'Its Super-Ego Has Gone AWOL'

The American philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona in 1962. It was published that year as a twenty-three-page pamphlet titled “On Sanity in Thought and Art.” For much of the text Blanshard reviews various twentieth-century fashions in philosophy, including logical positivism and existentialism. The essay gets more interesting when he turns to the arts, especially poetry: 

“Now the trouble with contemporary poetry is that its super-ego has gone AWOL. This has left its practitioners without an ear, and therefore without much music in their souls. Many present-day poems, if printed continuously rather than in lines, would give the impression of being peculiarly cacophonous prose.”

 

A thoughtful reader nods his head in agreement. In 1962, confessional verse was thriving, as were such tribes as Beat, Deep Image, Black Mountain, et al. Free verse reigned and poetry was placed on life supports. Blanshard cites the work of the English poet John Betjeman, who has never successfully crossed the Atlantic. He is, Blanshard writes, “no great poet” but “he must have something that the public is hungry for,” at least in England. He continues:

 

“Robert Frost has written some things that sing; Masefield has written more; but these are survivors of an earlier day. The last poet I can think of whose work was uniformly the product of a fastidious ear was Housman himself, who died in 1936.”

 

The lament is familiar: recent decades have been a sad time for poetry and its readers. “Poetry, no more than art or theology,” Blanshard writes, “can surrender itself to meaninglessness without capitulating at the same time to charlatans.”

 

Naturally, I thought of Joseph Epstein’s much admired and hated essay, "Who Killed Poetry?", published in Commentary twenty-three years after Blanshard’s lecture. It concludes: “One gets a darting glint of it [Wallace Stevens’ ‘a pheasant disappearing in the brush’] every once in a while in the work of the better contemporary poets, but to pretend that that meaty and delectable bird freely walks the land isn’t going to get him out of hiding, not soon, and maybe not ever.” I thought of the usual suspects, including poetry workshops, diminished literacy and the erosion of tradition. Most poets are reflexively followers of the herd, and prosy free verse ranks among Orwell's “smelly little orthodoxies.”

 

Edward Short has published “Joseph Epstein, Yet Again,” a celebration of the essayist and critic in City Journal:

 

“Instead of joining his contemporaries in touting the fashionably vapid, Epstein has always remained true to the voices of the great writers whose books turned him into the discriminating reader we encounter so frequently in his literary criticism. It also enabled him to see the ruinous effect that the academy has had on the writing of poetry. In [‘Who Killed Poetry?’], he nailed what continues to make our contemporary poetry, with few exceptions, so unreadably bad.”

'Scrawls With a Lavish Hand Its Signature'

“Where the wind listeth, there the sailboats list, / Water is touched with a light case of hives / Or wandering gooseflesh.”

Carl George is the sort of scientist whose company I most enjoy. He is a generalist, what used to be called a naturalist. Now an emeritus professor of biology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., Carl started as an ichthyologist but left that specialty when he developed an allergy to formaldehyde and other chemicals used to preserve fish specimens. His new specialty became everything, especially birds. The first time I saw a pileated woodpecker was with Carl. The same day we saw a scarlet tanager.

 

Carl is no mushy-headed nature mystic. His science is rigorous but he’s driven by wonder. A walk in the woods with him was better than a lecture. When I was working as a newspaper reporter he was an ideal source for many of my stories. One question could lead to half a day’s walk. Thirty years ago we were on the north shore of the Mohawk River in Scotia, N.Y., watching an osprey slam into the water, disappear and emerge with a fish in its talons. Carl asked if I had noticed what was happening on the surface of the river. Away from shore it gently riffled – not waves but rows of subtle disturbance. Carl explained the phenomenon as Langmuir circulation, named for Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), a chemist who, while working for General Electric in Schenectady in 1932, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.”

 

While reading Anthony Hecht’s poem “Riddles” in The Transparent Man (1990), I realized the opening lines quoted at the top could refer to Langmuir circulation, which  Hecht may never have heard of. Subsequent lines in the five-stanza poem seem to confirm it: “Scrawls with a lavish hand its signature / of ripples gathered into folds and pleats . . .” and “The surface wrinkles in spirit-shapes that sprint / Like small rapids or frightened schools of fish . . .” I’m not talking about influence. The allusions in Hecht’s richly learned poems are drawn from literature and history, not science. But Hecht, like George, was an intent observer, and it’s irrelevant if he understood the physics of water.

 

In his 1999 book-length interview with Philip Hoy, Hecht reflects on the mystery of writing poetry:

 

“One of the great satisfactions of writing poetry consists in the absolute and indispensable conviction, while one is writing, that one is working at one’s very best. To think otherwise is deeply discouraging, and virtually intolerable. But to feel one is working at one’s best is to call into question the fact that one felt this way about each and every poem one had written in the past, not all of them still regarded with pride or satisfaction, and some of them, alas, now disappointing if not humiliating. This does not bear much dwelling upon.”

