The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  The poetic line, Olson maintains, comes ‘from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes’. He speaks of the LAW OF THE LINE which projective verse creates and which must be ‘hewn to, obeyed’. The conventions ‘which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line’.

  Thirty years after Olson wrote this essay a new generation of theorists has emerged. Among the most outspoken of them is David Antin who, in support of Olson’s theory and practice, directs his main attack against ‘modernism’. Olson’s importance has not been recognized until now, he maintains, because unlike ‘Eliot, Tate, Lowell, and so on’ he did not ‘occupy a trivial moral space’.

  The followers of Olson are both exclusive and full of moral fervour; they have the fanaticism of Maoists. When one turns from their theories to the artefacts which they support, however, there is some discrepancy. Olson, according to Antin:

  will seek to articulate vowel music, to play upon patterned contrasts between tense and lax vowels, or compact and diffuse vowels, or vowels with higher and/or lower pitched prominent formants, to dispose of these under varying conditions of tenseness or laxness, or brevity or length in the environment of differentially closed, or closed versus open, syllables, under varying accentual conditions resulting from different position in words, in word groups, in sentences and whole segments of discourse. To this Olson adds a final discrimination in the notation of pausal juncture, and of shifts of attention and general speaking tempo and pulse.

  Yet Olson’s poetry is often as opaque to the feelings as it is to the intelligence. There is an illogicality at the heart of the argument. This is that the adoption of the ‘correct techniques’, the ‘right stance’ towards literature in our time will necessarily produce good verse. Underlying this assumption is a socio-politico-economic view of writing. With literature as an art in itself, with quality of sensibility, with understanding of the divine power of the creator to produce a poem which transcends theories and philosophies it is not concerned. If this is the spirit of the age into which we are being led, then literature is to be the handmaiden of ideas. Worthy as the political aim may be (‘a poetry broad enough and deep enough to embody the universal condition’; ‘the consideration of the poetry of non-literate and partially literate cultures’) it might be doubted whether the product so insisted upon would always be guaranteed to create in us that sense of truth and delight which has been the mark of the best poetry for two thousand years.

  At the same time, however, it would be foolish to deny the influence of the followers of ‘projective verse’. When Leslie Fiedler calls for a ‘Post Modernist’ criticism he is recognizing the importance of the shift which has taken place since the fifties, not a little of it due to the Black Mountain school – some also to the example of the Beat poets. We have, says Fiedler: ‘entered quite another time, apocalyptic, anti-rational, blatantly romantic and sentimental; an age dedicated to joyous and prophetic irresponsibility; one, at any rate, distasteful of self-protective irony and too great self-awareness.’

  The key to this observation may be found in the last phrase. However exaggerated the theories of Olson and Antin may be, it is clear that contemporary American poetry owes little to the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot or to the theory and practice of the ‘New Critics’ who dominated the American poetic scene in the forties and fifties.

  For my own part, as a follower neither of the ‘projective verse’ school nor of any other, I acknowledge their importance only in so far as they have cleared the air and liberated American poets, whatever their affiliations. It is poets who matter. In the end, I suspect, it is William Carlos Williams and he alone who is responsible for the great change which has come over American verse. However important Pound may have been, one cannot write ‘like’ Pound – as Olson has clearly shown. One can write like Williams – not always very well, perhaps, but sometimes not all that badly. It is his example, his ‘reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands’, which in the end, after fifty or more years, has shown the way for a generation of poets who in their differing styles project the American voice in poetry.

  This ‘new’ American poetry is not musical in the traditional English sense. It does not have what Eliot called ‘auditory imagination’; it creates a different kind of reverberation in the mind, projecting the sound of American speech: harsh, direct, ironical, obtaining its effects by timing, catching the cultural echoes and references which the tang of idiom brings with it. It is not calculated to appeal to the English ear. Although it is written in what seems to be the same language, it has different references, different cadences and pitches. Its echoes may be found in Ginsberg, in the throw-away line, the laconic phrase which connotes a much wider area of sensibility than it denotes:

  America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,

  or

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,

  poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing

  the grocery boys …

  They may be found in the fractured idiom of Berry man:

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

  só heavy, if he had a hundred years

  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

  Henry could not make good.

  Starts again always in Henry’s ears

  the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

  or Creeley’s ‘The Operation’:

  By Saturday I said you would be better on Sunday.

  The insistence was a part of a reconciliation.

  Your eyes bulged, the grey

  light hung on you, you were hideous.

  My involvement is just an old

  habitual relationship.

  Cruel, cruel to describe

  what there is no reason to describe.

  However, I find what I am seeking to define as clearly in less celebrated contemporary poets – in Reed Whittemore, for example, in Robert Bly, James Wright, Gary Snyder, and in Charles Bukowski:

  I mean if I don’t answer

  I don’t answer, and the reason is

  that I am not yet ready to kill you

  or love you, or even accept you,

  it means I don’t want to talk

  I am busy, I am mad, I am glad

  or maybe I’m stringing up a rope;

  so even if the lights are on

  and you hear sound

  like breathing or praying or singing

  a radio or the roll of dice

  or typing –

  go away, it is not the day

  the night, the hour,

  it is not the ignorance of impoliteness,

  I wish to hurt nothing, not even a bug

  but sometimes I gather evidence of a kind

  that takes some sorting,

  and your blue eyes, be they blue

  and your hair, if you have some

  or your mind – they cannot enter

  until the rope is cut or knotted

  or until I have shaven into

  new mirrors, until the wound is

  stopped or opened

  forever.

