by Harold Bloom
Shall we, then, play the sentimental stop,
And flute the soft nostalgic note, and pray
Dead men and women to remember us,
Imaginary gods to pity us?
Saying
We are unworthy, father, to be remembered,
We are unworthy to be remembered, mother,
Remember us, O clods from whom we come—
Shall we make altars of the grass and wind
Implore the evening:
Shall we make altars of water and sand
Invoke the changing:
Shall we desire the unknown to speak
Forget the knowing?
Aiken chose to die without spiritual hope. He did implore, as he dwindled to silence, a fanfare of glory, which, alas, he has not received. I would not assert that his eminence was that of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Hart Crane, yet to me at least he stands with William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, permanent poets in American tradition.
Richard Eberhart, “If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness”
I FIRST MET RICHARD EBERHART when I went to lecture at the University of Florida in Gainesville in the late 1960s. He was poet in residence, and I was there for a week’s visit to lecture on Sigmund Freud. Eberhart, whose poetry I had long admired and still read with great pleasure, was a delightful personality. He was, if I remember accurately, in his middle sixties, and I was about thirty-nine. Eberhart had an aura of human warmth and rugged health. Indeed, he lived 101 years, and had a rich and fulfilling life. It saddens me that his poetry is now little read, but I cannot believe that several of the poems will not survive.
Eberhart served as a lieutenant commander with the Naval Reserve in World War II. That informed his splendid poem “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”:
You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This is a considerable indictment of God and of man. An indifferent God presides over men who exult in their fighting soul. The last stanza has a poignance that haunts me.
Eberhart was a very original nature mystic. I always recall his poem:
If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.
Then I cast time out of the trees and fields,
Then I stood immaculate in the Ego;
Then I eyed the world with all delight,
Reality was the perfection of my sight.
There is a fusion of human kind and divinity in Eberhart’s memories of his childhood. One of his two masterpieces is “The Groundhog”:
In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots’ might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left; and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
This wild and persuasive rhapsody harks back to Thoreau and Emerson and also to the visionary poetry of William Blake. I still remember my happy shock at the sudden onset of a vitalistic epiphany:
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
Eberhart achieves near greatness in his final return to the few remnants of the groundhog. His secular epiphany spans the ages and comprehends the diversity of Alexander the Great, the great skeptic Montaigne, and the Spanish mystic Saint Teresa. The pace and phrasing of these final lines have an inevitability that I associate with permanent poetry.
Eberhart’s other masterwork is “The Soul Longs to Return Whence It Came.” The poet revisits a graveyard that frightened him when he was a boy. On a brisk autumn day, he finds a new relationship to what had once appalled him:
I flung myself down on the earth
Full length on the great earth, full length,
I wept out the dark load of human love.
In pagan adoration I adored her.
He stands up again, and suddenly a fire like madness possesses him:
The mind will not accept the blood.
The sun and sky, the trees and grasses,
And the whispering leaves, took on
Their usual characters. I went away,
Slowly, tingling, elated, saying, saying
Mother, Great Being, O Source of Life
To whom in wisdom we return,
Accept this humble servant evermore.
After many years of elation, I find no abatement in my response to this vitalism. More even than in “The Groundhog,” Eberhart has discovered the true posture of his spirit. I do not share his nature mysticism, yet I find it impossible to forget the wild eloquence that he achieves.
My clearest memory of the week I spent in Gainesville with Eberhart is comic. He insisted upon taking me down to look at
the campus alligators. I found myself standing with him at the edge of a swampy marsh actually on the campus. After a few moments I said to him, “Dick, I don’t see any alligator.” He replied with high good humor: “Harold, you may not see him, but he is staring right at you.” I stared again at what I’d taken to be a sodden log, and suddenly it had baleful eyes glaring at me. Never fleet of foot, I turned and ran back to Eberhart’s car, and sat inside, breathing hard. Dick arrived, laughing, and when I said I did not appreciate the joke, he replied: “Harold, what a marvelous moment it would have been in the history of literary criticism! Critic devoured by alligator.” Even now I shudder and do not find any of this merely humorous.
Weldon Kees, “Aspects of Robinson”
WELDON KEES, born in 1914, an apparent suicide at the age of forty-one, was a contemporary of Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell. Bishop stands apart: Kees is of the eminence of the others. I met Kees once, in 1951, at Minton’s, a New York City jazz club in Harlem, where I think Norman Granz introduced us. We discussed Bud Powell, who was performing that evening with his trio, Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums. It was not until I purchased and read his Poems 1947–1954 that I began to appreciate that the jazz critic was also a unique poet.
