Reading Minds

...Manning's rustic philosopher is closer to the writings attributed to Boone in Filson's book...

...Boone seemed an Adam loose in an Edenic landscape to those who believed that civilization was severing the connection between man and nature and diminishing the human spirit...

...Prodigality implies going astray, squandering one's talents or goods...

...Of mixed background himself, Walcott's poetic influences are the English and European writers he studied in school, from Virgil, Ovid and Horace to Shakespeare and Keats, as well as Racine, Baudelaire and Verlaine...

...For Whitman, Vendler writes, "poetic thinking geometrizes the events of the poem" through "selectivity of detail...

...Harcourt, 128 pp., $22.00), consists of a series of poems that take as their subject the incarnation of a romantic hero filtered through a postmodern lens...

...All too frequently discussions of poetry omit some vital aspect of the art...

...Born in 1734, Boone has variously been portrayed by admiring historians and hagiographers as a "natural man" uncorrupted by society, a legendary hunter and tracker with skills akin to those of the Native Americans, and one of the great explorers who brought civilization to the American "West" (as Kentucky and Missouri were known to early 19th-century settlers...

...Thus his authoritative late poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," discards his previous conception of the Muse as a beautiful heroine of Irish myth...

...Yeats uses imagery to "supplement, or in some cases replace altogether, discursive statement...

...Her passionate defense of his relevance in the face of his dismissal at the symposium ignites her writing with extraordinary energy...

...Fixations on language and the jargon of prosody whittle the audience down to specialists...

...Africans imported as slaves...

...English is a mongrel tongue, even in its origins...

...In The Prodigal, Walcott compares his own extensive travels, especially in Europe and the United States, to the New Testament parable of the youth who squandered his inheritance in "riotous living" before returning in repentance to his father's house...

...But what 19th-century writer would observe, as he does, that "every noun is a stump with its roots showing...

...On the other hand, treating verse as a means merely for conveying ideas runs the risk of reducing it to a more oblique echo of prose...

...Early English radicals admired the Americans' courage in shaking off the yoke of monarchy...

...More recently, unfriendly scholars have turned this adulation on its head, casting him as a colonialist, Indian fighter and land speculator, who exemplified all the sins of Europe against aboriginal culture and its care for the earth...

...French has been infused again and again...

...But the singular lilt of island speech has inflected his cadences as much as lush Caribbean settings have flourished in his verse...

...Their ancestors imbibed Roman, Saxon, Norman, and Danish words that remolded their speech...

...Manning believes this account influenced William Wordsworth's conception of the "natural man...

...She describes an interdisciplinary symposium at Harvard University where a philosopher, a political scientist and an anthropologist were asked to share their thoughts on Alexander Pope's poem "An Essay on Man...

...His evocations of scenery—snow-clad Alps, the misty Hudson Valley, Central American jungles, Mediterranean seascapes— are word paintings of the highest order...

...The speaker's collapse reveals that although ritual and other such exhaustive chromatic orderings have in the past kept existence intelligible for her, this rupture...is stronger than any reassuring ritual...

...If your ancient, but ignoble blood Has crept through scoundrels ever since the flood, Go...

...The author's copious notes—some are miniessays themselves—make a strong case for the impact of the American frontier on English romantic authors...

...And here she explains why the value of a poem is not diminished when the ideas it presents about society or science are outmoded...

...Imlay recouped his financial losses by penning romantic accounts of Kentucky as an earthly paradise that became popular with his countrymen...

...Manning's Boone is possessed of a contemplative soul...

...Walcott's story reflects his particular heritage, yet in a larger way this tension among diverse cultures and histories is common to every period of our literature...

...and East Indians who once worked the sugar mills...

...How much of the text was actually composed by the pioneer is a matter of scholarly debate...

...One of the radical romantics of the period, Gilbert Imlay, is remembered today as the lover who abandoned proto-feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft while she was pregnant with his child...

...her readings are consistently vivid and nuanced...

...Walcott is a master of sweeping lyrical descriptions...

...Like two of Vendler's previous books—The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995) and Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (2003)—a series of lectures was the genesis of Poets Thinking...

...They can be grasped only by our participating in the process they unfold...

...But she was aware that their views prevail in the literary world as well...

