In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery—try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.
In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery—try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.
After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America
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Overview
In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery—try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822399490 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 494 KB |
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After the Death of Poetry
Poet and Audience in Contemporary America
By Vernon Shetley
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9949-0
CHAPTER 1
ELIZABETH BISHOP'S SILENCES
Knowledge withheld is a recurrent motif in Elizabeth Bishop's poems. "I know what I know," says her almanac (CP 123); her loon "kept his own counsel" (CP 125); and in the scenes she describes, "whatever the landscape had of meaning" appears to be held back, "in the interior" (CP 67). Something is secreted within "The Monument" about which the poet can only speculate, while Crusoe's island remains unnameable and so unknowable. The biographical sources for this recurrent theme are not hard to find; her father's death and her mother's subsequent breakdown thrust the five-year-old Bishop into a puzzling and opaque world, rich in urgent and dangerous secrets. The ensuing period of being shuttled between various relatives surely helped to shape the powerful personal reticence often remarked upon by those who knew her. Reticence is a quality often posited of Bishop's poetry as well, and many commentators have noted and praised both the concern for craft highlighted by the poet's self-effacing manner and her reluctance to moralize her scenes and narratives. John Ashbery, for instance, remarks that "I find her [Bishop's] poetry terribly exciting because she can describe something perfectly and not draw any moral from it, and she doesn't have to at that point" (Koethe 180). I want to examine the way in which the silences of the poems shape Bishop's relation to her readers, and particularly to explore the way in which a strategy of withholding both moral statement and personal information enabled Bishop to be at once a "writer's writer's writer," in Ashbery's words, and also perhaps the favorite poet of the New Yorker audience.
David Kalstone remarks about Bishop that "her work is admired by many poets who do not admire one another" [Five Temperaments 12), and among the younger generation of poets today this remains the case; Bishop is claimed as an influence both by New Formalists and by many in the MFA mainstream. In the broad range of her admirers she resembles Robert Frost, who was, however equivocally, a modernist (whose critical supporters included Ezra Pound) while also appealing to a class of reader otherwise alienated from the modernist movement—the "general reader who buys books in their thousands" (Frost, Selected Letters 98). The growth of Frost's reputation among partisans of the modernist revolution proceeded through a determined excavation of the "Other Frost," to invoke Randall Jarrell's essay by that title, a Frost whose darknesses and ambiguities are those of a modernist poet, a figure far more "hard," "odd," and "gloomy" (in Jarrell's terms) than the "sensible, tender, humorous poet" beloved by the public. This revaluation has been accelerated in the last fifteen or so years by biographical revelations that have paradoxically made Frost more interesting as a poet as they have made him less likable as a person; the replacement of the "neighborly" Frost by a more complicated, if less attractive, figure has had a favorable effect so far as critical attention to his poetry is concerned.
The course of Bishop's reception bears a good deal of resemblance to Frost's (Parker 21-22). A number of the early poems of both poets quickly became anthology pieces (in Bishop's case, notably "The Map," "The Man-Moth," and "The Fish") at the same time that both had to endure a certain condescension from "advanced" critics. Frost was often weighed at the value of his public persona, as a plain-spoken, unintellectual embodiment of Yankee toughness and wisdom; and praise of Bishop's "charm" usually carried with it an implicit or explicit reminder of the limitations of that quality. If Frost was a regionalist, Bishop was a miniaturist, the circumscription of whose work was often seen in terms of gender rather than geography (Alvarez 324-26). Facts of Bishop's life that have only recently become available to open discussion—her lesbianism and the profound unhappiness of her childhood—have helped to erase the image of effortless charm and lightness and replace it with a sense of the emotional burdens hidden beneath the apparently casual surfaces. While biographical revelations in Bishop's case, unlike Frost's, have made her a more rather than a less attractive character, in both cases greater knowledge of the life has made the poetry seem richer, stranger, and more complex.
