Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected “Metaphysical Song.”
Like those of her mentor, Yvor Winters, Pinkerton’s lyrics exhibit both philosophical depth and clean, classical lines. She exceeds him in her careful definition of the human condition in terms of its inescapable orientation to the divine “First Principle.”
Such qualities show forth in her greatest short poem, an elegy for Winters, set at Stanford, where they both studied and taught literature for many years. The dry and littered landscape of the drought-stricken campus echoes the intellectual decline into which the university has fallen in the years since Winters’s death, and the rise of postmodern and Marxist ideologues among the faculty.
Pinkerton compares this desiccated intellectual environment to that of her own student days:
Standing against the “hucksters” of academic and poetic fashion, in hopes that “meaning might be mastered by [her] tongue,” has characterized Pinkerton’s work as a poet, literary critic, and historian. She has published few poems, but each of them orders language to truth with a severe discipline. This slender but rich Collected Poems brings that life’s work to a close and demonstrates that she is not just an important minor poet but a national treasure.
Helen Pinkerton was born in Butte, Montana, in 1927. Her father was a copper miner, killed in an accident when she was just 11. During World War II, she moved with her sister and mother to California, where all worked in a fruit cannery, while Helen applied to Stanford.
She had intended to study journalism, but in her first semester, she took a course with Yvor Winters, and his air of forbidding critical judgment filled her with awe. Her future lay in literature. She began writing poems under his tutelage, and Winters would later praise her as a “master of poetic style.” In 1950, she entered the doctoral program at Harvard, writing her dissertation on Herman Melville.
Winters encouraged all his students to read deeply in the Western intellectual tradition, including the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Pinkerton’s father was unchurched, her mother notionally Roman Catholic; but when she encountered the metaphysics of Aquinas, especially as explained by the French neo-Thomist Étienne Gilson, Pinkerton returned to her ancestral Catholicism—not out of a sense of filial sentiment, but of intellectual conviction.
In Gilson’s books, she learned that Aquinas’s philosophy of being demonstrated God as the pure act of existence from whom all things derive and on whose love their existence depends. The God whose essence is existence grants existence momently, she writes in “The Return,” continuing, God gives himself / Again in drawing you in caritas.
Pinkerton soon concluded that she, like most modern persons, was by disposition a “romantic.” That is, we seek to remake ourselves and the world in conformity to our own will. We want to be the god of our own world and so become, by definition, an absolute that does not exist; what begins as an ambition to be “all in all” ends as a lust for nothingness.
Gilson and Aquinas exposed this as delusion. Reality is, in fact, God’s gift of existence, a good to be accepted with gratitude, not conquered by will. Most of her lyric poems depict the internal struggle between these two positions, between what she calls the “romantic eros” and the existential realism of Aquinas. They have established her as one of the few genuinely metaphysical poets of our century.
Over the years, I have published several articles on Pinkerton, in hopes of bringing her metaphysical lyrics to a wider audience. I see now, however, that I have given short shrift to what may be her most lasting contribution to American letters, her five dramatic monologues in blank verse on the subject of the Civil War. These, I believe, will become classics: miniature epics that, like Virgil’s Aeneid, draw public history and private tragedy into a poetic whole.
The monologues trace their source to her lifelong study of Melville. She discovered, in the background of the novelist’s work, the moral and political questions percolating through the antebellum debate over slavery. Although zealots—abolitionists and “fire eaters”—sought to reduce politics to simple ideology, the greatest men of the age saw that they must steer between evils for the good of the country—often at tragic cost.
Melville’s collection of poems about the war, Battle-Pieces (1866), awakened her to the Civil War’s tragic moral complexity. There, she found a man committed to the Unionist cause who nonetheless admired the honor and courage of the Confederate Army. Pinkerton’s poems continue that tradition, retelling the story of Lemuel Shaw, Melville’s father-in-law, the Massachusetts judge who opposed slavery but enforced the Fugitive Slave Act in hopes of preserving the Union. She personifies Melville himself, writing to an English correspondent about the meaning of the war, as well as the Confederate general Richard Taylor, writing in old age to Henry Adams about what combatants on both sides learned from battle: “The war’s meaning was not its politics,” he insists. “It was their confrontation with the timeless,” their learning how to die for a “love beyond themselves.”
Two other poems spoken by Mary Custis Lee and Margaret Preston also explore the stoic Christian faith that sometimes overcame and sometimes gave way to a war in which (as Robert E. Lee wrote) “All must suffer.” These are poems that bring the moral and intellectual drama of the Civil War to life by insisting that the obvious right of the abolitionist cause must not blot out the practical wisdom of those seeking to preserve the Union from war. This, in turn, must not lead us to ignore the piety, self-denial, and martial heroism found among the great figures of the Confederacy.
Melville feared that the wounds of the war would never be healed unless the virtues of North and South could both be commemorated as treasures of one nation. This is not, of course, a popular position in our own day; but Pinkerton writes with the historian’s sense of duty to the fullness of the past, the Christian philosopher’s concern for the permanent, and the poet’s eye for the dramatic and significant detail, challenging us to see our national story whole.
Her lyrics challenged us, first, to perceive and embrace the divine gift of being. But in this age of bitter divisions among the American polity, she challenges us above all in her narratives of the Civil War. There we see that amid what Richard Taylor calls the “foul and rotten Vanity Fair” of democratic life are always to be found tragic heroes who lend to our history instances of nobility, courage, and valor.
James Matthew Wilson teaches at Villanova. His latest book is The Fortunes of Poetry.
