Irony, Tragedy and Violence
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry IRONY TRAGEDY AND VIOLENCE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In his Collected Poems (Chicago, 516 pp., $20.00), Howard Nemerov beautifully justifies Allen Tate's dictum that all of a poet's books...
...Having grown beyond the ethical rationalizations that one should only shoot for the best of motives ("honor") or that it is always wrong to shoot, the speaker comes to recognize the vitality of action per se...
...with the thrust, "The poet is he who fights on the passionate/Side...
...He certainly deflated Archibald MacLeish's rhetorical bombast to fellow-poets (in 1932)—"Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms...
...The speaker's energy is turned on himself—he is a jaguar that "leaps/For his own image in a jungle pool...
...Allen tate's Collected Poems 1919-1976 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 218 pp., $12.50) presents the most complete selection of his poetry available...
...But he treats these characteristic concerns in an array of styles...
...He stands where the eternity of thought/Opens upon perspective time and space;/He watches mind become incarnate...
...and two foreign translations by others of Tate's most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead...
...When he paints a tree, its seed, growth and decay, and ideas about other trees are simultaneously present to him...
...The painter's art must bring into being what already exists but is unseen: "His work is not to paint the visible,/He says, it is to render visible...
...In an era where fashion dictates that poetry should alternate between emotional extremes of euphoria and bitterness, he avoids both with an ironic stance born of a tragic vision of life...
...Juxtaposed against this tragic hubris is the humility of Lot, who is made the subject of a "vaudeville" treatment of history...
...On the Threshold of His Greatness, the Poet Comes Down with a Sore Throat" is surely the funniest spoof of Eliot's The Waste Land ever written (though its final line, "Metaphysics at mealtime gets in my hair," takes a respectful shot at Stevens, too...
...Lot was taken up at a crucial moment, then dropped once he had served some inscrutable purpose...
...Here is man's true tragic flaw: What gives us pain is equally the source of our high art...
...It is often hard not to picture Tate as a Southern Don Quixote, tilting at modern industrial materialism in defense of his dream of a vanished society where man could still choose between Good and Evil: O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath...
...In the essay "Narcissus as Narcissus," Tate explains that the poem is about solipsism as the fate of our age...
...In his marvelous notes to his translation of the "Pervigilium Veneris"—a late Latin poem of the Decadent period—Tate notices that its speaker prays that he might "suffer violence and be moved to sing," adding, "Is not the poem telling us that the loss of our symbolic language may mean the extinction of our humanity...
...Although Tate's poetic perspective is too subtle and sharp to fully support the Quixote comparison, like his noble Roman ("Aeneus at Washington, Aeneus at New York") he always does come down on the passionate side...
...Ultimately, the "wholeness" of the artist's mind should make His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought, The same dream that then flared before intelligence When light first went forth looking for the eye...
...There is the infallible instinct for the right battle/On the passionate side...
...Tate's bloodthirsty images betray a longing not for more wars or anarchic mayhem, but for blood instead of sterile abstractions...
...Collected Poems proves his imagination vital, his creations passionate—and that both are paradoxically imbued with the idealism he believes lost to our age...
...Along the way, the elaborate metaphysical casuistry occasionally evident in his early writing also has been reduced to gnomic riddles that astound by their unanswerable simplicity...
...a number of previously uncollected verses, some unpublished, written between 1919-24 (when he and his fellow "Fugitives" were fleeing a desiccated Southern literary tradition on the one hand, and Northern industrialism on the other...
...His "Ahasuerus" is an "homage to George Herbert," specifically that poet's daring "The Sacrifice," wherein Christ describes the Passion in progress, and the moving refrain in both poems is, "Was ever grief like mine...
...He sees/How things must be continuous with themselves...
...Yet after a schlemiel's chronicle of lucky mistakes, slapstick turns to pathos when the speaker realizes himself to be "A foolish man who lived in the grand dream/One instant...
...In one of the brief witticisms he calls "gnomes," there is an anecdote that tells of consulting "the Old Ones deep in the graves" about the origins of language: " 'We got together one day,' they said,/'And talked it over among ourselves.' " This mind-teasing tautology offers the paradox that to invent something, one must have a conception of it beforehand...
