I have tried to bear in mind two considerations: that of making a book which could be used as a ‘teaching anthology’ (i.e. one which includes generous selections from the poets normally taught in university courses) and that of making a book which would be representative, so that the full range of American poetry might be brought before the reader unfamiliar with the subject as a whole. For many years there has been a tendency in American anthologies to be restrictive – a reaction, no doubt, against the older principle of including as many authors as possible. My own solution is a compromise. I have cut the ‘classic American poets’ to a minimum, and given greater weight to the major figures of the between-wars period and to those poets who have emerged since the Second World War. I have also included a number of ballads and parodies, and even a sample or two of ‘‘public’ verse, such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Comic poets and the comic side of poets, also have their place, for poetry is not always a matter of ‘O altitude’.
American literature begins with the literary products of the colonists, for in the seventeenth century may be found the key to much of what follows later. Regardless of the historical importance of the Southern colonies it is the Puritan ethic which has formed, possibly warped, the American soul. This is fully reflected in American poetry. The Northeastern colonists of the seventeenth century wrote pietistic verse which is far removed from the intellectual sophistication of Donne, Herbert or Marvell. They wrote for a purpose, and writing for a purpose has coloured the whole of American literature.
I have selected from the wealth of material provided by Jantz, Meserole, Morison and others a sample of what I consider to be the best verse of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, adding a dash of Michael Wigglesworth – for ‘The Day of Doom’ is an interesting historical document and also provides unwittingly entertaining reading. Contrary to the usual practice, I have allowed slightly more space to Anne Bradstreet than to Edward Taylor, for although Taylor is intellectually more substantial, his verses make hard going for all but the most dedicated reader. Anne Bradstreet’s tender humanity is nearer to my heart. Earlier than Katherine Philips (‘the matchless Orinda’), she is the first woman poet in the English language and her response to pioneer conditions is of documentary as well as poetic value.
Unlike Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor wrote in what might be called a metaphysical style – the result of isolation since he was, in fact, born eleven years after Dryden. Typically, he is the one poet who is rescued from the meagre pickings of seventeenth-century New England verse by American editors who compile anthologies with such titles as Masters of American Literature. To my mind, however, he is not a great poet and it does American literature a disservice to claim that he is. As well as being physician to his community, Taylor was a Puritan preacher, and the range of his thought was limited by his embattled and lonely situation. His verse does not have the striking appeal and challenge of the English metaphysicals, whose style of far-fetched conceits he adopted. The seventeenth-century American could not afford to let any chink be seen in his armour. Otherwise there might penetrate not only lust and sloth, but Arminianism, Antinomianism, Quakerism, the terrifying possibility of there being an alternative attitude to life.
All this is revealed by a comparison of the poems of Bradstreet, Taylor, Wigglesworth, Tompson and the rest with the wealth of English poetry in the seventeenth century. Culturally speaking, colonies cannot be expected to compete with the motherland – that is self-evident, and one only suggests the comparison in order to let it be seen what Americans have had to contend with in becoming aware of – indeed developing – their own tradition. Perhaps the most important consequence of the peculiarly American combination of colonialism and Puritanism was that irony was scarcely available to the early Americans. There is no note in American poetry in the seventeenth century comparable to that of Herbert’s ‘The Pulley’. Not the making but the message primarily concerned the Puritan poet. From these seeds a garden was to grow, to which in time the seeds of other strains were added. But still the original plant persists, pervading the whole garden.
In the eighteenth century there is still little enough to choose from in American poetry except Freneau, Barlow and the ‘Connecticut Wits’. ‘The Hasty-Pudding’ obviously owes something to ‘The Rape of the Lock’, but it has an amateurish, breezy quality which is quite unlike the civilized wit of Pope. In Freneau we may also see the beginning of a conscious awareness of being American. He was one of the first to assert – even to the point of chauvinism – that the United States ought to draw upon her own strengths and not imitate the products of ‘that damnable place’. Concealed beneath his eighteenth-century poetic diction there is a power of sympathy which is very far from the sentiments of the earlier Americans towards the ‘black man’ of the forests. Curiously enough, although the style is, like Taylor’s, an anachronism (in an age of Crabbe, Blake, and Burns he has more in common with Prior, Pope or Gay), the sentiments are advanced for his age.
Building on Freneau’s example, the first American poet of the nineteenth century, William Cullen Bryant, made one important contribution: he hymned the grandeur of the American forests and prairies. For the rest, he illustrates a strain in American poetry which could have been its downfall. ‘Thanatopsis’, that favourite anthology piece (replaced here by the superior ‘The Prairies’), is curiously insipid, vaguely stoical. It is linked in tone with Emerson’s transcendentalism rather than with the trenchant empiricism of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In his lack of vitality, Bryant is also like Emerson and the rest of that race of gentle American aesthetes. There was an emotional anaemia in early nineteenth-century artistic and intellectual America which persisted long after the Civil War, even though in Whitman the vitality of American poetry had become clearly evident.
