The Poets' Corner

by John Lithgow

  Along with contemporaries Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice, Auden wrote dazzling poems and won great fame. His Age of Anxiety, a long poem that takes place in a New York City bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize and provided an apt name for his time. Auden often wrote about journeys or quests, and his personal life provided him with plenty of material: he traveled to Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish civil war, and moved to the United States, where he became an American citizen. I’ve always thought it interesting how T. S. Eliot brought his Americanness to England and Auden brought his Englishness to America, each to such different effect.

  Musée des Beaux Arts

  About suffering they were never wrong,

  The Old Masters; how well they understood

  Its human position; how it takes place

  While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

  How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

  For the miraculous birth, there always must be

  Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

  On a pond at the edge of the wood:

  They never forgot

  That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

  Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

  Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

  Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

  In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

  Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

  Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

  But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

  As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

  Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  The “musée” in the title is the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, which Auden visited in 1938 and viewed the painting Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Brueghel. Icarus, a character from Greek mythology, was trapped in Crete with his father, Daedalus, who made wings for both of them and fastened them onto their shoulders with wax. He explained to his son that if they flew too close to the sea, the water would soak their wings, and if they flew too high, the sun would melt the wax. Like many a stubborn young man ignoring his father’s warnings, Icarus soared too close to the sun, the wax that held the wings to his body melted, and he crashed into the sea.

  Favorite Poems

  “As I walked out one evening” “The Unknown Citizen”

  “Funeral Blues” “September 1, 1939”

  “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

  The many artists who have painted the fall of Icarus—“an important failure”—usually show Icarus front and center. But to Brueghel, the significant point of view is the ploughman’s. The only sign of Icarus is a splash in the bright harbor water, and a pair of legs disappearing. The ploughman, painted in the foreground, is perfectly indifferent and never looks up from his work, while beautiful ships sail serenely on. Auden is struck by the apathy of people toward suffering. His poem juxtaposes miraculous, fantastical events with commonplace, everyday ones: the ordinariness of plowing alongside the enormity of disaster. Gigantic catastrophes happen on a minute scale, and everyone goes on with their animal lives. And yet Auden continued to believe in the hope at the heart of human existence, saying, “We must love one another or die.”

  John Berryman

  The Alter Ego

  (1914–1972)

  Chaos was a large and natural part of Berryman’s own life,” explained the poet Robert Dana, who was once John Berryman’s student. It was also very much a part of his poetry. Although he had a formal education in poetry from Columbia and Cambridge universities, as he matured he broke away from classical forms to the point of inventing his own form, a deceptively loose, seemingly random association of words and phrases that thrilled and mystified readers and fellow poets alike. In truth, there was nothing at all random about his work; having lost his father at a young age, he spent his lifetime carefully honing a style that expressed his sense of tragic disorder. His poems weren’t all tragedy and sadness, though. He had a sharp sense of humor and a vast literary knowledge that made even his darkest poems twinkle with color and light.

  Berryman’s most distinguished work was 77 Dream Songs, which reflected the perfection of his original poetic form and set tongues wagging in poetry circles ever since. What’s to wag about? To start with, the length. Berryman described 77 Dream Songs as one long poem, in the vein of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” So while at first there seems to the reader to be seventy-seven individual poems, it quickly becomes clear that these overlap and lean in on each other in ways not easily understood. Not that the poems themselves are easy to understand either. No less a poet than Robert Lowell admitted to being perplexed by their “disorder and oddness.” But Lowell and most everyone else couldn’t resist the buoyant, “racy jabber” that propelled the poems, nor the irresistible characters of Henry and Mr Bones, who are the protagonists (and the poet’s presumed alter egos) of 77 Dream Songs.

  The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he is in business.

  —John Berryman

  John Berryman enjoyed the public debate over his style and meaning. While he denied that the character Henry was himself, he seemed to cheerfully encourage the scholarly and popular chatter on the subject. He was a poet through and through—he idolized Yeats, rigorously taught and challenged a generation of poets that followed him, and matter-of-factly gave himself over to the truth of being a poet: “Well, being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything. It doesn’t get you any money, or not much, and it doesn’t get you any prestige, or not much. It’s just something that you do.”

  Dream Song 76: Henry’s Confession

  Nothin very bad happen to me lately.

  How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,

  terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety.

