Opt. Engl. An III Sem. I Lit. Amer. - R. Bucur

Romulus Bucur
Aspects of 20 Century American Poetry
th
Curs pentru nvmnt la distan, anul V Romn Englez Braov, 2005 2006
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Objectives: Understanding the context in which 20th century American poetry emerged; retaining its two major tendencies
1. 19th century roots: E. A. Poe and Walt Whitman

There are two directions of American poetry, each inventing its own tradition one, cosmopolitan, centrifugal, practically trying to find a tradition outside the United States, to which to connect poetry, the other, autochthonous, centripetal, trying to find its roots in American life as such; in fact, both are the two faces of the paradoxical destiny of the United states a country born directly into the modern age, without a cumbersome tradition behind, and, on the other hand, having enough ties with the world it originated from to recognize it, to draw an inspiration from or to feel complexes towards it. To the former direction, in the first years of the 20th century, such poets as Pound and Eliot can be attached, and, later on, Wallace Stevens, to the second, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and a series of schools such as the Beat generation, the New York school, confessional poetry, the Black Mountain College movement, and so on, although, after World War II, it is quite difficult to follow the two directions mentioned above. One possible explanation is in a 19th century, not, or just half acknowledged, heritage. That is, the poetry of two major poets who, each in his way, will leave an imprint on modern poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Edgar Allan Poe would not be recognized as an important poet, there even existing the opinion that there are two poets, more precisely, two ways of reception of his work, Edgarp, for the French-speaking European, and EdgarAllan Poe for the English-speaking world, and that his indeniable influence upon
20th Century American Poetry __________________________ 3 modern poetry (his Philosophy of Composition as well as part of his poems and stories being translated into French by Charles Baudelaire, and serving as a poetic ideal for potes such as Stphane Mallarm and Paul Valry, not to mention the Symbolist movement) is due to a misunderstanding. The almost unanimous recognition Poe gained as a founding father of modern poetry is due, mainly, to his two essays, The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, constitute, after Hugo Friedrich, monuments of an artistic intelligence obtaining its results out of the observation of its own poetry, and they represent also the coincidence between poetry and the meditation equivalent to it, in this case, even superior to it, an essential symptom of modern age. Besides this alliance between creation and theory of creation, Poes merit was of still a different nature inverting the order of creation; if we believe his assertions, The Raven began with the end, with its planned effect upon the reader. What Poe maintains, that he followed an algorithm, can be seen in his detective and mystery stories, for instance in the Golden Bug, where deciphering, step by step, Captain Kidds secret manuscript leads to finding his treasure. In the end, it doesnt really matter whether Poe is to be credited for writing his poem after a project, or the project was made afterwards The Philosophy of Composition can be read as a document of the American way of thinking, either as a pragmatic, empirical approach to writing (the engineers way), or as a technical book of a product that has to be sold by paid poetry readings, by subscriptions to the poets books (the marketing executives way). And, from the success it had, at least in Europe, we may conclude it was an inspired approach. The other great name of the 19th century, Whitman has become the American poet. Nevertheless, Alan Trachtenberg asks the question whether America, in Whitmans work represents a political word, the name of a political entity, or a
4 __________________________ 20th Century American Poetry metaphysical category, and concluding that, along with democracy, it is a literary figure, a trope of possibility. The same can be said about I Hear America Singing, which presents an image of America that America would like to believe true an image of proud and healthy individualists engaged in productive and happy labor. []America singing emerges as a happy, individualistic, proudly procreative, and robustly comradely America. It is surprising that in such a brief poem so much of Whitmans total concept of modern man could be implied (James E. Miller, Jr., A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass). Also, I Hear America Singing can be viewed as more than just a metaphor; it is a reflection of a pre-mass-media culture in which Americans often entertained themselves and each other (David Reynolds, Walt Whitmans America). Other considerations might follow, in order to make even more obvious the obvious, which is the American roots of Whitmans creation. The reasoning goes as follows: the United States represent the only country born directly in the modern age, and performing a leading part in todays world, Walt Whitman is the most representative poet of it, therefore, Whitman is (one of) the most representative poet(s) of the modern world. To this, a lot of amendments and nuances can be added, but his poetical force, his leading role in the modern canon cannot be denied. This reception, quite similar to Poes, though his fate was somehow better can be traced, stage by stage, from aknowledging (and repenting for) the former rejection (in Ezra Pounds A Pact), to transforming it into a myth (in Allen Ginsbergs A Supermarket in California) and, finally, to deconstructing the myth (Ishmael Reeds The Gangsters Death). Oversimplifying, the first one is that which, on Poes traces, is called modern poetry Baudelaire, Mallarm, Valry, what
20th Century American Poetry __________________________ 5 has been called by Marcel Raymond the artists; the other direction (Raymondsvisionaries) can also be tied somehow to Poe, taking into account that its model / archetype, Rimbaud, had his poetic formula also indebted to Baudelaire. And the influence of French Symbolism on T. S. Eliots early poetry cannot be denied, nor can it be underevaluated the importance French poetry had on Wallace Stevens. In the case of Whitman, whose values-system was centered upon American life in all its aspects, the influence is complex and multilateral. From (almost) imitation Carl Sandburg, to thematic aspects, such as the interest in American urban, technological civilization (one example, Hart Crane), to a liberation of verse, to experimentation with metrics and prosody (Willliam Carlos Williams).
Abstract
This introductory chapter aims at presenting the roots of modern American poetry, represented by two major poets of the 19th century, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, seen as the forerunners of its two main directions manifest in the first half of 20th century, the centrifugal and the centripetal one, namely, the grounding of poetry in the European, and larger, world-literature tradition, and seeking its inspiration on the American soil. It is also examined the way both poets became highly influential myths of modern poetry, remaining in the same time, the former, the first theorist of modern poetry, the latter, one of the heavyweight pieces of the modern poetic canon.
Questions
1. What does, in the context of this course, centrifugal and centripetal mean? 2. What does Poe mean by his expression the poem per se? 3. Why, in your opinion, is Whitman one of the greatest American, and not only, poets?
6 __________________________ 20th Century American Poetry Homework

1. Try to demonstrate (or to infirm), from the analysis of The Raven, Poes affirmation that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. 2. Read one of the poems in the anthology at the end of this course, and comment it from the points of view of subject, language, musicality. If possible, find a Romanian translation, and compare it to the original. 3. Read Whitmans text, The Message of Great Poems, and argue its validity. Use also, as arguments, the fragments from Song of Myself in the anthology. 4. Read Pounds poem, A Pact, along with Ginsbergs A Supermarket in California. Try to make Whitmans portrait, contrasting these poems with suitable fragments from Song of Myself.
2. Beginnings of the 20th century: Ezra Pound and Imagism

