The idea for this book germinated more than twenty-five years ago at a particular moment while I was reading the last chapter of The English Elegy by Peter M. Sacks. That book concludes with a discussion of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and a contrast between English and American approaches to the elegy. I paused to think of other American elegies, and there were many. An unwritten book was there, to be sure, but I suspected it would soon be written by someone else. Eventually, Max Cavitch’s exemplary American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman appeared in 2007. But I paused a second time to think about other genres. What about the American ode, for example? I got stuck. Allen Tate’s elusive “Ode to the Confederate Dead” came to mind, and, with a little dredging, I remembered James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and William Vaughn Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” both from a decrepit anthology on the family bookshelf. Both were highly touted by the editor, though I had not seen them reprinted since. I was struck by the scarcity. Why does the ode figure so prominently in British poetry but not American? Why has this tradition appeared so faintly on this side of the Atlantic?
Answers to this question, however, led me to much larger questions – about canonicity, about public poetry, about politics and poetry, about the purposes of writing poetry at all. I began to search out odes written by American poets. They were more plentiful than I thought, particularly in the nineteenth century, but most were short odes or routine public statements, like Lowell’s “Ode Written for the Celebration of the Introduction of the Cochituate Water into the City of Boston” or Sidney Lanier’s “Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.” I likewise found scores of odes to abstractions1 – odes to Happiness, Freedom, and the Fourth of July, birthday and anniversary odes, and so on – which I read and mostly passed over. There were other odes, like Poe’s “The Bells” and Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode to Art,” which pose major issues in American poetics, and I have included a few of these. But the original trio of poems by Lowell, Moody, and Tate led me to consider the genre more narrowly. The weightiest, most fascinating poems that I collected all seemed to gather around crisis moments in American history. American poets turn to the ode for formal statements about the destiny of America itself.
These considerations also led me to identify a second important genre in American poetry, hitherto unrecognized. The American “progress poem,” which I discuss in chapter 2, is a genre that offers a synoptic history of the nation, its past, present, and some prophetic future. Like the odes, these poems deeply involve themselves in questions of history, governance, and national purpose – what Aristotle would call the final cause of America. Recognizing this genre helps clarify a number of nagging questions about the American “epic,” or “long poem.” Thus, while the ode genre remains a principal focus here, it was only a starting point. This book consists of a series of contextualizations of selected odes and progress poems, while the underlying argument addresses these works with what I think is a coherent vision of American poetry at its most nationalistic and self-referential.
While many of these poems have been little studied, I have not pursued what Edward Whitley has called “an abundance model” for my methodology.2 The poems included here, for the most part, have at some time and place in the past been admired and considered important (the outstanding exception being Tuckerman’s “The Cricket”). I have primarily concentrated on occasions when poets have turned to the ode or progress poem genre as an elevated rostrum from which to shape public thinking on matters of national importance. My efforts at historical contextualization have therefore turned this study into a narrative of American poems set into snapshots of those crisis moments, and, as such, this book resonates strongly with recent efforts to break down barriers between literary and political thinking in American studies.
These crisis moments include America’s wars and their rationales, including the pivotal Civil War; issues of African slavery, emancipation, and continued racism ever since; related issues of immigration and its perceived threat to entrenched privilege; American imperialism and its intervention in foreign nations; issues of economic and social justice, equality, the administration of American democracy; and the relation of poetry to public and political discourse. Needless to say, these issues are as heated today as they ever have been. I would also note certain problems that do not arise in these poems as often as they might have: the Native American presence is seriously considered in Freneau but only sporadically thereafter.3 Women’s rights and women’s experience generally are scanted in a largely male-dominated canon. LGBT issues remain in the closet until Ginsberg. American thinking tends to see democracy as simple common sense, but the historical record tells us how extraordinarily difficult it is to achieve in practice, and that difficulty has left its mark in all these poems.
