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Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision Science in Modernist American Poetry

Barry Ahearn Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision Barry Ahearn Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision

Science in Modernist American Poetry Barry Ahearn Tulane University New Orleans, LA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-36543-1 ISBN 978-3-030-36544-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To the Memory of Hugh and Mary Anne Kenner Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin for permission to republish a portion of “Tennyson and Babbage,” Tennyson Research Bulletin 10:1 (2012), 53–65. Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to republish material from the following works by Ezra Pound. Personae, © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Gaudier-Brzeska, © 1970 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Collected Early Poems, © 1926, 1935, 1954, 1965, 1967, 1976 by The Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. ABC of Reading, © 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Selected Prose 1909–1965, © 1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Unpublished drafts of The Cantos, © 2019 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

vii viii Acknowledgements

Every reasonable effort has been made to secure permission from the estate of Marianne Moore. “Acquainted with the Night,” “West-Running Brook,” “A Roadside Stand,” “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind,” “At Woodward’s Garden,” “Desert Places,” “On Taking from the Top to Broaden the Base,” “Build Soil,” “A Missive Missile,” “A Considerable Speck,” and “In Winter in the Woods Alone” by Robert Frost. From the book The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1934, 1936, 1942, 1956, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. For their assistance I would like to thank the librarians and staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and Elizabeth E. Fuller, librarian at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. I wish to thank John Gery, Donald Pizer, and Zhaoming Qian for reading portions of the manuscript. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their advice on improvements. Finally, my most heartfelt thanks to my wife, Pamela, who has had the grace to put up with this project for far too long. Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 To Be Precise 9

3 Ezra Pound and Error 61

4 Robert Frost and “Something” 141

5 Marianne Moore and Ac-/cident 213

6 Afterword 287

Works Cited 301

Index 317

ix Abbreviations

Works of Ezra Pound ABC ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960 C The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972 Con Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1969 EP/LZ Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987 EPPP Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals. Ed. Lea Baechler; A. Walton Litz; James Longenbach. 11 vols. New York: Garland, 1991 J/M Jefferson and/or Mussolini. New York: Liveright, 1970 K Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970 LE The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954 P Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1990 SP Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973

Works of Robert Frost BW A Boy’s Will. New York: Henry Holt, 1915 CPPP Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995

xi xii Abbreviations

CPRF The Collected Prose of Robert Frost. Ed. Mark Richardson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007 FR A Further Range. New York: Henry Holt, 1936 LRF 1 The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 1, 1886-1920. Ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2014 LRF 2 The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 2, 1920-1928. Ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2016 MI Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt, 1916 NB North of Boston. New York: Henry Holt, 1915 NH New Hampshire. New York: Henry Holt, 1923 NRF The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Ed. Robert Fagen. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2010 WB West-Running Brook. New York: Henry Holt, 1928

Works of Marianne Moore CP The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 1982 Prose Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia Willis. New York: Viking, 1986 SLMM The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge and Cristanne Miller. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is about three poets—Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore—and how they responded to the demand that poetry aspire to scientifc precision. This may seem a topic of minor importance compared to their involvement with such grave matters as politics, economics, literary history, and contemporary culture. But how they handled this demand affected such concerns; they would not have been the same poets without their varying responses to the insistence that poetry be precise. It is important to add that they often found precision shadowed by its opposite—imprecision. And just as Pound, Frost, and Moore handled precision differently, they found varied uses for imprecision. Before the early twentieth century, precision had rarely been associated with poetry. Pound sought to marry them as early as 1910 when he proclaimed in The Spirit of Romance (1910) that “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract fgures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions” (1968, 14). This analogy between poetry and exact mathematics was novel; it had been customary to regard them as barely acquainted. Indeed, poets and novelists sometimes ridiculed science and mathematics. Two centuries earlier, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift had derided the experimental eccentricities of the Royal Society in his description of the grand academy of Lagado. He also satirized the misuse of mathematics in the court of Laputa, where a tailor employs a quadrant, a rule, and compasses to measure Gulliver for a suit of clothes that turns out to be “very ill made.” Between Swift’s day and Pound’s, however,

© The Author(s) 2020 1 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_1 2 B. AHEARN science and mathematics increasingly demonstrated their practical utility. Steamboats freed mariners from dependence on the wind and tide. Samuel F. B. Morse made it possible to communicate instantaneously across vast distances. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had become commonplace to praise science extravagantly. In The Gay Science (1866), Eneas Sweetland Dallas exulted that “In electricity we seem to be hovering on the verge of some grand discovery, and already the electric spark has been trained to feats more marvellous than any recorded of Ariel or Puck. Optics now enable us to discover the composition of the sun, and to detect the presence of metals to the millionth part of a grain. Seven-league boots are clumsy beside a railway; steam-ships make a jest of the fying carpet” (1866, 1: 52). It was not enough for Dallas to boast about the triumphs of science and technology. His disparagement of Ariel, Puck, and the fying carpet implied that the romance of science had eclipsed the fantasies of dramatists, novelists, and poets. Science and mathematics had increasingly become the means by which civilization measured itself and the surrounding universe. This development raised a number of questions. Did the rise of science necessarily mean the devaluing of aesthetics? Where did this leave poets and novelists? Would they have to accept the fact that they were now merely entertainers? Certainly some poets felt threatened. Hart Crane fumed that “Science (ergo all exact knowledge and its instruments of operation) is in perfect antithesis to poetry” (1997, 232). Crane was only the latest in a distinguished line of literati who resented the glorifcation of science and the technological miracles accompanying its seemingly irresistible march. Wordsworth had objected to the intrusion of the railroad into his beloved Lake District, horrifed that its “noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure-hunters” would profane this “temple of Nature, temples built by the Almighty” (1970, 162–163). The malign effects of science and technology were not limited to their depredations in the landscape. Also alarming was the reverence with which the public regarded such progress, and the consequent inattention to issues at the heart of human life. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has one of his characters in The Land of Mist (1926) complain, “We were not put into this planet in order that we should go ffty miles an hour in a motor-car, or cross the Atlantic in an airship, and send messages either with or without wires. These are the mere trimmings and fringes of life. But these men of science have so riveted our attention on these fringes that we forget the central object” (1952, 341). Had science become a pair of blinders 1 INTRODUCTION 3 limiting everyone’s vision? Alfred North Whitehead certainly thought that it powerfully affected humanity: “this quiet growth of science has practically recoloured our mentality” (1925, 3). Whitehead, however, considered this development benefcial. What stance should literature take toward science? Could these competing approaches to reality be reconciled? Should poets and novelists adapt some of the methods of science and mathematics to their art? To be specifc, could precision—a value that had increasingly become one of the defning strengths of the sciences—be transferred to literature? A few years after The Spirit of Romance, when launching Imagisme, Pound insisted that poetry could not be truly modern unless it manifested precision. By invoking precision, he was draping poetry with an honor that the public had long since accorded to science. Pound also naturally associated scientifc and poetic precision with mathematical rigor, since it seemed that numbers were central to both. Yet by appeal- ing to the prestige of science and mathematics, Pound fxed poetry on a foundation rather more wobbly than he realized. When James Clerk Maxwell believed mathematics was “the keystone of professional science” (Brown 2013, 115) he was upholding a tenet that had a long and infuential history. The progress of science has been clearly indebted to mathematics. But science has not always been considered as rigorous and exact as mathematical formulae and functions. In truth, the assumption that science advances by always cleaving to mathematical precision is a common misunderstanding. As Stephen Weinberg admits, the infuence of mathematics on science starting in the sixteenth century persuaded many that science was “the search for mathematically expressed impersonal laws that allow precise predictions of a wide range of phenomena” (2015, 146). Yet, at the same time, there were important instances where mathematical imprecision proved necessary for science to advance. Citing Galileo’s experiments with falling bodies, Weinberg notes, “Galileo demonstrates his understanding of the need for scientists to live with approximations, running counter to the Greek emphasis on precise statements based on rigorous mathematics” (190). In the case of Galileo, and in other cases, scientists who demanded scrupulous mathematical proof exactly ftting a hypothesis became dissatis- fed. Indeed, Weinberg goes on to indicate that physical reality may forever elude precise mathematics. “Like me, most physicists today are resigned to the fact that we will always have to wonder why our deepest theories are not something different” (247). No matter how fnely 4 B. AHEARN we tune our mathematics, at some point physical reality deviates from it. Our notion of precision seems always one step behind the behavior of matter. To put it another way, scientifc precision continually discovers that it has been embarrassingly imprecise. As we shall see, Pound’s investment in poetic precision keeps running up against a similarly nag- ging fuzziness. Precision often failed to live up to the hopes he had for it. A number of studies have addressed the question of how science, mathematics, and technology infuenced Modernist poetry. One of the best of these, Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987) has nothing to say about Frost or Moore. They seem unrelated to what she calls “gear and girder technology.” She does, however, demonstrate how the mantra of “effciency” appealed to quite a few American artists and writers, including Pound. In her discussion of Pound, she teases out his emphasis on effciency in prose and poetry but does not mention his repeated stress on precision. Another study, Lisa M. Steinman’s Made in America: Science, Technology and American Modernist Poets (1987) covers much of the same territory as Tichi’s book, although she devotes a whole chapter to Moore. Steinman follows Tichi, however, in ignoring Frost and has little to say about Pound. Steinman mentions “precision” a few times, but in reference to a mode of painting, American Precisionism, which had its heyday in the Twenties and Thirties. This study seeks to remedy the neglect of “precision.” It is an odd neglect, since “precision” has enjoyed a much longer life than “effciency” in discussions about poetry. Critics have treated precision as a simple concept that everyone understands, whereas “effciency” has a more complex and broad application. Yet “precision” has a history that warrants investigation, as we shall see in the next chapter. It is also important to note that although “effciency” and “precision” have proven useful as part of the vocabulary of science and engineering, their meanings are not identical. We should not confuse the two. “Effcient” and “effciency” come from the Latin ex + facere, and therefore imply making or causation. The words “effcient” and “effciency” carry with them the connotation of an operation or work that has been, is, or will be carried out. They pertain to action. “Precise” and “precision,” however, come from the Latin praecīsiō, which the NOED defnes as an “act of cutting off, act of breaking off (in speech).” “Precise” and “precision” are etymologically related to such words as scissors, incision, and caesura. They connote trimming, reduction, and marking a break or boundary. 1 INTRODUCTION 5

To put it another way, “precise” and “precision” indicate reduction of the superfuous or unnecessary. Furthermore, insofar as they set limits, they suggest a curb on action. Thus “effciency” and “precision” carry with them traces of opposing intentions.1 Chapter 2, “To Be Precise,” traces the rising prestige of science and technology since the seventeenth century. The public became accustomed to thinking of science, mathematics, and engineering as essential to material progress. Even as factories and mills belched pollution, the public at large still expected that science would ultimately usher in a clean, bright, and orderly world. Science could ameliorate any of the unfortunate consequences of its triumphs. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, essayists, novelists, and poets took note of this public faith. They were keenly aware of the pressure to infuse in their works some of the same virtues that were claimed for science and technology. In particular, the chapter discusses how the alleged virtue of mathematical and scientifc precision presents itself in the work of Poe, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, and, ultimately, in Pound’s early poetry and criticism. Chapter 3, “Ezra Pound and Error,” takes as its point of departure Pound’s desire for precision that will enable him to fnely discriminate good from evil, truth from error. Pound insists, however, that only someone with visionary intelligence can make such judgments. This insistence creates a problem. Scientifc precision ultimately depends upon a communal consensus. Arguments about what does or does not constitute precision are socially adjudicated. Pound preferred to make individual genius the arbiter of precision. As Philip Kuberski put it, “And despite his opposition to sentimental conceptions of the poet popularized by the romantics, Pound attempted to preserve the poet’s authority” (1992, 4).2 The more Pound emphasizes the visionary power of the individual genius, the more precision is called into question. And the more precision is called into question the greater the potential for error. Pound was haunted by what he glimpsed on the other side of lines of demarcation—of precision—whether it be the missing words that have been cut off in the poem by Sappho that he translates in “Papyrus,” the history that has been lost to living memory, or what lies just over the border of commonplace experience in the realm of the supernatural. Anyone committed to the pursuit of such elusive phenomena will inevitably fall into error, although it takes courage—some would (and did) say foolhardiness—to make the effort. We also fnd in 6 B. AHEARN

Pound a paradoxical blend of intentions. On the one hand, his desire for precision emphasizes a reduction to essentials (as in his admonition to “cut the cackle” [Con 77], his concentration on gists and piths, and his advice to W. S. Merwin to “Read seeds not twigs” [2002, 10]).3 On the other hand, he promoted effciency, with its emphasis on production (as when he emphasizes converting ideas into action, or when we consider the sheer volume of words he produced in his lifetime). Someone committed simultaneously to these contrasting virtues could not avoid falling into occasional error. At times such error was trivial; on other occasions it proved nearly fatal. Chapter 4, “Robert Frost and ‘Something,’” begins by noting that a quite imprecise concept, exemplifed by the word “something,” occurs frequently in his poetry. Where Pound would strenuously object to such imprecision, however, Frost deems it a necessary part of the human condition. Frost treats it as a base upon which we can raise simple or elaborate structures. “Something” comes to represent a variety of phenomena that resist initial clarifcation. It can point to preconscious or unconscious mental currents which, in the course of a poem, become subject to fully conscious discovery and manipulation. On the level of vocabulary, it can take the shape of a cliché or well-worn phrasing that eventually is replaced or modifed by unconventional language. Frost’s early seizing upon the “sound of sense,” in which words are unclear while sound stands out, is another example of how the inchoate or inarticulate becomes a springboard for the speaker’s transition to a more precise statement. We should note, however, that although Frost relished the triumph of imposing form on what was chaotic or insuffciently articulated, he was wary of humanity’s propensity to carry precision too far. Thus, in “Education by Poetry,” he questions the dependence of science on number, and argues that science and the technologies produced by science will always be necessarily limited by that dependence. Frost goes even farther, doubting the ability of other disciplines to grasp their subjects with precision. For example, he suggests that historical research becomes more and more hazy as it delves deeper into humanity’s past. Chapter 5, “Marianne Moore and ‘Ac-/cident’” examines her attitude toward precision by frst observing that she and her critics often use the term. Sometimes Moore means by “precision” a careful deployment of words that promote accuracy. So far so good. This use of precision we recognize. But since “precision” is commonly linked to such qualities as 1 INTRODUCTION 7 accuracy, effciency, economy, and utility, it is rather surprising to fnd that “precision” in Moore’s art often leads to contradiction, ambiguity, obfuscation, and abrupt arrival at an impasse. Precision, in short, in Moore’s hands, can become an instrument for concealment rather than clarity. Concealment is necessary because, as she elsewhere indicates, the virtue of restraint is necessary when faced with the temptation to arrive at a quick or facile answer. This cautionary restraint partly arises from Moore’s religious faith, which, as one commentator notes, is informed by “humility and self-criticism arising out of the awareness of justifca- tion by faith alone, hatred of egocentricity and ‘highbrowism’ by artists, [and] reticence in approaching the mysteries of faith which is part of the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom” (Jenkins 1984, 35). Major studies of Moore often focus on the disruptive strategies in her poetry: pointed questioning, certainties turned into ambiguities, ambivalence or outright contradiction, aversion to dogma and monolithic ideology, objection to false objectivity, satire, an appreciation of imper- fection, and mistrust of neatness and closure. Frequently these qualities have been treated as instruments Moore uses to subvert cultural practices and institutions of which she disapproves, such as patriarchy, jin- goism, and social prejudice. Critics tend to agree that her targets are forms of oppression. What is generally left out of the discussion—with rare exceptions—is the role her religious faith plays as a motivating force. Most often, critics avoid discussing her Presbyterian background. On other occasions they acknowledge it but dismiss it as irrelevant. It has been left to a few authors to suggest her religion merits serious consideration. But she was possessed of a religious humility as well as a con- current skepticism about human ambition. Her work reveals a carefully crafted imprecision that Moore employs to indicate how frequently our uses of precision are more limited and more erroneous than we commonly believe. Finally, Chapter 6: Afterword explains why British poets who were contemporary with Pound, Frost, and Moore are absent from the discussion. To put it simply, American poets were more inclined to respond collectively to the demand for precision. British poets, however, maintained a robust individuality. Moreover, they looked askance at what seemed to them a foreign preoccupation. “Precision” they associated with Imagism, a movement the British considered an American importation. 8 B. AHEARN

Notes 1. Although Suzanne Raitt believes that Pound equates precision with effciency, she sees that in H. D.’s “Hermes of the Ways,” “elaboration, not economy was the rule” (2006, 98). She adds, “Even images turn out to need a narrative and a context, however minimal” (98). In short, when Raitt examines Imagist poems, she discerns that precision (cutting out the inessential) and effciency (saying what needs to be said) are not the same. 2. w hile I agree with Kuberski’s contention that Pound sought to unite the powers of nature with the precision of language, my approach focuses more on Pound’s investment in the human body as the instrument by which such a union might be effected. 3. In 1938, Pound published a signifcantly brief note, “Condensare.” In its entirety it reads, “If T. E. Hulme’s latest editor hasn’t quoted it I should like to conserve his ‘All a man ever thought would go onto a half sheet of notepaper. The rest is application and elaboration’” (EPPP, 7: 298). CHAPTER 2

To Be Precise

The divine modes are unattainable in their precision. Nevertheless we make conjectures about them, some more obscure, some more clear.1 —Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) Et puis, l’Art doit s’élever au-dessus des affections personnelles et des susceptibilités nerveuses! Il est temps de lui donner, par une méthode impitoyable, la précision des sciences physiques!2—Gustave Flaubert (1857)

1 in the Gloom In order to provide historical context for the importance of mathematics, science, and precision with respect to poetry, we shall frst consider some earlier instances in which science and literature came into contact. One such series of instances is the conjunction of the arts with the frequently hazy atmosphere of London. On the sunny morning of 31 July 1802 the Dover coach departs from London and rumbles over Westminster Bridge. Or it may have rum- bled. Perhaps “clatters” might be the right word. Or, heavily laden, did it slowly “creak”? Or briskly “rattle”? We cannot tell, because two of the coach’s occupants, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, were intent solely on what they could see. Dorothy recorded in her journal that it “was a beautiful morning. The City, St pauls, [sic] with the River & a multitude of little Boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they

© The Author(s) 2020 9 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_2 10 B. AHEARN were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand Spectacles” (2002, 123). William would later compose his famous sonnet about the scene, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” in which he marvels at the city being “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.” Contemporary readers would have shared his joy. For generations London without smoke had been a rare sight. The smoke came from coal. In the seventeenth century, the cost of wood in London rose to such an extent that coal became the cheaper fuel. Increased consumption of coal, however, led to air pollution. The problem moved John Evelyn to suggest remedies in his Fumifugium or, The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661). Unfortunately, Evelyn’s suggested cure—that the city’s “Brewers, Diers, Lime-burners, Salt and Sope-boylers” be moved fve or six miles down- river—was impractical (1995, 138). The population of London continued to increase and the burning of coal kept pace. Poets were not as quick as prose writers, such as Evelyn, to complain about London’s smoky air. Eighteenth-century poets found much to deplore about the city, as Swift does in his “Description of a City Shower” (1710) and Johnson does in “London” (1738), but they did not condemn the air they breathed.3 Noise, flth, footpads: these and other urban discomforts and dangers were commonplace, but in poems about London the sun seemed to shine without being veiled by noxious vapors. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, poets begin to record their dismay at the cloud hovering over and around the city.4 We fnd Mary Robinson, in her “London’s Summer Morning” (1800) asking “Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds / Of Summer’s Morning, in the sultry smoke / Of noisy London?” (2009, 2: 117).5 Robinson inaugurates a century of poems and tales about a London enveloped by fog and smoke. A few years later, when Byron’s Don Juan arrives in London, he sees “A mighty mass of brick and smoke, and shipping, / Dirty and dusky….” George Eliot’s “In a London Drawing Room” (1865) begins by peering outside the drawing room and noting, “The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke” (2005, 2: 91). By 1915, in The Soul of London, Ford Madox Ford suggested that travelers would know when they were entering the bounds of London by observing “where tree trunks commence to be black” (1915, 36). 2 TO BE PRECISE 11

The smoke from domestic, commercial, and industrial establishments mixed with Thames valley fog to enhance its density. A Londoner recalled that in the 1870s, “Fogs in those days were far worse than the mild affairs we have to-day—far blacker and more solid” (Hughes 1977, 18). In 1913, the year in which Ezra Pound urged clarity and precision in verse, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s novel, The Lodger, begins by conjuring up the “fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road.”6 Such details were, of course, intended not only to delineate the local scene but also to suggest lurking evil, since the lodger in question turned out to be cast in the same mold as Jack the Ripper. In another novel of the same year, Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, a deadly menace from the East also loomed among “the smoke-laden vapours of the Lower Thames” (2012, 226). Modernity was often murky, literally, and morally.7 But much more alarming possibilities lurked in the fog. Late in the century, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine warned that the people of London were in danger of asphyxiation. He sketched a frightening scenario of what might happen should atmospheric conditions permit.

The products of combustion of coal comprise also sulphurous acid and smoke, or soot—the colouring ingredients of fog—and other compounds which are exceedingly deleterious and unpleasant, but carbonic acid is the really dangerous ingredient of fogs, owing to its much greater abundance. We are so much habituated to trust Nature, that is to say, to the wind, for the ventilation of London that it may seem hardly credible, although it is a well authenticated fact, that if that natural ventilation should, under any circumstances, be suspended pending the continuance of a bad fog, that is to say, if there should be a ‘dead calm,’ the whole population might be poisoned by the carbonic acid with which the air would in that space of time be saturated. (Ross 1893, 232)

His solution to the potential catastrophe was simple; city offcials should install propellers at numerous locations. In the event of the dreaded “dead calm” they would be activated, taking the place of nature’s winds. Engineering science offered the solution to the problem that technological progress in the mining, transporting, and burning of coal had produced. 12 B. AHEARN

We have grown accustomed to this familiar story: The collateral problems that arise in the wake of scientifc advances can (or should be) alle- viated by scientifc remedies. So thought Marianne Moore’s father, who sought to perfect a smokeless furnace. According to family legend, the fact that he fell short of his aim contributed to his mental deterioration.8 He ended his days in an insane asylum. A faint glimmer of his ambition is refected in her 1919 poem, “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” where she imagines “when Adam / was alone; when there was no smoke and color was / fne …” (CPMM, 41). There is, of course, one form of smokeless combustion. Robert Frost concludes “The Wood-Pile” by noting its “slow smokeless burning of decay.” But it produces no useful heat; a smokeless civilization is as remote as Eden. Of the three poets in this study, the one who spent most time in London was Pound. Yet his early poems make no mention of smoke and fog. Instead, his eye often fxes itself on classical or medieval landscapes, which are often sunny. Even when darkness enters these poems, it is a natural darkness not caused by billowing smoke. In his early career, Pound seemed determined to ignore London’s brew of fog and smoke. Later, however, we fnd in The Cantos varieties of darkness, including a man-made darkness both physical and moral. The darkness lowering over London spread elsewhere; a black pall of smoke descended on other cities. In The Two Paths (1859), John Ruskin recalled the scene that met his eyes when he strolled in the outskirts of “one of our large manufacturing towns.” He came upon an abandoned cottage.

There, uninhabited for many and many a year, it had been left in unre- garded havoc of ruin; the garden-gate still swung loose to its latch; the garden, blighted utterly into a feld of ashes, not even a weed taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents; the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by, black as ebony and thick with curdling scum; the bank above it trodden into unctuous, sooty slime; far in front of it, between it and the old hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over a waste of grassless felds, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but by slabs of square stone, like gravestones, riveted together with iron. (1903–1912, 16: 339) 2 TO BE PRECISE 13

For Ruskin, the triumphs of unfettered industry entailed the strangula- tion of nature. What followed was the inevitable death of all that made life worthwhile. At this point in his career, Ruskin, deploring the urban landscape, at least left room for hope that rural England could still survive and nourish the human spirit. Later, however, Ruskin lamented in “The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884) that the whole atmosphere in Britain had gradually become afficted with a “plague-wind” during the last decade. And not only was Britain oppressed; “its range of power extends from the North of England to Sicily” (1903–1912, 34: 32). Furthermore, “It is a wind of darkness,–all the former conditions of tormenting winds, whether from the north or east, were more or less capable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady and bright sunlight; but whenever, and wherever the plague-wind blows, be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly” (34: 33–34).9 Thus humanity sinned against what the frst chapter of Genesis stipulated as the fundamental divine creation—light.10 Ruskin’s observations of the plague-wind may be charitably ascribed to incipient insanity, but he was not alone in his discovery of encroaching darkness. One need only recall the most famous nineteenth-century image of its descent over London, the Thames estuary, and the world at the close of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). It is not hard to fnd suggestions in nineteenth-century literature that the planet was growing more somber imaginatively, morally, and sometimes literally. When Matthew Arnold surveyed the view along Dover Beach in 1867, he framed his poem with references to night. The last word of the frst line is “to-night,” and the last word of the poem is “night.” In this literal, intellectual, and moral darkness the exceptions to obscurity are the moon and, “on the French coast, the light [that] / Gleams, and is gone.” The nature of that distant light is not altogether clear. Could it be a momentary shaft of moonlight? Or does it emanate from a lighthouse?11 One critic assures us that the poem refers to a lighthouse. “Lines 1 through 5 present a beautiful sight. The predominant tone is one of serenity. Even the fashing beam from the lighthouse on the French coast and the chalk cliffs are here emblems of the predominant tone. We may take it that the light fashes periodically as it turns toward England. The recurrence gives an added sense of security in that it is predictable and therefore something to be counted on. And since it is there anyway for safety, it symbolizes predictable safety. It is also a light in darkness, a conventional symbol of faith and security” (Fain 1984, 41).12 Perhaps so, 14 B. AHEARN but the poem’s comment that this gleam is momentary and “gone,” and that it does not return, tends to chill notions about security and safety. One could read the evanescence of the gleam as the poem’s dismissal of lighthouses and the assumptions about science, engineering, and technological progress associated with them. At the least, Arnold’s poem should be read in the context of Victorian optimism about science, engineering, and the illumination—literal as well as symbolic—emanating from them.

