jumble of images and rhythms … spent his entire life in New Jersey, a small-town doctor, specializing in pediatrics … played homebody to Pound’s and Eliot’s gadabouts, regular guy to their artistes—the former a lifelong friend, with whom he disagreed loudly and often … wanted to make “contact,” which he took to mean “man with nothing but the thing and the feeling of that thing” … not taken seriously by critics and intellectuals, who tended, until the Fifties, to treat him like a literary Grandma Moses … Paterson is his The Waste Land.
Motto: “No ideas but in things.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A poet of some local interest, perhaps.”—Eliot. “Anti-poetic.”—Wallace Stevens.
Favorite colors: Blue, yellow, tan.
Latest books read: Keats, Pound’s Cantos, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
The prestige Williams (for extra credit):
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—
since the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness
from Paterson, Book 2 (“Sunday in the Park”), Section 2 ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)
Profile: The one who got stuck being popular with readers outside college English departments … but not just the “miles-to-go-before-I-sleep” poet; as one critic said, “sees the skull beneath the flesh” … born in California, where he spent his boyhood:
The New England accent just a bit of a fraud … re-created, in his poems, the rhythms of actual speech, the actions of ordinary men … “got” nature, tradition, and anxiety … his tone sad, wry, and a little narcissistic … eventually carved out an elder-statesman role for himself in official American culture … isolation, limitation, and extinction were favorite themes … said to have been a creep to his wife and son (who committed suicide) … for better or worse, hard not to memorize.
Motto: “We play the words as we find them.”
A colleague begs to differ: “His work is full (or said to be full) of humanity.”—Wallace Stevens.
Favorite colors: Teal blue, slate gray, blood red.
Latest books read: The King James Bible, Thoreau’s Walden, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Frost:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
The prestige Frost (for extra credit):
…Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad….
from “Directive” WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)
Profile: With Yeats and Eliot, billed as a great “imaginative force” in modern poetry … self-effacing insurance executive who spent a lifetime at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, writing poetry nights and weekends … didn’t travel in literary circles (and was on a first-name basis with almost no other writers); did, however, manage to get into a famous fistfight with Ernest Hemingway while vacationing in Key West … believed in “the essential gaudiness of poetry” … his own verse marked by flair, self-mockery, virtuoso touches, aggressive art-for-art’s-sakeishness … in it, he portrayed himself as the aesthete, the dandy, the hedonist … held that, since religion could no longer satisfy people, poetry would have to … had the sensuousness and brilliance of a Keats (cf, as the critics do, Frost’s “Wordsworthian plainness”).
Motto: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A bric-a-brac poet.”—Robert Frost.
Favorite colors: Vermilion, chartreuse, wine.
Latest books read: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the poetry of Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Yeats, Henri Bergson’s On Laughter.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Stevens:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground.
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
“Anecdote of the Jar”
The prestige Stevens (for extra credit):
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
from “The Idea of Order at Key West” THE FIVE RUNNERS-UP MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)
If “compression is the first grace of style,” you have it.
from “To a Snail”
Has been called “the poet’s poet” and compared to “a solo harpsichord in a concerto” in which all other American poets are the orchestra … has also been called, by Hart Crane, “a hysterical virgin” … in either case, was notorious for staring at animals (pangolins, frigate pelicans, arctic oxen), steamrollers, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, then holding forth on what she saw … believed in “predilection” rather than “passion” and wanted to achieve an “unbearable accuracy,” a “precision” that had both “impact and exactitude, as with surgery” … watch for her quotes from history books, encyclopedias, and travel brochures … original, alert, and neat … appealed to fellow poets, including young ones, with her matter-of-fact tone, her ability to make poetry read as easily as prose. JOHN CROWE RANSOM (1888-1974)
—I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all….
from “Piazza Piece”
Finest of the Southern poets (he beats out Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren), and the center of the literary group called the Fugitives (mention tradition, agrarianism, and the New Criticism and they’ll read you some of their own verse) … liked the mythic, the courtly, the antique, and flirted with the pedantic … small poetic output: only three books, all written between 1919 and 1927 … founder and editor, for over twenty years, of the Kenyon Review, arguably the top American literary magazine of its day … at his worst, can be a little stilted, a little sentimental; at his best, devastatingly stilted and wonderfully ironical … worth reading on mortality and the mind/body dichotomy. E. E. (EDWARD ESTLIN) CUMMINGS (1894-1962)
… the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
from “[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]”
Innovative in a small and subversive way … the one who used capital letters, punctuation, and conventional typography only when he felt like it, which helped him convince a considerable readership that what they were getting was wisdom … the son of a minister (about whom he’d write “my father / moved through dooms of love”), he sided with the little guy, the fellow down on his luck, the protester … has been likened to Robin Hood (the anarchist), Mickey Spillane (the tough guy), and Peter Pan (the boy who wouldn’t grow up) … wrote love poems marked by childlike wonder and great good humor. HART CRANE (1899-1932)
The photographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal.
from The Bridge (“The Tunnel”)
Wanted, like Whitman, to embrace the whole country, and was only egged on by the fact that he couldn’t get his arms around it … his major poem The Bridge (that’s the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol of the heights to which modern man aspires), an epic about, as Crane put it, “a mystical synthesis of America’”; in it you can hear not just Whitman, but Woody Guthrie …
as somebody said, found apocalypse under rocks and in bureau drawers … “through all sounds of gaiety and quest,” Crane claims he hears “a kitten crying in the wilderness” … a homosexual who, at thirty-three, committed suicide by jumping overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
