`Uncertain Clarity'

William Carlos Williams, whose sentimentality always triggers a wince of embarrassment, was deep in the schmaltz when late in life he wrote these lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

No one in human history has died from such a lack. In fact, some poems are almost certain to make you sick. These unhappy truths gall the neo-Shelleyans who want a piece of the political action. Williams’ empty bromide sounds like the wishful thinking of the desperately insecure. Of course poetry has utility but it is, well, poetic, not world-historical. Zbigniew Herbert told an interviewer, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”

Ironically, if ever there was a poet who challenged Auden’s dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen,” is was Herbert. Almost uniquely among Polish writers of his generation, he never joined the Communist Party nor did he make moral accommodations with it, unlike the late and lately outed Ryszard Kapuściński. We shouldn’t be hasty to condemn Kapuściński, who remains a great journalist, especially in The Emperor. Who among us could have remained pure in the pressurized atmosphere of the Soviet Bloc? That Herbert was immune despite censorship and illness, and became a moral authority for dissidents while maintaining forbiddingly high artistic standards is miraculous. In “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination,” Herbert endorses an exacting prescription for poetry:

“Mr. Cogito’s imagination
has the motion of a pendulum

“it crosses with precision
from suffering to suffering

“there is no place in it
for the artificial fires of poetry

“he would like to remain faithful
to uncertain clarity”

We might be tempted to attribute Williams’ naiveté and sentimentality, and Herbert’s stoicism and sophistication to the traditional American/European divide, but that too is naïve. Not all American poets are soft-headed and puffed-up. Consider J.V. Cunningham, who with Edgar Bowers is the least known and most revered of our great poets. Cunningham’s austerity resembles Herbert’s. Both often wrote about themselves in the third-person; in part, I suppose, as a means of buffering the temptation to self-centeredness all of us share. In “The Journal of John Cardan,” Cunningham wrote that “a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

In the same essay, making no claims for the redemptive powers of poetry, Cunningham strictly spells out the boundaries of poetic accomplishment:

“No one will deny, what is overwhelmingly obvious, the immediacy and absoluteness
in itself of one's primary experience. But this is by definition self-sealed, isolated, and incommunicable. . . . To speak or to think or to write is to go beyond this. . . . For to write is to confront one's primary experience with the externally objective: first, with the facts of experience and with the norms of possibility and probability of experience; secondly, with the objective commonality of language and literary forms. To be successful in this enterprise is to integrate the subjectively primary, the immediate, with the objectively
communicable, the mediate, to the alteration of both by their conformation to each other, by their connexity with and their immanence in each other. It is the conquest of solipsism, the dramatic conflict of self with, on the one hand, reality in all its objectivity and potentiality, and, on the other, with philology in its old and general sense: or, with private and with public history.”