With respect to previous post, see somewhat apropos comments on criticism by BK Stefans (9/8/03).

On the Nature of Quietude


Pondering on my walk to work this "quietude" & what it is. In context of currently reading Edgar Wind's great book (Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance) about the Neoplatonic fellows of the Florentine Academy (15th cent.) - Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, et al. (Interested to see that Nicolas Cusanus emerges at the end.)

Anyway, Ron Silliman has laid out his various expositions based on a taunt by Edgar Poe at the reigning fireside magazine verse of his time. Ron's is a heroic narrative, in which the stodgy furniture & debased aesthetics of traditionalist establishment popular/elitist "verse" are gradually dismantled & swept away by the enlarged & vivifying renewals of the ever-resistant oppositiional avant-garde.

Was remarking yesterday, in comments on BK Stefans' review of Robert Lowell's oeuvre, on the lack of repose characteristic of the so-called mainstream eminences of the last mid-century (Lowell, Berryman etc). One way of looking at this would I guess be historicist : these poets were teetering on the brink of the revolutionary changes of the 60s, and their unease reflected that moment before the storm.

But you can't reduce poetry to history, nor these particular poets' work to a simple expression of angst or unease.

In fact you can't reduce poetry to sociology or ideology either.

As I mentioned, I'm pondering in the context of Wind's exposition of the neoplatonic humanists' philosophizing on the nature of humankind and God. So I'm thinking in terms of their ubiquitous triads, from Apollo's tripod up to the Holy Trinity. One of them had to do with the equilibrium of the good life stemming from a balance of three aspects of the soul: contemplation, activity, pleasure (intellectual, irascible, sensual; Saturn, Jove/Mars, Venus; etc. etc.).

It intrigues me to think of the wings of blogpoetics as tending to emphasize one or another of these aspects. Thus the NY School tends toward an epicurean pleasure principle & a light mockery of seriousness in any of its obvious forms.

The langpo-avant-gardists tend toward the vita activa, the irascible principle : art is a "movement" loosely aligned with social liberation & political correctness, struggling against the oppressive decadence of a debased commercialized mainstream. The irascible principle naturally seeks & finds its antagonist(s), the current ectomorph of which is the "School of Quietude".

The problem with this dialectic is that the irascible ones conflate the contemplative faculty with the complacent attitude. Intent, in their irascible fashion, upon reading literature politically & ideologically, they are deaf and blind to what is probably the most basic function of poetic harmonics : to lead the reader/listener to a recognition of inherent & beautiful equilibrium, to a visionary repose where contemplation, activity & pleasure reflect some kind of perennial life-principle, Dante's ben del intelletto.

BK Stefans includes an interesting canonizing review of Robert Lowell's recent Collected. The following passage is characteristic:


"One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). "

Berryman often came under attack from his own generation for "bad writing" (Louise Bogan probably the most salient example of this). Here Stefans juxtaposes Berryman & Lowell : Berryman's narcissism vs. Lowell's earnest bid for immortality through careful (re)writing.

What stands out for me anyway about that circle of "establishment" American male poets from mid-century is the enormous weight of stress & torment. The lyrical balance of some of Schwartz's poems contrasts with his miserable neurotic personal life. Berryman & Lowell's work is remarkable for its lack of repose.

I think Berryman actually captured the historical flavor of his times, through his manic self-obsessed disintegration & the schizoid undertone of "black talk", than Lowell did with all his earnest & Olympian historicism. America & the West are a racial-ideological construct on certain levels, and in Berryman we begin to hear the unsettling African undertone of that deeper seismic-historical resonance.

BK Stefan's patient revaluation of both Ron Silliman's comments & Lowell make good reading. Sustained careful attention is important not only because it affects the reading climate; it can also influence poets' awareness of what might be possible.

Every poet carries around their private landscape of literary history, a symbiosis of historical objectivity & personal affiliations.

Hart Crane is important to my own because he displays a synthetic, absorptive talent : an ear for both Elizabethan/Baroque sonority & for the technical fireworks of 1920s modernism (Joyce, ee cummings, Pound, Eliot are all there in The Bridge, along with Whitman & Dickinson & Melville). Much of Allen Tate's idiom sounds imitative of Crane; Tate (along with Crane) in turn influenced Lowell. I'm not mentioning this to promote Lowell but to note lines of stylistic filiation.

More later maybe.