AMERICAN POETRY AND SOME OF THE REST

It’s a good idea to make American poetry your bluffing speciality as there has been only 200 years of the stuff, if you discount the indigenous poetry of the Crow, Blackfeet, Apache, Sioux, etc.

The earliest recognisable poet from the USA was probably Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), but the founding figures of American poetry are generally reckoned to be Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Edgar Allan Poe (most American poets have three names). In 1837, Emerson marched into Harvard University and delivered an address called ‘The American Scholar’, the message of which was that nature and instinct are better guides for human behaviour than books and learning. It didn’t go down well at the time, but Oliver Wendell Holmes later called it ‘Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence’.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) summed up Poe thus:

Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three fifths of him genius, two fifths sheer fudge.

Poe kept well away from long poems and from those that preached moral improvement. He also loathed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s rhythmic storytelling (though ‘Hiawatha’ is almost certainly the best-known American poem in England).

Poe’s poetical philosophy was simple:

Q. What is the most melancholy of topics?

A. Death.

Q. What is the most beautiful of topics?

A. A beautiful woman.

Q. What, therefore, is the best thing to write a poem about?

A. The death of a beautiful woman.

Poe wrote a lot along these lines.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

The most celebrated work of Walt Whitman is Leaves of Grass (or Song of Myself as it was called in its final edition), an extensive collection written over a period of many years. His poetry is proud, audacious and pioneering, and a lot of it is sexually outspoken, which made Whitman (Walter ‘Walt’ Whitman to give him the obligatory three names) very popular with other nineteenth-century poets (Rossetti, Swinburne) and very unpopular with everyone else. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’, Whitman wrote in section 51 of the poem. Well, top marks for honesty at least.

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

Unlike most poets, who are desperate to see their work in print, only a handful or so of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published before she died aged 55, leaving more than 1,700 poems. Recognition came late, about 70 years after her death; she is reckoned a genius by many. Dickinson adopted a one-club approach to punctuation, employing the long em-dash (—) in place of the full set of punctuation marks that might have been expected. Early editors of her work sought to remedy what they saw as a glaring fault but only managed to attenuate the force of her writing. Compare, for example, the doctored stanza:

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside

with the original:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The former isn’t a patch on the latter, largely because the em-dashes give the writing an energy and urgency which the standard punctuation manages to destroy. You can be enthusiastic about her poetry, calling it highly strung, lyrical, paradoxical, gnomic – but check first that you know what ‘gnomic’ means (see ‘Glossary’). Dickinson led a quiet, and latterly reclusive, life which it is safe to assume did not involve the use of class-A drugs. Besides, she had no need of them, it seems, given the hit she got from a good shot of pure poetry: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’, she said.

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Robert Frost began writing poetry when he was in his late thirties (around 1912) and his early works have an archaic touch (‘She talks and I am fain to list’). Later his poetry became more powerful and awarded him four Pulitzer Prizes and 44 honorary degrees.

Frost was a farmer (although perhaps not a very assiduous one) in New Hampshire and many of his poems reflect his chosen profession. His poetry has an easiness about it, being almost folksy at times. Powerfully direct:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(‘The Road Not Taken’)

universal in their reach:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
(‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’)

and, at times, shocking, as in this poem about a boy working in a saw mill who dies after losing a hand:

They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
(‘Out, Out—’)

Frost’s poetry has had a profound influence on many a twentieth-century poet. The poet whom he had most influence upon, however, wasn’t even a poet when they met (i.e., a poet but he didn’t know it). In 1912 Frost brought his family over the pond to live, and while in England he befriended the reviewer and biographer Edward Thomas. It was Frost who convinced Thomas to begin writing poetry, and we must be thankful that he did, for Thomas wrote more than 140 poems in the two years after he began, the sublime ‘Adlestrop’ being among them.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)

The happy thing about Williams is that he was a Cubist, Surrealist, Symbolist, Objectivist, Imagist, Lyricist poet, so you can say anything you like about him. His most famous poem is a skinny little thing called ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. Here it is in full:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

As with any poem, there are a range of responses available to this. ‘If you say so, William,’ being just one of them.

EZRA POUND (1885-1972)

Pound was dismissed from his first job as teacher of Romance languages at Wabash College, Indiana, on suspicion of moral turpitude and ‘Bohemian behaviour’ – you can make what you like of that – and his life was one long slide into the unacceptable. He left the USA and went to Italy, where he preached anti-Semitism and became a big hit on Italian radio during the Second World War. After the war he was tried for treason but found unfit to plead, and was confined in a mental institution. Released in 1958, he lived to the ripe old age of 87 and wrote hundreds of ‘Cantos’.

If you favour Pound, try to ‘let the images fall into your memory without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced’ (an observation credited to TS Eliot). If not, take a firm stand and declare that better poets have been locked away in mental institutions with less cause.

Aside from his own poetry, Pound’s greatest contribution to English letters was the editing job he did on the draft of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, reducing the length of the original by over half. It is, you may suggest with impunity, a pity perhaps that TS Eliot did not return the compliment and thin down ‘The Cantos’ a tad.

