Leonie Adams, Consultant in Poetry, 1948-'49

Leonie Adams penned three complete collections between 1925 and 1933, capping her career publishing poetry with a selection in 1954. She became the seventh Consultant in Poetry in 1948. Most generally, she was a formalist who produced carefully structured verse. Not the most productive of poets, Adams crafted densely lyrical poems which tended toward the metaphysical and the romantic at a time when social, political and autobiographical subjects were more in vogue. It may be fair to think of her as something of an anachronism: a modest rebirth of John Donne.

Poets commonly struggle to not replace exuberance with craft, and craft with habit. The poem that is well-crafted and habitual often becomes decorative: a production-line painting that hangs in the lobby of a chain hotel. Such poems are, of course, not immoral or without value, but like the hotel lobby painting, they are engineered to be flat and unobtrusive. Such work is lifeless because it has sprung from muscle memory. It is cynical because it privileges the craft and form over imagination, discovery, and communion with the reader.

If craft is then further compacted with the metaphysical, which bring additional limits to the poet’s scope, the poles of the poet may reverse entirely. As opposed to expressing, the poet begins to repress their sentiment, bob their tone, and box the subject. The sentiment becomes a grave and essential lesson on existence, which the reader has almost certainly misunderstood until now. The tone is weary yet stoic, pathetic yet entitled. The subject is a metaphorical conceit which generally dwells on eyes, celestial bodies, water in all its states, bells and horns, birds and snakes. Adams epitomizes just such a constrained and blinkered poet.

Adams seems unburdened by the desire to innovate. Her symbols, so essential to metaphysical poetry, have been filched wholesale from the tradition. She uses a cultivated and sterile vision of nature to animate her modest epiphanies. The result is austere and uninflected, and it this great indifference towards the art of writing that is often mislabeled “lyricism.”
Adams confuses poetic words for lyricism in the same manner that a children’s choir might confuse volume for pitch. In her poem “Words for the Raker of Leaves,” all of the following poetic saws appear: wending, wizening, gamboling, skein, rime-bedabbled, bloom-dappling, weft, autumnal, roseate, mouldered, climes, musing, pathos, beseechings, eyebeam, vistaed, and foredone. Of course, there is nothing verboten about any of these words (far be it for me to pluck a single word from the poet’s garden); rather it is their congestion that results in a general lyrical nausea.

While this profusion of purple language may be held as a talent by some readers, Adams further dapples her poems with tortuous syntax and Yoda-speak. From “Elegy Composed in Late March:”

More than the lovely who prevail?
But very love must know
By no perduring thing
Can this be known.
Though with attributes of marble,
It is mortal beauty
Never hewn in stone.

Readers are required to unravel the poem to access its sentiment. This act of unraveling undermines interpretation by emphasizing comprehension. Once the lines are puzzled out, the sentiment is prim enough, i.e.: the qualities of beauty endure, but all expressions of beauty are fleeting. But there is little else to be mined here. Adams often further tangles her work by a liberal interpretation of the rules of punctuation. The Elegy quoted above concludes:

To what they loved and destroyed,
Never had their fill of cherishing and would not save,
Even the gods fixed no star;
But more in sign
The rainbow’s meltings and the reed
And the slight narcissus gave.

It seems that Adams prized the melody of phrases over their clarity. In their prime, her poems have the quality of reels and ballads, but often the melody comes across as an incessant, tuneless humming rather than a captured phrase of music.
When subverting the meter of her form and stretching rhymes to their limit, Adams sounds hopelessly arcane, as evidenced by her poem “Thoughts on a Violet:”

For here the violet was
Still in the offering hand
That quarrelled after; then,
Early, a fragrance strayed
Withering from dead’s muff; and led
In traverse of mind’s subterfuge perfecter
And far, borne memoried beyond
The seasons told,
Shone, vegetative star,
Risen and passing, after the summers told,
The winter’s patience, lent,
Exchange of darkness, where the tread
Of yearning, still visitant,
Arched not to bruise an emblematic head.

The lines are devoid of ease and flow, scanning instead like a logic proof. Poetic belaboring of this kind is common in Adams’ work. Ultimately, many poems read like leaden light-verse.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that Allen Tate prematurely congratulated Robert Lowell for revitalizing the public’s interest in formal verse. And perhaps Adams was handed the laurel in an attempt to further elevate interest in the mode. But the resurgence of formal verse never really materialized, and the reasons for its popular falling off are complex. An increasingly pragmatic culture, the ubiquity of newspapers, and the proliferation of cheap paperback novels and comics likely all contributed to a change in the public’s taste. I sometimes pretend that ours is the first impatient generation, but perhaps verse’s requirement for lengthy reflection seemed to our grandparent’s unnecessarily tedious.

Robert Lowell, Consultant in Poetry, 1947-'48

(In this post I examine the early works of the poet, especially Lord Weary’s Castle, which was published just before he became the Consultant in Poetry.)

I admit to being rebuffed by Lowell. The lag between entries in my series on the Consultants in Poetry/Poet Laureates is the result of my repeatedly ricocheting off the surface of Lowell’s early catalog, especially the nut of Lord Weary’s Castle. To compensate for my critical inability, I broke with precedent and read several works of criticism. Most helpful were the critical essays compiled in Readings in Literary Criticism: 17, edited by Jonathan Price, which included critical essays by Lowell’s contemporaries Jarrell and Williams, among other notables. The revelations those essays provided were enlightening but ultimately not alleviating. To quote Price in his introduction:

This activity, this hard thinking about his verse, is what Lowell most wants; in his early works, he admits he almost consciously made his poems as difficult as possible, for just this reason.