So the critic John Unterecker, in his account of Bishop's "Poem," darkens its seemingly untroubled description by cross-referencing a detail to the story "In the Village," behind which stands the biographical fact of Bishop's mother's breakdown. Encountering "the hint of steeple" (176), Unterecker remarks, "We have no choice but to remember the Presbyterian church steeple that in the story 'In the Village' threatens to echo an insane mother's scream" (77). Anne Stevenson, who knew Bishop and knew the facts of her painful childhood long before they became widely disseminated, warns her readers that Bishop's poetry, "for all its whimsicality, comes from the heart of despair itself" (121). Only after Bishop's death, however, have critics been free to reread the poetry in ways that highlight its experience of "deformity," "existential loneliness," and "epistemological murk or vacancy," to use the terms of Helen Vendler's shrewd essay (Music 298–99), which occupies in Bishop's reception a position similar to Jarrell's essays in Frost's. Charles Tomlinson, in his review of Questions of Travel, contrasts Bishop's poetry of wandering rather unfavorably with "the more radical homelessness of Rilke or Lawrence" (89); since 1966, what we know of Bishop has helped reveal in her work a sense of homelessness deeper and more disturbing than Tomlinson allowed. Similarly, our knowledge of Bishop's lesbianism provides a subtext that complicates and enriches our understanding of the poetry, as in Lee Edelman's ingenious detection of possible double meanings in "In the Waiting Room." If, as David Bromwich remarks, "to the reader who returns to these poems for their own sake, the question likeliest to recur is: what are they concealing?" (EBDH 84), criticism now has some ready answers that until recently were either unknown or, for those who knew, unsayable. But biographical knowledge can only encourage, rather than create, new readings, and surely both Bishops—the "miniaturist" and the poet of "existential loneliness"—are there in the poems.
One might see Bishop's mature work as a prime instance of what Richard Poirier terms, in polemical opposition to modernist difficulty, "density": "By 'density' I mean to describe a kind of writing which gives, so it likes to pretend, a fairly direct access to pleasure, but which becomes, on longer acquaintance, rather strange and imponderable" (130). Poirier lists Frost prominently among the exemplars of this quality of density, and Robert Mazzocco seems to have something similar to Poirier's "density" in mind when he remarks of one of Bishop's poems that "you'd have to go back to Frost for another poem as slyly unaccommodating" (5). Markedly "unaccommodating" poets were to be found aplenty among Bishop's contemporaries, most notably her friend and rival Robert Lowell; Mazzocco points here to the skill with which Bishop's work, unlike the more evidently difficult poetry of many of her peers, conceals its recalcitrance and strangeness behind an appearance of openness.
Though Bishop's work never approaches the levels of opacity attained by the early Lowell, this apparent openness is much more evident in her later works. Thomas Travisano, referring to the first half of North and South, notes that "many readers have found these early poems difficult" (19), and by this he means difficult in something of a modernist, or at least a New Critical, sense. Adrienne Rich remarks that, reading North and South at the time of its publication, she found some of the poems "impenetrable: intellectualized to the point of obliquity ... or using extended metaphor to create a mask" (15). The landscapes and situations of Bishop's early poems are recognizably within the reigning neometaphysical paradigm, even if she made the less usual choice of Herbert rather than Donne and Marvell as her chief metaphysical influence. The highly wrought, deliberately artificial worlds of the first part of North and South link the poems to prevailing 1950s formalist models: the poem about an object, real ("Cirque d'Hiver") or imagined ("The Imaginary Iceberg," "The Monument"), the Audenesque ballad ("Love Lies Sleeping"), or the fairy-tale parable ("The Man-Moth," "The Weed"). Many of these early poems turn on the kind of extended metaphor that was one of the chief stylistic progeny of the modernist marriage of metaphysical and symbolist modes, a fundamental analogy that governs the entire poem: the soul is like an imaginary iceberg, the poet is like a man-moth or the man who sleeps on the top of a mast, dreams are like armored cars, the city is like a body. These analogies share at once the unlikeliness of the metaphysical conceit and the self-enclosure of the symbolist mode.
