'Poets Survive in Fame'

“The history of a literary group that advocates no political program, and that has developed almost entirely outside New York or the Continent, has significance beyond the merits of the individual writers. It suggests interesting possibilities from such native groups, held together by a common interest in their craft, and committed neither to the furtherance of class struggle nor to an aggressive regionalism.” 

The author of this declaration was twenty-one years old and writing at the nadir of the Great Depression. Like a million other Americans, he rode the rails and picked up work where he could find it. He witnessed two suicides in the days following the 1929 stock-market crash. Born in Maryland, he grew up in Montana and Colorado, and always thought of himself as a Westerner. J.V. Cunningham (1911-85) was already a wayward soul. What he is describing above, in embryonic form, later became known as the “Stanford School” of poets.

 

Cunningham published “The ‘Gyroscope’ Group” in the November 1932 issue of The Bookman. “Gyroscope” was the name of the mimeographed literary magazine edited by Yvor Winters (1900-68) in Palo Alto. He published four issues in 1929-30. At the time, Winters was moving away from Imagistic free verse and beginning to work in traditional meter and rhyme. Cunningham, who had been summoned in 1931 to Stanford by Winters and would earn his B.A. there in 1934, concentrates on Winters, his wife Janet Lewis (1899-1998) and Howard Baker (1905-90). Cunningham refers to the trio as “a craft group, committed to no political program, and thus without community of subject-matter.”

 

Lewis had just published the first of her five novels, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s (1932). Set in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., it tells the story of the Johnston family beginning in the eighteenth century. Born in Ireland, John Johnston is a fur trader who marries an Ojibway woman who becomes the novel’s central character. I find the story too often bogged down in undigested history. It reads for pages at a stretch like a documentary. Cunningham says it is “perhaps the best example we have of the regional chronicle.” He must not have read Willa Cather. Lewis’ finest novel is The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) but all are worth reading: Against a Darkening Sky (1943), The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947) and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). 

 

Cunningham considers Howard Baker’s first novel, Orange Valley (1931), which I haven’t read. He writes: “The theme is the most serious available to any writer—the effort to continue a moral attitude in a world that no longer credits it.” Baker’s reputation has faded. I’ve read a scattering of his poems, including the sonnet “Dr. Johnson” in Ode to the Sea and Other Poems (Alan Swallow, 1966):

 

“With what imperious ‘Sir!’ he devastated

Coherences relieved of miracles,

I do not know; nor how he demonstrated

That cornered doubters wore the stripe of trulls.

But that after all the hue and cry is done,

Though his the victory who defends the name

Of the Immortal Soul, what has he won?

Death not more lightly shakes the mortal frame.

 

“Like him we stand, watching a smoky sky.

The eye loosens, blurring with darkness, haunted

By memory of faces; syllables die

Along the draft, and the heaving blood is daunted

In a blue chill on flesh. No other terms,

We are all Boswells harkening the worms.”

 

Cunningham and Winters were an uneasy pair. In his 1961 monograph devoted to his one-time colleague (Cunningham would have hated “protégé”), Winters described him, rightly, as “the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English today, and one of the finest in the language.” Cunningham, in turn, came to resent what he saw as Winters’ attempts to dominate and patronize him. Though both worked in the “plain style,” no one would mistake one’s work for the other’s. Describing Winters’ anti-romantic sensibility, Cunningham writes self-revealingly:

 

“More clearly than the others, he displays in his five books of verse their common tendency away from romantic excess and its preoccupation with the fringes of consciousness, not by ignoring romanticism, which is practically impossible for a poet without a settled background, but by subjecting its materials to classical form. If a writer begins with experience, which is essentially formless, strict form will prove to be a straitjacket. True classicism begins with a form and then selects from the only available material, one's private experience, whatever is pertinent to the realization of the abstract form in concrete poetic terms.”

 

Wiseblood Books recently republished J.V. Cunningham’s The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams (1960) and next year will return to print one of my favorite books, The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham (1976). Guy Davenport wrote that Cunningham’s poems “are as well made as wristwatches.” Here is an early one, “Lector Aere Perennior,” written at Stanford in 1933:

 

“Poets survive in fame.

But how can substance trade

The body for a name

Wherewith no soul’s arrayed?

 

“No form inspires the clay

Now breathless of what was

Save the imputed sway

Of some Pythagoras,

 

“So man so deftly mad

His metamorphosed shade,

Leaving the flesh it had,

Breathes on the words they made.”

 

Timothy Steele in the edition he edited, The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), tells us the title, borrowed from Horace and revised, means “The Reader More Enduring Than Bronze.”