Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/68823

Essay
What to Do About Poetry
The argument that keeps on giving.
By The Editors

In a recent article on the Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker lobs the latest volley in an ongoing intellectual debate. That is, who reads poetry, what does it mean to “understand” poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation's mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity. Artists should worry about making art, not about who's looking at it. A position similar to The New Yorker’s was put forth by August Kleinzahler in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, when he and Dana Gioia faced off over Garrison Keillor's populist anthology, Good Poems. More recently John Barr's article calling for a "new American poetry" that speaks to a broader audience fomented debate in the academic and creative writing world. And, in Christian Wiman's editorial in the December 2006 issue of Poetry, he argues that "if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently."

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

Read The New Yorker article>>

Read David Orr's article "Annals of Poetry" in the The New York Times Book Review>>


Read August Kleinzahler's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read Dana Gioia's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read John Barr's essay>>

Read Christian Wiman's editorial from the December 2006 issue of Poetry>>

Read Helen Vendler's "The Closet Reader">>

Read Robert Pinksy on "Poets Who Don't Like Poetry">>

Read Bill Knott on whether institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature>>

Read Adrienne Rich's "Poetry and Commitment">>

Read Jane Hirshfield on "Poetry Beyond the Classroom">>

Read Daniel Halpern and Langdon Hammer on William Logan's review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters>>

Read Jorie Graham's "Introduction to the Best American Poetry">>

Read D.W. Fenza on "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?">>

Originally Published: March 10th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/68888

Essay
[SIZE=5]Learning to Bear[/SIZE]
Composed just before a long period of poetic silence, “Zone” stands as one of Louise Bogan’s last great poems.
By Mary Kinzie
Introduction
Written in 1940, just before a long period of poetic silence, “Zone” is one of Louise Bogan’s last great poems. Poet Mary Kinzie takes a closer look at Bogan’s influences, and at Bogan’s moment of artistic—and personal—crisis.

The Irish-American writer Louise Bogan was, for nearly four decades beginning in 1930, one of the best-known and most powerful poets in this country. Her acuity, energy, balanced learning, and courage as a critic for The New Yorker were widely known, contributing further authority to a reputation founded on the exacting passion and eerie translucency of her poems. She established her name as an artist with two volumes of poetry in the 1920s, Body of This Death in 1923 and Dark Summer in 1929; her third volume, The Sleeping Fury, did not appear until 1937.

Much like Emily Dickinson, Bogan brought an intensity of her own to the lyric poem. But she diverged from her more prolific New England forebear in the variety of her poetic forms and voices. In her own time, when the lyric was already waning, Bogan invigorated the brief form by insisting on linguistic exactness, depth of dramatic embodiment, and a forthright and unflinching probing of the torments of jealousy and betrayal in love. In addition, she was at home in many modes of poetry, from meditation, description, and satire to imagism and song. Although her oeuvre was small, her reach was long.

A major influence was undoubtedly Yeats. Never as hieratic as he, Bogan nevertheless owed much to his model of the poet as the bulwark between the modern soul and the insidious materialism of the age. Yet Bogan was also uneasy with ideological politics, and so it is ironic that her model of a heroic poet was Yeats whose political engagement, to no small degree, defined him. In Bogan’s view, though, he stood above his own battles and his fallible allegiances: He had won out over them.

Her disdain for revolutionary regimes and the politics of parties stemmed from her uneasiness at their patent suspicion of artists: “the condescension of the political party toward the artist is always clear, however well disguised,” she wrote in 1939 in The Partisan Review, in a veritable fury that any revolutionary group would presume to grant or withhold liberation from imaginative artists. “The artist will be ‘given’ his freedom,” she mocked, “as though it were not the artist who ‘gives’ freedom to the world, and not only ‘gives’ it, but is the only person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs.”

Freedom and the artist’s ability to endure freedom, to pay its cost, and to give freedom to the world—I bring up these apparently sociological themes because they come near the suffering projected in poems such as “Zone.” However odd it may seem to speak of the poem’s worldly backgrounds, the ordeal portrayed here is borne by a sensibility for whom the private had a public reverberation.

Bogan’s temperament drove her to accept deprivations on both fronts; even the diction of bearing a burden moved both ways, from the psychological to the ethical. Metaphors of worldly hardship and struggle-against helped to channel the creative act. In a draft of the poem that became “To an Artist, to Take Heart,” she wrote that, however placid the deaths of Shakespeare and Milton, in life neither was “absolved from either the courage or the cowardice / With which they bore what they had to bear.” In the same vein, the speaker ends “Zone” bearing the rude touch of the wind, along with the other treacheries, disappointments, and importunities she and her companion “have learned how to bear”:

Zone

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef.
The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,
And these are of fear or grief.

Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes
Of the universe, in March.
Through one short segment’s arch
Of the zodiac’s round
We pass,
Thinking: Now we hear
What we heard last year,
And bear the wind’s rude touch
And its ugly sound
Equally with so much
We have learned how to bear.

Marianne Moore thought that Louise Bogan’s poem “Zone” owed some of its compactness to the plain-style imagism of William Carlos Williams. But Bogan’s experiments in dramatic compression seldom truly moved in his direction; in fact, she was beguiled by all the linguistic possibilities that Williams deliberately resisted—


the etymologies of words embedded in language (e.g., zone, or narrow belt, and strike, nautical term for taking soundings);
the metaphors linking pointedly diverging realms of experience and image (the nearness of the wind to words; the “ugly sound” that accompanies psychic shipwreck);
the novel yet sophisticated sound of the choice terms in the not-quite-colloquial order the poet chose for them (the adverbial phrase interrupting the sentence order in line 3, creating suspense; the nicely qualifying phrase “Equally with so much” in the penultimate line);
and, most important, the energy provided to language by the amplitudes and logic of syntax (so that even the brief declaration “We pass”—in its place—becomes a sustained and monumental act seen down a colonnade of precisely differentiated genitives: “Through one shore segment’s arch / Of the zodiac’s round”).


Consider, by contrast, a whole field of Queen Anne’s lace, “white desire, empty, a single stem, / a cluster, flower by flower, / a pious wish to whiteness gone over— / or nothing.” The impression made by the verse of Williams is of keenness moving aloft on the air passed through the words that he has liberated, even disowned. By contrast, the impression of a Bogan poem remains on the razor’s edge of feeling as, with an eye sharpened by a kind of delicacy, a damaged will looks on:

The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words. . . .

In “Zone,” the will has been damaged by inexorability and by mindless repetition. The couple are violently bound toward wrack, regardless of which one of them plays the role of jagged reef and which that of the doomed vessel that steers toward it. The zone of the poem’s central metaphor is also a place of violence, an area of danger into which the two people have been driven by forces they cannot control, at a latitude where seas are particularly violent, in March, in the time of the vernal equinox.

Not only are the winds of March proverbial, they are widely believed to produce what are called “equinoctial gales” at sea along the path of the zodiac (whose narrow zone, or sash, encircles the earth along the apparent annual path of the sun). Although the persons in Louise Bogan’s poem have entered a region of seasonal disturbance that is recurrent, the poem points beyond nature to emotional revisitings that are yet more indelibly severe. Weight of feeling gathers and presses down with a familiar, almost physical relentlessness . . . familiar, but perhaps a little irksome too, as if irritability were the other face of despair. (1) Both features emerge in Bogan’s 1962 comment that it was “in a transitional period” in the late 1930s, “both of my outer circumstances and my central beliefs,” that she composed “Zone,”

a poem which derives directly from emotional crisis, as, I feel, a lyric must. And I think that the poem’s imagery manages to express in concrete terms (the concrete terms which poetry demands), some reflection of the relentless universal laws under which we live—which we must not only accept but in some manner forgive—as well as the fact of the human courage and faith necessary to that acceptance.


Odd that Bogan should speak of the need not only to accept the burden of “relentless universal laws” but even to forgive them. If these were like other “laws”—axioms in science or a set of rules in a republic—the attitude of forgiveness would be most peculiar. But in “Zone” (as in a somewhat earlier poem, “At a Party”), Bogan is summoning the imagery of the planets and the zodiac to represent the laws that propel us toward interpersonal mismatches:

Over our heads, if we but knew,
Over our senses, as they reel,
The planets tread, great seven, great two
Venus, Uranus, in a wheel.
(“At a Party,” The Sleeping Fury, 1937)



Astrology would have it that these “great two” planets—Uranus, visible mid-month to the upper right side of the much smaller Venus, whose light is far brighter because closer to the earth—combine with effects of savage appetite, willfulness, and destruction. Whereas alone Uranus projects a strong individuality, and Venus effects of harmony (“Brief planet,” Bogan had called her in the 1935 poem “Evening-Star,” “shining without burning”), together these planets entice one toward explosive frictions, a manic social round, sudden attractions, and illicit broken love affairs. (2)

“Zone” emerges at the end of a period in Bogan’s life defined by loss and isolation. Since late 1933 she had been separated from her second husband, Raymond Holden (their divorce became final in 1937). Her mother, against whom Bogan had mightily struggled (until the daughter’s struggle carried over into other confrontations that similarly resulted in renunciation), died in 1936, impoverished, with Louise “unable to [afford to] provide her mother with private care” (as her biographer Elizabeth Frank points out).

Then, yet more crushing, it seemed that Bogan’s poetic gift was being withdrawn. In the period from 1936 to 1940, during which she spent great efforts on her literary journalism, she wrote fewer and fewer poems, completing “Zone” in March 1940, making it one of the last poems she wrote before she was overtaken by a dry period that lasted from 1941 to 1948. Even after that silence was broken, Bogan produced, during the final 20 years of her life, no more than a handful of poems—and none with the same mixture of tranquil eloquence, resignation, and distress.

* * *


(1) As Bogan suggests in a short poem whose speaker chafes against the task of speaking to those who are not thoughtful, and who bear little hardship; the “It” is the daemon that lashes her to begin again:

Must I speak to the lot
Who little bore?
It said Why not?
It said, Once more.
(“The Daemon,” Poems and New Poems, 1941)




(2) In her greatest sonnet, also from 1935, the time of her affair with Theodore Roethke, Bogan commands herself to “Take up the burden” (as in a theme or refrain traditional for this kind of song), a word punningly allied to the theme of crushing weight (the Latin pondus): “No stone, slate, metal under or above / Earth is so ponderous, so dull, so cold.” Then comes the third quatrain, with its paradox of erotic force applied without movement, and the diction of bearing this weight to the breaking point:

Too long as ocean bed bears up the ocean,
As earth’s core bears the earth, have I borne this;
Too long have lovers, bending for their kiss,
Felt bitter force cohering without motion.
(“Single Sonnet,” The Sleeping Fury, 1937)

Originally Published: June 18th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/68629

Essay
How Words Fail
Does language reflect the world? Or is it a distorting mirror that never gets reality straight?
By Cathy Park Hong
Introduction

In a response to Adrian Blevins’ article “In Praise of the Sentence,” Cathy Park Hong debates Blevins’ notion that syntax reflects the psyche of the writer. “The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression,” writes Hong, “It can prove to be a difficult transaction.”

I always felt an anxiety about language, an anxiety that grew more pronounced when I began writing poetry. I rationalized this anxiety by rolling out the immigrant truisms. Growing up, I had to negotiate the yawning gap between speaking Korean at home and battling it out in the schoolyard with my faltering English (for a while, my flimsy arsenal was “You shut up!” for every imaginative invective hurled at me). I thought the English language was a tricky, trap-filled activity I had to somehow master like squash or table tennis. Nabokov once called English “an artificial, stiffish thing” and wrote, “If Russian was his music, English was his murder”; yet he wrote some of the most exquisite prose in the English language. I am no persecuted exile, however, but a pampered second-generation American whose childhood difficulties with English nonetheless left their indelible mark.

When professors first introduced the craft of poetry to me, I felt like Leonard Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon-man, who appropriated the behavior of whomever was around him. “Write about your family experience! Write about what is true to you,” one dramatic poetry professor told me in his office, and then gave me poems by Asian American poets who sounded exactly like Sharon Olds. I tried to compose clear, confessional gems but thought of them as interesting exercises in imitation. When the professor looked at them, he told me I was beginning to find a voice. “Whose voice?” I asked. “Yours!” he announced, and the meeting was over.

“Finding your voice” is a familiar workshop trope, one that assumes poetry is an expression of an authentic self. I was asked to write in natural, plainspoken speech (none of which felt natural or plain to me), and this teacher mistook the result as me. He embraced the principle that a poem represents a person who is a unified whole, and that the syntax of the poem is a window to the person’s, or writer’s, mind. The professor’s assumptions proved only that I was a damn good mimic.

My teacher’s concept of “the voice” is shared by many poets, including Adrian Blevins, who wrote an essay about the music of sentences for PoetryFoundation.org. She opines that the sentence structure of a poem gives us a clear diagnosis of the poet’s mind. In her reading of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” she writes, “The ungrammatical . . . excerpt produces the emotional effects of an anxious or scattered psyche.” She sees a direct correlation between Berryman’s progressively unraveling mind and his unraveling syntax, concluding, “It’s interesting to note that Berryman began playing with syntax as a young man, when he was still, as far as anyone can determine, happy enough. As his life becomes more and more pressured . . . he becomes more and more serious and seems to lose, as a result, the sense of daring syntactical play. . . . It is therefore possible to speculate that Berryman’s suicide was at least partly the result of a loss of his syntactical distinctiveness.”

Blevins believes in a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state and the author’s syntactical choices, asserting that Berryman’s “loss of syntactical distinctiveness” helped lead to his own suicide. If we are to follow this logic, how to explain Hart Crane, who offed himself yet wrote poetry that is syntactically distinct? Or Sylvia Plath, who was at the top of her syntactic game when she shoved her head in the oven? Or that many poets today are happy on antidepressants yet write syntactically dull poetry? Blevins also observes that the sentences of Gertrude Stein and certain “post-post-post-postmodernists” are “stark raving mad,” implying that the poets must obviously be bonkers.

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.

The repetition in “Psalm” creates a propulsive cadence. The poem begins with a negation of Genesis. The recurrence of “No one,” a reference to God (or his absence), creates a tonally hammering antiprayer as it denies Creation. “Blessed art thou” is negated by the thudding absence of “No one.” “No one” becomes “Nothing” and then returns as “No-One’s Rose.” The song, driven by absence, ends somewhat redemptively, as the flowering song or the word sings “over” the imagery of suffering, Christ’s thorn. Yet the singing is also fractured—the invocatory “O” in the line “Over, O over” is a hesitant break in cadence. Driven by spiritual necessity, the music of Celan’s poetry is both brutal and brutalized.

Like Celan, the poet John Taggart entwines the music of his linguistic experiments with a deep spiritual sensibility. Son of a Methodist clergyman, Taggart was born in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1942 and spent most of his childhood within the church culture. He equates “poem as gospel service,” positing that poetry should have a spiritual power that can be wrought from its own music. But Taggart is no traditional lyricist. His “voice” is not a stand-in for the self. His ultimate goal is to turn the poem into what he calls a “sound object,” where words cease to be metaphor and become part and parcel a compositional score.

