Contemporary Poetry Review

As Reviewed By:
James Rother

Anthology Wars: Strong Measures' Second-to-Last Hurrah (Part Two)

The New Poets of England and America. Edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, with an Introduction by Robert Frost. Meridian Books, 1957.

New Poets of England and America: Second Selection. Edited by Donald Hall and Robert Pack. Meridian Books, 1962.


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By the early ‘60s, the unbelievable popularity of Donald M. Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), had made it impossible for formalists to write off the “open field” revolution as freakery, faddishness, or simply bad taste. And disappointingly, what had been touted as the flagship of the New Formalism, the Hall, Pack and Simpson collection, brought out by Meridian Books in the first year of Eisenhower’s second term as president, had proved something of a washout. For openers, it had the ill luck to appear in the fall of 1957, just when the hullaballoo over On the Road, by the Beat Prince of Darkness himself, Jack Kerouac, was reaching critical mass. No verse anthology content with business as usual could have survived that publishing season, and none did. The poetry market (if the phrase itself is not a solecism), having been strip-mined for years by the sort of shameless rehashing of neo-modernist standbys that floral arrangers like Oscar Williams and Louis Untermeyer routinely trafficked in, was in no mood to play catchup. When the stampede for prose fiction by even such riders of the purple page as the late (but not yet defunct) William Faulkner and the middling-to-middlebrow Robert Penn Warren (of World Enough and Time) was such as to make, even in recycling mode, many a book club rich; when squiring novels through the locks of reviewers’ cliques, which, though a far cry from As I Lay Dying or The Hamlet, prattled enough about doom to con the ding-dongs who bought them into believing that they as well as them would sholy endure; when the luxury liner of fools appeared to have docked at one’s personal pier—it was at such turning points in careers that Ivy League marketing executives had it dawn on them that the death struggle to publish James Gould Couzzen’s By Love Possessed  and other such books was not only worth the candle but the expeditious burning of it at both ends.

 And so, with almost all the good news pouring into the prose side of the executive suite, heavy lifting laced with despair became the job description of more than a few placeholders charged with sanitizing their corporation’s image via the favorable publicity generated through the publishing of slim volumes of poetry authored by squeaky clean poets with serious ivy growing out of their ears. The trouble was that after a while—after a very short while—CPA’s attached to the loss-leadering poetry division could no longer pass a flat line off as a bottom line when year-end accounting time rolled around. Not to be discouraged, Donald Hall and Robert Pack (Louis Simpson having opted to jump ship) concluded, two years after the publication of Allen’s anthology, that upbraiding the unparting waters with yet another wave of their Mosaic wand might not, after all was said and done, be ill-advised. This time, though, the editorial chores were split, like the volume itself, right down the middle. Rather than farming them out among three sowers of tamed oats as was done in 1957, Hall edited and introduced the volume’s first half devoted to English poets, with Pack following suit with the American contingent in the second. Whatever amity survived between the two remaining editors from the time of the first anthology, it does not seem to have extended to their views of what, if anything, ailed contemporary Anglo-American verse. While Hall attacks British quarterlies and their parochialism with the impatient civility of one loath to be reminded of the ease with which apologists for poetry downshift into “second-best is still best” rhetoric resorted to by used car salesmen, Pack, blistering with a rage that is nearly uncontainable, makes it clear that, had he been allowed to, he would in a New York minute have swapped all six pages of his introduction for a single wordless pop-up conveying, as would an unequivocal semaphore of a catastrophe already visited and intent presently on spreading pain as far and as wide as it can, how palpably horrendous the state of American poetry had become. Launched with an amiable sneer, his preamble then heads straight for space docking with righteous indignation, all burners firing:

Dividing American poetry today into two camps, the Academics and the Beats, has obscured the distinction between good and bad, honest and pretentious writing, and it has corrupted the unprofessional audience concerned with modern poetry by turning their attention from the poem to the personality of the poet. The assumption that led Life to do an article on the Beats is that gossip is more interesting than poetry; and Time despises whatever does not sell itself to popular taste: “Talented poets in this generation seem aware that readers outnumber poets, and seem willing to write something that might interest them. The poets apparrently want to rejoin the human race,” and in its usual manner, reduces criticism to innuendo: “Most poets’ friends are poets; usually even their wives are poets.” Would that be Time’s last word on Wordsworth, the Brownings, or Yeats? How long will the cowardly practice of writing unsigned articles of opinion pass as objective reporting? A poet is interesting to Time only after he is successful; he is interesting to the public whose attitudes are shaped by such media, if he drinks himself to death, if he undresses at a poetry reading, or if he takes part in a presidential inauguration, but not for what his poems say or for their quality. [Italics the author’s.]

Pack’s fixation on the Luce publications (as pretext, rather than fuel for, his own rabid preoccupation with, in his view, the Beats’ coarse grandstanding, their despoliation of basic literacy and confusion of the bardic with the hamhanded) should fool no one. We have here a poet who in his own right would probably have warbled a different tune had the articles from Time and Life singled out shilled readings given at Harvard, Yale or Princeton by writers within the New Poets circle. Fearful that the recall of the formalist muse under way might gather even more momentum, Pack launches an attack on the new “visionary company” of Kerouac, Ginsberg & Corso, whose hostile moves on the firm of Blake, Shelley, Keats & Whitman had reduced American poetics to the gutter level of the tabloid press:

     The idea of raw, unaffected, or spontaneous poetry misleads the reader as to what is expected of him. It encourages laziness and passivity. He too can be spontaneous, just sit back and respond. A good poem, rather, is one that deepens upon familiarity; it continues to release your feelings and engage your thoughts. Attention, which may begin as passive, becomes active—you are asked to remember, to associate, to consider, to comprehend, to speculate—you become involved. This is the challenge it offers, and this is the inescapable difficulty of poetry. It is not enough to let a poem echo through your being, to play mystical chords upon your soul. The poem must be understood and felt in its details; it asks for attention before transport.

So, to counter Pack’s parting shot, does a flight plan, but never mind. He clearly was on a roll in this introduction and not to be disheartened by any wavering of generalities. And besides, he hadn’t yet gotten to the crux of this diatribe on poetry’s unholy barbarians: the redemptive role of the university in keeping the Washed forever separate from the Unwashed:

The personality this is constitutionally grounded in opposition---sentimentalism in reverse—has a facile subject in hand, and lightly finds fluency in complaint. The shriek against the world adds no wisdom to what is obvious. I say this because there is always a movement in the Arts that tries to be new for the sake of newness, or makes a protest for the sake of protest. Individuality, uniqueness of style, are not so easily achieved. Nor is it honest to despise your audience and ask that you be loved for it.