In part, Lowell’s preference for the oblique seems to come from his community of New Critics, who hold that poetry resides in obscurity, clarity being a tenet of advertisement, the anti-poem. Compounding this expectation of “close reading” is Lowell’s preference for self-study. Perplexingly, Lowell seems to desire our scrutiny but not our understanding.

Robert Lowell became the Consultant in Poetry in 1947 a year after the publication of his second book, Lord Weary's Castle. Five of the poems in Lord Weary’s were revisions of poems from his first book, Land of Unlikeness, which opened with a bugle-call to critics penned by Allen Tate:

There is no other poetry today quite like this. T. S. Eliot’s recent prediction that we should soon see a return to formal and even intricate metres and stanzas was coming true, before he made it, in the verse of Robert Lowell.

Tate goes on to clear a critical and historic space for Lowell, the Catholic formalist, challenging readers to read his poems closely, patiently. Tate identifies Lowell as a frustrating talent, perhaps, but a rebellious alternative to the jingoist and the patriot poet who greeted, to quote Tate, “the advent of the slave-society.”

Tate seems to mistake Lowell’s rebelliousness for radicalism. While early in his career Lowell writes often about morality, war, corruption, and social inequality, very few of his meditations produce any insight or negotiation. Rather, his poems attempt to shame the reader into an undirected confrontation. From the concluding lines of “Christmas in Black Rock”:

O Christ, the spiraling years
Slither with child and manger to a ball
Of ice; and what is man? We tear our rags
To hang the Furies by their itching ears,
And the green needles nail us to the wall.

Often his poems conclude with similar little shocks; these are, as often as not, repelling gestures, the tough talk of a rebel.

Lowell’s flair for the acerbic turn in Lord Weary’s Castle may be attributable to his relative youth. Lowell came to the laurels early; before him, the average age of Consultants had been forty. Lowell was thirty when he came to the Consultantship. If there was a hub to the world of poetry in the 1940s, Lowell seems to have fixed himself upon it. Emerging from Kenyon College, and the tutelage of the New Critics, Lowell enjoyed the friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and the attention and hospitality of the Fugitives (a loose affiliation of southern poets that included the likes of Tate and Warren), and he quickly garnered the respect of critical notables such as Bogan, Berryman, and Jarrell. In 1947, Lord Weary’s was awarded the Pulitzer.

At the time of his Consultantship, Lowell’s poetry generally focused upon the subjects of the moral bankruptcy of Boston society (his hometown), his Catholic faith, and the immorality of modern warfare. Decoding Lowell’s poems may lead to minor epiphanies on the nature of the above subjects, but the sum of his early work doesn’t require deciphering. His accomplishment was a poetic effect of managed discord: a combination of the ironic and the devout, the gruesome image and the austere form.

Randall Jarrell offers an explanation of these elemental oppositions when he writes, “The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites.” But its not entirely apparent that Lowell thinks of them as existing in opposition. Indeed, sometimes the fatalism that peppers his work seems to suggest that he sees no conflict, but rather only an expression of a primal nature or eternal truth. Lowell begins his poem “The Soldier” with “In Time of war you could not save your skin,” and concludes with “Two angels fought with bill-hooks for his soul.” Human wars are reflected by the eternal battle between heaven and hell; our political violence is merely the animation of a spiritual violence. Lowell understands that gore, for example, is often simultaneously humanizing and dehumanizing; both romantic and obscene. These elements do not conflict; they reflect.

Or, put another way, what Jarrell sees as conflict Lowell may see as play. The poetic vamping that occurs between the two lines quoted above is essentially an exercise, or as Lowell might term it, a “conjuring.” From his poem “Colloquy in Black Rock”:

Black Mud, a name to conjure with: O mud
For watermelons gutted to the crust,
Mud for the mole-tide harbor, mud for the mouse,
Mud for the armored Diesel fishing tubs that thud
A year and a day to wind and tide; the dust
Is on this skipping heart that shakes my house, 

House of our Savior who was hanged till death.

This conjuring increases the ample atmosphere of the poem (and the collection), but adds little definition to our sense of the thing. Here too is a prime example of how Lowell often concludes the poetic meditations of Lord Weary’s Castle: with religious gesture. These professions lack the weight of theology or the nuance of devotion, most often evoking a chastisement or penance. It is difficult to imagine many readers being converted by this characterization of Catholicism; at best it lends a little gravitas to Lowell’s poetic conjuring.

Any description of Lowell’s early poetry is incomplete without reference to his technical ability. His handling of rhyme lacked the rigidity of Allen Tate’s work and the frequent sing-song contrivance of Karl Shapiro's work. Lowell's rhymes seem both natural and reckless with enjambment and cesura. Beyond Lowell’s riddling, lurk exotic, stumbling meters and ingenious rhymes. From “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”:

This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from the field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? 

Over the course of his thirty year career, Lowell’s style underwent several radical developments, which might roughly be lumped into formal, imagistic, and confessional modes. His private life, which I’ve generally overlooked in this essay, was often the brightest thread in the tapestry of his work. However,  he was also a social critic, a war activist, a historian, and a reader of literature. His early work can be characterized by its complex use of form, and his later work, by its authorial voice and image.

Undoubtedly, Lowell casts a shadow, long and deep, over the poets who followed him, but his shadow is also narrow. A pillar to poets, Lowell is generally irrelevant to contemporary readers. The ultimate reason for this is, of course, debatable. A poet might reason that the fault lies with the public, who lack attentiveness and curiosity; the public might reason that Lowell is a puzzle indifferent to solution. In his review of Lowell's follow up to Lord Weary's Castle, entitled The Mills of the Kavanaughs, William Carlos Williams seems to be advising Lowell directly when he says, "It is to assert love, not to win it that the poem exists." I find it hard to disagree. In recent weeks it has seemed to me that a critic is needed to appreciate the first half of Lowell’s oeuvre, and a biographer is required to enjoy the second.

