AMERICA’S BEST FORGOTTEN POET

In 1985, a minor American poet named J. V. Cunningham died at the age of seventy-four. A writer of elegant and precise little miniatures — brief epigrams for the most part, and epigrammatical even when longer — he had his share of publication in some of the premier venues for poetry in his time: Hound and Horn, Poetry, the New Republic, the Partisan Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. He had as well his share of strong admirers, including his longtime friend Yvor Winters, the younger poets X. J. Kennedy and Mark Strand, and the critic Denis Donoghue.

But he produced fewer than two hundred poems — several only two lines long — in a career of over fifty years, and although he lived through a number of poetic fads in America from the 1930s to the 1980s, he managed to remain unfashionable during them all. With a handful of what many professional critics and fellow poets acknowledge as nice minor verses, but without a single major poem identifiable by the greater poetry-reading public, he was little noticed, little anthologized, and little read. The system of foundation grants, artists’ colonies, and college poet-in-residence programs that emerged in America during his lifetime allowed him to remain, mostly at Brandeis University outside of Boston, a professional poet and man of letters, lecturing and teaching and occasionally writing essays of interesting Shakespeare criticism and commentary on his own and others’ poems. Within ten years after his death, however, his work had suffered the invariable fate of minor poetry — as his last thin and incomplete volume of collected verse from a subsidized press slipped unnoticed out of print.

Late last year, one final effort was made to salvage Cunningham when Timothy Steele — who had conducted a biographical interview with the poet for the Iowa Review shortly before his death — edited and brought out from the combined poetry imprint of Swallow/Ohio State University Press a new and more complete collection of his poems.

The book succeeded in obtaining from the major book-review journals in America some desultory nods toward the fading poet, but it has so far produced no real boom for Cunningham’s work: no outraged calls to revive a forgotten master, no trumpeted invitations to discover an unknown genius.

And thus there is slipping away, perhaps forever, even among the most devoted readers of poetry in America, an awareness of someone who — it seems worthwhile to mention — may have been the most talented poet of his generation, one of only three or four masters of a particular poetic form in the history of English poetry, and a genuine American original.

Among poets in America, there is a tradition of deprecating poetry, a sort of counter-current to the equally American tradition of Walt Whitman’s enormous proclamations for poetic importance. Robert Frost always called his work “lines” rather than poems, while J. V. Cunningham — living under the shadow cast over his generation by the world-dominating T. S. Eliot’s dense, rich, spiritual poetry in the very grand manner — insisted in self-defense that he wrote no poetry. In the 1939 “For My Contemporaries” (one of his better — known works but in many ways merely a typical example of his technique of tight, little ironic lines followed by a sudden and serious twist), he declared:
 
How time reverses
The proud at heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.
 
But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,
 
Despise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.
 
But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.

His path to such constricted, ironic, humorous, latinate verse was a strange one — perhaps most of all in its association with the American West that would produce such odd juxtapositions of narrow form and spacious matter as his “Montana Pastoral” or his sequence of poems about driving across the country, “To What Strangers, What Welcome.”

James Vincent Cunningham was born in 1911 in Cumberland, Maryland, to Irish- Catholic parents (whose religious faith he would later confess in a melancholy way his inability to hold in “A Moral Poem” and “Timor Dei”), but his father — a steam-shovel operator for the railroad moved the family a few years later to Billings, Montana, which Cunningham would always identify as his home. In 1923, his mother’s insistence upon finding a better education for the children took them to Denver, where Cunningham showed enormous academic promise, finishing at age fifteen the Greek and Latin program at the Jesuit-taught Regis High School.

The events of Cunningham’s late teens may hold some explanation for his verses’ often embittered compression of American themes into the poetic forms of Martial, Horace, and Catullus. The collapse of the family’s finances at the death of his father and the ruin of Denver’s economy in the Depression transformed within three years the promising, college-bound, classically educated young man into a train-hopping vagrant. There was, he would later remark, “a good deal of starving involved” as he tramped the West with his brother, looking for a job and writing ill-paying piecework for whatever publications he could find.

Even in high school, encouraged by a bookstore owner in Denver named Morris Rosenfeld, Cunningham had developed an interest in contemporary poet, entering into correspondence with a Stanford graduate student — and rising young poet and anti-modernist critic — named Yvor Winters. In 1931, from the road outside of Tucson, he wrote Winters to ask “if it was possible to go to college and stay alive.” Winters wrote back, offering the hobo the shed in his backyard. Taking both his undergraduate degree in Classics and his doctorate in English there, Cunningham would stay at Stanford for the next fifteen years — feuding with Winters, making up with Winters, not speaking to Winters, arguing for hours with Winters, and falling equally under the spell of Winters’s mentor, the Renaissance and Ben Jonson scholar William Dinsmore Briggs.

