The Good, the Bad, and the Extraneous
WIEDER, LAURANCE
The Good, the Bad, and the Extraneous The Library of America collects twentieth-century verse. BY LAURANCE WIEDER In 1861, Francis Turner Palgrave helped define Victorian taste by publishing The...
...What makes their poetry of the first order is the fact that their poems contain complete thoughts, and each poem is a new thought...
...This tends to be direct, apparently unadorned, and sober...
...Nearly two thousand pages later, the march of poetry calls a temporary halt at May Swenson, born in 1919...
...BY LAURANCE WIEDER In 1861, Francis Turner Palgrave helped define Victorian taste by publishing The Golden Treasury, "a true national Anthology of three centuries" of British poetry that contained not a single work by William Blake, Christopher Smart, or John Donne...
...Edward Arlington Robinson, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), Kenneth Rexroth (19051982), and Edna St...
...here one can make a life...
...It's impossible for anyone to read an Oscar Ham-merstein II (1895-1960) lyric, and not hear the music the words were written to and with and for...
...founder of Poetry magazine, which launched Ezra Pound and modernism in America), the novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), and Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) appear in both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthologies...
...If the reader can hear a living voice addressing him, in a way he can attend to and understand, then he has performed the poem and animated its voice...
...Generally speaking, poetry doesn't sell well in the bookstores...
...Samuel Taylor Coleridge talks about an even distribution of tone throughout the work, which gives rise to a living voice, recognizable even in the middle of the desert...
...Eliot as preferring Moses to the Muses, this is what he meant...
...Handy (1873-1958), Ma Rainey (1886-1939), Charley Patton (1887-1934), Irving Berlin (1888-1989), Bessie Smith (1898-1937), Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), Ira Gershwin (1896-1983), E.Y...
...Poets of the second order (which is the largest party of poets in the collection) are skilled and accessible...
...This anthology also contains a number of show tunes, folk songs, and blues lyrics...
...But what is a twentieth-century poem...
...Blackmur (1904-1965), Yvor Winters (1900-1968), and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), the social philosopher Paul Goodman (1911-1972), and the playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983...
...Who reads them all...
...Neither one of them shared in the glamour accorded the tribe of American expatriates active in Europe before World War II...
...That fine two-volume work, published in 1993, actually has a named editor in John Hollander, who presents American poets from Philip Freneau (1752-1832) through Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904) in order of birth...
...This is the land...
...They wait for the reader as the printed score waits for the soloist, or the conductor, to be realized...
...Is it poetry that takes American places, people, and speech for its matter, but is the golden...
...Is it written by citizens of the United States, either native or naturalized...
...But that's not because all the work here is genuine poetry...
...This accounts for contributions by Walter Conrad Arensberg (1878-1954, patron of the avant garde), John Reed (1887-1920, author of Ten Days That Shook the World), the novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970), the critics R.I...
...he kept up on art and philosophy through books, journals, and catalogs...
...Of the twentieth century's major poets, T.S...
...Poems are written and sit on the page...
...Sometimes work of the first order is produced by those whose poetry is a background activity, such as Henry Adams...
...I was awake...
...Why these five and not, for example, the philosopher George San-tayana (1863-1952...
...Is it poetry written in American English...
...I myself, have stood there by the aquarium, looking at the Statue of Liberty...
...in phantasmagoria about fishes, what disgusts you...
...You'll find here all the expected poems by the American expatriates...
...But whether it was bird of prey Or prey of bird I could not say...
...A song lyric, on the other hand, comes with a melody...
...Unless the Library of America wants to say that all this chewing gum is poetry...
...Stevens didn't leave the country at all, except for vacations in the Caribbean...
...This is not anthologizing, but a riskless attempt at unedited inclusiveness...
...By grabbing nearly everything— plain style and golden, world poetry and local—the Library of America proves incapable of attempting to define twentieth-century American poetry...
...And Pound, like Eliot, thought of what he did as world poetry rather than American...
...Is it poetry written here, no matter what the legal status of the poet...
...Henry Adams's "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres" follows five anonymous ballads as the first signed work in the collection...
...And this goes on for another fifty-nine lines...
...Their problem is eventual monotony...
...Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine...
...The plain-style Frost and golden-style Stevens never tempered their mutual rivalry and mistrust...
