by Harold Bloom
Standing back from the four Robinson poems, I ask myself why they give pleasure though so painful. Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals taught that pain is far more memorable than pleasure. Clarity when staring at the abyss is the gift of Weldon Kees. His optics cleanse to an essential slate. I come away from him wincing but a touch closer to the desolation of irreality.
May Swenson, “Big-Hipped Nature”
I BEGAN READING MAY SWENSON in 1954, but intensively only from 1963 on. Our mutual friend John Hollander introduced us in 1965. After that, she and I occasionally would drink coffee together at Chumley’s in Greenwich Village. We remained amiable acquaintances, as she seemed rather shy. Our conversations concerned friends in common but usually not her own work.
As a poet, May Swenson derives from Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop; she and Bishop formed a strong friendship. After her death in 1989, I made a number of attempts to stimulate the publication of her collected poems, but failed until my former student Langdon Hammer edited her for a Library of America edition (2013).
She is an authentic original whose genius is for surprise. Born in Logan, Utah, in 1913, she was the oldest of ten children of Swedish converts to the Latter-day Saints. Though she remained close to her family and respected their religion, her faith was in poetry alone. At twenty-three, she moved to Greenwich Village, and returned to Utah periodically for the rest of her days to see her family.
She realized early that her sexual orientation was lesbian, which remains unacceptable to the Mormon Church. But she would have left Utah in any case, as her passionate vocation was literary.
The first poem by May Swenson that I fiercely loved was her homage to her father, “Big-Hipped Nature”:
Big-hipped nature bursts forth the head of god
from jungle clots of green
from pelvic heave of mountains
On swollen-breasted clouds he fattens and feeds
He is rocked in the crib of the sea
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Swift and winding beasts with coats of flame
serpents in their languor black and blind
in the night of his dark mind express
his awe and anger his terror and magicness
Wherever we look his eye lies bottomless
fringed by fields and woods
and tragic moons
magnify his pupils with their tears
In fire he strides
Within the waterfall
he twines his limbs of light
Clothed in the wind and tall
he walks the roofs and towers
Rocks are all his faces
flowers the flesh of his flanks
His hair is tossed with the grasses everywhere
Stained by the rainbow every shell
roars his whispered spell
When sleep the enormous shadow of his hand descends
our tongues uncoil a prayer
to hush our ticking hearts our sparrow-like fear
and we lie naked within his lair
His cabalistic lightnings play upon us there
This is a firstborn child’s vision of her father, returning May Swenson and her readers to the mythological memories earliest in our visions of paternal being. Though published when she was forty-one, it must have been written many years before.
Heraclean and benign, Dan Swenson is a kind of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man who contains in his limbs all things in heaven and earth. In the child’s eye, the father is magical, and all the sounds of nature emanate from him.
I recall discussing “Big-Hipped Nature” with May Swenson sometime in the later 1960s. It was the only one of her poems we ever talked about when we met. I particularly admire the final stanza, where the child May Swenson and her siblings fall asleep beneath the enormous shadow of Dan Swenson’s hand. How much Kabbalah she knew I never inquired, yet the final image is true to the Jewish esoteric tradition. The protective father who is Adam Kadmon plays his emanations of light upon the sleeping children, who rest in the tragic moons of his tearful love as he broods over them.
Delmore Schwartz,
“The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain”
THE INFLUENCE OF William Butler Yeats on Delmore Schwartz was fairly constant, though mingled at times with traces of T. S. Eliot and of James Joyce, who was the god of Schwartz’s idolatry. Schwartz died at the age of fifty-two, on July 11, 1966, which was my thirty-sixth birthday. I had listened to him hold forth at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village five or six times in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Though frequently intoxicated, he was outrageously eloquent, with a bitterness tempering his wonderful surge of language. I had read him only in literary magazines until I purchased his Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge in 1959, which I absorbed with delight and misgivings. There was from the start a trouble even in his most ebullient performances. I knew very little about his life until after his death, when I discussed him with Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, and Saul Bellow, whom I found invariably prickly and unpleasant. It may be that Schwartz is now best known as the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), but that seems to me an ungrateful travesty, since Bellow had begun as a kind of disciple to Delmore Schwartz.
In 1943, Schwartz had divorced his first wife after six years of marriage; he then repeated the pattern with the second. Both were literary, beautiful, and necessarily long-suffering, since the poet was increasingly paranoid. His decline ultimately resulted in a solitary death in a New York City hotel; it was three days before the body was found.