Deeply influenced by the experimental music composer and writer John Cage and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Taggart incants through the “silence of the gaps” that surround the unadorned word. His words are mortarless, often unbound by clauses or punctuation. Rather than isolated poems, Taggart composes poetic variations that are circular, repetitive, and serial. In fact, his largest collection of poems, Loop,is aptly titled since his poetry obsessively returns to a set of nouns in different arrangements, as if each poem is a remix of the previous one. “Nativity,” for instance, scrolls down as if it were enacting a feverish sermon:

If you kneel
sender will teach
will teach you
here’s a sender
no bright harness
still a sender
if you kneel
will teach you
teach the shout.

But Taggart does not completely abandon content. Like Celan’s work, Taggart’s poetry can be read within a cultural-political context. Here is an excerpt from “Twenty-one Times,” Taggart’s most explicit poem about Vietnam and his own version of Wallace Stevens’s“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

4
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
The word breaks through partitions and outer-walls
Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

5
Napalm: the heart rubbed and smeared with soap
The young heart is soiled with fire
Soap cannot cleanse the soiling of the fire.

6
Napalm: why the child caught on fire
The itching as of creatures for possession of words
Glitter for self and nation.

The repeated incantation “napalm” is an attempt at exorcism, as if to cleanse the horrors associated with napalm. But despite the attempt to “wash” it out, the word grows cancerously: “Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.” As in many of Taggart’s other poems, the nouns in “Twenty-one Times” are reshuffled, and each time a noun is reintroduced, its associations become progressively menacing: “the young heart is soiled with fire” leads to “why the child caught on fire.” As the poem’s inexorable momentum builds to a frightening pitch, “napalm” as a word metastasizes inside the mouth, until poem’s end: “Napalm: speak and the word glows and plays / speak and suffer torment for love / because of you no one will have to write the word down.”

Celan and Taggart have created a distinctly haunting and astonishing music through solecisms and hesitations, through the broken sentence. For them, the disassociation of voice from language is not just a philosophical choice. It is also political. The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression. It can prove to be a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much conflicted demurral as actual communication, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

Originally Published: July 31st, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu...says/poet.html

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series [1844]

The Poet

Web Study Text by Ellen Moore, 1999
and Ann Woodlief, 2002, Virginia Commonwealth University

A moody child Note and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;Note
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.Note

Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.Note But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous factNote: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty,Note to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative.Note He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.Note

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter;Note but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.Note Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children,Note born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit. and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.Note He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.

For poetry was all written before time was,Note and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.Note

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and utterer of the necessary and casual. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet.Note I took part in a conversation the other day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a Iyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.Note The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all was changed,--man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome,--what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have arrived so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal even in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration!Note And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount about these clouds and opaque airs in which I live,--opaque, though they seem transparent,--and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday; then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost some faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.Note

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language.Note Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenter' s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:--

"So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight
For, of the soul, the body form doth take.
For soul is form, and doth the body make."'

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externization of the soul.Note Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus,"exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the un- apparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol.Note Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities.Note When you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs.Note In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the huge wooden ball rolled by successive ardent crowds from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship.' Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!Note

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.Note We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,--and re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,-- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts.Note Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,--and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,--yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems, but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the thought's independence of the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform- that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy,--sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth--are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker,Note naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.Note The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind.Note Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, -- a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms.Note I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated.Note As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, -- him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.Note

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.Note The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.Note

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration.Note All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up,Note and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.Note That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him.Note His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men.Note We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; -- or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes,

--
"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;"


when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; -- we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods.Note The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, -- you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.Note

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.

There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.Note We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials,Note and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets.Definition These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.Note The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, "By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, 'That is yours, this is mine;' but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist.Note Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only.Note Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty,Note plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

I found this article to be very, very interesting.. A lot of truth in this but one must separate the wheat from the chaff.
For as always the hand of the dark lord taints all that is in his power to do so.. Casting shadows into LIGHT.

A true poet writes to give, if for any other cause, then he or she, has not the TRUE heart of a poet, IMHO.
A true poet writes only truth from a light within his/her heart.
Writes about the good and the bad... For each serves a purpose...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/res...s/detail/69475

Essay on Poetic Theory
Invisible Architecture (2000)
By Barbara Guest
Introduction

Barbara Guest was a central figure in the New York School of poets. Her early career as an art critic prefaced her structural awareness of language throughout her career as a poet. While some critics classify her work as abstract lyric, Guest told Mark Hillringhouse in an interview for the American Poetry Review, “My poems tend more to language than ideas.” Indeed, her poetry often simultaneously inhabits both a musical and a visual field.

A restless explorer of borders and margins, Guest, in her short poetics statement “Invisible Architecture,” engages the productive tension between the “desire of the poet to control” and that “something within poetry that desires the invisible.” In form, Guest’s piece shifts over its course from poetry to prose, which has the effect of both illustrating and enacting the poet’s work. She initially uses gaps and syntactical breaks to show the uncertain process of beginning a composition, and to trace the fragile starts of new work. She begins, “There is an invisible architecture often supporting / the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem,” and she locates this architecture “in the period before the poem finds an exact form and vocabulary.”

According to Guest, the poem breaks free of this architecture as it grows surer, as one might from a scaffold or a mold. At this point in her piece, Guest shifts from poetry to prose, allowing the uninterrupted breath of her sentences to illustrate the calming and building of thought. She traces the balance sought between a poem’s surface and its unconscious, and between its stability and fluidity, though she notes that there are necessarily undefined elements of the poem’s progress. In conclusion, Guest wonders, “By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed.”

“Invisible Architecture” was published in Guest’s prose collection Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (2002). She died in 2006.

There is an invisible architecture often supporting
the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reaches
into the poem
in search for an identity with the poem,

its object is to possess the poem for a brief time, even as an apparition appears. An invisible architecture upholds the poem while allowing a moment of relaxation for the unconscious. A period of emotional suggestion,
of lapse,
of reliance on the conscious substitute words pushed toward the bridge of the architecture. An architecture in the period before the poem finds an exact form and vocabulary—,

before the visible appearance of the poem on the page and the invisible approach to its composition. Reaching out to develop the poem there are interruptions, some apparently for no reason—something else is happening the poet has no control—the poem begins to quiver, to hesitate, to become insubstantial the desire of poetry to elevate itself, to become stronger. The poem is fragile. It needs to reach through the armed vehicle of the poem,

to loosen the armed hand.

Losing the arrogance of dominion over the poem to an invisible hand, the poet campaigns for a passage over which the poet has control. Yet the unstableness of the poem is important.
Also the frequent lapses of control of the poem.
The writer only slowly retains power over the poem, physical power, when the poem breaks away from the authority of the invisible architecture.

This invisible authority may be the unconscious that dwells on the lower level, in a substratum beneath the surface of the poem and possesses its own reference. A fluidity only enters the poem when it becomes more openly aware of itself.

By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed. The Surrealists taught us to wander freely on the page, releasing mechanical birds, if we so desire, to nest in the invisible handwriting of composition. There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible.

The desire of the poet to control. This control was earlier destructive to the interior of the poem, to its infrastructure. There is something deliberate about this practice of control by the conscious. It includes the question that is undefined, the behavior of the poem. By whom or by what agency is this decided, by what invisible architecture is the poem developed?

Originally Published: February 15th, 2010

Biography

Barbara Guest rose to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of an informal group of writers known as the New York school of poets whose membership included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler. Their innovative approach to poetry was influenced by modern art, especially surrealism and abstract..

The desire of the poet to control. This control was earlier destructive to the interior of the poem, to its infrastructure. There is something deliberate about this practice of control by the conscious. It includes the question that is undefined, the behavior of the poem. By whom or by what agency is this decided, by what invisible architecture is the poem developed?

I am not sure if control is the prime in this analysis. Certainly true poets want to control their message delivered in their poetry...
Yet each must yield to their heart first(!), if sincere, and enslaved in their addiction..
For a true poet, even if loathe to admit it, is a slave to that addiction be it good or bad...
At times I dearly hate it, but far more often find it a great, great treasure...----Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://hammeringshield.wordpress.co...ned-awareness/

Hammering Shield
The Collected Essays



Hesse On Living A Life Of Heightened Awareness
February 12, 2014 ~ Hammering Shield


Once a turtle sticks his head out from the comfy confines of his shell, he has, most fundamentally, two choices… To stay out… or to duck back in. It’s more frightening and truly more dangerous outside the shell, but it’s also more exciting, and– if our turtle is a philosophical one– he may desire to know the more fully filled-in Truths he can gather from a vantage point outside his shell.

Similar to the turtle, once the human child (of whatever age) begins to come out from under the illusions in which society has wrapped him, he has two choices– remain in the relative comfort of the second-hand illusions or keep moving forward toward a greater, more painful, and yet also more delightful enlightenment.

Hermann Hesse, poet-novelist, encourages the more full-sighted approach. It saddens him to see that, as the youthful Hesse says in his essay On Little Joys (1905), “great masses of people these days live out their lives ina dull and loveless stupor.” They shuffle through their gray days to their gray jobs with their black and white values and their red little appetites.

Hesse wants us to break outside the coloring-book lines of the simplified and distorted worldview we are handed during childhood. He wants us to open our eyes wide and took a good look– absorb the world, plunge in all the way up to our elbows. This is the poetic frame of mind, and as with so many artistic things in life, it seems that the first step in the creation of the new is the destruction of the old. We have to UNSEE the world as it has been painted for us, only then do we have a chance at seeing what is really going on. Hesse writes in Variations On A Theme By Wilhelm Schafer of the poet possessing “this mood, this willingness of the soul NOT to recognize the familiar world.”

Hesse speaks openly about the dangers of seeking a heightened awareness of reality. It may not even be a healthy thing to do. The creature of heightened awareness, says Hesse in his essay on the BrothersKaramazov, is “an invalid of the sort who has lost the healthy, sound, beneficent instinct of self-preservation which is the essence of all middle class.” The person of heightened awareness (and like others before and after him, Hesse uses interchangeably terms such as “Prophet” and “Artist” and “Seer” and “Poet”)– this person serves as what Hesse calls an “antenna” for the dull and stupified masses. Such a person is “especially sensitive, noble, vulnerable” with “a prophetic sense of touch.” Hesse believes that, for the majority of people, the faculty which enables the life of heightened awareness “has remained vestigial”— and with good evolutionary reason… most people are happier and healthier without it.

Re-activating the vestigial faculty of heightened awareness takes, like any conditioning exercises, steady application and a commitment of time. Then, states Hesse in On Little Joys (1905)…

“Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights, to contemplate nature and city streets, to appreciate the inexhaustable fun of daily life. From their to the fully trained artistic eye is the smaller half of the journey. The principle thing is the beginning, the opening of the eyes.”

Hesse goes on to speak of “the ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life,” going so far as to say that it leads to “the conception of life as a happy thing, as a festival.”

This does NOT mean we should go off a Rimbaudian tear of deranging all the senses and exploding in a short, firework-burst of narcissistic, nihilistic debauchery. In fact, quite the opposite. After a person has developed a high level of awareness– less is more. A flower does not need to do a song and dance to be enjoyed by a person who can completely Be Here Now. For the man fully “in the moment,” a side-walk cafe can be as stimulating as the Grand Canyon. When it comes to the fully awake individual, says Hesse, “moderate enjoyment is double enjoyment.” I think included in what Hesse means by this is the fact that after moderate enjoyments, there are no hang-overs, no regrets, no painful consequences– all the negative after-effects of pleasure so routinely suffered by the undisciplined, unenlightened, semi-sighted over-indulgers of the world. No truly wise man has ever been a binge-er.

Hesse suggests, as a run-through of this new approach to life– we should stop playin’ the bloody tourist (I paraphrase). He uses the example of the museum visit. The typical bourgeois would run through the entire exhibition, attempting to see as much as possible during the time scheduled to “do” the museum. Relax, counsels Hesse. Try instead to spend “an hour or more in front of a single masterpiece.” In Concerning The Soul (1917), Hesse remarks that “contemplation is not scrutiny or criticism, it is nothing but love”-– and an “undemanding love” at that.

Hesse disparages the “aggressive haste” that undervalues every moment precisely by overvaluing it. “The idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living,” says Hesse, “is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” For some people the job of having fun is “hardly less irritating and nerve-racking than the pressure of our work.”

The irony of it all for Hesse is that– in a world of increasing leisure time and ever more technologies dedicated to pleasure and diversion– “there is more and more entertainment and less and less joy.”

I’d like to end today’s post with an example of Hesse’s prose, wherein I think he exhibits that sort of calm, poet’s contemplation of the world. The following is from the essay At Year’s End, written in 1904 when Hesse was still a young man, but sounding very much like an old sage…

“A brief hour ago I was out on the hills looking at the clouds. Each one drifted past, or strode or swam or danced by like a miracle, like a word or a song or a jest or a solace from the lips of God, and pressed on eagerly into the distance, cradled in the cool pale blue, and it was beautiful and sang more enchantingly than any songs printed in books.”

More Posts from Hammering Shield On Hermann Hesse:

Hesse On the Decline Of The West

Hesse On Clear Contemplation And The Cloudy Mirror Of Desire

Hesse On Critics: The Good, The Bad, And The Actually Helpful

Hesse On Facing The Abyss Within

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/70071

Essay
A Little Society
From the Brontës to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, literary siblings challenge assumptions of lonely genius.
By Casey N. Cep
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti

For years, a tiny pub on the road between the English villages of Haworth and Keighley has been home to a peculiar rumor. The Cross Roads Inn was one of Branwell Brontë’s favorite haunts. It was at the Cross Roads that two of Branwell’s friends claim he read from a manuscript that featured the characters who would later appear in the novel Wuthering Heights.

Despite Charlotte Brontë’s insistence that her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, the rumor that their brother Branwell penned the novel has persisted. In their various biographies, Juliet Barker, Daphne du Maurier, Lucasta Miller, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford all considered the possibility that Branwell was the true author of Wuthering Heights. Barker claimed to have identified a story of Branwell’s that influenced the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; du Maurier pointed to poems written by Emily and Branwell as evidence of an early collaboration between the two that could have blossomed into Wuthering Heights.

The persistence of the rumor reflects the curious, cloistered upbringing of the Brontës, but also the more universal experience of siblings. Collaboration and competition between brothers and sisters exists no matter their vocations, but literary siblings challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks. Patrick Brontë, father to the four artists, who raised them himself after their mother died, wrote: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society, in their retired country situation, they formed a little society amongst themselves—with which they seem’d content and happy.”

“A little society” is the perfect description of siblings. Brothers and sisters have long encouraged one another’s literary careers: letters and drafts change hands; carefully chosen words of praise and criticism pass between lips; scraps of paper, coveted notebooks, and particular pens move between writing desks.

The Brontës—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—were all prolific writers as children. When Charlotte was ten and Branwell was nine, they began to write plays set in the fictional world of Glass Town. When Emily and Anne were old enough to contribute, Glass Town grew into the separate kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Together, the four children filled miniature books and tiny magazines with poetry and stories.

Their juvenilia reveal young artists finding their voices, but also their audience. Writing first for one another, they learned how to write for others. When the sisters finally published a book in 1846, it was a collection of poems. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold poorly, and the sisters redirected their efforts to fiction. Emily and Anne continued writing poetry privately, but Charlotte would write poems again only to mark the deaths of her siblings.

