The Good, the Bad, and the Extraneous

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? 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. 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. (A five-member advisory board is listed in the front matter, but no clue is given as to whom they are advising.) But that still leaves us faced with the fact that these volumes seem determined to omit almost nothing.

Presenting the poets chronologically by date of birth, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century opens with Henry Adams, born in 1838. Nearly two thousand pages later, the march of poetry calls a temporary halt at May Swenson, born in 1919. 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. This is not anthologizing, but a riskless attempt at unedited inclusiveness. It’s like reprinting a hundred years’ worth of newspapers and calling what you’re doing the writing of history.

This new collection follows upon the Library of America’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. 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. 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.

Trading on the authority of its predecessor, the first two volumes of American 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.”

But what is a twentieth-century poem? And who is a twentieth-century poet? Henry Adams (better known as an historian, journalist, novelist, and Brahmin), Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856-1935), Harriet Monroe (1860-1936, the 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. Why these five and not, for example, the philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952)? (Though here, at least, one does find someone omitted from this endless anthology.)

Henry Adams’s “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres” follows five anonymous ballads as the first signed work in the collection. 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.”

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) in “Beer Bottles” observes: There are more poems in the world / Than empty beer bottles / So many millions of poems have been written! / What happens to them all? Who reads them all?

In “Poetry,” Marianne Moore (1887-1972) again sounds poetry’s dissonant chord about itself: I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.

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. But that’s not because all the work here is genuine poetry.

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.

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. Eliot (1888-1965), Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Hart Crane (1899-1932), e.e. cummings (1894-1962), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), and Langston Hughes (1902-1967).

Major poets write poems of the first order. They have a sizable body of work. What makes their poetry of the first order is the fact that their poems contain complete thoughts, and each poem is a new thought. Read Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” or Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump,” for good examples. Or Marianne Moore’s “Is Your Town Nineveh”:
 
Why so desolate?
in phantasmagoria about fishes,
what disgusts you? Could
not all personal upheaval in
the name of freedom, be tabooed?
 
Is it Nineveh
and are you Jonah
in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?
I myself, have stood
there by the aquarium, looking
at the Statue of Liberty.

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.
I was awake. It was no dream.
But whether it was bird of prey
Or prey of bird I could not say.
I never heard that sound by day.

Sometimes work of the first order is produced by those whose poetry is a background activity, such as Henry Adams. 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.
I have made fins from bluejays’ wings,
I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow.
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?

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. Here are poetry’s Great Plains, spacious and crossed by many; here is the home of the middle class; here one can make a life.

Poets of the second order (which is the largest party of poets in the collection) are skilled and accessible. Edward Arlington Robinson, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) are strong in single poems, but are difficult to stay with. Their problem is eventual monotony.

The third order of poetry may have no ideas at all. It can embody a sensibility, make gestures, proceed by method, or stand in opposition. 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. Its lesser practitioners can start out amusing and end up unreadable. Here, for instance, are some lines from Abraham Lincoln Gillespie’s (1895-1950) “A Purplexicon of Dissynthegrations”: punziplaze karmasokist Deco Yen Pompieraeian / scaruscatracery timmedigets outrege Opinducts. And this goes on for another fifty-nine lines. 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!

The fourth and final order of poetry included in American Poetry: The Twentieth Century are works that appear for social reasons. 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. P. Blackmur (1904-1965), Yvor Winters (1900-1968), and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), the social philosopher Paul Goodman (1911-1972), and the play-wright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983).

This anthology also contains a number of show tunes, folk songs, and blues lyrics. These are not poems. It’s impossible for anyone to read an Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) lyric, and not hear the music the words were written to and with and for. Just look at “Ole Man River” as it sits on the page. Poetry may embrace democracy, but it sure isn’t democratic. It no more includes the lyrics of W. C. 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. 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.

The difference is that poetry, no matter what outward form it assumes, has its own music. 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; John Ashbery calls it the magnetizing of language. Poems are written and sit on the page. They wait for the reader as the printed score waits for the soloist, or the conductor, to be realized. 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.

A song lyric, on the other hand, comes with a melody. 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. 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?

Generally speaking, poetry doesn’t sell well in the bookstores. So it’s one of those oddities of the marketplace that publishers call stuff poetry in order to sell it. It’s as though the compilers of this anthology, by importing ringers from other genres, have attempted a little reverse marketing. But poetry is not a commodity. It is the publisher’s bad conscience.

Reading this anthology, one begins to wonder what “American poetry” means. Is it written by citizens of the United States, either native or naturalized? Is it poetry written here, no matter what the legal status of the poet? Is it poetry that takes American places, people, and speech for its matter, but is written anywhere? Is it poetry written in American English? Can a person renounce being American, the way someone can choose to be American?

These are questions American Poetry: The Twentieth Century resolutely refuses to answer. You’ll find here all the expected poems by the American expatriates. 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. (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.)

The two long-standing traditions in poetry in English are the plain style and the golden. Of the twentieth century’s major poets, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost practice plain style. This tends to be direct, apparently unadorned, and sober. The voice is not distanced, and addresses the reader directly.

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. The golden style is more playful, while the plain style appears more earnest. When Ezra Pound characterized T. S. Eliot as preferring Moses to the Muses, this is what he meant. The plain-style Frost and golden-style Stevens never tempered their mutual rivalry and mistrust. In his poems, Stevens always referred to himself in the third person.

But there’s another dichotomy. Frost and Stevens are eminently American poets. They lived in America, they wrote about the place and spoke its language. (Frost did launch his career in England, but only as a strategy to get his due back home.) Stevens didn’t leave the country at all, except for vacations in the Caribbean; he kept up on art and philosophy through books, journals, and catalogs. Neither one of them shared in the glamour accorded the tribe of American expatriates active in Europe before World War II.

Pound and Eliot left America for the Old World with the explicit intention of promulgating what Pound called “World Literature.” 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. 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. This is the land
which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor
unity
Matter. This is the land. We have our
inheritance.

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. 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. And Pound, like Eliot, thought of what he did as world poetry rather than American. 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.

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 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. 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. 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. Unless the Library of America wants to say that all this chewing gum is poetry.

Laurance Wieder’s Chapters Into Verse: A Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible has just been published by Oxford University Press.