O dear to me my birth-things—all moving things and the trees where I was born—the grains, plants, rivers,
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps,
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their banks again,
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings or dense forests.
(“O Magnet-South”)
This is “Walt Whitman,” not Walt Whitman. Though it is tempting to dismiss the pious old fraud’s wish to embrace multitudes, these fictions pay homage to the depths of that most wishful of intelligences, idealizing and credulous at once. In such lines some essence of Florida has been seen and acknowledged, not allowed to exist merely as exotic (or erotic) detail but absorbed within a private philosophy that allows it new form. If Florida has been read through the poet’s imagination, the poet has been read through Florida’s.
This is the key to three poets who, having borrowed Florida’s myths, have transformed them into purloined goods, as if Circe’s pigs had been given Circe’s power: Stevens, Rimbaud, and Coleridge. In them Florida is purified but altered, until what emerges is the mutability of art, what it could not be without the superaddition of such myth.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
(Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”)
As late as 1890, Key West was the largest city in Florida—Stevens made annual winter “jaunts” there through the twenties and thirties. The singer may be singing only what she hears in the ocean and the wind. Her song is not the same as theirs, and—a canny observation, this—the singer may even drown out the sea. Here we have Stevens’s version of the complex relation between the artist and his material. The sea is “merely a place by which she walked to sing,” yet her song recreates it (“the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song”). This suggests, not just the artist’s dependence on the world, but his ability to make it seem that the world has been created by him. If the poem accomplished only so much, it might be enough; yet, as in much of his major work, Stevens considers the subject afresh:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Stevens could make a metaphysical poem out of a pig and a whistle, it sometimes seems; but the world beyond intrudes upon this poem more deeply than usual in his work. His vistas often seem those of the smoke-filled study, though apparently written down in a smoke-filled insurance office. (How curious the metaphor when he writes from Long Key, “The whole place: it is an island, is no larger than the grounds on which the Hartford Fire has its building”). Stevens, a man who almost never left the borders of his country, found in Key West the symbol of that world the artist worked to control. In such isolated, out-of-the-way habitations (trains did not reach Key West until 1912, and the tracks were blown down in 1935), art makes order, the order that is the world, from the disorder of the world.
Such fantasy could be pressed further. It’s common to pine for distant places, ones impossible to reach, the blood stirring with desire that can never be satisfied, common to feel some magnetic affinity with a place you’ve never visited (more frequently, I suspect, when travel was expensive). Few states in our country, other than California, have borne such a share of unfulfilled desire as Florida.
I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas,
where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
in human skins! and rainbows stretched like bridles
under the seas’ horizon with glaucous herds!
I have seen the enormous swamps seething,
traps where a whole Leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm,
and distances cataracting down into abysses!
Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
where the giant snakes, devoured by vermin,
fall from the twisted trees with black odours!
(Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat,” trans. Oliver Bernard)
I have arranged the translator’s prose gloss as poetry. It is as if Rimbaud, only sixteen when he wrote this, had bought a whole rack of postcards, so well does he reproduce Florida’s penny-ante images. The sea voyages of “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” and further back of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” lie behind the romantic longing here. Those who cannot escape their home often dream of such journeys; but the maturity of Rimbaud’s immature imagination (how Stevens would have loved a poem spoken by a boat) has, again, that added turn of the turnbuckle, not taking for granted the original impulse—in the end the boat wants to sail back to Europe. Florida becomes, not just the longed-for destination, but the exotic from which one must at last come home.
James saw what was at the heart of this retreat, why one might flee what had been desired: “Even round about me the vagueness was still an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all, the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak.” If you stay too long among the lotuseaters, at last you have to eat the lotus, too:
All the succulence of the admirable pale-skinned orange and the huge sunwarmed grape-fruit, plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for solicitation, and partaken of, on the spot, as the immortal ladies of Cranford partook of dessert.
This surfeiting banquet, this pliant vagueness, of which Florida has more than its share, prove ever tractable to the poet’s design.