“On the Death of Anne Brontë” is one of Charlotte’s most sorrowful poems. “There’s little joy in life for me,” it begins. From the first stanza (“I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save”) to the last (“And now, benighted, tempest-tossed, / Must bear alone the weary strife”), she laments her sister’s death and her fresh solitude. She outlived all of her siblings: Branwell and Emily died in 1848; Anne followed them to the grave less than a year later. Charlotte would be their literary executor after their deaths just as she had been their literary champion in life.

That same closeness characterized the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.”

Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” While the poem celebrates “the bliss of solitude,” the poet himself rambled through the Lake District with his sister. In one of her own poems, “Floating Island,” Dorothy wrote that “the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground.” She might very well have been thinking of the way her own writing nurtured her brothers.

The collaboration between siblings is not always so indirect. Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored several collections of poetry and prose for children. Long before he had established his reputation as an essayist and a critic, Charles collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), and Poetry for Children (1809).

Mary, who suffered from mental illness, wrote poetry and stories almost constantly when fueled by her mania; Charles, not without his own struggles, suffered from depression and alcoholism, both of which led to severe writer’s block. Brother and sister were linked not only in illness but in tragedy. Mary came to live with Charles after murdering their mother in a psychotic episode. Although Mary was 31 and Charles was only 21, he became her legal guardian and refused to have her committed. They lived together for 40 years, until Charles died.

Well known in literary circles, Charles and Mary were forever linked to one another. It was Thomas Carlyle who called the siblings “a very sorry pair of phenomena,” but everyone from Keats to Coleridge to Wordsworth enjoyed their company. While they hosted many of London’s literati, their deepest friendship, their strongest relationship, was with one another. It was brother and sister who saw one another through madness and depression, frustration and addiction. “You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both,” Mary wrote in 1805, “to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces, & saying how do you do? & how do you do? & then we fall a crying & say we will be better on the morrow.”

Unlike the Lambs and the Wordsworths, pairs of siblings in which the brother’s reputation far exceeded the sister’s, one Victorian family produced a daughter whose fame has outlasted that of her brother. Christina Rossetti is considered one of the greatest Victorian poets, while her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti is remembered more for his status as sibling than painter or poet.

Born to an accomplished poet and Dante scholar, Christina and her brother were the “two storms” in a family of four children whose other dyad was known as the “two calms.” All four of the Rossetti children had accomplished careers as writers and critics, encouraged by a childhood filled with arts and letters. As teenagers, they played rounds of bouts-rimés, racing against one another to write sonnets with specified forms and rhymes; Christina was the youngest, but is said to have excelled most at the game.

While Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to surround himself with other artists, Christina found support from the Portfolio Society, a group of female poets. Despite their esteemed position in literary society, they remained each other’s best critics. Exchanging letters almost daily for years, they critiqued one another’s work, suggested new topics and themes, and helped to organize poems into volumes for publication.

Private disagreements, including Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that certain topics are unsuitable for female writers and Christina’s increasing unwillingness to accept her brother’s revisions, did not keep them from championing one another’s work in public. And while Christina’s most remarkable poem, Goblin Market, testifies to the love between sisters (“For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather”), it was her brother Dante Gabriel whose illustrations accompanied its publication. And like Branwell Brontë, who painted a famous portrait of his sisters, Dante Gabriel produced iconic images of Christina.

Tellingly, Branwell’s painting of his sisters, the only surviving group portrait, originally included his likeness: the blurred pillar between Emily and Charlotte was once Branwell. As the oil paint fades, the canvas is slowly revealing Branwell’s figure. Brothers and sisters are not always at peace, and posterity plays favorites. Branwell is as spectral a figure in the portrait as he is in the pages of literary history. The competition for prizes, publication, and readers in life often continues posthumously, and not all siblings are peaceable partners in literary creation.

Where there is ink, there is envy. Literary siblings are certainly not exempt from the rivalries that animate other families. One sibling’s success fuels another sibling’s writing with jealousy and ambition or thwarts the other sibling’s efforts entirely; the connections of one sibling to the literary establishment facilitate another sibling’s career or, less ceremoniously, earn the lesser sibling a footnote in literary history as simply that, a biological relation.

Literary siblings are not only a thing of the past. Contemporary poetry is home to at least two of these little societies: Matthew and Michael Dickman are twin brothers who edit one another’s poetry and share a publisher; Fanny and Susan Howe are sisters whose poetic careers span decades. While many artists long to be orphans, free of family and obligation, some poets find strength in their siblings. The complicated dynamics of these little societies are fascinating and fraught. Collaborating on juvenilia, editing one another’s drafts, supporting one another through depression and doubt, championing each other’s work: these little societies sustain one another in ways only siblings could.

Originally Published: October 22nd, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/t...ohn_donne-1640

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The Life and Works of John Donne
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

DONNE, JOHN (1573-1631), English poet and divine of the reign of James I., was born in 1573 in the parish of St Nicholas Olave, in the city of London. His father was a wealthy merchant, who next year became warden of the Company of Ironmongers, but died early in 1576. Donne’s parents were Catholics, and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was directly descended from the sister of the great Sir Thomas More; she was the daughter of John Heywood the epigrammatist. As a child, Donne’s precocity was such that it was said of him that “this age hath brought forth another Pico della Mirandola.” He entered Hart Hall, Oxford, in October 1584, and left it in 1587, proceeding for a time to Cambridge, where he took his degree. At Oxford he began his friendship with Henry Wotton, and at Cambridge, probably, with Christopher Brooke. Donne was “removed to London” about 1590, and in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s Inn with the intention of studying the law.

When he came of age, he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, and about the same time rejected the Catholic doctrine in favour of the Anglican communion. He began to produce Satires, which were not printed, but eagerly passed from hand to hand; the first three are known to belong to 1593, the fourth to 1594, while the other three are probably some years later. In 1596 Donne engaged himself for foreign service under the earl of Essex, and “waited upon his lordship” on board the “Repulse,” in the magnificent victory of the 11th of June. We possess several poems written by Donne during this expedition, and during the Islands Voyage of 1597, in which he accompanied Essex to the Azores. According to Walton, Donne spent some time in Italy and Spain, and intended to proceed to Palestine, “but at his being in the farthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of returns of money into those remote parts, denied him that happiness.” There is some reason to suppose that he was on the continent at intervals between 1595 and the winter of 1597. His lyrical poetry was mainly the product of his exile, if we are to believe Ben Jonson, who told Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne “wrote all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old.” At his return to England he became private secretary in London to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper (afterwards Lord Brackley), in whose family he remained four years. In 1600 he found himself in love with his master’s niece, Anne More, whom he married secretly in December 1601. As soon as this act was discovered, Donne was dismissed, and then thrown into the Fleet prison (February 1602), from which he was soon released. His circumstances, however, were now very much straitened. His own fortune had all been spent and “troubles did still multiply upon him.” Mrs Donne’s cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, offered the young couple an asylum at his country house of Pyrford, where they resided until the end of 1604.

During the latter part of his residence in Sir Thomas Egerton’s house, Donne had composed the longest of his existing poems, The Progress of the Soul, not published until 1633. In the spring of 1605 we find the Donnes living at Camberwell, and a little later in a small house at Mitcham. He had by this time “acquired such a perfection” in civil and common law that he was able to take up professional work, and he now acted as a helper to Thomas Morton in his controversies with the Catholics. Donne is believed to have had a considerable share in writing the pamphlets against the papists which Morton issued between 1604 and 1607. In the latter year, Morton offered the poet certain preferment in the Church, if he would only consent to take holy orders. Donne, however, although he was at this time become deeply serious on religious matters, did not think himself fitted for the clerical life. In 1607 he started a correspondence with Mrs Magdalen Herbert of Montgomery Castle, the mother of George Herbert. Some of these pious epistles were printed by Izaak Walton. These exercises were not of a nature to add to his income, which was extremely small. His uncomfortable little house he speaks of as his “hospital” and his “prison;” his wife’s health was broken and he was bowed down by the number of his children, who often lacked even clothes and food. In the autumn of 1608, however, his father-in-law, Sir George More, became reconciled with them, and agreed to make them a generous allowance. Donne soon after formed part of the brilliant assemblage which Lucy, countess of Bradford, gathered around her at Twickenham; we possess several of the verse epistles he addressed to this lady. In 1609 Donne was engaged in composing his great controversial prose treatise, the Pseudo-Martyr, printed in 1610; this was an attempt to convince Roman Catholics in England that they might, without any inconsistency, take the oath of allegiance to James I. In 1611 Donne wrote a curious and bitter prose squib against the Jesuits, entitledIgnatius his Conclave. To the same period, but possibly somewhat earlier, belongs the apology for the principle of suicide, which was not published until 1644, long after Donne’s death. This work, the Biathanatos, is an attempt to show that “the scandalous disease 418of headlong dying,” to which Donne himself in his unhappy moods had “often such a sickly inclination,” was not necessarily and essentially sinful.

In 1610 Donne formed the acquaintance of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, who offered him and his wife an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane. Drury lost his only daughter, and in 1611 Donne published an extravagant elegy on her, entitled An Anatomy of the World, to which he added in 1612 a Progress of the Soul on the same subject; he threatened to celebrate the “blessèd Maid,” Elizabeth Drury, in a fresh elegy on each anniversary of her death, but he happily refrained from the third occasion onwards. At the close of 1611 Sir Robert Drury determined to visit Paris (but not, as Walton supposed, on an embassy of any kind), and he took Donne with him. When he left London, his wife was expecting an eighth child. It seems almost certain that her fear to have him absent led him to compose one of his loveliest poems:

“Sweetest Love, I do not go

For weariness of thee.”

He is said to have had a vision, while he was at Amiens, of his wife, with her hair over her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms, on the very night that Mrs Donne, in London (or more probably in the Isle of Wight), was delivered of a still-born infant. He suffered, accordingly, a great anxiety, which was not removed until he reached Paris, where he received reassuring accounts of his wife’s health. The Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London. In 1613 Donne contributed to the Lachrymae lachrymarum an obscure and frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous Marriage Song for St Valentine’s Day to celebrate the nuptials of the elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at court. Donne was now in weak health, and in a highly neurotic condition. He suggested to Rochester that if he should enter the church, a place there might be found for him. But he was more useful to the courtier in his legal capacity, and Rochester dissuaded him from the ministry. At the close of 1614, however, the king sent for Donne to Theobald’s, and “descended to a persuasion, almost to a solicitation of him, to enter into sacred orders,” but Donne asked for a few days to consider. Finally, early in 1614, King, bishop of London, “proceeded with all convenient speed to ordain him, first deacon, then priest.” He was, perhaps, a curate first at Paddington, and presently was appointed royal chaplain.

His earliest sermon before the king at Whitehall carried his audience “to heaven, in holy raptures.” In April, not without much bad grace, the university of Cambridge consented to make the new divine a D.D. In the spring of 1616, Donne was presented to the living of Keyston, in Hunts., and a little later he became rector of Sevenoaks; the latter preferment he held until his death. In October he was appointed reader in divinity to the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn. His anxieties about money now ceased, but in August 1617 his wife died, leaving seven young children in his charge. Perhaps in consequence of his bereavement, Donne seems to have passed through a spiritual crisis, which inspired him with a peculiar fervour of devotion. In 1618 he wrote two cycles of religious sonnets, La Corona and the Holy Sonnets, the latter not printed in complete form until by Mr Gosse in 1899. Of the very numerous sermons preached by Donne at Lincoln’s Inn, fourteen have come down to us. His health suffered from the austerity of his life, and it was probably in connexion with this fact that he allowed himself to be persuaded in May 1619 to accompany Lord Doncaster as his chaplain on an embassy to Germany. Having visited Heidelberg, Frankfort and other German cities, the embassy returned to England at the opening of 1620.

In November 1621, James I., knowing that London was “a dish” which Donne “loved well,” “carved” for him the deanery of St Paul’s. He resigned Keyston, and his preachership in Lincoln’s Inn (Feb., 1622). In October 1623 he suffered from a dangerous attack of illness, and during a long convalescence wrote his Devotions, a volume published in 1624. He was now appointed to the vicarage of St Dunstan’s in the West. In April 1625 Donne preached before the new king, Charles I., a sermon which was immediately printed, and he now published his Four Sermons upon Special Occasions, the earliest collection of his discourses. When the plague broke out he retired with his children to the house of Sir John Danvers in Chiswick, and for a time he disappeared so completely that a rumour arose that he was dead. Sir John had married Donne’s old friend, Mrs Magdalen Herbert, for whom Donne wrote two of the most ingenious of his lyrics, “The Primrose” and “The Autumnal.” The popularity of Donne as a preacher rose to its zenith when he returned to his pulpit, and it continued there until his death. Walton, who seems to have known him first in 1624, now became an intimate and adoring friend. In 1630 Donne’s health, always feeble, broke down completely, so that, although in August of that year he was to have been made a bishop, the entire breakdown of his health made it worse than useless to promote him. The greater part of that winter he spent at Abury Hatch, in Epping Forest, with his widowed daughter, Constance Alleyn, and was too ill to preach before the king at Christmas. It is believed that his disease was a malarial form of recurrent quinsy acting upon an extremely neurotic system. He came back to London, and was able to preach at Whitehall on the 12th of February 1631. This, his latest sermon, was published, soon after his demise, as Death’s Duel. He now stood for his statue to the sculptor, Nicholas Stone, standing before a fire in his study at the Deanery, with his winding-sheet wrapped and tied round him, his eyes shut, and his feet resting on a funeral urn. This lugubrious work of art was set up in white marble after his death in St Paul’s cathedral, where it may still be seen. Donne died on the 31st of March 1631, after he had lain “fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change.” His aged mother, who had lived in the Deanery, survived him, dying in 1632.

Donne’s poems were first collected in 1633, and afterwards in 1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654 and 1669. Of his prose works, the Juvenilia appeared in 1633; the LXXX Sermons in 1640; Biathanatos in 1644; Fifty Sermons in 1649; Essays in Divinity, 1651; his Letters to Several Persons of Honour, 1651; Paradoxes, Problems and Essays, 1652; and Six and Twenty Sermons, 1661. Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne, an admirably written but not entirely correct biography, preceded the Sermons of 1640. The principal editor of his posthumous writings was his son, John Donne the younger (1604-1662), a man of eccentric and scandalous character, but of considerable talent.

The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign. His originality and the fervour of his imaginative passion made him extremely attractive to the younger generation of poets, who saw that he had broken through the old tradition, and were ready to follow him implicitly into new fields. In the 18th century his reputation almost disappeared, to return, with many vicissitudes in the course of the 19th. It is, indeed, singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first impression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavorable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of his lyrics and one or two of his elegies excepted, the Satires are his most important contribution to literature. They are probably the earliest poems of their kind in the language, and they are full of force and picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar 419brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

Izaak Walton’s Life, first published in 1640, and entirely recast in 1659, has been constantly reprinted. The best edition of Donne’s Poems was edited by E. K. Chambers in 1896. His prose works have not been collected. In 1899 Edmund Gosse published in two volumes The Life and Letters of John Donne, for the first time revised and collected.

