And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
“Anecdote of the Jar”
The prestige Stevens (for extra credit):
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
from “The Idea of Order at Key West” THE FIVE RUNNERS-UP MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)
If “compression is the first grace of style,” you have it.
from “To a Snail”
Has been called “the poet’s poet” and compared to “a solo harpsichord in a concerto” in which all other American poets are the orchestra … has also been called, by Hart Crane, “a hysterical virgin” … in either case, was notorious for staring at animals (pangolins, frigate pelicans, arctic oxen), steamrollers, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, then holding forth on what she saw … believed in “predilection” rather than “passion” and wanted to achieve an “unbearable accuracy,” a “precision” that had both “impact and exactitude, as with surgery” … watch for her quotes from history books, encyclopedias, and travel brochures … original, alert, and neat … appealed to fellow poets, including young ones, with her matter-of-fact tone, her ability to make poetry read as easily as prose. JOHN CROWE RANSOM (1888-1974)
—I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all….
from “Piazza Piece”
Finest of the Southern poets (he beats out Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren), and the center of the literary group called the Fugitives (mention tradition, agrarianism, and the New Criticism and they’ll read you some of their own verse) … liked the mythic, the courtly, the antique, and flirted with the pedantic … small poetic output: only three books, all written between 1919 and 1927 … founder and editor, for over twenty years, of the Kenyon Review, arguably the top American literary magazine of its day … at his worst, can be a little stilted, a little sentimental; at his best, devastatingly stilted and wonderfully ironical … worth reading on mortality and the mind/body dichotomy. E. E. (EDWARD ESTLIN) CUMMINGS (1894-1962)
… the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
from “[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]”
Innovative in a small and subversive way … the one who used capital letters, punctuation, and conventional typography only when he felt like it, which helped him convince a considerable readership that what they were getting was wisdom … the son of a minister (about whom he’d write “my father / moved through dooms of love”), he sided with the little guy, the fellow down on his luck, the protester … has been likened to Robin Hood (the anarchist), Mickey Spillane (the tough guy), and Peter Pan (the boy who wouldn’t grow up) … wrote love poems marked by childlike wonder and great good humor. HART CRANE (1899-1932)
The photographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal.
from The Bridge (“The Tunnel”)
Wanted, like Whitman, to embrace the whole country, and was only egged on by the fact that he couldn’t get his arms around it … his major poem The Bridge (that’s the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol of the heights to which modern man aspires), an epic about, as Crane put it, “a mystical synthesis of America’”; in it you can hear not just Whitman, but Woody Guthrie … as somebody said, found apocalypse under rocks and in bureau drawers … “through all sounds of gaiety and quest,” Crane claims he hears “a kitten crying in the wilderness” … a homosexual who, at thirty-three, committed suicide by jumping overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
giant-finned cars move forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
from “For the Union Dead”
One of the New England Lowells (like James Russell and Amy) … discussed the intricacies of the Puritan conscience, then converted to Catholicism … his principle subject the flux, struggle, and agony of experience … was interested in “the dark and against the grain” … lived a high-profile personal life (political stress, marital strain, organized protest, mental illness) … even so, managed to outlive and outwork such equally troubled colleagues and intimates as Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman … gave poetry a new autobiographical aspect and a renewed sense of social responsibility … aroused greater admiration and jealousy, for the space of twenty years, than any other contemporary American poet. ROOTS: FOUR PRIMARY INFLUENCES
THE ROMANTICS: Wordsworth, Shelley, et al. The line of descent starts here, with all that talk about the importance of the imagination and the self. Don’t tell your modern-poet friends this, though; they probably follow Yeats and Eliot in repudiating the early nineteenth century and would rather date things from Whitman and/or the Symbolists.
THE SYMBOLISTS: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the rest of the Frogs, plus the young Yeats. (Poe and Baudelaire were forerunners.) Believed there was another world beyond the visual one, a world of secret connections and private references, all of which just might, if you gave them a shove, form a pattern of some kind. Thus drunken boats and “fragrances fresh as the flesh of children.” Gets a little lugubrious, but don’t we all? Anyway, they made poetry even more an affair of the senses than the Romantics had done.
WALT WHITMAN: Founding father of American poetry. Charged with the poetic mission (“I speak the password primeval”), he raised all the issues that modern poetry is about: experimentation with language and form; revelation of self; the assumption that the poet, the reader, and the idea are all in the same room together and that a poem could make something happen. Hyperventilated a lot, but people on the side of freedom and variety are like that.
EMILY DICKINSON: Founding mother of American poetry; as William Carlos Williams put it, “patron saint” and “a real good guy.” Reticent and soft-spoken where Whitman is aggressive and amped. Short lines to Whitman’s long ones, microcosm to his macrocosm: “The brain is wider than the sea.” Gets you to see how infinity can mean infinitely small as well as infinitely big. HOOTS: FOUR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS NOT TO TOUCH WITH A TEN-FOOT STROPHE