Karl Shapiro, Consultant in Poetry, 1946-'47

The fifth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress arrived on the scene with a clear sense of purpose. Karl Shapiro's poems had profound subjects: classism, war, anti-semitism, and third-world exploitation. In general, he explored these topics from a vantage very different from the previous Consultants, who alternated between professor and confessor. Shapiro wrote from the mob rather than the lectern.

Shapiro was by turns an imagist, a war poet, an activist, a formalist, and a curmudgeon, but he was first a student of modern American culture. Tate was an American historian and Warren something of an American folklorist, but their America seems almost colonial in comparison to Shaprio’s with its neuroses and "perversions," its muddle of guilt and entitlement.

Even early in his career, Shapiro showed a keen understanding of how modernity had split the American identity like a prism. The modern American was not only self-aware, but aware that the “self” was much larger and more diffuse than it had previously seemed. The out-of-body experience, the dissociative moment, and the alienated insider were the exotic fruits of a culture of commodities, entertainment, and global politics. He examined the psychological effect of row homes and magazines, the eroticism of cars, Catholic confirmations, and haircuts. But his poems of Buicks and starlets comment on more than modern fetishism; Shapiro’s poems explore how modernity and its values changed our consciousness, inducting the voyeur, the schizophrenic and the narcissist into the archetypal menagerie.

Shapiro studies the modern obsession with documenting and being documented, and he explores how the two result in a kind of vertigo, where one’s experience of the public record (the tabloid, the newspaper, the movie screen, the candid and the radio), causes one’s perspective and awareness to expand dramatically, while simultaneously their ability to affect the record collapses. The modern American sees the enormity of the landscape, but in seeing so much, they lose track of their place in the landscape and their proportion relative to it. This groundless feeling of falling into the distances of history, this vertigo of losing one’s unique sense of place and self to the panoramic culture is clearly articulated in Shapiro’s “Epitaph for John and Richard:”

They will not cast your honored head
Or say from lecterns what you said,
But only keep you with them all
Committed in the City Hall;
Once born, once married, and once dead.

The modern era seems to not only require the document, but to prefer it. Indeed, in much of Shapiro's poetry, he embosses the alienation that comes to typify the post war years. In “Fireworks,” Shapiro articulates American nostalgia as a citizenry's alienation from historical consequence. He characterizes a 4th of July spectacle as a parody of war, a melodrama for the entertainment of a desensitized population. He bottles this sense of alienation with giddy, associative images which: tarantulas, Gomorrah, Lincoln, ice-cream, and sperm. He describes the physical scene by characterizing the psychological scene of the suburban landscape. The poem is dizzy with leaps, and the tone often threatens hysteria.

Shaprio concludes the poem, as is his wont, with a sentiment which seems to trivialize what he has shown us, and this is the curmudgeon in him:

In Niagaras of fire we leak in the luminous aura
And gasp at the portrait of Lincoln alive on the lattice.
Our history hisses and spits in the burning Gomorrah,
The volcanoes subside; we are given our liberty gratis.

After five stanzas of textured insights, Shaprio lands on a too simple summation: the picnics and pyrotechnics make us forget that liberty is not really free. Which, while arguably true, undercuts the complexity of our experience of history, tradition, patriotism, and the new suburban surreal which the poem has led us through. Shaprio's urge to offer us a lesson is understandable, but his poems would be stronger if they weren't stood on such clay feet.

Shapiro makes similarly unnecessary didactic turns at the conclusions of “Drugstore” and “Hollywood,” though the latter has more philosophical merit. The cumulative effect of these instructive endings paints Shapiro as something of a grump; a grandfather who lectures past the point of our comprehension. And though the cantankerous conclusions seem to become more common in the twilight of his career, Shapiro’s best work on the American subject concludes with image rather than lesson. "Movie,""Haircut," and "The Tongue" are more evocative pieces because they finally eschew analysis for image.

Similarly, "Buick" concludes with a crystalline image, but in this case it is not the conclusion that makes (or unmakes) the poem. “Buick” is fascinating because it is a giddy and lyrically love song to a car. Here, Shapiro identifies the fulcrum of modernity, the object which redefined "freedom" as "mobility," the object which became central to American identity and central to our psychology. Shapiro reverses the dynamic of Cummings’ well-known “She being Brand,” written nearly twenty years prior to “Buick.” In “She being Brand,” Cummings relates a sexual encounter through extended metaphor in which the man is the driver, the woman is the car, and the driving is their lovemaking. Shapiro, here, is not describing a woman in terms of a car, but a car in terms of a woman. A woman is not being objectified; an object is being humanized.

Shaprio’s poem is not so much sexy as it is geeky; he delights in animating the grace and ease of the car, the pleasure of driving, the transcendence of speed. But the reader is never duped into thinking that he is referring to a woman. There is no double entendre; for all its alliterative exuberance, it’s kind of an imagistic, rote poem. But then the poet describes the car’s origins, and the poem gets yanked out from under us:

But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and smoke
Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night
And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests,
But now with you eyes that enter the future of roads you forget;

It’s a remarkable turn in a poem that had begun to lull. Suddenly, we are confronted with allusions to abuse, to rape, to a monstrous industry. It’s a sly move, because in the next stanza the poem returns to the exuberant present: the enraptured driver pulling into his garage, leaving his car “sleeping” like a lover exhausted from passion. But the earlier nightmarish aside is what lingers in the reader’s mind. Shapiro seems to have recognized what had changed in the years since Cummings wrote “She being Brand.” The car was no longer a metaphor for a man or a woman, but an anthropomorphic entity in itself. Shapiro runs the logic to its end: if the car is a person, where did this person come from, and have they been treated humanely? The revulsion that readers may feel upon reading “shrieked at the torch in your secret parts” is, of course, illogical (a car can not be tortured), but suggests an important element of the burgeoning consumer culture: people can be made to care disproportionately about things if they can be made to think of those things as having human characteristics.