In the 18th century his reputation almost disappeared, to return, with many vicissitudes in the course of the 19th. It is, indeed, singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first impression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavorable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of his lyrics and one or two of his elegies excepted, the Satires are his most important contribution to literature. They are probably the earliest poems of their kind in the language, and they are full of force and picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

I FOUND DONNE TO BE A POETIC GENIUS THE FIRST TIME I STUDIED HIS POETRY.
His immense depth of thought and brilliance was evident to me from the onset. Perhaps because I read so many other classic poets before finding Donne. That foundation gave me insight and better understanding. I took what I could , given my own poetry education and lesser talent and found common ground in the -- often (for me), ""odd terminology""...
Writing in a mixture of Fran Stanton simplicity , but embracing depth of thought by way of -- ""odd terminology""..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/68988

Essay
Genius Envy
How Rodin's failure inspired Rilke, and other curious routes of tribute.
By Geoff Dyer

In April, the Poetry Foundation cosponsored a panel at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Poets Mary Jo Bang, Peter Campion, and Raphael Rubinstein, as well as writer Geoff Dyer, explored the parallels between portraits in poetry and the visual arts, jumping off those on display at the Pulitzer's exhibition "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment." This article by Geoff Dyer is the second in a series by the four panelists. (Here's Raphael Rubinstein on Jacques Lipchitz and Gertrude Stein.) On Thursday (December 6), at the Pulitzer Foundation, John Yau moderates a panel on poetry and visual art, featuring Cole Swensen, Andrew Joron, and Arthur Sze.


The history of any art constitutes a form of self-commentary, what George Steiner calls “a syllabus of enacted criticism.” Within this syllabus there are especially charged moments when writers or artists deliberately and explicitly address the work of another writer or artist. The impulse is often elegiac: Auden writes his great elegy for Yeats (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”), Brodsky writes an elegy for Auden (“York: In Memoriam W. H. Auden”), and most recently, Heaney composes an elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled “Audenesque”).

“The words of a dead man,” writes Auden, “[a]re modified in the guts of the living.” These words—and this sentiment—are in turn modified by Brodsky: “Thus the source of love becomes the object of love.”

This chain is what I might term a linear tribute in that an artist composes a tribute to another artist who worked in the same medium. The recent exhibition “Portrait/Homage/Embodiment” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis presents a series of more complex tributes, in which the source of love in one medium becomes the object of love in another. Thus we have sculptural essays on music (Emile Antoine Bourdelle’s Large Tragic Mask of Ludwig von Beethoven) and literature (a Jacques Lipchitz bust of Gertrude Stein). These essays highlight the shifting relation between artist and subject. The relative importance of who the artwork is by and who or what it is about is always changing.

Every art form has its particular advantages and limitations. It is not unusual for people working in one medium to envy the freedoms of another. Frank O’Hara ponders these matters briefly and frankly—before dismissing them—in his poem “Why I Am Not a Painter”:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not.

In keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, I’d like to look a little more patiently at what happens when different media come into close proximity. How do they affect, or rub off on, each other? To what extent can one art form absorb and harness the possibilities inherent in another? To do this I’ll move beyond the exhibition and look at a cluster of well-known tributes and some of the tributaries—so to speak—that flow from this cluster. The cluster is composed of a novelist, who occasions the initial convergence, and a sculptor, a poet, and a photographer who subsequently find themselves grouped around him.
Auguste Rodin, Balzac. Exhibited 1898, cast later. Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University.



In July 1891, Rodin accepted a commission to make a sculpture of Balzac. He hoped to have a sketch ready by November and to complete the sculpture in 18 months. As often happened, though, the demands Rodin made on himself—his desire to find and capture the “soul of Balzac”—came close to overwhelming him. Claiming to be working “on nothing but the Balzac,” he nevertheless missed deadline after deadline.

In May 1894 delegates from the sponsoring committee visited his studio, only to find that, instead of the expected maquette of the novelist in a monk’s robe, Rodin had modeled a naked figure with arms folded over an enormous belly. This, needless to say, was considered quite unacceptable. Rodin worked on various other versions but was constantly dissatisfied. Although frustrating for everyone concerned, the failure was itself a kind of tribute. Balzac, after all, had written a famous—almost Borgesian—account of an artist’s absolute inability to bring a work to the desired state of perfection: The Unknown Masterpiece (which, incidentally, formed the basis for the interminable Jacques Rivette film La Belle Noiseuse). Finally, with pressure and doubts mounting (there was much speculation in the press as to whether he would ever finish it), Rodin exhibited a plaster cast of his Balzac at the Salon of 1898. The controversy it engendered was as swift as its gestation had been prolonged. The sculpture had its defenders, but Bernard Berenson sounded the more typical note: he regarded it as a “stupid monstrosity. Insofar as he [Balzac] has form at all, he looks like a polar bear standing on his hind legs.”

A poet gave the best account of how Rodin worked on the statue:

For years he lived engrossed by this figure. He visited Balzac’s home, the landscape of Touraine, which constantly reappears in his books, he read his letters, studied the existing portraits of Balzac, and he lived through his works again and again . . . he lived [in Balzac’s world] as if he were himself one of Balzac’s creations, unobtrusively inserted among the multitude of existences which Balzac had created.

Rainer Maria Rilke came to Paris to write a book about Rodin in 1902. As Rodin had immersed himself in the work of Balzac, so Rilke immersed himself in the work of Rodin. As Rodin had sought to pay homage to the genius of Balzac, so Rilke sought to do justice to the genius of Rodin. As Rodin’s sculpture was an essay on genius by a genius, so Rilke’s book became not only a monograph about Rodin but also a vicarious account of his own genius. Rilke himself was conscious of this, writing to Lou Andreas-Salomé that the book “also speaks about me.” The portrait of the artist is also a self-portrait of the poet, and became more so over time as Rodin’s huge influence on Rilke’s work took shape. From Rodin, Rilke developed his work ethic (their unrelenting industriousness was one of the traits that Balzac and Rodin also shared). It was from Rodin also that Rilke became convinced that he must write about his subjects not as they appeared on the surface but as if he had inhabited them from within: “One might almost say the appearance of his things does not concern him,” he wrote of Rodin, “so much does he experience their being.” Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality—his ability to create things—into the “thing-poems” [Dinggedichte] of 1907–8.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations. In 1902 he made a composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and Monument to Victor Hugo. In 1908 he made long exposures of the Balzac monument at night. After seeing Steichen’s pictures—that is, after the photographer had passed the ultimate test of doing justice to the sculptor’s genius—Rodin became convinced not just of Steichen’s individual talent but of photography’s viability as an art form.

It would be nice to be able to square the circle: to report that Steichen later did a portrait of Rilke at Duino as the first of the Elegies swept through him, or that Rilke wrote a poem about Steichen. This did not happen. The important thing is that whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke), photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak, be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead, in turn, to new meetings, new convergences.

The relative importance of what a given work is about and who it is by will change. Suppose, for example, that it was an interest in poetry, in Rilke, that led you to the encounter with Steichen. If you then follow his subsequent work, you will approach the famous photographs of W. B. Yeats and Carl Sandburg (Steichen’s brother-in-law) as examples of portraiture by an artist as much as you regard them as portraits of poets. Within the history of photography Steichen’s most obvious descendant is Richard Avedon, who, like Steichen, combined lucrative fashion work with highly regarded portraiture. This, in turn, means that at some point you will come across Avedon’s 1960 portrait of W. H. Auden in a snowstorm in St Mark’s Place, New York.

If you come from the other direction, to Steichen via Yeats and Sandburg, then you will end up like Joseph Brodsky contemplating a photograph of Auden: “I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.” You will, in other words, be back where we started. For every dispersal—there is something almost Rilkean about this, no? —is also a convergence.

So let’s look, briefly, at some other possible routes out of and away from that initial meeting.

After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was Cézanne. Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne reveals the enormous influence of the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, in the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in Cézanne’s still lifes, “cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.” And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to realize about himself and his own work: “It’s not really painting I’m studying. . . . It was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.”

The extent to which this breakthrough into “limitless objectivity” was achieved is revealed in “Requiem for a Friend” (1908). The poem was written in response to the death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who had discovered Cézanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchell’s translation)

There are several directions one might follow from here: From Cézanne to poems by Charles Tomlinson (“Cézanne at Aix” in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and Jeremy Reed (“Cézanne” in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Rich’s important corrective, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (Clara was Paula’s friend and Rilke’s wife), in which a poet speaks as a painter addressing a poet—thereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography.

Originally Published: December 5th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/69430

Essay
The Poetry of Autumn
Forget spring. Fall is the season for poetry.
By Annie Finch
A selection of fall poems. Illustration by Mark McGinnisIllustration: Mark McGinnis

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote John Keats, and yet that quintessential poet of autumn, his own life fading as the colors of his glory blazed and flew, was exquisitely alive to the season’s dying. His sleeping Autumn, cheeks flushed and hair awry, personifies the sensual richness of the early part of the season as iconically as the yellow leaves of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII embody the forlorn grandeur of the late. And yet both of these poems contain the tinge of their opposites, more exquisite for being so subtle: the unspoken sexual passion in the sonnet and the hint of the ominous in the ode (the wailing of the bugs, the swallows gathering) are so delicate they are barely there.

Through just this kind of sensitivity to duality, the poetry of autumn tends to ambiguity—and to greatness. What poet or lover of poetry could resist, now, when death and beauty are afoot? Together? The stereotypical poet writes of spring; the odds are that any parody of poetry will involve twittering and budding. But Millay answers, from the end of “The Death of Autumn”: “Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky! / Oh, Autumn! Autumn—What is the Spring to me?”

The evidence for the greatness of autumn poetry, at least in the Romantic tradition in English, is everywhere: Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Keats’s “To Autumn,” Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole,” H.D.’s “Orchard,” Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” Dickinson seemed to take the connection between poetry and autumn for granted, writing “Besides the Autumn poets sing / a few prosaic days” as if it were as standard a subject for poetry in her mind as spring is in ours. It seems likely that her own “Wild nights - Wild nights!,” not to mention its ancient ancestor, “O Western Wind,” was inspired by late autumn, by the kind of mood when Rilke wrote, “Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter; / who lives alone will live indefinitely so.”

Rilke’s poem partakes of the tradition of relentless autumn poems, those sad or bitter mournings of the season, the “withered” world on which Alice Cary so utterly turns her back. This is the aspect of autumn that drives Walter de la Mare, in “Autumn,” to spell-like obsession:

There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was . . .
Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was . . .

It drives Paul Verlaine to hear such long long sobs, and most brutally of all perhaps, Adam Zagajewski to political despair at the power of autumn “merciless in her blaze / and her breath.”

On the other end of the spectrum are the few stalwart, happy autumn poems. These seem, interestingly enough, more common among American than among English poets. Could it be the sheer beauty of a more heavily wooded landscape that tips the balance? Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Merry Autumn,” one of the most successful happy autumn poems, consciously calls up the “solemn” tradition it rejects:

It's all a farce,—these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o'er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.

Emily Dickinson’s “The morns are meeker than they were,” uncharacteristic of her as it may be, is utterly memorable, and Whitman basks in autumn with benign acceptance, feeling its rivulets flowing towards an eternal ocean. Longfellow, not at his best in his ruthlessly cheerful poem “Autumn,” more than makes up for it at the gorgeous beginning of Book 2 of his now-underappreciated, but still highly readable, epic Evangeline:

Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and
longer,
And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters.
Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the
ice-bound
Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands.
Harvests were gathered in; and wild with the winds of September
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel.

But poems of lament or celebration are the exceptions; the real tradition of the poetry of autumn is the paradoxical tradition. Where does paradox find its proper home but in poetry, and in autumn? From Shakespeare’s sonnet to Keats’s ode and far beyond, much of the most memorable autumn poetry embraces what Stevens called “the blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick,” that balance between fecundity and decay which Frost addresses with such excruciating specificity in “After Apple-Picking”:

Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear. . . .
I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

This paradox, I think, is the pith of autumn, the part that some of us just can’t get enough of, the reason autumn is so many people’s favorite season. This is the ineffable puzzle that inspires Stevens’s “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” and leads Archibald MacLeish to call autumn “the human season.” This is the time when, perhaps, we are all looking to feel more accurately what Mary Kinzie, in her commentary on Rilke’s “Day in Autumn,” described as “the flowering of loss, . . . the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” And in this, autumn is again like poetry: though it may help us to notice more deeply how we are alone, it can also help us to feel the excitement of sharing that solitude with each other. In the words of Basho,

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

Originally Published: October 28th, 2009

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/69068

Essay
The Energies of Words
How Poetry's legendary 1931 Objectivist issue came to be, from Pound's harangues to Zukofsky's essays.
By Peter O’Leary
Introduction
"Hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry." Peter O'Leary digs deep into the Poetry magazine archive to uncover the origins of the Objectivist movement.

The Objectivist movement didn’t yet have a name when Harriet Monroe sent a letter of recommendation on behalf of Louis Zukofsky to the Guggenheim Foundation in November 1930. The 26-year-old Zukofsky, she wrote, was “a member, perhaps the leader, of a ‘new group’ of poets who are doing very interesting, more or less experimental work in poetry and in authentic criticism. . . . I have such confidence in Mr. Z. that I am handing over to him the editorship of an entire issue of Poetry.”

The month before, Monroe had offered Zukofsky the chance “to put in whatever poets you like up to 30½ pages of verse and 20 more of prose.” Zukofsky’s reply provides an orienting credo for the Objectivist movement:

If we can get part of a Canto of Pound’s—and if I find it good which is highly probable—I don’t see why we should shun it. The energies of words are hard to find—I should want my issue to be entirely a matter of the energies of words.


Zukofsky had Ezra Pound to thank for Monroe’s invitation. Early in the magazine’s existence, she had appointed Pound her foreign correspondent. His legendary scouting reports from Europe included work by William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Rabindranath Tagore. By 1920, eight years after the magazine was founded, Pound and Monroe’s relationship had cooled. Nevertheless, Monroe kept in touch, and Pound sent her periodic advice and harangues, such as this characteristic bit from November 1926:

Dear Harriet: Have been looking through your last 18 or more numbers, find many of ’em uncut.
My impression is that you have tried ladies’ numbers, children’s numbers, in fact everything but a man’s number. And that you tend to become more and more a tea party, all mères de famille. . . . Fraid I will hav to take the bad boys off your hands and once again take up the hickory.


Writing in March 1930, Pound urges Monroe to notice Zukofsky: “I think you miss things. Criterion and H[ound] & Horn both taking on Zukofsky. If you can’t liven up the verse; you cd. at least develop the critical section [with his work].” In late September 1930, Pound wrote to again suggest that Monroe include work by Zukofsky

Dear Harriet,
Before leavin’ home yesterday I recd. 2 essays by Zukofsky. You really ought to get his Reznikof [sic]. = He is one of the very few people making any advance in criticism. = he ought to appear regularly in “Poetry.”


Twenty years had passed since Pound first became famous for agitating on behalf of literature, and he may have felt removed from any literary center and eager to dive back into the scrum. “Hang it all,” he continues, echoing the eventual opening to “Canto II,” “—you printed my ‘Don’ts’ + Ford’s essay in Poetry, in 1913. etc. + they set a date. You ought not to let the magazine drift into being a mere passive spectator of undefined + undefinable events.”

