American Poets of the '60s

...Of course there is a great deal of experimentation in contemporary poetry...

...My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked that "the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always to be waiting for its poet...

...and John Ashbery, the most daring of the poets of the 1960s, who treats the age-old themes of love, growing up and dying with an affecting and comic strangeness, pushing language as far as it will go, taking great risks...

...Actually, there is a great deal of diversity, particularly on the technical level, as one can see in the groupings of poets, the movements of the decade...

...In his view, the kind of dream that dissolves the world is false...

...What soul is without fault...

...In addition to these remarkable poets, there are a number of others who should be mentioned...

...Some of them cut up newspaper stories and rearrange them as poems...

...In the title poem of a recent collection called Advice to a Prophet, Wilbur describes the consequences of an atomic war not in terms of a depopulated world (which is the conventional approach) but in terms of a world-less man, a man in a desert that he has himself created...

...They differ from the Black Mountain group in their emphasis on Left-wing politics, drugs and sex, their uninhibited language, and their preoccupation with the lonely, God-intoxicated "angel" in a hostile, mechanized environment...

...Good novels are still being written, published, and read...

...Delire...

...a savage servility slides by on grease...

...And who are they...

...The land is within./ At the end of the open road we come to ourselves...

...He seems to be angry because, like the prophets of the Old Testament, he loves his people and wants them to mend their ways but has no confidence that they will, in fact, try to do so...

...They like the structural strength of meter and rhyme...

...Lowell, Wilbur and Creeley are three of the best poets working in the 1960s...

...Each line reflects the breath of the poet, and therefore his life force, all that he is, and so the shape of the poem is organic, an extension of content conceived of as the living, pulsing embodiment of the poet's response to reality...

...W. S. Merwin, who deals with archetypal images of voyaging and suffering floods and returning home in the hope of receiving paternal forgiveness...

...There is, for example, Robert Creeley...

...Robert Duncan, who keeps trying to understand the plight of humanity in a cosmic context...

...The workers in iambic measure are definitely in a minority...

...Of course the report of the death of American literature has been grossly exaggerated...

...This kind of poem has appeared in American poetry before, but today, coming as it does after the more or less objective imagery of the projective verse movement, it provides a useful corrective and extends the range of contemporary poetry...

...I am wrapped in my joyful flesh, As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green...

...Basically, Wilbur is an epistemological poet...

...It is a new thing to find the road come to an end and to need to concentrate, as a consequence, upon the present...

...come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close...

...In his view a poem is a "high-energy construct" whose function it is to transmit power from the poet to the reader...

...They are much less interested in discovering or affirming some divine master plan than they are in illuminating the contradictions and pitfalls of reality...

...They do not mention the death of American poetry, assuming it died long ago...

...Among the more recent movements is the "subjective image" group of poets, whose aim is to end the tyranny of the objective world by subjecting it to the distortions, metamorphoses, and emotional coloring of the inner life...

...If there is neither a past worthy of love nor a future worthy of hope, there is obviously only the present to do with as one can...

...The fact is that the contemporary poet no longer responds enthusiastically to the idea of the open road, the Whitmanian promise of an ample, rich, creative future...

...others collect advertisements and rework them...

...he is interested in the relationship between a man's dream of reality and the objects outside himself that constitute the world...

...This notion of announcement had something to do with the relationship between the human and the divine, for in Emerson's view of reality God was everywhere...

...If Lowell does not subscribe to the old Emersonian optimism, the same can be said of Richard Wilbur, another notable poetic contemporary, though Wilbur seems to take more delight than Lowell does in the report of his senses as they explore the world...

...He ends the poem gloomily: The Aquarium is gone...

...This extension is in line with one of the chief aims of the poet, which is to expand human consciousness...

...American poetry has never been more alive than it is today, or more accurate in defining the experience of the poet as he discovers himself in his relations to the world and to his wonderful but refractory medium, words...

...one could find him in nature and in oneself, if one only looked intently enough...

...The poet, on the other hand, enlarges his reader by suggesting that all power radiates from his awareness...

...The contemporary poet who comes closest to the Emersonian prescription is probably Robert Lowell, for he sometimes puts on a prophet's robes and speaks in a sort of oracular rhetoric...

...they are the only best-selling poets of the decade...

...What should we be without The dolphin's arc, the dove's return...

...Some, like Michael McClure, resort to automatic writing and never revise...

...The United States produced a great generation of poets in the recent past, such figures as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore...

...Louis Simpson recently published a book of poems called At the End of the Open Road in which he finds himself in California, at the end of America's open road, looking out over the Pacific...