The problem of an audience—of a community of informed and open discussions and dissent, concerned and yet free of commercial or vested interest—is inseparable from the question of the vitality of any art. In our time, the university, rather than the literary cliques, the poetry societies, the incestuous pages of little magazines, is capable of nurturing and supporting such an audience. For it alone is the place where past and present live together. And one finds among one’s students a genuine responsiveness, not yet spoiled, to art . . . 

Little did Pack realize that within less than a generation the university would not only meet his specifications but become the Fonz et origo of American poetry of every type and description, up to and including the “’open field’ rummaging for sense” which began with the Cantos and Paterson; filtered its way through Olson’s Maximal orisons at the lip of catastrophe; and came to piña colada fruition in the neo-surrealist dérèglements of the ‘60s, its postmodern aftermath in James Tate, Charles Simic and Louise Glück, followed by the instauration of the Ashbery mystique—all of which have landed us within earshot of the Billy Collins Follies, with its gospel choir of Neruda revivalists and Ammons channelers.

      But did Pack and Hall really feel that “charge of the Light Brigade heroics” would be viewed as less misguided and silly in 1962 than they had in 1957? Then, enmity between Sandals and Tweeds turned largely on the issues of class distinctions and whether (Hart Crane’s The Bridge, notwithstanding) the modernism of Eliot and Pound had truly played ghostbusters to the influence of Whitmanian golems as its early boasts proclaimed? Though more or less negligible in terms of book space, the volume lacking the definite article does reflect when all is said and done a greater catholicity of style and approach than its predecessor. The names of Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell and even James Dickey would no more have found their way into the first anthology’s American sector than those of, say, James Michie, David Holbrook or John Wain could have squeezed past into the English one. But catholicity is always if not a two-edged imprimatur, then certainly a two-handed engine of dispensation as useful to authority as it is destabilizing to its enemies for whom intransigence is the sine qua non of opposition. Hall, a shrewder counterpuncher in the clinches than Pack, showed in his own Penguin Books anthology, Contemporary American Poetry (also of 1962), that a formalist Maginot line would have to cede more than the equivalent of Belgium if it were to successfully contain the Hun. “For thirty years an orthodoxy ruled American poetry,” his Introduction begins, and the note of eulogy, of “The king is dead. Long live the king,” is out and on the page before we realize that an act of surrender is being drafted as though it were a cessation of hostilities by mutual consent. This orthodoxy, he continues,

derived from the authority of T. S. Eliot and the new critics; it exerted itself through the literary quarterlies and the universities. It asked for a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit. The last few years have broken the control of this orthodoxy. The change has come slowly and not as a rebellion of young turks against old tories. For one thing, the orthodoxy produced many good poems and some of the attack on it came from sources—like Time and the publicists of the Beat Generation—which could not supply literary alternatives to the orthodoxy. 

     Hall keeps the word “orthodoxy” before his reader with something like the assiduous calculation of Marc Antony harping on the honorableness of Brutus in a rather more famous eulogy on a dead letter in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Brutus, we may recall, had pumped for a Roman politics heartened by symmetry, intellect, irony and wit, and was then bemused, not to mention perturbed, to find these had been upended by a field campaign led by the unlikeliest of demagogues who embraced the same oyster bar of mob entertainments, generally speaking, that the Beats in America clove to somewhat further down the historical pike: anarchy, aformalism, passionate emotion and gross humor. Hall’s rhetorical approach is less apparent, if more seemly, than that of the apologist for the noblest Roman of them all. Clearly breaking with the pack he had long run with, he allows in this statement of intent and entente that the governance of the poetry officium might be informally shared with his enemies, the Sandals, and goes on to cement his proposal by stripping off as much tweed as modesty, if not group loyalty, permits. Hall’s concession speech to the faithful who had stayed up all night with him in fading hope of an October surprise is anything but svelte, but no less worth citing, complete with gag lines, for that:

Yet we must not regret the dissolution of the old government. In modern art anarchy has proved preferable to the restrictions of a benevolent tyranny. It is preferable as a permanent condition. We do not want merely to substitute one orthodoxy for another—Down with Understanding Poetry! Long live Projective Verse!—but we want all possibilities, even contradictory ones, to exist together. The trouble with orthodoxy is that it prescribes the thinkable limits of variation; among young poets of the forties and fifties, almost without exception, surrealism was quite literally beyond consideration. The orthodoxy which prevailed in every literary context had decided, while the poet was still in short pants, that “surrealism had failed.” And that was the end of that. Yet typically the modern artist has allowed nothing to be beyond his consideration. He has acted as if restlessness were a conviction and he has destroyed his own past in order to create a future. He has said to himself, like the policeman to the vagrant, “Keep moving.” 

Hall’s most painful readjustment to altered conditions was having to acknowledge the indispensability—and not just to the Lowell of Life Studies—of a key progenitor of the Projectivist movement, William Carlos Williams. Hailing him as a conservator of the “colloquial” in American verse, he is given credit for keeping the spirit of Whitman alive through the less estimable days of the “orthodoxy,” when Eliot’s and Pound’s repudiation of the good gray poet portended more than an obscuring of “democratic vistas” and only Hart Crane’s among the voices of late modernist formalism accorded his influence due respect. From Williams the younger poets “learned . . . a conscience of the eye rather than a conscience of the ear,” and became ensanguined by the new ethics of the sensorium his verse—and especially the epic Paterson—initiated. With him, Hall writes, “’getting the tone right’ is the poet’s endeavor, not ‘turning that metaphor neatly,’ or ‘inventing a new stanza.’” When such poetry “fails most commonly it fails because the emotion does not sound true”—the commonness of which failure, Hall would have us believe, was not all that uncommonly encountered. Though journals like Cid Corman’s Origins (begun in 1951 and about which Hall had mostly good things to say) stood out as the best sort of exception, others did much to entrench the prejudice (already loose in academic enclaves) that Black Mountain writing was tableture that had been brought down from the mountain a little too soon.

Pack’s own verse appearing in the 1962 volume embraces this contradiction with a bearhug that would do a grizzly proud. Having made the same adjustments to futility as his colleague Hall, his poetry plods in gloopy imitation of Eliot’s Four Quartets manner, the elder poet’s sinewy four-stress line being made to sag where the caesurae should be and lift and separate where cadence should be marked with a dying fall. The following from the poem “Resurrection” indicts this state of affairs in both archaic and modern senses of the term:

On the taut shore, the bald skull,
Bleached, abandoned, more regular than stone,
Glistens, a little cast-away sun
Among planetary pebbles, galaxies of sand.
Dragged out again, again to drown,
By choked water, wheezing waves,
The outflung aged angel gulls
Gossip its descent; cliffs moulder,
Smoldering the anger of the drugged earth’s age,
While the skull’s sockets suck the foam,
Windows for eels to swim like sight away,
With the crooked teeth laughing seaweed,
Sighing from the ribs of the deep sea-dunes. . . .

