A Psychic Janitor
Selected notebook entries (1959–63), first published in Straw for the Fire.
AS A CRITIC, I am no more than a janitor, a psychic janitor cleaning up what others have left sorting through—could it be some beautiful poem, or rubbish?
I don’t care what a writer claims, or what, even, he talks about—even if the talk is good—that’s for the discursive, albeit organized mind, for academia, for the lecturer, for the logic-choppers, the whereto and why boys. This is all second-order creation of reality. Poetry is, first, last, and foremost creation, the supreme creation, for me, at least in language… I’m sick of fumbling, furtive, disorganized minds like bad lawyers trying to make too many points that this is an age of criticism: and these, mind you, tin-eared punks who couldn’t tell a poem from an old boot if a gun were put to their heads. These jerks who know twelve lines of Dante, the early Tiresome Tom, and Ezra Pound’s laundry notes. These are the most monstrous, most pretentious arbiters that yet appeared on the academic scene.
There’s another typical stance: only I hear it. Then just listen: hump, schlump, bump—half the time: a real—did I say real?—I mean unreal, unnatural—thumping away in stupid staves, an arbitrary lopping of lines, rhythms, areas of experience, a turning away from much of life, an exalting of a few limited areas of human consciousness. All right, I say, make like that, and die in your own way: in other words limited, provincial, classical in a distorted and —I use the word carefully—degraded sense; “American” in the sense American means eccentric, warped, and confined.
I am fed up with some of the poems of self-congratulation by our poetic elders, that I have lived a life of self-control sort of thing, that gruesome spiritual smugness that comes from being ever so talky with and about God—God, Job, and the Lord Jesus himself. There’s no doubt, once we are aware of, once we venture into the area of the spiritual all dangers increase—there’s always spiritual pride, that greatest of sins…
There’s more than one variety of disease in this area of experience: the tiny epiphany, the cozy moment in the suburban rose garden, the ever so slight shimmer in the face of afternoon reality—not much more than the Georgians seemed to be talking about…
A lot of tired beetles, these American classicists. It’s as if the effort to be austere has left them with nothing much else than the impulse to congratulate themselves on being something else than their contemporaries—small-fry Hemingways who have read Homer.
I’m aware that among the expert (unfrightened) trans-Atlantic literary theologians to approach God without benefit of clergy is a grievous lapse in taste, if not a mortal sin. But in crawling out of a swamp, or up what small rock-faces I try to essay, I don’t need a system on my back.
TWO RETORTS TO ELIOT
I.
Our God Himself adores
Only beasts upon all fours:
Humility’s for bores.
II.
What do we need to foil intolerable Fate?
A God we kiss to, standing on our feet.
Essay: I Hate Eliot
1ST sentence. Why?
Because I love him too much—
The pseudo-poem; the whipped-up poem; the “decoration,” the intimacies of bogus and shoddy love affairs; the insights acquired running between the boudoir and the altar; rewritten St. Theresa and St. Catherine.
What poetry may need at this point is a certain vulgarity, not all vulgarities. What Synge referred to: the brutality, in a word, the aliveness of life.
What’s important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts? What’s important? Lacerations, whipped-up accusations, interlarded schoolboy Latin quotations, or the language really modified, a new rhythm…?
If we muddle and thump through a paraphrase, with side comments, however brilliant, we still do not have the poem.
For the poem—even the fairly good poem—means an entity, a unity has been achieved that transcends by far the organization of the lecture, the essay, even the great speech. This the academics at least should know—and more and more of them do. They were put on the world to understand this: it’s high time some of them did.
We cry against the critics: because it’s so important they be better.
I think poetic experience in the modern world must, of necessity, be primarily concerned with depth rather than breadth. A Goethe is no longer possible; but an intense personal poetry…
I’ve always found Robert Frost’s remark about free verse—he’d rather play tennis with the net down—I’ve always found this wonderfully suggestive, as an old coach, in a great number of ways. For one thing I coached at Penn State. We played in clothing cast off—laundered of course—by the football team. Of course, my derriere being what it is, I frequently found not only the net at least semi-down, but also my pants… You know how things get from too much laundering: the rubber in the various intimate equipment disintegrates, the string would bust in my sweat pants: there’d be a hole in my racket. Well, do you get the analogy: that’s me and free verse. Frost, he had a racket and balls all his life; but some of us out in the provinces operated under difficulties: we’ve had our disorganized lives and consequently our intractable material: we’ve had to use free verse, on occasion.
I never could understand the objection to “free” verse—it’s only bad, i.e. slack, lax, sloppy free verse one objects to. For the net, in final terms, is stretched even tighter. Since the poet has neither stanza form nor rhyme to rely on, he has to be more cunning than ever, in manipulating, modulating his sounds, and keeping that forward propulsion, and making it all natural. Instead of end-rhyme, of course, he has internal rhyme, assonance, consonance. But he can’t fall back on tradition as much as a formalist. It’s the pause, the natural pause that matters, Lawrence said somewhere—said it better, of course. He has to depend more on his own ear.