...They are like painters who don't know how to use paint...

...Only when they had published a substantial body of meaningful and influential work did the critics discover them...

...Here, for example, is a section of a poem by Charles Olson called "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele": dogwood flakes what is green the petals from the apple blow on the road mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow as the whippoorwill the night's tractor, grinds his song and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, o chateaux...

...What is happening in poetry...

...he is skeptical, critical, and gloomy...

...Charles Olson is the chief theoretician of the group...

...There are poets like Jackson MacLow who emphasize the principle of chance in composition...

...This simple, casual, seemingly naive poem presents an "I" character who is obviously high, either on liquor or drugs, for he cannot remember his friend's name and talks windily about the darkness surrounding him even as he entertains the idea of buying "a goddamn big car...

...and poetry is thriving...

...Those under the influence of William Burroughs juxtapose folded manuscript pages and, reading across them, discover interesting discontinuities...

...Addressing a prophet, Wilbur says: We could believe If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling...

...The chief members of this group are James Wright, Robert Bly, Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly...

...The traditionalists, largely associated with the universities and literary quarterlies, are vigorously opposed by the practitioners of "projective verse," a movement that got started at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s under the inspiration of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan...

...III The strong leaves of the box-elder tree, Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear Into the wilds of the universe, Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant, And live forever, like the dust...

...The hour of death is the only trespass This attractive lyric develops in what Olson calls breath lines...

...This is clearly Lowell speaking as a national prophet...

...It is doubtful that anyone, in the ordinary course of events, feels he is at the center of the American experience-and certainly the novelists do not give one any great feeling of confidence...

...Unlike Emerson and Walt Whitman, however, he does not see that destiny in optimistic terms...

...Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us...

...There are, first of all, the traditionalists, poets like Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell-though it must be noted that Lowell sometimes works in free verse...

...But this is not to suggest that the poetry of the 1960s lacks diversity...

...This view of the role of the poet is no longer a common one, largely because the metaphysical dimension that was so precious to Emerson has been denied or reinterpreted by recent philosophy...

...Like Bishop Berkeley and Wallace Stevens, he sometimes entertains the notion that the world exists only in the imagination, but he quickly rejects that solipsism as he examines the things of the world and they yield to his curiosity and love...

...The poet of our own age is more interested in illuminating the tensions, the patterns of contraries in experience, than in announcing the presence of God or affirming his eternal wisdom...

...The movement has some kinship with the surrealist group of the 1920s and owes a great deal to such poets as Lorca, Neruda, Breton and Trakl...

...They describe the contrast between hope and despair, the ideal and the real, life and death, the paradoxes of experience, the fact that man begins to die even as he is bom, that light is always matched with shadow...

...perception of the spring season follows perception in the brief, blood-begotten phrases of a man moving among pleasures that make him hesitate into an awareness of their natural antithesis, death...

...Are the poets who have been working in the shadow of the great generation of Eliot and Pound really good...

...that is, they make discoveries of image and idea that the very rigors of the form create by forcing the imagination...

...He is the only poet of the 1960s who can be characterized as a national poet, possessing the consciousness of a Virgil, for he is preoccupied with American history and the guilts of history and with the destiny of the American people...

...These poets like the sweetness of meter and rhyme, they are committed to the accentual-syllabic system in poetry that dates back to Chaucer, and they are confident that they can accommodate contemporary subject matter in traditional forms...

...Their ragged, hairy poems reveal their lack of skill in handling their medium, words...

...I have suffered and survived the night Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass...

...What has been described is a trend toward a new realism...

...Lowell paints another dark picture of modern society in a poem called "Skunk Hour," in Life Studies, in which he describes a New England resort town in autumn, after the tourists have gone, and shows, in sharp, frightening detail, how the people live as parasites and scavengers, symbolized by a skunk that "swills the garbage pail...

...But it is a new thing, this American doubt of the future...

...However, they are immensely popular...

...these poets made lasting contributions to American literature...

...Olson's theory and practice have been enormously influential, so that today it is free-form poetry that is the dominant mode...

...They find a heuristic value in them...

...they see the mountains on the horizon and overlook the roses in the kitchen garden...

...Well, how about the 1960s...

...And they put the chaos of contraries into a new poetic order by building bridges of metaphor that enable them to reconcile themselves and their readers to the world...

...None of these are optimists in the Emersonian or Whitmanian sense...

...There is a long and inevitable time lag between the creation of poems and their acceptance by the academy of critics and professors...

...and one hopes that the readers who enjoy their poems will eventually move on to better work...