Pound’s relationship with Monroe was arguably one of the most significant collaborations in the history of American poetry. Neither would have accomplished as much as they did without the other: Monroe supported Pound’s ideas when other venues found them tedious; Pound pushed Monroe to broaden her horizons. In the same letter, Pound rails, “A prominent americ. homme de letters came to me last winter saying you had alienated every active poet in the U.S.—one ought not to be left undefended against such remarks,” adding, “Zuk has [a] definite critical gift that ought to be used.” He included Zukofsky’s address just to be sure she took his point. Later, more gently, he assures her, “You cd. get back into the ring if you wd. print a number containing [Zukofsky’s work],” adding “Must make one no. of Poet.[ry] different from another if you want to preserve life as distinct from mere continuity.” In the upper front corner of Pound’s letter, Monroe—presumably—has penciled in the notation: “Sug’d a Zukofsky number.”

In recommending Zukofsky, Pound was essentially anointing the young poet as the head of a new movement, one that he felt deserved a manifesto as galvanizing as Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts ” had been to the Imagists in 1913.

Taking Pound’s cue, Monroe asked Zukofsky to formulate the February 1931 issue of Poetry as the announcement of a new literary movement, specifying that he should write an essay summarizing the merits and intentions of its work. “I shall be disappointed,” she wrote to Zukofsky on October 13, 1930, “if you haven’t a ‘new group,’ as Ezra said.” Zukofsky did what most young poets in such an unusually fortunate position would do: he solicited work from his friends and acquaintances. Even though he knew these poets didn’t actually constitute a group, he hedged when he wrote to Monroe describing his progress:

I shall probably—in fact, most certainly,—have more of a group than I thought. The contributions I have already—McAlmon, Rakosi, T.S. Hecht, Oppen, Williams, my own—tho never talked over by us together, go together. The Rakosi I received yesterday is excellent – the man has genius (I say that rarely) and he says he stopped writing five years ago—a curious case.


Making these poets “go together” would require novel thinking as well as a memorable label. Zukofsky first introduces it in “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” one of two essays he wrote for the issue.

What is Objectivist poetry? Strictly speaking, it is a tradition emerging from the work of four of the American poets that Zukofsky featured in the issue: George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and himself. Though he included many other poets, these four are lastingly thought of as the Objectivists. Basil Bunting, a British poet whose work also appears in the issue, is sometimes considered an Objectivist, reflecting more his affiliation with Pound, whose disciple he was, than any aesthetic similarity. Lorine Niedecker, later included in this school, would strike up a lifelong friendship with Zukofsky after reading the issue. In varying ways, the work of all five of these poets advanced the poetic principles of their forebears Pound and William Carlos Williams. (A poem by Williams is also included in the issue.) The principles of Pound and Williams can be summarized by Pound’s 1913 statement that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol” in a poem.

For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

Then why is this issue of a magazine among the most influential magazine publications of the 20th century? Put somewhat crudely, it provides the diagrams and all the materials for constructing a canon, a model that has since been often repeated. In focusing the issue on four key poets, surrounding them with largely forgettable, frequently limp free-versifying, and then framing the four poets’ work with a nearly impenetrable critical vocabulary, Zukofsky created a tactical and aesthetic strategy that has influenced successive groups of poets and critics. In some cases, this strategy has involved actively modeling a movement after the Objectivists, as the Language poets did. Seminal essays by such poet/critics as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Lyn Hejinian provided the theoretical basis and manifestos that inspired the work of other Language poets. For the Black Mountain poets, the manifesto was provided by Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse.” Exactly how the young Zukofsky more or less pulled off launching the Objectivist movement remains a remarkable story.


“Desire for what is objectively perfect” : The Theory

In his book The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins wonders whether Zukofsky’s choice of the term Objectivist was “a deeply considered description of the commonalities his poetry shared with that of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and William Carlos Williams,” or “an ad hoc formulation, a hastily conceived banner under which he could advance the poetry and careers of himself and his friends?” As shown by the letters between Monroe and Pound, and Pound and Zukofsky, it’s safe to answer yes to both questions. Zukofsky’s designation of the term Objectivist poetry is both deeply considered and completely provisional.

Objectivist poetry is best defined by the terms with which Zukofsky characterizes it in the essays he wrote for the issue—the principles of “sincerity” and “objectification” cohering in “the energies of words.” Accordingly, sincerity is to be true to living in the world; objectification is to represent its facts.

Though the title of the first essay, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” implies that Zukofsky is defining a new school of poetic theory, he isn’t. Rather, he is offering a perplexing definition with similarly perplexing extraneous matter (for instance, bizarrely, a lengthy quotation from a Hemingway poem). In the essay’s opening paragraphs, Zukosfsky defines what “an objective” for poetry would mean:

An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.


A poem’s objective, Zukofsky seems to be saying, can be understood through the analogies of a microscope and a military target. Does Zukofsky mean that a poem functions in the same way an optical device functions—focusing on an idea or object, targeting it in a military sense, in hopes of achieving an objective perfection that is equivalent to deducing the direction of historic and contemporary trends? Who knows? Zukofsky’s ideas are easier to understand if one applies them to his personal poetic program: remaking the epic poem through a language of philosophical, historic, and musical particulars, chiefly in his poem “A,” begun in 1927 and composed over several decades. For instance, when he further explains in the essay what he means by “historic and contemporary particulars,” Zukofsky slyly refers to events that he has already written about in the early parts of “A.”

It is understood that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events: i.e., any Egyptian pulled-glass bottle in the shape of a fish or oak leaves, as well as the performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion in Leipzig, or the Russian revolution and the rise of metallurgical plants in Siberia.


The subject of the opening section of “A” is a performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion. By mentioning the Russian revolution and the prospect of steel plants in Siberia, Zukofsky, a Marxist, was not only nodding toward the past but also winking to his leftist comrades (Scroggins refers to this as one of the “red flashes” that flare throughout the issue). And perhaps he wanted those few readers of Poetry who were already familiar with his poem to think that his work was “objective,” which is to say “objectively perfect” and aimed “inextricably” toward both the past and present.

Baffling as this definition of “Objective” is, the remainder of Zukofsky’s opening essay does little to clarify what he means. It is in his essay about Reznikoff’s poetry, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” that Zukofsky more fully develops his theories.

The essay defines the two operative terms of Objectivist theory: sincerity and objectification. Sincerity occurs when writing “is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” In other words, sincerity is describing things as they are in a musically memorable way. “Shapes suggest themselves,” Zukofsky goes on, “and the mind senses and receives awareness.” As an example of sincerity, Zukofsky cites a line of Reznikoff’s—“The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water”—noting it for “possessing remarkable energy.” He seems to be gesturing toward elements of visual and musical beauty contained in a line, what he would call in his 1948 book A Test of Poetry the “sight” and “sound” of a poem.

Objectification, on the other hand, is a nearly mystical expression of “rested totality”—a talismanic phrase and the poetic property that Zukofsky more highly valued. “This rested totality may be called objectification,” writes Zukofsky. “[T]he apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object.” Objectification is [to be] related to what Zukofsky calls “intellection” in A Test of Poetry, a variation of Pound’s logopoeia—“the dance of the intellect among the words.” Rested totality, in Zukofsky’s thinking in his 1931 essays, is the mind’s comprehension of the poem that is in Oppen’s phrase “concerned with a fact which it did not create.”

To make his case for objectification in poetry, Zukofsky offers some examples in the Reznikoff essay: five of Williams’s poems in Spring and All, Moore’s poems “An Octopus” and “Like a Bulrush,” Eliot’s “Mr. Apollinax,” and, equivocally, some of cummings’s lyrics. Zukofsky, though, reserves his real admiration for Pound. “In contemporary writing the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectification to a most constant degree; his objects are musical shapes.” They are, to reiterate what Zukofsky wrote to Monroe in his October 1930 letter, “a matter of the energies of words.” Zukofsky concludes his long paragraph of examples and explanations in the essay with a curt appraisal: “The degree of objectification in the work of Charles Reznikoff is small.”

What can we make of these terms, more than 75 years later? In truth, we make of them what Zukofsky’s vocabulary permits us to make. Scroggins reads objectification as form—“Not the form of the poetic handbooks . . . but form as a sense of unity, as an impression of ‘rested totality’ in the reader’s mind.” But notice here how Scroggins must rely on the vocabulary Zukofsky has provided to explain what Zukofsky means. Scroggins, like many before him, clarifies Zukofsky by perpetuating his language. Though it’s impossible to exactly paraphrase their meaning, Zukofsky’s presentation of sincerity and objectification as philosophical facts created the foundation for the Objectivist movement and its subsequent influence.

Reznikoff would later clarify Zukofsky’s Objectivist theory by relating it to factual evidence. Drawing on his long experience as a lawyer, Reznikoff wrote in “First, there is a need,” a pamphlet published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press:

With respect to the treatment of subject matter in verse and the use of the term “objectivist” and “objectivism,” let me again refer to the rules with respect to testimony in a court of law. Evidence to be admissible in a trial cannot state conclusions of fact: it must state the facts themselves. For example, a witness in an action for negligence cannot say: the man injured was negligent crossing the street. He must limit himself to a description of how the man crossed. . . . The conclusions of fact are for the jury and let us add, in our case, for the reader.


Poet Norman Finkelstein has written that “Zukofsky’s dream of the poem as the totality of perfect rest . . . is surely one of the most hermetic texts in the annals of twentieth-century poetics, and as such, it is open to endless Talmudic interpretation and disputation.” This hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry. “Rested totality” stands for that part of the imagination that is receptive and mainly intuitive. Perceiving such “totality of perfect rest” is, as Reznikoff understood it, a practice of providing poetic evidence, a testimony in the strictest sense of the term, from the Latin testis, for witness. The Objectivist poem is a witness to reality, both imagination’s and the world’s.


“Words will do it” : The Poetry

How does one witness reality in a poem? To propose an answer to that, we can turn to the poems Zukofsky gathered for Poetry. Pound had written to Carl Rakosi in the late 1920s and in 1930, encouraging him to get in touch with Zukofsky, who then in turn wrote enthusiastically to Monroe about his “genius.” Is it evident in the group of poems Zukofsky selected for the issue? Consider Rakosi’s “Orphean Lost,” which opened the issue:

The oakboughs of the cottagers
descend, my lover,
with the bestial evening.
The shadows of their swelled trunks
crush the frugal herb.
The heights lag
and perish in a blue vacuum.


The scene of the poem seems more Romantic than Objectivist, hinting vaguely of sexual malaise. In a strictly Zukofskyan sense, it lacks any objectification, any totality of perfect rest. It seems, instead, suggestively but mildly agitated.

Zukofsky followed Rakosi’s poems with his own contribution—the Seventh Movement of his epic poem-in-progress, “A,” a series of seven menacingly, skillfully rendered sonnets that recapitulate all the themes involved in his poem up to that point. Subtitled “There are different techniques,” the series begins with this sonnet:

Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words
Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but
They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds
Of words, from me to them no singing gut.
For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,
For their stomachs are logs with print on them,
Blood-red, red lamps hang from necks or where could
Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.

“Street Closed” is what print says on their stomachs;
That cuts out everybody but the diggers;
You’re cut out, and she’s cut out, and the jiggers
Are cut out, No! we can’t have such nor bucks
As won’t, tho they’re not here pass thru a hoop
Strayed on a manhole—me? Am on a stoop.


Zukofsky, in seemingly natural yet carefully rhymed lyric language, is describing a strictly urban scene: sawhorses at a work site. The “A” of his title is one sawhorse; two (now four-legged) make an M, an alphabetic objectification of the world.

The syntax of the last six lines is gymnastic, landing after all its twisting on the image of Zukofsky, sitting on a stoop, looking out toward the work site on the closed-off street. While this poem is excellent, technically speaking, is it Objectivist? Following Zukofsky’s initial definitions of “An Objective,” relying as they do on a language of focus (from optical focusing, to military targeting, to a poetic directing of historical particulars), we can say yes. The animal archetype, horse, yields “manes,” which happens to be the first word of The Iliad, meaning “rage” in Greek, invoking a mythical military campaign reflected in the situation of a street in Manhattan being closed off for repairs. All of which, through a series of ingenious rhymes, leads to Zukofsky himself, presumably as a boy, sitting on a stoop, observing the scene. It’s a pretty amazing achievement: if not rested totality, a virtuoso assaying of it to be sure.

Of the major Objectivists, the work of Charles Reznikoff appears next. The page-long selection of short poems exemplifies the type of poem that came to define Objectivist poetry: an almost purely descriptive, modestly lyrical depiction of an urban scene:

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
A girder, itself among the rubbish.


Nearly 30 years later, in 1959, George Oppen, writing to his half-sister June Oppen Degnan, would say of this poem, “Likely [Reznikoff] could mull along and tell you what he had in mind. But how other than with this image could he put into your mind so clearly the miracle of existence—the existence of things. It is only because the image hits so clear and sudden that the poem means what it means. I don’t know that he could make it any clearer by talking about it.”

Oppen is best known for the poetry he wrote after a 25-year silence that he initiated in 1934 in order to dedicate himself to the Communist Party. The two Oppen poems included in the issue appear in Discrete Series from 1934, his only book of poetry published before 1960. The poems Oppen wrote beginning in 1958 are much more expressive of Objectivist positions than the two included here. (“Of Being Numerous,” Oppen’s masterpiece from 1968, begins with an Objectivist credo: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’”) His second poem in the issue begins:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom,
Is of—aside from reading speaking smoking—
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen,
“Approached the window as if to see what really was going on”


The appearance of Maude Blessingbourne sounds closer in tone and spirit to the characters who show up in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” than to the scenes evoked in the poetry of Rakosi, Reznikoff, or Zukofsky. The poem concludes:

And saw rain failing, in the distance more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-glass—
Of the world, weather swept, with which one shares the century.


While the last line could possibly be describing the “direction of historic and contemporary particulars,” it’s hard to find any rested totality, or even anything particularly sincere, in these lines. (The dramatic setting could possibly reflect, among other things, Oppen’s interest in Henry James.)

The work of two other poets in the issue deserves mention: Bunting’s and Williams’s. Bunting’s contribution, a single poem titled “The Word,” would subsequently be divided by the poet into two different poems in his Collected Poems. The second appears in Poetry under the subheading “Appendix: Iron,” and runs:

Molten pool, incandescent spilth of
deep cauldrons—and brighter nothing is—
cast and cold, your blazes extinct and
no turmoil nor peril left you,
rusty ingot, bleak paralyzed blob!


Are these lines Objectivist? I don’t imagine Bunting ever thought so, but they do ring with the rhetorical soundings of Pound’s early Cantos. Truth told, Bunting was a friend, a connection soldered by Pound, rather than a member of this new poetic movement. The same was true of Williams, whose appearance was emphatically meant to signal influence and ancestry for Zukofsky’s “new group.”