We seem to be shyer of the prose-poem than the French. Maybe it fits their language better… I rather think this: that the modern poet can afford to get closer to prose much more easily and profitably and less dangerously than the writer of prose can afford to be “poetic.” I think of how spongy, how ersatz some of those passages from Virginia Woolf are…
Let’s say it’s another kind of thing, maybe a lesser thing, the settable song, but let’s also admit that it is enormously difficult to do. After all there was Shakespeare, and Campion, and even the Joyce of Chamber Music. And there are those who think Yeats’s plays were mere settings to the songs within them… It depends on the very energy of the psyche, the inner ear. The Victorians, many of them, were tired, and they wrote a tired poetry, though often subtle rhythmically. “I am half-sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott. She didn’t have the spiritual guts to peer into the black, to take a full look at the worst.
It became a whole psychological stance which Yeats himself picks up in his youth: the tired young man on the sofa; today we have the tired young man in the gutter.
Understand I’m not making a cult of violent energy in itself. One is often offended, for instance, by Browning’s huffing and puffing, let’s-have-no-nonsense sort of thing; and some of the bouncy ballads of Chesterton and the other English balladists I can’t abide; or the heavy swats that Housman sometimes will use in his ballad metres. But let’s hasten to say that Housman can modulate beautifully…
As our poetry has become increasingly dramatic, in the sense it often represents a struggle or a dialogue between our selves (didn’t Yeats say we make of our quarrels with others, rhetoric; of our quarrels with ourselves, poetry?): and with these poems becoming longer, often representing the protagonist under considerable stress, poets have had to learn to write a poetry that follows the motion of the mind itself: hence some of the associational jumps, the shifts, in subject matter and rhythm, the changes in speed. That is, the poet does not merely talk, or ruminate, he cries out in turn, in agony, in rage. This puts enormous demands on the writer: it is as if he is writing the high scenes in a tragic drama. And his shifts, his jumps, his changes of pace have to be imaginatively right, or all is lost; it will be a nothing, a windy bombast. We seem to demand or want a poetry with the personality under great stress.
The human mind, in the desperate effort to be gay, has produced so little real nonsense, so few funny poems, so few poems of joy.
R.F., W.C.W.
The Muse taught them a way of being plain,
Who, like the sun, grew greater going down.
In Muir, I find an almost intolerable sense of the sadness of existence.
Wilbur: can look at a thing, and talk about it beautifully, can turn it over in his mind, and draw truths from a scene, easily and effortlessly (it would seem)—though his kind of writing requires the hardest kind of discipline, it must be remembered. Not a graceful mind—that’s a mistake—but a mind of grace, an altogether different and higher thing.
Let the uncharitable, the obtuse say all they will, bringing their charges—sentimentality; of using words (flowers) as counters; of creating ambiguous non-states of being; of sniggering; of posturing… ethical self-indulgence; of failing to change after the first two books… of arbitrary syntactical nuttiness;—yet Cummings always remains a throwback if you will, but a throwback to something truly wonderful, almost lost from the language: the secret of being lyrically funny, the secret of being truly alive and happy. He has revived, renewed more than we know. All right, he’s father-haunted. Who isn’t? He’d be a monster if he were otherwise…
I think of Cummings, not as a poet of one kind of thing, one genre, one singularity, but as one who has explored various and important and often neglected sides of modern sensibility:
1. The child’s. Here, it seems to me, he moves within the mind of the child, is the child, if you will—without condescending or being coy—an enormously difficult feat.
2. The adolescent’s. And this area of experience is a real trap, with the reader so often conditioned by the notion that the young don’t really suffer. They’re just oversize children with stock reactions, living out the misadventures of inexperience, uttering only stylized lingo, boring as advertising formulae.
There are these randy various jumpings, a many-faceted marvelous man.
He is not content to doodle along in the five-foot line.
In an age of cozy-toe operators, he has always been ready to take a chance…
Put it this way: I detest dogs, but adore wolves.
I’m beginning to think like a novelist. Is that death?
How crude, how irrelevant those reports of reality called fiction! The worst honest poems are better. Who cares that Arnold Bennett ever lived? Or even Huxley?
Fitzgerald: He was born, and died, a Princeton sophomore. (A Princeton sophomore was cute; we, at least, were sinister. We didn’t play at being gangsters, we were gangsters.)
If I could but respect prose!—would I be happy?
In poetry, there are no casual readers.
My hope younger than I, of course,
Disdains Yeatsian remorse;
That balm of academic wits,
Remorse for what?
The imagist poet: runs out of objects, his eye tires.
Perhaps the poet’s path is closer to the mystic than we think: his thought becomes more imageless.
The body of imagery, possibly, thins out or purifies itself or the mind moves into a more abstract mode, closer to wisdom, in talent of a high order.
Those without poetry: their source of innocence lost.
“But reading poetry is as natural an activity as eating one’s breakfast.” Alas, some people associate it with other natural functions.
People can and do understand poetry but they don’t want to: it is a danger.
O Muse, when shall I arrive at a true sense of history,
I who have served pre-history so long and well?
An eager young coed was poised with her pencil. What is the most interesting phenomenon in American poetry, Mr. Roethke? What I do next, he said, abandoning her for a ham sandwich. My Gaad, he’s rude, she said. No, he’s just hungry. His tapeworm just had a nervous breakdown.
Anonymous is my favorite author.