There are a score of poems by Delmore Schwartz that possess a kind of greatness. I am most haunted by one he composed in 1962, “The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain”:
The common rain had come again
Slanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,
Fainting falling in the first evening
Of the first perception of the actual fall,
The long and late light had slowly gathered up
A sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and more
Until, as dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned,
A weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set aside
Neither tea, nor, after an hour, whiskey,
Ice and then a pleasant glow, a burning,
And the first leaping wood fire
Since a cold night in May, too long ago to be more than
Merely a cold and vivid memory.
Staring, empty, and without thought
Beyond the rising mists of the emotion of causeless sadness,
How suddenly all consciousness leaped in spontaneous gladness;
Knowing without thinking how the falling rain (outside, all over)
In slow sustained consistent vibration all over outside
Tapping window, streaking roof, running down runnel and drain
Waking a sense, once more, of all that lived outside of us,
Beyond emotion, for beyond the swollen distorted shadows and lights
Of the toy town and the vanity fair of waking consciousness!
If there is a voice here not wholly Schwartz’s it would be Walt Whitman’s more subdued moments of reflection and puzzlement. The repetitions are beautifully accomplished, and a keening of consonance is woven through the text, suggestive of Schwartz’s Scripture, Finnegans Wake. Slanting, fainting falling, weakening, burning, leaping, staring, rising, knowing, thinking, failing, tapping, streaking, running down, waking: all concourse into a flow of consciousness at desperate impasse.
It is poignant that the falling rain is “common,” and that the poem concludes with the recurrent sense of external se
lves beyond the poet’s sorrow and his exhausted emotion. True that the “beyond” is a distortion, and that the life of New York City is a toy town and Bunyanesque vanity fair, a consciousness awake to no purpose. Nevertheless Schwartz has banished self-pity or any sense of persecution. Selfhood wanes, and memory of an earlier spring is frigid yet glowing. There is a nostalgia for the gladness of a poet’s youth, but Schwartz holds off despondency and madness by the pleasure of his own extraordinary mastery of his medium.
A third of a century older than Delmore Schwartz at his death, I marvel at his use of memory for a Hamlet-like liberation without detachment. His august gift employs memory to transcend personal experience. Walter Pater defined the aesthetic as a seeing again more fully, a legacy brought to abundant harvest by James Joyce. There is a noble renunciation in “The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain.” Schwartz of course could not emulate Joyce’s clairvoyant sense of the end of the age, but, then, only Samuel Beckett accomplished that. It is more than enough that, at his best, Schwartz extended the American splendor of Walt Whitman, who was able to balance a lancing rapidity of self-awareness with a passion that could enable his “Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem.” That too was a horizon Delmore Schwartz could not attain, but it is marvelous how much he risked in the quest.
Alvin Feinman, “Pilgrim Heights”
I RECALL READING I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958) by William Carlos Williams sometime in the 1960s. Most of the poets to whom I was close have now departed: Robert Penn Warren, John Hollander, Archie Randolph Ammons, Mark Strand, Jay Macpherson, and John Ashbery among others. There were also such good acquaintances as Richard Eberhart, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, May Swenson, Robert Fitzgerald, and many more. Like the living poets of distinction who are my friends—William Merwin, Jay Wright, Henri Cole, Rosanna Warren, Joseph Harrison, Peter Cole, Martha Serpas, and others—they all wanted to write poems. I think also of my close friends, the philosopher Richard Rorty, gone for a decade now, and of the literary critic Angus Fletcher, just departed. Like the poets, they wanted to write.
Before I fell, some years ago, the first in a long series of falls, I enjoyed writing in longhand with a pen in ledgers. My right hand, after a fall, no longer sustains that mode, so I have turned to dictating, which I still find strange. Yet the desire to go on exploring literature remains strong.
One of my closest friends was the poet Alvin Feinman (1929–2008), a superb though still largely unrecognized master. Alvin wrote his rather sparse lifework of poetry invariably against his own will. He did not want to write poems. His mind was so scrupulous that he despaired of conveying his scope and accuracy even in highly wrought poems. There was also his absolute veneration of John Milton and William Wordsworth, who to him represented poetry itself. That standard, of course, would be fatal for any poet in the twentieth century.
In what follows, I seek to revise my two earlier brief essays on Feinman, the first in The Ringers in the Tower (1971), and the other my foreword to Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman (2016).
I first met Alvin Feinman in September 1951, the day before I encountered another remarkable young man, who also became a lifelong friend, Angus Fletcher. Alvin was twenty-two, a year older than we were, and a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, where Angus and I were students of literature. They are with me still. I think of them every day and try to go on learning from them.