Shapiro's ability to shock us with observable and relatable images is perhaps his greatest strength as a writer. He saw the subject as being obscured by the residual document, the real as being eclipsed by the artificial, the human overrun by the prude. “Auto Wreck” engages our sense of shock with pristine images and deliberate elements of artifice by way of theater. The scene has lighting, staging, directed action. The poem offers us not so much a narration as it does a scene. And the wreck is not the subject of the scene, but rather it is the erasure of the wreck, the sanitation of the street that becomes the scene.

We are deranged, walking among the cops
Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
One is still making notes under the light.
One with a bucket douches ponds of blood
Into the street and gutter.
One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,
Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.

What is ultimately shocking is not the mortal absurdity of the wreck, but how quickly the tragedy is being whisked away. This is the new real: deathless, sexless, and wanting for nothing.

Shapiro evokes a different kind of shock using a similar combination of image and theatrics in “Honkytonk,” but in this case he avoids a coherent scene in favor of a associative pastiche:

Then at the outskirts of our Conscious, No
From old high-over offices beats down
On standard faces Business-mad, and girls,
Grass under sullen stone, grown pale with work;
Yet shields with shadow this
Disgraced like genitals
Ghetto of local sin, laughable Hell,
Night’s very alley, loathed but let alone.

The effect of these lines is both frightening and infuriating: we are unnerved, but the cause of this terror is indistinct. It is ultimately Shapiro’s agitation that is most palpable. The truth is, his passion for image and his love of lyric sometimes overwhelms his subject and our sense of it; on some occasions his verse seems to rave rather than engage. But following the relatively strangled verse of Bogan, Shapiro’s frothing is something of a respite.

Shapiro was rarely subtle. He was brash and crude and disquieting, an agitator who was ill-prepared for the new age of political correctness. But he demystified many subjects and called out the taboo whether readers liked it or not. “Sunday: New Guinea” and “Troop-Train” humanize the absurdity of war with modest bewilderment and apolitical detail. “University” offers a scathing critique of the institutionalized racism of colleges, and "Nigger" is troubling because of the force with which Shapiro concludes that religion subverts rather than advances the struggle for equality. “The Confirmation” challenges the deceptive prudery of romanticism by describing a boys sexual awakening in terms which subvert the ideal and the mystic. “Jew,” “Shylock,” and “The Synagogue” illuminate both the suffering of jews and the flaws which he perceives in the jewish tradition. Shapiro spared no subject his critical (and occasionally jaundiced) eye.

Still, Shapiro was not constantly a bruiser. He was capable of quiet and reflection, and in these comparatively rare moments, readers get a glimpse of Shapiro’s vulnerability. Such moments suggest that while Shaprio was blessed with a critical mind, his analysis never inoculated him from feeling pangs of dread and alienation. From “A Cut Flower:”

My beauty leaks into the glass like rain.
When first I opened to the sun I thought
My colors would be parched. Where are my bees?
Must I die now? Is this a part of life?

Louise Bogan, Consultant in Poetry, 1945-'46

(My series on the Poet Laureates (Consultants in Poetry) continues below with a review of Louise Bogan’s aesthetic and works. By way of introduction: Bogan was a notable poetry critic at The New Yorker for almost forty years. In her reviews, she refused to mince words to spare anyone’s feelings, not even those of her friends. The practice of writing “negative” (or critical) reviews of books of poetry is so out of fashion today that honest criticism has all but disappeared. Contemporary critics and editors evidently think of poetry as a small, precarious raft floating on an ocean, crowded with a handful of castaways. The smallest of criticisms might unbalance the raft and result in the drowning of everyone. This ill-conceived attempt at self-preservation has resulted in a glut of Pollyanna reviews, and a general inflation of praise. Unsurprisingly, the number of “positive” (or sycophantic) reviews has caused readers to flee poetry. Soft-handed critics cause the disillusionment of readers and writers, alike. Of course, the bitter critic, too, may pursue self-serving agendas; I do not suggest that we confuse negativity with honesty. But if poetry is ever to escape the boutique it has become ensconced in, the escape must begin with critics and editors. I like to think Bogan would agree.)

The obscurity and obsessiveness of Louise Bogan’s work is often flirtatious and only sometimes consummatory. The reader departs her poems in a fog, disoriented by the brightness of her voice and the obliqueness of her song. At her best, Bogan produces lines that conjure up Rilke or Yeats: “I burned my life, that I might find / A passion wholly of the mind.” She is capable of disarming frankness, though she often recoils from the exposure, retreating into a tangle of abstractions and symbols.

She is a syntactical savant; her lines are garden paths that become mazes that becomes thickets. Other than the occasional reference to classical mythology, her work is devoid of proper nouns; the scene is generic and only populated by the characters “I” and “you.” Unlike Robert Penn Warren who used the “you” to huddle the reader nearer, when Bogan addresses the “you,” the reader is certain that she is speaking over their head to someone out of view. Bogan's obsessions are unapologetic and often sophomoric; she is a proud broken heart, but keeps her psyche on a short leash, as evidenced by her limited sentiments and sardonic gestures.

Bogan’s poems are difficult and bullish. The reader who persists is rewarded with moments of profundity and wonderful turns of phrase, as is evidenced by her poem, “Question in a Field.”

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind?