Zukofsky was 24 in 1928 when he struck up a friendship with Williams, who by then had been publishing poetry for 20 years, although he wasn’t especially well known. In letters he sent the younger poet in 1930, Williams worries repeatedly about making some money from his fiction and finding time to write. Responding to Zukofsky’s request for work for Poetry, Williams writes, “By some trick of the imagination I have persistently kept the Alphabet of Leaves thing for just the purpose you want it for. When you want it, yell.” Williams means “The Botticellian Trees,” a poem that would conclude the sequence titled “Della Primavera Transportata al Morale” in the various collected/selected poems of Williams published over the years. It’s arguably the finest and best-known poem in the issue, and Zukofsky was unequivocal in his praise: “Your poem is the best (I’m not kiddin’ either!) in my issue and I have some splendid material by Rakosi etc etc. Bob McAlmon, too.” The poem begins as a model of the kind of poetry Zukofsky meant to assemble:

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter


Monroe seems to have been pleased with this inclusion as well: the November 1931 issue announced that Williams had won the Guarantor’s Prize of $100 for “The Botticellian Trees” and for his service to poetry in general—“a recognition of the value and very individual quality of this poet’s work.” In writing to thank her, Williams told her that he planned to use the money (about $1,200 in today’s dollars) to help finance the publication of his next book; he had yet to find a publisher willing to print and pay for it.

The rest of the poetry in the issue, for the most part, is decidedly minor. (“Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives,” wrote Pound to Monroe in 1931.) Several of the poets were leftist intellectual friends of Zukofsky’s from New York, including Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, and, most famously, Whittaker Chambers, who as a Communist in the 1920s and early 1930s was recruited to work as a Soviet spy in Washington. When he defected from the Communist Party in 1939, he began a career of informing to the FBI on members of his circle, naming Alger Hiss as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.

Other minor poets of note in the issue include John Wheelwright, an eccentric Boston Brahmin who would go on to exert a considerable influence on John Ashbery; and Robert McAlmon, who had been married to H.D.’s eventual companion Bryher, and who for a period ran an important press in expatriate Paris, publishing Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

Kenneth Rexroth is the most anomalous poet in the issue. Monroe was unfamiliar with elements of Rexroth's poem 'Last Page of a Manuscript,' whose manifestly Christian and mystical language set it apart from the other poems.

Light
Light
The sliver in the firmament
The stirring horde
The rocking wave
The name breaks in the sky
Why stand we
Why go we nought
They broken seek the cleaving balance
The young men gone
Lux lucis


Responding to an editorial inquiry that Monroe sent him about the line “The chalice of the flaming byss,” Rexroth replied pedantically,

The term is byss, your printer made no mistake. The term is late Neo-Platonic, and is used for the plenum, roughly, Being as contrasted with Not-Being. It emerges in western culture with John Scotus Ereugina. Pico uses it. Also Jacob Boehme, who makes much of it.


“A number I can show to my friends” : Reactions

Soon after receiving the January 1931 issue of Poetry, Pound sent a typically hectoring letter to Monroe, accusing her of squandering the value of the magazine he had helped make great. In a postcard dated February 12, 1931, however, he requests four additional copies of Zukofsky’s issue. “This is a number I can show to my friends,” he wrote. In pencil, at the top of the card, Monroe wrote, “Ezra is pleased.” On the reverse side, Pound indicated the names of magazines to which review copies should be sent.

Monroe would quote Pound’s postcard, along with its addendum, in the “Correspondence” section in the April 1931 issue: “If you can do another eleven as lively you will put the mag. on its feet.” To which Monroe replies, chidingly, “Alas, we fear that would put it on its uppers!”

Jokes aside, Monroe had little intention either of doing another issue similar to the Objectivist one or of following Pound’s advice very closely. In March 1931, citing problems that had arisen because of Zukofsky’s distance from Chicago, Monroe suggested to Basil Bunting that they hold off on the British poetry issue Pound had urged them to undertake. One month after the February issue, Pound’s annoyance toward Monroe reignited. “Yet again: say the Feb. number doesn’t ‘record a triumph’ for that group. GET some other damn group and see what it can do. . . . Tell your damn guarantors I consider ’em as holy lights amid a great flock of cattle (millionaire illiterates, dumb and speechless tribes of unconscious pawnbrokers.)”

Readers reacted to the Objectivist poems with a mixture of enthusiasm, repulsion, and sharp criticism. Monroe printed their responses in the April 1931 issue. She particularly notes a Princeton student “who congratulates us upon achieving an interesting issue at last,” and the Long Island editor who wrote an Objectivist parody begging for “my money, my god, my money!” to be sent back. She included a letter from Horace Gregory praising the issue somewhat equivocally, a strange paragraph from a Rexroth letter “too long to quote,” and a bilious but impassioned letter from a very young Stanley Burnshaw, along with Zukofsky’s defensive, dismissive reply.

Burnshaw raises questions still relevant today: “Is Objectivist poetry a programmed movement (such as the Imagists instituted), or is it a rationalization undertaken by writers of similar subjective predilections and tendencies . . . ? Is there a copy of the program of the Objectivist group available?” Zukofsky answered, speaking of himself in the third person, “The editor was not a pivot, the contributors did not rationalize about him together; out of appreciation for their sincerity of craft and occasional objectification he wrote the program of the February issue of Poetry. . . .” In reply to Burnshaw’s admitted confusion about the meaning of “objectification,” Zukofsky pointed to some of the poems in the issue—particularly Oppen’s poems, but also, more faintly, Reznikoff’s sequence—without entirely clarifying it. He concluded by trying—futilely—to clear up another of his chosen terms: “The quotes around ‘objectivist’ distinguish between its particular meaning in the Program and the philosophical etiquette associated with objectivist. ”

For a short period following the issue’s publication, Zukofsky continued to work in the Objectivist vein. In 1932 he edited An “Objectivists” Anthology, issued by TO Publishers (an acronym for The Objectivists), a small press begun by Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and Oppen and his wife, Mary, and funded by Oppen’s modest trust. The anthology was reviewed unfavorably in the pages of Poetry by Morris Schappe in the March 1933 issue, prompting an acidic letter to the editor from Zukofsky. Once again speaking in the third person, he insisted that he “proceeded in that volume very closely along the lines of revolutionary thinking, both in his presentation of the poems of others and of his own poems.”

For a few additional years, there was energy and momentum behind the incipient Objectivists. When Oppen’s money began to run out, the Oppens changed the name of TO Publishers to the Objectivist Press and managed to publish a collected edition of Williams’s poems, as well as Oppen’s Discrete Series in 1934. The press folded in 1936, by which time the Oppens had joined the Communist Party and Oppen had stopped writing poetry.

Oppen’s silence is typical of the neglect and strained personal circumstances that characterized the careers of nearly all the Objectivists until the 1960s, when groups of younger poets in America and England rediscovered, celebrated, and rejuvenated their work. While the quiet 1940s and 1950s must surely have been disappointing to most of these poets—even to Oppen, who had chosen his silence—they lend an aura of authenticity to their poetry and to their commitment as poets. Without this period of decreased visibility, I doubt that the obscure terminology by which Zukofsky had defined this group would have acquired such meaning and mystique. From the vantage of the 21st century, it’s clear that without the initial efforts of Zukofsky in 1931, none of these poets, including Zukofsky himself, would have the place in American literary history they presently occupy.


* * *


Acknowledgments

I was greatly aided in the writing of Part I of this essay by the help of two friends: poet David Pavelich, a librarian at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who helped guide me through the extensive Poetry collection, and otherwise gave freely of his excellent company and knowledge; and poet Mark Scroggins, who supplied me with an electronic proof copy of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky that provided answers to nearly all of the questions I had, as well as much of the background detail that makes the story told in this essay coherent. Sincere gratitude to both of them. Thanks are due as well to Daniel Meyer, University Archivist and Associate Director of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who granted permission for the use of quotations from letters in the Poetry collection. In researching this piece, I made use of the “Objectivist Poets” entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_poetry, as captured on September 4, 2007.

Originally Published: June 12th, 2008

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/j...nd_poetry-1629

Article
John Donne's Life and Poetry
Written by: William J. Long

Life. The briefest outline of Donne's life shows its intense human interest. He was born in London, the son of a rich iron merchant, at the time when the merchants of England were creating a new and higher kind of princes. On his father's side he came from an old Welsh family, and on his mother's side from the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More's family. Both families were Catholic, and in his early life persecution was brought near; for his brother died in prison for harboring a proscribed priest, and his own education could not be continued in Oxford and Cambridge because of his religion. Such an experience generally sets a man's religious standards for life; but presently Donne, as he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, was investigating the philosophic grounds of all faith. Gradually he left the church in which he was born, renounced all denominations, and called himself simply Christian. Meanwhile he wrote poetry and shared his wealth with needy Catholic relatives. He joined the expedition of Essex for Cadiz in 1596, and for the Azores in 1597, and on sea and in camp found time to write poetry. Two of his best poems, "The Storm" and "The Calm," belong to this period. Next he traveled in Europe for three years, but occupied himself with study and poetry. Returning home, he became secretary to Lord Egerton, fell in love with the latter's young niece, Anne More, and married her; for which cause Donne was cast into prison. Strangely enough his poetical work at this time is not a song of youthful romance, but "The Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There he "carried some to heaven in holy raptures and led others to amend their lives," and as he leans over the pulpit with intense earnestness is likened by Izaak Walton to "an angel leaning from a cloud."

Here is variety enough to epitomize his age, and yet in all his life, stronger than any impression of outward weal or woe, is the sense of mystery that surrounds Donne. In all his work one finds a mystery, a hiding of some deep thing which the world would gladly know and share, and which is suggested in his haunting little poem, "The Undertaking":

I have done one braver thing
Than all the worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.

Donne's Poetry. Donne's poetry is so uneven, at times so startling and fantastic, that few critics would care to recommend it to others. Only a few will read his works, and they must be left to their own browsing, to find what pleases them, like deer which, in the midst of plenty, take a bite here and there and wander on, tasting twenty varieties of food in an hour's feeding. One who reads much will probably bewail Donne's lack of any consistent style or literary standard. For instance, Chaucer and Milton are as different as two poets could well be; yet the work of each is marked by a distinct and consistent style, and it is the style as much as the matter which makes the Tales or the Paradise Lost a work for all time. Donne threw style and all literary standards to the winds; and precisely for this reason he is forgotten, though his great intellect and his genius had marked him as one of those who should do things "worthy to be remembered." While the tendency of literature is to exalt style at the expense of thought, the world has many men and women who exalt feeling and thought above expression; and to these Donne is good reading. Browning is of the same school, and compels attention. While Donne played havoc with Elizabethan style, he nevertheless influenced our literature in the way of boldness and originality; and the present tendency is to give him a larger place, nearer to the few great poets, than he has occupied since Ben Jonson declared that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," but likely to perish "for not being understood." For to much of his poetry we must apply his own satiric verses on another's crudities:

Infinite work! which doth so far extend
That none can study it to any end.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/c...not_the_poet-1

Critique the Poem not the Poet
Written by: Rose DesRochers

The act of writing poetry is something that is very personal to us poets and sharing it for the first time can be a very frightening experience. The first experience of having your work criticized can boggle our mind and set us back a step in our writing. However critique is essential in any writer’s career.

Accepting criticism is something that we all must face even if we don't like it. When I received my first harsh critique it was on a ezboard workshop and right then I wanted to give up writing. They were arrogant and my opinion very mean. It was the most painful experience.

Running an online writing community for the last two years I have met a few arrogant and mean people just like the one on Ezboard. I think that some of these poets have gone to workshops and have been critique in this matter, so now they think this is how one critiques. Wrong!

How to give a critique :

Short reviews like good poem, I like this, and awesome are not useful to any poet. When giving a critique remember that poets are looking for in depth critique. As writers we strive on feedback and we grow as writers by getting both positive and negative comments on our work. At all times keep them respectful. You don't have to take a critical lengthy review approach when commenting on others poetry. You might just want to comment on the way the poem struck you, what you liked about a poem, or what threw you off about a poem. Maybe you can quote part of the poem and why you liked that verse. You don't have to write a book; just a few comments can really help someone know what works and what doesn't. Remember to be tactful and never disrespect the writer. Poets are sensitive souls and they take their poetry to heart. There is a wrong way and right way to say everything. You can offer constructive criticism where the poet is going to learn from it without being disrespectful and never mock your fellow poet.

Here is an example: You just read a poem and all you can find are reasons why the poem that you just read sucks. Maybe they had a number of spelling, grammar mistakes and run on sentences. Instead of commenting on only the bad parts of the poem start out by pointing out a good point. For instance you could say I think you've done a really fine job at expressing your emotions. I do believe that your poem could use some work on the structure to make it complete. I noticed a few spelling and grammar mistakes. I really think this is a good attempt and if you are looking for a more in depth critique I would be happy to work with you to tighten up the poem.

How to not give a critique:

Never critique the author, critique the poem. Never change the poem and put it in your own words. When you do this it no longer becomes the poet’s thoughts. Never think that you are an expert in your field. All poets have room for improvement. Never look at another poet as a failure, keep in mind just as movies not every poem will appeal to you. Don't point out every line in the poem that needs work. You should save that for a more in depth critique if the poet desires it. Don't come off as an arrogant critic that is not the way to help people or win friends in the writing business.

Critique is important to all poets. However if you feel that you are a poet expert with no room for improvement yourself than maybe you should stay away from critique groups and just look at your own writing because your really not helping anyone.

About The Author

Rose DesRochers is the founder of Today's Woman Writing Community http://www.todays-woman.net, a supportive online writing community for men and women over 18. Rose is also the founder of Blogger Talk Blog Community http://www.bloggertalk.net, a friendly fast growing blogging portal, offering bloggers support, advice, tools, tips and information about blogs and blogging.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/a...o_emerson-1650

American Poet and Essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of May 1803. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches. Among them were some of those men of mark who made the backbone of the American character: the sturdy Puritan, Peter Bulkeley, sometime rector of Odell in Bedfordshire, and afterward pastor of the church in the wilderness at Concord, New Hampshire; the zealous evangelist, Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus in Maine, who pursued graceless sinners even 333into the alehouse; Joseph Emerson of Malden, “a heroic scholar,” who prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William Emerson of Concord, Mass., the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the Revolution. Sprung from such stock, Emerson inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the metamorphic glow of Transcendentalism which passed through the region of Boston in the second quarter of the 19th century. But the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them out, was the Puritan spirit, elevated, enlarged and beautified by the poetic temperament.

His father was the Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Ralph Waldo was the fourth child in a family of eight, of whom at least three gave evidence of extraordinary mental powers. He was brought up in an atmosphere of hard work, of moral discipline, and (after his father’s death in 1811) of that wholesome self-sacrifice which is a condition of life for those who are poor in money and rich in spirit. His aunt, Miss Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant old maid, an eccentric saint, was a potent factor in his education. Loving him, believing in his powers, passionately desiring for him a successful career, but clinging with both hands to the old forms of faith from which he floated away, this solitary, intense woman did as much as any one to form, by action and reaction, the mind and character of the young Emerson. In 1817 he entered Harvard College, and graduated in 1821. In scholarship he ranked about the middle of his class. In literature and oratory he was more distinguished, receiving a Boylston prize for declamation, and two Bowdoin prizes for dissertations, the first essay being on “The Character of Socrates” and the second on “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy”—both rather dull, formal, didactic productions. He was fond of reading and of writing verse, and was chosen as the poet for class-day. His cheerful serenity of manner, his tranquil mirthfulness, and the steady charm of his personality made him a favourite with his fellows, in spite of a certain reserve. His literary taste was conventional, including the standard British writers, with a preference for Shakespeare among the poets, Berkeley among the philosophers, and Montaigne (in Cotton’s translation) among the essayists. His particular admiration among the college professors was the stately rhetorician, Edward Everett; and this predilection had much to do with his early ambition to be a professor of rhetoric and elocution.

