The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  To come from Stevens to the world of Williams is like coming from Parnassus into the market place. His poems read like notes or, as they sometimes were, jottings on the back of a prescription pad:

  This Is Just to Say

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving

  for breakfast

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  From this poem follows much of the writing of the sixties and seventies; but it took a long time for the message to get through. Although Williams had been publishing since 1909 it was only after the Second World War, with the appearance of Paterson, Book I in 1946 and the Collected Later Poems and Collected Earlier Poems of 1950 and 1951 that it became clear that Williams was a force to be reckoned with in a far more radical way than had previously been supposed. This was at least true in the United States – less so in England, where to one critic at least his verse ‘tasted like sawdust in the mouth’.

  The difficulty lay in the rhythm and form of communication. Although it was not quite true that Williams got his speech ‘from the mouths of Polish mothers’, he certainly followed his own voice-pattern, as later American poets (e.g. Olson and Creeley) have been doing. This, of course, was a radical departure for, in spite of the advances which had been made in the art of poetic communication since Robinson and Frost, Pound and Eliot, a certain transformation had always been felt necessary in order to turn what men actually said or thought into ‘literature’. And with the art of ‘making into literature’ there had gone the idea of memorable utterance, a series of phrase-patterns which had some relation to what had always been regarded as the ‘poetic line’. Not that modern poets (not good ones, anyway) ever attempted to write like Milton or Keats, but at least there was still an idea of a certain kind of ‘beauty’ at the back of their minds. Williams makes no compromise whatsoever with beauty. His verse is ‘anti-poetic’: factual, visual, simple – sometimes banal, un-mellifluous to the point of being prosy, if not prosaic. The form is direct; it makes no concession to ‘poetic music’. Dr Williams was in more senses than one an ‘objectivist’. Not only did he put objects in his poems; he also had his eye on the object, on the thing to be said. The way in which that thing was said emerged organically, like a Henry Moore sculpture from the grain of the stone.

  Like Williams, E. E. Cummings, born a generation later, embraced nature and naturalness, although, unlike Williams, he retained to the end a certain element of whimsy. Some of the most celebrated poems, like ‘my father moved through dooms of love’, are not entirely free from this strain. He was also a little too ready to use ‘stock response’ emotive words. R. P. Blackmur counted ‘flower’ forty-eight times in Cummings’s first book, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), and twenty-one times in Etcetera (1925). His conclusion was that ‘it must contain for him an almost unlimited variety and extent of meaning … The question is whether or not the reader can possibly have shared the experience which Mr Cummings has had of the word.’ Words like ‘thrilling’, ‘delicious’, or ‘bright’ also come very readily to Cummings’s pen.

  Cummings is at his best in the poems which reflect, without pressure on the reader, his ear for common speech. A good example is the one which begins ‘ygUDuh’. Others are ‘plato told’, ‘my sweet old etcetera’, and the touching ‘this little bride & groom are’. Right through his poetic career he could at his best achieve the perfection of the late ‘the little horse is newlY’, in which he conveys a simple yet powerful emotional state skilfully and poignantly. Where his contribution may be most important for the poetry of the future, however, is in the typographical experiments. Here the typography is part of the poem itself, so that we have an early twentieth-century example of ‘concrete poetry’ (an antecedent may be the emblematic poems of the seventeenth century). In many cases the poem cannot be read aloud at all; it must be seen on the page.

  Another poet who has special significance for the contemporary period is Marianne Moore. T. S. Eliot compared Miss Moore’s verse with certain eighteenth-century poetry like Gray’s ‘Elegy’, in which ‘the scene described is a point of departure for meditations on one thing or another’. What appeals today is not merely her dry scholarly wit but, more particularly, her syllabic counting and the engagingly matter-of-fact tone of her educated speech rhythms:

  There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious

  fastidiousness. Certain Ming

  products, imperial floor-coverings of coach-

  wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have

  seen something

  that I like better – a

  mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly

  ballasted animal stand up,

  similar determination to make a pup

  eat his meat from the plate.

  Miss Moore, it will be seen, was also, like Stevens, a proponent of the ‘ding an sich’, or perhaps – in her call for poets to be ‘literalists of the imagination’ and to present ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’ – nearer to the ‘no ideas but in things’ theory of Williams.