American poets during the colonial period governed themselves by English rules and regularly included odes as well as “progress poems” among their productions. But with nationhood, as everyone knows, resistance to English models arose. The two seminal American poets before Whitman in the 1840s, Emerson and Poe, exerted great effort to elevate the standards of poetry, and in Emerson this takes the form of revolutionary innovation, creating a national literature by breaking ties with the past, with England, and creating a literature to express American freedom of thought. He wrote a number of important poems that in the textbook nomenclature would be classified as “pseudopindaric,” or “Cowleyan,” odes. This was the freest form available to poets before the advent of free verse itself. Emerson championed it for his great prophetic pieces like “Bacchus” and “Merlin,” while in his prose scolding critics who set too much store by the rules. Emerson’s “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing” exhibits his wildest metrical extremes. Poe, on the other hand, attempted to elevate poetic standards by fetishizing craftsmanship, particularly at the auditory level of verbal “music”; yet his lyrics are frequently quite loose, varying stanzaic form within a poem (“Israfel,” “Annabel Lee”); and although he never called any of his pieces an ode, one of his best known works, “The Bells,” is unmistakably pseudopindaric. This same formal freedom turns up in later Americans, not just in Whitman’s free verse, but in writers like Herman Melville in his pseudopindaric Battle Pieces (1866), Emily Dickinson in her irregular quatrains, and even Sidney Lanier in “Corn” and “The Symphony.” These approaches to formal freedom in both Emerson and Poe left important legacies for the American writers that followed them.
Resistance to English taste combined with the inevitable provincial time-lag may have discouraged nineteenth-century American poets from following the recent innovation of the romantics in their so-called “greater romantic lyric.” This pattern, so defined by M.H. Abrams, does not appear to have been recognized or imitated by the Americans. Certain poems of Whitman, like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” might be said to qualify, as Abrams suggests, and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s complex and moving “The Cricket” was rediscovered far too late to enter the historical stream. But that romantic offshoot of the ode did not take root in the lost colonies.
On the other hand, American poets who honoured closer ties with English tradition, and all its consciousness of Latin and Greek precedent, maintained the eighteenth-century neoclassical view of the ode as the appropriate vehicle for occasional poems. In the nineteenth century, as before, such poems were often intended not only to be read but to be recited. Normally classified with lyric poetry, odes of this kind have their roots not in song but in oratory. The “Harvard Commemoration Ode” of James Russell Lowell was written for recitation, as presumably was Poe’s “The Bells.” These pieces have had a troubled reception history. Like Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” they were acclaimed in their day and widely reprinted in anthologies for decades after they appeared. But they are now forgotten. Such poems seriously challenge what survives of the notion of canonicity. I fully endorse Cary Nelson’s insistence that poems once widely read or influential “need to retain an active place in our sense of literary history, whether or not we happen, at present, to judge them of high quality” (51). There is provincialism of time as well as of place. Yet the odes and progress poems studied here are still troubled by the romantic suspicion of occasional and public poetry: it is written to order, say the critics; it does not fully engage the poet’s sensibilities – and so on. But present canonicity is just one aspect of a much larger issue: the purposes of poetry itself.
The poems that follow have, I believe, been written out of a particular passion, the passion not of the poet as individual but of the poet as citizen. The exemplary figure here is of course Whitman: “One’s self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.” This opening inscription of Leaves of Grass, carefully framed in iambic pentameter, is sometimes taken to be an irresolvable contradiction. Classicist W.R. Johnson disagrees. Instead, he finds in Whitman an “audacious reinvention of an archetypal choral voice,” an “extraordinary fusion of solo and choral voices” (Lyric, 182). Just as the idea of lyric in the past two hundred years has “tended to take on the narrow connotations of solo poetry,” so the idea of self has come to mean “only the private individual in his inwardness or in his isolation from, his opposition to, his victimization by, the world outside him” (176). Johnson identifies the Olympian odes of Pindar as the exemplar of this “choral voice” in Greek writing, but – without claiming influence – he hears in Whitman a similar ability to speak for the community as a whole, to speak both as self and citizen. “The prime function of Greek choral poetry was religious and ceremonial” (55), and when Whitman takes the United States as his subject, themselves the greatest poem, his lyric oratory is apt to sound like the most solemn of odes because his subject is the religion of Democracy.