The point of this exercise out of Understanding Poetry’s “Things to Make and Things to Do” section is (ostensibly—one can’t be sure) to limn the process by which poetic imagination (with the help of non-illegal moonshine) reconstitutes in cloud the body of a skull found on a beach having been washed in by the tide. Almost to formula, one hears the familiar Brooks a-babble and Warren sounds of hares eager to beat the tortoise to the Line. No wonder that in 1951 Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) could lament that not a single enlivening poem had appeared in an American magazine of verse since the Harlem renaissance moved downtown. For poetry to come on like this, blistering and drowning in overmunched carbs, tramples one of the oldest convenants between poet and posterity: namely that turning a governing metaphor’s tenor into a Cadillac does not excuse the crime of having treated its tenor as a vehicle in the first place. Tenor is tenor and vehicle is vehicle. Why mix apples and oranges when American poetry was visibly awash in fruit salad as it was?

     But enough of trying to Monday-morning quarterback the Zeitgeist. We should return now to the anthology which got this log rolling and the leaky assumptions it thought to portray as bulwarks against the rot and complacency the ‘60s were about to torrentialize through a cultural front door not so much open as utterly ajar. As a defender of formalism under siege, Robert Pack wasn’t content to just editorialize about Beat chiropractic, irresponsibly pursued, in his own (undeniably arthritic) neck of the woods. He refused to be dissuaded from putting other poets’ mouths precisely where he knew the money to be gained from publishing was not. When the definite article gracing the title of the 1957 anthology was dropped in that of its sequel, it’s hard to imagine Pack supporting Meridian Books’ editorial decision to embrace humility, if only to capitalize upon whatever reverse ostentation as might inhere in such a gesture. Public relations jiu-jitsu—or respectable distance-fighting, with bait-and-switchblades—might be the tactic preferred by his co-editor Hall, but his instinct was for a no-holds-barred below-the-belting of the guy on top. If the compiler of Contemporary American Poetry thought nothing of setting the unfettered Roberts—Creeley, Duncan and Bly—alongside redoubtable blunderbusses like Edgar Bowers, James Wright, and Hall’s old editorial cohort, Louis Simpson, the Americanist half of the second New Poets would for ever stick, come hell or high molasses, with the old crowd, the old fealties, the old—how the predictability of it all still rankles in any but Tory circles—stiff upper lip.

At any rate, the best new catch the second collection had to offer was certainly the pre-Ariel Sylvia Plath, who is represented by no fewer than six poems, all but one of which, the short-lined “Mushrooms,” are of reasonable length and substance. The most famous of these, “The Colossus,” draws upon themes, obsessions, fixations in basalt that would both plague and turn to gist the strains of her last, morbidly posthumous volume of poetry. One thing her last poems do, and do immitigably, is alembicate the scattered twitches of her previous work—now almost complacent-seeming to the post-mortem eye—into true distillates of horror they were later to become. “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Elm”—alluded to in this way, the quotation marks distinguish nodes of negative ecstasy as much as vexed titles making the poems to which they’re attached more, not less, than dreadful in the Kierkegaardian sense. Confronting her in Hall and Pack, we can’t appreciate what it was like not having the fauvist fits of Ariel bear down on our reading of her like a monorail no longer married to its track, a gimlet flying through the air, disengaged from its handle.  Now we know that “Daddy,” the god of the violated hearth, flexes and reflexes in Eumenidean torsions and torques, because “The Colossus” tells us so avant la lettre:

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon line.
It would take more than a lightnining stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-colour.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. . . .
 

Or in “Snakecharmer,” her pipe-smoking academic father re-emerges in memory’s courtyard as Pan, Panpipes, pipes piping water only a plumber can plumb:

As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe. He pipes. Pipes green.
Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his songs.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes

Is visible. . . 

Like a version of “The Idea of Order at Key West” owing almost as much to Krafft-Ebing and Sascher Masoch as to Wallace Stevens, Plath’s “Snakecharmer” vouchsafes nothing to the dolce far niente that this Panning of Daddy strums to nightmare pitch. The poet is not yet consigned to the silent dead (from whose grip she will soon enough escape to shock the world with her prescience), but rather working her way, inch by self-mortifying inch, into the magic limbo of the Ariel poems, where all that has pent, bent, spent her into a tailspin of Non serviam will become emulsified into a final lust for death. Athwart the path from The Colossus to Ariel lies a plethora of flayed nerves, poorly faked orgasms, and bills never paid for disservices rendered to (and by) the various alpha-males strewn throughout an uncommonly rigid life. (As to the orgasms she might have experienced, cruel as it might be to skirt speculation, we know with strong likelihood only of two—and they were those of her children’s father.) For no matter how skewed in favor of or against Plath the woman as opposed to Plath the poet the many biographies, gossip books, and feminist rumbles on the subject might appear, they all more or less agree about one thing: this Arielist led a cookie-cutter life because she refused to believe that dough insufficiently worried into shape could ever rise enough to make the ingredients of a family life closer to prep school than Father Knows Best and a university education on which all the stops on front loading had been pulled out seem less than indispensable.

But this is to stray somewhat from the path connecting the ultimate in Plath’s work from the less interesting penultimate, and we need to get on. To conclude on, rather than with, a promissory note, there was nothing particularly exceptional about the poetry of Plath being picked up by Hall and Pack for their second edition of New Poets. Her verse had begun appearing in the better poetry magazines around 1959, having had its way greased by one A. Alvarez, a friend of hers and of her husband Ted Hughes, and by Tambimuttu, an acquaintance of Alvarez’s and editor of what was then an influential poetry journal based in London, and she had impressed the literary community as promising if not quite full-fledged poet who might someday go farther than most women poets—always at a disadvantage with male editors—had a desire to. In this, Plath resembles another troubled female poet given space in Hall and Pack’s pantheon of the future: Anne Sexton. No less hard-wired for self-destruction than the sibyl of The Bell Jar, Sexton exploded into deftly fateful verse with poems like “The Truth the Dead Know,” commemorating the deaths, within a single year, 1959, of her mother and father:

 Gone, I say, and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye, and knucklebone.