...And in doing so he helps the reader expand his consciousness as well...

...Later he remarks that "Whitman was wrong about the People,/ But right about himself...

...Both Lowell and Wilbur use the rhetoric of oracular utterance when they speak of the destiny of modern man, but other poets, though equally concerned, prefer a more casual approach...

...He says he meets in California the "same old city-planner, death," and the American habit of dreaming: "The great cloud-wagons move/ Outward still, dreaming of a Pacific...

...American poetry is no longer Romantic...

...The difference between this poem and other poems of an imagistic character is that the focus is not on nature or objective reality, but on the "I" character's subjective world: "I have suffered and survived the night/ Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass...

...Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean...

...no critic wants to be wrong...

...Critics often suffer from farsightedness...

...Nobody studies happiness Every time the cock crows I salute him I have no longer any excuse for envy...

...For example, in the title poem of the collection For the Union Dead, published in 1964, Lowell describes the razing of the old Aquarium in Boston to make way for progress in the form of an underground garage and then focuses on the nearby monument to Colonel Shaw, who had commanded a regiment of Negro infantry in the Civil War and had lost half of them in battle...

...Since Emerson was an optimist and an idealist, he went on to say that the office of the poet was one "of announcement and affirming...

...In the light of this philosophy and Wilbur's love of the things of the world, it is clear that he would be repelled by the destructive aspects of contemporary technology, notably the development of atomic super-weapons...

...Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking-John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going...

...Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish...

...The great stream of American poetry based on common speech rhythms that has moved down from Whitman through Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams is stronger today than it has ever been before...

...Wilbur is clearly afraid that, by destroying nature, man will lose all possibility of knowing himself, for the things of the world are his means to self-expression...

...II Rising from a bed, where I dreamt Of long rides past castles and hot coals, The sun lies happily on my knees...

...The amazing optimism of Emerson, his calm assurance that all things were moving in accord with some marvelous and divine plan, is now regarded as rather touching and naive...

...It is a matter of caution, no doubt...

...Brooding about technological progress, as represented by the automobile and the atomic bomb, and about moral stagnation, as represented by war and preparations for war, Lowell remembers "a commercial photograph" showing "Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler safe, the 'Rock of Ages'/ that survived the blast," and he is appalled...

...and yet, as the record shows, they did not receive instant recognition...

...the last important poet of Romantic persuasion in American literature was probably Hart Crane...

...Other poets who have come into prominence recently and deserve praise include John Berryman, who has written brilliant, subtle poems based on popular idiom which explore social contradictions...

...The symbol of the road has always, in the past, involved a rejection of the past, a favorite American gesture as the pioneer or immigrant left the old world behind in order to discover a new one...

...James Wright, who describes ordinary realities in terms of an inner climate of terror and hope and produces a rich, subjective imagery...

...It should be mentioned that the beat poets take their rhythm from Olson and his confreres...

...They, too, talk about the breath line...

...They include James Dickey, William Stafford, Alan Dugan, Louis Simpson, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, A. R. Ammons, LeRoi Jones, and Diane Wakoski...

...His frequent success is a sign of the vitality and strength of the American poet in the 1960s...

...Denise Levertov, who keeps urging her readers to see, touch and taste reality and so recover the pristine excellence of their senses...

...His usual subject is the tensions and guilts of modern love, particularly married love, but in a poem called "I Know a Man" he touches on another contemporary failing, the tendency to dream of doom or affluence while forgetting immediate realities and dangers...

...Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, who are the charter members of the beat movement, are clearly less interesting poets than Olson, Creeley, Duncan and Levertov...

...only the creative dream, the dream that makes great architecture, painting and poetry possible, is true and commendable...

...As a sample of "deep image" poetry, here is a work called "Poem in Three Parts," by Robert Bly: I Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever...

...These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken...

...In a sense, the poet achieves, in his poem-making meditations, the effect that the drug LSD is said to produce in some cases: that is, the poet manages to intensify his awareness of himself, his medium, and the space-time continuum in which he finds himself, with all its contents...

...still others take lines from masterpieces of the past and reorder them to create new entities...

...ON POETRY By Stephen Stepanchev American Poets of the '60s In an access of nostalgia mingled with despair, professors and critics of contemporary literature often speak of the death of the American novel and of American drama...

...good plays are being produced not only on Broadway, off Broadway, and off off-Broadway, but also in many small but lively community theaters all over the country...

...This image of the lonely self on the road of an eternal present keeps haunting American poetry...

...Elizabeth Bishop, whose sharp, clear descriptions of fish, flowers and seas have the precision one has come to associate with Marianne Moore...