American Bards
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry AMERICAN BARDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL When not ignoring poets, Americans treat them alternately with extremes of distrust or reverence. Our native bards have attracted more attention...
...Thirty-four states of the union imitate the mother country by naming laureates, with some actually sponsoring competitions to encourage regional epics...
...If we have not thus far produced a native Spenser or Shakespeare, neither have we suffered a Colly Cibber of Alfred Austin...
...On February 21,1949, a headline in the New York Times announced, "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poem Penned in Treason Cell...
...This distrust boiled over when the cronies—all members of the Library's Fellows in American Letters—awarded the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry...
...Lindsay's "Gospel of Beauty" sought to teach the Philistine hearts of a mercantile nation to cherish transcendental beauty...
...The first Consultant, Louis Auslander, conformed to Huntington's and Whittall's conception of a poet...
...Certainly poets have maintained their freedom to be dissident voices, as the Bollingen fracas proves...
...MacLeish had been elected to the body too recently to have voted...
...On the other hand, every time the English marry ? ff a prince or bury a king Americans seem to admire the land of Shakespeare, where poetry still enhances the pomp of historical milestones...
...An anonymous British versifier observed in the Economist that given this country's cultural eclecticism, no single poet could possibly be representative: Sing in English, Spanish, Yiddish, Once voice only...
...But appointees, selected by the Librarian of Congress in deliberation with previous incumbents, preside only for a oneor two-year term...
...In a nation where writers enjoy political freedom while often being ignored, the Consultant/ Laureate acts as an advocate for poets, an educator of the public...
...Thomas Mann and his daughter, Erika, were also sheltered...
...dexterity of a masturbating monkey," and he set out to undermine him...
...When Alexis Saint-Léger, better known by his nom de plume, St.-John Perse, found his Caribbean homeland suddenly under the control of the Vichy French, he was given a niche as Consultant in French Literature...
...Warren and Nemerov, the first two also honored as Poet Laureate, are veterans of the old system...
...Auden, Erika's husband, secure U.S...
...Auden, who did vote for him, was furious about being linked with fascism...
...Titled "Treason's Strange Fruit," it purported to link all participants, real and imagined, to a "Jungian Nazi conspiracy...
...Although McGuire's account is neutral, there is no escaping the impression that MacLeish conducted a vendetta against Auslander, whose greatest crime was poor bureaucratic skills...
...Chapin, another Fellow and wife of Roosevelt's attorney general, Francis Biddle, had voted for a different candidate...
...he had served as an ambulance driver for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War...
...Nemerov, the current Laureate, reminds us, "It's a prose world...
...The fulfillment of Huntington's bequest has frequently resulted in a comedy of manners...
...New York's Senator Jacob Javits called for a Congressional investigation...
...cummings, E. A. Poe, ? Land of Cronkite, land of Carson, Gertrude Stein, and Hammer-ditto, Dorothy Parker, Dolly Parton, Land of Lowell, of Howl, of Whitman...
...Robert Lowell gained notoriety when he was imprisoned during World War II as a conscientious objector...
...citizenship...
...Yet questionable as the Librarian's motives may have been, he did manage to wrest the post from the hands of the old guard, insuring that future appointments would represent progressive tastes and thus saving the consultantship from respectable mediocrity...
...Allen Ginsberg became a household name for taking off his clothes during peace demonstrations in the 1960s...
...The parties involved knew little or nothing of Jung's theories, much less his politics...
...Still, Poetry's Catbird Seat convinces me that the philanthropist's quixotic scheme has turned out well, even nobly...
...Americans can boast that the post was offered to William Carlos Williams, who was too ill to accept it, and held be Robert Frost, among many distinguished figures...
...According to Marie Bullock, the founder and first president of the American Academy of Poets, he was especially "kind about helping untalented poets, chiefly ladies, with their verse...
...When Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Archibald MacLeish as an assistant secretary of state, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee fought his confirmation...
...The chastening experience taught future consultants what not to do, but it did not delineate a clear function for the office...
...obviously disqualifies [one] not only from public life, but from the sensible conversations by which ordinary men communicate...
...The suicides of Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Anne Sexton introduced them to millions who never had read their works...