No one could accuse this confessional poet of facile rhymes and diseased conscience. To rhyme gate with cultivate and stone with knucklebone indicates a desert rat’s ear for deprivation’s descant and the pricksongs that in the right hands can make its wrongs come right again, even if it’s only for a time and there’s no more ground to lie upon than an “as much” troped to a cigarette butt in solitary. But the desert rat disappears quickly, without leaving so much as a Derridean trace, in Sexton’s third quatrain, which, when the last Oscars in heaven are handed out for single stanzas, would beat all but one or two of Yeats’s and tie with the best any four-runner thus far has Englished into being. How much more memorable from the standpoints of sex and economy is the little death mixed with white water served up by Sexton than the one the Clintons came up with three decades later. And if poetry seems too infrequently to punch out the political lights behind God’s eye’s in the ex machina of His descending (and condescending) self-insertions, there is always this poet’s “For God While Sleeping”:

Sleeping in fever, I am unfit
to know just who you are:
hung up like a pig on exhibit,
the delicate wrists,
the beard drooling blood and vinegar;
hooked to your own weight,
jolting toward death under your nameplate.

Everyone in this crowd needs a bath.
I am dressed in rags.
The mother wears blue. You grind your teeth
and with each new breath
your jaws gapes and your diaper sags.
I am not to blame
for all this. I do not know your name.

Skinny man, you are somebody’s fault.
You ride on dark poles—
a wooden bird that a trader built
for some fool who felt
that he could make the flight. Now you roll
in your sleep, seasick
on your own breathing, poor old convict.

Apart from being doggerel on a somewhat tighter leash, this entrant in the claiming race for most offensive Crucifixion poems—had Christ’s loincloth ever been referred to as a “diaper” before this?—is by Freud, out of a mare’s nest of verisimiltudinous hooligans, all painting the same picture, out of the bush-whacker classic, Totem and Taboo, of the primordial slaying of the Father. But with a twist: this standing patricide is further “misconscrewed” (to invoke another father in eternal reruns, Archie Bunker) as a flaying of the Son. Or is this quintessential virago’s imago but a foretaste of that Lacanian Imaginary which would raise its full glower over America only after Sexton had cried Woolf for the last time? The implied resentment (most charitably laid to defensive undaughterliness) of the poet toward a Dad who is “somebody’s fault” but not hers would be viewed as unconscionable, were its rue of umbrage not thrown back in a single draught and swallowed without a hint of chaser.

      It is poems like these that ushered in the “age of confessionalism” in American verse that I touched upon in Part One of this retrospective. If Robert Lowell was its symbolic water boy (having elbowed aside all other aspirants to the baptismal font), then Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, and Adrienne Rich remain its earliest communicants, filing one tea culpa from the sex wars after another, not in boozy parentheses that reduced the later novels and Nobel acceptance speech of William Faulkner to a farrago of vat-of-consciousness keening, but in expulsions of breath displaced from thighs too long squeezed shut. The Levittown of the national psyche, increasingly restive in its sequestrations and conformities, was itching to think—and feel—outside the box. Suburban creep, and then actual sprawl, of the nation’s housing was building to a bust-out of wife-swapping and “swinging” that would find its Aeneid a few years later in that group-grope shaped like a novel, Couples, by John Updike (1966).

      None of which now seems that much off the chart because, if nothing else can be said for the five years separating New Poets 1 from New Poets 2, they did muster more than their share of embryonic history into the arena of doubtfully pregnant causes. Not only did Sputnik fire up dreams of extraterrestrial glory beyond anything Jeffrey Hunter impersonated in King of Kings, it galvanized the lethargic and largely racist society that had been sitting on its anti-Negro, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic laurels for longer than anyone could remember. Arthur Miller (with a little help from Kafka) tellingly Amerikanizes this society in his novel Focus (1962), a followup to The Crucible about Nazi-style assaults on Jews in a U.S. torn by war and—given the much bruited belief that President Roosevelt was really President Rosenfelt—dyslexia. A true feat of sublation this, transforming a sleepy industrial giant into a “Things to Make and Things to Do” autarky, that one would have thought only Penn and Teller (the disqualifying time-bend not being a problem) could have conjured up. Though not on the cheap: into the chasm opened by the mania to replace the man-in-the-moon with a man on the moon (to which lunacy a satellite-in-orbit vastly outranked, say, any naturally occurring mooning of Jupiter) whole educational establishments would topple and vanish. As a consequence, the Cold War would effect a noisy downshift into turbo (the Cuban missile crisis, though not yet a main street face-off, was around the corner), with the Soviets (and China) not exactly relishing the switch to No-Doz sweeping over the continental showroom to their right that, except for Korea, had for years acted less like a fortress of democracy than a holding company for General Motors. And then there was that deviancy still not daring to speak its name (in museum circles, at least), pop culture. Through an erotic exchange program with Great Britain, whereby such rock stars as Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard were traded for The Rolling Stones, the Who, and an anorexic horde of be-jeaned and bespangled East Londoners, would soon have the sexual seams of more than just young America at the point of bursting. (The Liverpudlian Beatles, though most popular of all, were no sexier at root than the Ken dolls (of “Barbie” fame), which at least had the virtue of being embraceable and were, one would think, no more incorrect anatomically than that group’s drummer Ringo.)

 Yet, most critical for the American economy—psychic as well as social—was the assumption of those betting on a lengthy space race between the superpowers that the moveable feast of transistors and printed circuit boards, having already begun its migration from Texas and Florida to California, would eventually spread before the American Leviathan (whose anti-Lawrentian merger of Calvin and Hobbes was now embarked on roiling otherwise temperate seas of commerce into mainframe discomfort zones of point and click) not a banquet of technological gadgets but a formula for the future reflecting—if in no other way than a zeal to smother—the titular obsession driving the most famous of the “New Wave” English dramas of the “Angry” period: Chips with everything.  

 

With so much going on that was shattering the image of the ‘50s and early ‘60s as a time in which the only immoderation permitted was in the pursuit, unfettered and split-ass, of moderation, how could the average reader of New Poets 2 not be put off by the sheer antiquarian insouciance of poem titles like “Narcissus,” “New Year’s Eve in Troy,” and “Prologue for a Bestiary”? True, not all of the pieces selected to appear in it reflect that level of indifference to the fact that poems, if they’re to exercise an appeal beyond the cénacle of Mallarmean enthusiasts targeted by the early modernists, must catch at something in the average poetry reader’s attentional weave. A poem’s literal level (to risk an analogy grounded in outmoded Freudianisms) provides the “dream work” that will either hook the reader or lose her to the countercurrents of apathy and incuriosity. There is much in poetry that reroutes even in the normal way our emotional A-through-Z, without poets going out of their way to abandon us to prosy deliriums of wank and sod to which we are already heir, willy-nilly and by default setting. The merely precious earns no brownie points with any but the smallest minority of modern poetry’s camp followers—the sort that might trail patiently the fascinating rhythms of the hyper-articulate, but would draw the line at endorsing (at eight bucks a pop in 1962 dollars) a circle-jerk of unhappy campers’ trumpeting, say, the return of the repressed in rime royal. For, however well meaning the trudge through the sort of paysage moralisé ineptly limned in, say, S. S. Gardons’s “To A Child,” the final payoff, despite the combinatory innovationalism of a “sonnet” comprised entirely of sestets, each one differently shaped and rhymed, is the purest mannerist Camp—

     They threw my letters out.
They said I had probably forgotten.
We have seen the sheen and glow of rotten
Wood, the glimmering being that consumes
     The flesh of a dead trout.
     We’ve been in livingrooms;

     We have seen the dodder,
That parasitic pale love-vine that thrives
Coiling the zinnias in the ardor
     Of its close embrace.
     We have seen men abase
Themselves with their embittered wives 

—if not a weird kind of art-deco kitsch. One can only suppose that for a poem this creaky in manner, “dodder” and “ardor” as much make up a subject rhyme as find closure in an actual one.