Objectives: Understanding the principles of Imagism;
familiarization with Ezra Pounds contribution to the theory and practice of modern poetry.
Pound left to Europe in order to complete an MA degree, which resulted in his book, The Spirit of the Romance, a rediscovery of the Provensal poetry of the troubadours, in his Imagist movement, in his undeniable influence on virtually everybody, from poets belonging to the older generation, such as W. B. Yeats, to poets of the same age, such T. S. Eliot, and in one of the most daring poetical experiments of 20th century, his Cantos. As regards the influence, he took the liberty to alter some of Yeats poems which he was supposed to send, as the poets private secretary, to the newly founded Poetry magazine, and, instead of being fired, he enjoyed his gratitude, and the acknowledgement of the poems improved quality; in his turn, Eliot enjoyed his advice, and made several alterations to his poem The Waste Land, which also bears an eloquent dedication, To Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. He was quite an important figure of London literary life in the first decades of the 20th century so no wonder he enjoyed both a numerous following and bitter adversities. One of the first movements he started during this period was Imagism, in association with Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and F. S. Flint. Its central concept was that of Image, which, in Pounds definition is
8 __________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term complex rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application. It is the presentation of such a complex instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits, that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
This concept of image, although Poes name was not mentioned, can be connected with his remark, that what we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones that is to say, of brief poetical effects [The Philosophy of Composition], and to the idea of posie pure [pure poetry], a notion important in modern poetry since Mallarm. In order to achieve this, three principles were stated:
1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
As the poet himself recognizes, the method in itself has brought faults of its own, but its justification lies, in the spirit of Pounds enlightened pedagogy, in the potentiality of some good poems to be written. Pound discusses about three types of poetry, melopia, wherein the words are charged over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning, phanopia, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination, and logopia, the dance
20th Century American Poetry __________________________ 9 of the intellect among words, that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but ittakes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music. In other words, he takes into account the two sides of the word as linguistic sign, the signifier and the signified, and, isolating them, ascribes each a type of poetry already existing, namely, the musical poetry of the Symbolists, and the descriptive poetry of Parnassianism. And, as a supreme kind of poetry, poetry as such, as verbal art, or, as already Poe had stated it, the poem per se. Pounds idea of poetry was based upon that of tradition, understood as a movement with a few great moments; No man writes very much poetry that matters, he wrote in his essay A Retrospect, therefore, a wiser, more useful approach for the poet would be making the sorts of experiments which may be of use to him in his later work, or to his successors. As for his poetics, perhaps the keyword would be natural about symbols, for instance, he considered
that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man uses symbols he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.
Also, his statement use either no ornament or good ornament can be interpreted as the expression of a taste for unaffected, unfeigned poetic utterance. An essay from which this poetics of making obvious the unobserved it The Chinese Ideogram. It is based on Ernest Fenollosas interpretation of the
10 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry Chinese ideographic writing, proven erroneous by specialists, but, nevertheless, fertile as a poetic idea. It is based on the rejection of abstraction (another form of affectation, of unnaturalness), characteristic to Western though, and its substitution through concrete expressions instead of concepts, metaphors. The technique consists in juxtaposing two things, sharing one common feature, with the intention of making obvious that feature, such as the Chinese, in Pounds opinion, would, for expressing the idea of red, have joined a rose, a cherry, iron rust, and a flamingo. This approach can be seen, for instance, in one of his poems from the Imagist period, In a Station of the Metro (see the anthology at the end of this course). It is also, although much more complicated, the approach used in his capital work, Cantos; here, the elements juxtaposed give up the pretension of pertaining to nature, being (parts of) texts, referred to in various ways by quotation, allusion, paraphrase, intentional misinterpretation and anachronisms that is, by making extensive use of intertextuality, a literary modality which requires, in order to be understood and appreciated, a vast culture. It is hard to decide whether Pound, in Cantos, wrote, to use his own words, much poetry that matters, or just made an experiment potentially useful to the next generation(s) of poets. The whole of the book is a very difficult and heterogeneous reading, but there are at least two things to retain from it his total love for poetry, and the exquisite beauty of certain passages such as the following (from Canto 81):
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lovst well shall not be reft from thee What thou lovst well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 11

What thou lovst well is thy true heritage What thou lovst well shall not be reft from thee The ants a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity , it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity , I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry , Pull down thy vanity , Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance . Master thyself, then others shall thee beare Pull down thy vanity
Abstract
This chapter presents Ezra Pounds contribution to modern poetry, first in the form of Imagism, with its concept of image, that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and then its three rules namely, direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective, the use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and, as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome, then his theory of poetry as an ideogram, and the three types of poetry he has in view, melopia, phanopia, and logopia, respectively, poetry concerned by the musical dimension of language, poetry interested by its representational function, and poetry proper, poetry as verbal art.
Questions
1. What is an image? 2. Which are the three rules of Imagism? 3. Which are, according to Pound, the three kinds of poetry?
Homework
1. Analyze Pounds poem A Pact, pointing out the way he reconciled, at last, with his American heritage. 2. Enumerate the three kinds of poetry stated by Pound, and try to find examples for each from your own reading experience.
12 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

3. Make a short written analysis of one of the poems in the anthology at the end of this course (In a Station of the Metro,
Alba, or Fan-piece for her Imperial Lord), evidencing the

imagist features of the poem analyzed. 4. Read Canto 1 in parallel with Homers Odyssey, XI, 1-200, and discuss the differences and the liberties Pound took in rewriting the classical text.
3. T. S. Eliots objective correlative

Objectives: Understanding T. S. Eliots poetics in connection with his poetry; getting familiar with contribution of one of the major poets of the century to modern poetry.
Eliot, along with other great modern poets, belongs to the family of poets whose creation is doubled by theoretical reflection on poetry. More yet, he made a point in drawing the attention upon the rapport between the two of them, upon the relevance it has the examination of a poets theory on poetry (in general) for the research of his work. In a famous conference, From Poe to Valry, he states that any poet writing his art potique is actually explaining, theorizing, defending or making way for his own poetical modality. It happens often that he entertains the illusion that his assertions have a general value, but it is more prudent for us not to take his affirmations for granted, but to check them against the kind of poetry he is really writing. As in the case of Pound, T. S. Eliots references to poetry are technical, pragmatic, moreover physical than metaphysical. To him, the poet is someone integrating experience, the widest possible experience:
When a poets mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary mans experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. [The Metaphysical Poets]
14 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry This amalgamation can be interpreted as based on a musical principle, an organizing principle functioning both at the level of literature as a whole, modifying tradition in the sense of integrating new works, so that the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted [Tradition and the Individual Talent], and at the level of the individual work, thus enhancing its dramatic movement making it possible to speak even of the musical laws of dramatic poetry. In the case of the poem too, music is a question regarding the whole, and not one or another of its parts. Although sustaining a position close to that of Paul Valry, who considers the poem as a hesitation between sound and meaning, Eliot feels obliged to draw attention from the very beginning to the fact that the music of poetry doesnt exist apart from its meaning; pure incantation, whose action upon us evades consciousness [From Poe to Valry], displeases him in the situation when it is unbalanced in comparison with the semantic component even in the most incantatory of the poems, the dictionary meaning cannot be overlooked without having to pay the price, adds he further. Anyway, the possibility of lingering upon one or the other of the extremes is not excluded: there are poems in which we are moved by the music and take the sense for granted, just as there are poems in which we attend to the sense and are moved by the music without noticing it [The Music of Poetry]. A note on amalgamating experience beyond the individual level the poets experience is determined, in its turn, by the institution of literature, which it determines in his turn. What Eliot calls tradition may be this institution itself, or, phrased in the terms of more recent approach (although Harold Bloom is contesting Eliots critical ideas), the canon. A tradition which cannot be inherited, so that one must obtain it by great labour [Tradition and the Individual Talent], which grants value not by imitation, but by emulation. An idea which incorporates,
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 15 surpassing it, that of the battle of the ancients and moderns, by postulating traditions dynamic, moving system character. Hence the difficulty of deciding on the real value of a contemporary poet, on the quantity of newness he brings with his poetry, otherwise, a relative notion, because, similarly to Pound, who considered that one cannot speak of good poetry written in a manner (only) twenty years old, the poet must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. Where judged does not mean amputated and, especially, does not mean judged by the canons of dead critics [Tradition and the Individual Talent]:
The most that I should venture to commit myself to about the word of any living poet when I met it for the first time, is whether this is genuine poetry or not. Has this poet anything to say, a little different from what anyone has said before, and has he found, not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying? Even when I commit myself thus far, I know that I may be taking a speculative risk. I may be impressed by what he is trying to say and overlook the fact that he hasnt found the new way of saying it; or the new idiom of speech which at first gives the impression that the author has something of his own to say, may turn out to be only a trick or mannerism which conceals a wholly conventional vision. [What is Minor Poetry?]
One of the ways of doing this, along with the amalgamating mentioned above, is by means of the objective correlative, a modality of, on one hand, integrating experience, and, on the other, of getting rid of the emotional load (a succinct formulation of his position towards it can be found in his longdiscussed essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent: Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
16 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry personality). In short, this, the objective correlative, is a modality of artistic creation short-circuiting the emotional dimension, the direct expression of feelings, allowing, in the meantime, the most complete / complex possible expression of experience:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [Hamlet and his Problems]
In the opinion of Ren Wellek, this notion is just a convenient word for the symbolic structure of a work of art, and it is to be considered only insofar it is a deliberately sought device. Yvor Winters, on the other hand, one of the critics fiercely against Eliots work, holds the opinion that the objective correlative is nothing more than the fact the poet is starting from an emotion, and, after having defined it, finds objective data which he thinks fit for embodying it. The objection is that this notion entails the priority and primacy of emotion in literary composition. Another particularity of Eliots poetics is the concept of persona, of voice letting itself be heard in the poem, lending it thus a dramatic character (and opposing it to quasi-dramatic and non-dramatic poetry), and opening it to expressive potentialities which, in the case of direct expression, would have been impossible to achieve:
The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the

limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character. [The three voices of poetry]
Within the same essay, he explicitly defines the notion, connecting it to the poetry of his friend, Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro [the best master], as the dedication to The Waste Land calls him:
It was Brownings greatest disciple, Mr. Ezra Pound, who adopted the term persona to indicate the several historical characters through whom he spoke and the term is just [The three voices of poetry]
Another dimension of poetry Eliot refers to, is the musical one. For him, the poems musical character is taking place both on a sound level, and on a semantic one:
a musical poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one [The Music of Poetry]
a similar position with, lets say, that of Wallace Stevens, for whom Every poem is a poem a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words. Also, the second meaning of musicality Eliot is speaking about is referring to the poems architecture, to its construction; this can be best seen in the apex of his poetical creation, in Four Quartets. The medium for the music of poetry is speech, vernacular language, to such an extent that all revolutions in the field of poetry are connected to it, to the return to it. A lesson the newer poetry has learned, from Olsons Projective Verse to the beat generation or to confessional poetry in the line of LowellBerryman. Not widely or enthusiastically acclaimed in his poetic beginnings, his first poems are indebted to French Symbolist
18 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry poetry (especially to Jules Laforgue, as he acknowledges as early as 1928, and to Baudelaire, whose influence he considers decisive for three extremely different poets, such as William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and himself. All these are obvious in a poem like Prufrock, whose other feature, evidenced here because it a constant of his poetry, is the theme of old age, associated with conformism, mediocrity, sterility: I grow old I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. In The Waste Land, essentially, there is the same thing the image of the impasse modern world faces, an impasse characterized by aridity natural, erotic, spiritual, all of this projected in a general vision of the world, beyond the barriers of historical time or the national or geographical borders. The poem stands under the sign of the enigma, reiterated onto several levels: the Sibyl, evoked in the epigraph (and, again, tied t the image of old age), whose prophecies were traditionally written on leaves, and left to the reader to order them coherently, Tiresias (Old man with wrinkled female breasts), answering to Ulysses, Madame Sosostris, the clairvoyante, consulting the tarot cards, and, finally, the Thunders words, the final enigma. From the point of view of structure, the poem is closer to myth, being moreover circular than linear; its order is simultaneous, and not a developing one. (Hugo Friedrich was even speaking of fragmentariness; while this is viewed positively, as a principal feature of modern poetry, Yvor Winters turns it against the poet, accusing him of fragmentary didacticism). In any case, one of the compositional techniques of the poem consists in associating by proximity of elements,
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 19 poetic or not, original or borrowed, and then in assigning new meanings to the juxtaposed elements:
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? O keep the Dog far hence, thats friend to men, Or with his nails hell dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frre! The images of aridity, of sterility, are frequent: breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water, Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road, Not the cicada / and dry grass singing etc. Reality is fragmented (which could explain the above assertion about the compositional technique), and not even the poets intervention (on whom Eliot said that his essential advantage is to be able to see both beneath beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory) cannot change this thing, which is just one starting point: Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images. To this initial vision, a symbolic reinforcement is added (declared by the poet himself, in the Notes accompanying the poem), represented by Frazer famous, Golden Bough, by the symbolism of the tarot cards (interpreted, also, quoting the poets confession, quite personally), and by a series of great poets cited in the text here, his position is similar to that of Pound; he put down in black and white, that:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. [Philip Massinger]
20 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry A symbolic reinforcement which facilitates the transitions between the various levels of reality, spatial or temporal, physical or symbolic, conferring coherence and cohesion to the whole. And the last line, the Upanishads quotation, Shantih shantih shantih, which, repeated as such, means The Peace which passeth understanding leaves us where we started from, on the point of the irremediably fragmented image of the world, yet with the consolation of the attempt of having tried to give it some unity. A much darker poem in this respect, and which largely follows the same poetics and vision is The Hollow Men. Preceded by an epigraph from Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, the poem represents an image of hell. Of a hell represented by apparent death, by incapacity of action, by lack of substance:
Shape without form, shade, without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to deaths other Kingdom Remember us if at all not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
In this realm of the end even death is fake, inauthentic; hope too is futile, and thence, the inutility of sight (The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley) and of speech: In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech). It follows the disintegration of prayer, intersecting, interspersing with the incapacity of action (Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow / For Thine is the Kingdom), which leads to a parody of the Apocalypse, imitated after childrens games, and measuring to this insubstantial world: This is the way the world ends / This is the
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 21 way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Eliots poetry can be regarded also as a Dantesque journey through Inferno and Purgatory, and his last major poems, Four Quartets, give an exemplary account of this journey, of this quest of human being through the waste land of modern world. Abstract
This chapter presents T. S. Eliots contribution to both modern poetry, and its poetics, closely connected from the very beginning, with Poes Philosophy of Composition, and Baudelaires theoretical writings, but to whom Pound and Eliot gave an extremely articulated form, highly influential on 20th century criticism. Concepts such as tradition, persona, music of poetry, and objective correlative (when expressing artistically an emotion, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion) are examined, then some particularities of his poetry, with
examples taken from Prufrock, The Waste Land and Hollow Men, establishing him as one of the poets who expressed, trying thus to solve, the crisis of man in modern world.
Questions
1. What is the objective correlative? 2. What does Eliot understand by amalgamation, and how does it work in the composition of a poem? 3. Which are the three voices of poetry, and how can they be distinguished in a poem?
Homework
1. Write an essay on mediocrity, starting from Prufrock. 2. Comment The Hollow Men, taking into account its epigraph (i. e., the context from where it was taken), and Dantes Divine Comedy.

3. Read the two poems, and draw a parallel between them, evidencing both similarities and dissimilarities.
4. William Carlos Williams and no ideas but in things

Objectives: Understanding William Carlos Williams contribution to constituting an American tradition in the modern poetry; making the students able to see the subtle interference between the visual and the auditory in the texture of a poem characterized by extreme simplicity, concision and precision, making evident the possibility of quickly passing from the physical to the metaphysical, just by the use of common speech and verbal art.
A friend of Pounds since his student days, without being truly a member of the Imagist group, William Carlos Williams took part in its publications; it was said that the model of his poem (at least at the beginning of his poetic career) short, precise, and making use of vegetal imagery (due not to imitation, but a constant of his poetry) remained faithful to an Imagist perception of things [French critic Serge Fauchereau]. Also, it is perhaps only himself who took literally Pounds first principle of Imagism, limiting himself strictly to the natural object, or, as Pound quoted him, All I do is to try to understand something in its natural colours and shapes. This leads to a model the poem which can somehow be approximated as something situated between the eye (that is, visual perception) and reality. A few examples will make the point the first of them is the poem The Great Figure:
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense

unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
Williams writes about it, in his Autobiography:

Once on a hot July day coming back exhausted from the Post Graduate Clinic, I dropped in as I sometimes did at Marsdens studio on Fifteenth Street for a talk, a little drink maybe and to see what he was doing. As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.
Christopher J. MacGowan, from whom is taken the interpretation, goes on quoting from the Autobiography Before continuing his account of the visit, Williams breaks his narrative to insert a later reminiscence. He recalls standing on a station platform with Hartley
when an express train roared by right before our faces crashing through making up time in a cloud of dust and sand so that we had to put up our hands to protect our faces. As it passed Marsden turned and said to me, Thats what we all want to be, isnt it, Bill?
Both Hartley and Williams emphasized their strategy of capturing the immediate. Hartley insisted upon the spontaneity of his Berlin compositions, declaring, The forms are only those which I have observed casually from day to day. Williams similarly asserts that The Great Figure is the record of an impression ... sudden and forceful, despite the variant printed versions of his poem, and the manuscript evidence of their careful revision.
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 25 The key-phrase of Williams poetics is perhaps no ideas but in things, to be found in A Sort of a Song and in the fragment from Paterson, book 1 from the anthology at the end of the course, but the poem quoted and briefly analyzed above can also be considered an application of it. In A Sort of a Song (see text at page 67), in the first six lines, we are confronted with the meeting of two plans, one of nature, both vegetal and animal (snake, weed) and culture (the writing); the latter seems to borrow its attributes from the former the curved lines of (hand)writing resemble weeds, as well as the snakes undulating movements; slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait and sleepless, though mainly characteristics of the snake, can easily be transferred to writing, this time as a human activity, and its effects on other human beings. Situated approximately at the center of the poem, reference to metaphor is essential; the idea of reconciliation, of unification of things situated on different levels of existence is somehow inherent in its nature. New is, though, the enormous distance between the two chosen elements people, that is, human being(s) are frail, supple, mortal, short-lived, but able of thinking; stones are hard, rigid, practically immortal, and not thinking. Metaphor (or poetry) is supposed to accomplish the same reciprocal type of transfer as the poet has demonstrated in the first part of the poem. Compose, that is, put things together and Invent, discover, are the two stages of the creative process. And, in this context, No ideas but in things means just starting from the physical level, from what is given by our sense-organs, and not from preconception, from experience, and not from abstraction. And the result, the poem, is something that changes the order of the world it reconciles, it unifies various levels of reality, and it splits, it separates, in order to insert itself as an object in the world. And, as a final comment, beauty, frailty, as embodied in a flower (saxifrage < saxum, a rock + base of frangere, to
26 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry break), are able to vanquish hardness, rudeness, as in Chinese philosophy, yin, the female principle, is able of subduing yang, the male principle, starting all creation again, from the beginning. It is not only the visual dimension of the poem which is important to Williams, but also the auditory one his is the notion, issued from the discontent, shared with Pound, about both mechanical rhythms and free verse, of variable foot, an approximation which would lead in the future of American poetry, in 1950, to Olsons concept of projective verse:
with music in our ears the words need only be taught to keep as distinguished an order, as chosen a character, as regular, according to the music, as in the best of prose. [A New Measure]
This can be easily seen in his use of the everyday language, of spoken American, and, in the meantime, of a rigorous sound pattern, as in, for instance, The Red Wheelbarrow, where each of the couplets is composed, the first line of three words, the second, of two syllables, such as it comes to dismembering words as wheelbarrow and rainwater, without the use of hyphenation to warn that the first noun is to be part of a compound [John Hollander], and the result that they are phenomenological constituents as well [John Hollander]; all in all, the meaningful, memorable visual image, in red and white, and the elaborate sound texture concur to building a masterpiece of concision and precision. It is symptomatic that the poet has disavowed his volume Kora in Hell. Improvisations, almost as soon as he published it, considering the book too European; the position he adopted was that of the American, without art and tradition, and refusing to engulf European culture, the way that Pound and Eliot were just doing at the time, a stance not unobserved by his friend, Ezra Pound: Carlos Williams has been determined to stand or sit as an American.
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 27 As a result of his choice, we have poems depicting scenes of American life, written in American, such as Proletarian Portrait, or beautiful poems able to take place anywhere, but, due to the quickly generalizing American way of life, also quite specific, like This Is Just to Say, or simply great American poems, like Paterson, the most original work after Whitmans Leaves of Grass, and one of the great poems of 20th century, along with Cantos, Four Quartets, and, from the domain of fiction, Ulysses. Abstract
This chapter presents William Carlos Williams contribution to the development of American poetry, from the point of view of the creative application of Imagist poetics, on the one hand, and of the consequent use of spoken language, of its rhythms, on the other. There are also analyzed some aspects of Williams mastery of verbal art, some examples of refinement and subtlety he attained in spite of his deliberate closing towards European inspiration and tradition.
Questions
1. Why is Williams poetics considered to follow the Imagist prescriptions? 2. How is supposed to work the words relation to music in Williams concept of variable foot? 3. How do you interpret the poets phrase No ideas but in things?
Homework
1. Write an essay on modern life, with its positive and negative aspects, taking as a starting point the fragment from Patterson in the Addendum. 2. Comment a poem of your choice, discussing the balance between the visual representation and the auditory dimension. 3. Comment a poem of your choice, from the point of view of No ideas but in things.
5. Wallace Stevens and the supreme fiction

Objectives: Understanding Wallace Stevens contribution to constituting an American tradition in the modern poetry; making the students able to see how reality, when examined in closer detail, and by the perceptive powers of the poet, becomes a fascinating verbal show; appreciating the poets mastery of verbal art.
Considered, by French critic Serge Fauchereau, a poets poet, Wallace Stevens poetical career is paralleled and contrasted to that of William Carlos Williams the former is willingly accepting European influences (a proof being the presence of uncountable French words in his poems, another, his own assertion, in Adagia, that French and English constitute a single language), while the latter repudiates them in favor of a sectarian Americanism. To begin with, it was Imagism also which, labeled as just a long stage in his evolution, explained his poetics, otherwise indebted to French poet Stphane Mallarm. His Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird were considered, again by Fauchereau, typically imagist poems, while his blackbird was judged closer to the one in maux et Cames (by Thophile Gautier) than to symbolist birds. Having mentioned one of his most celebrated poems, let us quote some other opinions on and interpretations of it. For instance, it was one of Stevens primary testing grounds for combining older uses of metaphorical and symbolic meaning with new nonrealist and nonidealist non-ontological uses of to be (Beverly Maeder); its fragmentary instantaneousness that relates it to Imagist poetry of the period is able to distract us from the fact that the framework itself creates a very strong
30 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry sense of location or setting; that is, it posits a spatial context and indicates the extent of this context for the sequence it embraces (Beverly Maeder). Further,
The blackbird thus becomes a figure of the very language that effects a realignment of cognitive activity within language. Language means both the denotative, symbolic, and metaphorical space of its signifieds and the textual space of the signifiers, such as the word blackbird. Hence the insistence on grammatically marked location throughout the poem. If Stevens poem speaks of its own condition of being determined by its linguistic history, it also allows the poet to create beyond the provincial boundaries his own linguistic culture has erected. If the language deceives, then the shock may represent a danger for knowledge, as when the passenger in the coach mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds and was pierced by fear (XI). Or if its activity surprises the observer and transforms the objects, as in blackbirds / Flying in a green light, our values may be shaken like the bawds of euphony. We are warned too that something false can be taken for that play of possibility and constraint represented by the blackbird in its varying linguistic contexts. If the blackbird seems to have an effect on every sections context and changes the readers sense of what Stevens called reality in it, it is also the case that each local verbal or linguistic context changes the blackbird and changes the effect of the whole on us as we become aware of how our linguistic culture works cognitively. (Beverly Maeder)
and, to conclude,
Poes raven can only reiterate Nevermore, but Stevens blackbird becomes a signifier that enables the proliferation of ever new contexts. The speculative activity of Thirteen Ways consists less in creating cognitive knowledge about some hypothetical truth than in creating a poetic being,

both as the text is being listened to and looked at and in the post-poem silence, beyond the birds whistling and the hearers listening, and beyond the confines of the page. (Beverly Maeder, Wallace Stevens Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute).
Summing up, if we take Thirteen Ways as a model of Stevens poetry, this can be considered as building complex, visual and auditory verbal objects (Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words, from Adagia), something he considers a supreme fiction:
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. (Adagia).
In a speculative and ironical way, the idea is developed in A High-Toned Old Christian Woman; the very first line asserts it: Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. The poem indicates the symmetry of Stevenss imagination; he proposes that religious fictions have no greater status than fictions of the imagination that include sensuality and play. Addressing the High Toned Old Christian Woman, the speaker comically proposes an alternative to Christianity in the form of a mummers parade or a Mardi Gras festivity, and, also, he is proposing poetry as the supreme fiction rather than God (Daniel R. Schwarz). Or, in another, slightly different, interpretation, the poet attempts to ruffle the composure of this true believer by proposing a shocking version of Santayanas argument in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry and religion are equally fictions of the human mind, reflecting the values of the human maker. (Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self).
32 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry A double construction is proposed, one based on the moral law, which leads to a baroque construction, exhibiting, in the end, emptiness, not quite different from the one in Eliots The Waste Land or Hollow Men (Like windy citherns hankering for hymns), the other based on The opposing law, which is either immoral or amoral, but it is an universe which cannot be controlled, and which takes on its own carnivalesque, ribald masks, based on the pleasure principle (Daniel R. Schwarz). What remains is just the show, performed on the planetary scene, A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres, and so contagious that even the opposite side is taking part in it Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, / Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, / Proud of such novelties of the sublime. And so powerful that it has a life of its own, more powerful than moral censorship: But fictive things / Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. Another of Stevens poems, which could be regarded as a manifesto for modern poetry, and even bears a significant name, Of Modern Poetry, is constructed as a scenario of the kind of text the modern theater requires; at the same time, it furnishes us with an example of that text. It provides the reader not with an idea but with the dramatized imaginative experience of an idea, and concludes with precisely the sort of emotional resolution it describes (David Walker, The Transparent Lyric). For Charles Altieri, The poems concerns are obviously Romantic ones, yet both its vision and the basic means for realizing it are distinctively Modernist (Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism). Reading it closely, we find out that it begins and ends with the mind: The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice, respectively, The poem of the act of the mind. This does not necessarily mean an intellectualistic approach
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 33 mind and reason are not equal, and the poet states it quite clearly in two of his aphorisms in Adagia: As the reason destroys, the poet must create, and The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. In other words, mind is not a fetish, but an instrument, more fit than the hand for constructing new worlds, such as theaters, an age-old metaphor for the world, to which he gives a new meaning, both in his poem, and in Adagia: Authors are actors, books are theathres. This construction is somehow impersonal, expressed in the use of it, and getting a touch of subjectivity through the presence of the actor / author, whose part consists of facilitating (self-)communication: speak words that in the ear, / In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, / Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound / Of which, an invisible audience listens, / Not to the play, but to itself, expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one. A communication, again, based on the mind the ear is not the physical one, but the delicatest ear of the mind and, once more, between real people, and refusing transcendence: The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live and also, between people as between themselves; but not between people and some other world (Adagia). A position that stresses the dignity of the mind, a defining characteristic of human being, and which lends its dignity to all human acts, whether intellectual or not: wholly / Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise. / It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. A last poem that will be analyzed is Men Made Out of Words. The very title is significant, as well as a good part of the second couplet: Life consists / Of propositions about life; its more complete form is to be found in Adagia: Literature is based not on life but on propositions about life, of which this is one. The circular reference of the latter is obvious
34 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry literature is auto-referential. But, in its light, the sentence in the poem means that life has no physical reality, no consistency either. Human being had to resort to imagination, more or less terrifying, in order to compensate for this void: What should we be without the sexual myth, / The human reverie or poem of death? Images of a distorted reality (or defamiliarizing the familiar, as Russian formalists described literature), such as Castratos of moon-mash, conform to his dictum, Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail (Adagia), and give us a hint of Shakespeares tragic vision of human condition: torn by dreams, // By the terrible incantations of defeats / And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one (compare it to True, I talk of dreams / Which are the children of an idle brain / begot by nothing but vain fantasy / Which is as thin of substance as the air Romeo and Juliet, I, 4, 98-101) The end turns the poets position into a general statement it is not about a special, gifted individual, chosen by the gods, but about human condition we all are poets, the way Jewish poet Paul Celan could say, after the Holocaust, that all poets are Jews: The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate. Abstract
This chapter presents the poetry and poetics of Wallace Stevens, somehow paralleled to that of Williams, in their respective accepting or refusal of European tradition, and in the influence of Imagism. Stevens is constructing the poem by minute attention devoted to detail, which is expanded into spectacular verbal performances, both on the plane of visual representation, and on that of sound structures. This performance, nevertheless, cannot hide the sadness of human condition, facing void, as in the case of most major modern poets, but offers at least some consolation, something the poet calls supreme fiction, another name for poetry.
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 35 Questions
1. In what way is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird indebted to Imagism? 2. Why is the construction of the image in High-Toned Old
Christian Woman baroque?