It was at Stanford as well that Cunningham would begin to write his serious verse, publishing his first volume, The Helmsman, in 1942. By the early ’40s, he was doing the best work of his career, and a second volume, The Judge Is Fury, followed in 1947 and a third, Doctor Drink, in 1950. In 1953, he took a teaching job at Brandis, where he would remain, off and on, for the rest of his life, publishing four volumes of criticism and five more slight collections of verse. (He knew how thin his books could seem, mocking after the publication of Doctor Drink that a reader Dislikes my book; calls it, to my discredit,/A book you can’t put down before you’ve read it.)

In The Judge Is Fury, in particular, but elsewhere as well, Cunningham presents a metaphysical view whose vocabulary and, he seemed to think, whose ideas derived ultimately from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus (who had also, and somewhat more accurately, influenced the philosophically trained Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins). In “The Metaphysical Amorist,” for example, Cunningham wrongly imagines — though with considerable sexual humor — that Scotus solves the conflict between Plato’s insistence on the sole reality of ideas and David Hume’s insistence on the sole reality of physical perceptions:
 
Plato! you shall not plague my life.
I married a terrestrial wife.
And Hume! she is not mere sensation
In sequence of observed relation.
She has two forms — ah, thank you, Duns! –,
I know her in both ways at once.

And under such Scotian titles as “Haecceity” — a medieval Latin philosophical term for “thisness,” or the brute particular existence of a thing — Cunningham puts in extremely compressed terms what is in fact not derived from Scotus but merely a confused and de-Christianized neoplatonism, not unrelated to the existentialism sweeping Europe at the time. “The more realized a thing is,” he would write in a prose essay, “the greater its defect of being” — and Cunningham did not shy from the quietism that is the ethical consequence of all such metaphysics: “hence any particular choice is as such evil, though morally it may be the best choice.” Or, as he put it poetically, Evil is any this or this / Pursued beyond hypothesis.

But poets are rightly not judged for the coherence of their stabs at abstract philosophy, and in fact — though the sort of quietism that refuses to act or take responsibility is reprehensible in its theoretical expression – – an admirable ethical persona does emerge from Cunningham’s poems. Time heals not: it extends a sorrow’s scope, he wrote in an early epigram, As goldsmiths gold, which we may wear like hope. He began another early poem, Men give their hearts away, / Whether for good or ill / They cannot say. By his second volume of verse, he had forced his narrow form to hold poems as difficult and good as his “Meditation on Statistical Method,” which ends:
 
Error is boundless,
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

Or “In Innocence,” which reads in its entirety:
 
In innocence I said
“Affection is secure.
It is not forced or led.”
No longer sure
 
Of the least certain
I have erased the mind,
As mendicants who see
Mimic the blind.

By the early ’40s, he had as well found his greatest gift, becoming one of the few genuine masters of the poetic epigram in English — moving from seven of these brief poems in his first volume to over forty in his second, and producing over a hundred in the course of his career. Like many tight, precise poets, Cunningham in his longer poems often tended toward the epigrammatic — little quotable bits that express a thought with exceptional neatness, as when he concluded a twenty-four line poem for a friend who had just received her Ph.D.: For you have learned, not what to say, / But how the saying must be said.

The poetic epigram, however, is something slightly different from the pithy saying that is called an epigram in prose, or even from an epigrammatical line or two in a longer poem. Quite what that difference is remains hard to say. Derived from the Greek word for “an inscription,” an epigram is literally merely any poem short enough to be inscribed on stone, and the Greek Anthology contains thousands of them. But as the form was passed to the Romans, it developed along certain lines, defined mostly by the success of the first-century poet Martial, who composed over fifteen hundred Latin epigrams — some obscene, some melancholy, many satirical, but all short, pointed, expressing a complete thought, highly reliant on unlikely metaphors, obviously poetic in form, and producing in their final words some unexpected but satisfying grammatical or intellectual twist.

With the Renaissance translation of the Greek Anthology and the rediscovery of the Roman poets, there came a revival of the Latin epigram in Europe, and the form quickly became popular among scholars and courtiers. It is during the Renaissance — with Scaliger, for instance, who wrote a taxonomy of the epigram in 1561 — that the epigram’s various sub-genres become more clearly discernible: the riddles, the mnemonics, the didactic and moral apophthegms, the sundial mottoes, the miniature elegies, the religious satires known as pasquilli, the sexual puns, the epitaphs and humorous gravestone inscriptions, and perhaps a dozen other types.

Just as nearly all determined poetic forms in English are borrowed from classical and Romance languages, so the epigram came into English with the Renaissance. Something in the epigram, however, unlike the sonnet or even the ode, seemed to resist English — or perhaps it’s better expressed the other way around: There’s something in English that doesn’t want to produce the poetic epigram. Perhaps it lies in the looseness of English grammar that requires a sentence to tell us its structure clearly, or perhaps it has to do with the fact that rhyme — rather than the metrical structure of vowels — is required in English to show that a short burst of words is poetry, and rhyme requires at least two lines.