2 from the Lighthouse In the deepening twilight, as the long frst day of To the Lighthouse draws to a close, Mrs. Ramsay fnishes reading a fairy tale to her son, James. “And there,” she says, “they are living still at this very time” (Woolf 1991, 70). As she concludes, however, she notices in his eyes the refection of “something wondering, pale,” and turns to see lighthouse beams “coming regularly across the waves, frst two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke” (70). Mrs. Ramsay, suddenly reminded of James’s desire to visit the lighthouse the next day, and also remembering her husband’s bluntly stated conviction that tomorrow’s weather will prevent the excursion, is certain that James will remember this disappointment “all his life.” Yet more is at stake in this scene than a child’s lingering disappointment. The juxtaposition of the fairy tale with the lighthouse suggests a latent confict. On the one hand we have the claims of imaginative play exemplifed in fction. On the other hand looms the “real world” of indisputable fact, a world measured with logical and mathematical tools as precise as the pulsating lantern of a lighthouse. It is this world that Mrs. Ramsay sees supplanting “the interest of the story” in James’s eyes and offering a competing narrative that troubles the communion of mother with son. To the Lighthouse subtly recalls a legacy of admiration for lighthouses—and the science that enabled their construction—that fourished in the nineteenth century. In 1844, for example, one enthusiast proclaimed, “There is perhaps nothing better calculated to impress us with the skill and ingenuity of man, and the power which scientifc knowledge imparts, than the sight of one of the beautiful Lighthouses of modern times” (Smeaton 1844, 1). By 1927 other technological marvels had replaced the lighthouse as icons of scientifc progress: the locomotive, the dynamo, the airplane. But in To the Lighthouse it still retains an association with scientifc prowess and the ability of science to 2 TO BE PRECISE 15 pierce the darkness. That illuminating power is of course associated with Mr. Ramsay. Although he decrees the initial expedition to the lighthouse to be impossible, years later he initiates, organizes, and leads the voyage there. Other men in the novel, friends, and relations of Mr. Ramsay, are also linked with science and the mathematics that underpins science. His son, Andrew Ramsay, a victim of the Great War, “should have been a great mathematician” (221). When Mr. Bankes happily notices Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, it “had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientifc problem” (54). The fondness with which he gazes upon the scene, thinks Lily Briscoe, is “like the love mathematicians bear their symbols” (54). The eagerness with which James looks toward the lighthouse—it makes him “gaze and marvel”— hints that he may eventually fall into line with those committed to the world of science, mathematics, and Gradgrindian fact.13 There are many categories visible in To the Lighthouse, categories often defned in terms of opposition: male/female, science/art, stability/fux, and so on. The boundaries separating such categories, however, prove to be permeable. The hardheaded Mr. Ramsay has a taste for the works of Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson and Cowper, authors who seem to have no bearing on his effort to reach beyond Q to R. So we should not be surprised by a passage in which Mrs. Ramsay, having just put James to bed, makes the Lighthouse her own.

Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw, and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. (71–72)

Lighthouses around the coast of the United Kingdom were each distinguished by a unique pattern of pulsations. In the 1850s, Charles Babbage had proposed a system of “occulting lights” so that mariners would not “mistake any casual light on shore, or sea, for a lighthouse” and could quickly determine which lighthouse had come into view (1989, 5: 16).14 Looking at the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay sees a precise pattern of blinking light, a testament to the logical discrimination upheld 16 B. AHEARN by Babbage, Mr. Ramsay, and Charles Tansley. Yet she imaginatively knits the fnal pulsation into her most intimate being. In that instant the novel dramatizes the brief reconciliation of Mrs. Ramsay’s private inner expanse with mathematics and science. It seems there are moments, at least, in which incompatible spheres can merge. Criticism of To the Lighthouse sometimes mentions that the setting of the novel was partly based on Talland House in the town of St. Ives. There, on the coast of Cornwall, the Stephens family spent summers when Virginia was a child. There too the family could look out at Godrevy lighthouse. In September of 1892 Virginia even visited it. The Ramsay family’s holiday home stands much farther north, on the Isle of Skye. Setting the household on an island helps to underscore one of the novel’s themes, that of human isolation. The Scottish coast, moreover, abounds in lighthouses. The author of Smeaton and Lighthouses (1844) described them in sublime accents: “Rising, it may be, from the point of a jutting rock amidst the dashing and roaring of the breakers, it is exposed to the utmost fury of the storm: graceful in its proportions, and uniting the elements of security and beauty, it resists the terrifc assaults of the winds and waves, and bears aloft to the help of the tempest-tossed mariner, the warning light that bids him shun the rocky shore” (Smeaton 1844, 1). This Victorian paean to lighthouses and the triumph of science over nature fnds, however, a somber echo in To the Lighthouse. As Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam sail to the lighthouse, old Macalister tells them about the sailors who drowned in the bay during “the great storm at Christmas” (186). For some mariners, the lighthouse proved insuffcient. The lighthouse therefore appealed to Woolf as a symbol still scintillating with traces of its prestige as an exemplary scientifc achievement. Yet the lighthouse and the science it represents have limitations, as the doomed sailors unhappily discovered. Woolf implies that too zealous a devotion to science and mathematics ignores the degree to which they sometimes fail us. The same excessive reliance may affect artists who commit themselves solely to their vocation. As the years pass, we occasionally see Lily Briscoe at work on her depiction of a segment of the Ramsay house and yard. Her choice of subject is partly a tribute to Mrs. Ramsay, but Lily seems unaware of the way in which Mrs. Ramsay had subsumed its last, long fash of light. There is no place for the lighthouse in her landscape. Other painters would have found it an attractive subject. Even the author of Smeaton and Lighthouses notes the “beauty” of “graceful” lighthouses, a virtue not lost on generations of artists who found them attractive 2 TO BE PRECISE 17 subjects, among them such masters as J. M. W. Turner (The Bell Rock Lighthouse [1819], Winslow Homer (Gloucester Harbour and Ten Pound Island [1880]), and Edward Hopper (Lighthouse Hill [1927]). Lighthouses symbolized scientifc endeavor and achievement, but they also exemplifed aesthetic glamor. Lighthouses thus served a double function. They represented both science and art, both masculine and feminine. This dual aspect makes it especially suitable for To the Lighthouse, because the novel frequently treats received notions (the lighthouse exemplifying the triumph of masculine science) as fabrications that can be reconceived (the lighthouse as an object whose light can be appropriated by Mrs. Ramsay). Both Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay can use the lighthouse for their own purposes. Such acts of reconciliation happen often in the novel. We fnd, for example, that it is not only men who are concerned with scientifc exactness and precise timing. Mrs. Ramsay presides over a dinner, since domestic affairs fall within her authority. Her sense of the appropriate management of the dinner requires as much coordination as might be found in a feat of engineering. “Everything depended upon things being served up the precise moment they were ready” (91). Mrs. Ramsay’s anxiety about precision at the table and the success with which she carries off the dinner puts the lie to Mr. Ramsay’s later exasperation with “the vagueness of their [women’s] minds” (190). It also suggests why the precision of the lighthouse’s patterned lights can appeal to Mrs. Ramsay. Thus the novel considers the disparity between male and female, science and art, logical rigor and imaginative play, mathematics and the dining table but also offers a tentative compromise. In the novel’s fnal pages, Lily Briscoe, painter, and Mr. Carmichael, poet, are intensely interested in the journey of Mr. Ramsey and his children to the lighthouse. Although their imaginative accompaniment is one-sided (Mr. Ramsey, James and Cam do not think about Lily or Mr. Carmichael), the effort and accomplishment of their sympathetic participation bridges a variety of divisions and seems required for Lily to fnally achieve her vision. The degree to which the novel notes the rift between the arts and the sciences, and the degree to which it wants to heal that divide, testifes to several centuries of uneasy contention. We understand why young James Ramsay would be cutting out pictures of machinery on the frst page of the novel, and why these pictures suggest the benignly helpful nature of technology. Science has become synonymous with progress. Furthermore, the adults in the novel would agree that musing over 18 B. AHEARN machinery would be unsuitable for James’s sister, Cam. Not only was there a growing gap between the arts and the sciences, but it was also a gendered one. Charles Tansley, the primary spokesman for a gender division in which men are responsible for the fnest achievements of civilization, complains, “It was the women’s fault. Women made civilization impossible with all their ‘charm,’ all their silliness” (98). The novel has already called into question this assessment of what constitutes an achieved civilization when Mrs. Ramsay’s walk into the village brings into view the circus advertisement being posted. “It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that—his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago” (12). Her remark reminds us of several matters. It recalls the pictures James was cutting out, deceptively innocuous representations of machines. What she sees also foreshadows common sights a few years hence, when crippled veterans of the Great War came home, victims of such technological innovations as tracer bullets, famethrowers, and poison gas. In short, To the Lighthouse proves itself constantly aware of a variety of cultural divisions, not the least of which is that between science and art. One of Woolf’s ambitions in the novel is to heal divisions, even if only temporarily. Her desire for reconciliations in To the Lighthouse sometimes posits the union of the arts and the sciences. A few readers respond to that desire by seeing Lily’s fnal line on her canvas as a representation of the Lighthouse.15 Perhaps that interpretation of the concluding line tells us as much or more about our anxieties regarding the rift between science and the arts as it does about Woolf’s. (One could also see the line as a counterpart to the “long steady stroke” of light that Mrs. Ramsay had made her own.) At any rate, the demand felt in To the Lighthouse for the melding of science and art testifes to a deep and widespread cultural unease. One could write a book, or books, about the phenomenon, and such books have been written, but my purpose here is limited to a few instances which illustrate how some authors depicted the problem. Woolf was not the only author troubled by the rift between the arts and the sciences. A century before To the Lighthouse we fnd another complicated instance of an author attentive to this division. The papers found among Poe’s effects included a short, untitled fragment of prose fction. It may have been the beginning of a short story or a novel. In his Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909), George E. Woodberry gave it a title: “The Lighthouse.” The tale’s setting is a lighthouse far removed from 2 TO BE PRECISE 19 any port and surrounded by the ocean as far as the eye can see. The unnamed narrator, who calls himself a “noble of the realm,” has volun- tarily taken up his post. His comments about his surroundings, however, have nothing to do with political or social stratifcation. His account takes the form of a journal, beginning “Jan 1 -- 1796.” Thus his record begins with numbers. Further numbers pepper his narrative. On his frst day, he remarks that the distance from his present location to Norland “can hardly be more than 190 or 200 miles” (Poe 1984, 924). As he surveys his compact domain he notes that the lighthouse rises 160 feet, but then adds that the interior height is 180 feet. He assures himself that he need not worry about the assault of storms because the wall of the lighthouse, at “50 feet from high-water mark, is four feet thick, if one inch” (925). The last entry in the journal is simply a date: “Jan. 4.” Few of Poe’s tales are so particular about dates; we shall come back to this matter of numbers and dates. Certain details about Poe’s lighthouse show that he took pains to avoid depicting a real lighthouse. First, this lighthouse does not follow what had long been standard practice regarding their staffng. Lighthouses were not tended by solitary individuals, much less nobil- ity. Crews consisted of at least two persons. There were good reasons for this. Should one of the tenders fall gravely ill or suffer a disabling injury, the other could carry on the work of keeping the lighthouse func- tioning. Yet the narrator tells us that in this lighthouse, “one man has attended it before now—and got on quite as well as the three that are usually put in.” The narrator himself partly recognizes that he should have a companion; he notes on his frst day, “I may get sick, or worse.” The supervisors of Poe’s lighthouse—the “Consistory”—seem unable to make up their minds about how many men are needed, even though common sense and experience dictated multiple tenders. Second, lighthouses were located where they were needed, typically near harbors or heavily frequented shipping channels. But Poe drops his lighthouse in an extravagantly remote spot. As we have seen, the narrator remarks that the ship that carried him to the lighthouse has a voyage of “190 or 200 miles” on its return journey. Why would anyone construct a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere? Third, the content of the journal bears little resemblance to the mundane and practical logging of daily chores required of lighthouse keepers. In 1849, the same year that Poe wrote “The Lighthouse,” Alan Stevenson (Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncle) drew up a list of “Instructions for the Lightkeepers of the Northern 20 B. AHEARN

Lighthouses” of Scotland. The twelfth item on the list specifes the need for documentation: “The Lightkeeper shall keep a daily Journal of the quantity of Oil expended, the routine of their duty, and the state of the Weather, embodying any other remarks that may occur. These shall be written in the Journal-Books, to be kept at each Station for the purpose, at the periods of the day when they occur, as they must on no account be trusted to memory” (1850, 196). Ignoring the wisdom of such regulations, the narrator of “The Lighthouse” flls his daily journal with his speculations and emotions. Fourth, the base of this lighthouse is markedly different from that of real lighthouses. The narrator comments: “It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been flled in with solid masonry.” His regret that the builders left the base hollow is well taken. It had long been recognized that a solid, weighty mass of stone at the base of a lighthouse offered the best resistance to the force of waves. Such was the case with John Smeaton’s Eddystone Lighthouse (1759) and other robust lighthouses. So Poe’s lighthouse is empty in two senses: literally and in terms of its resemblance to actual lighthouses. Poe had no interest in situating his lighthouse and his narrator in the world of genuine lighthouses, a world of technological innovation, engineering feats, and logbooks. Poe bars that world from his tale. He prefers to focus on the psychology of his narrator, a realm that in 1849 seemed beyond the capacities of science and mathematics. Hence the perversity of Poe’s lighthouse and his care in making sure the vicis- situdes of the narrator’s reactions are always foregrounded. Poe has little interest in fnding common ground between science and aesthetics. Unlike Woolf, he aims to wall off what he regards as the encroaching tide of precise numbers. We saw earlier that the author of Smeaton and Lighthouses praises lighthouses not only as emblems of the triumph of science and technology. He also fnds their shape beautiful, a shape arrived at by engineers designing a structure having the necessary strength and stability while offering the least resistance to a raging sea. Alan Stevenson pointed out that of all the possible shapes for a lighthouse, “There seems little reason, therefore, for any doubt as to the circular section being practically the most suitable for a Tower exposed in every direction to the force of the waves” (1850, 35). Hence the roundness of lighthouse towers arises not from aesthetic considerations but from practical necessity. The taper- ing upward curve of the lighthouse also represents a practical solution to an engineering problem, but one that contributes to aesthetic grace. 2 TO BE PRECISE 21

As Stevenson rather dryly puts it, “as the ultimate stability of a sea-tower, viewed as a monolithic mass, depends, caeteris paribus, on the lowness of its centre of gravity, the general notion of its form is that of a cone, but that, as the forces to which its several horizontal sections are opposed decrease towards its top in a rapid ratio, the solid should be generated by the revolution of some curve line convex to the axis of the tower, and gradually approaching to parallelism with it” (39). No wonder Poe was troubled by the lighthouse. It represented the potential annexation of the aesthetic by science and engineering. The engineer designing his mathematically precise edifce might create a more beautiful object than the sculptor. Poe’s lighthouse also suggests the conquest of the spiritual by the material. The Roman god Janus presided over beginnings and endings. Poe’s tale begins and ends with an abbreviated nod at Janus by framing itself between “Jan. 1” and “Jan. 4.” Within the story the narrator also mentions his sole companion in the lighthouse, his dog, Neptune. So another Roman deity enters the story, more explicitly, but diminished to a dog’s name. Thus “The Lighthouse” subtly records the reduction of classical gods to inconsequence. To an extent, this late fragment looks back to one of Poe’s earliest poems, “To Science” (1829). There the poet berates science for having expelled divinities from nature.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her food, The Elfn from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? (1984, 38)

The association of Science with Old Time would seem to suggest that both time and science typically devour what surrounds them. But this would attribute to science an implacable, irresistible, annihilating power. As the 22 B. AHEARN poem proceeds, however, it becomes clear that science has not destroyed divinity, merely displaced it. The “peering eyes” of the microscope and the telescope require Diana and the Hamadryads to look for new abodes. Poe’s poem, condemning the depredations of science, stands in marked contrast to earlier poetic notices of one of those “peering eyes”—the telescope. A well-known example occurs in Paradise Lost. There Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views / At evening from the top of Fesole, / Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, / Rivers of mountains in her spotty globe” (I: ll. 287–291). The Tuscan artist, Galileo, discerns new lunar geographical features, but Milton does not suggest any rivalry between science and poetry. In the seventeenth century, the word “artist” could apply broadly to a variety of occupations. Practicing their respective crafts, Milton and Galileo are equally artists. By the eighteenth century, however, it appears that the activities of natural philosophers may be worthier than the labor of poets. Pope’s epitaph on Newton elevates him far beyond Milton’s “artist”: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, let Newton be, and all was light.” In these lines the scientist partakes of divine power, as if the divine right of kings had a counterpart in the divine insight of the scientist. Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey materially refects the new respect for the scientist. Newton was accorded a more elaborate memorial than Oliver Goldsmith or anyone else huddled in the Poets’ Corner. By 1800 Newton had ranked as the greatest English scientist for a century. But rather than cede preeminence to science over poetry, Wordsworth sketches him in the third book of The Prelude as a Romantic hero.

And from my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone. (1969, 509)

Wordsworth casts Newton as an inquirer rather than a discoverer. He is not far removed from such Romantic seekers as Mungo Park, Alastor, Melmoth, or Victor Frankenstein. The gap between poet and scientist that appears in Pope’s epitaph has been sealed. That it needed sealing, 2 TO BE PRECISE 23 however, indicates the extent to which Wordsworth understood that science, not poetry, was increasingly considered the fount of truth.16 Poets could not contend with scientists when it came to physical phenomena. But there remained aspects of the human condition apparently unreachable by science. Sir Humphry Davy could demonstrate that dia- monds were pure carbon, but he could not weigh or otherwise measure the mind. Part of the interest of “The Lighthouse” lies in the fact that the occupant of the lighthouse fnds numbers to be both comforting and disquieting. On the one hand he invokes them to reassure himself of the robustness of the lighthouse; on the other hand, he seems dismayed to discover that “the foor is 20 feet below the surface of the sea, even at low-tide” (1984, 925). His equivocal attitude toward numbers indicates that the tale’s focus is on his psyche, which Poe deems hallowed ground where numbers cannot—and should not—be allowed to obtain purchase. Poe’s treatment of science and number also infects the last of the three stories in which C. Auguste Dupin fgures. In “The Purloined Letter” (1844), we learn that the thief, D ___, is also a poet, which, as Dupin tells the Prefect of the Paris police, fts himself as well: “I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself” (1984, 684). The Prefect, however, considers a poet as “only one remove from a fool” (684). Before the tale is half complete, we already suspect that poets and poetry achieve a more comprehensive vision than the Prefect and his strategies. The Prefect relies heavily on science for guidance; in scrutinizing the furni- ture in D ___’s apartment his subordinates have employed “the aid of a most powerful microscope” (685). The Prefect also has faith in mathematical procedure: “We divided its [the house] entire surface into com- partments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed” (685). Dupin’s companion observes, “The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence” (691). The Prefect would fnd this remark self-evident.17 Dupin’s discovery of the location of the letter, however, has nothing to do with mathematics. His recovery of the letter requires patient psychological analysis rather than minute examination of precise grid patterns. Such psychological perspicuity is a function of an individual mind probing the unique intellect of another mind. An earlier tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), anticipates Dupin’s account of the Prefect’s methods and the necessity of transcending their limitations. Dupin’s companion remarks of the game of whist, “Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by ‘the book,’ are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters 24 B. AHEARN beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced” (1984, 398–399). The Prefect and his assistants are bound by “mere rule” and disregard methods outside its confnes. Poe treats science and mathematics as usurpers. They are all very well in their place, and Poe himself was skilled at mathematics, but in his eyes they seek to dominate modernity. He responds in his poetry and tales by either ignoring them or exposing their limitations. In 1844, he published in the New York Sun an account of a balloon voyage across the Atlantic. The headlines in the Sun included the sensational phrases, “Astounding News!” and “Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying MACHINE!!!” The public seemed ready to believe anything was within the reach of science. Poe was depending on a public that had become used to scientifc and technological achievements as a matter of course. Unlike Woolf, who looks to narrow or eliminate—however temporarily or tentatively—the gap between the arts and the sciences, Poe was determined to restrict science to its rightful domain and rescue the arts from its encroachment. One of his longer fctions, The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840), exhibits just such a division between science and art. Rodman, an explorer of the unsettled West, has for his frst name that of the conquering Julius Caesar, thus evoking the grandeur that was Rome. But his last name dwindles down to the term for a surveyor’s helper. Rodman’s journal includes both matter of fact accounts of miles traveled and fora and fauna observed, but it also contains passages that are rhapsodic accounts of scenery. Rodman turns out to be a split personality. His journal refects both the triumph of scientifc exploration and the irrepressible aesthetic response that wild nature inspires. It is as if Lily Briscoe and Charles Tansley had been combined into a single voice. Julius Rodman can be seen as Poe’s attempt to unite the artist with the scientist, but even here it is the artist who prevails. As the “editor” of the Journal remarks, “The peculiar character of the gentleman who was the leader and soul of the expedition, as well as its historian, has imbued what he has written with a vast deal of romantic fervor, very different from the lukewarm and statistical air which pervades most records of the kind” (1984, 1187). The lighthouse symbolized in the early nineteenth century the triumph of science and engineering, but it shared that honor with another kind of lighthouse—the observatory. In his frst annual address to Congress, on 5 December 1825, John Quincy Adams noted, “the lighthouses and monuments for the safety of our commerce and mariners, 2 TO BE PRECISE 25 the works for the security of Plymouth Beach and for the preservation of the islands in Boston Harbor, have received the attention required by the laws relating to those objects respectively.” Adams did not need to urge the utility of lighthouses, because that seemed obvious. He appealed to Congress, however, to provide funds for new national works. His list of desiderata included a national university. Furthermore, he wrote,

Connected with the establishment of an university, or separate from it, might be undertaken the erection of an astronomical observatory, with provision for the support of an astronomer, to be in constant attendance of observation upon the phenomena of the heavens, and for the periodical publication of his observances. It is with no feeling of pride as an American that the remark may be made that on the comparatively small territorial surface of Europe there are existing upward of 130 of these light-houses of the skies, while throughout the whole American hemisphere there is not one. If we refect a moment upon the discoveries which in the last four centuries have been made in the physical constitution of the universe by the means of these buildings and of observers stationed in them, shall we doubt of their usefulness to every nation? And while scarcely a year passes over our heads without bringing some new astronomical discovery to light, which we must fain receive at second hand from Europe, are we not cutting ourselves off from the means of returning light for light while we have neither observatory nor observer upon our half of the globe and the earth revolves in perpetual darkness to our unsearching eyes?

When asking Congress to consider funding a national observatory, Adams did not specify the benefts that would result. “Shall we doubt of their usefulness to every nation?” he asked. As it turned out, Congress did have reservations. It failed to act on his request. Adams’s reference to discoveries about the “physical constitution of the universe” made no reference to any economic advantage such knowledge afforded. He pleaded for the incalculable beneft of new understanding. But he also invoked patriotic pride when he pointed out that Europe was far ahead of the United States in the observatory race. None of these arguments moved Congress. Adams was slightly ahead of his time. In 1838 Williams College established its observatory. In 1839 Harvard University followed suit. In 1843 Adams delivered the dedicatory address at the laying of the corner- stone for the observatory at the University of Cincinnati. Adams’s wish for a national observatory would come true during the administration 26 B. AHEARN of Andrew Jackson, who defeated his bid for a second term. Jackson’s Secretary of the Navy directed the establishment of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Thus during the late 1830s and early 1840s “lighthouses of the sky” began to dot the landscape of the United States. It would then be possible for the public to take pride in their nation’s explo- rations of the heavens, and to hear lectures from American astronomers, as Walt Whitman records in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1865).