...Tate and his cronies frankly preferred the cosmopolitan crowd to most of their parochial American confreres—who regarded the reigning clique with suspicion...
...So far, 21 men and six women have served...
...The poetry consultantship was the brainchild of Archer Milton Huntington, an expert on Hispanic studies as well as a traveler and map collector...
...We're here to provide the poetry...
...He began by selling Huntington on the notion of a rotating position in order to spread out honors as fairly as possible...
...Now William McGuire, in Poetry's Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 193 7-198 7(Library of Congress, 512 pp., $21.00), has provided an amusing, anecdotal chronicle of the post that comes closest to giving us an official national bard—and since 1986, by an act of Congress, in fact carries the title "Poet Laureate of the United States...
...The word 'poet,'" MacLeish later recalled, "was pronounced with a peculiar intonation, the implication being that this...
...Land of Frost, of e.e...
...Eliot...
...In June, the Saturday Review published an incendiary piece by Robert Hillyer...
...Howard Nemerov (who, during his 1963-64 tenure in Washington was also The New Leader's Poetry Critic) quipped, "The Consultant in Poetry is a very busy man, chiefly because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know what the Consultant in Poetry does...
...Next, he investigated the management of acquisitions...
...These two children of merchant princes tithed their money to try to realize this mystic vision...
...Our native bards have attracted more attention for scandals than for their writings...
...The job has evolved from its original notion of a haven for composing one's own verse to a quasiambassadorial position: meeting school children and poetry clubs, arranging readings for the Poetry Room, and sometimes attending the funerals of noted writers...
...Nevertheless, the Tate coterie demonstrated significant blindness to sensitive issues, particularly the anti-Semitism displayed so noxiously in The Pisan Cantos, Pound's prize volume...
...Read McGuire's narrative to discover just how tunefully poets have influenced the American dream...
...No officiary has toadied either to Congress or to the President, though McGuire relates many funny stories about the unsuccessful courting of poets by the White House...
...In addition, consultants have overseen the program that has poets recording their voices for posterity...
...All expressed disapproval of Ezra Pound's traitorous broadcasts from Italy, and some pointed out that this was why they had not voted for him...
...Neither has electrified the country with odes to space flights or international treaties...
...Auslander's nemesis was Archibald MacLeish, aconfirmed Modernist, who became Chief Librarian of Congress in 1939...
...The upshot was the removal of the Bollingen and all other prizes from association with the Library of Congress in order to avoid other controversies...
...Early cynics worried that the Consultant might become a propagandist, but this has yet to happen...
...During World War II, MacLeish provided illustrious foreigners with asylum at the Library...
...MacLeish later helped W.H...
...He had once described the Consultant in a letter to Ezra Pound as possessing "the labial...
...They performed the task rather zealously, with extravagant sums spent on material that was not always what it purported to be...
...Allen Tate was MacLeish's initial appointment...
...Manuscript collection remains important, with most making a genuine effort to read those that are submitted by neophytes and offer advice...
...He devoted a substantial portion of the fortune inherited from his railroad baron father to various philanthropic endeavors, among them endowing the American Geographical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters...
...Even the most respectable are tainted by the stigma of bohemianism...
...His wife, who also wrote, claimed descent from Shelley and persuaded the Library to hire her as Auslander's secretary...
...The couple commenced to acquire manuscripts of past and present notables...
...Eliot was merely visiting to work on his play The Cocktail Party...
...Public outrage initially focused on three innocent parties: Katherine Garrison Chapin, MacLeish and T.S...
...Hillyer's paranoid scenario was easily demolished (McGuire appends the relevant documents...
...Virtually all appointees have been highly regarded by many of their colleagues, and diverse schools of poetry have been represented over the years...
...Gwendolyn Brooks became known to a larger audience during her recent term...
...Like Gertrude Clarke Whittall, donor of the Library's Poetry Room, where many readings in Washington are held, Huntington grew up on the heady Romantic idealism of such poets as Vachel Lindsay and Edward Arlington Robinson: half Morris Socialism, half Arthurian romance...
...Tate, in turn, brought in his friend, Robert Perm Warren, to succeed him, then his protégé, Robert Lowell, and finally three outstanding women: Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams and Elizabeth Bishop...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 9
