'Humbling His Pride By Trying to Write Well'

Out of the blue a reader asks for “the best poem ever written by Edgar Bowers.” He has never read Bowers but noted my love of his work. Yvor Winters, Bowers’ teacher at Stanford, insisted we read poems not poets, as few poets are on every occasion worth reading, though Bowers comes close. His Collected Poems (1997) brings together four earlier collections and twenty-four new poems and is 168 pages long. Asking another to select the “best” makes my reader sound dilettantish and lazy but I’m naïve enough to think Bowers may charm him into further exploring the work. 

Bowers’ early poems are written in the “plain style” practiced by such seventeenth-century English poets as Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville, and championed by Winters. They are terse and padding-free. Even so intelligent and shrewd a reader as the late Helen Pinkerton once confessed to me she still found the work in his first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), difficult. But she never stopped reading.

 

Some readers will find him off-puttingly cool and rational. They’ll hear no howls or barbaric yawps. Not that Bowers is emotionless. The passion is contained, modulated and held in its proper place by form. Try “Autumn Shade” from his second collection, The Astronomers (1965). A memory of his Army service in Europe during and after World War II shows up in the sixth stanza:

 

“Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car

Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember

Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps;

Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds

Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead,

A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York.

The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old.

Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance,

In danger, to be mastered by a task,

Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed?”

 

Bowers’ later work relaxed. He mastered blank verse and became nearly conversational. I don’t know about “best” but perhaps my favorite Bowers poem is the title poem in For Louis Pasteur (1990). More memories of war as well as teaching. I always find moving the final section, in which he names the heroes whose birthdays he observes every year:

 

“I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium

Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence

Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,

Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,

Teaching his daughter to use a microscope

And musing through a wonder—sacred passion,

Practice and metaphysic all the same.

And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,

Humbling his pride by trying to write well,

Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention

Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,

And him whose mark I witness as a trust.

Others he saves but could not save himself—

Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit

Fastened by love upon the human cross.”

 

Perhaps I’m underestimating my reader. He may be ready for poetry unlike any being written today. See if you and he can find Russell Fraser’s memoir of Bowers, “His Little Book and All the Rest,” published in the January 2008 issue of The Yale Review. He recalls his early encounters with Bowers’ work: “When I read Bowers first, I missed the far-winding horns. Verbal music is not beyond him, only written in a minor key, but he was not the Romantic poet a young man’s ear is  tuned for.”

 

And this, tersely expressing the way some of us read: “All our criticism, if any good, comes partly from the viscera. Some sickle it over with a cast of dispassionate thought; not Edgar . . .”