  One or two other names from the rich period of the twenties must be mentioned before we pass on to the poetry of the thirties. The ‘Fugitives’ were a group who took their name from a little magazine, The Fugitive, edited in Nashville, Tennessee from 1922–5. The founders of the ‘movement’ were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore. Later, there came ‘Agrarianism’, a call for the South to defend its own values, the founding of the Southern Review, edited at Baton Rouge, Louisiana by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and then the Kenyan Review, edited by Ransom from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. From this group also sprang the ‘New Criticism’ and the textbooks of Brooks and Warren, which were to have such an effect on American university education in the years immediately following the Second World War. Of the ‘Fugitives’, Warren continues to mine a rich vein of verse. Incarnations (1968) showed that Warren – who is of course well known as a novelist – was writing better poetry in his sixties than he was in his thirties.

  A radically different poet, Hart Crane, however, emerged in the later twenties. Born in 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer, he had an unhappy home life and little formal education. He committed suicide in 1932 by jumping overboard from a ship returning from Mexico. His first book came at a time when ‘The Waste Land’ was making its greatest impact and Crane’s reaction was that he wished to ‘move toward a more positive, or (if I may put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal’. ‘When I speak,’ he wrote to Harriet Monroe, ‘of “adagios of islands” the reference is to the motion of the boat through islands clustered thickly … And it seems a much more direct and creative statement than any more “logical” employment of words such as “coasting slowly through the islands”.’ The battle had already been won – by Rimbaud, by Mallarmé, by the Dadaists and Surrealists – but writing as Crane was in an American context, he had to fight the good fight all over again. The result of his isolation was, at times, too much verbiage, a wildness which arises from a subconscious attempt to counteract the ‘residual pieties’ of Puritanism.

  The Bridge was a peculiarly American compromise. It arose out of Crane’s sense of the grandeur of man’s material achievements in the twentieth century; yet he tried also to express his sense of an accompanying flowering of the spirit. The ostensible subject is Brooklyn Bridge, but the bridge of Crane’s vision is also a bridge between centuries and between men, a Whitmanesque dream of brotherhood. ‘I found’, said Crane, ‘that I was really building a bridge between so-called classical experience and many divergent realities of our seething confused cosmos of today.’ In eight parts he presents an array of panoramas and insights ranging from the time of Captain John Smith to the Depression.

  The
re is something in the cultural atmosphere of the United States which has made Americans try the big thing. It can be seen in the novel, from Moby Dick to Of Time and the River, and in poetry, from The Columbiad, through ‘Song of Myself’, the Cantos and The Bridge to Paterson. In their different forms these poems have the impertinence to speak for humanity. One is awed as much by the pretension as by the effort that it cost. Crane, of course, with his half-baked symbolism and his attitudinizing (‘I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ’) has more bravado and less justification for it than his masters. Nevertheless, it is surprising how much he was able to get away with and how good he could be when he was not trying too hard, as in the lyrics of ‘Voyages’.

  The importance of Pound, Eliot, Stevens and Williams, of E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore and Hart Crane, tends to obscure the fact that MacLeish, H. D. and Robinson Jeffers made their own special contribution. Although – apart from H. D. – they have become unfashionable today, they are by no means negligible poets. Jeffers, in particular, has great power and individuality. Living and writing in California, the hawk and the rock became his symbols (‘I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk …’). He reacted violently against certain aspects of twentieth-century life (‘The orange-peel, eggshells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots/Of dung in corners of the rock …’). Beside the ‘intense and terrible beauty of nature’ he saw man, in his present state, to be futile and depraved.

  Finally, there cannot go unrecorded the phenomenon of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. Although, technically, there is nothing new about the poets who emerged from this movement, what is important is that, for the first time, the black man in America showed a militant racial consciousness. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen were the forerunners of the highly vocal Etheridge Knight, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni.

  There is little in American poetry of the thirties to parallel the political commitment of the so-called ‘Pylon Poets’ in England. It is true that many American writers turned to radicalism, or even joined the Communist Party, but they were for the most part not poets. There are no Audens, Spenders, Day Lewises, or MacNeices on the American scene; only Archibald MacLeish, invoking the ‘social muse’, and Kenneth Fearing, the Ring Lardner of American verse. Like Lardner, Fearing avoids sentimentality, in ‘Dirge’ celebrating a Depression death with:

  Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,

  But nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

  In the forties the chief ‘war poets’ were Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro and Randall Jarrell. Shapiro’s V-Letter, written when he was a soldier in the Pacific, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ is as stark a comment as any to emerge from the Second World War:

  From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

  And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

  Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

  I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

  When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

  Like Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz, these poets also wrote well on subjects unconnected with the war. But newer, younger poets were emerging who were to appear the brightest talents of the fifties: John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur. This was the age of ‘fine writing’, when, it seemed, no American poet could write badly, and when Wallace Stevens was the hero of the American scene.