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the fgures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. (1982, 409–410)

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” bears comparison with Poe’s “To Science.” Whitman’s poem points to the profound difference between unmediated nature and nature fltered through mathematics. Little wonder that Whitman fnds himself “unaccountable.” Whitman presents astronomy as the manipulation of numbers. The mathematical calculation is essential to astronomers, but Whitman emphatically asserts that the reduction of the heavens to numbers eliminates the most important aspect of humanity’s relation to the wider universe. A few generations later, in The Embodiment of Knowledge, William Carlos Williams would make a similar objection about science in general, complaining that science became a lie when it attempted “to give meaning to phenomena to which it is not related: when it becomes a fetish, a catch-all, when it seeks to be absolute” (1974, 87). In the early nineteenth century, both the lighthouse and the observatory symbolize triumphant science. In the case of the observatory, moreover, the category of the aesthetic—and even the moral—also comes into play. The telescope, increasingly more powerful as the century pro- gresses, reveals an ever more wondrous and apparently perfectly ordered universe. Even in the late eighteenth century, William Paley found in 2 TO BE PRECISE 27 the regular motions of the planets irrefutable evidence of an “intelligent interposition,” “a superior agent,” whose handiwork the heavens proclaimed (2006, 212). In 1833 the Reverend Henry Fergus amplifed on this insight. “We are not, indeed, acquainted with the inhabitants of the planetary bodies, and consequently cannot trace minute contrivance and mechanical adaptation in their organization, or in the provision that is made for their subsistence, accommodation, and comfort. We can reason only on the forms, arrangements, and motions of the planets. But even within this range we meet with decisive proofs of design, power, wisdom, and goodness” (1838, 102). It is not surprising, then, that some of those who were interested in lighthouses also looked to the heavens. John Smeaton, the builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse is a case in point. “Astronomy was one of his most famous studies, and he contrived and made several astronomical instruments for himself and his friends. In later years, after ftting up an observatory at his house in Ansthorpe, he devoted much time to it when he was there, even in preference to engineering” (Smeaton 1844, 41). One essential factor common to both lighthouses and observatories was number. The importance of mathematical calculation to astronomy was made especially clear by the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the planet Neptune. The French astronomer Alexis Bouvard, after observing perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, suggested that it must be infuenced by the gravity of a still farther planet. In 1846, three years after his death, calculations by the French mathematician Urbain Leverrier led to the frst direct observations of the planet. Early nineteenth-century accounts of the construction of lighthouses place a great deal of emphasis on sheer number: how many days each year in which work can proceed, depths at low and high tide, how many courses of stone and timber make up the foundation, the number of laborers, and so on. As we have already noted, not only are numbers essential to engineering of lighthouses, but Babbage also introduced the innovation of having each lighthouse display precisely different periodic lights. Thus we see in the nineteenth century a tendency to associate precise numbering, benefcial light, and the progress of science. In his poem “To Helen” (1831), Poe celebrated her “agate lamp,” but as the century advanced the public seemed more impressed by newer means of illumination. 28 B. AHEARN

3 the Light of Science In 1858 William Thomson, whom Queen Victoria would later ennoble as Lord Kelvin, patented his Mirror Galvanometer. This device used magnets fxed to a mirror to (1) register the presence of an electric current in a wire; (2) indicate whether it was positive or negative; (3) measure the amount of current. The galvanometer cast a bright spot of light on a chart. The spot falling on the chart’s segmented marks accurately measured the electric fow. The device proved quite useful for scientists and manufacturers. It also inspired the frst of a sequence of two poems by James Clerk Maxwell, “Lectures to Women on Physical Science” (1874). The speaker in the initial poem, a scientist or technician, addresses his beloved. He asks her to tell him what the Galvanometer’s light falling on the chart indicates about the rate of electrical fow. Unfortunately, however, it appears that she has no aptitude for such fne discrimination. In the concluding stanza he laments,

O love! you fail to read the scale Correct to tenths of a division. To mirror heaven those eyes were given, And not for methods of precision. Break contact, break, set the free light-spot fying; Break contact, rest thee, magnet, swinging, creeping, dying. (Campbell 1882, 631)

Maxwell has of course modeled his poem on Tennyson’s lyric, “The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls” (1850), even to the extent of retaining the same rhyme words for the last two lines. Maxwell’s third stanza also copies the beginning of Tennyson’s poem with the apostrophe, “O love!” But where Tennyson’s speaker presumes a concord of feeling and thought between himself and his beloved, Maxwell’s lecturer sees a sharp division between himself and the hapless lady. She is meant for felds of endeavor other than science because she lacks a talent for precision. This defciency is not trivial, but quite serious. During the nineteenth century, the association of science with precision became so frmly established that the phrase “scientifc precision” became commonplace. This union of science with precision will loom large later in this chapter, but for the time being we will focus on another important difference between Maxwell’s poem and Tennyson’s. This difference appears when we consider the 2 TO BE PRECISE 29 quality of light in both poems. Tennyson’s “long light [that] shakes across the lake” is the light of heaven. Maxwell’s light is a creature of the laboratory. Man-made light has replaced God’s light as the instrument that furthers our understanding of creation. “Let there be light” was no longer an exclusively divine command. The burning bush that spoke to Moses had been supplanted by the Mirror Galvanometer. During the nineteenth century, the light of science increasingly was invoked to pierce the darkness. Sometimes the darkness was pictured as ignorance; therefore science illuminated the mind by increasing knowledge. It was also the case, however, that scientifc light literally made the world brighter. We see the beginnings of the association of science with symbolic and literal enlightenment in the eighteenth century in the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, especially in such paintings as “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery” (1766) and “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (1768). Part of Sir Humphry Davy’s fame was due to his invention in 1815 of a safety lamp for use in mines. (It is worth recalling, however, that this boon to the British coal industry rendered mining less dangerous, thereby increasing the output of coal and its consequent pollution of the atmosphere. Davy’s illuminating triumph contributed to the blackening of the landscape. Scientifc ingenuity proved again to be a double-edged sword.) Michael Faraday entertained Victorian audiences with lectures that he later published as The Chemical History of a Candle (1861). One doubts his audience would have responded as well to discourses on the chemical history of a bootscraper. Of course the century’s most renowned triumph of science over darkness was Edison’s electric light bulb (1879). Robert Frost satirizes popular veneration of Edison in “The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus.” The literate farmer seems to be so besotted with the march of science that he refuses to believe that the bright light on the horizon is Venus. He insists it must be “a new patented electric light / Put up on trial by that Jerseyite [Edison]” (CPPP, 336). Frost’s farmer has apparently become so enamored with the triumphs of science that his natural faculties are distorted. Perhaps the single most famous union of light symbolic and light util- itarian was Liberty Enlightening the World. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived of the statue as both inspiring and practical. It would not only symbolize the glories of liberty; but it was also intended to be a lighthouse. When Bartholdi visited the United States in 1871 to spread the word about his project, among the eminent men he called on was 30 B. AHEARN

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who made a memorandum about the visit. “M. Auguste Bartholdi, French sculptor, calls with a letter from Agassiz. A pleasant, lively, intelligent man, a Republican and an Alsation. He has a plan for erecting a bronze Colossus on Bedloe’s Island, in New York harbor, – a statue of Liberty to serve at night as a lighthouse. It is a grand plan; I hope it will strike the New Yorkers” (Longfellow 1896, 3: 180–181). Unfortunately, the statue proved not quite useful as a lighthouse, even though the U.S. Lighthouse Board managed it until 1901. The amount of candlepower it projected was rather feeble. Still, it seemed natural at the time to marry the concept of liberty with a lighthouse. Marianne Moore draws on this association in her poem, “Light Is Speech” (1941), which asserts that

The Creach’h d’Ouessant lighthouse on its defenseless dot of rock, is the descendant of Voltaire

whose faming justice reached a man already harmed. (CP, 97)

As we have seen, the lighthouse in the nineteenth century was regarded as scientifc progress made manifest. As one author noted of Scotland’s Bell Rock lighthouse, it “may justly be considered one of the most wonderful achievements of modern science” (Cumming 1843, 63). Why not unite that scientifc marvel, the lighthouse, with the moral splendor of advancing Liberty?18 Longfellow’s memorandum of his encounter with Bartholdi, however, shows no indication that the poet saw a competitor in the engineer. Poe would have been aghast.

4 babbage and Tennyson The infuence of science and mathematics on poetry in the nineteenth century would, if we take Poe and Whitman as examples, seem to be one in which the poets resent and resist their claims to preeminence.19 Yet there are many examples of poets praising technological progress, not the least interesting of which is Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition.”20 In the case of Tennyson we fnd a poet who did not resent the “peering eyes” of telescopes, but owned one himself and spent many a nocturnal 2 TO BE PRECISE 31 hour scanning the heavens. Tennyson was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. These facts seem to lend plausibility to the famous anecdote about Tennyson yielding to the demands of mathematical precision in his poetry. The story begins in a footnote. The author of the footnote was John Churton Collins, who edited the frst critical edition of Tennyson: The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1900). With a scholar’s keen eye for detail, he carefully tracked variations from one edition to another. While inspecting “The Vision of Sin,” Collins noticed that Tennyson introduced a variation in two lines in the seventh edition (1851). The lines in question: “Every moment dies a man, / Every moment one is born.” He provided the following note about the change.

All [printings] up to and including 1850 read:-- Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born. Mr. Babbage, the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the following letter to Tennyson in reference to this couplet:-- I need hardly to point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equi- poise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:-- Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born. I may add that the exact fgures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre. (Tennyson 1900, 265–266)

Tennyson, it appears, took Babbage’s criticism to heart and judged it would be prudent to substitute moment (a brief but indefnite stretch of time) for a minute. The poet seems to agree that fdelity to scientifc precision requires that the line be emended. Philip and Emily Morrison included the letter in their anthology of Babbage’s writings, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines (1961). Hugh Kenner—who saw it there—took it up in The Counterfeiters (1968). Since so eminent a critic as Kenner vouched for the authenticity of the letter, there seemed to be no reason for Robert Bernard Martin to doubt it. In his widely acclaimed biography, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980) he discussed the matter of Tennyson and science (citing Kenner), and pointed out how some of Tennyson’s readers made the mistake of applying the 32 B. AHEARN otherwise estimable virtue of scientifc accuracy too narrowly. Martin found this to be true not only of twentieth-century critics but of Tennyson’s contemporaries as well.

The point of view was carried to fatuity by the mathematician Charles Babbage, who wrote to Tennyson after reading ‘The Vision of Sin’ to say that he was bothered by two lines: Every minute dies a man Every minute one is born. ‘I would therefore take the liberty’, wrote Babbage, ‘of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: “Every minute dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born.”’ (1980, 462–463)

Babbage’s suggestion, according to Martin, was an obvious instance of statistical scruples borne to ridiculous extremes. (Martin, incidentally, mistakenly substitutes “minute” for “moment,” when referring to Babbage’s proposed correction.) A century after Collins introduced Babbage’s letter to the world it has long since become part of Victorian lore. Scholars from various felds dust it off when addressing the subject of Tennyson’s relation to contemporary science and technology. A few minutes or moments of searching the Internet, using the terms “Babbage,” “Tennyson,” and “Vision of Sin,” returns multiple citations of the letter. It has fourished in the age of computerized connection. The diffculty with this apparent concession by Tennyson to Babbage’s mathematical suggestion is that there is no record of correspondence between Tennyson and Babbage. Nor do we have evidence that they ever met. The only reference by Tennyson to Babbage is anecdotal. On 15 September 1870, James Henry Mangles recorded Tennyson as saying, “S. Smith’s mot to Babbage was excellent. Dr. Lardner ran away with Mrs. Heavyside. Babbage said, surely he might have waited till the husband died. Ah! said Sidney Smith, tapping him on the shoulder, ‘you are calculating by your own machine’” (Knies 1984, 51). Dionysus Lardner (1793–1859) fed to Paris with Mary Heaviside in March 1840. Tennyson recalls an event thirty years in the past. The detail about Smith tapping Babbage on his shoulder suggests Tennyson might have been present on the occasion, unless Tennyson was simply repeating an anecdote told to him. More to the point, the anecdote is one in which Babbage’s mathematical abilities and his projected Calculating Engine 2 TO BE PRECISE 33 make him part of a joke. Tennyson’s recollection of the anecdote does not inspire confdence in the supposition that advice from Babbage led Tennyson to emend his poem. Even so, many commentators agree with Robert Bernard Martin that Babbage was quite serious in making his suggestion about revising “Every minute.” (They do not discuss why the supposedly statistics-mad Babbage would be reading Tennyson’s volumes in the frst place.) Alistair Kelman prefaces his citation of the letter by asserting, “Working with computers tends to make one pedantic, no doubt due to the fact that everything is seen in precise terms—black or white, yes or no, on or off…. This can lead to problems of relation- ships between the computer specialist and non-specialist even though the latter may be someone who dearly wishes to be a user of a computer. So we have the frst face—the pedantic face—typifed by the acknowledged inventor of the computer—Charles Babbage, in his note to Lord Tennyson after the latter’s poem ‘The Vision of Sin’ was published” (2011 [1–2]). A few years after the death of John Churton Collins, his son recalled his father’s labors on the critical edition of Tennyson.

In 1899 my father edited the Early Poems of Lord Tennyson. Not the least interesting feature of this edition lies in the emendations shown therein, which were made by Tennyson from time to time in successive editions of these Early Poems. How careful and how fastidious a poet Tennyson was may here be seen: he was continually altering the text—and sometimes, after varying readings in several editions, he would at last go back to what he had originally written. (Collins 1912, 149)

Laurence Collins’s comments about Tennyson “continually altering the text” place the decisions about alterations squarely with Tennyson. Even if we judge Babbage was being entirely serious in his suggested emendation—which seems unlikely—Tennyson accepted editorial advice only from a few of those closest to him. The supposition that Babbage was serious and that Tennyson bowed to his superior statistical acumen becomes more and more implausible the more we know about the two men. The belief that Babbage wrote in earnest, and moved Tennyson to discard “minute,” rests on later, mistaken assumptions about a yawning gap between the arts and the sciences in the early years of Victoria’s reign. We should not lose sight of the fact that what is most pertinent about the legend of Babbage’s advice leading Tennyson to alter his 34 B. AHEARN poem is the widespread acceptance of it, despite our having only Churton Collins’s footnote for evidence. No one even claims to have seen the letter that Babbage supposedly wrote. The tale’s widespread currency and acceptance tell us more about twentieth- and twenty-frst-century attitudes toward science and mathematics than it does about Babbage or Tennyson. Many writers assume that Tennyson would have naturally bowed to Babbage’s superior mathematical insight. (After all, Babbage had urged the adoption of occulting lights for lighthouses and had been a close friend of the astronomer Sir John Herschel, a fellow founder of the Analytical Society. On two counts, then, he can be linked to the lighthouse and the observatory.) The widespread acceptance of Collins’s anecdote as fact can also be traced to other twentieth-century considerations of nineteenth-century poetry and science. Keats in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” “felt like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken,” thus invoking the prestige of astronomy to praise Homer and his translator. The simile owed much to the example of Sir William Herschel, who had discovered Uranus fourteen years before Keats was born. When Keats compares his discovery of Homer to Herschel’s achievement, he invokes science to illuminate an emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic experience. It was not uncommon for the reverse to be true. In the nineteenth century there were mathematicians and scientists who wrote poetry: William Rowan Hamilton, James Clerk Maxwell, James Joseph Sylvester, John Tyndall, and Babbage.

5 Quantification The readiness with which many scholars assume that Babbage was serious about his statistical scruples—and that Tennyson would accede to them—shows how deeply we value exact quantifcation. This respect for numerical precision did not begin in the nineteenth century. One has to look back several centuries before one fnds Europeans who have little use for numerical precision. As Alfred W. Crosby notes, medieval Europeans “were in their way as concerned with time as we are, but their way was very different from ours. It had much to do with symbolic values and little to do with precision” (1997, 34–35). Quite gradually, however, and starting in the fourteenth century, developments in clock making required precise measurement. In turn, the clocks themselves began to suggest to people (at least to those who 2 TO BE PRECISE 35 could tell time) that time was divided into discrete, exact quanta. In the feld of painting we fnd a similar change. The development of perspective in the Renaissance required painters and viewers of paintings to think of space as geometrically precise. Space was, in other words, defned by precisely measurable segments. As Erwin Panofsky remarked, “Perspective, more than any other method, satisfed the new craving for exactness and predictability” (Crosby, 197). Not only were time and space mathematically subdivided, but a variety of other disciplines and bodies of knowledge were also increasingly so defned. The Italian mathematician, Luca Pacioli (1445–1517), declared in his Summa de Arithmetica, Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494) that “astrology, architecture, sculpture, cosmography, business, military tactics, dialectics, and even theology were mathematical” (Crosby 1997, 214). In this same text Pacioli also introduced what became known as double-entry bookkeeping. He became known as “the Father of Accounting” and helped form the European mind in a profound way. “For the past seven centuries bookkeeping has done more to shape the perceptions of bright minds than any single innovation in philosophy or science. While a few people pondered the words of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, millions of others of yeasty and industrious inclination wrote entries in neat books and then rationalized the world to ft their books” (Crosby 1997, 221). The labors of shopkeepers, bankers, and accountants during their working hours shaped their conception of reality as a whole. Crosby may be correct that accounting has led us to view the world as constructed by and amenable to mathematics, but his study of the rise of quantifcation ends in 1600. Therefore he does not discuss Francis Bacon and his Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620), a work often cited as the foundation of modern science. Bacon insists that the “senses and common notions” are insuffcient bases for the acquisition of new knowledge; “before one can sail to the more remote and secret places of nature, it is absolutely essential to introduce a better and more perfect use and application of the mind and understanding” (2000, 11). We know Bacon urges inductive reasoning as one of the more important ways to better apply the understanding. But Bacon was quick to add that inductive reasoning must have something tangible to reason about, hence the importance of properly designed “experiments which have been devised and applied specifcally for the question under investigation with skill and good technique” (18). Bacon stipulated that the 36 B. AHEARN defnition of what constitutes skill and good technique cannot be the property of any single person. Collective intelligence is the measure of truth: “For we are laying the foundations in the human understanding of a true model of the world, as it is and not as any man’s reason tells him it is” (96). Bacon democratizes science to the extent that his method privileges knowledge based on a communal understanding. For our purposes, however, the most crucial observation that Bacon makes about good technique has to do with measuring quantity. As Bacon’s model scientist’s investigation “moves towards simple natures, the more all things will be in a plain, transparent light; as the procedure passes from the multiple to the simple, from the incommensurable to the com- mensurable, from the random to the calculable, and from the infnite and undefned to the defnite and the certain; as it is with the letters in writing and the notes in chords. Natural inquiry succeeds best when the physical ends in the mathematical” (108). Bacon’s reduction of the physical to the mathematical implies that the physical world in any of its manifestations can be handled with numbers. So, for example, when Bacon’s hypothetical scientist has turned to the study of heat, Bacon advises him that thermometers are indispensable, since “a thermometer clearly shows expansion in air, and reveals it as a conspicuous, progressive, enduring, and not transient” (139). Of course, Bacon does not have to add that what makes the thermometer clearly show expansion are the precise gradations of numbers engraved on it. Bacon gives other examples of how scientifc experiment requires precise measures, whether in weighing substances, recording temporal intervals, or measuring the ratio by which a liquid expands into a gas. For Bacon, there can be no true science without universally agreed upon standards of measurement—that is to say, of number. “The strengths and actions of bodies are described and measured by dimensions of space, or moments of time, or by units of quantity, or by the dominance of a power; if these four factors are not honestly and carefully measured, it will perhaps make a pretty, speculative science, but it will be empty of results. Likewise we give the four instances which correspond to these the single name of mathematical instances, and instance of measurement” (emphasis in the original) (183). When Bacon turns his attention to how one should compose the account of one’s experiments and their results, his insistence on mathematical rigor carries over into his advice about prose. “Reject everything 2 TO BE PRECISE 37 that makes for ornament of speech, and similes, and the whole repertoire of eloquence, and such vanities. State all the things you accept briefy and summarily, so that there may be no more words than there are things” (225). Bacon goes on to reiterate that the student of natural philosophy must resist the temptation to go beyond the language of plain fact. “Brevity suits us; like faithful scribes, we pick up and write down the very laws of nature, and nothing else; brevity is almost imposed by things themselves. Opinions, dogmas and speculations, however, are innumera- ble; there is no end to them” (232). These Baconian strictures specify a clear division between the language of science and the language of other kinds of speculation. Three centuries later, Bacon’s desire for a scientifc language becomes the logical positivists’ verifability principle, with its aim to cleanse language by turning it into symbolic logic. Bacon’s desire for clarity and brevity also bears fruit in such sub-languages as B.A.S.I.C. Bacon’s advice about style similarly anticipates by three centuries Pound’s comments in his essays on Imagism about the necessity of eschewing superfuous words and merely rhetorical ornamentation. But however we trace later trends and developments back to Bacon, it remains the case that a tension arises between what came to be considered the proper modes of scientifc discourse and the rest of language. Indeed, Bacon believes language needs reformation before science can be properly undertaken. When considering the obstacles to the pursuit of scientifc knowledge, language itself looms large as one of the “idols of the marketplace.” “For men believe,” Bacon complains, “that their reason controls words. But it is also true that words retort and turn their force back upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistic and unproductive” (48). For Bacon, language serves well what he calls the “common understanding,” but language must be rectifed so that it can serve beyond merely common uses. Only then can legitimate scientifc work be done. Bacon’s concern about the correct meanings for words fnds a number of echoes in Pound. For example, “Good writers are those who keep the language effcient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear” (ABC, 32). Keeping Bacon’s and Pound’s admonitions about accurate meaning in mind, it behooves us to examine the word “precision.” For centuries it had almost no connection to poetry. How then did its meaning (or meanings) change so that it became part of the lexicon of poets and critics of poetry? 38 B. AHEARN

6 A Brief History of “Precision” In the discourse of natural philosophy in the eighteenth century, and that of science in the nineteenth century, two words become increasingly associated with rigorous and accurate methodology: precise and precision. They are excluded, however, from discussions about poetry. Only in the twentieth century do they become de rigueur. T. S. Eliot concluded his introduction to a 1930 edition of Johnson’s “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” by citing several passages from the poems and commenting, “The precision of such verse gives, I think, an immense satisfaction to the reader” (1930, 24). No one would have questioned Eliot’s terminology. Precision, or a defciency thereof, was then and still remains a test of poetry.21 Yet Eliot uses a word that Johnson himself neglected in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). When Johnson measures the stylistic felicities or faults of Milton, Dryden, Pope, or Gray, he never employs the gauge of “precision.” He appears to have forgotten that the word exists, which is rather odd since he included it in his Dictionary (1755). What had happened to “precision” between the Age of Johnson and the Age of Eliot? How did it become standard in the criticism of poetry? The short answer is well known. Precision became indispensable when Ezra Pound unveiled H.D. and the Imagistes to the world in Poetry’s January 1913 number. He proclaimed, “one of their watchwords is Precision, and they are in opposition to the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and interminable effusions …” (EPPP, 112). Two months later he and F. S. Flint enlarged on this remark in their brief essay, “Imagisme.” Precision meant more than just fnding the exact words; one had to whittle them down to the minimum essential. “Interminable effusions” could be cured, for example, by reducing ffty words to ten (1913, 200). (Eliot seems to echo the demand for condensation when he observes of Johnson’s satires, “the satisfaction I get from such lines is what I call the minimal quality of poetry” [1930, 24].) Pound, however, was not the frst critic to summon “precision” to his or her aid. It cropped up from time to time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but never became permanently aligned with poetry. What was it about Pound’s use of the word that fnally made it a vital part of critical vocabulary? Perhaps the most promising place to begin assessing “precise” and “precision” is with the eighteenth century. Here, according to Eliot, 2 TO BE PRECISE 39 we can discern precision in action. What did Johnson have to say about it in his Dictionary? As it turns out, a good deal. Johnson offers six different varieties of the word: precise, precisely, preciseness, precisian, precision, and precisive. For “precise,” Johnson offers “exact; strict; nice; having exact limitation.” The second defnition he gives is “formal; fn- ical; solemnly and superstitiously exact.” This second defnition hints at a meaning for “precise” that Johnson situates as the second meaning for “precisian”: “One who is superstitiously rigorous.” “Precise,” according to the NOED, sometimes referred to those who were “strict and scrupulous in religious observance.” Although the NOED catego- rizes this as an obscure meaning, it also notes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was “chiefy used of Puritans.” Johnson, aware of this coloration of “precise,” may have considered it no longer current by the time he started compiling the Dictionary, but found it suitable for “precisian.” It may also be the case that Johnson, with his Tory inclinations, did not want to sully literary criticism with a word that carried with it a faint air of religious zealotry. But such a hypothesis seems strained, especially since that meaning had lost currency by the time he was compiling the Dictionary. (We shall, however, have occasion to revisit “precisian” in Chapter 5.) Johnson contents himself with defning “precision” simply as “exact limitation.” He offers three exemplary quotations indicating how the word has been used. The frst two are from John Locke, which suggests that Johnson thought the word well suited for philosophical discussion. The third, however, is from Pope, an authority often cited in the Dictionary. Johnson’s example from Pope: “I was unable to treat this part more in detail, without sacrifcing perspicuity to ornament, without wandering from the precision or breaking the chain of reasoning.” Johnson found his example in Pope’s prefatory notice— “The Design”—to An Essay on Man (1733). There Pope explains why he chose to write in verse rather than prose. “I found I could express them [principles, maxims and precepts] more shortly this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force as well as grace of arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness. I was unable to treat this part of my subject more in detail, without becoming dry and tedious; or more poetically, without sacrifcing perspicuity to ornament, without wandring from the precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning” (1950, 7–8). Pope’s invocation of “precision” is quite uncommon in the history of English literary criticism, a fact that Johnson probably would have known. Most previous commentators on 40 B. AHEARN poetic style found the word unnecessary. Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (1595) does not use “precise” or “precision.” They are also absent from George Gascoigne’s “Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English” (1575), although he urges poets to “avoyde prolixity and tediousness” (Haslewood 1811–1815, 2: 11). William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) does use “precise” and “precisely,” but in general terms about the judgment of poets when following rules, not with respect to their choice of vocabulary when composing. William Scott’s The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) recommends that proper poetic diction may be described with these terms: perspicuity, purity, fullness, plentifulness, softness, and sweetness (2013, 54–55). “Precise” and “precisely,” however, are only used to describe meter (59, 61). Thomas Campion, in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), has no place for “precise” or “precision.” An exception to the rule is George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1569). He refers to unusual Greek and Latin meters and adds that they may be used in English “with good discretion and precise choice of words” (2007, 204). Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) refers to some poetic passages as having “elegancy” or being “easy.” But he omits “precise” and “precision” from his vocabulary. Pope, however, indicates the value of precision and warns that precision will be gravely injured by “wandring.” Precision may be lost if one strays, or errs, from a narrow and clearly delineated path. So Pope would have concurred with Johnson’s defnition of precision as limitation. Precision helps to prevent verse from falling into error. But Pope also links it with “conciseness,” which invigorates verse. Thus he anticipates by almost two centuries Pound’s trumpeting of the virtues of precision. Pope was the earliest critic to specify the advantages of “precision” in verse. He did this only once, and it would be quite some time before anyone ventured to do so again. Johnson’s avoidance of “precision” in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets seems all the more strange after his citation of Pope’s association of concision and precision with “force,” because Johnson often speaks in terms suggesting degrees and directions of energy. Cowley he found guilty on one occasion of “feeble diction.” Addison also was “not suffciently vigorous to attain excellence.” Waller, however, penned lines that were “vigorous and striking.” Furthermore, Milton’s diction exhibited “copiousness and variety.” Other terms Johnson commonly used to assess style seemed to indicate the degree to which energy, vigor, and force could be refned and directed: “delicacy,” “neatness,” 2 TO BE PRECISE 41 and “elegance.” He acknowledged, for example, that William Broome’s “diction is select and elegant.” Such observations are quite in keeping with neoclassical ideals. Yet Johnson unaccountably avoids “precision” as a term useful in applauding or belittling any poet’s talent for reining in excessive energies. What restrains him from putting it to use? Almost without exception, critics of the Romantic period emu- lated Johnson. Wordsworth’s criticism seems to indicate that he was unacquainted with the word; at least he never fnds it appropriate. His account of Newton in The Prelude associates discovery with exploration, not precision. Similarly, in The Excursion (1814), science rightly applied serves the fights of the imagination.