  Sober as a man can get, no girls, no telephones,

  what could happen bad to Mr Bones?

  —If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

  in a modesty of death I join my father

  who dared so long ago to leave me.

  A bullet on a concrete stoop

  close by a smothering southern sea

  spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.

  —You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

  I offers you this handkerchief, now set

  your left foot by my right foot,

  shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,

  arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,

  hum a little, Mr Bones.

  —I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.

  From the start of this poem, you find yourself in the riddle of the relationship between Henry and Mr Bones. You want to know more about them—who are they and how do they know each other? You want to understand the dynamic between them, which seems to be a sad Mr Bones and a comforting Henry. And what awful thing happened to Mr Bones that calls for Henry’s consoling words?

  Well, it helps to know that Henry and Mr Bones are one and the same. Throughout 77 Dream Songs, Henry often talks to himself in the voice of Mr Bones, who is a kind of sorrowful, minstrel-show twist on himself. So Henry is telling his own story here, of the harsh loss of his father, and of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sense of purpose required to keep on going. This poem paints such a vivid narrative picture—it’s packed with story, but the story just suggests itself, never making clear its context. While you read, your brain is trying hard to place this story in a familiar context, but it’s almost impossible to do. That’s a neat trick, the poet smudging the edges just enough that you can’t bring the whole of it into focus, and you’re forced to look at the details inste
ad. A bullet on a concrete stoop. A smothering southern sea. Spreadeagled on an island. Those are bleak impressions—no wonder Mr Bones (or Henry—or Berryman!) needs a reassuring hug.

  Favorite Poems

  “Dream Song 1” “Dream Song 29”

  “Dream Song 263” “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”

  “The Ball Poem”

  I like the rhythm of conversation between Henry and Mr Bones in Berryman’s poems. The last stanza in “Henry’s Confession” is like a song, and you can’t help but be uplifted yourself. “Hum a little, Mr Bones”—what a sweet bit of encouragement that is. And, tell me, where can I get a handkerchief sandwich?

  Elizabeth Bishop

  The Poet’s Poet

  (1911–1979)

  I had never heard of Elizabeth Bishop until thirty years ago when a poet friend said she was his favorite twentieth-century poet. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize and many other literary awards, Bishop never achieved the fame of some of her more high-profile peers. During her lifetime, however, she was highly respected and well-known by other poets such as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and John Ashbery, who said Bishop was “a writer’s writer’s writer.” They appreciated her exquisitely precise descriptions of the natural world, whether a single fish, a cold spring, or the seascape, and how geography affects, forms, and reflects human beings. “All my life,” wrote Bishop, “I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper—just running down the edges of different countries and continents, ‘looking for something.’”

  Bishop’s perpetual travel was in large part forced on her by circumstance. After her father’s death, before she was even a year old, her mother became mentally unstable. Bishop was sent to live with one set of grandparents in Nova Scotia, then another set in Worcester, Massachusetts, until she finally settled with an aunt in South Boston for the remainder of her childhood. She never saw her mother again. Little wonder many of her poems are filled with loss, displacement, and isolation.

  Favorite Poems

  “Sestina” “In the Waiting Room” “The Armadillo”

  “One Art” “At the Fishhouses”

  Yet she also has a wonderfully dry, subtle sense of humor, which weaves throughout her small body of work. Bishop was a perfectionist who loved to challenge herself by writing in strict forms such as sestinas and villanelles. She was a master of creating the most vivid, true miniature worlds within a single poem: a dentist’s waiting room, washing hair in a basin. “I’m not interested in big-scale work as such,” she once told Robert Lowell. “Something needn’t be large to be good.”

  Filling Station

  Oh, but it is dirty!

  —this little filling station,

  oil-soaked, oil-permeated

  to a disturbing, over-all

  black translucency.

  Be careful with that match!

  Father wears a dirty,

  oil-soaked monkey suit

  that cuts him under the arms,

  and several quick and saucy

  and greasy sons assist him

  (it’s a family filling station),

  all quite thoroughly dirty.

  Do they live in the station?

  It has a cement porch

  behind the pumps, and on it

  a set of crushed and grease-

  impregnated wickerwork;

  on the wicker sofa

  a dirty dog, quite comfy.

  Some comic books provide

  the only note of color—

  of certain color. They lie

  upon a big dim doily

  draping a taboret

  (part of the set), beside

  a big hirsute begonia.