 “To A Child” is plainly of a piece with those poems mentioned earlier that even in their titles can’t resist striking a pose of arch gothicism. Coyly and at a dangle likely (their authors think) to serve as a hook, such poetry holds out (like a small child a recently expelled turd) its excruciate of esoterica in the form of a nub teased from recessed history or myth. To make the most stylistically of its having little that is new to add or subtract to either—or to any other subject, for that matter—a poem of this kind swims in the pretext (trumped up, and hence almost always left unstated) of having fallen into its creator’s lap through some serendipity of browsing. Garrulity is accorded its full measure of aleatory inconsequence (though not much else happens), while the taxi of poetic occasion is left to throb, wait and idle—with metre running—for a fare that never quite materializes. Not infrequently in such verse, metaphors of things dead or dying are either strewn about in casual profusion or stashed like souvenirs of long petered out crushes, depending on the anal retentiveness of the poet in question. Such ravaging downers not only invite comparison (for their ability to vampirize positivity) with the bloodsuckers swarming in and out of Sartre’s play Les Mouches, but they can also darken the face of already tenebrous emotional tundra with light-dissolving gloom, and that is precisely what we find happening in many of the poems chosen by Robert Pack. Across the expanse of this wrung out poemscape or that, tenors vie with vehicles for the pick of hospices to roost their last in and vulture perches from which to scan the parade of morbidity in its entirety, rather than just a part of it.

The odd thing is that such obsession with violent death should find its mythic outreach, and poetic home, in verses ostensibly written to or for a child. John Logan’s “Lines to His Son on Reaching Adolescence” fits this pattern with typical—for this time—overbearing allusiveness:

But for both our sakes I ask you, wrestle
Manfully against the ancient curse of snakes,
The bitter mystery of love, and learn to bear
The burden of the tenderness
That is hid in us. Oh you cannot
Spare yourself the sadness of Hippolytus
Whom the thought of Phaedra
Turned from his beloved horse and bow,
My son, the arrow of my quiver,
The apple of my eye, but you can save your father
The awful agony of Laocoön
Who could not stop the ruin of his son. . . .

A suffusion of imprecision in language so pointlessly blunted by allegorism—and secondhand allegorism at that—reaps its own rewards of misprision: the “awful agony” of Laocoön is by now not only a cliché forever surrendered to Lessing-is-more aestheticisms, but in this maudlin plea of Logan’s the tone of bargaining in the teeth of fatality reduces the double-edged swordplay inherent in father-and-son différance to no more than puckish snicker-snack with a Gilette blue-blade. For one thing—and it’s a pretty big thing, given the poem’s theme—how is it possible to wrestle against an ancient curse of snakes? Either it’s an effective curse, with its potencies up and running, or it isn’t; but if it is such, its powers to both contaminate and subvert are unbridgeable and inviolate. One can wrestle with a curse (like the ancient one that snakes are reputed to carry), but if we do, we will in the end lose out because in wrestling with it we certify its existence and release its power to exert power over us.

      All of which highlights a problem which has plagued formalism even in those periods when its star rode high in the heavens of patronage and few could fault its ascendancy as chief conservator of the very highest things: its association, from the age of Virgil to our own, with coinage struck from that mint of impecunious wisdom, the sensus communus. The ‘50s, though viewed as a time when discretion in public (and especially sexual) affairs was thought not only the better, but in many instances, the only part of valor, was also one in which the longing to break out into unconstrained badlands of freedom ruled the American collective unconscious. Fueled (in intellectual circles at least) by the twin vogues of existentialism and neo-surrealism that since the end of the war had held Europe, and particularly France, in their tentacular grip, a slew of younger American poets might have talked the talk of traditionalism in verse but they were managing less well to walk its walk without strange twitchings and spasms giving untoward torque to what otherwise doubled as composure.

By 1962, the year the Cuban missile crisis had more than restored lead to the pencil of an atomic mania that had faltered somewhat between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the first ambivalent years of the Space Age which saw the edge acquired in 1957 by the Russians with Sputnik somewhat rounded off by the promise made in President Kennedy’s inaugural speech to have an American on the moon no later than 1969. As a consequence, the national desire to—as Stephen Sondheim put it—“relax, let go, let fly” approached a crisis point in its long established cycle of repressions. Something would either have to be bled out of the American psychic economy or some new variety of suppressant with powers as yet undreamed of would have to be transfused into that economy. Eight years under Eisenhower of sugar shock one minute and nuclear dread the next had managed to clog the pores of America’s instinctual life to such a degree that only an orgasmic chain reaction of Reichian proportions could fracture its character armor and release what years of sullen disaffection had allowed to fester into a coast-to-coast nightmare designed largely by gossip columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen.

     Well, almost anyone can whistle, but not everyone can make a tune cohere out of what is no more than hot air. The formalists missed their chance to get a last-ditch “Worstward Ho” effort out of the blocks when “beat” was a buzzword only with jazz musicians and teenagers. Now, when Beat Generation beards had more and more pepper giving way to salt and, apart from Howl and On the Road, the movement’s appeal to the young was increasingly measurable in the number of laughs at its expense gotten on Steve Allen’s Tonight Show, the opportunity to get it together had clearly passed. Robert Lowell’s sly elision out of “ Where the Rainbow Ends” (1946) into “Words for Hart Crane” (1959) tells a story enunciable wholly in its unuttered passage from mentor to mentor (i.e., John Crowe Ransom to W. C. Williams) and, by a reverse trajectory, from desperate conversion to Sion to post-detox reversion to scion and a return to the lordly bosom of his Family, which is to say, of James Russell, Amy—indeed the full complement of Mayflower aristocrats. Hence, the significant absence of this major minor poet is probably not an act of negligence on the part of editors like Pack. After having been conspicuously featured in the pages of New Poets of 1957, it seems highly improbable that the exclusion his newest work from the second edition was anything but deliberate. But why? Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, and other poets of less than metrical rigidity were admitted to Pack’s redoubtable Parnassus, why not the most famous, the most charismatic of the confessionalists? (About this time Elizabeth Bishop was still an unsightable galleon on the high seas of postwar verse. Her time—one coincident with, yet oddly disjunct from, the one under discussion, would come somewhat haltingly, later when, with full momentousness, gays and unattached female poets, once having broken surface, could emerge without fear of patronization—or matronization—into the light.) Could it have been that to the formalist way of thinking turncoats and recidivists were less to be tolerated than those that had always evinced a benighted cast of mind? That to jilted suitors of a muse gone all droopy in the mammaries a future garbed in gravecloths of immolation seemed somehow less threatening than a past chaste in memory but confirmed in the present as a whore?