What separates the strongest poems that have used this giant semicolon lying under the East Coast, this ornate bracket, this sandy stump of old ocean bottom, from the mere stuff of journals or journalists, from the self-regarding or self-inflamed? The ability, not just to succumb to seductive myth, but to transform it. Coleridge, who once dreamt of living in America as part of a society of Pantisocrats, used Bartram’s Travels to feed his vision of a place wholly other (as Shakespeare used reports of the Bermudas as background for The Tempest). His dream vision, famously incomplete, its transcription interrupted by the mysterious visitor from Porlock, suggests in its interior bafflings the ways by which the poet, both insatiable and a perfectionist, managed his failures by not taking himself to account for them.
Coleridge’s compressive imagination drew from many sources simultaneously, if one trusts the patient detective wo
rk in John Livingston Lowes’s classic, The Road to Xanadu. Amid the quieter passages of Bartram’s journals (those in which he was not fending off alligators trying to overturn his canoe), the poet found descriptions of the fountains and disappearing rivers common in northern Florida. From these scanty sources he made his Xanadu.
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.
(“Kubla Khan”)
These are neither the most memorable nor most carefully written lines in Coleridge’s vision, showing every sign of half-hearted (or half-heated) composition—the repetition of momently, the clumsy wording at line end (often to secure the rhyme), the wounded syntax and half-comic phrasing (those fast thick pants, those dancing rocks). Only in the passage’s last lines does the writing have the confidence of sources absorbed and converted—there we have Florida no longer, but something, if not measureless, then very difficult to measure.
Florida has gone from a vague report, used like a mirror, to the scientific account (Bartram was Florida’s Joseph Banks) altered and distorted and rearranged, emerging almost as a dream of itself: one paradise has begotten another. The state’s characteristic vagueness here disappears into the mists of someplace ever more distant. What has been lost in the reaches of Xanadu is the Florida that is only itself:
Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.
The mosquitoes
go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.
After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh
until the moon rises.
Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,
and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks
too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest
post-card of itself.
(Bishop, “Florida”)
How different Coleridge’s dreams from what Bishop saw—her cooler eye, which celebrates the darker character of this somewhat absurd place, has all the virtues that lie beneath ambition. Sometimes the still waters of modesty may be deepest, after all.
Not many miles north of Lake George, where Bartram saw that geyserlike fountain, was the Alachua savannah, which he visited some days later. On the shores of that swampy expanse, two years before the poet died, the Treaty of Payne’s Landing was signed, a document riddled with bad faith and outright lies. There followed the Second Seminole War, the death of the great chief Osceola, and the forced removal of most Seminoles to the Indian Territory. The swamps allowed a remnant band a place of concealment. Coleridge’s poem is devoid of real history, and that is the danger of using sources without taking them beyond their word.
Yet poetry, too, is a kind of bad faith. In our own visions, our own dreamed privacies, there is much a place cannot take into account or render us responsible for. How else would a name bequeathed merely because Ponce de Leon first spied the land on or about Easter Sunday (in Spanish, Pascua Florida, the Feast of the Flowers) still seem so beautifully appropriate? Florida did not have to grow into its name, because it was already all that its name could ask it to become.
Elizabeth Bishop Unfinished
Readers admire Robert Lowell; entertain a fondness for Marianne Moore; respect Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot; become fanatics, a few of them, about Ezra Pound; even compete to join the cult of Sylvia Plath; but they fall helplessly in love, over and over, with Elizabeth Bishop. In the markets of reputation, the past quarter century has seen the rise of a poet considered by some of her peers to be frivolous, whimsical, even trivial. Why has our age become so enamored of a poet who almost to the end of her life required a special taste?
Though she was praised by Lowell and Randall Jarrell, Bishop’s early reviews were less lavish than those lavished on others (“bizarre fantasies,” said one critic of her poems). She later won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award but never campaigned for literary recognition and spent almost half her adult life in Brazil. (Those who hate the hoopla of the literary world find that absence makes the hearts of other writers grow fonder—if they don’t forget you entirely.) For a long while, she lived in the shadow of Marianne Moore, who had befriended the young poet and commented on her work; Bishop adapted, in her own shy, cross-purposed way, Moore’s quirky gift for description yet for a long while was seen as a minor disciple of a poet odder and more original.