With the transformation in Bishop's style inaugurated by "Florida," the creation of aesthetic worlds is replaced in her poetry by catalogs of observations, and a new relationship to metaphor is established. Where the earlier poems posit arbitrary and farfetched analogies as starting points, then work out their consequences, Bishop's metaphors in her subsequent work persuade us not so much to focus on unsuspected similarities but rather to measure skeptically degrees of likeness and difference. The late poem "Crusoe in England," for instance, implicitly urges the reader to attend to the metaphoricity of metaphor, to keep the literal firmly in mind along with the symbolic. Crusoe's snail shells merely resemble "beds of irises," so when he takes the figure for the fact—"I tried / reciting [poetry] to my iris-beds"—we're hardly surprised that the recital is a failure. In "Crusoe," metaphor may indeed become treacherous:
I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat.
[CP 165]
That a rhyming pair's similarity in sound points to an occult coincidence of meaning is a persistent myth or dream of poetry; here that dream becomes a nightmare as phonic similarity betrays the imagination. "Brazil, January 1, 1502" establishes an unsettling set of linkages between "our eyes" and those of the conquistadores, and between these invaders' vision of the New World and the "familiar" myths and assumptions they brought with them; the construction of similarity leads directly to a savage violence. In the bulk of Bishop's work, negative simile, notations of what a thing is not like, is an important tool of investigation, while positive expressions of likeness are frequently meant to direct our attention as much to difference as to similarity.
Bishop's work might be said, then, to exhibit to some extent the transition from a "closed" to a more "open" poetic that is the commonplace account of the progress of American poetry in the decades after the Second World War. At the same time Bishop, from the very beginning of her career, refrained from many of the strategies adopted by her more deliberately difficult and more self-consciously ambitious contemporaries. Her poems contain little learned allusion, rarely invoke historical events, and are little given to the violent wrenchings of syntax that were the stock in trade of poets like Berryman. Ekphrastic poems by her contemporaries confront well-known monuments of Western pictorial tradition; Bishop writes about the "Large Bad Picture" painted by a great-uncle. So, when Robert Lowell, in the late 1950s, was seeking new resources for opening out his poetic style, he learned from Bishop's more colloquial manner and more quotidian mode of observation. Rereading Bishop, Lowell remarks, "suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner," a manner that had come to seem to him "distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult" (Collected Prose 227). Bishop's way of being "strange and imponderable" rather than "difficult" proved to be a highly attractive mode of moving beyond New Critical prescriptions in both her own and subsequent generations. In the work of younger poets like Sandra McPherson, Brad Leithauser, and Alfred Corn, one finds an apparent modesty of voice and vision, along with a subdued verbal wit and a descriptive precision derived from Bishop's practice. For these poets, as for Lowell, Bishop's work offers the possibility of a poetry without rhetoric, without the inflations of Lowell's apocalyptic mode or the artificiality of neometaphysical modernism, at the same time that it remains true to an ideal of exacting craft.
The transition in Bishop's style, though, should not obscure an underlying consistency. Whether the scenes or narratives are imagined or observed, Bishop's poems work by straightforwardly presenting scenes or narratives whose significance the poet resolutely refuses to reveal. Bishop's reluctance to moralize or draw conclusions has drawn both praise and blame; what Ashbery particularly admires, A. Alvarez deplores: "Reading her poems is like listening to highly imaginative bed-time stories and hearing everything but the plot; it is touching, disquieting, but queerly inconclusive" (Alvarez 325). Certainly, Bishop's disinclination to moralize is one of the chief points of difference between Bishop's style and that of her mentor Marianne Moore, with its often pointed predications. The signature gestures of closure in Moore are the rhetorical question, the QED, and the epigram: "why dissect destiny" (52); "What is / there in being able / to say that one has dominated the stream" (39); "This then you may know / as the hero" (9); "if you demand ... you are interested in poetry" (267); "we prove, we do not explain our birth" (80); "Ecstasy affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form" (88). Bishop's closing questions, on the other hand, are often far more than rhetorical; her characteristic strategies of closure revolve around the image, taken in the sense of "an intellectual and emotional complex" (Pound, Selected Essays 4) and the posing of undecidable alternatives: "The Lent trees had shed all their petals: / wet, stuck, purple, among the deadeye pearls" (CP 100); "more blue than that: / like tatters of the Morpho butterfly" (CP 131); "It would be hard to say what brought them there, / commerce or contemplation" (CP 12); "The sun climbs in ... faithful as enemy, or friend" (CP 39).