 

 Hecht died twenty years ago today, on October 20, 2004 at age eighty-one.

'Weightier Than All the Gear I’ll Carry'

I was a lazy student of Latin in junior high school and gave it up after two years. What I retained was a lasting interest in mythology, Roman history and etymology. I probably learned more English words than Latin – celerity, pulchritude, jocular, spelunker, procrastination, sartorial – all of these and more I owe to my teacher, Miss Chambers. 

History and etymology converged in a Latin word that retains its spelling in English: impedimenta. In second-year Latin we translated passages from Commentarii de Bello Gallico – Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, which famously begins “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . .”  That’s where I first encountered impedimenta, which the OED defines as “things which impede or encumber progress; baggage; travelling equipment (of an army, etc.).” In the Gallic War, it referred to the armor, weapons, tools and other supplies that accompanied the Roman troops. The connection with the English word impediment is obvious. It's a hindrance or obstruction.

 

Much about the military remains unchanged after millennia. R.L. Barth in 1968-69 was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. In “Preparing to Patrol,” Bob catalogs the impedimenta he carried:

 

“Before tomorrow’s briefing and insertion,

Tonight I check the gear that I’ll be humping:

Clean M-16 (I hope I’ll never need),

Eighteen or twenty magazines, grenades

(Frags, Willie Peter, smokes,), flares, bayonet,

Block of C-4 explosive, blasting cap,

Compass, watch, field dressing, sleeping bag

(Nights in the mountains can be wicked cold),

Four canteens, strobe light, extra camo stick

Of grease paint (sweat and monsoons both demand it),

Four days of long rats (only fools lug C-s),

Two pencils, notebook, handful of salt tabs,

And, weightier than all the gear I’ll carry,

The lives of the nine men that I’ll be leading.”

 

Bob explains the poem’s origin: “The other day, someone or other posted some Vietnam War photos, and Susan and I got to talking. I'm not sure she really wanted to know, but she asked what I carried on patrol. We talked about the subject for a bit, and then I decided I would write what I consider a documentary poem, cataloguing what I carried. Having written the first draft, it occurred to me that maybe a pure catalogue required something to redeem it as a poem, hence the opening and concluding lines.”

'Weightier Than All the Gear I’ll Carry'

I was a lazy student of Latin in junior high school and gave it up after two years. What I retained was a lasting interest in mythology, Roman history and etymology. I probably learned more English words than Latin – celerity, pulchritude, jocular, spelunker, procrastination, sartorial – all of these and more I owe to my teacher, Miss Chambers. 

History and etymology converged in a Latin word that retains its spelling in English: impedimenta. In second-year Latin we translated excerpts from Commentarii de Bello Gallico – Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, which famously begins “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . .”  That’s where I first encountered impedimenta, which the OED defines as “things which impede or encumber progress; baggage; travelling equipment (of an army, etc.).” In the context of the Gallic War, it referred to the armor, weapons, tools and other supplies that accompanied the Roman troops. The origin of the English word impediment is obvious. It refers to a hindrance, obstruction or burden.

 

Much about the military remains unchanged after millennia. R.L. Barth in 1968-69 was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. In “Preparing to Patrol,” Bob catalogs the impedimenta he carried:

 

“Before tomorrow’s briefing and insertion,

Tonight I check the gear that I’ll be humping:

Clean M-16 (I hope I’ll never need),

Eighteen or twenty magazines, grenades

(Frags, Willie Peter, smokes,), flares, bayonet,

Block of C-4 explosive, blasting cap,

Compass, watch, field dressing, sleeping bag

(Nights in the mountains can be wicked cold),

Four canteens, strobe light, extra camo stick

Of grease paint (sweat and monsoons both demand it),

Four days of long rats (only fools lug C-s),

Two pencils, notebook, handful of salt tabs,

And, weightier than all the gear I’ll carry,

The lives of the nine men that I’ll be leading.”

 

Bob explains the poem’s origin: “The other day, someone or other posted some Vietnam War photos, and Susan and I got to talking. I'm not sure she really wanted to know, but she asked what I carried on patrol. We talked about the subject for a bit, and then I decided I would write what I consider a documentary poem, cataloguing what I carried. Having written the first draft, it occurred to me that maybe a pure catalogue required something to redeem it as a poem, hence the opening and concluding lines.”

'The Top Thing of the World'

 John Keats’ meditation on a reader’s paradise: 

“I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it and reflect from it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the ‘two-and-thirty Palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious, diligent indolence!”

