by Judy Jones
giant-finned cars move forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
from “For the Union Dead”
One of the New England Lowells (like James Russell and Amy) … discussed the intricacies of the Puritan conscience, then converted to Catholicism … his principle subject the flux, struggle, and agony of experience … was interested in “the dark and against the grain” … lived a high-profile personal life (political stress, marital strain, organized protest, mental illness) … even so, managed to outlive and outwork such equally troubled colleagues and intimates as Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman … gave poetry a new autobiographical aspect and a renewed sense of social responsibility … aroused greater admiration and jealousy, for the space of twenty years, than any other contemporary American poet. ROOTS: FOUR PRIMARY INFLUENCES
THE ROMANTICS: Wordsworth, Shelley, et al. The line of descent starts here, with all that talk about the importance of the imagination and the self. Don’t tell your modern-poet friends this, though; they probably follow Yeats and Eliot in repudiating the early nineteenth century and would rather date things from Whitman and/or the Symbolists.
THE SYMBOLISTS: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the rest of the Frogs, plus the young Yeats. (Poe and Baudelaire were forerunners.) Believed there was another world beyond the visual one, a world of secret connections and private references, all of which just might, if you gave them a shove, form a pattern of some kind. Thus drunken boats and “fragrances fresh as the flesh of children.” Gets a little lugubrious, but don’t we all? Anyway, they made poetry even more an affair of the senses than the Romantics had done.
WALT WHITMAN: Founding father of American poetry. Charged with the poetic mission (“I speak the password primeval”), he raised all the issues that modern poetry is about: experimentation with language and form; revelation of self; the assumption that the poet, the reader, and the idea are all in the same room together and that a poem could make something happen. Hyperventilated a lot, but people on the side of freedom and variety are like that.
EMILY DICKINSON: Founding mother of American poetry; as William Carlos Williams put it, “patron saint” and “a real good guy.” Reticent and soft-spoken where Whitman is aggressive and amped. Short lines to Whitman’s long ones, microcosm to his macrocosm: “The brain is wider than the sea.” Gets you to see how infinity can mean infinitely small as well as infinitely big. HOOTS: FOUR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS NOT TO TOUCH WITH A TEN-FOOT STROPHE
First, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Our Lady of the Sonnets, who, in 1923, beat out—with three slender volumes, including one titled A Few Figs from Thistles— T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for the Pulitzer Prize; but who, subsequently, despite former boyfriend Edmund Wilson’s efforts to save her, began to seem, “ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,” very silly. Also, Amy Lowell, dragon to Millay’s sylph, whom Eliot called “the demon saleswoman of poetry” and whom Pound accused of reducing the tenets of Imagism to “Amy-gism”; you may remember, from tenth-grade English, her musings on squills and ribbons and garden walks. Now she doesn’t even make the anthologies.
Clockwise from top left: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg
Then, Carl Sandburg, who catalogued so memorably the pleasures of Chicago, his hometown (“City of the Big Shoulders,” and so forth), who almost certainly liked ketchup on his eggs, but who was, even back then, accused—by Robert Frost, hardly an innocent himself—of fraud; better to go with Will Rogers here, or Whitman (whom Sandburg consciously imitated). Finally, Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy” we can recite whole stanzas of, too, which is precisely the problem. Picture yourself in a room full of well-groomed young adults, all of whom, if they chose, could swing into “Miniver loved the Medici, / Albeit he had never seen one; / He would have sinned incessantly / Could he have been one.” OFFSHOOTS: FIVE CULT FIGURES
Five poets, no longer young (or even, in a couple of cases, alive), who are nevertheless as edgy, angry, and/or stoned as you are.