Science then Shall be a precious Visitant; and then And only then, be worthy of her name. For then her Heart shall kindle; her dull Eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery; But taught with patient interest to watch The processes of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most noble use, Its most illustrious province, must be found In furnishing clear guidance, a support Not treacherous, to the Mind’s excursive Power.(2007, 164)

Coleridge likewise had no use for “precision.” His lectures on poetry in 1811–1812 make no mention of it. When discussing Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” Coleridge praises the “perfect sweetness of the Versifcation, so adapted to the subject” (1969–, 5: 241). He points out how Shakespeare’s “accuracy of description” combines with the “sud- denness, beauty, & fancifulness of the image” (5: 252) in the poem. “Accuracy” is the closest Coleridge comes to “precision.” He does make use of “precision” in Biographia Literaria (1817), but not in relation to poetry.22 Lesser contemporaries of Wordsworth and Coleridge make the same omission. When Francis Jeffrey praises Byron for being “concise and condensed,” a virtue that Jeffrey hopes will be a lesson to his contemporaries, who are too often guilty of exhibiting “intolerable prolixity and redundance” (1894, 96), we might suppose that he would encourage poets to trim their lines—to cultivate precision. But he does 42 B. AHEARN not. When he recommends precision, it has nothing to do with style. It refers rather to the duties of the poet before he or she sits down to write. Jeffrey advises the poet who wants to portray humble life to “study characters with a minute and anatomical precision” (70). By moderating “precision” with the adjective “anatomical,” Jeffrey shifts the word away from poetry and into medicine. This usage suggests that Jeffrey may consider “precision” as peculiarly suited to scientifc discourse. Painters and sculptors, however, knew the value of studying anat- omy, so the term could just as well direct us to the fne arts. We shall encounter such an association again, but for the moment it is suffcient to note that Jeffrey does not include “precision” as desirable in poetic diction. Poets should rather cultivate a style “beautiful or impressive” and “consistent” (47, 49). Victorian critics who examined poetry also ignored the word. Leigh Hunt excludes it from his An Answer to the Question “What Is Poetry”? (1844). “Precision” never fgures in the answer. While discussing the style of Sydney Smith, Walter Bagehot observed in 1855, “He had not patience for long argument, no acuteness for delicate precision, no fangs for recondite research” (1965, 333). Bagehot refers, however, to Smith’s prose contributions to the Edinburgh Review, not his poetry. When Bagehot’s attention does turn to poetry, “precision” never appears as a test of value. We can partly attribute this absence to his tendency to treat poems as vehicles for ideas. For Bagehot, content trumps form. On occasion he would discuss style, but curtly, as in this comment on Shelley’s poetry: “language is minutely and acutely searched; at the dizziest height of meaning the keenness of the words is greatest” (475). Clearly this aspect of Shelley calls for no further analysis by Bagehot. He prefers to consider poetry in terms of its truth value, as when he points to a passage from James Bailey’s Festus and comments, “We cannot believe that this passage expresses the settled opinion of any thoughtful and instructed man at this day” (129). The most eminent literary critic of his time, Matthew Arnold, also treated poems as artifacts made of ideas. In “The Study of Poetry” (1880), Arnold lists a number of “touchstone” lines from supremely gifted poets: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. Readers must intuit what renders these lines worthy, because Arnold declines to minutely examine their qualities. Arnold tends to general- ize: “The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner” (1960–1977, 9: 171). 2 TO BE PRECISE 43

Readers are at liberty to conjecture what constitutes the superiority of diction and movement. One of Arnold’s late essays, his introduction to an anthology of English poetry, suggests why “precision” is conspicu- ously absent when he discusses poetic style. When he surveys the eighteenth century, Arnold notes that this was a period when English prose became “ft.” He adds, “The needful qualities for a ft prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a ft prose, must of necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention, to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repression and silencing of poetry” (1885, xxxviii). In short, true poetry dwells somewhere beyond the precincts of regularity, uniformity, precision, and balance. Hence he concludes that Dryden and Pope “are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose” (xl). A generation later, when Pound emphasized precision as a touchstone of poetic merit, he was tacitly contradicting Arnold. Arnold and Bagehot share the conviction that the moral or ideological burden of a work of art takes precedence. This being the case, “precision,” which points to technique, remains absent from their critical vocabulary. But when we reach the end of the nineteenth century, we encounter a competing view of the arts. Pater and Wilde ask their readers to consider aesthetic ftness. We might expect, therefore, that poetry criticism by Pater’s and Wilde’s contemporaries might show the resurgence of “precision.” Yet if we begin with Swinburne we are disappointed. He echoes earlier criteria when he repeatedly refers to Byron’s “power”; “precision” is never introduced. We fare no better when Swinburne turns to Arnold’s poetry. “Clearness” becomes the operative term, as Swinburne notes the “majesty and composure of thought and verse, the perfect clearness and competence of words” (1972, 65). Whether Swinburne points to Byron’s “passion and power” or Arnold’s “charm and clearness,” neither poet elicits the term “precision.” Similarly, Swinburne praises “Rossetti’s delicate mastery of language—of his exqui- site manner of speech, subtle and powerful and pliant to all necessities of thought” (85). As with the other poets Swinburne examines, Rossetti never requires recourse to “precision.” In George Saintsbury’s criticism the case alters. Saintsbury’s analyses of poetry, while attentive to general ideas and broad strokes, often discuss merit on a small scale, even down to individual words. 44 B. AHEARN

Thus Saintsbury comments on poets’ attention to detail, as he does in his essay on Walter Savage Landor (1893): “Mr. [William] Morris cannot pretend to Landor’s dignity, precision, and lasting certainty of touch” (1923–1924, 2: 116). Indeed, even in his early essays, Saintsbury has an eye for the minute distinctions in verse, as when (in 1875) he comments on Baudelaire’s “precise presentation within contracted limits” (4: 23–24). Other words akin to “precise” or “precision” are frequently found in his vocabulary: “exact,” “accurate,” “clearness.” The word “precision” is not common in his criticism, but it does occur more often in his later essays, such as “Milton and the Grand Style” (1908), where he remarks that “though grotesque requires precision there is not the slightest necessity that precision should be grotesque” (3: 188). Four years later, in “Dante and the Grand Style,” Saintsbury praises Dante’s “amplifcation and precision” (3: 207). “Precision” is hardly ubiquitous in Saintsbury’s vocabulary, but he fnds it occasionally useful. Although employing it, he does not insert it permanently into critical vocabulary. It does not stand out as essential to any critical platform that he constructs. For Saintsbury, precision remains an incidental feature of poetry. Nevertheless, Saintsbury’s invocation of “precision” anticipates other critics’ adoption of the word. In the frst decade of the twentieth century we fnd English critics beginning to stipulate criteria for the valuation of poetry that would soon render “precision” necessary. Indeed, “precision” comes to the fore because it fts with other terms that between 1910 and 1914 coalesced in an aesthetic promoting rigorous specifcity. “Precision,” in short, became part of a package that T. E. Hulme, Pound, and others pushed with such success that they helped defne the terms for modern criticism of the arts. In 1908, the year that Pound settled in London, F. S. Flint suggested in his reviews in the New Age that contemporary poets needed to cultivate concision: “The long poem is, I believe, an historical error; the canto and stanza clever tricks that lure a poet on to sing beyond the prime emotion” (1908, 212). If a good poem was basically the record of a “prime emotion,” clearly the poem should evoke that emotion and little more. In the same review, Flint singled out Japanese haika as exemplifying the pure spirit of poetry. He also stipulated that “A poet should listen to the individual rhythm within him before he turns, if ever, to the accepted form. He should not be content to grind an iambic barrel-organ, for instance. Beauty, emotion, and supple rhythm are the essentials of good poetry” (212). If rhythm and emotion were best 2 TO BE PRECISE 45 expressed by variable, short lines, such would be the shape of the poem. As close as Flint comes to urging “precision,” however, he does not specifcally single it out as necessary to poetry’s renaissance. Readers of the New Age would at least be alerted that much contemporary poetry was marked by precision’s opposite. In his 1909 review of Francis Thompson’s Shelley, Vincent O’Sullivan complained that Thompson was too vaguely effusive: “we fnd a good deal of the nebulous imprecision of poetry; the plain, hard statements lie far apart; we have to catch breathlessly at jutting points as we are whirled along by this torrent of language amidst gorgeous scenery” (1909, 75). Here “imprecision” stands out as a common and deplorable failing in poetry. The obvious solution would be to diminish the fow, to mold it into those “plain, hard statements” that are neither nebulous nor overwhelming. But O’Sullivan does not name “precision” as the cure. A few years later the word “precise” surfaces in Hulme’s vocabulary, most notably in his essay, “Romanticism and Classicism.” The essay was originally a lecture, most likely delivered in 1912.23 Hulme told his audience,

the great aim is accurate, precise and defnite description. The frst thing is to recognise how extraordinarily diffcult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness: you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrifc struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fxed to your own purpose. (1994, 68–69)

For Hulme, precision is not simply a sedulous paring away of words, or a sifting through them until the right one remains, but an agon. Hulme presents language as the accumulated mental baggage of all those who have used it. It is a jumble badly in need of sorting. Artists work language to their purposes, just as the sculptor shapes the lump of damp clay. Hulme goes on to emphasize the necessity of invention in remaking language. “Fancy is not mere decoration added on to plain speech. Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that it can be made precise” (Csengeri, 71). Hulme suggests that 46 B. AHEARN language must be shaken up, dislocated, before it fts the artist’s aim. At that point it turns “precise.” And precision in verse demonstrates that language has been renewed. It appears that Hulme must be credited with the discovery of how important “precision” could be in the coming poetry revolution. Then again, perhaps not. Did Hulme infuence Pound, or was it the other way round? The Spirit of Romance (1910) shows Pound already had the word in his critical vocabulary. “Dante’s precision both in the ‘Vita Nuova’ and in the ‘Commedia’ comes from the attempt to repro- duce exactly the thing which has been clearly seen” (1968, 114). Yet Pound gives “precision” no particular emphasis in this, his frst critical book. Furthermore, he uses the word and its variations in mixed fashion. At one point it suggests to him sterile intellectual activity: “While the highest minds of the age were passing systematic legislation for the most orderly angels, and reconstructing the laws of God with a fas- cinating preciseness… the Troubadours were melting the common tongue and fashioning it into new harmonies …” (13). Here “preciseness” denotes a variety of thoughts abstracted from the everyday experience of humanity. On the one hand we have Scholastic fussiness; on the other we have the Troubadours, who practice a worthy “melting” of vulgar speech. Describing the efforts of the Troubadours with a liquid term points up the contrast with the activities of the philosophers and theologians. “Preciseness” here describes a refashioning or modifcation of that which already exists. It could be merely moving pieces around the chessboard, whereas “melting” connotes the creation of the “new harmonies.” “Preciseness,” as Pound uses it here, suggests a recycling of the stale (a conception just the opposite of Hulme’s formulation of the meaning of “precision” two years later). In another section of The Spirit of Romance, Pound uses “precision” somewhat less pejoratively than he did “preciseness.” When discussing style in the Lusiads, he observes, “What Camoens wanted is very clearly stated in Book I, Stanza 5: ‘Give me a madness great and sounding, / Not of the country pipe or shep- herd’s reed, / Mas de tuba canora e bellicose / But of a trumpet reso- nant and warlike.’ The muses answered his prayer with precision” (229). Does Pound mean by “precision” what he meant when he referred to Dante? Even if he does, Camoens is no Dante. Pound’s use of the word hints at Camoens’s limitation. As he says in the same chapter, “Camoens writes splendid bombast, and at times it is poetry” (228). “Precision” helps Pound to acknowledge the vigor of Camoens, but it also indicates that vigor’s narrow compass. 2 TO BE PRECISE 47

Elsewhere in The Spirit of Romance Pound again invokes “preciseness.” Referring to a translation of a sonnet by Rossetti, Pound comments, “Here the preciseness of the description denotes, I think, a clarity of imaginative vision” (92). Clearly, the niggling preciseness of Scholasticism is not the same as Rossetti’s preciseness. And Pound says of another Rossetti translation, “The distinction may seem over-precise, but it is in the spirit of this period to be precise” (93). In this second instance, being “precise” seems to be a way to recover a distant, distinctly different worldview. It has a slightly archaeological favor. For the most part, when Pound wants to praise a poet’s skill, he chooses such synonyms as “accurate,” “accurateness,” and “exact.” For Pound these are positive traits in poetry, along with other qualities he specifes: “vividness,” “majesty,” “simplicity,” “intensity,” “vigor,” and “beauty.” Pound was only one of various critics to use “accuracy” as a test of poetry. But the term would not become predominant in his vocabulary, probably because “accuracy” does not necessarily lead to concision. One can be accurate at tedious length, like the phone book. “Precision,” however, connotes clear demarcation and economy of effort. It would appeal to poets writing curt lines and short poems. After The Spirit of Romance we fnd that Pound drops “preciseness” as a critical term but sticks with “precision.” (He does, however, refer to “scientifc preciseness” in “The Serious Artist” [1913].) Hulme’s essay, “Romanticism and Classicism,” might or might not have frst seen the light of day as a lecture in July 1912. Be that as it may, we have evidence that Pound began reassessing “precision” before that date. The evidence appears in his continuing series of articles in the New Age, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (December 1911—February 1912). “Precision” now displays wholly positive facets. When Pound discusses Cavalcanti, he remarks, “His poetry is interesting, apart from its beauty, for his exact psychology, for an attempt to render emotions precisely…” (EPPP, 47). Turning to Arnaut Daniel, Pound contends that he taught Dante “precision of observation and reference” (EPPP, 49). Pound implies that the artist who works precisely will present data in such a way that they cannot be confused with other data. Yet, as he points out, this care for precision does not necessarily lead to a poetic that simply mimics photography. “When I say above that technique is the means of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means, I do not by any means mean that poetry is to be stripped of any of its powers of vague suggestion. Our life is, in so far as it is worth living, made up in great part of things indefnite, impalpable; and it is precisely 48 B. AHEARN because the arts present us these things that we—humanity—cannot get on without the arts” (EPPP, 57). Indeed, the necessity of grappling with the indefnite and impalpable makes it all the more important that one’s terms be precise. Otherwise, different species of impalpability would be indistinguishable. The winter of 1911–1912 seems to have been crucial to Pound’s reassessment of “precision.” Not only was he composing “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” but he was also preparing to lecture the Quest Society on “Psychology and Troubadours.”24 The lecture was printed in the journal of the Quest Society in October 1912. If the printed text accurately records what Pound offered the Quest audience earlier in the year, then Pound would have told them, “a sort of hyperscientifc precision is the touch-stone and assay of the artist’s power and of his honour, of his authenticity.” He added that whatever the poet describes, “there is to the artist a like honourable opportunity for precision, for that precision through which alone can any of these matters take on their immortality” (EPPP, 84). In The Spirit of Romance, Pound had treated precision as a technique a poet uses to accurately record what impressed itself on his or her consciousness. But in “Psychology and Troubadours” it becomes the measure of a poet’s claim to enduring fame. Pound had charged “precision” with new meaning and raised it to Olympian heights. Thus far we have only reconstructed Pound’s changing evaluation of “precision.” It remains to be seen how those changes were motivated. What led him to make it central to poetry? Pound would have been well aware of its resonance in discourses other than poetry criticism. If we look at where the word did fourish, we can more fully grasp what potential he saw in the word. Three discursive felds in particular are relevant here: rhetoric, science, and art criticism. A look at its uses in those felds helps to (1) give a fuller picture of Pound’s conversion, (2) explain why the word was so scarce in poetry criticism, and (3) indicate how shrewd Pound was in perceiving that he could shanghai the meanings of “precision” from other discourses for his purposes. His strategy, in fact, resembles that which Hulme recommended: to wrest words from their usual “conventions and communal ideas” and thereby make them new. If we turn once again to the eighteenth century, we fnd that “precision” often appears in the phrase, “perspicuity and precision,” although instances of the phrase occurring in the frst half of the eighteenth century are uncommon. Rhetoricians in the second half of the century approve of precision, but at frst only tentatively. George Campbell 2 TO BE PRECISE 49 uses it sparingly in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). He cautions that in dramatic writing, “A blunder cannot be properly introduced con- versing with all the perspicuity and precision of a critic, no more than a clown can be justly represented expressing himself in the polished style of a courtier” (1992, 273). When discussing the distinction between who and which, Campbell observes that the habit of using the frst to refer to people and the second to things offers “a real advantage in point of perspicuity and precision” (374). Campbell’s analysis of stylistic error indicates that he shares Samuel Johnson’s defnition of “precision.” For Campbell, precision requires knowing the proper limits of a word or words. Perspicuity is being clear, and precision furthers clarity. Joseph Priestley added in his Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777) that it was advisable for speakers when planning their discourse to “sit down to composition provided with a tolerably complete list of those topics, digested with care and precision” (1965, 23). Yet neither Campbell nor Priestly tell us how “precision” might apply to the criticism of poetry. Their silence on the matter strongly suggests that the word should be reserved for prose. Shortly after the appearance of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, the Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair published his highly infuential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). As his most recent editors note, its “immense popularity … was unrivaled by any language text for a full half-century” (2005, xv). When Blair took up the matter of style, he cautioned that it could be designated by a multitude of terms: “diffuse,” “concise,” “fowing,” “copious,” “nervous,” and so forth (99). But the title of the tenth chapter of his book, “Perspicuity and Precision,” elevates “precise” and “precision” to new dignity.25 Blair also insists, “to write with Precision … one must possess a very considerable degree of distinctness and accuracy in his manner of thinking” (101). Blair is the frst rhetorician to discuss “perspicuity and precision” extensively. He does not, however, associate precision with the composition of poetry. Yet he does make a signifcant alteration in usage. Where Campbell and Priestley had briefy suggested that precision was simply one aspect of perspicuity, Blair advances it to an equal footing. He warns that it is not enough to be perspicuous; even though an author “uses proper words, and proper arrangement; he gives you the idea as clear as he conceives it himself; and so far he is perspicuous: but the ideas are not very clear in his own mind; they are loose and general; and, therefore, cannot be expressed with Precision” (103). His emphasis on perspicuity and 50 B. AHEARN precision impressed later writers. After Blair the phrase occurs in English writing much more commonly; “precision” had become a signifcant and indispensable term in the criticism of prose compositions. Yet critics still were chary about applying the test of precision to poetry. No one followed in Pope’s footsteps. “Precision” had become frmly fxed in the catalog of terms that applied to prose—but not to poetry.26 Critics who discussed poetic style, even those who treated it in terms of energies released or restrained, complied with this unwritten rule. Pound dissented. His admiration for Flaubert, Henry James, and Ford Madox Ford led him to insist, “poetry must be as well written as prose” (1950, 48). He concluded his essay, “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (1914) with this comment: “It is not, however, for Mr. Hueffer’s gift of song-writing that I have reviewed him at such great length; this gift is rare but not novel. I fnd him signifcant and revolutionary because of his insistence upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition, in brief, upon effcient writing—even in verse” (LE, 377). Pound applauds Hueffer for importing the virtues of prose to poems. And it followed that what was good for prose would now be good for poetry. Since “effcient writing” included “precision,” that term could at last be frmly attached to poetry. By broadening the defnition of poetic style to include the virtues of good prose, Pound had also widened the body of critical terminology applicable to poems. It was now safe to speak of precision in poetry. Pound also saw that a particular subfeld of prose composition— namely, scientifc writing—could be useful in making “precision” crucial to poetry. Scholars have written at length about how Pound borrowed terms taken from science and mathematics for his criticism. Thirty years ago, Martin Kayman demonstrated that from 1912 onward Pound repeatedly adopts scientifc terms to make the poet the “scientist of immaterial man” (1986, 80). The particular science that intrigued Pound in 1912 was psychology. Pound’s reference to Cavalcanti’s “exact psychology” in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” and the title “Psychology and the Troubadours” indicate Pound’s interest in contemporary discussions of how the mind works. The clearest indication of Pound’s attention to psychology appears in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Here Pound defnes an Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (1913, 200). He then remarks that he employs the concept of “complex” in an up to date fashion. “I use the term ‘complex’ rather in the technical sense employed 2 TO BE PRECISE 51 by the newer psychologists, such as [Bernard] Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application” (200). It is worth asking, however, where Pound found this notion of the “complex” in the writing of Bernard Hart. He would have found it in an essay Hart contributed to Subconscious Phenomena, a work frst published in the United States in 1910.27 Hart defnes “complexes” as “ideas … bound together into systems” that “exert an infuence upon the fow of phenomenal consciousness of which we may or may not be aware. The complex may be said to be the psychological analogue of the conception of force in physics” (Hart 1910, 132–133). Pound seized upon Hart’s linking of (1) the play and circulation of mental phenomena with (2) the functions of force in physics. He took it as an endorsement of his contention that the poet was at least as important a fgure as the physicist. The physicist explored the fuctuations of natural forces; the poet investigated the play of mental forces. Pound also would have found in Hart’s essay several associations of science with precision. For example, Hart explains, “During the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, the need for a precise formulation and defnition of these foundations [of science] began to make itself felt” (111). For Hart, the words “science” and “precise” were com- fortably allied.28 In fact, they had been linked well before Hart appeared on the scene. “Precision” had long since become frmly attached to the sciences. By the late eighteenth century the adjective “scientifc” became wedded to it and the phrase “scientifc precision” began to emerge. By the nineteenth century the phrase was ubiquitous. On the Origin of Species (1859) contains such statements as, “The practical experiments of horticulturists, though not made with scientifc precision, deserve some notice” (Wilson 2006, 610). We have now accounted for two discursive realms where “precision” was featured: prescriptions for prose writing and in the vocabulary of science. A third area that drew Pound’s interest was criticism of the fne arts. Here too the word has a history. I noted earlier that critics of poetry in the Romantic period had little use for the word. Hazlitt is the exception. In “On Milton’s Versifcation” (1815), he says of a passage in book three of Paradise Lost, “the fgures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue … (1930, 4: 39).” Hazlitt also found in Cowper “a certain precision and minuteness of graphical description” (1998, 249). Of The Beggar’s Opera, he remarked that Gay “chose a very unpromising ground to work upon, and he has prided himself in 52 B. AHEARN adorning it with all the graces, the precision, and brilliancy of style” (1998, 264). Hazlitt, unlike his contemporaries, found the word applicable to verse. Yet he does not use it frequently enough to make it particularly notable. His use of it failed to infuence his peers or the succeeding generation of critics. Nor does he employ it specifcally as Pope did to indicate a style that gathers force through precision. Rather he limits the term to examples demonstrating minute accuracy.29 Hazlitt most likely borrowed the word from art criticism. He was intensely interested in painting. No other notable literary fgures of the early nineteenth century were as deeply committed to painting as a career. (Eventually he recognized his talent with the brush was too limited, but he remained interested in the fne arts.) “Precision” was part of the vocabulary of art criticism before and after Hazlitt. We fnd it in the most notable English treatise on art in the eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses: “The painters who have applied themselves more particularly to low and vulgar characters, and who express with precision the various shades of passion, as they are exhibited by vulgar minds, (such as we see in the works of Hogarth,) deserve great praise; but as their genius has been employed on low and confned subjects, the praise which we give must be as limited as its object” (1975, 51). In his Discourses, Reynolds advocates training in copying, which will promote “a habit of exactness and precision” (20). He also praises “correctness and precision” elsewhere (52). In Hazlitt’s day, the entry on “Sculpture” in the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1810) recommends that the sculptor forming depths in stone should determine them “with precision.” Occasionally Hazlitt used “precision” to unite painting and poetry. In his essay, “On Hogarth’s Marriage A-La-Mode” (1814), he comments that Hogarth in portraying the Bride captures “the precise look and air which Pope has given to his favourite Belinda, just at the moment of the Rape of the Lock” (1930, 4: 25–26). In “On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin” (1821), Hazlitt again suggests that precision can apply to both painting and writing. “Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. […] He seized on, and struck off, with grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to catch the reader’s fancy” (1930, 8: 171).30 Hazlitt’s association of the fne arts with poetry by means of “precision” suggests he was more infuenced by art criticism than the discourses of rhetoric or natural philosophy. One doubts that Pound would have taken up “precision” out of fondness for Hazlitt. But, like Hazlitt, he would have found the use of 2 TO BE PRECISE 53

“precision” in art criticism adaptable to poetry. He may have recalled, too, a late poem by Robert Browning—“Francis Furini” (1887)—that speaks of “that precision of the brush” without which artistic greatness can never manifest itself (1981, 2: 812). In particular, the power that Pope attributed to precision would have been familiar to Pound through his acquaintance with Asian art. The key fgure in this aspect of Pound’s education was Laurence Binyon. Elkin Mathews introduced Pound to Binyon early in 1909. Shortly thereafter Pound began visiting Binyon at the British Museum, where, as Rupert Arrowsmith observes, Binyon was “the museum’s leading expert on art from Japan, China, and Korea” (2011, 105). According to Arrowsmith, Pound’s keen interest in art from the Far East did not occur until 1912 (the same year as the rise of “precision” in both Pound’s and Hulme’s vocabulary), and was signaled by his return to the Print Room on 27 September of that year, after an absence of three years (116). It would appear, therefore, that Pound’s immersion in the art of the Far East postdates his new appreciation of precision in the winter of 1911–1912. Nevertheless, Arrowsmith notes that Binyon gave four lectures on “Art and Thought in East and West: Parallels and Contrasts” in March of 1909, and that Pound attended at least the frst two of these lectures (112–114). Pound wrote to his parents on 15 March 1909 that he found Binyon’s frst lecture, “intensely interesting” (2010, 164). The question remains, however, whether “precision” denotes a value that Binyon would have explicitly associated with Japanese and Chinese art. The lectures were never published, but we can discern from Painting in the Far East (1908), what terms he brought to Asian art. In this survey, Binyon often uses the word “delicacy” to describe artistic achievement. He remarks, however, of the Japanese painter Maruyama Okio, that we can detect “in his art … a new particularity and precision” (1908, 216). Furthermore, Binyon fnds that one of Okio’s students, Goshun, “has less fneness and precision than that master’s” (220). Yet the Japanese have not monopolized precision, for Binyon says of a much earlier, Chinese painting that the brushwork is “frm and precise” (42). As was the case with Hazlitt and Reynolds, we fnd “precision” can describe the application of brush on canvas or paper. Further comments by Binyon suggest another aesthetic approach that would appeal to Pound. We recall that Pope associated precision with restraint. The two qualities promoted, as he said, “force” and “grace.” At several points in Painting in the Far East, Binyon discusses the virtues of concision. For example, when he analyzes Chinese painters of 54 B. AHEARN the Sung dynasty, Binyon emphasizes that they “found that mind could speak to mind by suggestion more intimately than by elaboration” (167). Such artistic restraint was also understood by Japanese painters, who discovered that “beauty has most power on the imagination when not completely revealed” (169).31 Pound would have learned from Binyon that Chinese and Japanese artists often emphasized the power latent in implication—a few brush strokes could imply much more than the viewer would see at frst glance. Pound’s innovative use of “precision” for literary criticism therefore imbues that criticism with overtones from the fne arts, rhetoric, and science. The frst two categories do not require a large imaginative leap, but the presumption that “precision” as used by scientists would be applicable to poetry is questionable. Since “precision” for scientists is so frequently judged in numerical terms, scientists might justly claim that any use of the word apart from a numerological one constitutes a corruption. Pound, however, could argue that restricting “precision” to numbers is much too narrow a defnition. His use of “precision” suggests an economy of words (“cut the cackle”) as well as a commitment to the mot juste. The problem that arises for Pound is that without a hard and fast numerical test for “precision,” then the test for “precision” must be something else. For Pound that test includes how the word or words have been used by great poets of the past, how a great poet of the present would use it, and how it must be carefully distinguished from erroneous use. But, having jettisoned the clearly demarcated measurements of numbers, Pound had increased the possibility that “precision” for the poet would be more prone to error than precision for the scientist. If, for example, one grounds precision in the vague category of ineffable genius, “precision” may inhere in whatever the poet simply decrees to be precise. The consequences of Pound’s attachment to his version of precision are the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1. Nicholas 1989, 68. 2. The remarks by Flaubert are from a letter to Mme. Leroyer de Chantepie (Flaubert 1980a, 2: 691). Francis Steegmuller translates them as: “And then, Art must rise above personal affections and neurotic susceptibilities! It is time to banish anything of that sort from it, and give it the precision of the physical sciences” (1980b, 230). 2 TO BE PRECISE 55

3. In the Rambler 14 (5 May 1750), Johnson, however, described one’s impression upon arriving in “a large city,” and concluded that the visitor would encounter “narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke” (1958–, 3: 79–80). 4. Peter Brimblecombe, in his history of London air pollution, credits the Romantic movement with this change in attitude. “Pollution and the human suffering it engendered were forces that infuenced the development of the Romantic movement. Two hundred years later, we can now fnd neo-romantic aspects to the environmentalism of today” (1987, 83). 5. A visitor’s guide to London, popular in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, praised the setting of Kenwood House overlooking Hampstead Heath, but with a qualifcation: “The garden front, which is more extensive than the other, commands a fne view of rich meadows, falling in a gentle descent, and relieved by some noble pieces of water, that supply part of the metropolis. But this view is terminated by what can add no beauty to rural scenery, the spires of London enveloped in fogs and smoke” (Bew 1794, 61). 6. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 flm adaptation of the novel is subtitled “A Story of the London Fog.” 7. One author, writing in 1843 in The Chemist (London), pointed out that the problem of managing smoke had attracted a large number of failed remedies. “For upwards of twenty years many plans have from time to time been suggested for the combustion or prevention of smoke, but with what success we are left to judge from the fact that none of them singly, or any combination of them, has been generally adopted” (Dircks 1843, 455). 8. See Leavell (21–24) for an account of John Moore’s work on the furnace and his subsequent mental aberration. 9. Although Ruskin professed to be ignorant of the immediate cause of this blighting wind, his editors, Cooke and Wedderburn, were certain about its origins. It was smoke from burning coal that had besmirched the wel- kin: “the storm-cloud thickened just when the consumption of coal went up by leaps and bounds, both in this country and in the industrialised parts of central Europe” (1903–1912, 34: xxvi). This explanation avoids dealing with Ruskin’s insistence that the “plague-wind” was a manifestation of the decay of civilization. 10. Tennyson’s Princess Ida echoes the importance given to light as the basis for Creation in Genesis.