 

Keats is writing a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds on February 19, 1818. His spirits are high. Never theory-minded, here he proposes a bona fide theory of reading, one uncluttered and pleasure-driven. Slow down. Savor. No “multitasking.” Minimize distractions, internal and otherwise. For real reading, that is, not junk or obligatory texts. His letters often double as compact anthologies of literary snippets. In this one he cites passages from Pliny, Swift, Wordsworth and two of Shakespeare’s plays. Keats’ genius for poetry and prose is baffling, an affront to journeyman writers, especially coming from a man who would die at age twenty-five. If I were compelled to choose between the letters and the poems, I would defy the conventional choice and stick with the letters. He is one of those writers from past centuries – Swift is another -- from whom we can learn how to write,

 

Logan Pearsall Smith used the Keats passage above as the epigraph to A Treasury of English Prose (1920). Smith’s selection runs from Chaucer and The Book of Common Prayer to H.G. Wells and George Santayana. He is particularly fond of the seventeenth century, which remains unequaled in the history of English prose – the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Burton, Browne, Hobbes, Walton, Milton, Taylor, Traherne and the rest. Five Americans are included – Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James and Woodrow Wilson [!].  Smith’s friend Desmond McCarthy reminds us of “what he had preached incessantly, that style is the sole preservative.” A young writer could learn much about prose style from Smith’s choices. In Fine Writing (1936), Smith suggests irony is the saving grace of fine writing, not purple prose:

 

“. . . I should be inclined to say that an ironic way of writing is the one to which Prose is peculiarly adapted. I could instance among the ancients the irony of Plato, of Tacitus, and Lucian, and among the moderns the irony of Hamlet and of Falstaff, of Pascal, of Burton, Sterne, and Fielding, of Voltaire, of Swift, and of Gibbon, who was perhaps a greater artist than he knew.”

 

Smith isn’t talking about today’s cheapened, reflexive sense of irony, the lingua franca of undergraduates and second-rate comedians. Naturally, he choose more samples of Keats’ prose from the letters for inclusion in his anthology, including another addressed to Reynolds, on August 25, 1819:

 

“I am convinced more and more, every day, that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing of the world; the Paradise Lost becomes a greater wonder. The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy. . . . My own being which I know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home.”

 

[Logan Pearsall Smith was born on this date, October 18, in 1865, and died in 1946 at age eighty.]

'One I Loved Taught Here, Provoking Strife'

When Yvor Winters retired from the Stanford English Department in 1966 after almost forty years, the university published a commemorative volume, Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems. It gathers twenty-six poems written by former students, including Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis (Winters’ wife, not a student), Thom Gunn, Turner Cassity and Helen Pinkerton. 

Helen died in 2017. Her daughter, Erica Light, gave me a copy of Laurel, Archaic, Rude, one of three-hundred published. No editor is named but Erica tells me the book was largely the project of her mother. A brief “Dedication” at the front says of the poets whose work is included:

 

“Some of them came to Stanford with styles already formed and a history of publication; some came with only an obscure need to write, which [Winters] encouraged and criticized. Neither intellectual fashion, nor personality cult, nor publicity value has deterred his teaching from its only aim – the production of good poems from those writers in whom the potentiality lies. To discover the potentiality, to encourage the effort, and to judge the result are gifts of his, among others he possesses.”

 

The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of human gifts. Perhaps only exceptional ability in music and mathematics are rarer. I’ve said it before but the Library of America is long overdue to publish a volume devoted to the Stanford School. No other group in American literary history has possessed so many gifted writers who are so waywardly heterogenous. No one would confuse Cassity’s work with Pinkerton’s. The collection’s title is taken from Winters’ “On Teaching the Young”:

 

“The young are quick of speech.

Grown middle-aged, I teach

Corrosion and distrust,

Exacting what I must.

 

“A poem is what stands

When imperceptive hands,

Feeling, have gone astray.

It is what one should say.

 

“Few minds will come to this.

The poet’s only bliss

Is in cold certitude—

Laurel, archaic, rude.”

 

Winters’ understanding of teaching, and writing poetry and criticism couldn’t be less in fashion. Laurel implies triumph or distinction – notions today denigrated as elitist, as though the best poems were anything other than a triumph of distinction over mediocrity. Helen echoes her former teacher in “Autumn Drought” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002). The dedication reads “In memory of Yvor Winters—Stanford University 1976”:

 

“November brings no rain. Brown stubble blackens.

Torn paper litter, wind-blown with the leaves,

Piles up against dead stems. As traffic slackens,

Nightfall brings fear, and always now one grieves.

 

“Where I once listened, lonely as these young,

But with some hope beyond what I could see

That meaning might be mastered by my tongue,

Anonymous process now claims them and me.