The future may appreciate our age for poetry we despise rather than poetry we love. Having better taste than we do, the future usually has the good sense to judge an age by its one or two poets of genius (if you have four or six, you’re living in 1600 or 1820—that is, a golden age) while cheerfully and cruelly ignoring the hundreds who gratified the taste of the day. What would American poets of 1875 have thought could they have peered into a glass and seen that, before a few decades had passed, their age would be known only for that great American poseur, Walt Whitman, and some unknown spinster from Amherst?
Readers adore Bishop and adore themselves for adoring her. She never found writing easy, one reason nonwriters like her—an artist who must plod toward genius bears the mark of humanity (Beethoven is human, Mozart only divine). After her midthirties, she finished fewer than two poems each year; and her papers contain notebook after notebook and file after file of poems in fragmentary or unfinished form—some just dust heaps of phrases, others roughly glued into shape, some dragged through numerous frustrating drafts, and a few that seem to lack nothing but the poet’s approval. Since Bishop scholars have mined this trove haphazardly, readers will be grateful that Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, has gathered the best of this raw material in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.
The deceptive ease of Bishop’s poems conceals her trouble in finishing them—she worked hard to make them fresh and offhanded, as if they hadn’t been written at all. (She’s hardly the first artist to use great labor to make labor look easy.) When she was stuck, she would pin a poem to her bulletin board and wait for the right word to come along. Sometimes this was a very long wait. “The Moose” took more than two decades to finish; and “12 O’Clock News,” finally published in the seventies, was started at Vassar forty years before. Her letters are littered with references to poems just begun or half done, poems she wanted to include in her next book or dispatch to a dedicatee; but months and years piled up while such poems were abandoned, revisited, abandoned once more.
City Stars
Perishable, adorable friends,
each sometimes ends.
No rhyme to it at all
and not less of reason.
The miles of dirty air—
it’s dim, but one is there,
and there’s another, fairly bright
white, or is it a jet?
They’re there, they’re there.
From a distance, it’s hard to imagine what she found wrong with such lines. The editor has printed the poems partly in draft form, with the messiness a copy editor would have tidied up. The good argument for this (it reminds us the poems never received the poet’s imprimatur) goes only so far, since the defects (punctuation gone astray, lines hovering between two or three phrases) make it hard to see the poem plain. (I have added clarifying punctuation and capitals, here and elsewhere, and made minor adjustments.) For a lonely child, the stars might invite the same longi
ng for intimacy as the mute toy horse in “Cirque d’Hiver.” (“City Stars” seems related to various big-city poems, like “The Man-Moth,” that Bishop began in the thirties while living in New York just after college.) The stars are one more example in Bishop of the beautiful concealed by dross, her version of the ugly-duckling theme. That final line insists the stars are there, after all; but beneath it lies a mother’s soothing there there, there there—Bishop was good at reassurance cut with desperation.
Often bedridden as a child, wheezing with asthma or coughing from bronchitis, Bishop was shuffled from house to house and relative to relative after her father died and her mother went insane. The warring sides of her family treated the child, all but orphaned, like a shuttlecock—she felt, looking back, that she was “always a sort of a guest.” In the end, she was dispatched to the stark and forlorn apartment of an aunt and uncle in a poverty not at all genteel.
The poems in her first book, stuffed with allegories and fables, betray too close a reading of George Herbert—sometimes she seems a Metaphysical, Third Class. (The juvenilia included here show how long it took her to trust her instincts—worse, she didn’t know she had instincts.) Yet a poem like “Sestina,” with its mournful old woman and trusting granddaughter, today appears painfully autobiographical; we know so much more now about Bishop’s life, it’s easier to see, as in Eliot, where the personal wormed into the poetic. Even in Worcester, the child found small, obscure delights—the pansies on the back porch every spring; the two canaries, Sister and Dickie; even the quarreling neighbors (you can tell she was deprived because the pleasures were so small). She turned the ordinary into an Aladdin’s cave of wonders because she had to.
Bishop’s poems, as aesthetic organizations, often look ruefully toward the past or reinvent the present in fabulous terms. There are sorrows available in both. This was written in her twenties:
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