To your question now, Which touches on the workman and his work. Let there be light and there was light: ’tis so: 56 B. AHEARN

For was, and is, and will be, are but is; And all creation is one act at once, The birth of light …. (Tennyson 1969, 782) 11. Arnold may have been partly inspired to compose his poem by the erection of the Calais lighthouse. It was built in 1848, and there are indications that Arnold began the poem in 1851, during or soon after the time he and his bride honeymooned at Dover. 12. Fain echoes an earlier comment about the light on the coast of France. “The light that gleams from France must be a beacon; and now it is gone; but it will gleam bright again as lighthouse beacons do turn on and off, on and off” (Creevy 1978, 13). 13. Woolf’s short sketch, “Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Offcer” (1931) emphasizes the nearly mechanical behavior of “Captain Brace” and his crew. Almost every sentence does so. For example: “With the sweep of an automatic action, he pressed a blotting paper over his design with one hand, with the other he placed his cap on his head. Then he marched to the door; then he marched down the three steps that led to the deck. Each distance seemed already cut up into so many stages; and his last step brought him exactly to a particular plank[,] to his station in front of fve hundred blue jackets. Five hundred right hands few exactly to their heads. Five second later the Captain’s right hand few to his head. After waiting precisely two seconds it fell as the signal falls when an express train has passed” (1989, 233). 14. Augustin Fresnel and Admiral Edouard de Rossel had already imple- mented a simpler system of lighthouse signaling along the coast of France, a system completed in 1854 (Levitt 2013, 83–84 and 116). 15. One critic assures us that “the line down the centre of Lily’s painting is certainly her depiction of Godrevy lighthouse” (Hill-Miller 2001, 31). The concluding sentences of To the Lighthouse, however, do not indicate whether the line is vertical, horizontal, or tilted. It is merely “in the centre.” The lack of specifcation, however, does at least make it possible to construe the line as representing a lighthouse. So far as the lighthouse itself is concerned, critics of To the Lighthouse agree that the lighthouse is symbolic. A handful of critics, generally earlier ones, sought specifc meaning for it. In the last few decades, however, we fnd general agreement that the Lighthouse does not symbolize anything determinate. Mitchell A. Leaska remarks, “the Lighthouse means different things to different readers” (1970, 120). We might expect that Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World would have something to say about real lighthouses, but here also the Lighthouse is simply one of a series of symbols 2 TO BE PRECISE 57

in the novel “meant to resonate with signifcance” (1986, 206–207). I am not arguing that the Lighthouse must be compared only to real lighthouses, just that this comparison can be fruitful. 16. Later in the century, it was clear that Newton continued to loom over the intellectual landscape. In 1862 the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz declared, “the discovery of the law of gravitation and its consequences is the most imposing achievement that the logical power of the human mind has hitherto performed” (1873, 22). 17. John T. Irwin argues that Poe “must have been aware that for most of his educated readers the contemporary association of the word analysis would have been largely mathematical. Clearly, Poe felt the need to reclaim the word for an older, wider range of meaning” (1994, 368). 18. Edmund Clarence Stedman’s poem, “Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886), contains a stanza that refers to the function of the statue as a lighthouse and associates it with Old Testament guidance for the Israelites on their way to the Promised Land. My name is Liberty! From out a mighty land I face the ancient sea, I lift to God my hand; By day in heaven’s light, A pillar of fre by night, At ocean’s gate I stand Nor bend the knee. (Stevenson 1936, 595) Stedman was not the frst poet to associate lighthouses with Providential direction. Witness these lines from Sheldon Chadwick’s “The Lighthouse and the Press”: The lighthouse stands upon the rock In beauty, strength, and might; ‘Tis like a Pillar of Cloud by day And a Pillar of Fire by night! (Chadwick 1875, 77) Chadwick’s readers would have understood the reference to Genesis 13: 21. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fre, to give them light; to go by day and night.” 19. Despite Poe’s objection to the increasing dominance of science, there are, of course, aspects of his work that indicate he was also interested in making use of its prestige. His account in “The Philosophy of Composition” 58 B. AHEARN

about composing “The Raven” makes the process of poetic inspiration as rigorous and logical as a mathematical proof. 20. Mightier than Egypt’s tombs, Fairer than Grecia’s Roma’s temples, Prouder than Milan’s statued, spired Cathedral, More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps, We plan, even now, to raise, beyond them all, Thy great Cathedral, sacred Industry—no tomb, A Keep for life for practical invention. 21. For example, in the New York Times Book Review for 27 December 2015, one poet is praised for his “absolutely precise description of the almost imperceptible way a day begins” (13), while another demonstrates “an urgent, get-the-word-out quality to his unpunctuated lines that sometimes comes at the expense of precision” (26). In the TLS for 11 December 2015, a reviewer mentions that one poet says “precisely things the reader won’t forget” (29); on the same page, another reviewer fnds a different poet offers “a new though unerringly precise vocabulary.” Two years later, in the TLS for 14 July 2017, we fnd that one poet’s poems display an “economy, vividness and precision.” In the same issue a reviewer notes that another poet’s work offers “precision.” The term has proven useful even when critics discuss poetry written in a foreign language. Frank Kermode, in an essay on Paul Valéry, notes that “Only the poet can develop this raw material through hundreds of drafts, towards the infnitely perfectible but infnitely imperfect poem, seeking the exact curve in language never to be made absolutely precise” (1963: 52). “Precision” seems to be a universal value. 22. In the ffth chapter, when he discusses the concept of association of ideas, he remarks of Thomas Hobbes, “the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him” (7: 96). 23. The editor of Hulme’s Collected Writings speculates that it “is very possibly the lecture Hulme delivered on 15 July 1912, at Clifford’s Inn Hall, London” (Hulme 1994, 59). 24. Just a few months before “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” began appearing in the New Age, he informed his parents, on 17 September 1911, “I have spent the P.M with G. R. S. Mead. Edtr. of the ‘Quest’ who wants me to throw a lecture ‘Troubadour Psychology’ whatever the dooce that is” (Pound 2010, 51). Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz say that Pound gave his lecture, “Psychology and Troubadours” “early in 1912” (Pound 1984, 88). They imply it was delivered earlier than another series of lectures he gave in March. If Pound lectured to the Quest Society in January or February, he would have done so at the same time “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” was concluding in the New Age. 2 TO BE PRECISE 59

25. Blair, perhaps glancing at Johnson’s Dictionary, observes, “The exact import of Precision may be drawn from the etymology of the word. It comes from ‘precidere,’ to cut off: It imports retrenching all superfuities, and pruning the expression so, as to exhibit neither more nor less than an exact copy of his idea who uses it” (101). 26. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s champion, urged an educational curriculum that would “devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to the careful study of the models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art” (Dawson 2011, 1: 209–210). Huxley does not say, however, whether he envisions instruction in the art of writing poetry as part of the English child’s training. 27. Pound most likely used the British edition (1912). 28. This is also apparent in the book for which he was best known, The Psychology of Insanity (1912). When discussing a patient’s amnesia, Hart promises that later in his study “its precise nature and causation will be explained” (30). At another point, Hart assures the reader that “The degradation of speech and mental content proceeds according to fairly precise laws which have been laboriously investigated by Jung and his followers” (158). Hart found “precise” happily ftting with psychological science, yet he was not the frst to do so. When Hart cites a passage from the work of Wilfred Trotter, the word crops up again, when Trotter refers to “that vast group of the mentally unstable which, while diffcult to defne without detailed consideration, is suffciently precise in the knowledge of all to be recognizable as extremely large” (168). 29. Eliot, despite his adoption of “precision” as part of his critical vocabulary, seems to have been unimpressed by Hazlitt, “who had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our distinguished critics” (Eliot 1988, 115). 30. Hazlitt had little patience with criticism that preferred content to form. As he remarked in his essay, “On Criticism” (1822), “The highest subjects, equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens) are the best. But the power of execution, that manner of seeing nature, is one thing, and may be so superlative (if you are only able to judge of it) as to countervail every disadvantage of subject. Raphael’s storks in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, exulting in the event, are fner than the head of Christ would have been in almost any other hands” (1930, 8: 219–220). Hazlitt anticipates the renewed respect that would be accorded “the power of execution” as the nineteenth century drew toward its close. 31. Still another artistic value that Binyon emphasized was rhythm. When recounting the aesthetic theory of a sixth-century Chinese artist, Binyon points out that “In this theory every work of art is thought of as an 60 B. AHEARN

incarnation of the genius of rhythm, manifesting the living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the gross impediments of complex matter allow to be transmitted to our senses in the visible world around us” (9). Binyon returns several times to the importance of rhythm in Chinese and Japanese art. “Rhythm, indeed, is recognized as the vital essence of art” (66), writes Binyon, and he praises the art of Li Lung- Mien as displaying “magnifcent mastery of design built up of rhythms of fuid line” (126). Pound would have welcomed this emphasis, if we can judge by his later comments on rhythm in “Imagisme” and “Some Don’ts by an Imagiste.” CHAPTER 3

Ezra Pound and Error

In general … every error upon our view contains some truth, since it has a content which in some sense belongs to the Universe. And on the other side all truths are in varying degrees erroneous.—F. H. Bradley, “On Appearance, Error and Contradiction” (1910)

Preamble: The Erroneous Ezra Writing to Guy Davenport in 1968, Hugh Kenner recommended Harry Meacham’s The Caged Panther. “Whatever its holes, it is the one honest book on the late Pound so far, i.e. the only one the author of which is solely interested in fnding out & telling what happened, rather than in letting us understand that Ez after all understood politics or Chinese less well than he” (Davenport 2018, 2: 1050). Kenner was irritated by the fact that others were perpetually reminding Pound that he had gotten things wrong. Such criticism began early in Pound’s career. One reviewer of Canzoni (1911) faulted Pound for his “utter carelessness as to rhythm” (Erkkila 2011, 44). This reviewer also objected that the “translations of poems by Heine … are execrable to the last degree.” A few years later, Professor William Gardner Hale denounced Pound’s versions of Propertius as the work of someone “incredibly ignorant of Latin” (1919, 52). Hale suggested that if Pound wanted to continue to translate from Latin he should “employ some respectable student of the language to save him from blunders” (55). At least Hale suggested a means by which Pound could be rescued from his ineptitude. This was not the case with Wyndham Lewis, who seemed to ascribe Pound’s

© The Author(s) 2020 61 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_3 62 B. AHEARN defects to a quirk of personality. “He is never happy if he is not sniff- ing the dust and glitter of action kicked up by other, more ‘active’ men. With all his admirable fair for ‘genius’ (in which he has described himself as a ‘specialist’) it leads him into the support of things that are at once absurd and confusing” (1957, 40–41). Those who considered Pound an inept student of the art of poetry were not impressed when political and economic considerations started appearing in his work. Even some of his friends were taken aback; in the 1930s, it became commonplace for both his friends and his enemies to highlight the faws in Pound’s political and economic views. William Carlos Williams read Guide to Kulchur with exasperation: “The failure of the book is that by its tests Mussolini is a great man; and the failure of Pound, that he thinks him so” (Erkkila, 259). Even after Pound’s death, many sought to diagnose what had gone wrong with his thought. Thus, Jean-Michel Rabaté, in 1986, put his fnger on what he thought was Pound’s economic error: “Pound’s main failure from a scientifc point of view lies in his inability to account for the logic of capitalist production” (1986, 287–288). Many of his critics seem to have shared a common assumption, namely, that if Pound had paid better attention to reliable information he would have seen the error of his ways. Or, to put it bluntly, some of his critics alleged he simply did not know enough. Others attributed Pound’s failings to an excessive ambition that led him down unproftable avenues. Jessie B. Rittenhouse said of Lustra, “The whole effect of Ezra Pound’s work, of recent years, is that of one straining for technical variety, passing from one technical experiment to another, projecting the whole against a background of many tongues as if to obtrude his recondite learning” (Erkkila, 81). In other words, the poet was showing off, and the result was injurious to genuine poetry. Quite a few critics found his display of “recondite learning” attributa- ble to a pedagogical bent. If they detected a didactic element in the poetry, they condemned it, because they found his desire to instruct incompatible with poetry. When Richard Eberhart reviewed the Pisan Cantos in 1949, he not only objected to Pound’s pedagogical fare but found it fawed. “Pound is in one facet the frustrated teacher neuroti- cally forced because his pupils do not know about, or enough about, or qualitatively enough about Padre Jose Elizonida, Kung, taou, Chung, Kung futsen, Tang-wan Kung, or Tsze Sze’s third thesis. He wants them to know about these. He lays them out to view in a long fury of explication. He ends by stuffng them down the throats of his readers. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 63

After the nth reference to x, how many of his readers will be provoked to refer to, study, and inwardly digest that individual or datum? The error is that of explication, and of explication, of incomplete explication” (Erkkila, 293). For Eberhart, Pound the teacher sometimes over- shadowed Pound the poet. That was bad enough, but Pound was also too sketchy to be a sound instructor. These two accusations against Pound, frst, that he was too ready to faunt his learning, particularly in an unhelpful manner, and second, that he was not as competent as he should have been, are of course compatible. Gertrude Stein had already merged them when she tagged him as the “village explainer.” Most of Pound’s detractors can be divided into two camps: those who claimed he was too ignorant and those who thought he knew too much and that he presented it badly. If we set aside the explanations of Pound as the poet who bit off more than be could chew, and Pound the fawed pedagogue, what remains? There are a few who believe that his errors stemmed from some sort of insanity, either diagnosable or of a type not found among the usual forms of mental aberration. This approach lacks a convincing explanation for why so many other poets of demonstrably sound mind admired his poems. What has been too often lacking in Pound studies is a body of scholarship that considers the nature of his errors in depth. There are two notable exceptions. Both Christine Froula and Michael North have looked closely at this matter of Poundian error. In To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (1984), Froula offers an aesthetic and historical explanation for his missteps. Her account of The Cantos suggests that the plans Pound had for his epic were doomed to fail because the culture of modernity rendered impossible the kind of totalizing and coherent masterwork that Pound once envisioned. As she puts it, “The authorial errors in the text of The Cantos, then, may be viewed as the ‘footprints’ of the unfnished and unfnishable wandering which Pound’s epic discovers—against its author’s initial hopes as well as its readers’—to be modern history, modern experience” (1984, 154). Froula argues that in the course of writing The Cantos, Pound discovered that modernity with- drew from epic poetry the stable frameworks enjoyed by past authors. To be modern was to be part of a complex nexus of “social agreement” which rendered nugatory a “distanced, objective perspective” (158). In a sense, Pound became both a victim of his times and its representative. Froula portrays Pound as a poet so sensitive to his era that he could not help but produce an epic poem startlingly different from 64 B. AHEARN prior epics. “But if Pound’s dream was of an ultimate order of human experience … his poem’s claim to greatness rests in its unretouched enactment of the failure of this dream” (166). Froula concludes that Pound never quite grasped the nature of his own achievement in The Cantos, almost as if Pound was a modernist in spite of himself. In such a reading, Pound becomes the quintessential modernist, if we defne modernity as the anguished recognition that the old modes of narration, historical or literary, have become obsolete. The large and small errors in The Cantos emerged as fssures when its antiquated structure settled into the shaky ground of modernity. Michael North’s essay, “Where Memory Faileth: Forgetfulness and a Poem Including History” (1988), takes up Pound’s paradoxical treatment of history and its preservation (or loss) in memory. On the one hand, Pound is clearly concerned that the past be remembered. On the other hand, he is often cavalier about historic detail. North fnds that this ambivalence on Pound’s part can be explained by the fact that he distinguishes two sorts of memory. The frst kind consists of the recollection of mundane details such as dates, names of books, and the like: in short, things that can be learned by rote. The second kind is much more valuable since it represents “knowledge of processes” (1988, 147). Rote knowledge can be dispensed with (and easily regained), but inherent knowledge of processes cannot. North points out that Pound links “knowledge of processes” to the total and invaluable knowledge Pound called (borrowing from Leo Frobenius) the paideuma, “the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time” (quoted in North, 152). As North argues, however, the paideuma “is a closed book to those outside…” (153). One has to grow up in a particular culture at a particular time in order to absorb the paideuma of that culture and that time. But Pound evades this diffculty by relying on his innate ability to transcend cultural gaps and differences. “Pound is able to imply that the culture of the peasant can be acquired by outsiders” (153). North does not say, but suggests, that such outsiders must be men or women of genius. He cites the China cantos as illustrating how Pound seizes the Chinese paideuma. North argues that these cantos depict “a pattern of deviation from and return to one standard of truth” (158). If one is able to perceive, amidst the clutter of historical detail, the “one standard,” then the diffculties presented by the peculiarities of particular paideumas fall away. The visionary poet has 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 65 penetrated the thicket of words, images, domestic practices, dynastic tur- moil, etc., that are the observable features of a paideuma and grasped its inner essence. Once that has been accomplished, one can safely forget any niggling details. This, says North, is what Pound thought he had done. Hence the importance for Pound of facts that evoke the permanently remembered processes and his dismissive attitude toward facts that do not. But the decision about which facts are the important ones turns out to be Pound’s, even though he makes obeisance to a collective, social, and “scientifc” consensus about the recovery of history. The poet of genius may make small errors, but he (or she) is incapable of committing grave mistakes. Froula and North are correct in identifying Pound’s attachment to his genius as both the impetus for what is most valuable about his work as well as what is most puzzling about it. In Froula’s reading, it led Pound into diffculties when he grappled with modernity, but those same diffculties are (for her) the most intriguing aspect of The Cantos. The Cantos reveals the features of modernity, and this could only have been accomplished by a genius so determined to master the fractures and schisms of the modern. Froula confnes herself to The Cantos; I hope to demonstrate that throughout his career Pound’s faith in his visionary powers could not immunize him from error. North’s account is smaller in scope; it is, after all, an essay. He takes up the specifc problem of why Pound is concerned to preserve some bits of history while seeming unconcerned about other bits. Yet, like Froula, he assigns the reason for this to Pound’s faith in his own talent and intellect. Pound habitually posited himself as the arbiter of truth. He might well have taken for his motto the words of Acoetes in Canto 2, “I have seen what I have seen.” This stance, however, inevitably conficted with what Western civilization had come to consider the touchstone of truth, namely, consensus. The West had largely abandoned its veneration for the authority of the seer, but Pound lingered by that altar. The following chapter shows how Pound’s visionary stance extended beyond The Cantos and beyond his view of history. The shorter poems, his translations of Confucius, The Cantos: all these display Pound’s faith in his incisive perception. I particularly stress his alignment of that perception with science, or rather what he selected as “scientifc.” That alignment, as we shall see, led Pound into diffculties when he sought to confate scientifc methods with the mystic vision of the seer. 66 B. AHEARN

1 the Dance Floor and the Laboratory In his old age, John Ruskin’s opinion was solicited regarding a novel contraption called the “bicycle.” He heartily disapproved. Here was another product of the Industrial Revolution that bent people out of their natural shape. But this time gears, wheels, and chains had escaped the mill; they were not even confned to iron tracks, as were railroad engines. They could venture forth on any road or path. Where others might have seen opportunities for increased independence in their travels, Ruskin did not.1 He had once stipulated that “mining, millwork, or any oppressive and monotonous labour” was degrading (1903–1912, 34: 293). The same was true with respect to the bicycle. Faced with it, Ruskin once again saw people reduced to “monotonous labour.” God never framed humanity to conform itself to pedals and rotary monotony. Ruskin commented that people were meant for just four types of locomotion: “to walk, to run, to leap, and to dance” (34: 617). When Britons mounted their bicycles, Terpsichore wept. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) Henry James compares the artist’s pursuit of that fckle and elusive phenomenon—reality—to learning a new dance, or rather learning a continually changing dance: “Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.” Implicit in James’s account is the suggestion that mimesis can never be a completely successful imitation of the real. No matter how long or how dil- igently the artist strives, he or she will be plagued by hesitancies, gaps, and errors that will inevitably mar the attempt. Our dance partner, life, is always one step ahead. James’s essay was a response to Walter Besant’s identically titled lecture, “The Art of Fiction.” Besant had begun his lecture with three propositions; James particular objected to one of these, the one in which Besant claimed that the art of fction was “governed and directed by general laws; and that these laws may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion” (Besant 1885, 3). James took issue with the claim that laws of such “precision and exactness” could ever be applied to fction. As James saw it, life, and the art that sought to capture it, were ineluctably various and volatile. Precision would only go so far; indeed, precision would hardly go far at all. Like Ruskin, James valued the spontaneity and freedom of the dance more than the certainty of precise regulation. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 67

A generation later, Pound shifted the metaphorical locale from the dance foor to the laboratory. In part, he was responding to the spirit of the time in which he was born. As G. K. Chesterton recalled in his Autobiography, during his childhood “science was in the air of all that Victorian world, and children and boys were affected by the picturesque aspects of it” (1886–, 16: 107). For the grownup Pound, the artist now was more like a scientist than a dance student. He made that alteration in part because he recognized the prestige of science and technology. He also found in the scientist, the mathematician, and the engineer a better opportunity for reducing error. Indeed, the scientist became for Pound a seer whose capacity for error had been so curtailed as to be nearly irrelevant. This happy result could be shared by poets, or so he believed. Yet, as we shall see, when Pound allied the scientist and the poet he made certain assumptions about precision that warrant scrutiny.

2 Agassiz and Objectivity Critics have frequently noted Pound’s attraction to the vocabulary of science, mathematics, and engineering.2 In the essay, “The Wisdom of Poetry” (1912), he claimed, “What the analytical geometer does for space and form, the poem does for the states of consciousness” (SP, 362). Three years later he explained what the Image meant to the Imagists by defning it in terms that made it resemble an electric bat- tery or dynamo: “it is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy” (SP, 375). Furthermore, “the best artist is the man whose machinery can stand the highest voltage. The better the machinery, the more precise, the stronger, the more exact will be the record of the voltage and of the various currents which have passed through it” (SP, 376). Clearly Pound implied that he himself created poems, or machines, that had the virtue of being “more precise.” As we have already seen, one of the signal virtues of science and mathematics that Pound had invoked during the creation of Imagism was precision. By importing precision into the creation and criticism of poetry, he hoped it would “once again become a medium for communication between intelligent men” (Schafer 1977, 407). It appears that intelligent men had abandoned poetry for the works of Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, James Clerk Maxwell, and Karl Pearson. And who could blame them when faced with the likes of Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, John Drinkwater, and Lascelles Abercrombie? 68 B. AHEARN

Pound’s marriage of science and poetry was founded on the assumption that the sciences and the arts were not fundamentally distinct. This assumption underwrites Pound’s contention that “scientifc” approaches by the artist and the critic are not only possible, but necessary. The following passage from “The Serious Artist” (1913) shows how early and how explicitly Pound had arrived at this conclusion.

The permanent property, the property given to the race at large is precisely these data of the serious scientist and of the serious artist; of the scientist as touching the relations of abstract numbers, of molecular energy, of the composition of matter, etc.; of the serious artist, as touching the nature of man, of individuals. (LE, 47)

Pound thus portrays the scientist and the artist as similarly engaged; each works in his or her separate feld, but each handles “data” in a rigorous and energetic fashion. Also, each produces his or her results with precision. Neither the scientist nor that artist can claim to be more relevant or “better” than the other. Thus Pound attempted to place science and poetry on an equal footing. Twenty years later, in “The Teacher’s Mission” (1934), Pound again discussed the scientifc method. This time he recommended it as a cure for the tendency of colleges and universities to becloud the minds of students with abstraction. After lamenting the educational methods he fnds endemic to colleges and universities, Pound offers hope for their amelio- ration—if professors would heed the lesson of Louis Agassiz.

All of which is inexcusable after the era of ‘Agassiz and the fsh’—by which I mean now that general education is in position to proft by the parallels of biological study based on examination and comparison of particular specimens. All teaching of literature should be performed by the presentation and juxtaposition of specimens of writing and not by discussion of some other discusser’s opinion about the general standing of a poet or author. Any teacher of biology would tell you that knowledge can not be transmitted by general statement without knowledge of particulars. By this method of presentation and juxtaposition even a moderately ignorant teacher can transmit most of what he knows without flling the student’s mind with a great mass of prejudice and error. (LE, 60) 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 69

Pound’s proposal for academic reform contains two more assumptions. First, scientists see clearly and objectively. He breezily designates this as examination. Second, the scientifc method is fundamentally an act of comparison. This is true as far as it goes, but Pound omits other practices that constitute scientifc investigation. For example, he makes no mention of the degree to which scientifc discovery relies upon what Francis Bacon called “cooperative labours.”3 Also lacking from his sketch is the extent to which scientists depend upon verifable experiments to reach consensus. And Pound says nothing about the importance of mathematics to science. Pound also discusses Louis Agassiz and the fsh in an anecdote near the beginning of ABC of Reading (1934). Here Pound lays out his most extensive account of what it means to be—or at least to be trained as—a scientist. As the story goes, Agassiz presents a fsh to a student and asks him to describe it.