3. Is Disillusionment of Ten oclock a serious poem? Argue either the positive or the negative answer.
Homework
1. Analyze a poem of your choice, taking into account the following two of Stevens aphorisms: After one has abandoned a belief
in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as lifes redemption, and The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live and also, between people as between themselves; but not between people and some other world.
2. Develop the following aphorism of Stevens, Authors are actors,
books are theathres, using as material his poem, Of Modern

Poetry. 3. Check the truth of Imagination applied to the whole world is
vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail

(Wallace Stevens, Adagia) against Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
6. Confessional poetry: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman

Objectives: Getting familiarized with the confessional direction of American poetry; understanding in a new light the relationship between biography and poetry
The term of Confessional Poetry was employed by M. L. Rosenthal in his book, The New Poets. American and British Poetry since World War II, with reference to Life Studies (Because of the way Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and psychoanalytical problems into the poems of Life Studies, the word confessional seemed appropriate enough), and covered a range of poets of the late 50es early 60es; they represent an informal movement started with Robert Lowells Life Studies (1959), and followed by Sylvia Plath (The Colossus, 1960 and Ariel, published posthumously, in 1966), and John Berryman (Dream Songs, 1968). What they have in common it the dramatic tension of existence incorporated in the poem the poets own biography becomes subject matter of their poetry. Or, in Rosenthals words,
In a larger, more impersonal context, these poems seemed to me one culmination of the Romantic and modern tendency to place the literal Self more and more at the center of the poem
or, in a slightly different vision, that of Jonathan Cott, we are facing a reversal of perspective as compared to science; whereas here the Copernican system is more important than the one, in poetry, the Ptolemaic system (where the poet stands for the earth) is prevailing over the Copernican one (where types and myths stand for the sun).
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 37 It must be said from the very beginning that biography, personal history, confession, etc. are only a matter of contents, that is, indifferent to poetry. Only insofar as we have good poetry, that is, an exploration of both the world and language, mirroring each other, it gets consistence, and, therefore, it can be taken into account in the analysis of poetry. In other words, a genuine confessional poem has to be superbly sucessful artistically it if it to achieve this fusion of the private amd the culturally symbolic, but it must at any rate be far more highly changed than the usual poem (M. L. Rosenthal). Although harder to demonstrate, the critics goal is to evidence the inseparability of the two aspects of the program, which, altogether, his breakdown of the familys past and of his childhood relation to it, and his slow reconstruction of an adult self from the depths of that analysis, are aesthetic in character despite their autobiographical relevance (M. L. Rosenthal). Lowells merit, in this context, lies in creating a myth, namely that of an America (and a contemporary civilization generally) whose history and present predicament are embodied in those of his own family and epitomized in his own psychological experience (M. L. Rosenthal), and Life Studies is perhaps the most functionally shaped and continuously communicative of the great poetic sequences (M. L. Rosenthal). Lowell was able to demonstrate, in his turn, that it is not the spectacular choice of confessing his most intimate secrets that was responsible for the success of his book, but consummated craftsmanship:
Writing is neither transport nor technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their callings tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good

workmanship. (from his address when he received the National Book Award for Life Studies).
Also, in a letter to M. L. Rosenthal, he displays perfect knowledge of the risks undertaken, of the challenges faced, when writing (and deciding to publish) the book:
I know what my book intends and what went into its making. Its final character is another matter. I have no way of telling whether there was enough energy and skill behind the projectile to carry it home. Something not to be said again was said. I feel drained, and know nothing except that the next outpouring will have to be unimaginably different an altered style, more impersonal matter, a new main artery of emphasis and inspiration. Such, such the joy and despair of our profession!
Lowell is conscious too about what he calls the imaginative risk, that which it appears when crossing the invisible border between literature and life: In the best poems, one is torn by saying, This is so true and lived that most other poetry seems like an exercise, and then one can back off and admire the dazzling technique and invention. Perfect control, like the control of a skier who avoids every death-trap until reaching the final drop, a risk whose neglecting can be assumed, as he does, as responsible for the death of Sylvia Plath; about him, it could be said to be the master who has survived the imaginative risk both in his life and in his art (M. L. Rosenthal) in any case, he is the only one of the poets discussed in this chapter who died by natural causes (heart attack, at the age of 60). As regards Sylvia Plath, although her range of technical resources was narrower than Robert Lowells, her choice was what seems the one alternative position to Lowells along the dangerous confessional way, that of literally committing her own predicaments in the interest of her art until the one was so involved in the other that no return was possible, a way considered the old romantic fallacy, if you will, of confusing motive and art, or the real with the ideal (M. L. Rosenthal).
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 39 Such a poetry is somewhere at the boundary of the unbearable if, with Lowell, we are made the audience of the poets purgatory, Sylvia Plath offers a first-hand account of a trip to hell. In a way, she is conforming to Rimbauds terms in his Letters of the Visionary. The difference is that we are not faced with imagination, that is with the exploration of the unknown, nor with the systematic disorder of all senses, but rather with fantasy, with the recombination of too well-known things present in memory attempted suicide, a sort of genetic memory of the Holocaust, associated with the intense guilt, the torturer victim relationship. Which returns us to the imaginative risk she knows perfectly well what she is doing; it is about experience, and, more precisely, relevant experience, and the handling of it, about not just expressing suffering, but filtering it through literature:
I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldnt be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on (Sylvia Plath, in a 1962 interview)
The tension was extraordinary her best and most tensioned poems, those published posthumously in Ariel were written in only a few months before her death, and, paradoxically, they were written in a state of serenity, as the poet herself confesses: They were all written at about four in the morning that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the babys cry,
40 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles, or, rephrased by M. L. Rosenthal, they are written out of a strange kind of terror, the calm center of hysteria, the triumphant surge of affirmative projection that comes with a clear perception of despair by an energetically creative spirit. The disturbing question is about the price the poet has to pay for such poetry and, in the case of most confessional poets, it is the highest possible. Taking seriously the reference to Romanticism, a possible explanation would be that of Virgil Nemoianu in The Taming of Romanticism, that High Romanticism is short-lived, both as a movement, and in the poets personal history it leads to premature death, suicide, illness, madness, drugs. The third poet treated here is John Berryman. He started from the American tradition (in his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet), only to exercise in wearing a mask through which to reveal himself. This is probably the main difference between him and Lowell while the latter is speaking about himself in the first person, the latter does this by inventing a character, a persona, Henry, an alter ego of the poet himself, and also another one, Mr. Bones, who sometimes replies him ironically. Henry, as a character, is a white middle-aged American, talking about himself in first, second, and third voices, and listening to his unnamed Friend, a white American in blackface speaking Negro dialect. Henry is greedy, lusty, petulant; he is essentially Freuds Id. His Friend is conscience, and their dialogue works itself out, as Helen Vendler argues in The Given and the Made (1995), as analysis in the therapists office, each song approximating a session on the couch. Henry, speaking with all of Berrymans baggage paternal suicide, shameless libido, drunkenness is allowed to aggress and regress, throwing his anger, fears, and blasphemy up against Friend, a blank wall of therapeutic response. (Joel Athey, John Berrymans Life and Career). After French critic Serge Fauchereau, the intention behind the Dream Songs, Berrymans major creation, is to be a historical
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 41 poem of the 20th century, somehow similar to Pounds Cantos. Again, it is to be noticed a more profound implication into the social of Berrymans character, Henry, than that of Lowells I, at least in Life Studies. The Dream Songs were published in 1964, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Then, in 1969, they were extended to 385 pieces, and completed, in 1968, by His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award (1969) and the Bollingen Prize. To quote the author himself, in his acceptance speech, I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry. (Joel Athey, John Berrymans Life and Career). In Robert Lowells opinion, Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as pote maudit, child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture of tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in the first person; to quote him again, when eulogizing him in 1972, In his 1972 eulogy of Berryman, Lowell was more direct: 77 Dream Songs are harder than most hard modern poetry, the succeeding poems in His Toy are as direct as a prose journal, as readable as poetry can be. This is a fulfillment, yet the 77 Songs may speak clearest, almost Johns whole truth. I misjudged them, and was rattled by their mannerisms. The poet himself, in an interview the same year, declared about his poetic intentions:
I dont know what I had in mind. In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet my model was The Waste Land, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is as unlike The Waste Land as it is possible for me to be. I think the model in The Dream Songs was the other greatest American poem I am very ambitious Song of Myself a very long poem, about sixty pages. It also has a hero, a personality, himself. Henry is accused of being me and I am accused of being Henry and I deny it and nobody