  Why the extraneous plant?

  Why the taboret?

  Why, oh why, the doily?

  (Embroidered in daisy stitch

  with marguerites, I think,

  and heavy with gray crochet.)

  Somebody embroidered the doily.

  Somebody waters the plant,

  or oils it, maybe. Somebody

  arranges the rows of cans

  so that they softly say:

  ESSO—SO—SO—SO

  to high-strung automobiles.

  Somebody loves us all.

  What a fantastic, vivid description Bishop has written! It’s like the verbal equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting. You feel as if you are right inside the poem, the filling station, because she makes it so immediate and clear. I can sense the poet coming upon the scene, like a still life, stopping to absorb the details, the flecks of color in this commonplace setting—the kind of beauty that is often invisible to us because we move through these ordinary moments unaware, not paying attention, not noticing the way Bishop does. As Randall Jarrell, the most important poetry critic in America at the time, pointed out, “All her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.”

  I feel her surprise at discovering the individual effort and attempt at some kind of loveliness in such an unlikely place, amongst all the filth. She uses words so deliciously to help us appreciate the station’s small touches—“taboret,” “doily,” “hirsute begonia.” But then there is an echo of loneliness, of longing, just below the surface. The last line is almost like a prayer or a plea, and reminds me of the last line in another Bishop poem, “The Bight,” which was the epitaph she chose for herself: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful.”

  William Blake

  The Mystical Visionary

  (1757–1827)

  William Blake first saw visions of God and angels as a child, which set him off as an odd bird throughout his life. He went to art school when he was ten; at twelve, he began to write poetry, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. A homeschooled youngster who would later study at the Royal Academy, Blake never became a part of the artist and literati “in crowd”—he had more in common with fellow nonconformists such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft than with literary peers such as Coleridge. Blake worked throughout his life as an engraver, illustrator, and printmaker in order to support himself and his wife, whom he taught to read and write and make prints. As an engraver, he had the skills and tools to print his own poetry, and as an artist, he was inspired to invent a visual style for his work that became his signature—something similar to the illuminated manuscripts created by monks centuries earlier. He also illustrated or finished many pieces by his own hand in watercolors.

  Blake’s industriousness was legendary; he was constantly working, getting up in the middle of the night to write and then lighting the fire for breakfast before his wife was awake. Commissioned to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, he taught himself Italian at the age of sixty-three so he could fully appreciate the work. An eighteenth-century radical and revolutionary and a true individualist, Blake heralded creativity and imagination over the tides of reason and rationalism that prevailed at the time. He was thought of as a genius, if a bit of a madman, by contemporaries such as Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Robert Southey. He died in 1827, singing about what he saw in heaven.

  The Tyger

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears,

  And water’d heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  “The Tyger” was the most popular of all the poems William Blake published in his lifetime, and scholars have since ranked it the number one poem anthologized in English. There are so many reasons for this! First, it is just made to be read aloud. By speaking this poem, you can’t help but be swept up in Blake’s awe and fear of this powerful and mysterious animal. Although critics often point to this and other of his Songs of Experience as a metaphor for his condemnation of the Industrial Revolution, the Tyger surely represents the power of creation itself—the beauty, the terror, and the wonder of it. Words like “sinews” and “dread grasp” remind me of Blake’s prints and watercolor paintings, which are so strange and curiously vivid.

  Favorite Poems

  “London” “The Garden of Love” “And did those feet”

  “Infant Joy” “To the Evening Star”

  Notice all the question marks—these are the universal questions we have when we try to make sense of our place in the natural world. Where do we come from? Who or what made us the way we are? He asks the Tyger, who could “frame thy fearful symmetry?” In other words, how did that Tyger get its stripes? This is about God and the whole wonderful, terrifying spectrum between great strength and tenderness, the Tyger and the Lamb.

  I love the bravura of this muscular poem, which truly has a sense of its own power—this is the secret to why it’s so satisfying to read aloud.

  The Lamb

  Little Lamb, who made thee?

  Dost thou know who made thee?

  Gave thee life & bid thee feed

  By the stream & o’er the mead;

  Gave thee clothing of delight,

  Softest clothing woolly, bright;

  Gave thee such a tender voice,

  Making all the vales rejoice!

  Little Lamb, who made thee?

  Dost thou know who made thee?

  Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,