First, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Our Lady of the Sonnets, who, in 1923, beat out—with three slender volumes, including one titled A Few Figs from Thistles— T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for the Pulitzer Prize; but who, subsequently, despite former boyfriend Edmund Wilson’s efforts to save her, began to seem, “ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,” very silly. Also, Amy Lowell, dragon to Millay’s sylph, whom Eliot called “the demon saleswoman of poetry” and whom Pound accused of reducing the tenets of Imagism to “Amy-gism”; you may remember, from tenth-grade English, her musings on squills and ribbons and garden walks. Now she doesn’t even make the anthologies.
Clockwise from top left: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg
Then, Carl Sandburg, who catalogued so memorably the pleasures of Chicago, his hometown (“City of the Big Shoulders,” and so forth), who almost certainly liked ketchup on his eggs, but who was, even back then, accused—by Robert Frost, hardly an innocent himself—of fraud; better to go with Will Rogers here, or Whitman (whom Sandburg consciously imitated). Finally, Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy” we can recite whole stanzas of, too, which is precisely the problem. Picture yourself in a room full of well-groomed young adults, all of whom, if they chose, could swing into “Miniver loved the Medici, / Albeit he had never seen one; / He would have sinned incessantly / Could he have been one.” OFFSHOOTS: FIVE CULT FIGURES
Five poets, no longer young (or even, in a couple of cases, alive), who are nevertheless as edgy, angry, and/or stoned as you are.
ALLEN GINSBERG: Dropout, prophet, and “Buddhist Jew,” not necessarily in that order. “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” His most famous works, Howl (about the beat culture of the Fifties, the second part of which was written during a peyote vision) and “Kaddish” (about his dead mother, this one written on amphetamines). Some critics see him in the tradition of William Blake: A spiritual adventurer with a taste for apocalypse, who saw no difference between religion and poetry. As William Carlos Williams said in his intro to Howl, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
FRANK O’HARA: Cool—but approachable, also gay. At the center of the New York School of poets (others were John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch), and a bridge between artists and writers of the Sixties. Objected to abstraction and philosophy in poetry, preferring a spur-of-the-moment specificity he called “personism.” Had a thing about the movies, James Dean, pop culture in general; his poems prefigure pop art. Thus, in “The Day Lady Died,” lines like, “I go on to the bank / and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) / doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life….” Killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island when he was only forty.
ROBERT CREELEY: One of the Black Mountain poets, out of the experimental backwoods college in North Carolina where, back in the Fifties, the idea of a “counterculture” got started. Kept his poems short and intimate, with titles such as “For No Clear Reason” and “Somewhere.” His most famous utterance: “Form is never more than an extension of content.” (Stay away from the prose, though, which reads like Justice Department doublespeak.) The consummate dropout: from Harvard—twice, once to India, once to Cape Cod—with additional stints in Majorca, Guatemala, and, of course, Black Mountain. “If you were going to get a pet / what kind of animal would you get.”
SYLVIA PLATH: Her past is your past: report cards, scholarships (in her case, to Smith), summers at the beach. In short, banality American-style, on which she goes to town. May tell you more about herself than you wanted to know (along with Robert Lowell, she’s the model of the confessional poet); watch especially for references to her father (“marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal…”). Wrote The Bell Jar, autobiographical—and satirical—novel of an adolescent’s breakdown and attempted suicide. Married to English poet Ted Hughes, she later committed suicide herself. The new style of woman poet (along with Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich), a cross between victim and rebel.
IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA (The poet and activist formerly known as Leroi Jones): Started off mellow, doing graduate work at Columbia and hanging out with his first wife (who, as it happened, was white) in Greenwich Village. Subsequently turned from bohemian to militant: “We must make our own / World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man / is dead. Let’s get together and kill him, my man, let’s get to gather the fruit / of the sun.” Moved first to Harlem, then back to Newark, where he’d grown up; took up wearing dashikis and speaking Swahili. Likewise to be noted: his plays, especially Dutchman (1964); his most famous coinages, “tokenism” and “up against the wall.” In 2002 he was named poet laureate of New Jersey—stop laughing—and proved he was still capable of raising hackles with the public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” in which he sided with conspiracy theorists who suggested that the Israeli and U.S. governments knew in advance that the September 11 attacks were going to take place: “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” Was New Jersey’s last poet laureate.
American Intellectual History,
and Stop That Snickering
The French have them, the Germans have them, even the Russians have them, so by God why shouldn’t we? Admittedly, in a country that defines “scholarship” as free tuition for quarterbacks, intellectuals tend to be a marginal lot. Jewish, for the most part, and New York Jewish at that, they are accustomed to being viewed as vaguely un-American and to talking mainly to each other—or to themselves. (The notable exception is Norman Mailer, an oddball as intellectuals go, but a solid American who managed to capture the popular imagination by thinking, as often as not, with his fists.) The problem is precisely this business of incessant thinking. Intellectuals don’t think up a nifty idea, then sell it to the movies; they just keep thinking up more ideas, as if that were the point. GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946)
Our man in Paris, so to speak, Stein was one of those rare expatriates who wasn’t ashamed to be an American. In fact, for forty-odd years after she’d bid adieu to Radcliffe, medical school, and her rich relatives in Baltimore, she was positively thrilled to be an American, probably because her exposure to her compatriots was pretty much limited to the innumerable doughboys and GIs she befriended (and wrote about) during two world wars—all of whom, to hear her tell it, adored her—and to the struggling-but-stylish young writers for whom she coined the phrase “The Lost Generation” (Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, et al.), who were happy to pay homage to her genuine wit and fearless intellect while scarfing up hors d’oeuvres at the Saturday soirées at 27 rue de Fleurus (an address, by the way, that’s as much to be remembered as anything Stein wrote). True, Hemingway later insisted that, although he’d learned a lot from Gert, he hadn’t learned as much as she kept telling everyone he had. True, too, that if she hadn’t been so tight with Hemingway and Picasso (whom she claimed to have “discovered”), the name Gertrude Stein might today be no more memorable than “Rooms,” “Objects,” or “Food,” three pieces of experimental writing that more or less sum up the Gertrude Stein problem. The mysterious aura that still surrounds her name has less to do with her eccentricity or her lesbianism (this was Paris, after all) than with the fact that most of what she wrote is simply unreadable. Straining to come up with the exact literary equivalent of Cubist painting, the “Mama of Dada” was often so pointlessly cerebral that once the bohemian chic wore off, she seemed merely numbing.