'Finder of Refuge, Maker of Refuge, in Words'

Since first writing about it, I’ve had time to browse further in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004), the anthology/textbook edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason and Meg Schoerke. Anthologies are published to be argued with. That’s their purpose and value. The editors admit as much in their preface: “Anthologists begin with the hope of making a clear, cogent and inclusive canon of poetry, but end in despair at all the excellent work they must exclude.” 

An attentive reader, one who cares about poetry, will always be pleased and, inevitably, disappointed with any anthology. The undeserving are collected, the worthy neglected. I’ll ignore the former and point out that some of our best poets are left out of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Edgar Bowers, Henri Coulette, L.E. Sissman, Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton, Vladimir Nabokov, Dick Davis, R.L. Barth, Eric Ormsby, Janet Lewis and Herbert Morris. And I acknowledge that I’m probably leaving out other good poets.

 

The last name on that list is especially troublesome because I can’t think of another American poet whose reputation so disproportionately misrepresents his accomplishment. Twenty years after his death, Morris has been erased from readerly and critical memory, his four major collections forgotten.

 

The Poetry Foundation keeps a generous selection of his poems available online. Last year I was marginally involved in having a collected edition of Morris’ work published, but because of recalcitrance by surviving family members, it came to nothing. Morris wrote masterful blank verse, usually in dramatic monologues. His poems are densely woven and difficult to intelligibly quote in brief passages. If I have to choose a favorite among his poems, I might select “House of Words” (What Was Lost, 1999), in which an aging Henry James delivers a nineteen-page, 657-line monologue:

 

“I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge,

in words. Whose life, indeed, was spun of words,

spun and respun, spun once more, then respun,

a life which has itself become a refuge

(words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side,

by the tumult of passion on the other);

the thinness, yes, the thinness of one’s life:

what has one built if not a house of words?”