Immediately after graduation he became an assistant in his brother William’s school for young ladies in Boston, and continued teaching, with much inward reluctance and discomfort, for three years. The routine was distasteful; he despised the superficial details which claimed so much of his time. The bonds of conventionalism were silently dissolving in the rising glow of his poetic nature. Independence, sincerity, reality, grew more and more necessary to him. His aunt urged him to seek retirement, self-reliance, friendship with nature; to be no longer “the nursling of surrounding circumstances,” but to prepare a celestial abode for the muse. The passion for spiritual leadership stirred within him. The ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the divinity school at Cambridge, to prepare himself for the Unitarian pulpit. His course was much interrupted by ill-health. His studies were irregular, and far more philosophical and literary than theological.

In October 1826 he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. The same year a threatened consumption compelled him to take a long journey in the south. Returning in 1827, he continued his studies, preached as a candidate in various churches, and improved in health. In 1829 he married a beautiful but delicate young woman, Miss Ellen Tucker of Concord, and was installed as associate minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. The retirement of his senior colleague soon left him the sole pastor. Emerson’s early sermons were simple, direct, unconventional. He dealt freely with the things of the spirit. There was a homely elevation in his discourses, a natural freshness in his piety, a quiet enthusiasm in his manner, that charmed thoughtful hearers. Early in 1832 he lost his wife, a sorrow that deeply depressed him in health and spirits. Following his passion for independence and sincerity, he arrived at the conviction that the Lord’s Supper was not intended by Christ to be a permanent sacrament. To him, at least, it had become an outgrown form. He was willing to continue the service only if the use of the elements should be dropped and the rite made simply an act of spiritual remembrance. Setting forth these views, candidly and calmly, in a sermon, he found his congregation, not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him, and therefore retired, not without some disappointment, from the pastoral office. He never again took charge of a parish; but he continued to preach, as opportunity offered, until 1847. In fact, he was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His supreme task was to befriend and guide the inner life of man.

The strongest influences in his development about this time were the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical visions of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, and the stimulating essays of Carlyle. On Christmas Day 1832 he took passage in a sailing vessel for the Mediterranean. He travelled through Italy, visited Paris, spent two months in Scotland and England, and saw the four men whom he most desired to see—Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth. “The comfort of meeting such men of genius as these,” he wrote, “is that they talk sincerely.” But he adds that he found all four of them, in different degrees, deficient in insight into religious truth. His visit to Carlyle, in the lonely farm-house at Craigenputtock, was the memorable beginning of a lifelong friendship. Emerson published Carlyle’s first books in America. Carlyle introduced Emerson’s Essays into England. The two men were bound together by a mutual respect deeper than a sympathy of tastes, and a community of spirit stronger than a similarity of opinions. Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were self-reliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson’s Diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes the keynote of his remaining life. “A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself.... All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without, the principles of them all may be penetrated into within him.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself.... The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” Here is the essence of that intuitional philosophy, commonly called Transcendentalism. Emerson disclaimed allegiance to that philosophy. He called it “the saturnalia, or excess of faith.” His practical common sense recoiled from the amazing conclusions which were drawn from it by many of its more eccentric advocates. His independence revolted against being bound to any scheme or system of doctrine, however nebulous. He said: “I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” But this very wish commits him to the doctrine of the inner light. All through his life he navigated the Transcendental sea, piloted by a clear moral sense, warned off the rocks by the saving grace of humour, and kept from capsizing by a good ballast of New England prudence.

After his return from England in 1833 he went to live with his mother at the old manse in Concord, Mass., and began his career as a lecturer in Boston. His first discourses were delivered before the Society of Natural History and the Mechanics’ Institute. They were chiefly on scientific subjects, approached in a poetic spirit. In the autumn of 1835 he married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, having previously purchased a spacious old house and garden at Concord. There he spent the remainder of his life, a devoted husband, a wise and tender father, a careful house-holder, a virtuous villager, a friendly neighbour, and, spite of all his disclaimers, the central and luminous figure among the 334Transcendentalists. The doctrine which in others seemed to produce all sorts of extravagances—communistic experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands, weird schemes of political reform, long hair on men and short hair on women—in his sane, well-balanced nature served only to lend an ideal charm to the familiar outline of a plain, orderly New England life. Some mild departures from established routine he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism for a while, but gave it up when he found that it did him no particular good. An attempt to illustrate household equality by having the servants sit at table with the rest of the family was frustrated by the dislike of his two sensible domestics for such an inconvenient arrangement. His theory that manual labour should form part of the scholar’s life was checked by the personal discovery that hard labour in the fields meant poor work in the study. “The writer shall not dig,” was his practical conclusion. Intellectual independence was what he chiefly desired; and this, he found, could be attained in a manner of living not outwardly different from that of the average college professor or country minister. And yet it was to this property-holding, debt-paying, law-abiding, well-dressed, courteous-mannered citizen of Concord that the ardent and enthusiastic turned as the prophet of the new idealism. The influence of other Transcendental teachers, Dr Hedge, Dr Ripley, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Jones Very, was narrow and parochial compared with that of Emerson. Something in his imperturbable, kindly presence, his angelic look, his musical voice, his commanding style of thought and speech, announced him as the possessor of the great secret which many were seeking—the secret of a freer, deeper, more harmonious life. More and more, as his fame spread, those who “would live in the spirit” came to listen to the voice, and to sit at the feet, of the Sage of Concord.

It was on the lecture-platform that he found his power and won his fame. The courses of lectures that he delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston, during the winters of 1835 and 1836, on “Great Men,” “English Literature,” and “The Philosophy of History,” were well attended and admired. They were followed by two discourses which commanded for him immediate recognition, part friendly and part hostile, as a new and potent personality. His Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College in August 1837, on “The American Scholar,” was an eloquent appeal for independence, sincerity, realism, in the intellectual life of America. His address before the graduating class of the divinity school at Cambridge, in 1838, was an impassioned protest against what he called “the defects of historical Christianity” (its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus, and its failure to explore the moral nature of man as the fountain of established teaching), and a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and a new inspiration of religion. “In the soul,” he said, “let redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. Go alone. Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” In this address Emerson laid his hand on the sensitive point of Unitarianism, which rejected the divinity of Jesus, but held fast to his supreme authority. A blaze of controversy sprang up at once. Conservatives attacked him; Radicals defended him. Emerson made no reply. But amid this somewhat fierce illumination he went forward steadily as a public lecturer. It was not his negations that made him popular; it was the eloquence with which he presented the positive side of his doctrine. Whatever the titles of his discourses, “Literary Ethics,” “Man the Reformer,” “The Present Age,” “The Method of Nature,” “Representative Men,” “The Conduct of Life,” their theme was always the same, namely, “the infinitude of the private man.” Those who thought him astray on the subject of religion listened to him with delight when he poetized the commonplaces of art, politics, literature or the household. His utterance was Delphic, inspirational. There was magic in his elocution. The simplicity and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine face, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript, lent a strange charm to his speech. For more than a generation he went about the country lecturing in cities, towns and villages, before learned societies, rustic lyceums and colleges; and there was no man on the platform in America who excelled him in distinction, in authority, or in stimulating eloquence.

In 1847 Emerson visited Great Britain for the second time, was welcomed by Carlyle, lectured to appreciative audiences in Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, made many new friends among the best English people, paid a brief visit to Paris, and returned home in July 1848. “I leave England,” he wrote, “with increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or substance seems to be the best in the world. I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration.” The impressions of this journey were embodied in a book called English Traits, published in 1856. It might be called “English Traits and American Confessions,” for nowhere does Emerson’s Americanism come out more strongly. But the America that he loved and admired was the ideal, the potential America. For the actual conditions of social and political life in his own time he had a fine scorn. He was an intellectual Brahmin. His principles were democratic, his tastes aristocratic. He did not like crowds, streets, hotels—“the people who fill them oppress me with their excessive civility.” Humanity was his hero. He loved man, but be was not fond of men. He had grave doubts about universal suffrage. He took a sincere interest in social and political reform, but towards specific “reforms” his attitude was somewhat remote and visionary. On the subject of temperance he held aloof from the intemperate methods of the violent prohibitionists. He was a believer in woman’s rights, but he was lukewarm towards conventions in favour of woman suffrage. Even in regard to slavery he had serious hesitations about the ways of the abolitionists, and for a long time refused to be identified with them. But as the irrepressible conflict drew to a head Emerson’s hesitation vanished. He said in 1856, “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” With the outbreak of the Civil War he became an ardent and powerful advocate of the cause of the Union. James Russell Lowell said, “To him more than to all other causes did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives.”

Emerson the essayist was a condensation of Emerson the lecturer. His prose works, with the exception of the slender volume entitled Nature(1836), were collected and arranged from the manuscripts of his lectures. His method of writing was characteristic. He planted a subject in his mind, and waited for thoughts and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a plant or flower. When an idea appeared, he followed it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly”; when it was captured he pinned it in his “Thought-book”. The writings of other men he used more for stimulus than for guidance. He said that books were for the scholar’s idle times. “I value them,” he said, “to make my top spin.” His favourite reading was poetry and mystical philosophy: Shakespeare, Dante, George Herbert, Goethe, Berkeley, Coleridge, Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, Plato, the new Platonists, and the religious books of the East (in translation). Next to these he valued books of biography and anecdote: Plutarch, Grimm, St Simon, Varnhagen von Ense. He had some odd dislikes, and could find nothing in Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shelley, Scott, Miss Austen, Dickens. Novels he seldom read. He was a follower of none, an original borrower from all. His illustrations were drawn from near and far. The zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the naked Derar, horsed on an idea, charging a troop of Roman cavalry; the long, austere Pythagorean lustrum of silence; Napoleon on the deck of the “Bellerophon,” observing the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian doctrine that every man has two pairs of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the horizontal stratification of the 335earth; a soft mushroom pushing its way through the hard ground,—all these allusions and a thousand more are found in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, the Sphinx, St Paul’s, Etna and Vesuvius, you will find the White Mountains, Monadnock, Agiocochook, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking through the sky, the chick-a-dee braving the snow, Wall Street and State Street, cotton-mills, railroads and Quincy granite. For an abstract thinker he was strangely in love with the concrete facts of life. Idealism in him assumed the form of a vivid illumination of the real. From the pages of his teeming note-books he took the material for his lectures, arranging and rearranging it under such titles as Nature, School, Home, Genius, Beauty and Manners, Self-Possession, Duty, The Superlative, Truth, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American. When the lectures had served their purpose he rearranged the material in essays and published them. Thus appeared in succession the following volumes: Essays (First Series) (1841); Essays (Second Series) (1844); Representative Men (1850); English Traits (1856); The Conduct of Life (1860); Society and Solitude (1870); Letters and Social Aims (1876). Besides these, many other lectures were printed in separate form and in various combinations.

Emerson’s style is brilliant, epigrammatic, gem-like; clear in sentences, obscure in paragraphs. He was a sporadic observer. He saw by flashes. He said, “I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought.” The coherence of his writing lies in his personality. His work is fused by a steady glow of optimism. Yet he states this optimism moderately. “The genius which preserves and guides the human race indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favourable to the side of reason.”

His verse, though in form inferior to his prose, was perhaps a truer expression of his genius. He said, “I am born a poet”; and again, writing to Carlyle, he called himself “half a bard.” He had “the vision,” but not “the faculty divine” which translates the vision into music. In his two volumes of verse (Poems, 1846; May Day and other Pieces, 1867) there are many passages of beautiful insight and profound feeling, some lines of surprising splendour, and a few poems, like “The Rhodora,” “The Snowstorm,” “Ode to Beauty,” “Terminus,” “The Concord Ode,” and the marvellous “Threnody” on the death of his first-born boy, of beauty unmarred and penetrating truth. But the total value of his poetical work is discounted by the imperfection of metrical form, the presence of incongruous images, the predominance of the intellectual over the emotional element, and the lack of flow. It is the material of poetry not thoroughly worked out. But the genius from which it came—the swift faculty of perception, the lofty imagination, the idealizing spirit enamoured of reality—was the secret source of all Emerson’s greatness as a speaker and as a writer. Whatever verdict time may pass upon the bulk of his poetry, Emerson himself must be recognized as an original and true poet of a high order.

His latter years were passed in peaceful honour at Concord. In 1866 Harvard College conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and in 1867 he was elected an overseer. In 1870 he delivered a course of lectures before the university on “The Natural History of the Intellect.” In 1872 his house was burned down, and was rebuilt by popular subscription. In the same year he went on his third foreign journey, going as far as Egypt. About this time began a failure in his powers, especially in his memory. But his character remained serene and unshaken in dignity. Steadily, tranquilly, cheerfully, he finished the voyage of life.

“I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near.

And every wave is charmed.’”

Emerson died on the 27th of April 1882, and his body was laid to rest in the peaceful cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, in a grove on the edge of the village of Concord.

Authorities.—Emerson’s Complete Works, Riverside edition, edited by J.E. Cabot (11 vols., Boston, 1883-1884); another edition (London, 5 vols., 1906), by G. Sampson, in Bohn’s “Libraries”; The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883); George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (Boston, 1881); Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius and Writings (London, 1882); A. Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher and Seer (Boston, 1882); Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1882); Joel Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883); F.B. Sanborn (editor),The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (Boston, 1885); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (“American Men of Letters” series) (Boston, 1885); James Elliott Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (the authorized biography) (Boston, 1887); Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston, 1889); Richard Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London, 1888); G.E. Woodberry, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1907). Critical estimates are also to be found in Matthew Arnold’s Discourses in America, John Morley’s Critical Miscellanies, Henry James’s Partial Portraits, Lowell’s My Study Windows, Birrell’s Obiter Dicta (2nd series), Stedman’s Poets of America, Whipple’s American Literature, &c. There is a Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by G.W. Cooke (Boston, 1908).

(H. van D.)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://bactra.org/Poetry/Tagore/modern-poetry.html

Modern Poetry
Rabindranath Tagore
Writing about modern English poets is by no means an easy task, for who defines the limit of the modern age in terms of the almanac? It is not so much a question of time as of spirit.

After flowing straight for a while, most rivers take a sudden turn. Likewise, literature does not always follow the straight path; when it takes a turn, that turn must be called modern. We call it adhunik in Bengali. This modernity depends not upon time but upon temperament.

