Henry Bard has second thoughts

The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe troubled my sleep, and I awoke feeling reservations about the gaudy bardic proclamations of previous post.  Perhaps there are two deep currents in 20th and 21st-century poetry : 1) the urge toward engagement, fellowship, judgement, passionate witness; and 2) the urge toward imperturbable detachment, disinterested objectivity, the autonomous perfection of the art work.  You could say Whitman is representative of the first impulse, and Poe of the second.  David Jones across the Atlantic, another great modern exemplar of the long poem, wrote some wonderful essays in defense of the absolute freedom of the artist - as artist - from social/political requirements.  Art has a moral purpose, and forwards human freedom and dignity, simply by fulfilling itself, by working out its own quest toward integral beauty, in free association with the manual arts, applied technology and useful crafts.

It seems clear to me that I have wavered through my writing life between these two poles, between Whitman and Poe.  It's why my favorite American "bard" has always been, not Ezra Pound, but Hart Crane.  Crane's Bridge is a national paean to American culture : yet the poem is so dense and "overdetermined" with pure poetic resonance that it is always more than whatever abstract or paraphrase is applied to it.  The Bridge is multidimensional and recursive, self-referential : you could say the poem radiates the free-standing beauty of an achieved work of art, an "end-in-itself".

Also the serene formulae of the early-modern poetic movement of Russian Acmeism gave me examples of possible integrations of these two poles (call them the aesthetic and the political, or the communal and the individual...).  Gumilev and Mandelstam found a mediation between revolutionary Futurism and reactionary or detached Symbolism : by making poetic works of integral, pure and free art, by following, revising and fulfilling artistic traditions they had inherited, the Acmeists produced an art of and for the people.  "The Word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread : suffering" (Mandelstam, from the essay "Word and Culture").

Yin & yang, systole, diastole... the poet goes out singing, and comes back again - to work late, & in secret, at the smithy of the integral poem.

This may be another partial explanation for my marginal presence on the contemporary scene.  I've been too busy working at the forge.  My massive unread poems are an effort, in part, to bring the American long-poem enterprise to some kind of artistic, integral fulfillment, on the model of Crane's Bridge and Osip Mandelstam's life-work.  Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram...  It would be somewhat ironic if someday critical reception picks up on the idea that the American national epic has been fulfilled by a contribution from Soviet Russia.  But don't call Putin or Trump : Mandelstam and Gumilev speak from a completely other Russia, the Russia of Pushkin, Chaadev, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova.  The spiritually-free Russian psyche, so radiant with balletic grace and deep chords of solemn harmony.

Gateway Arch Monument, St. Louis

Wilson seems like an apt critic for the Symbolists & Moderns because he's not really like them. He's a humane journalist-scholar. That is, he reads poetry & fiction as a generalist, through a wide lens of general human problems. He approaches art in terms of character & psychology, but he's not a psychologist; in terms of history and politics, but he's not a historian or an ideologue. He's synthetic, not programmatic or theoretical. As somebody noted somewhere, he's a subtle literary portraitist; we begin to see literary moves & choices as shaded, in part, by the personality of the artist, & in part by the economic & political climate of the times - underneath the more explicit or tendentious philosophical-aesthetic debates.

(- plus he wrote a pretty good essay about Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, so he can do no wrong.)

Notes Toward & So On

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.

These big yak sessions about where poetry is going next, they are, which, a sucker for, I am.

Definitions of various critical notions - such as Image, or Symbol - change over time. Symbolism, as inherited from Poe and Baudelaire and Mallarme and the Russian Symbolists, was tinctured with something approaching allegory : the radiant, outlined image or symbol was an earthly representation of some intellectual, spiritual, supernal substance.

The modernist movements of the 20th century were strongly marked by a rejection of Symbolist-Romantic spiritualism, vagueness, emotional blur. The emphasis was on positivism, the strict isolation of art & poetry within their own autonomous spheres, reductionism in notions of "true (scientific) statements", etc.

Aesthetic developments shared in these trends. Thus the Hulme-Pound push for imagism carefully limited the image to a concrete, isolated representation of some actual thing, or the yoking of two isolated things so that they resonate as an isolated (metaphorical) third thing. The New Critics, strongly influenced by the categorical scientism of I.A. Richards, isolated the poem within its own "autotelic", self-referential aesthetic sphere.

Nevertheless, there were counter-trends at work. Eliot, in his critical writings, and especially in Four Quartets, promoted a notion of imaginative synthesis, in which poetic language united the intellectual & the emotional in the image from "outside" (his "objective correlative"). Stevens, the quasi-Romantic, quasi-Symbolist, turned around and around his central, productive metaphors - simultaneously uniting and distancing the beautiful and the real, "poetry" and "life". & remember Marianne Moore's apothegm : "imaginary gardens with real toads in them".