Nevertheless, the minor poets of the nineteenth century are import ant in their own special way. Poe, who wrote ‘out of Time, out of mind’, did so much for French poetry that he became that well-known French poet ‘Edgarpo’. Bryant, Emerson and Thoreau, and those four designated by George Arms in The Fields Were Green as ‘the Schoolroom Poets’ (Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and Lowell), also show another side of the American character. The latter two, in particular, are representative of what Holmes himself called the ‘harmless, inoffensive, aristocracy of New England’. Their poetry shows that ability to convey a tone which I. A. Richards noted in Longfellow’s ‘In the Churchyard at Cambridge’ when he said:
… if there is any character in poetry that modern readers – who derive their ideas of it rather from the best known poems of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats or from our contemporaries, than from Dryden, Pope or Cowper – are unprepared to encounter, it is this social, urbane, highly cultivated, self-confident, temperate and easy kind of humour.
This quality is something which is not easily found in the lusher pastures of the English nineteenth-century scene and cannot be discarded as merely a throwback to the English mood of the eighteenth century, for it is classicism in a nineteenth-century key – with an admixture of Yankee directness, good sense and honesty. Richard’s perception gives considerable point to Auden’s observation that: ‘From Bryant on there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman.’ Even so, the distinctions are fine; only with Whitman does the difference between English and American verse become both dramatic and obvious.
It is not only a matter of tone or vocabulary; Whitman did not have ‘poetic subjects’; he had something to say, the strength of which fills his work with such buoyant confidence that, despite his lapses and outrageous coinings, we are carried along on the wave of his rhetoric. Only an American poet would have had the gall to strike such an attitude and not care. As Randall Jarrell said in Poetry and the Age, ‘Walt Whitman, he had his nerve.’ Jarrell also spelt out the details of Whitman’s more subtle achievements, how one must look behind the so-called ‘catalogues’ to the nature of the words themselves. So analysed, Whitman is rev
ealed as a writer of great delicacy and deep human sympathy. This, combined with the enormous range of his reference and his capacity for detail, make him the first great original of the American scene. Charles Feidelson extended Americans’ awareness of their own poetic individuality by making clear the nature of Whitman’s symbolic act, the significance in his work of ‘the voyaging ego’. When Whitman says ‘See steamers steaming through my poems’ he gives us these things; we become them. Not ‘talking about’ but presenting in living detail is the American artist’s contribution to literature.
Emily Dickinson’s work also exhibits in a quite remarkable way another aspect of the American contribution: the ability to shock us into an awareness of the extremity of human experience with a single phrase. She expresses the joys and sorrows of a single life, and such was her strength and such her insight that it is our lives which she mirrors.
A measure of Emily Dickinson’s strength may be seen by comparing her work with that of the English woman poet who was born in the same year: Christina Georgina Rossetti. Rossetti’s verse sings; it has a pleasing musical element. But in spite of the freshness of Rossetti’s original perceptions, her verse is trifling, full of paraphernalia, images thought up to illustrate poetic attitudes. Emily Dickinson’s concentrated phrases startle and shock the reader with their harshness. Not even Emily Brontë could approach this, for the English Emily – despite the fact that she was of the same stamp as Emily Dickinson and had a far harder life – never expressed in verse that jarring combination of terrifying atmosphere and exactly right sentiment which was Emily Dickinson’s achievement.
Twentieth-century American poetry begins with Edwin Arlington Robinson. His contribution to the development of a native American style may be found in such poems as ‘Isaac and Archibald’ which, but for its excessive length, I should have included in this volume. As an exemplar, this poem is interesting both as a product of New England ten years before the freer style of the ‘Chicago Renaissance’ and as a forerunner of the conversational manner represented half a century later by Robert Mezey’s ‘My Mother’ or Charles Bukowski’s ‘don’t come round but if you do’. Robinson’s diction is nearer to the note of American speech than the hypnotic Biblical cadences of Whitman. In prose, this note is found in Huckleberry Finn which – as Hemingway was fond of telling us – was the one book out of which all subsequent American literature came. Certainly, it is the heart-note of American utterance, the making over into memorable speech of what Tocqueville was referring to when he said: ‘It is not then to the written but to the spoken language that attention must be paid if we would detect the modification which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.’
This is the main line of American writing, in verse as much as in prose. American literature may have its other facet: the contribution of Henry James or of Wallace Stevens, but, in reverse of history, the redskins – to use Philip Rahv’s half-ironical categories – seem to have triumphed over the palefaces. This fact might confidently have been predicted from the beginning by a process of deduction such as Tocqueville so brilliantly formulated, but it is the inductive examination of the historical facts which supplies the proof. Even at their most sophisticated, the Americans are more down-to-earth, less ‘literary’ than the English. In this context Robert Frost’s deceptively quiet verse marks a further step towards the achievement of a native American voice in poetry.
Apart from the work of Robinson and Frost, the major American contribution in the early years of the twentieth century lay in the pioneering work of Pound and Eliot. They were the great instigators of ‘modern’ poetry; they made available a new poetic style, different in its range and cultural references from anything which had gone before.