...The prodigal may need to return to his native land, but it will benefit much from his travels...

...But as a native Kentuckian, Manning is equally interested in the trail Boone blazed in our own history and lore...

...The writer's portrayal of Boone as a hero of the wilderness was a roundabout repayment to his former surveyor...

...Vendler's new book has happily united form and function into a compelling thesis: "The poet's style of thinking, instinctual though it may become in the heat of composition, issues from an extensive repertoire of image-memory and intellectual invention, coupled with an uncanny clairvoyance with respect to emotional experience___The evolving discoveries of the poem— psychological, linguistic, historical, philosophical—are not revealed by a thematic paraphrase of their import...

...They smugly concluded that works like Pope's "must be relegated, as outmoded artifacts, to the museum of cultural attitudes...

...A richly diverse culture was formed there by successive migrations of settlers: indigenous tribes...

...Because it is very cumbersome to lay out an intellectual argument in verse, Vendler contends, any poetic attempt at a philosophical, political or anthropological treatise would be folly...

...But his own era knew him as author of the popular ? Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792...

...European colonialists...

...The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott grew up on the tiny mango-shaped island of St...

...Each panelist picked out examples of concepts turned obsolete since its composition in the 18th century: social theories about the class system or discredited science like the Great Chain of Being, displaced by Darwin's theories...

...On Poetry Reading Minds By Phoebe Pettingell Poetry is often derided as a fundamentally irrational art fashioned from emotional reactions rather than reason and subjective impressions instead of facts...

...Nevertheless, contemporaries accepted its elevated prose style as what was to be expected of such a brave and virtuous figure...

...Walcott is a supremely appropriate laureate for us...

...Yeats' poetic thinking, she illustrates, is reflected in the images that mark his mental maturation...

...Manning derives his title from a passage in the putative Boone autobiography: "Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls [Job 30:29 AV], separated from the chearful [sic] society of men, scorched by the Summer's sun, and pinched by Winter's cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness...

...Since I am what I am, how was I made...

...Many British writers over the last three centuries have been shaped by Celtic influences...

...Later, he was portrayed as the instrument of Manifest Destiny in conquering the wilderness...

...Health shrank not from him—for Her home is in the rarely trodden wild, Wliere if men seek her not, and death be more Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled By habit to what their own hearts abhor, In cities caged...

...In her discussion of Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," Vendler outlines the frightening way the poet captures in her brief stanzas the static and repetitive thoughts of an obsessive mind...

...Like a camera zooming in for a closeup, the narrative cuts from the farm's wide fields to the hall of the house where the letter is received, then to the narrow bed of the grieving mother...

...And pretend your family is young...

...The United States, with its democratic values and sublime landscapes, stoked the imaginations of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge...

...Lucia in the Caribbean, where English and French have blended into a patois...

...Vendler grasps the satirist's subversive imagination while honoring Pope's humanist depiction of man as "the glory, jest and riddle of the world...

...The Empire and its colonies rendered English truly international, spoken on every continent, and that historical circumstance continues to enrich its literature...

...In "The Pleasure of Stasis," he muses, I wasn't always moving through the woods: some days I sat like feldspar in a rock fast bound to the world around me, or a wick in wax, a candle S only vein, whose task is waiting for aflame...

...What kind of thought, then, can best be conveyed by poets...

...The present case in point I Cite is that Boon lived hunting up to ninety...

...Is life all light and motion, or is there room for shadows, dim and slow, retreating only when the earth decides to creak a few lazy degrees around on its hinge—as a woman clicL· her teeth in mild disgust and pulls the shawl from her lap, confessing that the fire is enough—the earth moves in two directions, like a gate swinging open and closed with the pulse of the wind...

...At the event, Vendler disagreed...

...Emily Dickinson rearranges narratives to demonstrate how experience disrupts our sense of ideal structure...

...He accuses himself of having somehow "missed the 20th century," of being stuck "a little further on than Baudelaire Station," in the linguistic and visual countryside of the decadents and the earliest impressionists...

...Nothing seems wasted, however, in the lavish depictions of people and places Walcott has crafted throughout his career...

