The Introverted Poem, Blog 2: Frost, Wilbur, and Pound

Having throughout my high school and college years navigated, as a result of my mother’s early death, the “perilous seas of faerie lands forlorn,” and having grown eventually less paralyzed by loss, I became not only a devotee of the poetic muse but a practitioner betimes of the very mode. Eventually, by way of acceding to adulthood and functionality, I became a teacher of literature and writing.

I don’t know that my commitment to writing and teaching took me down a road less travelled. I didn’t become a monk about it or anything. But the yellow wood through which this road took me in college and at university consisted of any number of seminar rooms, library stacks, departmental offices and research centers, in which I was imbued with the rigors and thought-protocols of theory and critical exegesis. Academic discipline strove as best it could toward the certainty of something like empirical exactness, without any mucking about in the subjectivity of grief or imagination. During these years, the hardest thing for me to understand, both cognitively and emotionally, was that the world was not there to answer to my needs. Study was not an exercise in personal growth, and poetry was an object, as Cleanth Brooks would have it, to be analyzed rather than appreciated or felt. Poetry was to be broken down, seen for what it was as a linguistic construct.  Even writing poetry could be both studied and learned. Creativity was not necessarily a free and imaginative state. It had its laws and rules, its guidelines let’s say. These were reiterated and enforced in workshops and tutorials by what might be thought of as “certified” writers whose own work might be taken as analogous to professorial publications, peer-critiqued, award-winning, deemed valid, sound, qualifying.

As a teacher, too, I was functionalized in a systems sense by all sorts of professional enrichment designed to ensure that I would never teach the way the good nuns did. In certain respects, this was easy enough. I was disinclined to violence or psychological abuse in the enforcement of classroom discipline. I found that telling a joke here or there, or floating an outrageous lie then retracting it, could be quite effective in resetting classroom focus. As for methodology I quite embraced the requirement to understand students in a developmental sense, to observe clear boundaries between my experience of the material and theirs, to design lessons according to articulated goals, execute those lessons, measure the results against the goals, re-design and re-execute. All this as I gladly understood was by way of attaining to a standardized approach, minimizing the role of chance or, perhaps more accurately, spontaneity, in what was conceived of as an objectively measurable process that involved as per my students something called ‘cognitive development.’

In the areas of scholarship and pedagogy I remained at least functional—professional, we called it—for a good forty years. Writing, though, was a different matter. That may have been due in large part to the fact that no one required it of me. After I completed an MFA program, I was back on my own in the good ole U.S. of A., where art, whatever that was, was generally thought of in a performance context as embodied, say, in the halftime show at the Superbowl. Unperplexed by any possibility of approval, except in the form of getting published in a mag now and then, I began following my nose wherever it was inclined to go, which after I read Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems was in the direction of formal poetry.

This amounted to a break with past practice, a reversal even. Having come of age in the seventies I was all about experimentation, breaking the rules, getting down to something called reality. My sense of poem as rebellion against tradition was a function of modernism and it had to do with the harshness of industrialism, the dysfunctionality or abusive nature of authority structures, and above all self-revelation, either in a psychological or a political sense.

All this was resonant of Pound’s observation in defense of imagism that meter and rhyme were easy enough to craft but were inadequate to capturing emotions in the industrial age. The modern world, Pound implied, resisted the metronome as well as the predictable “noise” of schematic rhyming. He promoted the music not so much of formal song as of everyday speech under the pressure of direct, momentary emotion. Given his dislike for the excesses of late nineteenth century romanticism—about which more later—Pound was immune to the notion that maybe, just maybe, the potential for an emotional life at all in a world dominated by industrial and later commodity capitalism was itself, well, questionable. Emotions, such as they were, were engineered to accrue as much as possible around commodities or around the efficiencies of production, so they were transient, scattered, disconnected. The solitary self, alone, alienated, cut off from stable community life, encouraged to reinvent itself on a regular basis, tended frequently enough to disengage from emotions it was conscious of and re-engage with different emotions as a matter of survival. Or abandon emotions altogether. Be that as may be, Pound more or less embraced the twentieth century world as what there was, and therefore as what poetry in any case needed to adapt itself to without any hearkening back to pre-industrial values. Thus vers libre—or else Eliot’s bequeathal, free verse. Thus: chopped lines happening on observations that were juxtaposed rather than related, the sealed-in and solipsistic other-unawareness of free association, an almost radical terseness of expression.