...Though here, at least, one does find someone omitted from this endless anthology...
...It's as though the compilers of this anthology, by importing ringers from other genres, have attempted a little reverse marketing...
...It's most often in their omissions that anthologies of poetry grow interesting—for it's in the omissions that you can measure the risks the editor is willing to take...
...And who is a twentieth-century poet...
...Gertrude Stein's (1874-1946) "Stanzas in Meditation" and John Cage's (1912-1992) experiments with chance and arbitrary arrangement are higher forms of this art...
...And you'll find as well poems by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Helen Adam (who writes poems in Scots dialect), and Vladimir Nabokov— works that are American only because they were written in America...
...Frost did launch his career in England, but only as a strategy to get his due back home...
...Major poets write poems of the first order...
...In his poems, Stevens always referred to himself in the third person...
...Among writers born through 1919, the canon of major poets remains pretty much what it has been for the last forty or fifty years: Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and T:S...
...cummings (1894-1962), Elizabeth Bishop (19111979), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), and Langston Hughes (1902-1967...
...It was no dream...
...The golden style employs tropes and rhetoric, elaborate wit, is often self-conscious and referential, relying upon literary fancy rather than plain speech and moral order...
...When Ezra Pound characterized T.S...
...In fact, the all-inclusiveness of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century does give us something, for it suggests the possibility of distinguishing four orders of descending importance in twentieth-century American verse...
...And perhaps the reader can set aside the fact that their title pages do not name anyone as the editor of record, which is an even worse sign...
...The early poems are so good, and Pound's social shadow so long and deep, that he cannot be disappeared from any history of poetry, no matter how disagreeable his politics, how poisonous his rage...
...Its lesser practitioners can start out amusing and end up unreadable...
...These are not poems...
...Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) is best remembered as a painter, but his poem "Fishmonger" is so electric, it makes this anthology look like a good idea: I have taken scales from off The cheeks of the moon...
...A five-member advisory board is listed in the front matter, but no clue is given as to whom they are advising...
...Poetry may embrace democracy, but it sure isn't democratic...
...The two long-standing traditions in poetry in English are the plain style and poets...
...In his "perfect" Canto XIII, Pound's Chinese sage recalls A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn't know, / But that time seems to be passing...
...What happens to them all...
...We have our inheritance...
...And neither division nor unity Matter...
...The golden style is more playful, while the plain style appears more earnest...
...Or Marianne Moore's "Is Your Town Nineveh": Why so desolate...
...Pound and Eliot left America for the Old World with the explicit intention of promulgating what Pound called "World Literature...
...It can embody a sensibility, make gestures, proceed by method, or stand in opposition...
...But poetry is not a commodity...
...here is the home of the middle class...
...We have, as Moore points out, a real need for the genuine in poetry, and it's possible to learn from these volumes of twentieth-century poetry the difference between the genuine and the contrived...
...The difference is that poetry, no matter what outward form it assumes, has its own music...
...Poetry of the second order, however, articulates a familiar thought, or the same set of ideas over and over: time's passage, for instance, or the sting of injustice, the beauty of nature, love and desire, cruelty and yearning...
...Henry Adams (better known as an historian, journalist, novelist, and Brahmin), Lizette Woodworth Reese (18561935), Harriet Monroe (1860-1936, the Laurance Wieder's Chapters Into Verse: A Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible has just been published by Oxford University Press...
...Is it Nineveh and are you Jonah in the sweltering east wind of your wishes...
...Hollander's notes include a masterful thumbnail biography of each poet, and a time-line chronology clarifies the relations among the writers and their time...
...I never heard that sound by day...
...Selective intelligence is all editors have to offer readers when there is so much information available that it all looks like the chewing gum Henry Adams derided...
...They lived in America, they wrote about the place and spoke its language...
...But there's another dichotomy...
...They have a sizable body of work...
...Given the postwar population boom and the massive increase in published poetry after 1950, the Library of America is looking at a journey of ten thousand pages to complete its work...
...The fourth and final order of poetry included in American Poetry: The Twentieth Century are works that appear for social reasons...
...Adams once remarked in a letter that "all the notices from today to doomsday will never make an American public care for poetry—or anything else unless perhaps chewing gum...
...Try to read Dorothy Fields's "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" as it is punctuated in these pages and not as it is sung...