  Below the surface in the fifties, however, a revolution was taking shape. Under the leadership of Charles Olson, rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a number of poets including Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn and Paul Blackburn developed an ‘open-field’ verse which they saw to be the answer to the domination of the ‘New Criticism’. For the Black Mountain poets Pound and Williams were the chief gods. At the same time the ‘Beat’ poets, although subscribing, like those of the Black Mountain, to the idea of a more ‘open’ verse, sounded a more ecstatic, apocalyptic note. In their opposition to authority and formalism Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti followed Williams more than Pound. Ferlinghetti established the City Lights Press so that the work of the ‘Beats’ might gain the audience which it could not find in the literary magazines, just as the Black Mountain poets sought their own outlets in the Black Mountain Review and Origin. Olson’s ‘Maximus’ poems were first published by Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Press. Throughout this period such prestigious reviews as Hudson and Sewanee refused to admit that anything except ‘academic’ verse could be critically acceptable – at least, that is how the story is told by the Beat and Black Mountain poets.

  The Beats, originally from New York, established themselves in San Francisco, where Kenneth Rexroth had been publishing for many years. Robert Duncan also became associated with this group and, later, Gary Snyder, who was to spend some time in Japan. The new note was sounded by Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. The experiences of which the Beats wrote were private, visionary. They openly embraced drugs and hallucination, using words and experiences which were shocking to an audience accustomed to good taste and felicity of expression.

  In New York in the fifties a quite different group of poets were mounting their own attack on good taste. The leaders of the ‘New York School’ were Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Intensely interested in the art of Pollock and de Kooning, like them they attacked accepted styles and received values. Koch parodied Robert Frost in ‘Mending Sump’. In ‘To the Film Industry in Crisis’ O’Hara (‘Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals …’) ends his first verse with an invocation to:

  … you. Motion Picture Industry,

  it’s you I love!

  It was during this period that Robert Lowell made a distinction between poetry which was ‘cooked’ and poetry which came ‘raw’. But the proponents of the ‘cooked’ – Robert Lowell himself among them – acknowledged the dawn of a new era by changing their styles to accommodate the new taste for ‘open verse’. The difference between the highly wrought ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’ and almost any of the poems in Life Studies (1959) is dramatic. Also, in the latter volume Lowell made use of the material of his own life, inviting the description of ‘confessional’ poet.

  Most of the poets who were accepted as important in the fifties seem to have gained something from the Beat and Black Mountain initiative. Theodore Roethke’s style became more open and discursive; Richard Wilbur was found to be using, in Walking to Sleep (1969), the broken line of William Carlos Williams; John Berryman seemed sometimes to be competing with Lowell (or vice versa) in his haste to change from the tortured style of The Dispossessed. Not that the superb Dream Songs bear any overt resemblance to the products of the Black Mountain or the Beat poets; the influences were as subtle as they were profound. It was something in the conditions of American life that these poets were becoming attuned to, something which the Black Mountain and Beat poets had picked up earlier and responded to more wildly and extremely.

  During the sixties the Beats, who had at first seemed so outrageous, settled into the public consciousness. They no longer had to be published by small presses. In fact, as a group they ceased to have any real existence, Ginsberg emerging clearly as the outstanding talent. In a similar way, after the end of Black Mountain College as an experiment in the later fifties, the Black Mountain poets took on separate identities. Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn have their own special – and probably different – followings. Olson, in particular, has become a cult-figure, a rallying-point for those who are as much interested in the reform of society as in literature.

  Olson is a difficult case. He was, in every sense, a big man and if a man has the confidence to think and act big he will almost certainl
y have followers. Taking his lead from Pound’s Cantos and Williams’s Paterson, Olson wrote the Maximus poems, based on Gloucester, Massachusetts. As Maximus he uses his Gloucester base to explore the geography, history, anthropology and archaeology of the region. Unfortunately, however, he did not have Pound’s power or Williams’s human sympathy – or the talent of either of them, so that the result too often reads like pastiche. It is perhaps not remarkable that he acquired a following in the universities since, if the reader lack the sensibility to tell the real from the imitation, there is always the study of poetry – and that can be undertaken without critical discrimination. For such readers what Olson is saying seems to be eminently on the right lines and, in the light of what they take to be the ‘true’ nature and direction of verse in our time, his essay on ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) is a key document. It is not easy to follow Olson into all the ramifications of his argument. However, the main points are as follows.

  Olson begins by making a distinction between ‘open’ or ‘projective’ verse on the one hand and ‘closed’ or ‘non-projective’ verse on the other. ‘Closed’ verse is verse ‘which print bred’. It requires a different ‘stance toward reality’ from ‘composition by field’. From the moment a poet ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION he can ‘go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself’.

  Form, for the projective poet, is ‘NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’; that is the principle. The process can be ‘boiled down to one statement,’ says Olson, ‘(first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.’