Johnson’s claims, traversing centuries and disparate cultures, may seem grandiose, but they are compatible with the more common and historically plausible precedent for Whitman found in the syntactic versification of the biblical prophets. The prophetic poet assumes the traditional values of the culture and adapts them to current events. This impulse is not unique to Whitman but is shared with numbers of American poets who have turned to the ode to examine the state of the nation. The genre itself signals the importance of the occasion. Such poems are topical, and their thinking may be subtle, necessitating not just factual annotation but a grasp of the complex political and social anxieties in which they were written. They address both the moral judgment behind public decisions and the practical consequences of those decisions. If they do not convey the usual intimate feelings of lyrical poetry, they embody a kind of patriotic feeling, an emotional and intellectual energy envisioning the task proper to the nation, with deepest concern for its wellbeing. For all these reasons, the important poems that I discuss here have often been rejected and set aside by critics and readers. Some, like the Southern writers of the Confederacy, are downgraded for political reasons. Allen Tate’s widely admired “Ode for the Confederate Dead” now teeters at the edge of the canon. But most, I think, have been rejected simply because they do not conform to expectations of poetry’s supposed lyric purpose. Poems like Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” or Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” were acclaimed in their day, when neoclassical standards still lingered, and reprinted in anthologies for decades afterwards. But the passion that they voice is social, not merely personal.
“Ode” is a notoriously slippery term.4 The odes included here are either named as such by their authors or, like Poe’s “The Bells,” observe the conventions of pseudopindaric versification. Within these terms, I have concentrated on poems of considerable weight, not lighter pieces, “Anacreontic” odes, or shorter pieces. Most are public poems and assume a public voice of address – though a few simply toy with or even negate the idea of a public voice (Tate’s “Confederate Dead,” Millay’s “Ode to Silence”). I have passed over multitudes of routine occasional poems. With regret, I have excluded two superlative greater romantic lyrics, E.A. Robinson’s severely stoical “Man against the Sky” and its epicurean counterpart, Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” because their subject matter does not align with the rest of this book. On the other hand, I have included a few examples, like “The Bells” or Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode to Art,” for their bearing on American poetics. The ode may be a subgenre of the lyric category, but it is far from the monological text of Bakhtin’s thinking or the transcendent subjectivity of some theorists. The public voice and topical subject matter of most of these poems invoke an inter-discursive historical narrativity that creates dialogicality and at the same time de-idealizes its lyric purity.5 American poets intervene directly into the ongoing great experiment in democracy as events unfold, or as they become commemorated. There is a substantial heritage of such state-of-the-union poems that have been brushed aside, not just those of Lowell and Moody. My purpose is to reinscribe this heritage. Why are they left unread? Were the poems I had been contemplating rejected because they were bad art? They did not seem so to their contemporaries. My argument does not purport to explain “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” with Joseph Harrington in his provocative essay. This is not a prescriptive demand for poets to become activists or politically engaged. More simply, it examines moments in which poets rise out of their political unconscious and employ their art to enact their citizenship. American poets in every generation have in fact engaged in controversies over slavery, the Mexican War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Spanish-American War, immigration, the Great Depression, two world wars, and so on. Odes are formal position papers. Such poems strike me as “important” – important incontrovertibly for what they said when they said it. And they are supremely important to our understanding of the wider powers of poetry.
Three broad issues impact my narrative. First, the ode has suffered from romantic suspicion of the occasional poem as nothing but insincere ritual, as flat as all those royal birthday odes. The romantic generation in England responded by turning the ode into the solo meditation of the “greater romantic lyric,” though no one called it that until M.H. Abrams invented the term in 1965. English poets continued to write both kinds of ode without distinguishing between them; if Coleridge wrote “Dejection,” he also wrote “France: An Ode.” American poets, however, were slow to recognize the English innovation and continued to use the genre for occasional and political purposes. Even so, as Linda Gregerson says, “American poets have generally been wary of ‘forcing the Muse’ in the service of public occasion” (Ode, 121). Then, circa 1900, even before modernism began its campaign to erase the nineteenth century, American poets began to question the genre. Moody’s friend E.A. Robinson doubted “that anyone in 1900 could be serious in calling a poem an ode” (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 106), while one of Millay’s most fervent admirers complained that the ode was “as definitely out of 1920 fashion as pantalettes” (Atkins, 115). Ironically meanwhile, as academic poets turned away from the genre, or used it as a joke (Donald Justice’s “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy”), outsiders from Mike Gold to Frank O’Hara began picking it up.