Reading Wilbur, quite simply, cancelled all this out for me. The formal beauty of Wilbur’s poems, the hearkening after something very like the sublime, the sense of the permanent rather than the transitive nature of the image--all this evoked a response from me that boiled down to one question: Why spend my life writing anything other than this sort of thing? This was beauty, I felt, in the permanent, even the transcendent, sense. It wasn’t ugly as industrial capitalism was, or faux in the way of commodity capitalism, or alienated, or alienating. It was a little stubborn, but rightly so in that it consistently refused to do what Pound seemed to feel poetry should be up to by way of crafting, as it were, non-beauty, non-mystery, and as inhabited by something primal, a force that could be felt but was hardly inspiring in the sense that older agriculturally based cultures thought the natural world was in the context of humanity’s relationship with it.

Beauty’s stubbornness occasioned a degree of pushback from the champions of beat-ism, confessionalism, language-ism and the rest. Their consensus was that it was reactionary to believe in beauty in an unrelentingly ugly world, to embrace imaginative freedom when Herr Weber’s iron cage had fully descended. This consensus amounts, in my opinion, to the argument that one must fight ugliness with ugliness, hold the mirror up to Caliban, as it were, or despise him as per Prospero, instead of exposing him on a regular basis to Miranda’s mildness and truth. Since the world had abandoned poetry, the logic seemed to go, poetry should abandon itself. Poetry should let go the very possibility of there being something along the lines of a human soul, something that inhabited us, was of us, and was opposed to the logic that purposed us merely as systems components. The bitter reasoning whereby commentators throughout the modern era have pronounced poetry dead is a species of this logic, a denial, that is, of the correlative and much more painful truth that civilization itself is perhaps dead and, what’s worse, by its own hand. I came to feel that as long as Wilbur’s poetry existed one need not relinquish hope. Civilization might be dying but it wasn’t necessarily dead. Poetry, real poetry, could be a kind of life support.

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This had something to do in my mind with the subversive nature of metaphor especially with regard to its relationship to the ideal as a construct of imagination and memory. The age of progress only values memory and the past as ideological reference points. Look how far we’ve come, we like to say. We sure are more complex and systematic in our thinking and planning than we used to be. Imagination, too, is useless, childish almost, self-indulgent except as reconfigured in our minds as an always-collaborative “thinking outside the box” (within corporate parameters, of course). To cultivate either—memory or imagination—to cultivate both, even—undermines the very myth of progress, amounting to a kind of stepping outside the system to consider, implicitly or explicitly, everything the system is not and has never been. From a systems standpoint, such mental peradventurings are inefficient, dysfunctional even. They can lead to very dangerous (for the system) notions as to how much more humans are than widgets and how little need humans really have for the material outputs of commodity capitalism. Beauty as imagined through the workings of metaphor threatens commodity logic by virtue of its having almost no material basis. As a remembered construct it defies the very notion of progress.

Wilbur took Frost as his mentor, so I have quite naturally been led back to Frost’s poetry over the years,  not this time as a repository for my own or Sister Michael’s grief, but as an example of what poetry could have amounted to in the modern era. Amounted to, that is, had poets stuck to their guns and taken their inspiration more from an agrarian world than an industrial one, more from Frost’s admittedly spurious projection of himself as a New England farmer than from Pound’s and Eliot’s urban based revolutions in content and form.  The distinction was enhanced by what I came to learn of Frost’s positioning of himself vis-à-vis modernism and the extent to which this positioning derived from his own embrace of metaphor as both the primary way of knowing and the essential component of lyric poetry. I also came to understand just how well and how subversively Sister Michael Geraldine had understood what it meant to look into those woods as a construct of both memory and imagination—and, more importantly, as a metaphor for something in the human soul.