Post-graduate Student: “That’s only a sunfsh.” Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.” After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichtus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfsh from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject. Agassiz again told the student to describe the fsh. The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fsh. At the end of three weeks the fsh was in an advanced stage of decomposition, but the student knew something about it. (ABC, 17–18)

Pound dwells on the anecdote because he wants the student of poetry to compare poems with the same intensity with which Agassiz’s student examines the fsh. Also, by invoking the anecdote about the training of a scientist, Pound invites us to consider the examination of poetry as equally important as the examination of the natural world. Yet some diffculties arise when we inquire whether the analogy between scientifc examination and the scrutiny of poetry holds up so neatly. We might ask, for example, whether the training of the student, involving ever more lengthy descriptions of the fsh, can be justly compared to a sound training in the understanding of poetry. Perhaps so, but Pound’s account of 70 B. AHEARN his creation of “In a Station of the Metro” reverses Agassiz’s instruc- tional regimen. As he recalled in Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), the poem recording his emotions began with a version of thirty lines, then was reduced by half, and was fnally boiled down to just two lines.4 If one’s training as a scientist demands ever more extensive documentation, but the labor of a poet involves ever more condensation, are the two occupations really alike? The second diffculty that the anecdote presents has to do with objectivity. Pound assumes that the scientifcally trained eye clearly registers what it examines. From the start, Agassiz’s student can see; he just has to be more persistent in his inspection. Pound seems unaware that the question of what the scientifc eye sees can be extraordinarily complicated. When scientists turn their eyes onto natural phenomena, questions arise, most of them epistemological in nature. Would two observers see exactly in the same way? Can prejudice or bias be summarily dismissed as of no consequence? We can ask similar questions about the scene Pound describes. Was the training the student had prior to his encounter with Agassiz only clouding his judgment? Did Agassiz’s function merely amount to urging the student to keep looking at the fsh? But Pound omits such questions from his discussion of the anecdote. Pound’s faith in the scientist’s unerring eye deserves scrutiny because, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison observe,

The history of scientifc objectivity is surprisingly short. It frst emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and in a matter of decades became established not only as a scientifc norm but also as a set of practices, including the making of images for scientifc atlases. However dominant objectivity may have become in the sciences since circa 1860, it never had, and still does not have, the epistemological feld to itself. Before objectivity, there was truth-to-nature; after the advent of objectivity came trained judgment. The new did not always edge out the old. Some disciplines were won over quickly to the newest epistemic virtue, while others persevered in their allegiance to older ones. The relationship among epistemic virtues may be one of compatibility, or it may be one of rivalry and confict. In some cases, it is possible to pursue several simultaneously; in others, scientists must choose between truth and objectivity, or between objectivity and judgment. Contradictions arise. (Daston 2010, 27–28)

Pound assumes that the eye acts as a pure sensory instrument. It registers images without prejudice, bias, or distortion. He takes it to be 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 71 scrupulously objective. Pound, apparently unaware of the competing modes of inspection among which scientifc observers were obliged to choose, presents the story of Agassiz and the fsh as one in which the true scientist can remain happily unconcerned about modes of inspection. The scientist already can see, and that’s that. All the scientist (or scientist in training) needs to do is to apply his eyesight more strenuously. Then the scientist will see what there is to see. That “objective scientifc eye,” however, cannot sustain the role that Pound expects it to fulfll. There is no such thing as the purely objective scientifc eye. Details in the anecdote, moreover, subvert Pound’s assumption that the eye acts without bias or prejudice. Agassiz needs to supervise (literally, “look over”) the student. The savant chooses the object for the student’s attention and directs the student’s sight. In fact, Pound in ABC of Reading replicates Agassiz’s role. The reading lists he presents are like the varieties of fsh that Agassiz offers to his students. But does Pound himself truly advocate the kind of training he sketches in the Agassiz story? Does he act simply as the instructor who appears at long intervals to nudge the student to look again? Daston and Galison’s account of Linnaeus suggests that Pound’s conception of the literary critic worthy of the name more closely resembles a Linnaean rather than an Agassizean model.

He [Linnaeus] … would have dismissed as irresponsible the suggestion that scientifc facts should be conveyed without the mediation of the scientist and ridiculed as absurd the notion that the kind of scientifc knowledge most worth seeking was that which depended least on the personal traits of the seeker. These later tenets of objectivity, as they were formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, would have contradicted Linnaeus’s own sense of scientifc mission. Only the keenest and most experienced observer—who had, like Linnaeus, inspected thousands of different specimens—was qualifed to distinguish genuine species from mere varieties, to identify the true specifc characters imprinted in the plant, and to separate accidental from essential features. (59)

At frst glance it appears that Pound, in recounting the story of Agassiz, the student, and the fsh promotes objectivity. As he says, “At the end of three weeks the fsh was in an advanced stage of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.” Yet absent the mentor who selects the particular fsh and forces the student to more closely examine and 72 B. AHEARN describe it, the student would not “know something about it.” Agassiz’s role resembles that of literary critics such as Pound, who have “themselves produced notable work” (ABC, 40). Those who have done so are in a position to know what constitutes the notable work of the past. Although Pound presents himself in ABC of Reading as liberating his pupils from forms of instruction that “draw the mind of the student away from literature into inanity” (LE, 20), what will be the end of such instruction? What must result when the student completes his or her Poundian education? When Pound decrees that genuine inspection and comparison of literary work primarily entails “knowing and examining a few of the best poems” (ABC, 43), he directs that result. Pound already knows the best poems. The student following Pound’s landmarks should arrive at the same judgments he has long since formulated. The student will value the same authors and for the same reasons that Pound does. Should the student err by wandering from Pound’s designated curriculum (for example, by complaining that Tennyson has been thinly represented), the fault will lie with the student because the student has not done enough of the kind of broad comparison Pound insists is the vade mecum. “Motive does not concern us, but error does. Glorifers of the past commonly err because they measure the work of a present DECADE against the best work of a past century or even of a whole group of centuries” (ABC, 91). The student avoids such error by following Pound’s table of comparisons, which does not focus too closely on the work of the recent past. By investing so heavily in comparison as the hallmark of scientifc investigation, Pound neglects the extent to which scientifc understanding depends upon collective judgment. It is telling that in his reference to the anecdote in “The Teacher’s Mission,” Pound drops the student from the story. All that remains is the fsh and Agassiz, the knowledgeable expert.5 Students may or may not become experts, and so prove dispensable. The masters of their felds, however, are indispensable. In Pound’s formulation, the masters agree with him about poetry through the ages. Those who disagree show by the measure of their dissent how far they fall short of true comprehension. According to Pound’s anecdote about scientifc training, Agassiz’s role consists simply in keeping the student’s attention fxed on the fsh. Yet earlier versions of the anecdote—to which Pound does not refer— indicate that Agassiz did more than leave the student alone with the fsh. Two students of Agassiz left memoirs about his “fshy” teaching method. The frst of these, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, recalls how 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 73

“Agassiz brought me a small fsh, placing it before me with the rather stern requirement that I should study it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything relating to fshes, until I had his permission so to do” (Cooper 1945, 41). Much as in Pound’s version of the story, Shaler recalls how he spends a week with the fsh, only to fnd that Agassiz dismisses his efforts by saying, “That is not right.” Shaler, however, persists. “I went at the task anew, discarded my frst notes, and in another week of ten hours a day labor I had results which astonished myself and satisfed him” (42). Shaler’s recollection presents Agassiz as simply a taskmaster, and so Agassiz appears in Pound’s version. But another student, Samuel Scudder, reveals more detail about Agassiz’s training in his short memoir, “In the Laboratory with Agassiz.” According to Scudder, Agassiz does not tell him to describe the fsh, but simply departs, saying, “by and by I will ask what you have seen” (Cooper, 56). Scudder spends several hours staring at the fsh, handling it, and even counting its scales. None of these forms of examination strike him as adequate. “At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fsh; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature” (58). At that moment Agassiz returns and comments, “That is right; a pencil is one of the best of eyes” (58). Scudder has hit upon one of the forms of examination that Agassiz approves. Scudder’s success deserves our attention because drawing specimens, rather than photographing them, is one of the methods of truth-to-nature description. But more remains to be done. Agassiz remarks, “you haven’t even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is plainly before your eyes as the fsh itself; look again, look again!” (58). Scudder is perplexed. What has he missed? Scudder spends a sleepless night asking himself over and over again what he was supposed to see. The next day, Scudder returns to the laboratory and asks Agassiz, “Do you perhaps mean that the fsh has symmetrical sides with paired organs?” (59). Agassiz delightedly replies, “Of course, of course!” and discourses “most happily and enthusiastically … upon the importance of this point” (59–60). Scudder has succeeded in identifying what Agassiz hoped he would see, which is only one of a multitude of possible facts about the fsh. “Looking” at the fsh has less to do with “objective” sight and more to do with seeing what Agassiz and his peers had already determined were its important features. When looking at the fsh, Scudder should, and fnally does, grasp part of the disciplinary discourse of ichthyology. Precise insight and precise knowledge are a function of that discourse.6 74 B. AHEARN

Pound composed ABC of Reading so that students could fnd a sounder basis for evaluating poetry than merely subjective tests. But the “scientifc” and “objective” approach that Pound offers ends with the student compelled to fnally judge poetry on the basis of Pound’s expertise. In his zeal to free instruction from the biases that prevailed in the academies, Pound has compromised his goal by adopting a narrow model of how science approaches the truth. In adopting an “objective” model supposedly exemplifed by Agassiz’s methods, he has actually reproduced an approach that requires the savant to direct the taste of the neophyte. Pound’s attempt to liberate students from the faulty curriculum imposed by the academy ends in the authority of the seer, an authority based on innate and superior vision. Scientifc precision in Pound’s hands becomes an aspect of a mysterious and inexplicable intuitive gift. His “science” and “precision” mask something else: ineffable genius, a visionary power immune to precise measurements. What seems to be precise and objective exceeds the boundaries of both of these virtues.7 The image of the scientist as seer contrasts sharply with what most historians of science conceive of as scientifc endeavor. In their portraits of scientists at work, error is not something to be removed from the process of discovery, but inherent to it. To put it bluntly, our understanding of the physical nature of the universe is erroneous, and what we call scientifc investigation is the gradual and endless process of making it less erroneous.8 Science so conceived, however, has little use for the visionary who sees into the heart of the matter. Yet Pound insisted that human progress depended upon the efforts of a few great men, who, across the centuries, had seen the truth.

3 great Men “from a fne old eye the unconquered fame”. Canto 81

In Guide to Kulchur (1938) Pound refers to the “supreme intelligence of the universe” (189). It was his faith that the supreme intelligence could be adequately (although never perfectly) refected in the fne arts and in language. Fortunately for humankind, however, we are blessed with a few visionaries who demonstrate superior discernment. “By genius,” Pound writes, “I mean an inevitable swiftness and rightness in a given 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 75 feld” (105–106). The geniuses Pound encountered often demonstrated their special insight by uttering pithy comments. Thus Pound recalled Arthur Griffth as “a great man.” One proof of his greatness lay in Griffth’s observation that you “Can’t move ‘em with a cold thing like economics” (105). Similarly, Mussolini displays quick insight by asking Pound, “Perchè vuol mettere le sue idée in ordine?” (105).9 Griffth and Mussolini may have regarded their comments as merely casual remarks. For Pound, however, such observations testify to their genius. His citation of the few words that demonstrate their insight accords with his claim that “real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits” (99). Discrete, particular chunks of experience—these “titbits”—slowly and surely accumulate. The “natural man” thus gradually builds up a body of genuine knowledge. But a few sharp minds, such as Griffth and Mussolini, do this more rapidly and more thoroughly than most men. In turn, Griffth and Mussolini can produce verbal titbits that (a) display their genius and (b) serve as nuggets of wisdom for others to snatch up. Griffth and Mussolini have the insight and experience that produces those nuggets; Pound likewise has the insight and experience to perceive them as golden. Yet these fashes of wisdom occur in the vicinity of men with whom Pound had only a feeting connection. He met Mussolini just once. Pound’s personal encounter with Griffth was also brief. The tangen- tial nature of these meetings may have been for the best, because when Pound had a longer acquaintance with intelligent contemporaries it often led to disagreement. For example, Pound’s correspondence during the 1930s with other people who tackled economic reform demonstrates that he was frequently at odds with them. The more Pound exchanged ideas with others, the greater the opportunity for rifts to develop. Pound seemed never to ask why his correspondents’ experience never brought them into complete agreement with him. If the supreme intelligence of the universe is a coherent whole, then great minds should see in the world about them the same structures, activities, developments, and potential. Honest, thoughtful men should be absorbing the factual titbits which, when found, sorted, and contemplated, reveal enduring truths. Apparently the reformers Pound dealt with were not quite the trenchant intellects he hoped they were. Either that, or there was something wrong with Pound’s epistemological model. Pound saw error as a deviation from an orderly unity. Those who thought erroneously would, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, be 76 B. AHEARN erroneous in a multitude of ways. But true savants would have perceptions of the universe that tallied with each other. Acute perceptions of this order would be the same or quite similar. Pound offers an analogy from mathematics, the realm where clarity and sharp discrimination seem to be most vivid: “Certain poetic beauties are a sort of recurring decimal” (K, 238). Just as the recurring part of a decimal repeats ad infnitum, over the millennia great artists will see and report comparable beauties. Just as the recurring decimal reveals a pattern that refects the unity and totality that comprises the universe, so the artistic record reveals a similar pattern. And a heightened awareness of the historical record makes explicit other, related parts of the grand design.

The fght against unjust monopoly has never let up from the hour of St Ambrose’s philipic [sic]. Jean Barral will take it back to the Egyptian cap- tivity. Matsumiyo with Japanese angle of incidence writes his history by dividing the year spring, summer, autumn, winter. No conception of culture will hold good if you omit the enduring constants in human composition. (K, 47)

Pound’s formulation here presents several challenges. How are we to identify these “enduring constants”? Are they the same in every culture, or do we need to translate from differing cultures in order to perceive the equivalents in ours? Even if Pound could fnd others who would see the same enduring constants as he does, he would be hard- pressed to convince them that every enduring constant he nominates as of greatest importance would be exactly the same as those they would identify. Yet Pound overcomes this potential for disagreement quite readily. In the case of “enduring constants” with respect to ethical standards, he contends that all clear-headed thinkers will come to the same conclusion.

It is OF the permanence of nature that honest men, even if endowed with no special brilliance, with no talents above those of straightness and honesty, come repeatedly to the same answers in ethics, without need of borrowing each other’s ideas. (SP, 89)

In this model, honest folk do not require genius or even any “special brilliance” to arrive independently at the same ethical principles. Simple 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 77 observation of humanity and nature will suffce. Furthermore, the choice of the word “straightness” indicates that Pound divides intellectual activity into two opposed categories. The frst kind of thought pursues the straight, correct, and precise path to truth; the second errs and deviates. When describing this second type, Pound evokes the vermic- ular: “In Mencius several cardinal lines are explicit, the most squirmy Ersatz-monger will have diffculty in worming away from them” (SP, 82). Pound offers certain Chinese ideograms to support his dichotomy of “straight” versus “crooked.” Even though there are “categories of ideograms not indicated as such in the dictionaries,” Pound notes that some of them denote “the twisted as evil” (SP, 93). Just as Pound looking at the ideograms fnds that his conception of the distinction between the straight and the twisty is valid, so honest men throughout history, observing nature and humanity, will agree which ethical principles are sound. Pound also addresses the matter of how honest thinkers should come to comparable conclusions in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935). In Chapter X, “The ‘New’ Economics,” he recalls that “London stank of decay back before 1914” and that he was keenly aware of the stench (1970, 48). Pound’s awareness, he says, was shared by some others. “I don’t know how many men keep alive in modern civilization but when one has the frankness to compare notes one fnds that intuition is confrmed just as neatly or almost as neatly as if the other man saw a shop sign” (49). (Pound does not name these others, but the list would probably include Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and a few more in Pound’s circle.) Pound’s comment restricts awareness of the profound and pervasive London corruption to the men who were “alive.” Would, however, someone merely intelligent and honest necessarily rise to the level of being “alive”? Perhaps not. Indeed, should an intelligent and honest man differ with Pound on this point, such disagreement would be a strong indication that he was not yet “alive.” The dubious reader might object that Pound has stipulated that Pound’s perception of London—and his alone—is the standard to which others must aspire before they can be considered “alive.” Pound, alert to this objection, denies that his intuition is purely personal. “I mean the perception is not the perception of one’s own subjectivity, but there is an object which others perceive” (49). A culture’s corruption eventually percolates to such a height of loathsomeness that it is “out there” for all “alive” men to see. Pound insists that his perceptions are not simply the 78 B. AHEARN result of his private awareness.10 That insistence, however, does not constitute a compelling proof. Why must we take his word for it? As Pound further explains how his perception operates, he again invokes intuition. “It may be, of course, that one’s intuition takes in the whole, and sees straight, whereas one’s verbal receiving station or one’s logic deals with stray detail, and that one’s intuition can’t get hold of this particular, or anything particular, but only of the whole” (50). Despite the fact that elsewhere Pound strongly insists that particulars pave the way to the palace of truth, here the particulars are irrelevant or perhaps even a distraction.11 In presenting passages from The Cantos that indicate Pound’s memory was sometimes faulty when it came to facts, Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves remark, “Whatever he thought, the values behind the opinions necessarily and legitimately rest ultimately not on the facts but on his own imagination, his view of the world” (Kimpel 1983, 628). As Pound sees it, intuition passes over particulars to grasp the whole. His reference to the “verbal receiving station” indicates that his intuition leaps beyond words. Pound experiences profound insights that transcend the verbal and which therefore cannot be completely expressed in words. If this is the case, then how can Pound escape solipsism? He does so by assuming that other great minds exist. What one genius intuits, other geniuses—whether contemporary or not—also comprehend. Yet once more the test of a great mind is simple: does it resemble Pound’s? Massimo Bacigalupo suggests that The Cantos amounts to Pound’s “personal myth” (2013, 29). Try as he might to fx his principles to “objective” criteria, when Pound offers his credentials as a reliable witness to civilization’s ailments, these credentials remain little more than a request to trust his genius. The exactitude with which he and his contemporaries of genius discern truth is still a function of the ultimately mysterious operations of the mind and body of Ezra Pound, operations that cannot be traced or analyzed with precision.12 So long as that is the case, Pound leaves open the possibility that those operations are not themselves precise, but meandering, off base, unstable, and muddled, that is to say, prone to error. For most of his career Pound strove for precise assurance of the truth. All the while, however, whether he was aware of it or not, imprecision—and with it the possibility of error—constantly shadowed him. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 79

4 “Wrong from the Start–” (P, 185) Tradition is full of error many evil tales, many wrong Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 43, box 72, folder 3245

For forty years I have schooled myself, not to write an economic history of the United States, or any other country, but to write an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest” crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and “fra I maestri di color che sanno.” For this reason, I have had to understand the NATURE of error. “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States” (SP, 167). In his eighth decade, as he abandoned work on The Cantos, Pound fretted about error. Canto 116 refers to “my errors and wrecks” and to “many” additional and unspecifed errors. This preoccupation was not solely a product of gloomy old age. Pound worried about error throughout his career. He agonized about colossal ones, such as World War I and World War II. Those on a smaller scale annoyed him, such as the meaning of the apparently unique Provençal word, noigandres, which, in Canto 20, we learn arose from scribal misreading. His correspondents discovered that their blunders—or what Pound deemed their blunders— aroused in him degrees of displeasure ranging from slight irritation to high dudgeon. In May 1935, he commenced a letter to Louis Zukofsky in this wise: “You bloody buggaring fool/ Have you not even sense enough to USE a WORD with a meaning and let the meaning adhere to the word” (EP/LZ, 168). Zukofsky counted as one of the “live men” among Pound’s acquaintances, but his refusal or inability to precisely connect words with meaning threatened Pound’s conviction that great minds think alike. Hence Pound’s fuming. Pound had little diffculty uncovering error; it kept obtruding itself on his notice. It bubbled up endlessly, inexhaustibly. That was inevitable, since the world so often deviated from his vision of justice and reason. Despite his quarrels with Judeo-Christian dogma, Pound’s obsession with error aligns him with some notable Christian authors who also worried about the human propensity to go astray: Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Aquinas, to name only the most prominent.13 The most thorough Christian discussion of error, however, can be found in Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into very many 80 B. AHEARN received tenents, and commonly perceived truths (1646). Sir Thomas located the origin of human error with the help of the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve’s unfortunate yielding to temptation was the original error. The consequences of that frst mistake were manifold and would plague their descendants until the end of time. Sir Thomas concluded his discussion of the Fall by remarking, “In briefe, there is nothing infallible but God, who cannot possibly erre” (1981, 1: 9). Psuedodoxia Epidemica goes on to provide a taxonomy of error. Sir Thomas demonstrates a multitude of ways in which humanity goes wrong. In his account of human error, any act of creation or re-creation carries with it a potential for error: the more signifcant the act the larger the potential. Furthermore, it seems that every act of creation must take into account the issue of error, if only to eliminate the seeds of error. But can they be eliminated? Or must a story of creation inevitably be followed by a narrative of error? In Genesis the birth of the universe proceeds smoothly until the God’s fnal creation, Eve, disobeys His commandment. Thus begins a chain of error: Adam also disobeys, Cain kills Abel, and before long “the wick- edness of man was great in the earth” (Gen. 6: 5). Angered by humanity’s descent into evil, God performs an act of re-creation by cleansing the earth with the great food. No sooner does the renewed earth blos- som, however, that the second series of error commences: Ham looks upon his father’s nakedness, the Tower of Babel rises, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah merit and receive obliteration, and so on. The act of multiplying humanity, of going beyond a single Adam, seems to ensure a perpetual recurrence of error. Yet God had observed that it was not good for Adam to be alone. So even though Creation containing just one human falls short of being ideal, the same can be said of Creation containing multiple humans. When Sir Thomas concluded that only God could not err, he seemed to imply that He created a universe in which error must inevitably arise. As Kenneth Burke points out, “the possibility of a ‘Fall’ is implied in the idea of the Creation, insofar as the Creation was a kind of ‘divisiveness,’ since it set up different categories of things which could be variously at odds with one another and which accordingly lack the proto-Edenic simplicity of absolute unity” (1970, 174). Once God created something other than Himself, error became inevitable. Since Pound chastised Zukofsky for neglecting the meanings of words, it behooves us to approach “error” with care. The NOED tells us that “error” comes from the Latin errare, which can be translated 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 81 as “to err,” “wander,” “be wrong,” or “go astray.” The Oxford Latin Dictionary shows that the ancient Romans assigned those meanings to the word plus a few more. As with modern usage, it could indicate straying from the straight and narrow path; in the second book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Phoebus Apollo warns Phaethon to “hold the way, and not go straying from the course” (“utque viam teneas nulloque errore traharis”) when driving the chariot of the sun (1971, I: 64–65). To be in error could also mean to be in doubt or uncertainty. One could also use it to refer to a mind deranged. In Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, Damon sings: “ut vidi, ut perii! ut me malus abstulit error!” (“As I saw you, how was I lost, and a fatal frenzy swept me away!”) (1974, 58–59). This meaning for error has not descended to English, but one wonders if Pound had it in mind when composing his glum comments about error in Canto 116. He had, after all, been incarcerated in a mental hospital for twelve years. And late in his life he suffered from bouts of mental depression. The particular sense of error that seems most applicable to his career, however, is that of wandering and going astray. It would seem that those who err have lost track of the goal toward which they were striving, or simply stepped away from the correct path. They are in a general sense out of bounds. The problem might have been avoided, of course, if they had continued with precision. That is to say, they should have curbed or cut off their errant tendency by keeping to the straight and narrow. They should have kept their eyes on the correct path and the goal they long for at its end. John Bunyan dramatizes these sorts of meanings associated with error in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian’s path through the Valley of the shadow of Death is “exceeding narrow” and runs between a deep ditch and a mire (Bunyan 1966, 67). Two of his early compan- ions, Formalist and Hypocrisy demonstrate the danger of error when they turn aside from the Hill of Diffculty into the ways of Danger and destruction (46). Even with their example before him, Christian later strays from the true way. He wanders into By-path Meadow, where Giant Despair seizes and imprisons him (114–116). Fortunately, however, Christian frequently encounters those who point out his mistakes. For example, he meets such helpful guides as the shepherds Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

Then said the Shepherds one to another, Shall we show these pilgrims some wonders? So when they had concluded to do it, they had them frst to the top of an Hill called Error, which was very steep, on the farthest 82 B. AHEARN

side, and bid them look down to the bottom. So Christian and Hopeful looked down, and saw at the bottom several men dashed all to pieces by a fall that they had from the top. (124–125)

More than a few of Pound’s biographers and critics have portrayed him as dashed all to pieces by his mistakes. Alfred Kazin spoke for them when he found that “The great work of his life, The Cantos, turned out for many of us to be the great failure as the epic it proclaimed itself to be— and fnally a work of such obscene hatred as to make one weep over the manic faw in Pound, his overbearing illusion that through his innate tie to poetry he could instruct a disordered world” (1981, 120). It is hardly surprising that many assume his public silence in his last years amounted to an admission of previous errors and a self-imposed pen- ance for them. Pound himself provided evidence for such an assessment when he dismissed The Cantos as a “botch” in an interview (Wilhelm 1994, 342), when he confessed to falling for the “suburban prejudice” of anti-Semitism, or when he penned these lines late in the composition of The Cantos.

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. (C, 822)

His late regrets are affecting not only for their pathos, but because they contrast so strongly with his earlier, optimistic beliefs. Through the greater portion of his career, Pound would take exception to Sir Thomas Browne’s insistence on the human propensity to err. Over and over again he demonstrates faith that the most grievous problems that affict humanity—war, famine, poverty, disease—can be remedied. Courageous and visionary men, if given the opportunity, can lead us into the sunny uplands of the future. So Pound in 1934 crowed that “Scarcity Economics died” at the hands of Mussolini (J/M, viii). The Celestial City was much nearer than most people commonly supposed. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 83

It may seem odd to invoke such pious worthies as Bunyan and Sir Thomas Browne when discussing Pound. Yet the Bible casts its shadow, or its light, or at least its infuence over Pound in subtle ways. Consider, for example, his early poem from Hilda’s Book, “The Tree,” which Pound composed circa 1903.