...Unlike many biographers who have reduced Dickinson to a crippled neurotic, Vendler defends her as an assured experimental writer who reproduces the tortures of neuroses in her art...

...The poems colorfully evoke the details of an adventurous life—the rescue of Boone's daughter from Shawnee raiders, an encounter with John James Audubon, the death of a brother and two sons fighting Indians, marriage to a woman who bore him 10 children, and the progressive exploration of parts of Kentucky and Missouri...

...As Manning points out in his notes, Byron's Don Juan contains a panegyric to "General Boon": Crime came not near him—she is not the child Of solitude...

...American children watch television shows and read boys' biographies that paint Boone as a rough man of action...

...But now the scene is changed...

...Manning's second collection, A Companionfor Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c...

...he asks himself, trying to understand his habit of roaming the world: any man without a history stands in nettles and no butterflies console him, like surrendered flags, does he, still a child, long for battles and castles from the books· of his beginning, in a hieratic language he will never inherit, but one in which he writes "Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew " his whole life a language awaiting translation...

...She analyzes her subjects in a manner that does not reduce them to templates for her assertions...

...Peace crowns the sylvan shade...

...For that matter, would a poet raised outside a bilingual environment pun the English "pain" with the French pam (bread...

...Her answer is that verse shows "what thinking is 'really' like as it happens...

...During romanticism's heyday English writers learned about Boone through the "autobiography" that appeared as an appendix in John Filson's 1784 volume The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke...

...Indeed, that approach could profitably be applied to The Prodigal: A Poem by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 112pp., $20.00...

...To guard against this, he determines to reinspect the fount of his inspiration to ensure it continues to flow fresh...

...Similarly, in Whitman's little-known "Come Up from the Fields Father," the critic points out how shifting the perspective from daughter to father to mother involves the reader inexorably in this poignant account of a farm family receiving news of a son's death in battle...

...Unlike certain of the Romance languages primarily derived from Latin, it has absorbed words and syntactical constructions from a variety of linguistic traditions...

...Walcott is also a talented visual artist...

...She has few peers among critics tracing a literary strand through the work of several writers...

...But do we need to burn to find contentment...

...Boone was employed as Imlay's surveyor when the Englishman fell into debt and departed America in haste, leaving Boone in the lurch...

...With each book, he comes closer to the heart of his subject: the mystery of why human beings use language not merely to communicate, but to evoke the world around them and the interior world of their thoughts and emotions...

...A Companionfor Owls revives him as a true romantic hero, embodying the greatness, and the contradictions, of this nation...

...In his old age, she has dwindled into "the libidinous id, the erotic and irrational desire that dwells below all conscious life, 'that raving slut/ Who keeps the till.'" Having once conceived of old age as a noble quality, he realizes that those who live long enough all arrive at the same humiliation of decrepitude and shameful urges...

...she felt the scholars had not grasped Pope's intentions...

...Walt Whitman draws scenes that present concepts, then re-examines them from alternate esthetic perspectives...

...Vendler challenges future anthropologists to examine Pope's "savage renditions of the tribal customs," instead of 18th-century society's acceptance of what we now know to be obsolete: "And the next political scientist to read ['An Essay on Man'] might investigate in it not the remnants of a discredited social order but rather Pope's dismissal at every moment of the assumption that aristocracy and merit are one: Go...

...The poet worries that his recent spate of laurels could petrify his talent into "the death-mask of Fame...

...In this light, Pope's intention is to parody intellectual discourse and to illustrate the workings of his "mercurial and satiric mind...

...During her long academic career, Vendler has spent enough time with the four poets of her subtitle to gain an almost unconscious understanding of their output, yet she rarely gets lost in a poem...

...In this year of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration, Maurice Manning, the winner in 2000 of the Yale Younger Poets Award, has channeled the voice of another celebrated American pioneer, Daniel Boone...

...Early in her new book, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Harvard, 142 pp., $ 19.95), Helen Vendler relates an anecdote about this marginalization of verse...

...In 27 pages, she distills an impression of the workings of Pope's mind that displays his complex personality and virtuosity...

...For them, Boone was a symbol of righteousness untainted by government oppression...

...How these various sources of inspiration interact has increasingly become the subject of his recent long poems...

...Nor own, your fathers have been fools so long...