The Work of Poetry

...In "Poetic Experiences," he recalls momentous early encounters with the Psalms, A Child's Garden of Verses, and Wallace Stevens, as well as his formation within a generation of poets (poets whose first books appeared in the 1950s) which includes Ashbery, Ammons, Anthony Hecht, W.S...

...Whether the state should direct the economy was rarely questioned: the challenge was merely to find the right tack between Stalinist bludgeoning and less intrusive modes of Keynesian guidance...

...Here Hollander considers (in the American context) whether poetry can help us be "greatly good," can restore "what has gone wrong with our own and society's lives...

...Franqois Babeuf, the revolution's "Gracchus," was one of the few proto-Communists in its ranks...

...WE'RE ALL CAPITALISTS NOW Charles R. Morris hortly before he died, the poIitical philosopher Isaiah Berlin commented in an interview: "Where is there an active Left now...

...As unsatisfied by the Modernist segregation of the aesthetic from the moral as he is by contemporary poems that are politically or morally knowing, Hollander argues that the Modernist assault on the didactic function of poetry was so persuasive that the necessary and important restitution of that function can only come about when poems bear witness to their own diminished capacity to teach...

...Where are they now...

...Hollander achieves such transport in that parenthetical reflection on Ararat...

...Olympus as a region, seat, or dwelling place of the gods...

...There are several kinds of mythical mountains...

...For at least a generation, centrally directed economies appeared to be the world's most successful, leading to a considerable crisis of confidence in America, the country most resistant to Socialist ideas, especially after the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957...

...Taking us slowly through three poems by James Merrill, John Ashbery, and A.R...

...Daniel Yergin, who won a Pulitzer for The Prize, a history of the quest for oil, has the credentials for such a challenge, and Commandiny, Heights' splendid t i t l e - - t a k e n from Lenin's description of the government's place in the economy--raises hopes...

...In these conditions, Hollander wants to assert as strongly as possible that poetry is a demanding and life-giving human work...

...It is the first time this has happened for two hundred fifty years...

...WRITERS & READERS TOGETHER Daria Donnelly he Work of Poetry is a resonantly arranged and beautifully titled collection of twenty-three lectures, book introductions, and essays written over a twenty-year period by John Hollander, Sterling Professor of Poetry at Yale and much-honored poet...

...In every essay of The Work of Poetry, and perhaps most especially in the first section, "Poetic Substances," where poetry is considered in relation to dreams, work, restitution, and originality, the irrepressible Hollander supersaturates his sentences with information and insight gleaned from a lifetime of reading...

...His best paragraphs are glorious digressive rifts of allusion, my favorite a catalogue of mountains--a resonant evocation of "Vision," poetically and religiously conceived--that is provoked by A. R. Ammons's line, "I went to the summit and stood in high nakedness": But the summit of what...

...The poet Richard Howard perfectly described Hollander's work as trusting in the possibility of "a teeming surface bearing one to a high place...

...Spenser's Mount of Heavenly Contemplation, his beautiful Acidale, his part-local part-universal ArloHill...

...But the political Left allowed its cause to become so tightly tied to specific theories of economic organization that it was exposed and vulnerable when Socialist economies started visibly lagging about twenty years ago...

...For me, the heart of the book is the essay titled "A Poetry of Restitution...

...Each of these essays - - some pyrotechnically allusive, others warmly crowded with recollected poems and literary friendships - - asks the reader to work hard and, at almost every paragraph, repays our labor...

...Parnassus as a scene of specifically poetic elevation...

...Oz~ sont h's ne~,es d'antan...

...Merwin, and Alan Ginsberg...

...The Work of Poetry is a hymn to reading and an argument that reading (not the accumulation of raw life data or feeling) is the poet's most important work...

...and then the last remnant of true believers were put to ignominious flight by the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989...

...All are paradigmatic of later mountains (as indeed the earlier ones in this list are of those at Commonzoeal 2 5 April24, 1998 the end of it) in subsequent poetry...

...Milton's Niphates upon which Satan alights and the pinnacle from which the other Satan (in Paradise Regained) "smitten with amazement, fell...

...There are six-anda-half pages on Poland, a page-and-ahalf on Czechoslovakia, three pages on Bolivia, two on Chile, three on Argentina...