But perhaps the most substantial counter-example was offered by Hart Crane. Of all the American modernists, Crane learned the most from James Joyce about the properties of symbolic language. Just as Joyce grounded his symbols in the steady, all-round gaze at concrete reality (Dublin, Ireland), so Crane centered his (double) vision on something both actual and metaphorical : the Brooklyn Bridge. In this way, the poetic symbol emits a double resonance : toward actuality, on the one hand, and toward a universe of metaphorical similitudes, echoes, and meanings, on the other. The verbal symbol is grounded in actuality. Similarly, Joyce's early notion of "epiphany" draws the symbol out of the "quiddity" - the substantial reality - of each particular thing. (Similar to GM Hopkins' notion, 50 years earlier, of the radiant things of the world speaking their essential nature - which is, that is, to speak themselves.)

One way of thinking about the progress of American poetry after 1950, is as a search for an adequate idiom to represent reality, on the one hand, and discover the unique, particular purpose for poetry, on the other. A hunt for the Grail, or wild goose chase.

The New Critics developed a kind of 20th-century neo-classicism, by focusing solely on the internal properties, the strictly aesthetic rhetoric, of "the poem itself". The Confessionals broke that mold, liberating poetic form and bringing into the poem vast areas of "experience" : but at the price of setting a whole new mold or mask in place - the anecdotal egoism of personal narratives & psychodrama, which only reinforced more general currents of American exceptionalism and narcissism. The "Deep Image" poets explored the character of symbol and image more directly : but limited to a narrow range of Jungian-Surrealist "subconscious" material - another layer of psychologism. The Beats took their breakout from New Critical traditionalism in the direction of counter-cultural adventure narratives, which exhibited literary-generic limitations of their own. The Olsonian Projectivists and Black Mountain poets took adventure narrative to another level of psychic-spiritual development - toward zen, Jungian-occult Christianity, and other forms of poetic nature-&-cosmos mysticism. The NY School executed a balletic inversion of New Critical practice : the poem retained its playful aesthetic independence - but now it was grounded, not in the morose narrativity of the Confessionals, but in the plangent de-centering of the "I", and a plunge into an American sort of "high-pop" aesthetic pleasure principle : the firmness of the literary symbol always somewhat undermined by the talky, self-deprecating persona of the Whitman-O'Hara-Ashbery narrator (talking-rambling in the foreground, rather than the Eliotic disinterested background). The language poets and post-avants executed their own kind of inversion, this time turning around the anecdotal narcissism of 70's free verse by systematically dissolving both "subject" and "object" : dislocating entirely the logic of meaning, syntax, rhetoric. What was autotelic, for the New Critics, on the level of the poem itself, became totally opaque, for the language poets, on the level of individual words, since, for the language poets, poetic "language" was reduced to a kind of denatured "thing", without any external correlatives or consequences whatsoever. This was a radical move, both in a political and an aesthetic sense : but it was part of a wider trend in postmodern philosophy, heavily indebted to Nietzsche, Derrida, and other theorists of the dislocation of discernible meaning. With language poetry we come to a kind of terminus to the notion of "epiphany" or "objective correlative" or Coleridgean sensual-intellectual symbol, since the word (in language poetry) no longer has symbolic capability : in fact, the "language word" actively disrupts consistent representation.

The wild goose chase of post-WW II American poetics, while not finding what it sought, in a sense offered a glimpse of a profile of what remained undiscovered. Only a new, "post-postmodern" mentality or worldview will ground a new style or poetics. My guess is that critical appraisal of new work in poetry will be based on the nature and status of the image or symbol, understood in a new way. An image, or verbal picture, is already a symbol of what it represents. Often the most radiant or vibrant images are metaphors - ie. they apply a contrast or similitude, in order, first of all, to add force to the impression of the thing portrayed, and secondly, to imply a web of meaning (between the two parts of the metaphor, and among all the other things these parts imply or resonate with). This web of resonant interconnections is the symbolic order of the poem. And when the original image is an "epiphany", in the Joycean-Cranean sense - ie., grounded in the apprehension or experience of actual things and natural processes - a symbolic resonance is generated on yet another level, the poem gains in substance and objectivity. The metaphorical double (or perhaps four-fold) vision of the "earthly symbol" is the "bridge", in Crane's sense, or the "rose", in Eliot's (incarnational) sense, to poetry's essential utterances. It may also provide a bridge between the distinctive dialect of American poetic idioms, and the broader stream of (worldwide) poetic tradition.