     A digression broaching the larger context rendered null and void by the parochialism of Hall and Pack’s anthology, its insistence on treating what was in fact but a 400-page circular file as a riposte to the enfranchisement of its increasingly significant Other, the confraternity of Eleusinian slum-bunnies who could talk like Plotinus, decry a stiff prick’s lack of conscience like Origen, and smell like nothing this side of Avernus, is called for here. That enfranchisement was metastasizing apace as the anthologists themselves were speaking in their introductions so eerily decoupled from reality as to refer to the “very good poems” being written “in England these days” and of the “many” Americans appearing in New Poets who “will leave behind them the kind of statement that will guide the future, if there will be one.” Those “very good poems” were indeed being written in England and elsewhere, but there was hardly a surfeit of them; and of those British poets singled out by Donald Hall as assured of survival—Larkin and Tomlinson, Hughes and Hill—the first might well disappear up the sewer pipe of his own self-disclosed bigotry and the last, adrift in a New England rather than an Old, sinks ever more grumpily into hagiographies and the despondencies their failure to resemble present lives give vent to.

     Wherever the tendentiousness of this argument points, its leadstring is the capitulation and reconfessionalizing of Robert Lowell.  The bottoming out of American verse formalism begins here and will pretty much wind up in the abortive extremity of the “strong measures” movement some twenty years later.

     Look out below.     

 

II.

     From the vantage point of this new century, Lowell’s radical departure from formalist norms reflects not so much an alterity of purpose reasserting itself as the buckling of options once able--more compressively perhaps than impressively—to fire up boilers of disgruntlement like Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1954). This buckling was not, as many critics have argued, merely psychological. The period of “imitations” and translations—Racine’s Phaedra (1961) remaining the most notable, though Richard Wilbur’s entry into this field has somewhat eclipsed Lowell’s—represents an imprecocious coming to terms with the demons of restraint, which (or as regards Yvor Winters, whom) he had wrestled with since coming under the traditionalist sway of New Criticism’s redoubtable Godfather, John Crowe Ransom. Nor was he alone in this. The attractive combination of bodacious worldliness and blackly holistic irony made the pull of this Southern poet’s style nearly irresistible to young writers of verse after the war. They were on the make and Ransom had indisputably made it—by trimming Pegasus’s wings to a fashionably austere spread and by returning the pure and the simple to their pre-Occamite condition of mortal enemies. Not for him the discontents of the Wintersian Bourse, on whose tides of approval a summarizing Swallow or blissful Bowers waxed or waned. He had more whited and sepulchral fish to fry on that procrustean hibachi of his, more rack to screw to that unbearable tightness of being so scrupulously excruciated in “lyrics” like “The Equilibrists” and “Painted Head.” Most genially affected—some might say infected—by his style were those making up the diaspora that Eliot and Auden had left behind when either repudiating Waste Land  poetics or glibly Kierkegaardianizing Freud to the delight of book clubs, such as Reader’s Subscription and Marboro, that they helped start.

 Lowell’s revised hallucinatory assault on America differed from its predecessor only in its having finally jettisoned the pretense (so scrupulously maintained in poems like “After the Surprising Conversions,” for example) that style obtruding on form comes from the pact with the devil any good poet must make if daily quotas of originality are to be met. Suddenly gone was the ivy-beleaguered rant in decasyllabic couplets and very much present—though not always accounted for in the new poetry’s chapter or verse—were workable ironies and somewhat less belabored metaphors. This made poetry readers think twice about what was, even in the affective utterances of, say, “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid,” a flagging singularity at odds with its own tortured plurisignations. On the heels of the critical wound administered to Lowell in Poetry and the Age (1953) by his friend and fellow poet Randall Jarrell came unsettleable doubts about exhaustion of method and encroachments of the madness that had plagued him throughout the ‘40s and then into the ‘50s. The miraculous facelift-cum-metamorphosis given to William Vaughn Moody’s “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” (1901) by Lowell in the title poem from For the Union Dead registers more than just a turning away from Ransom’s Thou-ier-than-holy Place Holder in the sky. Apart from its liberating effect on Lowell himself, within the broader confines of American poetic culture it had the resonance of a pistol shot let off in the innermost sanctum of formalist Innigkeit. What had at first seemed a tribute to his friend and mentor Allen Tate’s most famous poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” more and more took on the motley of a comeback aimed at that endlessly revised work’s lament that the world travestied in Gone With the Wind had—well, gone with the wind. While Tate’s version of Dulce et decorum est had avoided lowering itself to the level of Dame Margaret’s kitschfest with its deferrable (“I’ll Cry Tomorrow”) tearjerking, its satellite perspectivizing still cried out, at least so far as Lowell was concerned, for corrective reorbiting. (A footnote in passing to America’s perennial “study in Scarlett”: An awful, unadmitted thing about the Tate-Mitchell send-up is that, had the latter been blessed with an IQ of the former and been able to write of comparable things as well as, say, Willa Cather or John O’Hara, she might as easily have given us The Fathers as the Southern author who did. As it was, she sent spinning into the world a book—and film—that cornucopiates anaesthesia to the silly, the sentimental and the mindlessly sodden in our midst ad infinitum. Like confederate flag decals on pickup trucks, her vision of de Souf remains as astigmatically plantational as Disney’s only partially animated homage to Joel Chandler Harris’s avuncular romulation of Remus, The Song of the South, while continuing to homestead in book if not cinematic form a potential for setting the races at odds as inflammatory as anything in the Turner Diaretics of D. W. Griffith filmdom. As regards Tate’s own hangings in this galère, suffice it to say that a poet who could elegize Jefferson Davis with a refulgence no worse honed on atrocity than Andrew Marvell’s in the famous ode equivocating upon the pandemonium-like frenzy greeting Lord Protector Cromwell in England on his having returned safely from the Pandemonium of his own making in Ireland—such a poet could ironize anything from populist dictators thrown up by the rabble to gated communities maintained by and for its rousers.)            