ALLEN GINSBERG: Dropout, prophet, and “Buddhist Jew,” not necessarily in that order. “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” His most famous works, Howl (about the beat culture of the Fifties, the second part of which was written during a peyote vision) and “Kaddish” (about his dead mother, this one written on amphetamines). Some critics see him in the tradition of William Blake: A spiritual adventurer with a taste for apocalypse, who saw no difference between religion and poetry. As William Carlos Williams said in his intro to Howl, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
FRANK O’HARA: Cool—but approachable, also gay. At the center of the New York School of poets (others were John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch), and a bridge between artists and writers of the Sixties. Objected to abstraction and philosophy in poetry, preferring a spur-of-the-moment specificity he called “personism.” Had a thing about the movies, James Dean, pop culture in general; his poems prefigure pop art. Thus, in “The Day Lady Died,” lines like, “I go on to the bank / and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) / doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life….” Killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island when he was only forty.
ROBERT CREELEY: One of the Black Mountain poets, out of the experimental backwoods college in North Carolina where, back in the Fifties, the idea of a “counterculture” got started. Kept his poems short and intimate, with titles such as “For No Clear Reason” and “Somewhere.” His most famous utterance: “Form is never more than an extension of content.” (Stay away from the prose, though, which reads like Justice Department doublespeak.) The consummate dropout: from Harvard—twice, once to India, once to Cape Cod—with additional stints in Majorca, Guatemala, and, of course, Black Mountain. “If you were going to get a pet / what kind of animal would you get.”
SYLVIA PLATH: Her past is your past: report cards, scholarships (in her case, to Smith), summers at the beach. In short, banality American-style, on which she goes to town. May tell you more about herself than you wanted to know (along with Robert Lowell, she’s the model of the confessional poet); watch especially for references to her father (“marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal…”). Wrote The Bell Jar, autobiographical—and satirical—novel of an adolescent’s breakdown and attempted suicide. Married to English poet Ted Hughes, she later committed suicide herself. The new style of woman poet (along with Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich), a cross between victim and rebel.
IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA (The poet and activist formerly known as Leroi Jones): Started off mellow, doing graduate work at Columbia and hanging out with his first wife (who, as it happened, was white) in Greenwich Village. Subsequently turned from bohemian to militant: “We must make our own / World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man / is dead. Let’s get together and kill him, my man, let’s get to gather the fruit / of the sun.” Moved first to Harlem, then back to Newark, where he’d grown up; took up wearing dashikis and speaking Swahili. Likewise to be noted: his plays, especially Dutchman (1964); his most famous coinages, “tokenism” and “up against the wall.” In 2002 he was named poet laureate of New Jersey—stop laughing—and proved he was still capable of raising hackles with the public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” in which he sided with conspiracy theorists who suggested that the Israeli and U.S. governments knew in advance that the September 11 attacks were going to take place: “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” Was New Jersey’s last poet laureate.
American Intellectual History,
and Stop That Snickering
The French have them, the Germans have them, even the Russians have them, so by God why shouldn’t we? Admittedly, in a country that defines “scholarship” as free tuition for quarterb
acks, intellectuals tend to be a marginal lot. Jewish, for the most part, and New York Jewish at that, they are accustomed to being viewed as vaguely un-American and to talking mainly to each other—or to themselves. (The notable exception is Norman Mailer, an oddball as intellectuals go, but a solid American who managed to capture the popular imagination by thinking, as often as not, with his fists.) The problem is precisely this business of incessant thinking. Intellectuals don’t think up a nifty idea, then sell it to the movies; they just keep thinking up more ideas, as if that were the point. GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946)
Our man in Paris, so to speak, Stein was one of those rare expatriates who wasn’t ashamed to be an American. In fact, for forty-odd years after she’d bid adieu to Radcliffe, medical school, and her rich relatives in Baltimore, she was positively thrilled to be an American, probably because her exposure to her compatriots was pretty much limited to the innumerable doughboys and GIs she befriended (and wrote about) during two world wars—all of whom, to hear her tell it, adored her—and to the struggling-but-stylish young writers for whom she coined the phrase “The Lost Generation” (Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, et al.), who were happy to pay homage to her genuine wit and fearless intellect while scarfing up hors d’oeuvres at the Saturday soirées at 27 rue de Fleurus (an address, by the way, that’s as much to be remembered as anything Stein wrote). True, Hemingway later insisted that, although he’d learned a lot from Gert, he hadn’t learned as much as she kept telling everyone he had. True, too, that if she hadn’t been so tight with Hemingway and Picasso (whom she claimed to have “discovered”), the name Gertrude Stein might today be no more memorable than “Rooms,” “Objects,” or “Food,” three pieces of experimental writing that more or less sum up the Gertrude Stein problem. The mysterious aura that still surrounds her name has less to do with her eccentricity or her lesbianism (this was Paris, after all) than with the fact that most of what she wrote is simply unreadable. Straining to come up with the exact literary equivalent of Cubist painting, the “Mama of Dada” was often so pointlessly cerebral that once the bohemian chic wore off, she seemed merely numbing.