The second issue points to deeper concerns about the purposes of poetry itself. Much has now been written about the reduction of all poetry to the state of “lyric.” Michael André Bernstein’s The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (1980), still one of the best books on Pound, begins by framing this question in the broadest sense – the competition among “poetry,” “epic,” and “novel.” Bernstein takes his cue from the Marxist critic György Lukács, who argued that the novel had taken over the function of epic because “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given” (Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 3, my emphasis). Neither Lukács nor Bernstein refers to Bakhtin’s parallel argument that poetry typifies a language of “monoglossia,” while the language of the novel is “heteroglossia,” but the implication is much the same. The modern novel is the genre in which “modernity stands forth over epic’s dead body,”6 and this is because only the novel is capable of dealing with “the extensive totality of life,” the complexities and ambiguities of daily existence, private and public, including one’s public existence as a citizen. Poetry is not.
A number of critics have pursued this allegation backward to its sources, the process conveniently termed the “lyricization” of poetry by Mark Jeffreys and expanded in Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005). In the eighteenth century, poets wrote pastorals, lyrics, satires, songs, epistles, hymns, fictional narratives, histories, epigrams, progress poems, elegies, georgics, ballads, burlesques, essays, odes, and so on. Virginia Jackson defines lyricization as the “historical transformation of many varied verse genres into the single abstraction of what critics now refer to as the post-romantic lyric.”7 This concept is more comprehensive than it appears since it affects not just the criticism of poems but also the conventions of poetry reading as well as the roots of poetic invention itself. “Lyricization” delimited the poetic object and the purpose of the poetic object to that of the anthology lyric, short and self-contained and teachable, a solo utterance, a subjectivity in meditation, overheard.
A pointe d’origin of this idea is impossible to fix, but Poe’s valorization of the short poem certainly holds a crucial position.8 Bernstein historicizes this triumphalist development in ways that would seem familiar to modernists like T.S. Eliot (see “From Poe to Valéry,” 1948) or Allen Tate, one of the prime movers of the neo-aesthetic New Criticism. Like Bernstein, Tate also points to Poe and even the Parnassian art-for-art’s-sake poets of the British fin de siècle as sources for a reshaped relationship between the “poetic artifact” – that is, the perfectly artificed lyric – “and the world of quotidian reality” (see “Our Cousin Mr Poe,” 1949).9 Both then point to Mallarmé as its reductio ad absurdum.10
The process of lyricization is now widely observed, though complex questions of cause and effect remain open. As Mark Jeffreys put it, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the default form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins” (“Ideologies of Lyric,” 200). Form demanded attention over content. It is no coincidence that this process occurred simultaneously with the growth of the concept of “absolute” music and the rise of sophisticated interest in English prosody during the nineteenth century.11 But lyricization in the twentieth century clearly found its home in the New Critical classroom, where lyric poems short enough to teach conveniently were removed by force from their native habitats, made to stand for inspection naked, out of context, with no historical bearings, and spill their stories in their own words with no coaching whatever. Each poem, its author ruthlessly excluded, was nonetheless granted a legal fiction called a “speaker” – a “generic back-formation” from the dramatic monologue.12 And by this uncompromising process, the lyric poem became the way poetry as a whole was known. Or so we are told.
In American poetry, the Mallarméan reductio ad absurdum was attained with Pound’s invention of “imagism,” an aesthetic of rigorous minimalism. But even as Pound advanced imagism and its successor vorticism, he was preparing to inaugurate his lifelong epic project, asking (in a footnote) “whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem.”13 In Mark Jeffreys’s account, “the diverse projects of modernist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist poetics have shared the goal of regaining for poetry the central place that it lost when narrative prose displaced the epic and other narrative forms.” Pound had purified poetry to a single moment of insight, heir to Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” Poe’s “series of lyrics” called The Iliad, Pater’s “fine crystals” found in Wordsworth’s Prelude, Joyce’s “epiphanies.” But was poetry capable of dealing, in Bernstein’s phrase, with “the extensive totality of life” – including socio-political life? As Jeffreys notes, “Most of these recent criticisms of lyric share an expectation that the more lyrical a writer seeks to be, the more that writer will try to exclude history and otherness” (198).