In what follows I use a series of Bishop's poems to explore the ways in which a consistent strategy of reticence and withholding intersects with a changing use of tropes of similitude. While Bishop's reticence, her penchant for showing as against telling, and the apparently modest scale of her work have been the aspects of her achievement most influential on other poets, it seems to me that the complex strategies of similitude she employs are what gives her work the depths that recent critics have been concerned to explore, and on which they base their claims for ranking her as a major poet. Tracing the workings of similitude in Bishop's poetry reveals at once a poetic more complex, and more skeptical, than that of most of her heirs, or of other contemporary poets who, though less directly influenced by her, adopt similar stances of indirection and limitation. In the course of her early work Bishop seems to put aside her attraction to symbolist modes of representation, her attraction to an antimimetic poetry that aims at the creation of aesthetic worlds; as I've remarked with regard to "Brazil, January 1, 1502," her later work is not without its warnings regarding the dangers of this habit of thought. But beneath this transformation, the pull of what a critic like Harold Bloom might term the "heterocosmic" impulse remains strong in Bishop's work, and in tracing that force I think we will also uncover a deeply hidden but powerful attraction to apocalyptic modes of imagining. It's the hiding of that attraction to apocalyptic rhetoric, I propose, that generates much of both the difficulty and the power of Bishop's poetry.
"The Monument" is Bishop's closest approach to an ars poetica. The poem, from Bishop's first published volume, seems to put forward a poetic of impersonality, ambiguity, and organic form close to that of the then-reigning New Critical paradigms. As an ars poetica, "The Monument" bears a didactic burden, yet the poem turns out to be strangely uninstructive; many questions are asked in the poem's course, but they receive only oblique answers, if any. Indeed, the whole endeavor of the poem seems to be toward forms of knowing that entertain alternatives without needing to decide them. Cast in the form of a dialogue between a knowing instructor and a resistant pupil who is also a kind of Idiot Questioner, the poem seems to stake the claims of an aesthetic mode of apprehension against the scientific and ethical. The questioner asks a set of questions prompted by a scientific-historical and an ethical reason: "Where are we? ... What is that? ... what can it prove?" The instructor answers only by patiently continuing the process of observation, and to the reader it's apparent that the instructor's careful scrutiny yields a knowledge more significant than the questioner's irritable reaching.
The poem seems to begin at some point after the lesson has started; it appears that the first effect of the lesson will be to render its object visible: "Now can you see the monument?" The thirty lines of detailed description that follow function to create the object described, making it present to both the reader and the interlocutor of the poem (the voice that appears in quotation marks). The description begins in metaphor:
It is of wood
built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
Each is turned half-way round so that
its corners point toward the sides
of the one below and the angles alternate.
[CP 23]
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After the Death of Poetry by Vernon Shetley. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Abbreviations,
Introduction: Difficulty and the Postwar Poet,
Elizabeth Bishop's Silences,
Public and Private in James Merrill's Work,
John Ashbery's Difficulty,
The Return of the Repressed: Language Poetry and New Formalism,
Directions for Poetry,
Notes,
Introduction: Difficulty and the Postwar Poet,
Elizabeth Bishop's Silences,
Public and Private in James Merrill's Work,
John Ashbery's Difficulty,
The Return of the Repressed: Language Poetry and New Formalism,
Directions for Poetry,
Works Cited,
Index,