RECOMMENDED READING: Three Lives (1909), three short novels centered on three serving women; an early work in which Stein’s experiments with repetition, scrambled syntax, and lack of punctuation still managed to evoke her subjects instead of burying them. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), the succès de scandale in which Stein, adopting the persona of her long-time secretary and companion, disseminated her opinions on the famous artists of her day with great good humor and, the critics said, an outrageous lack of sense. Also, give a listen to Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera collaboration with Virgil Thomson that still gets good notices. EDMUND WILSON (1895-1972)
A squire trapped in the body of a bulldog. Or do we mean a bulldog trapped in the body of a squire? Anyhoo, America’s foremost man of letters, decade after decade, from the Twenties until the day of his death. Erudite and cantankerous, Wilson largely steered clear of the teaching positions and institutional involvements that all other literary critics and social historians seemed to take refuge in, preferring to wing it as a reviewer and journalist. The life makes good reading: quasi-aristocratic New Jersey boyhood, Princeton education (and start of lifelong friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald), several marriages, including one to Mary McCarthy (whom he persuaded to write fiction), robust sex life, complete with a fairly well-documented foot fetish, running battles with the IRS (over unpaid income taxes) and Vladimir Nabokov (over Russian verse forms), the nickname “Bunny.” Plus, who else went out and studied Hebrew in order to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls (Wilson’s single biggest scoop) or ploughed through a thousand musty volumes because he wanted to figure out the Civil War for himself? Bunny, you see, was determined to get to the bottom of things, make connections, monitor the progress of the Republic, and explain the world to Americans and Americans to themselves, all with the understanding that it could be as much fun to dissect—and hold forth on—Emily Post as T S. Eliot.
RECOMMENDED READING: Axel’s Castle (1931), a book-length study of the symbolist tradition in Europe and a good general introduction to Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, et al. To the Finland Station (1940), a book-length study of the radical tradition in Europe and a good general introduction to Vico, Michelet, Lenin, Trotsky, et al. Upstate (1972), an old man’s meditation on himself, his life, and his imminent death. LIONEL TRILLING (1905-1975)
Self, society, mind, will, history, and, needless to say, culture. It can be a bit of a yawn, frankly, especially when you really only wanted him to explain what Jane Austen was up to in Mansfield Park, but at least you’ll find out what liberalism—of the intellectual as opposed to the merely political variety—is all about. A big Freudian, also a big Marxist, and affiliated with Columbia University for his entire professional life, Trilling worries about things like “the contemporary ideology of irrationalism” (this in the Sixties, when the view from Morningside Heights wouldn’t hold still, and when Trilling himself was beginning to seem a little, uh, over the hill); “our disaffection from history”; and, more than anything else, the tensions between self and society, literature and politics, aesthetics and morality. A touch rueful, a little low-key, Trilling wasn’t constantly breaking out the port and the bon mots like Wilson, but his heart was in the right place: He cared about the nature and quality of life on the planet, and probably would have lent you the guest room if, as one of his undergraduates, you’d gotten locked out of the dorm.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Liberal Imagination (1950), the single most widely read “New York” critical work, which, under the guise of discussing literature, actually aimed, as Trilling said, to put liberal assumptions “under some degree of pressure.” The Middle of the Journey (1947), his one novel, about political issues (read Stalinism) confronting American intellectuals of the day; loosely based on the life of Whittaker Chambers. Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), late Trilling, especially the concluding examination of “the doctrine that madness is health.” HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1974)