believes me. Various other things entered into it, but that is where I started.
In J. M. Linebargers interpretation (John Berryman), Dream Song 29 is about Henrys response to the death of the father, the funeral itself (the cough, odour, and chime), and Henrys hallucinations about killing others, and was quoted by the poet in 1965 to illustrate his technique, with the following comment: Whether the diction of that is consistent with blackface talk, heel-spinning puns, coarse jokes, whether the end of it is funny or frightening, or both, I put up to the listener. Neither of the American poets who as reviewers have quoted it admiringly has committed himself so I wont. The poem starts with a quite sentimental assertion of Henrys state, somehow counterbalanced by irony: There sat down, once, a thing on Henrys heart / s heavy, if he had a hundred years / & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Then, the things listed by J. M. Linebarger, which we can treat as allusions, or, if not, as an objective correlative a complex of objects with an obscure signification, nevertheless able to evoke an emotion. Further, a temporal parallel, between a hundred years, as individual, subjective time, and a thousand years, as historical time, overwhelmingly projected onto the individual one, with a sense of guilt: like a grave Sienese face a thousand years / would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. The bells in the end of the first stanza, with all their symbolic and intertextual meanings, can be taken literally too, in the allusive interpretation quoted above, as too late connects backwards to the temporal juxtaposition. The second stanza, not a murderous fantasizing, but moreover a reminiscence of the clownish ending of Tristan Tzaras Chanson dun dadaste, sums it up Nobody is ever missing can be seen as an imaginary gathering place of all, living and dead, real and imaginary; the pieces, in their turn, can
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 43 be dismembered thought, chunks of reality, to a certain extent modeled by poetic art, but present, unavoidably present. Abstract
In this chapter, confessional poetry, a term coined by critic M. L. Rosenthal, and referring to poetry exploring and making use of personal experience, of the poets own biography, is discussed. Three major representatives of this directions are presented, starting with Robert Lowell, who, with his Life Studies, started the tendency, followed by Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. Lowells concept of imaginative risk is employed to the analysis of the poets work, as well as their own confessions interviews, letters, public statements.
Questions
1. What is meant by confessional poetry? 2. How does the imaginative risk apply to the discussion of confessional poetry, and to poetry in general? 3. What is the relation between psychological suffering and poetry, as seen in confessional poetry?
Homework
1. Analyze a poem by Robert Lowell, and try to decide to what extent his experience (as a poet, as an American, as a man) could be familiar to us. 2. Write an essay about the admissibility of using ones own life as poetic material. Use arguments drawn from the poems in the anthology. 3. Analyze one of Sylvia Plaths poems, and discuss the relationship between personal suffering and that felt through empathy. 4. Discuss the tragicomical dimension of one of John Berrymans Dream Songs.
7. Beat Generation Poetry: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso

Objectives: Understanding the context of Beat Generation; getting familiarized with the new dimension of public address of the poem; perceiving the new rhetoric of the Beat poem.
The context of Beat poetry is that of a crisis, that of stagnation, the sensation that poetry doesnt anymore respond to the challenges of an anguished age. These are the hottest years of the cold war, the period of the Korean War, of the Cuban missiles crisis, of the preparation for the war in Vietnam, of antiCommunist hysteria, of senator McCarthys black lists, and also the advent of a generation which puts the idea of personal freedom above that of duty. The term itself is ambiguous, and can be explained in various ways, such as very tired (adjective), beaten, the musical meaning, the main pattern of sounds in a piece of music, or the strongest sounds in this pattern, or a single regular sound or a series of regular sounds, especially of two things hitting together, a unit of measurement for a piece of music (Macmillan English Dictionary), or associated with beatific, beatitude. As regards the musical associations, it must be said that the association between poetry and jazz, in poetic performances is something Beat poets have introduced. Ginsbergs beginnings are connected with Columbia University, in the 40s, having as colleagues Jack Kerouac (author of the novel On the Road, a cult-book of the Beat movement) and William S. Burroughs. Expelled, then readmitted, after various jobs, he graduates in 1948. He has
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 45 visions, associated with drugs, is interned in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets Carl Solomon (to whom Howl is dedicated), wanders through Cuba and Mexico, finally arriving in San Francisco, where he integrates in the citys effervescent artistic life; among the people he meets is poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights bookshop and publishing house, where most of the Beat poets will publish their books, among them Ginsberg himself. Considered as having ushered in a new generation (poet Richard Eberhart), Howl represents a revolution moreover through the violence of style, than through its theme (Serge Fauchereau). Analyzing it closely, its fortes, as well as its weaknesses are quite easy to detect today, after fifty years from its publication. Ginsberg, quoted by James E. B. Breslin, described his first book, Howl and Other Poems, as a series of experiments in what can be done with the long line since Whitman. In Breslins opinion,
In Howl itself Ginsberg stepped outside the formalism of the fifties, stepped away from even the modernism of Williams, and turned back to the then-obscure poet of Leaves of Grass, transforming Whitmans bardic celebrations of the visionary yet tender self into a prophetic chant that is angry, agonized, fearful, funny, mystic, and affectionate the prolonged and impassioned cry of Ginsbergs hidden self which had survived (From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965).
His enthusiasm is a bit displaced, in spite of the liberating effect that Ginsbergs poem had on them [contemporary poets] in the late fifties (James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965); his list of transgressions,
Not irony but prophetic vision; not a created persona but naked confession; not the autotelic poem but wrathful social protest; not the decorums