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood, Knowing the truth of things unseen before; Of Daphne and the laurel bow And that god-feasting couple old That grew elm-oak amid the wold. ’Twas not until the gods had been Kindly entreated, and been brought within Unto the hearth of their heart’s home That they might do this wonder thing; Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before. (P, 3)

When he culled his early work to make a defnitive selection for Personae (1926), Pound discarded a great many poems. But this he retained and placed it frst, although its diction likely made him wince as he revisited it. “Nathless,” for example, echoes Paradise Lost, where Milton (whom Pound thought vastly overrated) describes Satan striding through the infernal lake that “smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fre. / Nathless he so endured … (I: 298–299). It also carries with it a whiff of late Victorian decadence, since Swinburne used it in “Laus Veneris”: “I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss / Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss, / Brief bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin; / Nathless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is” (2000, 14).15 “Nathless” had long proved a useful substitute for “nevertheless,” because, being more metrically docile, it neatly accommodates itself to the traditional rhythms of English verse. This advantage ensured its inclusion in that category of expressions Ford Madox Ford once characterized as the Poetic Vernacular.16 By 1926 Pound had left conventional meters, the Poetic Vernacular, the Decadents, and Milton in the dust. Nathless, Pound offers “The Tree” without apology or revision. What was it about this poem that moved him to give it pride of place? 84 B. AHEARN

The reference to Baucis and Philemon may invite us to see the poem as being about the recovery of a lost Classical insight, a sudden acces- sion of a non-Biblical epiphany. Yet the emphasis on this tree owes much of its effect to readers’ familiarity with the Book of Genesis. There also we fnd a tree prominently featured when God advises Adam of His sole interdiction. “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2: 16–17). As Mark Twain pointed out in Letters from the Earth (1909), this injunction raises an interesting question. How would Adam have interpreted the news that the consequence of eating the fruit of this tree would mean certain death? What would he make of “Death”? Until that admonitory moment in Genesis there has only been creation; no deaths are reported. How would Adam know what God refers to? Be that as it may, Adam accepts God’s prohibition. Sometime later the serpent advises Eve that God has misled Adam.

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fg leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Gen. 3: 5–7)

After donning his apron, Adam might reasonably have assumed that he now knew what God meant by “die.” He and Eve had undergone a radical transformation. For the frst time they became aware of their nakedness. “To die” becomes the equivalent of “to know” because their new awareness, like death itself, utterly and irrevocably changes Adam and Eve’s perspective. They cannot reclaim their original state of innocence. The title of Pound’s poem, like the third chapter of Genesis, directs our attention to a tree. It likewise is a tree of knowledge, one that leads to an understanding of “many a new thing.” The poem strongly implies that this illumination will not be reversed. This enduring knowledge cannot be forgotten or wished away. The speaker has been pro- foundly changed, as were Adam and Eve. Yet there are sharp differences 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 85 between their epiphany and that recorded in “The Tree.” Pound revises the Biblical account of how knowledge comes to humanity. The poem reconfgures the story in four major respects. First, there is no distinction between the tree of knowledge and the knower. The Tree becomes the poet himself, transformed by that awareness. Second, no hectoring Jehovah points to approved or forbidden acts.17 Third, where Genesis postulates an Eden in which humankind merely has to follow directions in order to be safe and happy, “The Tree” presents a world where the autonomous self makes decisions. Fourth, where the book of Genesis emphasizes the losses sustained by Adam and Eve, the poem celebrates unmitigated gain. The speaker in “The Tree” attains his epiphany without paying a price for it. When Adam and Eve violated God’s prohibition, they gained knowledge, but at the expense of suffering. When the speaker in “The Tree” acquires knowledge, no suffering follows. This is the frst and last time a poem by Pound will offer the experience of comprehending the natural and the divine without a reciprocal loss. To put it another way, “The Tree” represents one of Pound’s most optimistic personae. He offers a scene in which the acquisition of knowledge is unaccompanied by suffering or error.18 The rest of his career can be read as a long meditation on the fact that the acquisition of knowledge is intertwined with some degree of loss. For example, one’s friends may fall away—even though you have brought them the gospel of the just economy—when they fnd you unbearably cantankerous. The poem’s reference to Classical accounts of metamorphosis not only diverts our attention from considerations about Adam and Eve, it also partly conceals the degree to which it represents a conversion narrative. The conversions of St. Paul and St. Augustine are not only a sudden acquisition of a new insight, they also mark a decisive transformation from an old self to a new one. Furthermore, the new self comes with a settled and unshakeable conviction that its beliefs are true. By placing “The Tree” at the head of Personae, Pound affrms that his fundamental beliefs are valid and unchangeable. “The Tree” offers an alternative to the Judeo-Christian account of knowledge and suffering (albeit demonstrating the power of that account by signaling the necessity of its refutation). But it also repudi- ates Classical accounts of divine intervention in human affairs. Neither Zeus nor Hermes fgure in the new awareness that has come upon the poet. “The Tree” portrays do-it-yourself discovery.19 The poem implies, moreover, that such happy apprehension can only be done in isolation. 86 B. AHEARN

Once we enter the social world we become prone to error, because of our unavoidable conficts and incompatibilities with other people. The rejection of social ties and a resort to the woods is of course an American tradition. Jonathan Edwards as a boy was much concerned about the state of his soul, and in order to concentrate on his salvation without distraction “had particular secret Places of my Woods, where I used to retire by my self; and used to be from time to time much affected” (2013, 681).20 The speaker in the frst poem in Robert Frost’s frst book contemplates a plunge into “those dark trees.” The autonomous discovery of old truths in “The Tree” foreshadows Pound’s conviction that there can be no substitute for sheer genius. The average person wandering in the woods will emerge none the wiser. Nor will most urban pedestrians fare any better. The man or woman on the street will remain oblivious to treasures close at hand. Hence the recollection in ABC of Reading that Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat sat “unnoticed until Rossetti found a pile of remaindered copies on a second-hand bookstall” (80). Rossetti represents one of those indispensable seers on whom civilization relies. “Most human perceptions,” Pound insists, “date from a long time ago, or are derivable from perceptions that gifted men have had long before we were born” (ABC, 64). Yet even poets of the highest genius encounter a world of manifold error. In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” the forest primeval—a blessed site in “The Tree”—has been reevaluated.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date…. (P, 185)

These woods are not the scene of transcendent perception. The reason that the young poet—whether we call him E.P. or Mauberley—has been “Wrong from the start” is not through an intrinsic faw. Rather, it is the consequence of his having been “born / in a half savage country, out of date.” (A savage is, etymologically speaking, a forest dweller.) Error need not be something one commits; it may be something one inherits, like 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 87

Original Sin. For Samuel Johnson, error was consequent upon desire; as he succinctly notes in “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” “Fate wings with every wish the affictive dart.” Fate does not portion out misery and death casually or at random. One has to wish for “airy good” or material bounty before fate commences hurling darts. “Mauberley,” however, lowers the bar. Even when one does not wish for anything, one is beset by falsehood and misdirection. The fault lies with a civilization— European as well as American—in which merely being born entangles you in error. Hence the poem portrays people going in the wrong direction or being at odds with their surroundings. Youth is herded to death in Sect. 4, where “Young blood and high blood” perish in the trenches. M. Verog is “out of step with the decade.” Sexual desire has been sti- fed in Ealing “With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen.” The “stylist,” whose natural home should be in the city, has been forced to fee to the countryside. The form of most of the stanzas is, of course, out of key with the early twentieth century, since Pound borrowed it from Gautier. What happens to a poet born into a culture already rife with error? What values can he take for granted and which should be scrutinized? If he mistakes which values to cherish and which to discard, shall his talent wither and die? Will he eventually fnd himself mourning over the sepulcher of his own talent, as seems to be the case at the beginning of “Mauberley”? In “The Tree” the poet observes that some unspecifed phenomena were once “rank folly” to him, but now he understands them as manifestations of a higher truth. What if this revelation had never happened, or happened only partially? Has the conversion narrative that colors “The Tree” worn off? Furthermore, what assurance has he that his gifts are unaffected by the errors of the age? Such troubling questions are refected even in poems long before “Mauberley.” In “Famam Librosque Cano,” Pound anticipates his talent made public: “A book is known by them that read / The same” (P, 14). In the literary marketplace, however, his gift may ficker and die. The poem anticipates an unprepossessing reader, the somewhat ragged intellectual, coming across his battered book and inspecting Pound’s verse “to see / How I ‘scaped immortality” (P, 14). The literary career that begins awry may simply end that way. “Famam Librosque Cano” is one of several poems in Personae about literary vocations that may end in abject failure. But we also come upon quite different poems, ones that reassure Pound that judiciously applied talent can transcend time. “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me” because Jacopo del Sellaio’s 88 B. AHEARN

(ca. 1441–1493) skill leaps across the ages to Pound’s acute gaze (P, 69). Just as “The Tree” emphatically declares Pound’s faith in an unerring vision, so other poems express his faith in the power of art to overcome the gaps, deviations, and dead ends that divide different times and places. We fnd eternal verities transmitted intact. Abysmal failure or splendid triumph: this note of bifurcation in Pound’s early work, the dread of ineptitude contrasted with the sublime assurance of visionary power, bears an interesting analogy to Christian fears of damnation and assurances of salvation. For Pound, as for Christian believers, there is no middle ground. Heaven or hell—the Celestial City or eternal pun- ishment—are comparable to Pound’s division of himself into either a forgotten nonentity or a transcendent artifcer. The stakes are all or nothing. His ambition, of course, vaults far beyond a desire to escape the limitations of his own culture. He declares himself the diagnostician who will trace error to its source and demonstrate how to banish it. If Woodrow Wilson thought that the Great War was a struggle to make the world safe for democracy, Pound imagines his career as a campaign to make the world safe for artists, so that they will not continually be “quick eyes / Gone under earth’s lid” (P, 188). Yet the high ambition of this crusade requires an intense consideration of where to start. What tactics, what knowledge, what aim does the poet and his poem require? How can he avoid error? These are questions that “Mauberley” raises; Pound tries to answer them in The Cantos.

5 Quo Vadis? “Where the hills part in three ways,” “Provincia Deserta” (1915) (P, 125)

Pound sometimes displayed a bumptious assurance about his own genius.21 Often overlooked, however, are those moments when his works refect uncertainty or doubts about his abilities and his aims. These anxieties surfaced most obviously and most poignantly late in his life, but we fnd instances of them in his early years—as in “Famam Librosque Cano.” Of course Pound referred to many of the personae in his early work as so many masks; nevertheless these masks were fashioned from thoughts and emotions he knew well. It is hardly surprising, then, 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 89 to fnd instances of Pound mulling over the problem of getting The Cantos underway. Indeed, the earliest published versions of The Cantos foreground his perplexity about how to begin. The frst of the “Three Cantos” of 1917 (later known to scholars as the ur-Cantos) asks which way to turn, which path to take: “How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?” (P, 233). The use of “progress” uneasily combines the antique with the modern. The word once referred to a royal excursion, with all its pageantry. Yet “progress” also connotes modern inventive- ness: Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. We fnd Pound with one foot stretching into the past and the other solidly in the present, and wonder (as does he) how he will reconcile the two. The poem cat- alogs varieties of commencement. Shall the poem take up Browning’s methods? Perhaps not, since “there can be but the one Sordello!” (P, 229). Or maybe the poem could “As well begin here” with Catullus (P, 230), since “Sirmio serves my will better than your Asolo” (P, 231). Any particular model from the European past, however, strikes Pound as inadequate. The poem then considers whether a multicultural model would prove fruitful. Egypt might contribute something new. Or shall the poem turn to China and the “Temple of teak wood” (P, 233)? The poem keeps puzzling over what pathways or avenues to pursue: “How many worlds we have!” (P, 234). Indeed, the very act of raising the problem of how to begin snares the poem in the past. Other poets have been here before. In the frst ur-Canto Pound echoes the beginning of The Prelude, where, a century earlier, Wordsworth ticked off potential themes. We fnd the same speculation about how to commence at the beginning of Don Juan and The Ring and the Book. The initial ur-Canto’s meditations on which direction to take resemble the frst defnition of “error” in the NOED: “The action of roam- ing or wandering; hence a devious or winding course, a roving, winding. Now only poet. The primary sense in Latin….” The poet’s fumbling for a beginning and a method, however, is not just a repetition of the beginning of The Prelude and other English epics. Pound obscures any indebt- edness to Wordsworth by calling him a “bleating sheep” (P, 232), and then pointedly seeks inspiration outside European traditions. The extravagance of his range suggests how deeply he feels constrained by a literary marketplace that tends to prefer the parochial and the familiar. The artist’s only honorable course is to wander away from those “straight” paths in search of occluded or forgotten ones. (“I have walked there” in 90 B. AHEARN valleys “full of winding roads,” Pound recalled in “Provincia Deserta” [P, 125].) But how does genius know when it is on the right track? Perhaps genius asks the wrong question. Pound recognized that the focus on his authorial problem merely replicated what others had done before. His reconfguration of the “Three Cantos” a few years after their initial publication presents the question of which path or paths to take quite differently. Canto 2 refers only briefy to the problem of how to begin. The poet no longer makes a spectacle of himself agonizing over it. Instead, the problem of beginning is now something for readers to experience; the canto requires us to make choices—acts of interpretation. Canto I plumps us down in a perplexing spot—the text of the Nekyia section of the Odyssey. The frst word of The Cantos, “And,” shows we are in the middle of something. One of our frst responses as readers is to try and fgure out exactly where we are. By moving the Nekyia passage to the beginning of The Cantos, Pound shifts the focus from the perils and opportunities of authorial creation—whether Browning’s, Wordsworth’s, Dante’s, or his own—to the perils and opportunities attending any act of interpretation.22 The bewildered reader must commence The Cantos without the guiding hand of the author. Errors associated with starting out, if errors there are, become part of the experience of reading the poem. For example, the opening lines of the frst canto are full of common nouns—“ship, ” “keel,” “breakers,” “sea,” “mast,” “sail,” “ship, ” “winds,” “canvas” plus one adverb (“sternwards”)—evoking the nautical. These all occur in the frst six lines of the canto. The seventh line begins, “Circe’s this craft…” (C, 3). The cluster of nouns referring to the sea and seafaring leads readers to anticipate that ensuing nouns will likewise refer to nautical phenomena. Furthermore, the line’s reference to “the trim-coiffed goddess” subtly links “trim” with “craft,” thus evoking the common phrase used admiringly of sea-going vessels: “trim craft.”23 So the reader coming to The Cantos for the frst time is likely to see “craft” as referring to Odysseus’s ship. (Students in my classes invariably read “craft” this way.) Yet why is it called “Circe’s”? A little refection shows that “craft” refers rather to Circe’s magic spell—her witchcraft—that summons the wind for the bellying canvas. Thus Pound alerts readers that (1) semantic errors may mislead us and (2) we must be prepared to make corrections as we voyage through the text. To err is human, and to correct error is equally human. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 91

The frst canto also points to another kind of error, a textual error. After Odysseus fends off the ghosts who clamor for the blood of the sacrifcial bell-sheep. Tiresias appears, saying, “A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and the joyless region” (C, 4). A second time? This is odd. Odysseus has not been to hell before. Why does Tiresias refer to a second coming? Carroll Terrell’s Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound elucidates the reference to a “second time.”

Pound’s translation of Andreas Divus’s Latin translation of the Greek word διγονοσ which was apparently printed in place of the now accepted διογενεσ in line 92 of Book XI of the Odyssey. Divus was probably using a corrupt Renaissance edition of the Greek text. Scholarly regular- ized editions still place this line in square brackets to indicate restora- tion of a corrupt text. Whereas διγονοσ means twice-born or double, διογενεσ means ‘sprung from Zeus’ or, in a general sense, ‘noble’ …. (Terreill 1980–1984, I: 2)

Pound takes Divus’s sixteenth-century text as the copy text for his translation, even though διγονοσ had long since been judged a corruption. Pound could be reminding us that the Renaissance recovery of Classical texts was itself prone to error. “A second time” shows how a simple scribal mistake can turn into a narrative error. The misreading suddenly creates a phantom visit by Odysseus to the underworld. It also is worth considering that the same mistake would not be made in oral transmission. Different kinds of mistakes would occur. Nevertheless, making an oral text permanent in writing translates the text to a new medium. The text then becomes vulnerable to the dangers peculiar to that medium. Writing preserves, but it can also distort. (It also is typical of Pound, however, to include traces of the chain of transmission by which archaic texts have been passed down. He had done so a few years earlier by leaving Japanese forms of Chinese names in the poems of Cathay.) The error also serves a structural purpose, subtly linking the frst canto with the next one. The Greek epithet διγονοσ is of course commonly applied to Dionysus, the “twice-born,” and in Canto 2 Acoetes tells the story of how piratical sailors tried to kidnap Dionysus. In other words, error is not simply something to be noted and avoided; it may lead to unforeseen connections.24 The beginning of The Cantos, a poem in large part determined to uncover and correct error, subtly points to the uses for error. Truth and error seem hopelessly entangled, an insight that Pound frequently resisted but sometimes put to use. 92 B. AHEARN

6 the Unerring Body “Her fngers were like the tissue Of a Japanese paper napkin.” “The Encounter” (P, 113)

Circe told Odysseus that he must ask Tiresias the way to Ithaca. But Tiresias requires blood to speak. Blood’s attraction for Tiresias and the other apparitions refects another of Pound’s cures for error. He fnds in the living body a high degree of wisdom. Those who rely too heavily on purely mental apprehension run the risk of becoming ephemeral and inchoate. Such is the fate of the lady sketched in “Portrait d’une Femme” (1912) (P, 57–58), one of Pound’s most admired and reprinted early poems. She has been too much in love with intellectual acquisition and neglected what Pound regarded as the wisdom of the body. The poem fnds her intellect, indeed her very personality, to be incoherent. Her identity has been formed by a habit of passive accumulation rather than rigorous self-fashioning. Yet the poet’s strenuous insistence on separating himself from the “you” whose mind is like the Sargasso Sea makes one question whether the poet discerns in the lady certain qualities that he shares with her. Pound, like the lady, is resident in London. Pound, like this lady, prefers to meet “great minds” (minds are intangible). Pound, like this lady, accumulates “strange spars of knowledge.” Indeed, the poem can be read as Pound’s warning to himself about the potential pitfalls awaiting those who fnd eccentric knowledge attractive.25 The poem also implies that genius guards itself against such occasions of error by relying on bodies it has actually encountered as the test of truth and wisdom, rather than seeking enlightenment in the wider world of other bodies. The community of others has its ways of assessing truth, but those ways, precisely because they are dependent on collective judgment, are prone to error. After all, many members of that collective are incompetent or nefarious. And if one has not met them, how can one discriminate the good from the bad? The mind of the lady sketched in “Portrait d’une Femme” apparently cannot be saved from deliquescence. In other early poems, Pound delights in the senses and the fesh. Consider, for example, the second stanza of “The Garret” (1913). 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 93

Dawn enters with little feet like a gilded Pavlova, And I am near my desire. Nor has life in it aught better Than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together. (P, 84)

Here we fnd nothing concerning “minds” whether great or small; the height of bliss occurs in the proximity of bodies. Furthermore, the phrase “waking together” implies more than just emerging from slum- ber. The “waking” could also be the dawning of heightened awareness. The frst line of “The Tree” indicates that the necessary prerequisite to attaining new vision is to become like a material object—a tree. Lest we assume that Pound alone enjoys this privilege, he includes a poem in Ripostes (1912), “A Girl,” in which she reports, “The tree has entered my hands, / the sap has ascended my arms, / the tree has grown in my breast” (P, 58). Organic form conducts us to immaterial truth. Thus Pound fnds in the body—and parts of the body—a potential remedy for intellectual error.26 His reliance on the body helps explain why he so often treats eyes—such as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s “fne old eye”—as ideal instruments.27 It is the fne old eye, too, of Agassiz, that registers what is essential to see in the bodies of fsh. The desire for acute perception, the longing to see things as they are, is a permanent feature of Pound’s career, from such early poems as “The White Stag” (“I ha’ seen them ‘mid the clouds on the heather” [P, 24]) to his foreword to his Selected Prose: 1909–1965 (“I was out of focus”). He has little or no use for some widely respected avenues to the truth. Media that refect majority opinion leave him unimpressed. We fnd journalism (“Fleet Street”) derided as the business in which “The sale of half-hose has / Long since superseded the cultivation / Of Pierian roses” (P, 194). Formerly estimable documents are found wanting. An extreme example is the papal indictment of Malatesta in Canto 10 (“Stupro, caede, adulter” et cetera), which collapses under the burden of its rabid hyperbole. Pound views with suspicion most of the pro- nouncements of those who exercise fnancial, political, or ecclesiastical authority. Yet there is one form of vision and report that he usually accepts; eyewitness accounts weigh heavily.28 He rarely concedes that his or other witnesses’ memories might be shaky. Eyewitness testimonies are almost invariably faithful and reliable. They record a truth or truths 94 B. AHEARN with precision. Pound treats such accounts as valid. In “A Visiting Card” (1942) he presents one such recollection.

Let them erect a commemorative urinal to Mond, whose brother said in the year of Sanctions:

‘Napoleon wath a goodth man, it took uth 20 yearth to crwuth him; it will not take uth 20 years to crwuth Mussolini’

adding as an afterthought ‘and the economic war has begun.’ I know that drawing-room; that sofa where sat the brother of Imperial Chemicals. I know it. It is not something I read in some newspaper or other; I know it by direct account. (SP, 313)

These sentiments are attributed to Sir Robert Ludwig Mond (1867– 1938), whose brother, Alfred Mond, First Baron Melchett, was a titan of the British chemical industry. Sir Robert is speaking in 1935, the year that the League of Nations imposed economic sanctions against Italy for its incursion into Abyssinia. Seven years separate his remarks from Pound’s account of them, but readers are obliged to suppose that Sir Robert’s words are given verbatim. Furthermore, the passage makes it clear that Pound was not present and listening to Sir Robert, but offers a hearsay account. Pound stresses that he has been in the room where the remarks were allegedly made, but when he uses the phrase “direct account,” he slightly obscures the fact that he is not recording his direct impression. Yet he believes that the informant who reported Sir Robert’s comments not only got them right but also mimicked his pronunciation exactly. (An alternative interpretation would be that Pound, believing that he knows how Sir Robert would speak, has given the pronunciation himself. Pound could defend his depiction of the accent by arguing that his frst-hand acquaintance with varieties of British pronunciation would entitle him to attribute particular accents to a member of the British upper class.) We do not know if Pound or his unnamed witness presents the imitation of Sir Robert’s speech. Nevertheless, Pound asks us to accept the accuracy of this eyewitness (and earwitness) report. He also asks us to do so in Canto 80, where a brief snatch of the conversation appears: “It will not take uth twenty yearth / to cwuth Mutholini” (C, 497). Here the pronunciation is slightly different. Yet Pound presents both versions as correct.29 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 95

Pound’s confdence in the credibility of eyewitness testimony appears as early as “Mauberley.” Indeed, in much of the poem Pound hunts for eyewitnesses. “Yeux Glauques,” the section immediately following parts IV and V, in which the poem condemns the “wastage as never before” of the Great War, commences with details that date from the year Ruskin wrote “Of Kings’ Treasuries”—1867. At that point, the chronology of “Mauberley” recedes ffty years—thus approaching the limit of the span of living memory. In doing so, Pound replicates Sir Walter Scott’s backward glance in Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). Scott recalled how in his boyhood he “had been acquainted with many of the old warriors of 1745, who were, like most veterans, easily induced to fght their battles over again for the beneft of a willing listener like myself” (1985, 522). Both Scott’s novel and Pound’s poem rely upon testimony from the elderly. “Mauberley” for a short while takes the form of a documentary based on the spoken testimony of aged but still living witnesses. In the section following “Yeux Glauques,” “Siena Mi Fe; Disfecemi Maremma,” the poem begins its interrogation of living fgures from the past (in this case, from the previous generation) as it listens to Monseiur Verog. He illuminates the lives of the poets of the previous generation and also extends memory’s locus to the continent. While it recovers neglected voices, the poem proceeds as if wary of the validity of printed documents from the past. Even though Swinburne and Rossetti were publishing in their day, the poem notes that someone else was also in print; Robert Buchanan, journalistic assassin, attempted to drown out their voices. The poem’s exasperation with pernicious texts such as Buchanan’s “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871) appears again in the interview with Mr. Nixon, who advises the aspiring man of letters to boost his literary career by praising work regardless of its merits or demerits; the point is to puff those who in turn can polish one’s own reputation. As far as “Mauberley” is concerned, literary journalism has forfeited its credibility. Pound’s hunger for the testimony of living witnesses also affects the series of poems, “Moeurs Contemporaines.” In the last two sections we hear two accounts of “Old men with beautiful manners,” one of them not named but identifable as Henry James. Another unnamed eyewitness takes us to Italy and recalls the fervor of the partisans of the Risorgimento. 96 B. AHEARN

And he said they used to cheer Verdi. In Rome, after the opera, And the guards couldn’t stop them. And that was an anagram for Vittorio Emanuele Re D’ Italia, And the guards couldn’t stop them. (P, 180)

The last section of the sequence offers the recollections of a “very old lady” who remembers James Russell Lowell and Browning, poets who died too early for Pound to meet them. Pound presents himself as a collector of frst-hand knowledge of great artists, or, failing that, he con- tacts them through the mediation of those who were fortunate enough to know them. Hence his interest in the woman of “Portrait d’une Femme,” who, despite the lack of anything intrinsically attractive about her, has at least the merit of being a medium through which the “great minds [who] have sought” her may be approached. Perhaps she knew Swinburne, whom Pound failed to seek out, even though he moved to London eight months before Swinburne’s death. He recalls that omission in Canto 82: “Swinburne my only miss / and I didn’t know he’d been to see Landor” (C, 523). Swinburne, another physical link, Pound became aware of too late. As “Mauberley” and “Moeurs Contemporaines” attest, the eyewitness reports that Pound selects are almost invariably terse. The longest of these in The Cantos—Jim X’s Tale of the Honest Sailor—stands out as an exception at two pages. The succinctness of eyewitness reports seems to highlight their accuracy and hence their credibility. As we have already seen, the same brevity marks the conversation of Arthur Griffth and Mussolini. Indeed, terse and pithy comment becomes for Pound the mode by which wise governors communicate. “Le beau monde gov- erns because it has the most rapid means of communication. It does not need to read blocks of three columns of printed matter. It communicates by the detached phrase, variable in length, but timely” [SP, 313].) The pithy phrase is the verbal counterpart of the sharp glance of the eyewitness. Pound’s dismissal of the “three columns of printed matter” suggests we should approach with caution elaborately composed documents. For example, in “A Visiting Card,” he stipulates the virtue of condensed writing: “DICHTEN CONDENSARE” [SP, 327]. Pound suggests = that numerous or lengthy documents warrant our mistrust. Look to the terse comment or quotation for the truth. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 97

Here, however, we encounter a potential problem. If, as we have already seen, language has a tendency toward instability and corruption (or at least ambiguity), can the eyewitness report be fully trusted? Pound does not appear to be troubled by this question. He believes the testimony of eyewitnesses he has personally known; he even credits the reports of some who are long dead. Great poets of the past are endowed with perpetually valid vision. “In the art of Daniel and Cavalcanti, I have seen that precision which I miss in the Victorians, that explicit rendering, be it of external nature, or of emotion. Their testimony is of the eyewitness, their symptoms are frst hand” (LE, 11). As scholars have long recognized, Pound believed the human condition displayed enduring features. Times change, fashions emerge and vanish, technologies alter, but beneath these mutations lie the fundamental facts of human existence. For Pound, these attributes are present in the art of prehistoric cave painters; they are also in verbal constructions, such as the eleventh book of the Odyssey. But who will identify these permanent aspects of our existence? Ultimately Pound relies on his own genius to recognize recurring human truths. He is the ultimate eyewitness. And it takes an eyewitness to know an eyewitness. He recovers the perceptions of Arnaut Daniel or Cavalcanti despite the passage of centuries. Across time great minds see alike.30 Pound’s insistence on the unique value of eyewitness accounts appears early in The Cantos. In Canto 2, Acoetes urgently advises Pentheus that what he has witnessed bears directly on the king’s fate. Acoetes saw the curse that befell the sailors; Pentheus had better take warning and drop his ban on the worship of Dionysus. Acoetes’s blunt claim, “I have seen what I have seen,” underscores Pound’s faith in the clear vision of certain witnesses. This assurance is all the more striking since it follows Canto 1’s sheen of error. Pound himself benefted from an act of wit- nessing. His comment in “Mauberley” about the three years he was “out of key with his time” because “wrong from the start” indicates he had to alter his poetic style. What moved him to change course? Disparaging remarks by reviewers had nothing to do with it. As Pound’s account of Ford Madox Ford’s 1911 “Giessen roll” indicates, what moved him to recast his style was a body in motion.