Back in the Fifties she seemed like an absolute godsend—a bona fide German intellectual come to roost in the American university system at a time when intellectuals had the kind of clout that real estate developers have today. Not only did Arendt actually condescend to talk to her students at Princeton (where she was the first woman professor ever), and Columbia, and Berkeley, and so on, but she saw nothing demeaning in writing about current events, bringing to bear the kind of Old World erudition and untranslated Latin and Greek phrases that made Mr. and Mrs. America feel they could stand tall. She wasn’t afraid to take on the looming postwar bogeymen—war crimes, revolution, genocide—and, as it seemed at the time, wrestle them to the ground with the sheer force of her Teutonic aloofness, her faith in the power of the rational, her ability to place unspeakable events in the context of a worldview and a history that, inevitably, brought us home to Plato and the moderation-minded Greeks. Granted, she was a little too undiscriminating about her audience, a little too arbitrary in her assertions, and a little too sweeping in her generalizations for many of her fellow political philosophers. And she was a little too intent on forging order out of chaos for our taste: When it came to distinguishing among “labor,” “work,” and “action,” or reading 258 pages on the nature of “thinking,” we decided we’d rather merengue. Still, who else dispensed so much intellectual chicken soup to so many febrile minds? Who else thought to point out, amid the hysteria of the Nuremberg trials, that perhaps Adolf Eichmann had not acted alone? And when Arendt had an insight, it was usually a lulu—like the notion that even nice middle-class folks were capable of monstrous acts of destruction. The latter idea gave rise not only to her now-famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” but, it is generally agreed, to the New Left—which, of course, later disowned Arendt as a flabby bourgeois.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a dense, sometimes meandering study of the evolution of nineteen
th-century anti-Semitism and imperialism into twentieth-century Nazism and Communism; still the classic treatise on the subject, it was, surprisingly enough, a bestseller in its day. Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (1963), with which she made a lot of enemies by insisting not only that Eichmann didn’t vomit green slime and speak in tongues, but that he didn’t even get a fair trial. The Life of the Mind (1977), her unfinished magnum opus, two volumes of which were published posthumously; as one critic pointed out, it may fall short of chronicling the life of the mind, but it does a bang-up job of chronicling the life of Arendt’s mind. PAUL GOODMAN (1911-1972)
True, he was an anarchist, draft dodger, sexual liberationist (and confirmed bisexual), as well as den father to the New Left, but Paul Goodman still comes off sounding an awful lot like Mr. Chips. Talk about softspokenness, talk about lending a hand, talk about talking it out: Goodman is there for the “kids,” as he calls them, including the “resigned” beats and the “fatalistic” hoods, plus everybody else who’s going to wind up either dropping out or making Chevy tail fins on an assembly line. Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It’s the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it’s the kids who really take it in the groin. Thus goes the indictment of the American social and educational systems in Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960), the book that made him more than just another underground hero. But to get the whole picture, you’ll also have to plow through his poems, plays, novels, magazine pieces, and confessions; his treatises on linguistics, constitutional law, Gestalt therapy, Noh theater, and, with his brother, city planning; plus listen to him tell you about his analysis and all those sit-ins. A Renaissance man in an era that favored specialization, Goodman never lost his sense of wonder—or of outrage. And one more thing: If your parents used to try to get you to watch them “making love,” it may well have been on Goodman’s say-so.