of high culture but the language and matter of the urban streets; not disciplined craftmanship but spontaneous utterance and indiscriminate inclusion (James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965)
can easily be dismantled both irony and prophetic vision are equally legitimate in poetry; artificial (created persona) and natural (quotes have their significance, because literature is anything but natural), naked confession are polar hypostases of literature, high culture and popular culture are not reciprocally exclusive, as is the case with spontaneity vs. craftsmanship. It is true, some literary periods value one set of features, others the other one, but it doesnt result from anywhere the superiority or inferiority of one of them. As regards literary / artistic revolutions, they are rarer than thought, thus the final remark in the respective paragraph, Howl violated all the current artistic canons and provoked a literary, social, and even legal scandal (James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965) contains probably more truth than it intended. We find verbal violence for its sake, similar to the way the avant-garde artists cultivated anti-art for anti-arts sake. It is not that life is not violent, but violence without art is sheer violence; after the shock has passed, nothing remains a proof is confessional poetry discussed in the previous chapter; Sylvia Plath, for instance, is a major poet not because she is violent, but because she artistically organizes violence. Values which can be acknowledged are Ginsbergs connection to Whitman, and a certain visionary force. But, again, why not prefer the original instead of a replica? Or, speaking of visionary poetry, why not Rimbaud, who did produce a poetical revolution? The thinking which underlies the poem (and the movement) is simple and nave: the old anarchist revolt against all institutions, from state and its authorities, to family and other
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 47 bourgeois values; denial, revolt, rebellion, generations conflict (where the young are always right, and the elder, always wrong) are quite normal in teenage years, but one finally grows up So, ever amplified repetition, oral character, direct address to the average man, a bit of obscenity, as part of the show, can constitute the recipe for a successful poem, for a period of time. A time which, unfortunately, has passed. A different case is with A Supermarket in California. Here, the tone is more tempered, there is a central idea, structuring the whole, and not the disarticulation of the intoxicated visions of Howl. Walt Whitman, a professed model of Ginsbergs poetry, is viewed as a symbol, as the mythical father, not just op American poetry this is secondary but of civic virtues:
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courageteacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
As regards the other poets of the group, they just add color to the painting; they present a historical interest, or occasionally, can be read in anthologies, fulfilling the condition of what T. S. Eliot called minor poetry. Abstract
In this final chapter, the social and literary context of the apparition of the Beat generation is analyzed, along with its rhetoric, as exemplified by Allen Ginsberg. Other important poets of the movement, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso are presented, with the nuances they bring to the main stream of this poetry.
Questions
1. What is your opinion about violence in art? 2. Which are the relationships between Beat poetry and avant-garde?

3. How does Allen Ginsberg relate to Walt Whitman?
Homework
1. Read the fragment from Howl in the anthology, evidencing its rhetoric, its use of violent language, and its relationship with Whitman. 2. Analyze A Supermarket in California and evidence the traces of Whitmans visionary poetry. 3. Write an essay about the quarrel between older and younger poetical generation, using as a starting point Corsos poem I Am 25. 4. Analyze a poem of your choice from Corso or Ferlinghetti, evidencing the similarities and dissimilarities between them.
Addendum: A Small Anthology

Edgar Allan Poe The Raven
One upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door Only this and nothing more. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow sorrow for the lost Lenore For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name LenoreNameless here forevermore. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; This it is and nothing more. Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, Sir, said I, or madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you here I opened wide the door; Darkness there and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, Lenore? This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, Lenore! Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. Surely, said I, surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery. explore; Tis the wind and nothing more!

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; 4. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou, I said, art Sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the nightly shore Tell me what thy lordly name is on the nights Plutonian shore! Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning-little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as Nevermore. But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered not a feather then he fluttered Till I scarcely more than muttered, Other friends have flown before On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before. Then the bird said, Nevermore. Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, Doubtless, said I, what it utters is its only stock and store Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore Of Never-nevermore. But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking Nevermore. This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosoms core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushions velvet lining that the lamplight gloated oer, But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamplight gloating oer, She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. Wretch, I cried, thy God hath lent thee-by these angels he hath sent thee Respite-respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore! Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.

Prophet! said I, thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil! Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted On this home by horror haunted tell me truly, I implore Is there is there balm in Gilead? tell me tell me, I implore! Quoth the Raven, Nevermore, Prophet! said I, thing of evil-prophet still, if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above us-by that God we both adore Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore, Quoth the Raven, Nevermore, Be that word our sign of parting, bird Or fiend! I shrieked, up starting Get thee back into the tempest and the nights Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demons that is dreaming, And the lamplight oer him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted nevermore! 6. 5.
Ulalume-A Ballad
The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere The leaves they were withering and sere: It was night, in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid-region of Weir It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Here once, through an alley titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my soul Of cypress with Psyche, my soul These were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the Pole That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the boreal Pole. Our talk had been serious and sober, But our thoughts they were palsied and sere Our memories were treacherous and sere;

For we knew not the month was October, And we marked not the night of the year (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) We noted not the dim lake of Auber (Though once we had journeyed down here) We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. And now, as the night was senescent And star dials pointed to morn As the star dials hinted of morn At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous luster was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn Astartes bediamonded crescent Distinct with its duplicate horn. And I said: She is warmer than Dian; She rolls through an ether of sighs She revels in a region of sighs. She has seen that the tears are not dry on These cheeks, where the worm never dies, And has come past the stars of the Lion, To point us the path to the skies To the Lethean peace of the skies Come up, in despite of the Lion, To shine on us with her bright eyes Come up through the lair of the Lion, With love in her luminous eyes. But Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said: Sadly this star I mistrust Her pallor I strangely mistrust: Ah, hasten! ah, let us not linger. Ah, fly! let us fly! for we must. In terror she spoke, letting sink her Wings till they trailed in the dust In agony sobbed, letting sink her Plumes till they trailed in the dust Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. I replied: This is nothing but dreaming: Let us on by this tremulous light! Let us bathe in this crystalline light! Its sibylic splendor is beaming With hope and in beauty tonight: See! it flickers up the sky through the night! Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming, And be sure it will lead us aright We surely may trust to a gleaming, That cannot but guide us aright, Since it flickers up to heaven through the night.

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom And conquered her scruples and gloom; And we passed to the end of the vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb By the door of a legended tomb; And I said: What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended tomb? She replied: Ulalume Ulalume! Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume! Then my heart it grew ashen and sober As the leaves that were crisped and sere As the leaves that were withering and sere; And I said: It was surely October On this very night of last year That I journeyed-I journeyed down here! That I brought a dread burden down here On this night of all nights in the year, Ah, what demon hath tempted me here? Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber This misty mid-region of Weir Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber, This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Said we, then the two, then: Ah, can it Have been that the woodlandish ghouls The pitiful, the merciful ghouls To bar up our way and to ban it From the secret that lies in these wolds From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds Have drawn up the specter of a planet From the limbo of lunary souls This sinful scintillant planet From the hell of the planetary souls?
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love I and my Annabel Lee With a love that the wingd seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulcher In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me: Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling And killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we Of many far wiser than we And neither the angels in heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the nighttide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In her sepulcher there by the sea In her tomb by the side of the sea.
Walt Whitman The Message of Great Poems

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto, the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in masses. Here is the hospitality which for ever indicates heroes. Here the performance, disdaining the trivial, unapproachd in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings, and the push of its perspective, spreads with cramples and flowing breadth, and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground, or the orchards drop apples, or the bays contain fish, or men beget children upon women. Other states indicate themselves in their deputies but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors, or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors but always most in the

common people, south, north, west, east, in all its States, through all its mighty amplitude. The largeness of the nation, however, were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not swarming states, nor streets and steamships, nor prosperous business, nor farms, nor capital, nor learning, may suffice for the ideal of man nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best authority the cheapest namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses of individuals or states, and of present action and grandeur, and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!) The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and all returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude of geography or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the sight and realization of full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple. The American poets are to enclose old and new, for America is the race of races. The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative, and has vista. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, the great poet never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach he stands, turning a concentrated light he turns the pivot with his finger he battles the swiftest runners as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelopes them. The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by steady faith. Faith is the antiseptic of the soul it pervades the common people and preserves them they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person, that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist. The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet, but seldom the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not what is wanted. The presence of the great poet conquers not parleying, or struggling, or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way, see after him! There is not left any vestige of despair, or misanthropy, or cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or color, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.
Song of Myself
1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back awhile sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 16
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same, A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deerskin leggings,a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, a Badger, Buckeye; At home on Canadian snowshoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of iceboats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians, comrade of Free Northwesterners, (loving their big proportions), Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 57 Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, Quaker, Prisoner, fancy man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist anything better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place. (The moth and the fish eggs are in their place, The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.) 24
Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index. I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. Through me many long dumb voices, 8. 7. Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves. Voices of the diseased and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deformed, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veiled and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured. I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from, The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the
58 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mold of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! Firm masculine colter it shan be you! Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you! You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of washed sweet flag! timorous pond snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mixed tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fiber of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you! Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you! Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you. I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish, Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be, A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. To behold the daybreak! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows, The air tastes good to my palate. Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding, Scooting obliquely high and low. Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs, Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven. The earth by the sky stayed with, the daily close of their junction, The heaved challenge from the east that moment over my head, 9. The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master! 52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds,
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 59 It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot sales. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Ezra Pound A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman I have detested you Iong enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It wasyou that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We ha ve one sap and one root Let there be commerce between us.
In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Alba
As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.
Fan-piece for her Imperial Lord

O fan of white silk, dear as frost on the grass-blade, You also are laid aside.
Canto 1
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us onward with bellying canvas Circes this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till days end. Sun to his slumber, shadows oer all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly deaths-heads; As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much; Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender, Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms, These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, creed to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze; Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine; Unsheathed the narrow sword I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since toils urged other. Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech: Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? Camst thou afoot, outstripping seamen? And he in heavy speech: Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circes ingle. Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against the buttress, Shattered the nape-nerve the soul sought Avernus.