...With the rise of electronic media—searchable and more inclusive than any book could ever be— this kind of vast, omnibus anthology is already a dinosaur...
...Could not all personal upheaval in the name of freedom, be tabooed...
...I have taken flushes from the peachlips in the sun, From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you, Set it swimming on a young October sky.I sit on the bank of the stream and watch The grasses in amazement As they turn to ashy gold.Are the fishes from the rainbow Still beautiful to you,For whom they are made,For whom I have set them,Swimming...
...It no more includes the lyrics of W.C...
...Eliot and Robert Frost practice plain style...
...Here are poetry's Great Plains, spacious and crossed by many...
...Frost and Stevens are eminently American written anywhere...
...But that still leaves us faced with the fact that these volumes seem determined to omit almost nothing...
...It's like reprinting a hundred years' worth of newspapers and calling what you're doing the writing of history...
...Who can value a transcription of a blues song when the original is out there, accessible, and probably better known than most of the poems in this anthology...
...Trading on the authority of its predecessor, the first two volumes ofAmerican Poetry: The Twentieth Century announce on their dustjackets that they embrace "nearly 1,400 poems by over 200 poets . . . in a series that will ultimately survey the entire century...
...This is the land which ye Shall divide by lot...
...So what are we to make of the first two volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, issued this year by the prestigious Library of America...
...Can a person renounce being American, the way someone can choose to be American...
...Just look at "Ole Man River" as it sits on the page...
...I'm not suggesting these shouldn't be included, but I am curious to see how the series eventually will rule on W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Muldoon...
...And American Poetry: The Twentieth Century further muddies its own waters by mixing media—adding to the jumble an enormous set of songwriters, social critics, and extra-literary figures whose lives we have to forget well enough to judge their work...
...So it's one of those oddities of the marketplace that publishers call stuff poetry in order to sell it...
...Harburg (1896-1981), Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929), Bukka White (1909-1977), or Frank Loesser (1910-1969), say, than the Mosaic Law includes the Motor Vehicle code...
...Here, for instance, are some lines from Abraham Lincoln Gillespie's (1895-1950) "A Purplexicon of Dissynthegrations": punziplaze karmasokist DecoYen Pomp-ieraeian / scaruscatracery timmedigets out-rege Opinducts...
...Lindley Williams Hubbell (19011994) in "Beer Bottles" observes: There are more poems in the world / Than empty beer bottles / So many millions of poems have been written...
...John Ashbery calls it the magnetizing of language...
...Some poetry of the first order is written by less familiar poets, such as Robert Francis (1901-1987), in "By Night": After midnight I heard a scream...
...His poetry conjures unreal cities and imaginary landscapes, an alien and eternal anywhere: Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert...
...Pound, whose strongest poetry now appears to be the translations and imitations he wrote before 1920, invented a world of bards and troubadours, sages and scholar poets, truth-telling historians and displaced persons, which he inhabited as a man without a country...
...This new collection follows upon the Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century...
...The voice is not distanced, and addresses the reader directly...
...Eliot (1888-1965), Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Wallace Stevens (18791955), Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Hart Crane (1899-1932), e.e...
...Perhaps the reader can set aside the fact that the volumes contain no statement about the selection process, though that's a very bad sign...
...In "Poetry," Marianne Moore (18871972) again sounds poetry's dissonant chord about itself: I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle...
...Following Dante's light as Dante followed Virgil's, Eliot became a British citizen and returned here only for lecture tours and other public occasions...
...Read Frost's "Provide, Provide," or Stevens's "The Man on the Dump," for good examples...
...The third order of poetry may have no ideas at all...
...These are questions American Poetry: The Twentieth Century resolutely refuses to answer...
...I have made fins from bluejays' wings, I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow...
...Vincent Millay (1892-1950) are strong in single poems, but are difficult to stay with...
...Presenting the poets chronologically by date of birth, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century opens with Henry Adams, born in 1838...
...Reading this anthology, one begins to wonder what "American poetry" means...
...It is the publisher's bad conscience...
...In 1874, Palgrave's American friend Ralph Waldo Emerson published an anthology of American poetry that left out Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe...
...A less metaphysical essay is Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's (1874-1927) "Klink— Hratzvenga (Deathwail)," which begins: Ildrich mitzdonja—astatootch / Ninj—iffe kniek— / Ninj—iffe kniek...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 2
