'On Fitting Language to His Thought'

J.V. Cunningham died on March 30, 1985 at age seventy-three. A few years earlier, Guy Davenport had written that Cunningham’s poems were “as well made as wristwatches,” though unsympathetic critics, always interested in sounding fashionably up-to-date, characterized them as anachronistic. C.H. Sisson once wrote in an autobiographical essay that “for about a year (circa 1932) I must have been contemporary.” Something comparable might be said about Cunningham, though the date in question might has been 1620 or 1820. As a poet, Cunningham was contemporaneous with Ben Jonson and Walter Savage Landor, and absolutely modern.

In its Autumn 1985 issue, the Chicago Review published “A Tribute to J.V. Cunningham,” with contributions from six poets. All are worth reading, which means having access to Jstor or a university library. Here are excerpts from each.

Robert Pinsky, “The Poetry of J.V. Cunningham”: “Because they are funny, immediately accessible, and patently masterful in execution, the epigrams that fall into this category -- incisive, witty, judicatory -- seem effective ways to introduce people who are not yet Cunningham-addicts to his work. I have often quoted them to friends for that purpose; but having done that, one worries that the new reader, whether through wavering attention or prejudice, may think that Cunningham is merely a funny man, the author of a kind of light verse [hardly the severest criticism imaginable].”

W.S. Di Piero, “Four Notions”: “It’s difficult to sound generous when describing Cunningham’s poetic gifts. A plain style. A puritan discipline for worrying the consequences of pleasure. A Roman Catholic terror of (and attraction for) the Absolute. Brevity. An austere speech whose power lies in impassioned denials. Definition by exclusion. Brevity. A belief that practice proceeds from definition, so that no definition, no outline of figure, gets redrawn or revised in the process of composition.”

Thom Gunn, “J.V.C.”:

“He concentrated, as he ought,

On fitting language to his thought

And getting all the rhymes correct,

Thus exercising intellect

In such a space, in such a fashion,

He concentrated into passion.”

Raymond Oliver, “Epigrams on Mortality” (“in homage to J. V. Cunningham”):

“1. From Youth to Age”

“We stay the same,

Yet not - as an arc,

Cast from a main

Of water, starts

Compact and small,

Then peaks, then down

Scattering falls

Unshaped to the ground.”

“2. To JVC”

“You saw me last ‘too long ago,’ you wrote;

‘Perhaps we'll meet again.’ We didn’t. Now

You are a text to read, its final note

Resonant in my mind. Death won--but how?

You’d caught him in your lines. But he, inane,

Deaf to your words--the beautiful, the true

Will not confront the mind, only the brain.

Death was no worthy adversary for you.”

Alan Shapiro, “The Early Seventies and J.V. Cunningham”: “After an interminable silence in which I contemplated some alternative career, Cunningham held my poem up and said in that low, almost whispering voice of his, ‘This is nothing more than spilled ink,’ and proceeded to the next poem.”

Kenneth Fields, “Barbed Wire: A Tribute to J.V. Cunningham”: “A modern, a man of his own time and experience who insists on the novelty of his own statements, Cunningham himself has best characterized his independent classicism: ‘The only new poetic style since 1930 has been, for good or ill, my own.”

I still hope the Library of America gets serious and finally publishes a volume devoted to the Stanford School of Poets – Yvor Winters, Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis, Helen Pinkerton and the others.