I’ve sung the tillage of the earth, the lore of heaven,
Now it’s the turn of wine, and with it the trees that crowd
in woody copse, and the produce of the gradual-growing olive.
Come, Lord of the Wine-press—everything here is lavish
By your largesse, for you the field’s a-flower and laden
With vines of autumn, the vintage foams in vats overflowing—
Come then, Lord of the Wine-press, pull off your boots and paddle
Bare-legged with me and dye your shins purple in the grape juice.
—Virgil, Georgics, II, 1–8
Neither needed men of so excellent parts to have despaired of a fortune which the poet Virgil promised himself (and indeed obtained) who got as much glory of eloquence, wit, and learning in the expressing of the observations of husbandry, as of the heroical acts of Aeneas.
Surely if the purpose be in good earnest not to write at leisure that which men may read at leisure, but really to instruct and suborn action and active life, these Georgics of the mind concerning the husbandry and tillage thereof, are no less worth than the heroical descriptions of Virtue, Duty, and Felicity.
—Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
Almost all the great works of antiquity were done on request. The Georgics are propaganda for the farming of the Roman countryside.
—Pablo Neruda
I’ll spend three thousand years writing it, it’ll be packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology, Hsuan Tsung’s travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, Oceanic ecology and food chains.
—Japhy Ryder, in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, describing a long poem he imagines writing
1. We don’t have a useful vocabulary for poems of information and instruction or the way the formal imagination might work in them, partly because, beginning with the romantics, poets came to feel that poetry had different work to do from the work of the expository, idea-synthesizing intelligence, and they stopped writing didactic or instructive poems. By the time of Baudelaire and Whitman, however, poetry had come to have an oppositional relation to its dominant cultures and could come to seem, among other things, a tradition of alternative information. So Ezra Pound could refer to his Cantos as “the Ezra-versity” and his young friend Louis Zukofsky could have a go at explaining Leninist economics in a long poem called A. So Japhy Ryder—Jack Kerouac’s portrait of the young Gary Snyder—could imagine a poem containing all the practical and spiritual information not on the curriculum of Cold War America in the 1950s, and by the 2010s a book of literary theory called Ecocriticism could have a chapter called “Georgic.”
2. The georgic got its name from Virgil’s Georgics, a set of four long poems in dactylic hexameter about farming.
3. From the introduction to a 2005 translation: “The Georgics is a poem for our time. Though written more than two thousand years ago, it speaks to us just as it spoke to Virgil’s contemporaries. The poem not only gave specific instruction to Italian farmers but also passionately advocated caring without cease for the land and for the crops and animals it sustained. A message inhabits the instructions: only at our gravest peril do we fail to husband the resources on which our lives depend” (Janet Lembke, Virgil’s Georgics, Yale University Press, 2005). See also The Georgics: A Poem of the Land, translated by Kimberly Johnson, Penguin Classics; Georgics, translated by David Ferry; and a recent translation by an Irish poet, Peter Fallon, Georgics.
4. They were translated by John Dryden at the end of the seventeenth century—his versions are still very readable, if you have a taste for their sound—and for a period there was a vogue in English for a poem of instruction and information. It corresponded roughly with the rise of the new science and an appetite for practical knowledge. Readers, at least some readers, seemed to feel that it was more pleasant—it was the age of the rhymed couplet—to get one’s information from poetry than prose. Joseph Addison wrote an essay praising the georgic, and Dryden wrote about the form in his prefaces to the translations. They both said, in effect, that maybe it was time that poetry actually do something of practical use.
5. The first book of practical and theoretical instruction about farming by an American writer was Samuel Deane’s The New-England Farmer, or Georgical Dictionary, and it is possible to think of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as prose in the georgic tradition. In the twentieth century, Wendell Berry’s Farming: A Handbook (1970) is in this tradition, though it is book of poems nearer to ode and satire. Maybe the distinction is that poems in the territory of ode are toward-which poems, ones in search of value or a right relation to values. In the georgic the values are in place.
6. When I was first compiling these notes for the forms class, it didn’t occur to me to include the georgic because it seemed both out of the way and extinct. Three things made the form suddenly interesting to think about. One was the emergence of an environmental poetry and efforts toward a critical ecopoetics, reflected in Janet Lembke’s sense of the contemporaneity of the poem. Another was the emergence of a documentary poetics. And another was the work of my Berkeley colleague Kevis Goodman, a scholar of eighteenth-century poetry, who has had interesting things to say about the genre and why it disappeared in her book, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism.
Her basic argument is that when the romantics redefined the nature of poetry by claiming that it was not a pretty and musical way of dressing up knowledge, but itself a form of knowledge, it made poetry seem the opposite of practical instruction, and the georgic disappeared, or rather the role of information and practical instruction in poetry went underground.
7. Didn’t Ezra Pound describe the Cantos as “sailing after knowledge”? This is me now, not Goodman. Mightn’t it make sense to regard those poems—or parts of them, the stuff on Italian banking, and Chinese history, and the friendship of Adams and Jefferson—as georgics?
8. And thinking about genre, about the elegy and the ode, might it not make sense to say that satire is to the elegy, as georgic is to the ode? If the formal elegy contains an element of social criticism, uses public anger at social evils as a way to find a channel from private grief back to life-giving feeling, perhaps in the work done by the ode to connect its speakers to the creative imagination and notions of the good, there have been poems that work to tell you, in a practical way, how to get there.
9. There aren’t many sharp boundaries in nature, and ecologists have a word to describe the transition zones between grassland and forest, sea and shore. They call them ecotones. And it strikes me that a lot of poems inhabit the ecotone between elegy and satire, ode and georgic. The ecotone between elegy and satire: Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to a Native Place comes to mind, also interestingly, an experiment in mixing verse and prose.