...Nemerov uses imitation to pay tribute as well as to mock...
...In "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," among Nemerov's most beautiful and profound poems, the same theme is developed more fully as a theory of the creative process...
...with a passion for time/Longer than the arteries of a cave...
...But Allen Tate can no longer be dismissed by his detractors as a poet's poet...
...Who loves the Lord and does not know His ways/Neither permitted the pleasure of his sins/Nor punished for them...
...Howard Nemerov has the gift to be simple, the art to embody complex ideas in homely images and language...
...Bereft of any unifying ideals, what has modern man left to spur him into song except violence...
...It includes, in addition, the all-too-small body of his superlative translations from Latin and French...
...Eternally...
...Suddenly, the recital has no more humor than the book of Job...
...Its genius is in caricaturing both the faintly patronizing air of the poem's eclectic allusions and footnotes, and, of greater importance, the insufferable way it is taught as something more profound to our culture than the Bible...
...While the dead soldiers and the living persona have shared a sense of violence, that of the Confederates was purposeful, and within ritual traditions...
...Ahasuerus is the legendary Wandering Jew, condemned to roam the earth till the end of time for having spit in the Lord's face on the way to Calvary...
...Autumn is the season most congenial to this poet: An intimation of frost sharpens his vision, while naked trees and muted colors reveal the landscape stripped to its essentials...
...Here, paradox is translated into mystery and magic...
...Out of the bleakness, he discovers a voice older and wiser than his own: Now I can see certain simplicities In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time, And say over the certain simplicities...
...From The Image and the Law (1947) to The Western Approaches (1975), Nemerov has displayed no dramatic conversion of style, method or outlook, but rather a gradual intensifying of a unified perspective...
...Again...
...the violent imagery profoundly influenced Robert Lowell...
...Tragedy is the song that rises out of human suffering, and Nemerov is one of its finest singers...
...there are many other instances...
...then/He paints the tree...
...Even flippancy is grist for Nemerov's poetic mill, as is fitting for one who has written on "the likeness of poems and jokes...
...Because the book is arranged chronologically, it permits us to observe the honing of his rapier-like ironies, characterized by R. P. Blackmur as "images of violence yoked together by form," and to note how Tate exemplifies his own notion of a poet's ouevre being a single entity...
...On Poetry IRONY TRAGEDY AND VIOLENCE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In his Collected Poems (Chicago, 516 pp., $20.00), Howard Nemerov beautifully justifies Allen Tate's dictum that all of a poet's books should ultimately be regarded as one work by including the nine volumes of his verse to date...
...Without either, we are less than human...
...how in his youth he wanted to be as different from them as possible, but now, / know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance— In killing there is more than commentary...
...Was ever grief like mine...
...Tate's mark is indelibly on the generation of poets that followed him: Howard Nemerov adopted the tragic and ironic stance...
...His final image is of life as a desire more primitive and thoughtless than his savage old men, a drive like "a black river full of eyeless fish/Heavy with spawn...
...At the very outset, he proved himself a master parodist, with a facility for burlesquing the foibles of fellow-poets...
...In Nemerov's poem, the Jew answers Jesus by enumerating his sufferings—really those of his people: the diaspora, persecution, helplessly witnessing pogrom and holocaust—and ends with an audaciousness transcending even Herbert's: Shall I have spirit, when He tells me then, Give over, Child, and be as other men, To spit at Him...
...In "The Meaning of Life," the monologist tells us of old men from his Kentucky boyhood who "shot at one another for luck...
...Ode to the Confederate Dead" remains Tate's most explicit demonstration of the tension between "active faith" (represented by the Confederacy's belief in heroic excess) and the "fragmentary cosmos" of 20th-century existence...
...Let us be evil could we enter in Your grace, and falter on the stony path...
...And I speak to you now with the land's voice, It is the cold, wild land that says to you A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things: The old hills hunch before the north wind blows...
...Nemerov's theme never varies—it is always man's sometimes tragic, sometimes ludicrous relation to history, death and the universe...
Vol. 60 • December 1977 • No. 24