  What is significant – and important – is the language which contemporary American poets use, the vehicle which they provide for a kind of poetic communication which is not yet possible in Britain. Perhaps, before it is, society itself must change. British poets – with one or two honourable exceptions – go to one extreme or the other, producing either a false chumminess or a form of poetic language which arises from striking an attitude. Whichever way, the note is off-key. We are told by little-Englanders that the chief thing wrong with our society is that it has been ‘Americanized’, as if Americans were responsible for all the ills of the world. Perhaps what is wrong is that it has not been Americanized enough, if by ‘American’ is meant the ability to communicate without pretension, without self-consciousness and with perfect assurance of the truth and value
of what is being said. As W. H. Auden put it: ‘One comes across passages, even in very fine English poets, which make one think: “Yes, very effective, but does he believe what he is saying?”: in American poetry such passages are extremely rare.’

  The University of Hull

  GEOFFREY MOORE

  1976

  I should like to express my gratitude to Mrs Christine Gibbons for preparing the manuscript with typical care and accuracy and to Michael Woolf for his unfailing willingness to help in the early stages of the book. My special thanks are due to Peter Easy, without whose devoted assistance with the texts, bibliographies and proofs my task would have been immeasurably more arduous.

  G.M.

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  When this book first appeared, I was surprised to discover from some of the reviewers that it had a peculiarly personal point of view. They were kind enough not to complain too much, but it was obvious that they regarded my ‘emphasis’ as unusual. The spirit of the vernacular, they implied, loomed a little too large. Then it dawned on me that it was because the reviewers were all British. Had they been American they would have expressed no surprise because, in the American context, it is self-evident that what used to be called ‘the line of Poe’ is not where the main strength of American poetry lies.

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century Americans valiantly tried to follow the pattern and style of English poetry. They had not found their voice; it was too early. Whitman and Dickinson began to show the way. Then the emergence of new, original talent before and after the First World War revealed clearly how different this American voice was from the British. It was illustrated in the various styles of Frost, Pound, Eliot and Stevens, of E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore, of Masters, and of Sandburg – as Rebecca West delightedly discovered. William Carlos Williams was the most extreme. Laconic, deceptively casual, he struck an entirely new note. His aim was ‘the rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions’. Passionately against the form and vocabulary of ‘men content with the connotations of their masters’, he tried to forge a ‘reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands’.

  The American poetry which emerged after the Second World War owed something to Williams, but also something to Pound – and, beyond them, to Whitman. The Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York School, the ‘Confessionals’ were very different, but they all had one thing in common: a self-confidence which gave their verse power and authority.

  It was this quality which I wished to bring out. What I had in mind was to print as representative a selection of ‘classic’ American poetry as I thought the general reader might require. Then, in the twentieth century, I sought to emphasize those native talents which possessed unmistakably the American shape and sound. In making this new edition I have not considered it necessary to alter this emphasis. Indeed, I have tried to strengthen it by including some new names, by cutting out others, and by changing or augmenting the original selections. While it would be tedious to detail all the changes, the reader may wish to know my reasons for some of them.

  Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century it seemed to me that the choice could stand. When it came to Poe, however. I decided that ‘Ulalume’ was more useful than the too-sentimental ‘For Annie’. In the period between Poe and Emily Dickinson it is clear that there is only one shining light, and that is Whitman. However, Melville and Thoreau called for retention, although they were not primarily poets. So did the ‘Schoolroom Poets’, Holmes and Lowell, unexciting though they are. Did I need ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’, though? It was enough to have ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ from an earlier period. Nor did I wish to perpetuate the sonnets of Jones Very and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman – although Tuckerman is clearly the better of the two. The moral tone of nineteenth-century American poetry is adequately illustrated by Emerson and Longfellow.

  It seemed right to retain the anonymous ballads which are so strong in the American tradition. And I could not bring myself to omit the parodies and examples of light verse for which I have a fondness – for example, George A. Strong on ‘Hiawatha’, Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James’ and the anonymous ‘Sometimes I think I’d rather crow’. Don Marquis, too, is an original, and sadly underrated by academic critics.

  Because I believe that Robert Frost is a central figure in the American tradition, I printed eleven of his poems in the first edition. These were, for the most part, designed to illustrate what Harry Levin called ‘the power of blackness’ in this seemingly plain and simple New Englander. On reflection, I have decided to emphasize this quality by including more poems of this type, and omitting the earlier ‘The Tuft of Flowers’.

  As for Williams, I am unrepentant Like Frost, he is crucial. I decided that I no longer liked ‘An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence’, which trails off after the first stanza, nor ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’, which was intended to serve as a contrast to Robert Lowell’s tribute to Ford (also now omitted). Instead, I have added poems which seemed to me – in Randall Jarrell’s phrase – ‘honest, exact and original’.