But to return to poems about the Union dead. Moody’s 227-line diatribe-in-verse had drawn its inspiration—as would Lowell’s later—from “the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made” honoring Robert Gould Shaw, killed, as the headnote to the ode stipulates, “while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted Negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.” The poem’s hubbub of recriminations take the American demos to task for its imperialistic adventures against Spain, this time in the Pacific, in the region of the Philippines. “Through street and mall the tides of people go / Heedless,” he writes, anticipating the purview of Lowell’s “Everywhere,” in which “giant finned cars,” in a triumph of the impersonal, “nose forward like fish.” Both poets see the Civil War sacrifice made by Shaw and his Negro troopers—and the elegant emaciation given it in St. Gaudens’s sculpture—as an omission twice damned by the brute and stubborn fact of American pragmatism run amuck. For Moody, it led to a conflation of manifest destiny with raw profiteering, which in turn led to the massive cover-up of piratical plundering with civic abominations:

Lies! Lies! It cannot be! The wars we wage
Are noble, and our battles still are won
By justice for us, ere we lift the gage.
We have not sold our loftiest heritage.
The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat
And scramble in the market-place of war;
Her forehead weareth yet its solemn star . . .

Sophisticated modernity eschews all vestiges of Vachel Lindsay, and so Lowell’s take on Colonel Shaw’s desecration bears no discernibly human stain of the over-the-top “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” And yet, is not the unstated theme of “For the Union Dead” at least contiguous in moral space with the rhetorical questioning of American ideals in the eighth strophe of Moody’s “Ode”?

Was it for this our fathers kept the law?
This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth?
Are we the eagle nation Milton saw
Mewing its mighty youth,
Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth,
And be a swift familiar of the sun
Where aye before God’s face his trumpets run?
Or have we but the talons and the maw,
And for the abject likeness of our heart
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?—
Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?

One could conceivably disclaim even a spectral antecedence for Lowell’s unsparing contempt in the raucous enjambment of Moody’s saeve indignatio and lament for “the frustrate dead,” were it not that the ghosts haunting the Boston Common in each are equal opportunity wraiths in wreaths. While the latter poem might choose to direct its venom against an execrable caste of buccaneers trampling the heroic grandeur and nobility of Shaw and his soldiers in the fool’s gold-dust of imperial ambition, and the former to excoriate the insidiousness of “a savage servility” that “slides by on grease,” the upchuck—sorry, upshot—of both is the discomfiting ease with which platitudinous stone rededicates itself to moral anarchy and the blandishments of time immemorial.

      It’s forgivable to luxuriate occasionally in intertextuality because, as E. M. Forster suggests in the Marabar Caves sequence of his novel Passage to India, reiterative reverb posts the devil’s donations without having to detail the gifts proffered or their provenance. The knife-edge saliences of Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” while steeped in tannins of the “backward arts” gone incontrovertibly straight, make their incursions into rotogravure territory without leaving so much as an incision mark to show where “I am a camera” lensification entered the picture. The later Lowell is good at this but impatient with his own staying power (or is it attention span?). In the famous “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to his alter id, Elizabeth Bishop, the inner photography renders the outer unduly oblique:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right. 

This isn’t  “I am a camera,” it’s “I am the camera,” and the chi-chi touches—the self-conscious ellipsis, the carefully dropped psychological stitch of the stanza’s last line—did little to persuade the smart money that what was really on what remained of Lowell’s mind (after all the drinking, carousing, and making large hangovers out of little ones throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s) was, at bottom, a Mayflower aristocrat’s fear of being disliked for the wrong reasons. But that was to rob the Precocious Delinquent that Lowell clearly had been of the right benefit of the wrong doubt. If in 1960 he was not all he had once pretended to be, he could still make amends for the O’Neillish histrionics given inadequate cover by Ransomian poetics in the verse of his youth by forgoing the mask of werewolf intoxicated with Horace and doing lunacy in tones that, in terms of voiceprint at least, could pass for his own. What clearly wasn’t his own was the box of that newly acquired voice, being one which, when you got right down to it, had been lifted at least in part from Paterson, that bleeding chunk torso of a so-called “epic” that was in fact less a discrete poem than the intonings of “a Voice plus a name,” the last being William Carlos Williams’s.

Which makes “For the Union Dead” almost a self-contained typology of everything the earlier, more Audenesque formalism of Wilbur, Moss and Hecht, for example, stood against. At first blush, and despite a casual deploying of unrhyming quatrains, Lowell’s poem makes not only hash but hashish of the mindless straining after order that Williamsesque free verse is heir to and the brainless lusting after “ideas of order,” that epigones of Wallace Stevens find irresistible, not to mention poetasters like Ronald Perry, who take routine stock of each of these paired extremities and then trade flagrantly in both simultaneously:

Oranges in a wooden bowl,
Orange and Moorish drape, like
A study in the contradictions
Of color.
The palest fruit
Turns long and lush as any
Odalisque, and the drape burns
Into a bush, Grandfather,
Under the swift, blue incursions
Of your terrible brush. Or,
A tree turns to stone
After your touch . . .

One study in the colorless contradiction of color opens out on another until the whole finaigle grandfathers itself out under, one is tempted to believe, an obscure umbrella clause limiting apprentice work to soft landings on borrowed airstrips. “Still-Life” is not surprisingly the title of this poem and the life it tableau-vivifies is so hard to discern that it is scarcely distinguishable from the morbidity its figures yearn fruitlessly to exorcise.

      Perry’s poem hangs precariously from that ledge of preciosity that artistic modernism, without always meaning to, taught at least two generations of its ephebes—two beyond the original one of Eliot and Pound—to scale. Its hallmarks were an essentially contentless effeteness and a passion for the esoteric, though not always in tandem. The best of the neo-formalists—the Merrills, Wilburs, Shapiros and Vierecks—made hay while the twin Christian orbs of Eliot and Auden held sway in the firmament; the others, the oatburners, so to speak, consumed their ephemerality with consummate rapidity, leaving little for the counterculture, coming later, to plow under. The early ‘60s saw the end of poetic formalism in America for at least a generation, though the elder statesmen of that movement—if that indeed is what it was—never actually went away. Stanley Kunitz, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, and a host of others like them continued plugging away in their work-stations, trying to salvage a semblance of current from what was looking more and more every day like a plunging tide. Not just an ungovernable swell, but a tsunami in which all the verities of modernism—beyond the urge to shock and do outrageous things with form—would be overwhelmed by a vortex the size and shape of which would have defied the imagination of the original Vorticists of 1915, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

 