 

“Perhaps the enterprise of mind is vain;

Where hucksters sell opinions, knowledge fails,

Wit pandering to the market, for gross gain,

Corrupted words, false morals, falser tales.

 

“Though one I loved taught here, provoking strife,

By speaking truth about the human word,

And died—as few men do—ready for life,

I, teaching in his absence, seem absurd,

 

“Seem almost unremembering, unawake.

And should his poems live—some consolation

To those who knew him and to those who take

His measure by their worth—their celebration

 

“Will not be here, not where the idle gaze,

Touristic, slides past phoenix palms to stare

Where Mount Diablo dominates through haze

The ever-diminishing waters and the glare.”

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 at age sixty-seven.

'Who Needs Your Stories?'

Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading, ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with the remainder of the work. It happens to me not often enough. The passage stands as a discrete creation, sufficient unto itself, aphorism-like, even out of context. You’ve sifted from the surrounding text a nugget you commit to memory and wish to share with others. Consider this, by Dana Gioia: 

“One purpose of literature is to register the complexity of our response to people, ideas, and events.”

 

Dana has sent me a copy of his latest book, Poetry As Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2024). It includes “Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford,” a profile of the English poet and critic befriended by Dana. “My intention,” he writes, “is to portray him accurately. He would have flinched at a sentimental or platitudinous memoir. ‘Speak of me as I am,’ he would have said, ‘Nothing extenuate,’” followed by the excerpt transcribed above.

 

The writer I thought of immediately was Anton Chekhov, who was nagged in his day by critics, editors and common readers for not writing ideological tracts. He was accused of being morally irresponsible. In his well-known letter to Aleksey Pleshcheyev on Oct. 4, 1888, Chekhov writes:

 

“The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

 

Further evidence of Chekhov’s  anti-ideological bent is supplied by the Russian painter Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), who wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in 1973 (trans. Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972 (1977), edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (twenty-three and studying for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The exchange could have been recorded this morning on an American college campus:

 

“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.

 

“’If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, ‘you can’t be a writer.’

 

“No one can say, ‘I have no convictions,’ said another. ‘I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.’

 

“’I have no convictions,’ replied Chekhov.

 

“‘You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’

 

“‘I have no ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.

 

“These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.

 

“‘Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’

 

“‘Nothing else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”

 

Karlinsky’s introduction to Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973) and his comments throughout are the best place to start learning about Chekhov’s resistance to ideology and politics generally.

 

The essential word in Dana’s sentence quoted above is “complexity.” Ideologues and other busybodies aren’t interested in complexity. Their understanding of the world is quite simple, thank you.

'Personal Affections'

Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most snobberies, it seems arbitrary and silly. 

Much of my education started with the poetry anthologies edited by Oscar Williams (1899-1964). With a few exceptions – Shakespeare, Whitman, Kipling, et al. -- that’s where I first encountered the English-language poets, major and minor. I specifically remember reading Karl Shapiro’s “Scyros” in one of Williams’ collections while standing in James Books on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. I bought the Washington Square Press paperback.    

 

Good anthologies are literary smorgasbords, an opportunity to sample many writers and develop taste. How else is a young reader to make up his mind, learn the tradition and sharpen his critical judgments?  He’ll encounter plenty of dreck, of course, but that’s inevitable. Bad poetry helps us identify and appreciate the good stuff.

 

T.S. Eliot devoted much of “What Is Minor Poetry?”, published in The Sewanee Review in 1946, to the subject of anthologies. The essay is collected in Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 in the eight-volume Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (2021). I’ve been reacquainting myself with Eliot’s work, poetry and prose. He was an early and influential favorite, and is more than merely “democratic” when it comes to anthologies. He is clever and insightful and perhaps remembers his own early experience with them:

 

“The value of anthologies in introducing us to the work of the greatest poets, is soon over; and we do not go on reading anthologies for the selections from these poets, though they have to be there. The anthology also helps us to find out, whether there are not some lesser poets of whose work we should like to know more—poets who do not figure so conspicuously in any history of literature, who may not have influenced the course of literature, poets whose work is not necessary for any abstract scheme of literary education, but who may have a strong personal appeal to certain readers.”

 

The subsequent passage sounds deeply personal: “Indeed, I should be inclined to doubt the genuineness of the love of poetry of any reader who did not have one or more of these personal affections for the work of some poet of no great historical importance: I should suspect that the person who only liked the poets whom the history books agree to be the most important, was probably no more than a conscientious student, bringing very little of himself to his appreciations.”

 

I find Eliot’s sentiments here rather touching, and they come close to describing the evolution of a lifelong devotion to literature. I’m tempted to name some of the “minor” poets whom I often read again, though I’m afraid that might come off as condescending.