Of course, the resistance of the language has never stopped English poets from producing epigrams, particularly during the centuries when poets were reared on classical languages. Nearly all major poets have turned their hands to the form, from the eighteenth-century Alexander Pope — who wrote the inscription for the collar of the king’s pet: I am His Majesty’s dog at Kew.   / Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you? — to the twentieth-century William Butler Yeats, who wrote, for a fellow Irish literary figure, “To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine”:
 
You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another’s said or sung,
‘Twere politic to do the like by these,’
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

It is a form congenial to poets whose natural bent is for concision and the transparency that makes a poem look easy though it is in fact extremely difficult; to A. E. Housman, for example, who wrote of the British dead in the Boer War:
 
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

or to Philip Larkin, who wrote for Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee in 1977:
 
In times when nothing stood
but worsened, or grew strange,
there was one constant good:
she did not change.

A handful of minor poets have proved surprisingly good at the epigram — the utterly forgotten Georgian poet Frances Cornford, for example, who used a typical joining of classical reference and modern situation for “Parting in Wartime”:
 
How long ago Hector took off his plume,
Not wanting that his little son should cry,
Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye – –
And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

or the Edwardian Hilaire Belloc with his humorous series of sundial mottoes: I am a sundial, and I make a botch / Of what is done far better by a watch, and I am a sundial. Ordinary words / Cannot express my thoughts on birds. The Victorian Walter Savage Landor is often included in anthologies solely because of such epigrams as his description of a beautiful dead woman being ferried over the River Styx:
 
Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
With Dirce in one boat conveyed!
Or Charon, seeing, may forget
That he is old and she a shade.

And yet, despite the occasional forays of major poets into the form, and despite the occasional achievements of minor poets, the poetic epigram has never succeeded in English as well as the sonnet. Only three major poets in the language have devoted themselves to a systematic exploration of the epigram: Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and J. V. Cunningham.

Like Jonson and Herrick — who demand to be read in their entirety — Cunningham shows his knowledge of the sub-genres of the form. He translates some of Martial’s sharp social observations:
 
Bert is beguiling with his mother,
She is beguiling with her Bert.
They call each other Sister, Brother,
And others call them something other. . . .
A mother who would be a sister
Would be no mother and no sister.

and composes his own:
 
Some twenty years of marital agreement
Ended without crisis in disagreement.
What was the problem? Nothing of importance,
Nothing but money, sex, and self-importance.

He reproduces the little teaching lessons of the Renaissance didactic distiches in “Cantor’s Theorem,” the sundial mottoes in “I who by day,” and the explicit sexual puns in “Bride loved old words” and “Lip was a man who used his head.” He indulges the dyspeptic misogyny traditional in the epigram with The ladies in my life, serially sexed, / Unscrew one lover and screw in the next, and
 
Career was feminine, resourceful, clever,
You’d never guess to see her she felt ever
By a male world oppressed. How much they weigh!
Even her hand disturbed her as she lay.

He gives such humorous epitaphs and gravestone inscriptions as An old dissembler who lived out his lie / Lies here as if he did not fear to die, or Here lies my wife. Eternal peace / Be to both of us with her decease, or, for a seducer, Naked I came, naked I leave the scene, / And naked was my pastime in between. He invents types to mock: This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained, and Pal was her friend, her lover, and, dismissed, / Became at last her lay psychiatrist. And he gives way to the epigram’s deep melancholia in, for example, Life flows to death as rivers to the sea / And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

And yet, even after this parade of marvelous and insufficiently appreciated verse, it is worth asking why Cunningham is not an even better poet — why the reader feels at last a narrowness in his verse, an unfulfillment, a poetic gift greater than its poetic output. Like Jonson and Herrick, Cunningham performed the nearly impossible feat of mastering in English a form that English doesn’t want to master. But unlike Jonson and Herrick, Cunningham had nowhere to go once he had mastered the epigram and the epigrammatical turn. His poems contain everything the epigram can do, but the epigram does not contain everything his poems could have done — and consequently, much of his best poetry was never written and much of his greatest poetic impulse fell away unused.

The poet X. J. Kennedy was strongly influenced by Cunningham, and — thanks to his promotion of unpopular poetry during the 1960s and ’70s — Kennedy became, in turn, a major influence on the school of New Formalists who began to achieve recognition in the ’80s and ’90s for demanding poetry in difficult and traditional forms. After Cunningham’s death, Kennedy wrote his “Terse Elegy for J. V. Cunningham,” in which he claims that the poet
 
penned with patient skill and lore immense,
Prodigious mind, keen ear, rare sense,
Only those words he could crush down no more
Like matter pressured to a dwarf star core.

It is a lovely tribute to the man, but it is not quite right. The Renaissance epigram was a little diamond — polished, brilliant, and cold. But Cunningham’s best verse means more than its form can convey. You can almost see it in his photographs: The man is not forcing his poetry down to compression by an act of will; he is himself being forced. Whether it is by something inside him from his days of extreme poverty, or outside him from what he perceived as his ambivalent relation to American culture, who can say? — but something was ramming with terrible force a great poetic will and imagination through a chokingly constricted funnel.

But that is, of course, exactly why J. V. Cunningham remains — in all that he did and all that he failed to do — the most fascinating poet of his generation.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. J. V.