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)

Ginsberg once described his poetry as ‘Angelical Ravings’. One-time hero of the Beat Generation, there’s hardly a line that doesn’t mention ‘madness’, ‘fix’, ‘narcotic haze’, ‘undressing’, ‘drunk’, etc. If you rave about Ginsberg, you’re likely to be met with blank stares by anyone under 40. If anyone over 40 raves to you about Ginsberg, they’ve probably got a blank stare but for a totally different reason.

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)

Plath wrote most of her poetry at four o’clock in the morning, which may account for the depression that most of it engenders. It is heavy stuff. Don’t read it at four o’clock in the morning. If – no, when, as it will inevitably happen to you if you hang out in poetryland for any length of time – a young person (female, first year at university, reading English) tells you with great enthusiasm that her favourite poet is Sylvia Plath, you must a) give her your sympathy and b) make your excuses and leave. Absolutely do not mention, and definitely do not praise, the British poet Ted Hughes (aka ‘The Devil Incarnate’ to any Plathites) on account of their tempestuous marriage and her subsequent suicide. Of course, marrying a dour Yorkshireman with an enormous chin would drive most sensitive young women to the brink.

DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967)

Parker approached death with delightful wit, as in ‘Résumé’:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

And live she did. It took Dorothy 74 years to drink herself to death, which is slow going for a poet.

Other American poets you should know the names of include Robert Lowell (1917-1977), who wrote lots, mainly about himself (‘confessional poetry’ being a label applied to Lowell’s poetry among others in the 1950s and 1960s), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and John Ashbery (1927-).

Buffs love Ashbery, mainly because he’s so cutesy and ironic that no one knows what on earth he’s going on about. He did say one sensible thing, however, calling Elizabeth Bishop ‘a poet’s poet’s poet’, a comment that speaks of the high regard in which Bishop is held by almost all poets in the universe. The good thing about Bishop is that you can familiarise yourself with her work fairly quickly because a) her poetic output was extremely slender (70 poems published in her lifetime in four slim volumes), b) it is accessible and c) it is simply the greatest poetry written in the twentieth century. If Rossetti, as suggested earlier, could reasonably be thought of as the most unhappy of English poets, Bishop may have some claim for the American title. ‘When you write my epitaph you must say I was the loneliest person that ever lived’, she wrote to Robert Lowell on one occasion – a claim which doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny when you consider that an edition of her collected letters runs to more than 500 pages. But poets – even the best – play fast and loose with the truth, especially if it might get them a bit of sympathy.

SONGWRITERS AS POETS

There’s one way to approach American poetry without having to read any of it (always the preferred way of approaching poetry) and still appear an expert on the subject. Some of the slickest, liveliest and most moving verse from the USA is to be found in the lyrics of songs. The names to remember above all are Lorenz Hart (of Rodgers and Hart), EY Harburg and Ira Gershwin. Books of their work have been published, showing, in the case of Hart especially, a massive, sophisticated and witty output. The great advantage is that here is an immense volume of poetry that you already know. The great difficulty is managing to recite these poems without bursting into song. Claim that the appeal is in the ‘wonderfully rhythmic quality of the verse’ and in ‘the innovative use of rhyme’, e.g., Cole Porter’s:

...flying too high/with some guy/in the sky/is my idea of nothing to do... (‘I Get a Kick Out of You’)

While you love your lover let/blue skies be your coverlet... (‘Mountain Greenery’)

or the verse of Ira Gershwin’s ‘Our Love is Here to Stay’ written to the last song George Gershwin ever wrote and in which Ira is mourning the death of a much-loved brother. Avoid Oscar Hammerstein II.

The other American poets to try, without hurting your brain, are ee cummings (the man with the broken caps key) and Ogden Nash – author of the delightful ditties:

Shake, oh shake the ketchup bottle
None will come, and then a lottle.

And:

The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.

Who ever said that American culture lacks depth?

AND THE REST...

This book purports to help the tyro rub shoulders with the cognoscenti without coming a cropper in the process. It doesn’t set itself up to represent the whole of poetry in English. However, it would leave the bluffer vulnerable and exposed if it did not recommend that he or she familiarise himself or herself somewhat with poetry written in English from countries other than the UK and USA. Any history of poetry – even a rollercoaster such as this one – needs to stop and admire the poetry of great Irishmen such as Yeats and Heaney; nor could it look itself in the mirror if it did not mention the poetry coming out of Australia. Les Murray is probably the most well-known – a large man who writes large poems. There is a lot of Murray (and a lot of it is worth reading) but it is certainly less time-consuming to get to know the work of an Australian rejoicing in the name of Kenneth Adolf Slessor (see ‘The Lakes, the Patriots and the War Poets’), a journalist writing in the 1930s and 1940s whose entire output amounts to about 100 poems. ‘You know, of course, that Murray was highly influenced by Slessor’ is a sure-fire bluff; hardly anyone has heard of Slessor and you can therefore expose your interlocutor’s ignorance of Aussie poetry without mercy.

Airy yet extremely knowing mention must be made also of the poetry of the Caribbean, of which Nobel Prize-winning Derek Walcott is perhaps the foremost exponent. ‘Ah, “Omeros,”’ you may opine, while hoisting a plagiaristic eyebrow, ‘Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries’; and silently thank Robert Graves for the accolade.