I recall my first reading of “Aspects of Robinson” and my initial puzzlement:
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.
Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
Robinson is Kees as Crusoe, the daemon of a solitary existence. A hovering presence, to my ear, is Conrad Aiken’s Senlin rather than T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. Kees and Aiken corresponded on a very personal level, with the younger poet confessing the sorrows of his troubled marriage and his own nihilism. Aiken many years later told me at dinner that he had a fear Kees would die early: a fate shared with the English poet Malcolm Lowry, who died two years after Kees at the age of forty-seven. Alcohol and drugs killed Lowry, though it is unclear whether the death was suicide or perhaps murder by his distraught wife.
“Aspects of Robinson” yields to repeated readings as a vivid yet curiously dispassionate self-portrait of the poet drifting in a state of death-in-life. Kees cares and does not care. Whether at the literary haunt of the Algonquin, or at a party in Brooklyn Heights, or walking in solitude in the park, his alter ego mourns for the unlived life. In bed with a married woman, he is fearful, drunk, weeping. At home, it is equally flat, whether he reads or takes a drug. Swimming by day, drinking at night, Robinson is properly attired for a spring without renewal. The last line is a triumph of desolation: “His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.” “Usual” is apt and hopeless. Acedia, the malady of monks, is the sin of being sullen in the sweet air, portrayed classically in canto VII of the Inferno.
There are three other Robinson poems. Here is the first:
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.
All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.
Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.
This is beyond acedia. The sun goes on; actual trees at their work starkly contrast to Robinson, whose act, like his dog’s, is over. With nothing to reflect, the mirror blackens. Kees contrives a negation so total that the poem scarcely can get written, and yet it does. Some critics have called Kees a bitter poet, but that is accurate only with the proviso that he is romancing the etonym. His bitterness is his bite. For Hart Crane, white buildings gradually answer day. For Kees, they yellow silently. A kind of foreshadowing of Samuel Beckett is one of Kees’s saliences.
I hear that curious anticipation of Beckett’s Murphy in the even more acrid “Robinson at Home”:
Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening
Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street
Conspire and combine toward one community.
These are the rooms of Robinson.
Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though
All the blurred daybreaks of the spring
Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,
Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors
And moonlight of a different kind,
He might awake to hear the news at ten,
Which will be shocking, moderately.
This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire
To die like this has known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear.
But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,
“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—
This city—nightmare—black—”
He wakes in sweat
To the terrible moonlight and what might be
Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,
And the long curtains blow into the room.
One might have thought Kees could not descend to a deeper negative, but for him there were only depths beneath depths. His moonlight is terrible; his rooms are bleached, wan, colorless. The sleep of exhaustion yields nightmares of a mad city, and an ostensible silence is a wiry drone and a wind blowing that might as well be a buzzing. I reread “Robinson at Home” and I think of Stevens in “Esthétique du Mal,” canto XV:
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound….
There is no one to speak or be spoken to and nothing to propound. Robinson at home is Robinson in hell. Finally, in the fourth of the series, “Relating to Robinson,” the poet splits into equal components, each refusing to be identified with the other:
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
>
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.
From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio
Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.
Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars,
While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,
He stopped and gazed into a window
Where a plaster Venus, modeling a truss,
Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson,
I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,
Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape,
Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.)
And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.
Kicked all night at a bolted door.
You must have followed me from Astor Place.
An empty paper floats down at the last.
And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs
Unrolled its horror on my face
Until it blocked—” Running in sweat
To reach the docks, I turned back
For a second glance. I had no certainty,
There in the dark, that it was Robinson
Or someone else.
The block was bare. The Venus,
Bathed in blue fluorescent light,
Stared toward the river. As I hurried West,
The lights across the bay were coming on.
The boats moved silently and the low whistles blew.
One thinks of other doublings: Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”; Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”; Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock; Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass”; Dostoevsky’s The Double; and above all E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” Uncanny as these are, they do not disturb me nearly as much as “Relating to Robinson.” The singular and daemonic obsessiveness that floods Weldon Kees batters at the word “relating.” It is consumed as he enters the whirlpool. Stages of his age and youth fail to pass before him. Death by water, an Eliotic mode derived from Shelley’s life and work, haunted Kees, who contemplated Hart Crane’s return to the waters of childhood.