...The name of the second author, Joseph Stanislaw, a business associate at Yergin's consulting firm, is in much smaller type, so one must assume that this is Yergin's book...

...The rise and fall of the political Left since the midnineteenth century is, in many ways, the story of a shifting consensus on practical economics...

...I say beautifully titled because the collection reveals itself as a sustained meditation on the multiple senses of the phrase "the work of poetry": a book dedicated emphatically not to inspiration but to the labor of poets and readers...

...Surely, this is the stuff of grand narrative, a project for a writer with the flair and intellectual sweep of a Hugh Thomas or a Paul Johnson...

...Densely allusive, richly autobiographical, digressively informative, and crowned by brilliant close readings that are Hollander's particular genius, these essays provide a crash course in poetry: what it has been, what it is, what it gives us when it is good, how poems work, what makes a poem masterful...

...The Work of Poetry finds Hollander perhaps overindulging the temptations that beset us with advancing age, but more in evidence is the suppleness of writing and thought that makes his poems such potent witnesses for the ongoing vitality of formal verse, i i Daria Donnelly has taught literature at Brandeis and Boston University...

...In "The Work of Poets," Hollander dedicates individual essays to the work of twelve poets, many not wellknown, from the Victorian period through his generation, whom he wishes to particularly recommend to us: Walt Whitman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, George Meredith, Trumbell Stickney, Edgar Lee Masters, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, and Geoffrey Hill...

...Sinai as a high point of revelation and transmission of the holy law...

...The evident failure of the capitalist system in the 1920s and 1930s seemed the final vindication of the Socialist idea...

...Ammons respectively, Hollander shows contemporary American poems which nourish the moral force of the imagination by dwelling on the conditions under which they have come into being, and by making the reader "cooperate in their creation...

...Hollander's effort to restore our sense of an enlarging poetic past does not require a blighted poetic present...

...Only Ararat seems a nonce occurrence--a point whose height does not reach toward a higher realm, or provide views of the lower one, but that becomes, at the subsiding of the Deluge, the new First Ground...

...Of the three headings under which Hollander has grouped his essays, two expressly chart his reading life...

...When I got bogged down it was not because of the diverting gems laid down in the path of each essay but rather because I was so disheartened by the bitter and barely limned portrait of the state of American poetry and poetry teaching...

...maybe in Korea...

...those who do may prematurely put down the volume...

...China gets a whole chapter to itself, and Russia most of a chapter, although there is more on India than on China and Russia put together...

...Private enterprise led to monopoly, war, colonialism, and the immiseration of the working classes...

...The notion that equality of possession is prerequisite to equality of rights became radical doctrine only after the violent upheavals of 1848, when Marx began to weave disparate strands from Hegel, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others into a grand synthesis that became the charter for the intellectual Left for the next hundred years...

...In I_atin America, maybe...

...Pisgah as a supreme point of overview, of what can be vouchsafed in vision but not directly possessed or inhabited...

...Such emphasis reflects no special hostility on Hollander's part to the Muses, but rather his sense that we live in dark times, when language has become a coarse currency for crude thought, and poetry largely a form of cheap grace...

...The revolt against royal authority in America was led by a conservative propertied and professional class...

...Hollander's essays so successfully unsettle the generic boundaries between poetry and prose writing that you may be ruined for the business-as-usual prose of the majority of other critics, even if bewildered by his subordinating argument to description...

...When I was young, there were left-wing leaders in F.ngland--Laski, Cole, Tawney...

...Sadly, Commanding Heights' ambitions far exceed its powers...

...Instead of grand narrative, we get a dutiful compilation of potted little economic histories of almost every country in the world--or at least it feels that way...

...Unfortunately readers unfamiliar with contemporary poetry will not recognize his portrait as caricature...

...Radical intellectuals, even as late as the French Revolution, gave relatively little thought to questions of wealth and property...

...And, at the other end of the list, there is Thomas Mann's Der Zauberber,g, in no way a typical revision of any of these...

...Economics was too important to be left to the blind and violent whims of a "market" that was usually rigged in favor of the rich anyway...

...Taiwan, Hong Kong, Commonweal 2 6 April24, 1998...