Alvin at twenty-two was already a poet of astonishing individuation: the emergence of voice in him clarified as rapidly as it had in Rimbaud and Hart Crane. I recall reading the first of his three Relic poems sometime in October 1951:
I will see her stand
half a step back of the edge of some high place
or at a leafless tree in some city park
or seated with her knees toward me and her face turned toward the window
And always the tips of the fingers of both her hands
will pull or twist at a handkerchief
like lovely dead birds at a living thing
trying to work apart something exquisitely, unreasonably joined.
A month later, I was introduced by Alvin to this beautiful, intense young woman in New York. Though lovers, she and my friend seemed remote from each other. I watched her hands in constant motion tugging at a handkerchief and wondered silently at the dispassionate tone of the eight-line lyric so precisely called “Relic.”
Reciting the poem to myself these sixty years, I have come to see its relationship to Eliot’s farewell to Emily Hale:
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
“La Figlia Che Piange”
The dominant influences upon Feinman’s poetry were Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, and the earlier Rilke. I have listed them in the order of their importance in helping form his style and stance. Feinman’s prime precursor was Hart Crane, and, like the poet of White Buildings and The Bridge, my friend began with a volume of difficult yet frequently radiant lyrics. Unlike Crane, Feinman was not able to go on to the larger form of a visionary romance, and his inability to continue doomed his remarkable volume to neglect.
Returning to Preambles and Other Poems floods me with memories. I had taken the little book to my editor at the Oxford University Press, the late Whitney Blake, and urged him to publish it, though not even a single poem had appeared in a magazine. Whitney discerned the high value of Alvin’s poetry and agreed to publish it if I could provide endorsements by other poets and critics. Conrad Aiken, Allen Tate, R. W. B. Lewis, John Hollander, and Geoffrey Hartman joined me in support of the new poet. Hartman made a memorable comment:
Thought thinks its ruin here without widening speculation. It finds what will not suffice….Yet Feinman’s poetry performs so total an époché on “discursions fated and inept” that only the stumble toward a preamble is left. For so rigorous a sensibility, writing verse must be like crossing a threshold guarded by demons….
The Swiss critic Marcel Raymond characterized Paul Valéry’s “The Young Fate” and “The Marine Cemetery” as a ceaseless agon between absolute consciousness and the acceptance of natural mutability:
In them, a struggle takes place between two contrary attitudes: the pure (absolute) attitude, that of consciousness entrenching itself in its isolation, and the opposite, or impure attitude, that of the mind accepting life, change, action, giving up its dream of perfect integrity and allowing itself to be beguiled by things and captivated by their changing forms.
These two attitudes can be defined as total detachment or total involvement. In Valéry these contrary stances exist simultaneously. Feinman’s total detachment purchases its freedom at the expense of a world of mutable splendors. The astonishing clarity of his best poems makes them expensive torsos rather than comprehensive visions.
Alvin Feinman’s difficult fusion makes it a strenuous act of readership to decide where the visual and the purely visionary part in him:
And the light, a wakened heyday of air
Tuned low and clear and wide,
A radiance now that would emblaze
And veil the most golden horn
Or any entering of a sudden clearing
To a standing, astonished, revealed…
That the actual streets I loitered in
Lay lit like fields, or narrow channels
About to open to a burning river;
All brick and window vivid and calm
As though composed in a rigid water
No random traffic would dispel…
As now through the park, and across
The chill nailed colors of the roofs,
And on near trees stripped bare,
Corrected in the scant remaining leaf
To their severe essential elegance,
Light is the all-exacting good,
That dry, forever virile stream
That wipes each thing to what it is,
The whole, collage and stone, cleansed
To its proper pastoral…
I sit
And smoke, and linger out desire.
And know if I closed my eyes I’d hear
Again what held me awake all night
Beside her breathing: a rain falling
It seemed into a distant stillness,
On broad low leaves beside a pond
And drop upon drop into black waters.
“November Sunday Morning”
I cannot recall any other poem by Alvin that is this celebratory, though a cleansing light is the entire basis for rejoicing. When I first read “November Sunday Morning,” actually handed to me by the poet on a Sunday morning just before Thanksgiving, it renewed memories of my youth, when I would wander round our neighborhood early in the day and experience instant clarification of streets grown too drearily familiar. I had no name then for these bursts of transcendence, nor did they move me to composition, since any desire to write poems was alien to me. Poetry was what I read incessantly, possessed by memory, and wanted to absorb gradually. The genesis of a literary critic, at least in me, was remote from any incarnation of the poetical character.