The poetry to which I was introduced in my boyhood might have been classed as modern in those days. Poetry had taken a new turn, beginning from Robert Burns, and the same movement brought forth many other great poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

The manners and customs of a society are shown in social usage. In countries where these social customs suppress all freedom and individual taste, man becomes a puppet, and his conduct conforms meticulously to social etiquette. Society appreciates this traditional and habitual way of life. Sometimes literature remains in this groove for long periods of time, and whosoever wears the sacred marks of perfect literary style is looked upon as a saintly person. During the age of English poetry that followed Burns, the barriers of style were broken down, and temperament made its debut. ``The lake adorned with lotus and the lily'' became a lake seen through the special view of official blinkers fashioned in the classic workshop. When a daring writer removes those blinkers and catch phrases, and looks upon the lake with open eyes, he also opens up a view through which the lake assumes different aspects and various fancies. But classic judgement cries ``fie for shame'' on him.

When we began to read English poetry, this unconventionally individualistic mood had already been acknowledge in literature, and the clamor raised by the Edinburgh Review had died down. Even so, that period of our life was a new era in modernism.

In those days, the sign of modernism in poetry was an individual's measure of delight. Wordsworth expressed in his own style the spirit of delight that he realized in nature. Shelley's was a Platonic contemplation, accompanied by a spirit of revolt against every kind of obstacle, political, religious or otherwise. Keat's poetry was wrought out of the meditation and creation of beauty. In that age, the stream of poetry took a turn from outwardness to inwardness.

A poet's deepest feelings strive for immortality by assuming a form in language. Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. There was a time when humanity in its moments of leisure sought to beautify that portion of the universe with which it came into contact, and this outer adornment was the expression of its inner love, and with this love, there could be no indifference. In those days, in the exuberance of his sense of beauty man began to decorate the common articles of daily use; his inspiration lent creative power to his fingers. In every land and village, household utensils and the adornment of the home and person bound man, in color and form, to these outward insignia of life. Many ceremonies were evolved for adding zest to social life, many new melodies, arts and crafts in wood and metal, clay and stone, silk, wool and cotton. In those days, the husband called his wife: ``beloved disciple in the fine arts.'' The bank balance did not constitute the principal asset of the married couple in the work of setting up house; the arts were a more necessary item. Flower garlands were woven, the art of dancing was taught, accompanied by lessons in the vina, the flute and singing, and young women knew how to paint the ends of their saris of China silk. Then, there was beauty in human relationships.

The English poets with whom we came into contact in my early youth saw the universe with their own eyes; it had become their personal property. Not only did their own imaginations, opinions and tastes humanize and intellectualize the universe, but they molded it according to their individual desires. The universe of Wordsworth was specially ``Wordsworthian,'' of Shelley, ``Shelleyan,'' of Byron, ``Byronic.'' By creative magic it also became the reader's universe. The joy that we felt in a poet's world was the joy of enjoying the delight of a particular world aroma. The flower sent its invitation to the bee through a distinctive smell and color, and the note of invitation was sweet. The poet's invitation possessed a spontaneous charm. In the days when the chief bond between man and universe was individuality, the personal touch in the invitation had to be fostered with care, a sort of competition had to be set up in dress and ornament and manners, in order to show oneself off to the best advantage.

Thus, we find that in the beginning of the nineteenth century the tradition which held priority in the English poetry of the previous age had given place to self-expression. This was called modernism.

But now that modernism is dubbed mid-Victorian senility and made to recline on an easy chair in the next room. Now is the day of the modernism of lopped skirts and lopped hair. Powder is applied to the cheeks and rouge to the lips, and it is proclaimed that the days of illusion are over. But there is always illusion at every step of the creation, and it is only the variety of that illusions which plays so many tunes in so many forms. Science has throughly examined every pulse beat, and declares that at the root of things there is no illusion; there is carbon and nitrogen, there is physiology and psychology. We old-fashioned poets thought the illusion was the main thing and carbon and physiology the by-products. Therefore, we must confess that we had striven to compete with the Creator in spreading the snare of illusion through rhyme and rhythm, language and style. In our metaphors and nuances there was some hide-and-seek; we were unable to lift aside that veil of modesty which adorns but does not contradict truth. In the colored light that filtered through the haze, the dawns and evenings appeared in a beauty as tender as a new bride. The modern, Duhshashsan, engaged in publicly disrobing Draupadi is a sight we are not accustomed to. Is it merely habit that makes us uncomfortable; is there no truth in this sense of shame; does not Beauty become bankrupt when divested of the veil which reveals rather than conceals?

But the modern age is in a hurry, and livelihood is more important. Man races through his work and rushes through his pleasure in a crowd of accelerating machines. The human being who used to create his own intimate world at leisure now delegates his duties to factory and rigs up some sort of provisional affair to suit his needs according to some official standard. Feasts are out of fashion; only meals remain. There is no desire to consider whether life is in harmony with the intellect, for the mind of man is also engaged in pulling the rope of the huge car of livelihood. Instead of music, we hear hoarse shouts of ``Push, boys, push!'' He has to spend most of his time with the crowed, not in the company of his friends; his mentality is the mentality of the hustler. In the midst of all this bustle he has no will power to bypass unadorned ugliness.

Which path must poetry now follow, then, and what is her destination? It is not possible these days to follow one's own taste, to select, to arrange. Science does not select, it accepts whatever is; it does not appraise by the standard of personal taste nor embellish with the eagerness of personal involvement. The chief delight of the scientific mind consists in curiosity, not in forming ties of relationship. It does not regard what ``I'' want as the main consideration, but rather what the thing in itself exactly is, leaving ``me'' out of the question; and without ``me,'' the preparation of illusion is unnecessary.

Therefore, in the process of economizing that is being carried out in the poetry of this scientific age, it is adornment that has suffered the biggest loss. A fastidious selectivity in the matter of rhyme, rhythm and words has become almost obsolete. The change is not taking place smoothly, but in order to break the spell of the past, it has become the fashion to repudiate it aggressively, like trying to arrange bits of broken glass in an ugly manner, lest the selective faculty should enter the house by jumping over the garden wall. A poet writes, ``I am the greatest laugher of all, greater than the sun, than the oak tree, than the frog and Apollo.'' ``Than the frog and Apollo'' is where the bits of broken glass come in, out of fear that someone will think that the poet is arranging his words sweetly and prettily. If the word ``sea'' were used instead of ``frog,'' the modernists might object to it as regular poetizing. That may be so, but mentioning the frog is a more regular poetizing of the opposite kind. That is to say, it is not introduced naturally, but is like intentionally walking on your toes; that would be modern.

But the fact of the matter is, the days are gone for the frog to be admitted into poetry with the same respect as other creatures. In the category of reality, the frog now belongs to a higher class than Apollo. I do not wish to regard the frog with contempt; rather, in an appropriate context, the croaking laugh of the frog might be juxtaposed with the laugh of the poet's beloved, even if she objected. But even according to the most ultra-scientific theory of equality, the laugh of the sun, of the oak tree, of Apollo, is not that of the frog. It has been dragged in by force in order to destroy the illusion.

Today. this veil of illusion must be removed and the thing must be seen exactly as it is. The illusion which colored the nineteenth century has now faded, and the mere suggestion of sweetness is not enough to satisfy one's hunger - something tangible is required. When we say that smelling is half the eating, we exaggerate by nearly three quarters. Let me quote a few lines from a poem addressed to a beauty of bygone days.

You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.

This kind of modern coinage is cheaper but stronger, and very definite; it clearly sounds the modern note. Old-fashioned charm had an intoxicating effect, but this poem has insolence; and there is nothing misty about it.

The subject matter of modern poetry odes not seek to attract the mind by its charm. Its strength consists in firm self-reliance, that which is called ``character'' in English. It calls out: Ho there! behold me, here am I. The same poetess, whose name is Amy Lowell, has written a poem on a shop of red slippers. The theme is that in the evening the snowflakes are whirling outside in the wind; inside, behind polished glass windows, rows of red slippers hang like garlands, ``like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the street, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. The row of white, sparkling shop-fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers.'' The whole poem deals with slippers.

This is called impersonal. There is no ground for being particularly attached to these garlands of slippers, either as a buyer or a seller, but one has to stop and look; as soon as the character of the picture as a whole becomes apparent, it no longer remains trifling. Those concerned with meaning will ask, ``What does it all mean, sir? Why so much bother about slippers, even if they are red?'' To which one replies - ``Just look at them yourself.'' But the questioner asks, ``What's the good of looking?'' To which there is no reply.

Let us take another example. There is a poem by Ezra Pound called ``A Study in Aesthetics,'' in which a girl walks along the street, and a boy in patched clothes cries out in uncontrollable excitement, ``Oh! look, look, how beautiful!'' Three years later, the poet meets the boy again during a great haul of sardines. The father and uncles box the fish in order to send them to the market at Breschia. The boy jumps about, handling the fish, and his elders scold him to be quiet. The boy strokes the neatly-arranged fish, and mutters to himself in a tone of satisfaction ``How beautiful!'' On hearing this the poet says, ``I was mildly abashed.''

The pretty girl and the sardines elicit the same comment, "How beautiful!" This observation is impersonal, pure and simple; even the slipper-shop is not outside its purview.

In the nineteenth century poetry was subjective in character; in the twentieth it is objective. Hence, emphasis is now laid on the realism of the subject-matter, not on its adornment; for adornment expresses individual taste, whereas the power of reality consists in expressing the subject itself.

Before making its appearance in literature, this modernism exposed itself in painting. By creating disturbances, it sought to contradict the idea that painting was one of the fine arts. The function of art is not to charm but to conquer the mind, it argued; its sign is not beauty but truth. It did not acknowledge the illusion of form but rather the advertisement of the whole. This form has no other introduction to offer; it only wants to proclaim the fact that it is worth observing. This strong case for being observed is not made by appeals of gesture and posture, nor by copying nature, but by its own inherent truth, which is neither religious, moral, nor ideal - it is natural. That is to say, it must be acknowledged simply because it exists, just as we acknowledge the peacock and the vulture, just as we cannot deny the existence of the the pig or the deer.

Some are beautiful, others are ugly; some are useful, others harmful; but there is no possible pretext for discarding any from the sphere of creation. It is the same with literature and art. If any beauty has been created, it needs no apology; but if it possesses no innate strength of being, only sweetness, then it must be rejected.

Hence, present day literature that has accepted the creed of modernity, scorns to keep caste by carefully adjusting itself to bygone standards of aristocracy; it does not pick and choose. Eliot's poetry is modern in this sense, but not Bridges'. Eliot writes:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways,
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of whithered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots.
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

Then comes a description of a muddy morning filled with the smell of stale beer. On such a morning, the following words are addressed to a girl:

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;

And this is the account given of the man:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

In the midst of this smoky, this muddy, this altogether dingy morning and evening, full of many stale odors, and waste papers, the opposite picture is evoked in the poet's mind. He says:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Here the link between Apollo and the frog is broken. Here the croaking of the frog in the well hurts the laughter of Apollo. It is clearly evident that the poet is not absolutely and scientifically impersonal. His loathing for this tawdry world is expressed through the very description he gives of it. Hence the bitter words with which he ends the poem:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The poet's distaste for this gathering world is evident. The difference from the past consists in there being no desire to delude oneself with an imaginary world of rosy dreams. The poet makes his poetry trudge through this mire regardless of his laundered clothes; not because he is fond of mud, but because in this muddy world one must look at mud with open eyes, and accept it. If Apollo's laugh reaches one's ears in the mud, well and good; if not, then one need not despise the loud, leaping laughter of the frog. One can look at it for a moment in the context of the universe; there is something to be said for this. The frog will seem out of place in the cultured language of the drawing-room; but then most of the world lies outside the drawing-room....

But if modernism has any philosophy, and if that philosophy is to be called impersonal, then one must admit that this attitude of aggressive disbelief and calumny toward the universe, is also a personal mental aberration owing to the sudden revolution. This also is an illusion, in which there is no serious attempt to accept reality naturally in a calm and dispassionate frame of mind. Many people think that this aggressiveness, this wantonly destructive challenging is what is called modernity.

I myself don't think so. Even though thousands of people are attacked by influenza today, I shall not say that influenza is the natural condition of the body in modern times. The natural bodily state exists behind influenza.

Pure modernism, then, consists in looking upon the universe, not in a personal and self-regarding manner, but in an impersonal and matter-of-fact manner. This point of view is bright and pure, and there is real delight in this unclouded vision. In the same dispassionate way that modern science analyzes reality, modern poetry looks upon the universe as a whole; this is what is eternally modern.

But, actually, it is nonsense to call this modern. The joy of a natural and detached way of looking at things belongs to no particular age; it belongs to everyone whose eyes know how to wander over the naked earth. It is over a thousand years since the Chinese poet Li Po wrote his verses, but he was a modern; he looked upon the universe with freshly-opened eyes. In a verse of four lines he writes simply:

Why do I live among the mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man,
The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on....

Another picture:

Blue water ... a clear moon ...
In the moonlight the white herons are flying.
Listen! Do you hear the girls who gather water-chestnuts?
They are going home in the night, singing.

Another:

Naked I lie in the green forest of summer...
Too lazy to wave my white-feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.

A river merchant's wife writes:

I would play, plucking flowers by the gate;
My hair scarcely covered my forehead, then.
You would come, riding on your bamboo horse,
And loiter about the bench with green plums for toys.
So we both dwelt in Chang-kan town,
We were two children, suspecting nothing.

At fourteen I became your wife,
And so bashful I could never bare my face,
But hung my head, and turned to the dark wall;
You would call me a thousand times,
But I could not look back even once.

At fifteen I was able to compose my eyebrows,
And beg you to love me till we were dust and ashes.

I was sixteen when you went on a long journey.
Traveling beyond the Ken-Tang gorge,
Where the giant rocks heap up the swift river,
And the rapids are not passable in May.
Did you hear the monkeys wailing
Up on the skyey height of the crags?

Do you know your footmarks by our gate are old,
And each and every one is filled up with green moss?
The mosses are too deep for me to sweep away;
And already in the autumn wind the leaves are falling.

The yellow butterflies of October
Flutter in pairs over the grass of the west garden
My heart aches at seeing them ...
I sit sorrowing alone, and alas!
The vermillion of my face is fading.

Some day when you return down the river,
If you will write me a letter beforehand,
I will come to meet you - the way is not long -
I will come as far as the Long Wind Bench instantly.

In this poem the sentiment is neither maudlin nor ridiculous. The subject is familiar, and there is feeling. If the tone were sarcastic and there was ridicule, then the poem would be modern, because the moderns scorn to acknowledge in poetry that which everybody acknowledges naturally. Most probably a modern poet would have added at the end of this poem that the husband went his way after wiping his eyes and looking back repeatedly, and the girl at once set about frying dried prawn fish-balls. For whom? In reply there are a line-and-a-half of asterisks. The old-fashioned reader would ask, ``What does this mean?'' The modern poet would answer ``Things happen like this.'' The reader would say, ``But they also happen otherwise.'' And the modern would answer, ``Yes, they do, but that is too respectable. Unless it sheds its refinement, it does not become modern....''

Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home a put a bullet through his head.

There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.

If you call a reverence for universal things sentimentalism, then you must also call your rebellion against them by the same name. If the mind becomes bitter, for whatever reason, the vision can never be natural. Hence, if the mid-Victorian age is to be ridiculed as being the leader of ultra-respectability, then the Edwardian age must also be ridiculed with the opposite adjectives. The thing is not natural and therefore not perennial. As for science, so for art, the detached mind is the best vehicle. Europe has gained that mind in science, but not in literature.