By focusing on the sensuous-intellective presence or "weight" of an image-complex, or the overall symbolic resonance of the poem, critics will no longer be hampered by a narrow emphasis on the performing personality (stylistic mannerisms, cuteness, cleverness) - the "stand-up comedy" feel of much contemporary verse; nor will they be subjected to the mystagoguery of serious postmodern "experimentalism", which drowns symbolic representation in discontinuity, abstraction, and literary pretense - a combination of overt intellectuality, depleted sense-perception, and emotional shallowness.

What was that battle about, back in St. Petersburg, in Viacheslav Ivanov's "tower", at the turn of the LAST century, between Russian "Symbolists" & "Acmeists"?

& why should this matter to you, bloggiste?

Symbolism was a cultural paradigm, part of the atmosphere, fin-de-siecle. Mallarme one of its chief avatars.

Mallarme took the alienation, the de-centeredness, the Void (drawn in subterranean fashion from Poe) - in itself an inalienable element of human experience (in traditional Christian terms, "fallenness") - and applies it, translates it, into a theory of language. And a script for the social role of Poet.

In this operation, he was percursor of much philosophy, much theory, for the century to follow. Thus the exaltation of Poetry among the philosophers, from Heidegger to Derrida. (Maybe the existentialists, drawing from Kierkegaard, were more realistic about the (in)adequacy of poetry & language as antidote for experiential alienation.)

In Symbolism, the magic of language replaced traditional religion as the skeleton key to the heavenly, otherworldly saferoom.

Acmeism was a struggle against this literary pseudo-religion. Elena Corrigan, in Mandelshtam's Poetics, relates how difficult & longlasting this struggle was for M. in particular. His early poetry was Symbolist in tenor, & suffused with an awareness of the "non-being" of poetic speech, the inherent "displacement" of experience.

The "school", the "theory" of Acmeism was a formulation of literary principles on the level of the essay & the manifesto. One of its basic attitudes was an enmity toward symbolist "stars" & otherworlds. Poetry somehow had to participate in & celebrate the goodness to be found in this world; it was to participate, through "craft", in civilization-building and the continuity of culture.

Such an attitude (stemming from pre-WW I, pre-Revolution Russia) sounds naive in comparison with the subtle obliterations of 20th-cent. post-structuralism & deconstruction, the Mallarmean myths of the empty, de-signified word.

Corrigan describes how Mandelstam's own working theory changed & developed through the 20s & 30s. The notion of literary culture-building molted into a concept of fellowship, "kinship", between reader/writer. Symbolist otherness in poetic speech was absorbed into a larger pattern of "reading" - which begins in catastrophic break or alienation (the text from reality), but metamorphoses into a kind of journey, of kinship & recognition.

It seems to me that underlying these theoretical positions (symbolism, acmeism, affirmation, alienation) are more basic stances or attitudes - psychic responses to positive & negative experience.

Literature can acknowledge, name & identify the terrors of life : it can even (as in the case of Mallarme & symbolism & many of the theoretical discourses that followed) produce a philosophical armature or logic which identifies with, sometimes glorifies in, existential absence, dislocation, meaninglessness.

The anguish of existence is a human predicament, an aspect of experience.

Poe & Whitman might be seen as avatars of these opposing stances : anguish or celebration; denial or affirmation.

But it would be a mistake to channel poetry into a theory of language which sponsors only one or the other stance.

Identity, non-identity. Being, otherness...

Language doesn't merely displace or obliterate or create a phantasm of the thing it represents. The relation is dialectic between word & thing; speech can move toward both denial & affirmation, blindness & recognition. So the theory of poetry based on a language of displacement & non-identity is a partial one, which limits poetry to only one half of the phenomenon.

Every affirmation in words represents a kind of promissory note, a letter of credit - standing for the fact, deed, thing which it affirms. Thus a poetry situated in the language of affirmation is constitutionally modest & humble - it acknowledges its own partiality. It does not replace the flower but depends upon it, stems from it. (Mallarme's recognition of the displacement effect of language also humbles poetry, in another way. It destroys rhetorical bombast. But only so long as it refrains from becoming a technique, a modus operandi, in its own right : a complacent acceptance, a glorification, of alienation.)

Mandelshtam's Acmeism developed not only in conflict with the abstractions of Symbolism, but in conflict with the violence & fraud of the State, and with the constitutional fatalism of Russia. Thus in this context the literary "Word" was pure affirmation - "the Word is bread - it shares the fate of people : suffering" (or something like that). How different from the Mallarmean notion of the Word as purified of worldly corruption! Actually, they share an idealism of poetic speech - but for Mandelshtam this is rooted in "the people" as language-nation, the people as a whole - rather than solely in the poet as scapegoat, (self)sacrifice.

I think you can see in Celan's fascination with Mandelstam a means by which he tried to integrate poetic speech (at the most knowing & sophisticated depth of literary self-alienation) with a kind of silent or unspoken "sense" - of solidarity with the living & the suffering. & to make this fusion a "definition" of poetry.