Part of what they stood for may be found in Pound’s manifesto of Imagism, an Anglo-American literary movement produced under the aegis of another influential literary figure of the years before the First World War, Amy Lowell:
(1) To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word.
(2) To create new rhythms – as the expression of new moods. We do not insist upon ‘free verse’ as the only method of writing poetry … We do believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms.
(3) To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
(4) To present an image (hence the name ‘Imagist’). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.
(5) To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.
(6) Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very essence of poetry.
Pound’s spirit, however, could not – any more than Wordsworth’s in his time – be bounded by the rigidity of a theory. Only perhaps in the works of H. D. do we find Imagism unsullied by personality. But personality, T. S. Eliot notwithstanding, is what makes the work of a poet distinctive. Pound’s distinction could be seen from the first. He ‘struck through the mask’; he showed that poetry was life and not merely a part of life; and he insisted on the greatest models and the highest traditions. He was – like so many other American literary artists – the teacher par excellence; he came, like some poetic messiah, to show the way.
And show the way he did, to a generation of poets who did not wish to cling to the outworn conventions and stereotyped subjects of the past. One in particular who was indebted to him was T. S. Eliot, for whom he was ‘il miglior fabbro’, the man who helped forge ‘The Waste Land’. But there were others who had reason to be grateful to Pound, and not merely in a literary way. He was the great befriender, scornful of hypocrisy, but genuinely helpful to all who needed help. His un-American activities during the Second World War and his anti-Semitism may have been errors of judgement or morality but one cannot fault him in friendship or generosity.
The young Pound maintained a constant communication both with the advanced and experimental writers of continental Europe and with those back home who were working for the same cause. In Chicago, for example, Harriet Monroe had founded Poetry in 1912 and was doing her best to encourage creative activity in middle-America. Not that her taste was always Pound’s taste. It is not, for example, recorded that Pound had much of an opinion of the poets of the so-called ‘Middle Western Renaissance’: Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.
Rebecca West wrote an appreciative little book about Sandburg in the twenties and it is true that, in the light of the insipid neo-Georgianism and Sitwellian play-acting which seemed to dominate the English scene, there was a certain brash mixture of the laconic and the histrionic about Sandburg which must have been appealing. There has always been an attraction for the English in the kind of personality which Sandburg represented. He was a great ‘character’, who celebrated the might of Chicago, ‘the broad acres’ and the people of the Middle West. Yet in retrospect it is Masters (of the Spoon River Anthology) who is revealed as being the most important of the three; even Vachel Lindsay’s thundering metres (‘The Congo’, ‘Simon Legree’, ‘General William Booth Enters Into Heaven’) now seem more acceptable than Sandburg’s hollow invocations and folksy anecdotes.
The real strength of poetry in the United States, however, lay not in regionalism but in the degree to which her major poets could make an impact on the international scene. In this connection no others were so important in the twenties as Pound and Eliot. Robinson was well-known only in America, and Frost, at first, only in England. As time went by, however, it was to become increasingly clear that two more had to be reckoned as major. The first was Wallace Stevens; the second William Carlos Williams.
In the thirties, a decade after Stevens’s first book, Harmonium, was published, Louis Untermeyer could assert that his poems had ‘little relation to any human struggle’. On the contrary; Stevens’s contri
bution goes very deep. All his life he was interested in the profoundest problems of human existence, problems which transcend national boundaries or immediate social necessities: the nature of apprehended reality and its relation, to the creative imagination, and the problem of belief and order. He was a meditative poet and while he was capable of the most vivid sensual images he never used them at random or in excess of their immediate poetic relevance. His images, like his thought, are complex and relate closely to the syntax of his verse – and so his clear grammatical structure and exact use of words are a great help in understanding the more difficult poems.
A lawyer for an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut for nearly forty years of his life, Stevens negotiated the world of business with the same authority which invests his poems. Behind what seemed to Untermeyer a charming example of Connecticut rococo, there stands a toughness and seriousness of mind that is equalled only by T. S. Eliot. His poetic manner runs from the extravagant rhetoric of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ to the subtle seriousness of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’.
This long and difficult poem deals with the basic philosophical and spiritual imperatives towards which Stevens had been moving all his life. The imagination, in its attempt to abstract truth, brings up the idea of ‘major man’ – not the exceptional man, like the ‘MacCullough’, but the best in every man. Change, as Stevens pointed out in ‘Sunday Morning’, is not merely a bringer of death, but a source of vital freshness. We must celebrate life by a constant and amazed delight in the unexpectedness of each moment. The ‘order’ that we seek must be flexible, organic, partaking of the freshness of transformation. Through the aesthetic experience Stevens explored the possibility of a new epistemology, pushing the boundaries of poetic communication to a new limit. His poetry is a controlled jugglery of parenthetical, qualifying, and extending impressions, to which no commentary could do justice for, as Stevens saw so clearly, poetry ‘is the subject of the poem’, it ‘must defeat the intelligence almost successfully’. Whatever qualifications one might feel called upon to make about Stevens’s final contribution, his poetry begins where other good verse leaves us, in a state of heightened awareness.
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 2