Lyricization, which was re-dialogized in Pound’s Cantos, is likewise complicated by the genre of the ode. While categorized as lyric poems, odes share many attributes of epic, and so they stand apart. They call for a high style – or at least an upper-middle-class style – and they often exhibit ambitions for the sublime. More closely related to oratory than song, they speak aloud. They deal with communal or national subject matter and, therefore, adopt a public, not a private, voice and a public object of address. The same can be said of “progress poems,” which easily slip into quasi-epic narrative as they develop their nationalistic past-present-future exposition. Odes and progress poems, being topical, are anything but self-contained or “autotelic.” Conspicuous exceptions to twentieth-century assumptions about lyric, then, these poems are susceptible to being misunderstood and rejected.
This brings us to a third issue, the modernist aversion to political poetry in America. Here, I believe, we see not an evolving large-scale transatlantic process but an accidental coincidence of circumstances peculiar to America. At the moment when the New Criticism was beginning to vie for dominance, circa 1930, the Great Depression and rising military tensions abroad should have been preparing a ready environment for poetry about public and political topics. It did in England, where W.H. Auden and his circle, or poets like Hugh Mac-Diarmid and Roy Campbell, spoke out. Such writing did occur in America, but it was deflected in a variety of ways. Cary Nelson and Alan Wald and others have traced the struggles of poets on the political left, including black poets like Langston Hughes and any number of proletarian writers. In the context of Jim Crow segregation, conservative resistance to FDR’s New Deal, and moneyed privilege (not everyone was poor during the Depression), political poetry threatened to animate the spectre of race and the bugaboo of socialism. Archibald MacLeish, who began in the New Critical camp, demanded increasingly through the decade that poets address domestic and international crises in their work. But whether these voices were too weak, or simply out-manoeuvred by the rising New Critics working in tandem with right-wing isolationism on the political scene, is difficult to measure. Odes and progress poems were written but failed to leave their mark. At the same time, the New Critics were joined by others who fought to create room for the difficult new modernism by extinguishing the reputations of nineteenth-century writers, with all their moral and social consciousness, and for most of the century they succeeded. Theoretically, nothing in New Criticism discouraged political poetry. But when the Marxists and liberals like MacLeish demanded that poetry be politically engaged, Tate and the New Critics loudly resisted – while continuing to write politically for their own purposes. In practice, any poetry that appeared too partisan, especially on the left, was certain to be pronounced an “artistic failure.”
New Critical lyricization is still a powerful habit even today. Witness Michael C. Cohen amid a sophisticated argument in his introduction to The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015), an innovative study of broadside ballads and other ephemera. After tortuous explanation, Cohen reaches the conclusion that the meanings of such poems “cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone.”14 Cohen is fighting an all-too-familiar demon. The autonomous New Critical lyric – or a simulacrum of it – still haunts academe and must be ritually exorcised.
Since the so-called “hegemony” of New Criticism has faded, critics of American poetry have been able to see it with new eyes. The “archive,” as opposed to the canon, of American poetry now looms larger, more various, less predetermined, than it had before. The great American modernists have not been banished, but they have been obliged to share space with a diversity of peers. Interest has grown in women writers previously ignored. African American writing has now taken its rightful place (though boundaries of disciplinary segregation persist), and other minorities are heard from. There may even be platforms for forgotten proletarians like Lola Ridge or Arturo Giovanitti, or populists like Sandburg or Benét, or provocative women like Genevieve Taggard or Muriel Rukeyser. Similar openness has reignited interest in American poetry of the nineteenth century beyond Whitman and Dickinson.