While there are revelatory moments, especially related to the subjects of beauty, love, and the nature of femininity, Bogan’s preference for abstractions and symbolism keeps readers at arms length, and the arcane qualities of her voice and subjects make her appear priggish. She seems a poet who aged but did not grow; a poet who fears exposure but who is still drawn to the burlesque show.

Bogan favored a narrow stripe of themes, and is probably best remembered as a poet of classical myths. In truth, her poems about Medusa, Cassandra, and Leda are good, but they don’t transcend the genre. If, for example, you don’t know that Zeus transformed himself into a shower of gold and (inexplicably) raped Danae, the conclusion of her poem “Stanza” makes no sense.

And the truth of the matter is, Bogan chiefly used myths as a way to encrypt her favorite theme. The most pronounced theme in her poems is love, and more particularly the life-cycle of the relationship, from initial flirtation, to the torment of the daily domestic negotiation, to the inevitable abuses and collapse of passion, to the recovery there from. While her poems lack personal detail (and do so defiantly), the quality of her poems about relationships suggest that they originate in experience rather than observation. From “Portrait:”

What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
Was loved by men.

Often her poems on the subject of love will be developed or resolved by allusions to nature. Unlike Warren, Bogan handles nature as a symbol, an emotional alphabet, rather than as an essence of location or an object deserving study. When her poems turn towards nature, it often seems merely a gesture: a feigning attempt at perspective. But the strength of Bogan’s poems is not their perspective, but rather their lyrical, metrical, and syntactical obsessiveness; qualities well represented in her poem, “Simple Autumnal.”

The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,
The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.
Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,
But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

Despite her preoccupation with love and nature, Bogan was no romantic. Indeed, Bogan offers a criticism of romanticism which seems to herald the feminism of the ‘60s. In Bogan’s hands, romanticism is characterized as a poetic ornament of chauvinism: a formalized process of dehumanizing a woman to produce a misogynist ideal. In her poem “The Romantic,” Bogan illuminates the true romantic process:

In her obedient breast all that ran free
You thought to bind, like echoes in a shell.

Allusions to claustrophobia and seclusion are often employed by Bogan to characterize the oppression of women. In “Women,” Bogan combines the claustrophobic trope with her characteristic sarcasm.

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

Bogan seems at her bristling best when she addresses the domineering nature of men. The oppression of women cannot be curtailed by love, because it is the idea of romantic love which essentially legitimizes the oppression. The failure of a relationship is often attributed by Bogan to an insidious misogyny, as in her poem “For a Marriage:”

She gives most dangerous sight
To keep his life awake:
A sword sharp-edged and bright
That darkness must not break,
Not ever for her sake.

Even so, Bogan is the first to admit that reason and knowing do not inoculate a person from passion. She explores the baffling compulsion of love in her poems, “The Alchemist,” “The Crows,” and “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,” which includes the lines, “Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,/What a marvel to be wise,/To love never in this manner!”

Much of her poetry is not so coherent. Often her verse is turned opaque by abstractions and lyric, leaving readers with a sense that they are reading an awkward translation of a non-English poem. On such occasions, reader’s can easily discern the tone and gist of the work, but it is difficult to not feel that Bogan is being coy. In her ironically titled poem, “Didactic Piece,” she concludes with the riddling lines:

We wait, we hear, facing the mask without eyes,
Grief without grief, facing the eyeless music.

Such moments suggest that Bogan is bearing down on her poem much as she is bearing down on us. In her attempt to purify her poem of self-reference and exuberant error, Bogan’s work begins to seem inhuman. Bogan is easiest to enjoy on the rare occasions when she allows herself a little liberty, as is the case with “I Saw Eternity,” “Poem in Prose,” and “Several Voices Out of a Cloud,” which should be enjoyed in its entirety, and which notably concludes with the bad-ass lines:

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn’t for you.

This poem alone is enough justification for Bogan being made Consultant in Poetry. Her verse may have been repressed and arcane and labyrinthine at times, but she was fearless. I admire those who can be bold despite their vulnerability, and Bogan is a great example of such bravery.

Robert Penn Warren, Consultant in Poetry, 1944-'45

(Robert Penn Warren has the distinction of being on the list of U.S. Consultant/Laureates twice. In fact, he would become the first poet to occupy the station after the title was officially changed to “Laureate” in 1986. The following entry in my series on the U.S. Poet Laureates focuses primarily on the poetry that he wrote before he became the third Consultant in Poetry; I’ll write about his later works once I work my way to his second term. Warren’s career as a fiction writer and critic are equally estimable, but not discussed here.)

By 1944 when he became the Consultant in Poetry, Robert Penn Warren had established himself as a poet who wrote for an American audience as if it were culturally and historically distinct. Whereas previous Consultants, Auslander and Tate, seemed to be bridegrooms of the English poetic tradition, Robert Penn Warren shared a bloodline with Whitman and Stevens. Though Warren's early work lacked some of the yop, he carried on Whtiman’s investigation of American identity and culture, in all its metaphysical and moral weirdness. His use of Southern lore and landscape is more human and fraught than Tate’s often moral and bucolic portrayals. And though Warren’s poetry is at times inscrutable, the idiom that he wrote in was generally more popular than previous Consultants. If Auslaunder was an occasional poet, and Tate was an academic, then Warren was as an empathist fascinated by the inconsistencies of human nature. Though Tate and Warren both belonged the coterie of Southern poets called the Fugitives, Warren emerged as the greater outlaw.

Probably the most remarkable quality of Warren’s work, especially in the context of previous Consultants, is his choice of subjects. Warren writes about summer vacations, mass murderers, mama’s boys, Mexican border tourism, and doctor’s visits, describing each with an outsider’s sense of awe but with the astuteness of an insider. In his poem “End of Season,” Warren explores the American vacation, the national urge to tourism, and how these escapes are, at their base, a denial of mortality.