  The Pound selection also needed some adjustment. ‘Near Perigord’ would be more rewarding if it were a third of its length. ‘Provincia Deserta’ is a more successful example from Pound’s Provencal period. I have also included one more poem from Cathay.

  The small number of poems by Eliot was dictated by cost. I wanted ‘The Waste Land’ in addition to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – and a section from one of the ‘Quartets’. But, alas, it was not to be. At least I could content myself by arguing that my selection represented Eliot before he became a British subject. I have, however, substituted the excellent ‘Preludes’ for ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’.

  If John Crowe Ransom had to stay – with ‘Janet Waking’ replaced by ‘Captain Carpenter’ – Conrad Aiken did not. Eminent literary figure though he was, considering himself – as he once told me – superior to T. S. Eliot, whose reputation (and, incidentally, that of Emily Dickinson) he helped to promote, his verse now seems as unexceptional as it is mellifluous. In his place I have put Charles Reznikoff who, although he is of the same generation, speaks much more to our time.

  After Aiken the task of cutting was more difficult. Take Allen Tate, for example. Although he was a penetrating critic I have always found his poetry uncompulsive; worked over ad nauseam it takes itself too seriously. But ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’ has a firm place in literary history, and so must stay – an example of the sort of compromise which the anthologist is sometimes required to make.

  Richard Eberhart is another case in point. Although the body of his verse does not constitute my favourite reading, ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ is a riveting poem. I decided also to restore ‘The Groundhog’ which, although much anthologized, is better than ‘If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness’. Robert Penn Warren, of about the same age, deserved to be represented by one of his earlier poems as well as by a sample of his late-flowering glory.

  Reluctantly, I decided that a number of the one-poem poets would have to go – Weldon Kees and Paul Blackburn for example. Frank O’Hara, on the other hand, had to have more representation. Although he died in 1966 his appeal increases with the years. John Ashbery also, who is very much alive, gains in stature with each new book, and needed more space.

  I devoted the last part of my original Introduction to the kind of American poetry which had made such an impact since the fifties. I said that it caught the sound of American speech. I also said that it obtained its effects ‘by timing, catching the cultural echoes and references which the tang of idiom brings with it’, and I quoted specific examples – from Ginsberg, Berryman, Creeley and Bukowski, adding that these same qualities might be found in many other poets, such as Reed Whittemore, Robert Bly, James Wright and Gary Snyder. What I did not say, however, since it was not relevant to my point at the time, was that these poets had made t
heir initial reputations in the fifties annd sixties. Of course, they continued writing, and well, into the seventies, but they were not of the seventies.

  Most anthologists who cover the whole span of American poetry from the seventeenth century to the present end with Sylvia Plath. Some include one additional name: the black poet, Imamu Amiri Baraka. None, to the best of my knowledge, go as far as to include, as I did, nine new poets – new, that is, up to the middle seventies, when I finished my selection for the first edition. Five were black, and two of these were women. Of the other four, two – Richard Emil Braun and James Tate – showed, as did John Ashbery before them, the contemporary American ability to combine colloquialism with sophistication and a hint of fantasy. Another, Robert Mezey, illustrated how it was possible to change from an early mannered style to a controlled ‘easy talking’. Finally, Diane Wakoski had to be included, since she is the most powerful and promising of the younger white women poets.

  It was the recent blacks who seemed to arouse the most antagonism among the reviewers. One referred to ‘versifiers who are miserly with punctuation and very free with anti-White racial sentiments’. This was the one who said that I had ‘completely ignored’ Laura Riding, ‘arguably the most gifted and important poet of the twentieth century’. (I did, incidentally, ask Laura Riding who said that she did not any longer wish to be represented in anthologies.) This reviewer was clearly referring – as did some others – to the poem ‘TCB’ by Sonia Sanchez, with its refrain of ‘wite/motha/fucka’ which, as a matter of fact, ends up calling for cooperation between black and white. I have read this poem to many different types of audience and the result has always been electrifying – and appreciative.

  The nine poets after Sylvia Plath to whom I have referred seemed to me a fair enough sample to represent the first half of the seventies. In their different ways they speak with the contemporary American voice. Some British critics might find it distasteful, saying – as one of them did – that Americans had not produced any considerable and agreeable poet since John Crowe Ransom. But we are not only in another country, we are in another time. Some of the new poetry is strident and some is for the ear rather than for the page. To complete the representation of the period up to the early eighties, I have added to the original nine three new voices which stand out among acres of ‘instant’ verse. The only trouble with the vernacular mode is that, at its worst, it can produce uneventful talk – just as traditional poetry can produce its own acres of what Hopkins called ‘Parnassian’. You cannot write ‘like’ Creeley; you have to be Creeley. The charge must be there. What certainly seems to be true – writing from the vantage-point of the early eighties – is that no outstanding new poet emerged in the past decade who was worthy to rank in stature with Lowell, Berryman, Ginsberg, Creeley or Plath.