Whither poetic formalism, then, in 1962? Neither forward, for that path would soon be blocked by Paris Leary’s and Robert Kelly’s ecumenical in spirit but still freethinking A Controversy of Poets (1965); nor backward, for that would mean a rematch with the brood assembled so provocatively in 1960 by Donald M. Allen, and there was certainly no prospect of a better result after a second engagement. While the American poetry world mostly awaited the equivalent of the codification of jottings by Olson and Creeley from tablets descended from Black Mountain, other developments were afoot and, as things stood, they most definitely did not include the possibility of growing great genial oaks from the negligible formalist acorns strewn by various Yvor Winters clones churned out at Stanford. Among the more promising was a newly emergent group of poets referred to collectively as the New York School. Centered about a nucleus of defrocked abstract expressionists including the just returned from Paris, John Ashbery; Reikian clown Kenneth Koch; fast forward lens adrift in New York, Frank O’Hara; cut-up sonneteer Ted Berrigan; and the Mark Wahlberg of this entourage, Bill Berkson, this unabashedly queer conclave struggled to be reborn from the phoenix ashes of French surrealism and the Lower Manhattan art scene. The movement to jumpstart a second San Francisco renascence in what was once exclusively Ferlinghetti territory was also beginning to appear on radar screens, and, least predictably of all, a new wave of British rockers were about to turn the world of mass culture right-side up by providing the impetus for hanging neo-Rimbaldian verse—that of Bob Dylan (baptized this year—2003—into the Tradition by an eminence no less establishmentarian a gray than Christopher Ricks), Jim Morrison, and Leonard Cohen—on Electric Ladyland-style walls of sound.

 And as if all that weren’t enough, somewhere in the sands of the desert around L. A., a new and even scarier Hollywood was moving its slow thighs toward an apocalypse, intimations of which were already being shared by those with access to Acapulco Gold. Peyote and yage visions would soon haunt a movie business long accustomed to luring the spiritually homeless into theatres to translate spectral shapes into storied outcroppings of themselves. Doomed by the crapshoot of American life to one snake eyes-and-boxcars weekend after another, these de-Whitmanized waifs hardly needed a building to fall on them to know that a mitzvah was missing from their lives, that beyond where lip of wonderland thinned to outermost reality’s yawning maw, dragons waited to lay waste to dreams that only those spectral shapes, having called them forth in caverns silvered with darkness made visible, could, beyond the theatrical space itself, watch over and keep safe from harm. For decades, movies had performed this service as a matter of course (and of intercourse, when young people in the grip of hormones used them as a legitimating prelude to going all the way). But what was in store for America as the Hollywood not yet having hoved into view bore down on it would end by loosing more abstract horrors than even the old mariner’s warning not to sail past the Antipodes—“Beyond here be dragons”—could ever have warned of.

Within the broader context of the decay of formalism, however, that ends up being of rather less than major importance. What the followers of the New Critics failed to grasp was that an as yet unimagined twist on formalism was being invented on the “back 40” of American poetry—indeed, on the other side of the Great Divide separating Sandals from Tweeds, by such chips off the Poundian block as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky—and that this was the pretext behind Donald M. Allen’s epoch-making anthology The New American Poetry in 1960, not any desire to deliver to the already foundering ship of neo-modernist formalism of the Eliot-Auden variety a crippling broadside. Somehow it never occurred to critics and reviewers until very much later—the 1970s, really—that the tablets codifying the new laws of poetic procedure that had descended from Black Mountain in the mid-‘50s not only anticipated a wholly new type of poem that was for the first time in history as uniquely American a creation as the Coke bottle, but provided, within limits, an accurate shadowplay of its lineaments and roulade of externalizing forces.

But that was a movie screened almost exclusively for the cognoscenti. Between Black Mountain and the Valley of the Dolls opened out to land grab in the ‘60s lay the Beats, and their story was one of success too like one of failure not to have been an instance of the former eventually misconstrued as the latter. The Beats conquered—for a time—because as a movement they proferred what in America could never, no matter how raucously hyped, be sufficiently on offer: youth. Regardless of the degree of obviousness with which they refused to hawk their wares to an ungrateful hoi polloi, the younger generation of formalists could not avoid having the air of mal vivants having drunk early and often, like Max Beerbohm in the infamous bon mot, from the fountain of old age. The reek of their poems, even when secreted out of a callowness that barely mimed maturity, was not of the odor of sanctity—though that was what many of them tried to exude—but of the ordure of that peculiar sanctimoniousness that at Tartuffean climax shudders into casuistry.

In a way, the Pisan Cantos of Pound, however formidable and aloof its ethos, provided one of the more potent attitudinal templates for such posturing and aping of betters. The author of that simultaneously bent and towering work at least had the virtue of having come by his loss of paradise the hard way, by having earned its forsaking, if only late in life and through back-to-back incarcerations in two very different prisons of visceral heart and ethereal soul. Yet the Beats, too, considered him, despite his love for things fascist that was as translucent as his enthusiasm for things literary and historic was opaque, a salvageable hero. His later poetics appealed to them as able to contain with plurisignative equanimity the demotic and aristocratic in both the realm of language and the play of the symbolic. All of this proved magnetic to the young, eager to seize upon a version of the lyrical that did not remind them of the high-flown junk, the unmetabolizable antiques they had been made to assimilate in high school—poems in a wholly artifical idiom that robbed them of the right and privilege of being romantic by suffocating them with an avalanche of archaisms from the slopes of Romanticism’s Mont Blanc. The Beats, in their synchronous embrace of liberational sex and regenerative suffering (à la Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse), provided young readers for whom preemptive surrender to middle age was not a viable option with an attractive alternative. They made it fashionable to get down and dirty with what was by common consent maximally dirty and therefore anything but a downer. In fact, they made it seem fun to broach the sublimities of scum as rhapsodized by such mavens of sty-induced vision as Arthur Rimbaud and August Strindberg, to gain admission, without fear or trepidation, to “a Coney Island of the mind,” to commandeer a mantra coined by the publisher of City Lights Books, the Sol Hurok of the Beat Generation himself, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They laid the groundwork for, in a word—though that word was not to enter the public domain until the advent of Kurt Cobain and the entirely new twist on nirvana that surfaced with a fresh breed of “subterraneans,” this time not in San Francisco but to the north of it, in Seattle—the sensibility of grunge, which managed to make earlier avatars of the gutter like Jim Morrison of the ‘60s rock group, The Doors, look like Mr. Clean. 

That, however, broaches an installment to appear later about a period that antedated the one just discussed, the early, mid- and late ‘50s. The present account of resurgent American formalism and how, given its lapses and omissions, it was sent Packing, is now complete and can be ended here. 


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