...the annual sacrament of sea and sun,
Which browns the face and heals the heart, will seem
Silence, expectant to the answer, which is Time

In his poem “Pursuit,” Warren revisits the American vacation, but to this he adds the modern doctor visit, depression and alienation. In this case, the vacation is a prescribed cure to feelings of malaise and anxiety, though one which cannot really solve the vacationer's underlying dread.

Till you sit alone-- which is the beginning of error--
Behind you the music and lights of the great hotel:
Solution, perhaps, is public, despair personal

While other poets were writing about grand abstractions, institutions, and landscapes, Warren was writing about individuals disoriented by their place in modernity. Warren often employed the universal “you” on the occasions that he wrote about common cultural experiences, but it is an inclusive gesture rather than a divisive one; Warren seems to include himself among the universal other.

One of the challenges one experiences while reading Warren’s work is that he is alternately sincere and ironic, which makes his tone sometimes ambiguous. This poetic choice doesn't seem to be the result of dishonesty or ambivalence but rather the honest sentiments of an empathetic man. The conflicted tone reflects the difficulty and integral contradictions of his subjects, which leaves readers, as often as not, without a tidy moral sum at the conclusions of poems.

In “Letter from a Coward to a Hero” Warren turns his talents to the prickly subject of war. He does not comment on war in the abstract, nor does he pound out another nationalistic ode to valor, rather the poem is styled as a personal address to an unidentified soldier. In that address, Warren confesses his own dislike of guns and violence, and describes the causes of war in diminutive and mundane terms. What is often painted as glorious, he describes her as fragmented and chaotic.

Later in the poem, Warren describes the heroic soldier, home from the war, adrift in a suburban life, sitting up late at night. That poem concludes with the soldier contemplating what may be a piece of shrapnel that nearly killed him or the medal awarded for his heroics:

You are what you are without our aid.
No doubt, when corridors are dumb
And the bed is made,
It is your custom to recline,
Clutching between the forefinger and thumb
Honor, for death shy valentine.

On reflection, a reader may understand that when earlier in the poem Warren writes “I think you deserve better;/Therefore I am writing you this letter,” he is speaking both of how a nation honors its soldiers and that tricky concept of “honor” itself, which seems here little better than a memento, a trinket, upon later reflection. The grandiosity of the hero is struck from the scene, and we are left to consider the residue of the man rather than the brief, heroic act.

Warren doesn’t create straw-men characters in his poems; if there’s ever an easy target, it seems to often be himself: he is the dupe, the coward, the bumbler. Though he is often self-conscious, he does not lose a sense of his proportion to the world. When he describes seeing an old beggar while touring Mexico in the poem “The World Comes Galloping: A True Story”, his sense of perspective is succinctly expressed:

We could not see his history, we saw
Him.
And he saw us, but could not see we stood
Huddled in our history and stuck out hand for alms.

This reveals one of Warren’s greatest qualities: his honesty. Exaggeration is both easy and common in the genre, and necessarily so: the condensed nature of the poem requires, on some occasions, a heightened delivery reminiscent of a stage actor’s. But Warren rarely exaggerates to swell a point, unless it be to comedic effect, and even when dealing with his favorite themes of mortality and time, he animates his ideas with simpler anecdotes and characters.

When Warren writes with some pomp or grandness, it is often to great effect. In his poem “History,” Warren addresses the imperviousness of time and a culture’s increasing indifference towards historical knowledge. The poem ends:

In the new land
Our seed shall prosper, and
In those unsifted times
Our sons shall cultivate
Peculiar crimes
Having not love, nor hate,
Nor memory.

Though “History” concludes with a clear moral, this is seldom the case with Warren’s early work. Warren’s work shows a preference for the aside, the wink, and the abrupt about-face: poetic moves which sometimes make his poems difficult to unravel. “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” a fourteen page poem, takes a sprawling family history of poverty and deviance and lands it on the pinhead of “luck” and a arresting implication of the reader. It is a baffling conclusion to what had been a relatively direct parable. “The Return: An Elegy” reads like a schizophrenic episode as two voices intrude upon each other and bicker with themselves, and never seems to entirely develop outside of the moody symbolism.

Warren’s obscureness seems a symptom not of his “genius,” that all too common excuse for oblique writing, but seems an outgrowth of the same empathy that makes his work so honest and compelling. Warren captures the empathetic experience in which there is no clear hierarchy of subjects, no unified perspective, and few conclusion are drawn. The sometimes confusing result asks the reader to sift through the equally emphasized (or understated) objects and symbols, to consider the idea or event from multiple perspectives, including the universal or historical lens, and to embrace the ambiguity of the experience. As a result, reading Warren can be exhausting.

Much of Warren’s early work is formal, with consistent patterns of meter and rhyme, and though his rhymes are inventive and his lyric pleasing, the music of his poems seem tertiary to the associations and the meaning. His poems churn as much as they turn, and while the poet’s biography, his mortality and tics, are never very far from the margins of the poems, the reader never feels the claustrophobia that came to characterize later confessional poets. Perhaps this is because of Warren’s charming honesty, his ability to converse without complaint, his habitual inclusion of the reader, and his skill for never letting the landscape, the immediate and present world, leave the reader’s mind for very long. Warren expresses his ability and limitations best in his later poem “The Letter About Money, Love, or Other Comfort, If Any” where he writes:

[I] discovered I had a small knack
for honesty, but only a passion, like a disease, for Truth

I take this as explanation for why his early poems sometimes baffle and why I still leave them with a sense of having had a sincere and meaningful experience.