But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied Heap up mine arm, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed: A man of no fortune, and with a name to come. And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows. And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: A second time? why? man of ill star, Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever For soothsay And I stepped back And he strong with the blood, said then: Odysseus Shalt return though spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Lose all companions. Then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outwards and away And unto Circe. Venerandam In the Cretans phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful oricalchi, with golden Girdle and break bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:
T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Sio credessi che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza pi scosse. Ma per ci che giamnai di questo fondo non toma vivo alcun, siodo il vero, senza tema dinfamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question Oh, do not ask, What is it? Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, Do I dare? and, Do I dare? Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair (They will say: How his hair is growing thin!) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin (They will say: But how his arms and legs are thin!) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all Have known theevenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, 10. When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin? Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep tired or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet and heres no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tell, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: 1 am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all. And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor And this, and so much more? It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous Almost, at times, the Fool. I grow old I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The Hollow Men

A penny for the Old Guy
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade, without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to deaths other Kingdom Remember us if at all not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 65 II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In deaths dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the winds singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. Let me be no nearer In deaths dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rats coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead mans hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this In deaths other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of deaths twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five oclock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Life is very long Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
A Sort of a Song
Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
The Poem
Its all in the sound. A song. Seldom a song. It shou1d be a song-made of particu1ars, wasps, a gentian-something immediate, open scissors, a ladys eyeswaking centrifugal, centripetal
Proletarian Portrait
A big young bareheaded woman in an apron Her hair slicked back standing on the street One stockinged foot toeing the sidewalk Her shoe in her hand. Looking intently into it She pulls out the paper insole to find the nail That has been hurting her
The Mind Hesitant

Sometimes the river becomes a river in the. mind or of the mind or in and of the mind Its banks snow the tide falling a dark rim lies between the water and the shore And the mind hesitant regarding the stream senses a likeness which it will find a complex image: something of white brows bound by a ribbon of sooty thought beyond, yes well beyond the mobile features of swiftly flowing waters, before the tide will change and rise again, maybe
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 Book I, Paterson

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automatons. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires unroused. Say it, no ideas but in things nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained secret into the body of the light! From above, higher than the spires, higher even than the office towers, from oozy fields abandoned to gray beds of dead grass, black sumac, withered weed-stalks, mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves the river comes pouring in above the city and crashes from the edge of the gorge in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists (What common language to unravel? ... combed into straight lines from that rafter of a rock's

lip.) A man like a city and a woman like a flower who are in love. Two women. Three women. Innumerable women, each like a flower. But only one man like a city.
Wallace Stevens Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
Disillusionment of Ten oclock

The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange,

With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
72 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry VI
Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow All indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.
At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.
20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 73 XII
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth, The human reverie or poem of death? Castratos of moon-mash Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Reverie is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began. Allow, Therefore, that in the planetary scene Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A birds cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow. It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleeps faded papier-mch The sun was coming from outside. That scrawny cry it was A chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.
Robert Lowell Sailing Home from Rapallo

(February 1954)
Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks .... When I embarked from Italy with my Mothers body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother travelled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleons at the Jnvalides.

While the passengers . were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyards soil was changing to stone so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook ,and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only unhistoric soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mothers relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge. In the grandiloquent lettering on Mothers coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil.
Skunk Hour
(For Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Islands hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her sons a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; shes in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victorias century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The seasons ill weve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an. L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnets filled with orange cork, orange, his cobblers bench and awl; there is no money in his work, hed rather marry, One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hills skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town My minds not right. A car radio bleats, Love, O careless Love I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat I myself. am hell; nobodys here only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.
To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage

It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours. Schopenhauer The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open. Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes, free-lancing out along the razor's edge. This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge. Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust... It's the injustice... he is so unjust whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. My only thought is how to keep alive. What makes him tick? Each night now I tie ten dollars and his car key to my thigh... Gored by the c1imacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant.
Man and Wife

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five day's white. All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye and dragged me home alive ... Oh my Petite, c1earest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve: you were in your twenties, and I, once hand on glass and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass, while the shrill verve of your invective scorched the traditional South. Now twelve years later, you turn your back. Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child, your old-fashioned tirade loving, rapid, merciless breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
John Berryman from The Dream Songs Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) Ever to confess youre bored means you have no Inner Resources. I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.
Dream Song 29
There sat down, once, a thing on Henrys heart s heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henrys ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobodys missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. 11. Nobody is ever missing.
Dream Song 75
Turning it over, considering, like a madman Henry put forth a book. No harm resulted from this. Neither the menstruating stars (nor man) was moved at once. Bare dogs drew closer for a second look and performed their friendly operations there. Refreshed, the bark rejoiced. Seasons went and came. Leaves fell, but only a few. Something remarkable about this unshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist thing made by savage & thoughtful surviving Henry began to strike the passers from despair so that sore on their shoulders old men hoisted

six-foot sons and polished women called small girls to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting tree!
Sylvia Plath Lady Lazarus

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify? The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot The big strip tease. Gentleman, ladies, These are my hands, My knees. I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say Ive a call. Its easy enough to do it in a cell. Its easy enough to do it and stay put. Its the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: A miracle! That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ashYou poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-

A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had timeMarble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, Im finally through. The black telephones off at the root, The voices just cant worm through. If Ive killed one man, Ive killed twoThe vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. Theres a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through.
Allen Ginsberg from Howl (For Carl Solomon) I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in. the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickfords floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzis, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newarks bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry

scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsmans loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of

these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountain-tops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and Horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliffbanks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borscht & . tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or

were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each others hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each others salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim States Rocklands and Greystones foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitudebench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now youre really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of Americas naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and fan owed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day

performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For hes the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who mayor may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence
Sometime during Eternity

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hep to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad And moreover he adds Its all writ down on some scroll-type parchments which some henchmen leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres a long time ago and which you wont even find for a coupla thousand years or so or at least for nineteen hundred and forty seven of them to be exact and even then

nobody really believes them or me for that matter Youre hot they tell him And they cool him They stretch him on the Tree to cool And everybody after that is always making models of this Tree with Him hung up and always crooning His name and calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat whos got to blow or they cant quite make it Only he dont come down from His Tree Him just hang there on His Tree looking real Petered out and real cool and also according to a roundup of late world news from the usual unreliable sources real dead
Gregory Corso I Am 25
With a love a madness for Shelley Chatterton Rimbaud and the needy-yap of my youth has gone from ear to ear: I HATE OLD POETMEN! Especially old poetmen who retract who consult other old poetmen who speak their youth in whispers, saying: I did those then but that was then that was then O I would quiet old men say to them: I am your friend what you once were, thru me youll be again Then at night in the confidence of their homes rip out their apology-tongues and steal their poems.
Dont Shoot the Warthog

A child came to me swinging an ocean on a stick. He told me his sister was dead, I pulled down his pants and gave him a kick. I drove him down the streets down the night of my generation I screamed his name, his cursed name, down the streets of my generation, and children lept in joy to the name and running came. Mothers and fathers bent their heads to hear; I screamed the name. The child trembled, fell, and staggered up again, I screamed his name! And a fury of mothers and fathers sank their teeth into his brain. I called to the angels of my generation on the rooftops, in the alleyways, beneath the garbage and the stones, I screamed the name! and they came and gnawed the childs bones. I screamed the name: Beauty Beauty Beauty Beauty

Opt. Engl. An III Sem. I Lit. Amer. - R. Bucur

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Aspects of 20 Century American Poetry

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1. 19th century roots: E. A. Poe and Walt Whitman

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6 __________________________ 20th Century American Poetry Homework

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2. Beginnings of the 20th century: Ezra Pound and Imagism

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8 __________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

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20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 11

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12 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

Alba, or Fan-piece for her Imperial Lord), evidencing the

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3. T. S. Eliots objective correlative

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20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 17

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22 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

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4. William Carlos Williams and no ideas but in things

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24 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

Williams writes about it, in his Autobiography:

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28 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

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5. Wallace Stevens and the supreme fiction

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20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 31

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20th Century American Poetry _________________________ 35 Questions

Christian Woman baroque?

books are theathres, using as material his poem, Of Modern

vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail

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6. Confessional poetry: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman

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38 _________________________ 20th Century American Poetry

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