This book remains a genre study focusing on certain important American odes and progress poems, many of which have attracted little critical attention. Unlike certain recent studies, however, I am interested in presenting the poems themselves. I am not, like Joseph Harrington in Poetry and the Public, “more interested in the history of poetry reading” than in “individual poems or poets” (3). My chapters set out relevant historical context for individual poems, plus close readings – which are not the prerogative of any one critical school but foundational to them all.15 This approach inevitably raises questions of selection and evaluation; but while I admire some poems examined here more than others, my personal taste is not the issue. These poems were written, all of them, to perform particular cultural work that was important in their time and that remains important to our understanding of America as it has developed. Most of these poems address the concept of nationhood within American culture, from the viewpoint of the ardent patriot or the acerbic critic, sometimes in the same person. When Jane Tompkins introduced the suggestive phrase “cultural work” in 1986, she shifted critical attention away from literary merit to the function of literature in its social context, setting questions of “success” or “failure,” so dear to the New Critics, aside. “Tompkins sees literature as part of a cultural conversation about problem solving, a blueprint for survival, agent rather than object of cultural formation” (Morey, Review, 260). In this sense, I do participate in Harrington’s concern with “the social form of the genre of poetry” (Poetry and the Public, 4). This approach breaks down the old disciplinary partition between “American Literature” and “American Studies,” with an assumption that writing, whether prose or verse, does not passively mirror the ideas and attitudes of its culture but actively constructs them.
Recent poets have been far less hesitant to address public themes than they were during the extended debate between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War. Piotr K. Gwiazda, in US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012, argues that “in the era of globalized economy, culture, and increasingly politics, U.S. poets take it upon themselves to perform the role of public intellectuals” (1). This role has long been expected of poets writing in languages other than American English. If the political odes and progress poems of the past have lain unread, as I lament, there is now a critical atmosphere in which they can be re-examined and found meaningful. If the Civil War is still being fought in American politics, we should consider why Lowell or Timrod thought it was worth fighting at the time. If American soldiers are still dying for American imperialist causes in Asia, we should remember Moody’s first “hesitations” of conscience about such causes, and how he risked being fired from his university position for expressing them. If conservative traditions are still so powerful in American governance, we should measure their current manifestations against those of the 1930s or the 1950s and ask what the word “conservative” means.
I conclude with a personal disclosure. I write this affectionate narrative of American patriot poets as an expatriate foreign national. I was born and raised in the United States, in Minneapolis, where I pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes every school day. I received my undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota, where I was privileged to take a course from Allen Tate, who figures prominently in the following pages. In 1966, I left for Canada, finished my graduate work at the University of Toronto, a department then dominated by the Old Historicism, not to mention Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. I took Canadian citizenship in 1973. I can claim to have experienced American identity from both inside and out. This background, I submit, allows me a certain distance from my subject, while my devotion to the welfare of American democracy remains, I hope, self-evident.
In Canada, my professional life has been largely devoted to American literature, particularly the work of Ezra Pound. This focus has kept me in touch with the political turbulence of the mid-twentieth century and issues of international fascism, anti-Semitism, cultural diversity, and economic exploitation. My first attraction to Pound, however, was aesthetic: because of my own background in music, I studied his quest for metrical perfection and the music he actually composed, keeping politics at bay. But I came to realize that my true attraction to The Cantos and other American long poems was their capaciousness, their ability to burst the bounds of “poetry” and engage with history and current events, economics, mythography, farming, and fly fishing – the world at large. My argument here attacks the hegemony of lyric perfection as the sole measure of poetry, not to deny it but to make room for other contingencies of value. Poetic language may detain us with a “consideration of its intriguing, perhaps meaningless symmetries” in a game of “mental solitaire” (to borrow phrases from a recent reviewer), but it can do so much more. To put it another way, it is an injunction for teachers, critics, and poets to acknowledge poetry as a potent force beyond the boundaries of lyric expression. In a previous book, I have much to say about the aesthetics of lyric poetry. When Allen Tate asks querulously, “Who now reads Herrick?” I can still reply in the affirmative.16 It’s not an either/or issue.
As for politics, my childhood began in a family of habituated northern white Republicans, with all the conservative social and racial attitudes of the 1950s. Like many in my generation, I moved to the Democrats as an undergraduate in the 1960s. So I can also claim memories, however dim, of the two major political parties from the inside. Now, as a Canadian, I find myself the beneficiary of my country’s all too slowly evolving socialism, having to resist being smug with American friends. I have seen the future and it works, more or less. My view, in short, is from the left: which in the present-day American tyranny of libertarian selfishness means simply a profound commitment to the pieties of liberal democracy and a belief in the reality of a common weal. But I preserve measured respect for a compassionate and intellectually grounded conservatism, when it can be found. Governments of whatever stripe require an acute loyal opposition. I do not claim objectivity, only an effort at fair mindedness.