Allen Tate, Consultant in Poetry, 1943-'44

(What follows is another installment in my series of posts on the American Poet Laureates. I've undertaken the project for my own education; any instance in which I sound authoritative should be regarded with suspicion. Further, I have limited myself to study of the primary texts (the poems) with only minor supplements from biographers and critics. If any musing contradicts the reality expressed in the superior scholarship of others, it is doubtlessly the result of my ignorance, not their error.)

Reading a poem by Allen Tate is like navigating a museum: each phrase, each line, requires scrutiny as a distinct item in the museum’s collection, and when the poem in its entirety is considered, the reader, like a museum goer, is suffused with a sense of history, tradition, and an appreciation for craft which provides the spontaneity of inspiration with a skeletal frame. The museum is not trying to be obtuse, but the coherence of a museum is not the same coherence of a story or a play.

You do not run through Tate’s museums. You do not scan or skim. You stroll, you dally, you sit on a bench and puzzle it out.

In contrast to Auslander’s populist verse, Tate’s formal and carefully metered poetry is often uninterested in accessibility or amiable subjects. Similarly to Auslander, Tate seems a traditionalist, a romantic, and a preservationist.

Indeed, Tate is often an epideictic poet: he uses rhetoric and irony to praise and blame the various subjects of his careful meditation. He is also a didact, spending some time instructing us on the finer sinews of history: classical, American Southern, and modern. He is sometimes a grump, but rarely is he unlikeable: his dislike of industrialization is faceted and political; his praise of nature and the pastoral is not misty or grand; his meditations on youth are frank and affecting. “The Swimmers,” for example, is a profound characterization of the horror that strikes us in our youth when we are exposed to violence before it is blunted by repetition, contextualization, and the rationalization of our social machinery. It’s also a most striking account of the aftermath of a lynching, and it shows Tate's own developed sense of race.

Despite these loose observations on the content of his work and despite the fact that he was an accomplished critic, Tate was never, it seems, as concerned with the content of his poems as he was with their meter, rhythm and form. Perhaps this preoccupation can be best elucidated by the poet himself as he describes his excitement at striking upon a manner for translating “The Vigil of Venus:”

...then I suddenly knew that I ‘had’ it. I had it, that it to say, in language that somewhat resembled English and in a metre that the English language can be written in: plain iambic pentameter, with anapaestic substitutions for the frequent falling rhythms of the original. The Latin is in trochaic septenarii, seven-footed lines with, at the end, an extra syllable which is usually accented, making eight accents...

Tate’s enthusiasm for meter and form, which far outstrips my own, sometimes makes his verse sound like complex machinery, and indeed his poems tend to wind and unwind rather than “turn.” Contributing to Tate’s “unwinding” verse is his miserly use of commas, the absence of which often requires a certain willingness among readers to live with the disheveled sentiment and the ambiguous dictum.

I have every confidence that Tate knew what he meant. I, however, being of reasonable analytical ability and fair patience, often have only inklings, guesses, and, on occasions, angry gestures of despair.

Tate’s poetry is staid and ironic. Even when he is criticizing a man or his practice, Tate maintains his decorum. This calm sounds, I think, sometimes aloof to modern ears:

Didactic Laurel, loose your reasoning leaf
Into my trembling hand; assert your blade
Against the Morning Star, enlightening Thief

Of that first Mother who returned the Maid.

But Tate’s tone conjures both the Southern culture in which he was raised and the classical education he received. What may seem like pretense is actually his pedigree.

He was Consultant in Poetry (what later became referred to as "Poet Laureate") from 1943-44, and it was around this time that he wrote the poem, “Ode to Our Young Pro-consuls of the Air.” The Ode stands in contrast to Auslander’s blithely patriotic verse, though Tate’s tone and form in this case somewhat resembles Auslander’s (and the popular) aesthetic. In the Ode, Tate expresses what could not have possibly been a popular sentiment: namely, that poets were not lackeys of the state, that the polaristic nature of military conflict was antithetical to the moral and rational mind, and that the refusal of poets to act as fonts of propaganda had never hastened any military conflict, past or present, and critics who said otherwise were more the coward than the reflective poet. Tate harps on the cultural characterization of war, its ubiquity in boyhood toys, and its over simplification in historical review. He also concludes the poem with the most acerbic of adjournments:

Take off, O gentle youth,
And coasting India
Scale crusty Everest
Whose mythic crest
Resists your truth;
And spying far away

Upon the Tibetan plain
A limping caravan,
Dive, and exterminate
The Lama, late
Survival of old pain.
Go kill the dying swan.

This seems brave to me, and it seems an interesting and hopeful precedent to set: the laureate is not the nation’s ad man.

One of Tate’s most beloved saws was the defense of (and conversely, the assault of) Romanticism. Tate, a Romantic seemingly in the tradition of Wordsworth and Blake, vies in several of his poems to characterize the institution. His poem, “To the Romantic Traditionalists,” insinuates that inferior romantics are superficial (or perhaps, metaphysical), mystical (as opposed to religiously observant or at least faithful), and cavalier in their handling of morality and mortality. Like Auslander, Tate uses the poetic form to comment upon and direct the poetic tradition. Like Auslander, Tate calls folks out. But Tate’s treatment of the poets he addresses is more severe. In “Winter Mask,” Tate seems to chide the late Yeats as a minister dismissed from the room of a dying man:

I asked the master Yeats
Whose great style could not tell
Why it is man hates
His own salvation,
Prefers the way to hell,
And finds his last safety
In the self-made curse that bore
Him towards damnation:
The drowned undrowned by the sea,
The sea worth living for.