10. Another interest of Goodman’s work is that she writes about what was for Virgil and his readers in the English Augustan age, the problem of language. He was writing in a heroic meter, the meter of the Iliad, which raised the issue of what level of diction one used to write about fertilizing fields and the mechanics of stock-breeding. To use a language of instruction raised the usual formal questions familiar to writers of expository prose about what order to present materials in—Do you take up tillage first? Or the cultivation of fruit trees? And in what order do you present the orchardist’s tasks?—but it also raised questions about what kind of language to use, and, more complexly, what aesthetic energy and what sense of the nature of the world came from the formal effects created by trying to know something. Wasn’t this, more or less, the subject of Wallace Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction?
11. That is, the philosophical poem, if it takes up the question of what the proper work of poetry is, and what kinds of language, what uses of metaphor constitute it, is doing a sort of exploration of poetic husbandry. Interestingly, like Virgil’s poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is written in four parts, each taking up a proposed aspect of its subject.
12. So it seemed suddenly useful to think about the georgic as a literary form. And to think about the ways in which some of the typical formal devices of modernist and postmodernist poetics—collage, fragmentation, braiding, and juxtaposition—have been put to work by contemporary poets doing expository work in verse. This turn in the twentieth century begins with Pound, who evokes Hesiod in Canto 47: “Begin thy plowing / when the Pleiades go to their rest, / Begin thy plowing, / forty days are they under seabord” and initiated The Cantos partly from an instinct (which was his ruin) that a poem ought to do useful work. This sense deepened in the years of the Great Depression and produced the two documentary sets of poems, The Chinese Cantos and The Adams Cantos, both published in 1940. The formal problem of this kind of work is the same in prose or verse, how to organize and present the material. Pound, using the method of the earlier parts of the poem (or earlier poems, depending on how you think of The Cantos), experimented with “piths and gists,” trying to make ideograms from fragmentary quotation. Though the case, as he said in another context, “presents no adjunct to the Muse’s diadem,” it suggested a way for what was to become a documentary poetics. The poet to take it up immediately was Louis Zukofsky, in the first eleven books of A, written mostly in the early 1930s.
It’s interesting that the other books that begin to make a documentary tradition were published in those years, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony in 1934 and Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead in 1938. As the aesthetic of the English georgic was connected to the rise of the empirical sciences as a rational response to a sclerotic social system, the Depression in the United States altered for some poets their sense of the work that poetry might do.
13. Doc-po: The twinned concerns with environmental crisis and evident social injustice has had some similar effect in the last decade. Documentary poetry—common enough to have gotten a nickname—and ecopoetics have both, in a range of ways, taken up the tasks of being an alternative history and a place to present useful ideas. Almost all this work mixes genres: now georgic, now elegiac, now satiric, now lyric. And maybe amounting to a vast ode, as in the case of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General or Ernesto Cardenal’s Homenaje a los indios Americanos, in which he uses Pound’s method to evoke the native peoples of Central America. See also his Zero Hour: Documentary Poems.
14. For our purposes the thing to attend to is what work the shaping imagination is doing in this range of work.
READINGS:
Hesiod: Works and Days
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Virgil: Georgics
Anne Bradstreet: The Quaternions—This is the young Anne Bradstreet, writing sometime before The Tenth Muse was published in 1650: a set of five four-part poems on the seasons, the ages of man, four kinds of monarchy, etc. I don’t know that she thought of them as Virgilian georgics, but they are poems of information and the first American long poems. The four-part structure is like Virgil’s and seems to have conveyed a sense of completeness.
John Dryden: The Georgics 1697—This is his Virgil translation.
I doubt many contemporary poets will want to read through the history of the georgics boom in the English eighteenth century, but here is some of the scholarship on the subject: John Chalker, The English Georgic, 1969; Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830, 2002; Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, 2004. The poems the scholars place in this tradition: John Philips, Cyder, 1708; John Gay, Rural Sports, 1713; Christopher Smart, The Hop-Garden, 1752; John Dyer, The Fleece, 1757; James Grainger, The Sugar Cane, 1764; and Henry Jago, Edge-Hill, 1767. Nearer to a science treatise: Erasmus Darwin, The Love of Plants, 1789, also a poem in four books.
Both Chalker and Goodman trace the history of the landscape poem, a track that might be interesting to poets working in an emerging ecopoetics. Chalker begins with John Denham, Cooper’s Hill, 1642, and Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest, 1713, and proceeds to James Thomson’s The Seasons, 1726–1730, a poem I still find readable, and William Cowper’s The Task, which is perhaps to eighteenth-century poetry what Tristram Shandy is to the eighteenth-century novel. It’s in six books of what Coleridge called “divine chitchat” and invents a conversational blank verse to make a poem of sublimely disorganized meanderings. Goodman ends with Wordsworth’s The Excursion, 1814, a blank verse poem in nine books.
Ezra Pound, The Chinese Cantos, The Adams Cantos; Louis Zukofsky, A 1–11; Charles Reznikoff, Testimony; Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead.
A SAMPLING OF MORE RECENT WORK:
Peter Scott: Coming to Jakarta (1989)
Gary Snyder: Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)
Lisa Robertson: The Weather (2001)
Juliana Spahr: The Connection of Everything with Lungs (2005)
C. D. Wright: One Big Self (2007)
Mark Nowak: Coal Mountain Elementary (2009)
Claudia Rankine: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), and Citizen (2014)
Evelyn Reilly: Styrofoam (2009)
Craig Santos Perez: Guma: from Unincorporated Territory (2014)
And there is work clearly in the lyric tradition, for our purposes the ode or quest tradition, whose work contains georgic and documentary elements: Jorie Graham’s look at the Second World War in Overlord and at the environment in Sea Change; Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy of books on the elements.