The Cantos
The Bridge
Paterson
The Maximus Poems
"A"

- here's a stack of them. How, how well, do they represent social/city life? How well do they evoke "utopia"? quick notes:

Cantos have a sort of tragic grandeur, as well as a hectic energeia which sometimes captures the quick rough quiddity of experience, the plunging violent unpredictability of urban reality. Also a practiced lyrical-cantando-enchantment, esp. describing nature, feminine allure. Still, as Olson pointed out long ago, the backward-looking antiquarian preciosity, as well as the authoritarian politics, push the Cantos toward a sort of ever-living obsolescence.

The Bridge, in my view anyway, succeeds pretty well in blending lyric proportion, emblematic history, and Gotham immediacy (the Joycean day's dream-journey of the narrator) - so that the reading experience itself reproduces its locale (how shall I put this: when you read The Bridge, you have the pleasant sensation of being-in-NYC-reading-The Bridge. Sort of Borgesian, that way). Its technique, however, is refined and ironic - so that much is left out which its competitors here try to include (there's a study on puns in The Bridge, though, which argues that a lot of that excluded mundaneity comes back in by the back door. Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge). Crane's trans-chronological "Atlantis" is a sort of poetic summation of 1920s "Our America" idealism. Still beautiful & hopeful.

Paterson is best of these in evoking city as a collective-psychic organism, where drab dailiness overlays historical-geological fragments & dreams, an arena of contingencies & possibilities. WCW's sharp eye & humor help, but for me the language is too flat & derivative to be very moving, & his cautious analytical bent doesn't do much for me, though others will savor the stringent-sour critical awareness of this social & egalitarian poet. His empathy often strikes me as tepid & careful, the attitude of the professional medical man (many will disagree). He also tries too hard & too obviously to remodel his models (Eliot, Pound).

Maximus Poems. When Olson tries to improve on his masters - Pound, WCW - he often does so. He's a genius at turning the obscure historical footnote into both vivid fragment and portentous psychic extrusion-symbol. Better than the rest is the feel for working-class poverty, necessity, & odd moments of liberation. Olson really does succeed at turning a literary mask into an emblem of some vast cosmic order. Where he loses me, most of the time, is with his actual language use. The personality that comes across sometimes - overbearing, pompous, pretentious, eccentric, sneering, vulgar - seems like a weird oedipal reaction to Pound & Literature - an effect like a bad habit, rather than a genuine reflection of Olson the better man. But it's off-putting, and for me, gives sign of minor rather than major poetry. Olson was a kind of hero, in a heroic & lonely struggle for origination & powerful mantic speech - but I wonder if he was up to the battle he chose.

"A" - I haven't read this carefully enough to say much. Zukofsky has an incredible ear for rhythm & sound on the syllabic level. Using it, he takes the civic and the utopian experience and - taking direction from Pound & Joyce & going much further - internalizes, subjectifies those experiences. A sort of quasi-Orphic process, I think: reality is completely absorbed into A-Z's limping, limpid, familial-household mumbling. What bothers me about it is precisely what made Z. appeal to the postmoderns : the turn to pure sound, the recherche Mallarmean-Symbolist aestheticism. Its action is almost diametrically reverse to that of The Bridge : whereas the latter incorporates the reader into an imaginary NYC-America, the former absorbs all things - the world, the reader - into Zukofsky-sound.

More interesting comments from Josh Corey, relating to very general approaches to style. Raising a question about whether there is a "symbolist" aesthetics (Baudelaire, Eliot, Lowell), which accepts (is built on) the conceptual framing (allegorical?) of perception, as opposed to a more free-form, "pure perception" aesthetics stemming from Pound & Olson. I'm paraphrasing here.

His remarks seem a least tangentially related to distinctions I've made recently (& periodically) between very general "acmeist" vs. "futurist" poetics : the notion that poetry is in part a reflection/recurrence of the past - the Otherness of the past being recognized & reconciled in a re-making of the Same (ie. Stevens'

"the ever-never-changing Same,
appearance of Again, the diva-dame"

or something like that) - which could encourage a Crane, for example, to re-make rather than throw out the pentameter -

or perhaps these differences reflect an older, more basic distinction, between the beautiful & the sublime?

But I wouldn't like to promote yet another simplistic binary. Seems pleasant, though, to take these paths into matters of style rather than literary politics. Quietude/Negativity is not symbolist/imagist is not beautiful/sublime is not the cooked/raw is not New Critical/Confessional is not mainstream/oppositional. . .

the critic would evaluate the poem or poetics as a many-sided complex/simple within the circus of contemporary verbalizationzzzzzzzzzzz. . .