But, as with much of Tate’s poetry, the ending sentiment is not entirely clear. I like Tate best when he begins to lose his temper or when he allows flecks of cynicism to spangle his verse. “The Ivory Tower,” “To the Lacedemonians,” and “Two Conceits” are each, in their own ways, chinks in Tate’s cloak of inscrutable and swift associations. At his most obscure, Tate's writing is like a door without hinges:

O Pasiphae! mother of god, lest nature,
Peritonitis or morning sickness stunt
The growth of god in an unwholesome juice,
Eat cannon and cornflakes, that the lamb,
Spaceless as snow, may spare the rational earth
(Weary of prodigies and the Holy Runt)
A second prodigious, two-legged birth.

Even to his contemporaries, Tate was regarded with a cocked eyebrow. He is often now called a poet’s poet, a dubious distinction which has not, apparently, been continued. His work is increasingly omitted from college-level anthologies; if he is remembered at all, it is for his poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which is obscure, difficult, and finally insufficient. He has become a poet’s poet’s poet, irrelevant to a generation which discounts form and prizes innovation, a generation which is suspicious of tradition and prizes tribalism.

To the pedestrian readers of poetry, Tate must sound generally dour, pessimistic, and severe. The clime of his poems is dreary in description and effect. It is his sound, his meter which is finally most memorable because his meaning is so often laced up with a knot at the top, middle, and bottom.

Joseph Auslander, Consultant in Poetry, 1937-1941

Joseph Auslander wore the laurel of Consultant in Poetry from 1937 to 1941. He spent four years in the hot seat, published a dozen-something books, including a couple of novels, and was a regular contributor of poetry to the Saturday Evening Post, and for all his tapping at the national consciousness, for all the marks he made on our common cultural wall, Auslander has been almost entirely forgotten.

I wanted to correct this error, but I have been unable to produce much of a reason for recalling the man or his work. If anything can be gleaned from sifting through Auslander’s poetry it may be that writing to and from a conservative present hastens one's induction into the unfossilized past.

Auslander’s work can be generally characterized as starchy verse expressing inflexible sentiments. Cliches, in Auslander's poetic cornucopia, are treated as finished dishes to be served under silver bells rather than the over-boiled vegetables that they are. In 1936 he was the last poet to use "unshriven" in a poem without smirking.

Auslander contributed poetry to the Saturday Evening Post over the course of three decades, his poems often buried between columns in the center of the page. The poems that appeared in the SEP were generally short, formal homilies which generally addressed patriotic, military, or religious themes. His broadly circulated poetry is short on sentiment, but long on wind, as demonstrated by these later lines in his poem "Christmas Catechism:"

Can the bells of Christmas banish
Horror camp, inhuman lust?
Can the scars of hatred vanish?
Can Faith quiet our distrust?
Can the Dove of Christendom
Dwell with the Atomic Bomb?

It is difficult to discuss his work without being snide. But Auslander was at least sincere and purposed, and his causes, such as religious tolerance and human rights, were generally noble, though occasionally jingoistic. Of course, his work is also pompous and clinking, but this is made, perhaps, forgivable by the fact that Auslander was interested in neither lyricism nor the ambiguity of metaphor. Rather, he created instructive verse which employed simple rhymes because they would adhere to one’s memory most firmly. The imperativeness of his writing reflects his profession; he was a teacher for much of his career, filling lecterns at both Harvard and Columbia.

The poems that appeared in the SEP were populist and occasional, patriotic and religious, and Auslander's longevity at the post suggests that they were favorably received by the readership. By comparison, the poems in the book More Than Bread (1936) were by and large preoccupied with the dullest of poetic subjects: poetry. Over a dozen of the poems in the collection reference poetry, poets, and/or the poetic tradition directly, including the poems “Poet and Spider,” “To The New Poets,” “To the Poets Who Fly Left,” “The Poet Purses His dreams” and the catastrophic free verse poem, “I Am Poetry.” In every case, Auslander is sermonic in his insistence that 1.) Poetry is form, and 2.) Poetry is being ruined by a new generation of poets who don’t understand that poetry is form. Auslander laments “our raucous time,” “our restless hour,” and “these amorphous days,” as being incapable of producing or appreciating formal verse. He touts the genius Keats, Coleridge, and Heraclitus, and often worries about the lack of music in the new generation's poetry.

The poem, “I Am Poetry” deserves a little more attention if for no other reason than it seems unique to Auslander’s work, being written in free verse. It is also arguably insane.

Each of the seventeen stanzas begin with the phrase, “I am Poetry,” and each stanza proceeds to catalog the ubiquity and grandeur of poetry, which is apparently a snake-oil cure-all. Complicating this exuberance is the question of the speaker. The “I” here seems to be Poetry personified. Of course, it may also be read as the personification of the poem (a very postmodern move on Auslander’s part).

Or the “I,” most troublingly, may be Auslander himself. This reading is supported by the lines, “I confront you with Keats,” which seems to come directly from the poet’s mouth, but is then complicated by the line, “I am Poetry/And I am the vision/Without which the people perish,” which seems a little extreme, and “I am taller than the Empire State Building,” which seems hysterical. A careful reader will notice that the poem references several tropes from earlier poems in the collection, suggesting that either Auslander is flattering himself or that he is an unimaginative poet who believes there is some poetic weight left to the phrase, “I lift the heavy heart/With a rainbow or a leaf,” which is, coincidentally, how he concludes this six page poem.

To call Auslander’s poetry “light verse” would be misleading because it is so often leaden, sermonic and bleak. But when he veers into lighter subjects, such as love, the result is so awkward and feckless that it seems self-mocking.

Love will never be found
By searching here and there;
Love is all around,
Nowhere, and everywhere,
And nowhere abound.

One year after publishing this poem Auslander was appointed Consultant in Poetry.