And he felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere superfcial snob, ridiculously) on the foor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed 98 B. AHEARN

me trapped, fy-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn to learn, mehercule, the stilted language that then passed for ‘good English’ in the arthritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles, Newbolt, the backwash of Lionel Johnson, Fred Manning, the Quarterlies and the rest of them. (1982, 172)

When Ford reacted to the stilted diction of Canzoni by finging himself on the foor and rolling about, Pound accepted it as a candid response because it was visceral. It is worth emphasizing that what Pound considered the most cogent criticism he received—advice that irrevocably altered his style—was not verbal. Here the whole body itself, not just the eye, was the witness that proved most telling. Pound also associates Ford with the body’s senses in section X of Mauberley. Ford, designated only as the “stylist,” resides in a cottage with a leaking thatch (touch, as when rain drips on one’s head), “offers succulent cooking” (taste), and his “door has a creaking latch” (hearing). Pound leaves the most signif- icant detail for last. “Creaking” indicates that Pound has taken his own body to the scene, since it is the kind of detail that could be reported by an earwitness. We can follow Pound’s emphasis on the testimony of the body in the early cantos. In the frst canto we fnd that words are the least important component of the ritual that Odysseus oversees. Although the ceremony requires the praying of “many a prayer,” blood proves indispensable in attracting the souls of the dead. The ghostly clamor for blood shows that in this world the physical is the fundamental basis for any and all metaphysical contact. In the second canto, Acoetes testifes how the guilty sailors were physically transformed, but he can only offer King Pentheus his own word as proof. Thus the second canto is one step removed from the dramatization of the physical. Indeed, the frst three cantos can be seen as a gradual reduction in examples of the powers of the physical body and a countervailing increase in merely verbal accounts.31 In the frst canto we are offered a bald account of the ritual involving blood. And, as Pound believed, it is an oral epic originating in and passing from voice to voice—that is to say, from body to body—long before it was committed to writing. In the second canto, however, we are offered a version of a carefully crafted document, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s text stands at a farther remove from orally transmitted myth. With Ovid we are squarely in the age of literary sophistication. In the third canto, in the midst of an epic about a hero, legal documents appear 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 99 for the frst time, complete with “The big seal and the writing.” El Cid is frustrated by words on paper; Odysseus never was. Nor is it a coincidence that this legal proclamation is designed to impede the plans of the hero. In the third canto, words not only fail to adequately express the physical, they serve to thwart it. Part of the infernal darkness of the early cantos is verbal obfuscation, especially the advent of written words that impede physical courage. The Cantos often revisits this problem of what to do with words that have strayed from their proper role of precisely and succinctly communicating. A myriad of subsidiary problems arises from errant words. Whose words are trustworthy? What test do we use to sift true documents from false ones? Where documentary testimonies differ, which ones shall we credit? How do we construct verbal manifestations that are precise? How do vision and hearing relate to verbal documentation? Can we make oral truth remain true when we turn it into writing? What documents offer valid testimony about fgures from the past? These questions are curtly raised at the beginning of Canto 2.

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.” But Sordello, and my Sordello? Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana. (C, 6)

Pound greatly admired Sordello (1840), a poem which became notori- ous for its obscurity, a charge also leveled against The Cantos.32 But the issues raised at the beginning of Canto 2 have nothing to do with setting, characterization, legibility, or coherence, the usual constituents that make for clarity or obscurity. Instead, Pound puts the question of how Browning’s version of Sordello accords with his own, or, for that matter, with the earliest surviving account. The inclusion of “Lo Soredels si fo di Mantovana,” a brief passage from a thirteenth-century biographical sketch of Sordello, implicitly contrasts Browning’s version of Sordello with that of the biography. It also implies a third potential version which Pound might create. Some pressing but unstated issues hover over these lines. They are pressing because of Pound’s investment in the physical. How can one recover the living man? Is Sordello available to future generations in any fully satisfactory sense, or are we forced to be content with fctions erected on a slim foundation of fact? How do we recover any portion of the physical Sordello from the traces left behind?33 100 B. AHEARN

In Canto 2 Pound does not try to answer these questions. Yet the complications posed by them were addressed by some of his notable elders and contemporaries. It helps us to locate Pound’s position—and his apparent certainty that he can recover fgures from the past, a certainty that allows for the resurrection of Sigismondo Malatesta and others—if we know how these others responded to the problem of recovering the mighty dead. In Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), William James took up the question of our relation to the past.

The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verifed indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were the antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. (1987, 580)

James affrms that we can have true ideas about the man called Julius Caesar. Such ideas about Julius Caesar are true insofar as they are consistently in agreement with ancient documents, inscriptions, monuments, statues, and all that still remains of the Roman world as it was in Caesar’s time. Such relics would count as “prolongations or effects of what the past harbored.” James adds, however, that these true ideas are overlaid by additional ones—which are equally true.

Many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such predicates are of course human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome’s freedom. He is also an American schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones. (598)

Subsequent varieties of Caesar such as the “schoolroom pest” are also present to us, although far removed from the fesh and blood Caesar. If we accept James’s defnition of Caesar, it seems logical that an analogous defnition would hold for all historical fgures, including Sordello. It follows that no single version of Sordello can claim absolute authority. All versions have a part to play in the sum total of “Sordello,” a fgure who remains a work in progress until the day that humanity stops conceiving 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 101 of Sordello altogether. According to James, no single account of Caesar can claim to have recovered him. James’s account of Caesar, a pragmatic approach to understanding how we can know him, turned out to be a stone tossed into an epistemological pond. On the other side of the pond were Bertrand Russell and F. H. Bradley. In his essay, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” (1910), Russell envisioned a much more elusive Caesar: “Returning now to Julius Caesar, I assume that it will be admitted that he himself is not a constituent of any judgment which I can make” (1910, 118–119). Russell made distinctions that rendered the historical Caesar quite remote.

When, therefore, I say that we must substitute for “Julius Caesar” some description of Julius Caesar … I am not saying that we must substitute an idea. Suppose our description is “the man whose name was Julius Caesar.” Let our judgment be “Julius Caesar was assassinated.” Then it becomes “the man whose name was Julius Caesar was assassinated.” Here Julius Caesar is a noise or shape with which we are acquainted, and all the other constituents of the judgment … are concepts with which we are acquainted. Thus our judgment is wholly reduced to constituents with which we are acquainted, but Julius Caesar himself has ceased to be a constituent of our judgment. (120)

Russell’s sweeping denial of our access to distant historical fgures moved F. H. Bradley to disagree at length in his essay, “What is the Real Julius Caesar?” (1911). Bradley’s refutation of Russell concludes with this claim.

The real individual then (we fnd) does not fall merely within a moment, nor is he bounded by his birth and death, nor is he in principle confned to any limited period. He lives there wherever the past or future of our ‘real’ order is present to his mind, and where in any other way whatever he infuences or acts on it. (1914, 427).

Bradley acknowledges that there are important aspects of Caesar that can never be recovered; but he produces a Caesar enveloped in a type of immortality, or at least situated in an immortal feld. For Bradley there is something we can, with reservations, call a “real” order that human beings share with Caesar. This “real” order becomes a communal ground for perception and apprehension across space and time. 102 B. AHEARN

It would appear that Pound’s conception of our relation to past fgures is closest to Bradley’s. Yet Pound never offers as complete, explicit, and nuanced an account of such a relation as Bradley’s. We have to intuit his views from his handling of fgures comparable to Sordello. Before The Cantos is very far advanced we are introduced to Sigismondo Malatesta, whose life and times are given close and extensive attention. Documents on which Pound relies, such as letters to Malatesta that were intercepted by his Siennese employers, are treated as texts offering intimate access to Malatesta and his circle. Yet at the same time, the versions of those texts that appear in The Cantos are sometimes transcribed verbatim and at other times rendered in eminently free translation. The hand of Pound is almost visibly present as a mediating infuence. Pound would probably insist that not everyone is equipped to grasp the essence of Malatesta or Sordello. What is required to most fully recover them is a poet of genius. Malatesta as he appears in The Cantos is an amal- gam of documents fltered through Pound and Pound’s judgments. In a sense he is a Bradleyan Malatesta, but one that Pound would insist has been limned by a poet of genius—himself. The visionary power that persists in texts can only be fully appreciated by another poet of genius. As Lawrence Rainey concludes in his study of the Malatesta cantos, “For Pound, a historical problem was grasped in an intuitive apperception by the observer, the validity of which was secured by ‘sensibility’ and personality, not a dialogic exchange of heterogeneous testimonies” (1991, 150). Yet neither we nor Pound can say with precision what constitutes genius. Genius refuses to submit to rational parsing. As a result, The Cantos tests the validity of documents according to whether they accord with Pound’s vision. Readers may pick up along the way some useful tips about how to detect signifcant aberrations in a document (such as by noting Pound’s rendition of the elaborate rhetoric in the letter to Malatestata from his very young son), but Pound asks us to trust that his view of such documents is correct.34 Pound relies on the body, the eye, and the ear as the touchstones least prone to error. As the observations of James, Russell, and Bradley indicate, however, the recovery of the past presents enormous diffculties. James believes that the original Caesar has acquired encumbrances over the centuries, additions that cannot be dismissed. Russell’s argument indicates that access to the “real” Julius Caesar can only be an illusion. Bradley disagrees with Russell, but the recovery that he describes offers no guarantee that the “real” Caesar or the “real” Sordello that the mind 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 103 apprehends is that same as the Caesar and the Sordello who lived and died long ago. None of the three come close to Pound’s faith in ear, eye, and body as instruments that can, even at second hand or more distantly, register vital truths about others. Pound’s touchstones function because Pound believes in them. This cure for error will be a cure to the extent that Pound has faith in its effcacy. And should his faith weaken there is no external authority to which he can turn for assistance. As William Blake observed, if the sun and moon should doubt, they would immediately go out.

7 doubt “Dubious, facing three ways” H. D., “Hermes of the Ways” (1913)

For the most part, Pound’s faith in his abilities and the genius that nour- ishes those abilities remains strong. Yet there are instances where doubt creeps in. The reason for this is familiar. If one locates authority in the self, and the integrity of the self is called into question, there remains no authority to which the self can appeal to save itself from error and the threat of dissolution. Pound’s prose continually presents a robust, visionary persona, but his poems sometimes confess doubts about the integrity of such a persona. Earlier I suggested that the sketch of the lady in “Portrait d’une Femme” might be taken as a projection of Pound’s uneasy concerns about his own intellect. An earlier poem anticipates the inward incoherence that afficts the lady in “Portrait.” In “On His Own Face in a Glass” (1908) the poet not only fnds his visage “strange,” but multiple rather than single.

O strange face there in the glass! O ribald company, O saintly host! O sorrow-swept, my fool, What answer? O ye myriad That strive and play and pass, Jest, challenge, counterlie! I? I? I? And ye? (P, 33) 104 B. AHEARN

Pound discerns a self paradoxically combining both the “ribald” and the “saintly.” Furthermore, other segments of the self ft together awkwardly. The line “Jest, challenge, counterlie!” should have for its fnal word not “counterlie” but “countersign,” the conventional response to a sentry’s challenge. The substitution of “counterlie” for “countersign” emphasizes discord within the observing self. The poem sounds another jarring note when its sole rhyme matches “counterlie” with “I,” as if prevarication helps construct the self (as Freud said it did). The triple repetition of “I” in the penultimate line of the poem suggests a self that darkly mirrors the Christian Trinity. But whereas the Trinity constitutes a thoroughly harmonious (albeit mysteriously con- cordant) God, “On His Own Face in a Glass” presents the opposite. Indeed, we might say that the Christian designation of the tripartite deity as united is one that Pound departs from in several of his early poems. The number three keeps cropping up in other poems, not, however, in terms of the poet’s doubts about his inner integrity, but in connection with some diffculty Pound suffers or encounters. “Three” becomes associated with a search dogged by frustration, bewilderment, and incoherence. In “Mauberley,” for example, the errant young poet “Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn” (P, 185) is out of key with his time for three years. We tend to notice the absurdity of extracting lilies from acorns; less noticeable is the frst word in the line, “Bent.” Is an activity that requires one to be bent truly benefcial? “Bent” anticipates Pound’s later insistence on being “twisty” as a departure from the intelligence of the universe. “Wringing,” insofar as it represents an act of twisting, adds more fruitless bending to the scene. Tortured trinities appeared in an earlier poem, “Provincia Deserta” (1915).

At Rochecoart, Where the hills part in three ways, And three valleys, full of winding roads, Fork out to south and north. There is a place of trees … grey with lichen. (P, 125)

Here the repetition of “three” in conjunction with the adjective “winding” also situates the poet in diffculty. Which road is the right one? 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 105

The fact that all of them are winding may imply that whichever one he chooses will lead him astray. The topographical split into “three ways” and “three valleys” has a counterpart in the tripartite division of the poem. Pound attempts to recover the distant past with three different methods. First, he immerses himself in the natural world that would have been the same for the Arnaut Daniel and Bertran de Born. Thus the frst section of the poem fnds the seeker noticing trees “gray with lichen” and observing the “Dronne … full of lilies.” Since nature perpetually repeats itself—an assumption the poem takes for granted—therefore the trees and lichen are the same in the thirteenth century as well as the twentieth century; the wanderer can suppose that he sees precisely what the eyes of Daniel and Bertran registered. It is almost as if he sees with their eyes. Nature, however, constitutes only a portion of the past, and thus proves insuffcient for the seeker. In the second part of the poem he takes note of medieval edifces. No doubt Bertran and Daniel walked by, through or in them; they were familiar with these buildings. Once again he tries to imagine himself in their shoes, pointedly seeing Perigord not by gas light or electric light, but colored by “the torch-fames, high leaping.” In the third and fnal part of the poem, he adds to the frst two attempts to recover history still another bridge: imaginative vision. The poem marks the transition by dropping the repetitive phrases “I have walked” and “I have seen,” phrases that emphasize the physical nature of his encounter. They are replaced by the meditative: “I have thought.” This method of recapturing the past is paradoxically both the strongest and the weakest. On the one hand, it allows the traveler to picture the people he wants to encounter (“Two men tossing a coin, one keeping a castle, / One set on the highway to sing”), but on the other hand he has lost his grounding in the physical. He no longer focuses on the trees, roads, and castles that anchored him in that remote era. Once the seeker stops dramatizing the past, he fnds himself back in his own age. Hence the dismissive note as the poem draws near to its conclusion: “So ends that story / That age is gone” (P, 127). Each of the three modes of time traveling has its advantages, but none brings the past back to life with the solidity and vivacity which the poem so ardently desires.35 It is worth noting that Pound’s insertion of himself into the same environs that knew Arnaut Daniel, although presented as a fresh way to connect with the past, lacks originality. In Italian Hours (1909) James describes his frst night in Siena in 1873. As he enters the Palazzo Pubblico, he fnds it “devoid of any human presence that could fgure 106 B. AHEARN to me the current year; so that the moonshine assisting, I had half an hour’s infnite vision of medieval Italy” (1993, 513). (The account was originally published in “Siena Early and Late,” in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1874.) James employs a trope most famously evident in Byron. The fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage fnds Harold in the Coliseum, where he announces that “we become a part of what has been, / And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.” This being so, he has a vision of the distant past. “I see before me the Gladiator lie: / He leans upon his hand—his manly brow / Consents to death, but conquers agony, / And his drooped head sinks gradually low—” (1980–1993, 2: 170–171). In short, Pound’s appeal to place is comparable to his ruminations in the ur-Cantos about how to begin. Both repeat what other authors have already done. Pound makes another attempt at time traveling in “Near Perigord” (1915). Once again he structures the poem as an excursion in three parts. But this time the excursion is generic. Pound tries to recapture the past with three literary modes. First, he tries the scholarly approach, in which the poet considers several facts that might explain Bertan de Born’s intention behind “The Borrowed Lady.” Was it simply a declaration of love, or instead a cunning strategic ploy? Could it have been both at once? This part of “Near Perigord” evaluates various kinds of evidence from the region’s topography, from its political history, and from the Provençal literary record. The second part of the poem approaches the past via the methods of historical fction. “Near Perigord” offers details that bolster verisimilitude, such as “Stray gleams on hanging mail, an armorer’s torch- fare / Melting on steel.” We also hear Arnaut Daniel and Richard the Lionhearted debating Bertran’s intentions for the poem, and discover they are likewise puzzled. In its third attempt to resurrect the past, the poem resorts to the dramatic monologue. Bertran soliloquizes about Maent, the lady of “The Borrowed Lady.” Here too, however, the exposition ends with the same quandary that marked Bertran’s poem—multiplicity of intention and shape. Maent and Bertran perceive in each other disassociated and fragmented selves. She fnds his “mind” at odds with “your soul, your hands.” He sees in her “a shifting change, / A broken bundle of mirrors” (P, 154). By the end of the poem it becomes clear that its title has a double meaning, partly spatial and partly temporal. In terms of space, the events that unfold in the poem take place near Perigord. In terms of time, however, the poem can only approach the era and what happened then; it can come near but never happily arrive. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 107

Both “Provincia Deserta” and “Near Perigord” fail to secure a frm grip on the past. Both employ a three-pronged approach to the problem. As if hopeful that the third time is the charm, Pound makes still another attempt. He begins his major life’s work with the publication of “Three Cantos for a Poem of Some Length” (1917). Pound assails the past in three different ways. The frst canto takes up the basic question of what it means to write an epic and the familiar trope of where one should begin. The poet’s voice delightedly and somewhat dizzily inventories the rich variety of material available. He seems somewhat overwhelmed by it all: “How many worlds we have!” (P, 234). The second Canto narrows the feld by focusing on the past and the ways it can be examined. It also contemplates differing versions of the meaning of the past. The third canto primarily concentrates on language, especially Latin, as a key to recovering history, or rather attaining a vision of “the Goddess, Venus” (P, 245). Yet there is no fourth canto that would unite these disparate approaches or discard them for a more satisfactory avenue into the past. A tripartite approach that ends with doubtful results had already appeared in an earlier poem, “April” (1913), which has for an epigraph, Nympharum membra disjecta (“scattered parts of the nymphs”).

Three spirits came to me And drew me apart To where the olive boughs Lay stripped upon the ground: Pale carnage beneath the bright mist. (P, 92–93)

Three supernatural beings unite to direct the speaker to a scene of dis- memberment. If this poem had been composed in the spirit of happy insight that characterized “The Tree,” we might have expected this trio to lead the speaker to some ineffable truth. Instead they point to a local arboreal disaster. Are the spirits the ones who had inhabited the olive boughs, and are they eager to have him witness the aftermath of this crime? Are they simply concerned for the dryads harmed by this injury? Or is the lesson that nature assaulted is an affront to the divine? The poem leaves these and other potential questions hanging. Nevertheless, it exemplifes a recurring pattern: the promise of a vision that escapes the bounds of present time and space, but a promise leading only to a fragmented display. 108 B. AHEARN

When Pound recast the frst three cantos, the tripartite plan persisted, with alterations. Canto 1 situates us in the Homeric age in the eastern Mediterranean, the region of the Greeks. Canto 2 advances roughly a thousand years and moves to the middle of the Mediterranean—the Roman world—by revisiting Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Canto 3 leaps another millennium and takes us to the western Mediterranean and a third culture—Spanish. The frst canto dramatizes relations between the human and the divine. The Cantos begins on a promising note, since the frst canto describes a ritual in which Odysseus and his shipmates summon the spirits of the dead with scrupulous correctness. The ritual requires the proper sacrifce of natural objects—sheep and their blood—so that the supernatural element—the souls of the dead—can be summoned. Here we have a counterpart on the social plane of the achievement in “The Tree.” There is even a hint that the triumph recorded in “The Tree” may have a broad social application. The trinity of humanity, nature, and the divine happily coincide, as they do in “The Tree.” In this canto a small group of pious men preside over a happy marriage of diverse elements; the same marriage could only be attained in “The Tree” by an individual. But such a reading overlooks troubling details in the canto. The canto intimates that a perfect harmony uniting the human, the natural, and the spiritual remains elusive. Odysseus knows that only Tiresias can tell him how to navigate back to Ithaca, but other souls— importunate and unruly—crowd forward. Furthermore, in the middle of the sacrifcial ceremony, the shade of Elpenor breaks into beg for proper burial. That rite should have been performed but was not. Past neglect disturbs the present ritual. Thus Odysseus’s painstaking performance in summoning Tiresias is attended by unanticipated diffculty and error. To a small but noticeable extent, Canto 1 is “wrong from the start.” Where can we fnd the perfect union of humanity with the divine that occurs in “The Tree”? When two or more people act jointly, is error inevitable? If we restrict the number of people involved to just two, then perhaps error can be avoided. As we saw in “The Garret,” the moment of “waking” of two intimately related bodies could be a waking to a higher truth. Yet even in this instance a potential problem arises. We hear only one voice in the poem; the other person “waking” makes no declaration. Silence means consent or tacit dissent; we cannot say which. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 109

8 the Imprecise Language of the Gods Pound’s notes and drafts for Cantos 31–33 include this sentence: “The aim is to bring back the / gods, that is to say, the aim / is to create states of mind in / which certain things are comprehensible.”36 The passage relocates the gods from an exterior realm to an inner one. The gods are not occasional visitors on holiday from Mount Olympus, but latent in our minds. The aim to create states of mind also chimes with the sentiment of the unnamed “Russian correspondent” whom Pound cited approvingly in his essay, “Vorticism”: “I see, you wish to give people new eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing” (Pound 1974, 85). The terms in which Pound states his intention, however, call for examination. Will these “new eyes” always focus precisely? What guarantee does Pound provide that these states of mind can be created in accordance with human desire? Even if they can be created, what assurance have we that they will not be accompanied by unintended, confusing and unexpected phenomena? If we turn again to some of Pound’s earlier poems, ones presenting states of mind in contact with the supernatural, it becomes obvious that the project of bringing back the gods opens up myriad possibilities for error. For example, “The Return,” (P, 69–70) exhibits a high degree of ambiguity in terms of phanopoeia, the “casting of images upon the mind” as Pound defned it. We are never quite sure of the identity of “they” who return. The poem’s exclamation, “Gods of the wingèd shoe!” connects them to Hermes, but this helps only modestly, since Hermes mediated between the divine and the human. That is a large territory; which one does Hermes inhabit in this poem? Furthermore, to invoke Hermes could indicate that these gods are merely circulating on the periphery of someone’s perception. Other indices, such as “these were the souls of blood,” lead us into more ambiguity. Does the poem mean these were mortals who passed into a supernatural plane of existence? Or does it charge them with a propensity for violence? Is one reading erroneous and the other correct? If so, which should we choose? Opportunities for error occur in another vision of the gods, “The Coming of War: Actaeon” (P, 109–110). The poem is marked by swift transitions in which qualities ascribed to one element in the poem are quickly shifted to others. For example, the epithet “unstill” at one point refers to the sea, but later in the poem is attached to the cortege. The sea itself, adjacent to the cliffs, is compared to granite, a metaphoric leap 110 B. AHEARN that would obviously be more appropriate when discussing the stony cliffs. Furthermore, the phrase “cool face” refers to the feld, but more justly applies to the dead visage of Actaeon. In short, no sooner does the poem designate some element than the designations are free to foat off and attach themselves to other objects. Visionary capacity in this poem is, to borrow a phrase from “Near Perigord,” a shifting change. Such precision as we fnd here is the precision of forms dimly seen through fog. Vision that presses beyond the ordinary world undergoes a dream- like mutation.37 Two questions about precision persistently lurk in much of Pound’s early work: frst, can error be avoided, and second, can one start fresh without erroneous assumptions or directions? The poems aspire to a state of being in which error will be avoided or at least reduced to an absolute minimum. Furthermore, even as evidence of error, misappre- hension, or ambiguity accumulates, there are intimations of remedies for these problems. While such poems as “The Return” or “The Coming of War: Actaeon” leave us peering at obscurities, other poems seem to want to educate our vision. As we have already noted, “The Tree” stands out as the expression of a clear and valid vision. But the knowledge that the speaker in that poem has acquired is never stated. Indeed, the poem implies that the awareness of “many a new thing” can only be attained by following in the footsteps of the speaker, not by reading any report he might provide. (The method of following in his footsteps is itself of dubious value, since the vision follows immediately on his ceasing to move.) The same diffculty with verbalizing the transcendent occurs in “Paracelsus in Excelsis” (1910), where Paracelsus, having passed beyond mortality, proclaims, “The mist goes from the mirror and I see” (P, 31). What he sees, however, cannot be adequately transmitted to us in mortal language. Paracelsus offers images that are contradictory. “Fluids intangible that have been men, / We seem as statues round whose high- risen base / Some overfowing river is run mad” (P, 31). The state of Paracelsus and other seers who have surpassed the mortal plane is paradoxically liquid and solid. His report from a region beyond mortal experience, however, still must be cast in the language of mortals, hence the report’s perplexing imagery. The same problem with language is true of “The Tree.” Language cannot stretch to the horizon of divine perception. The comprehensiveness, stability, purity, and precision that we presume would be the attributes of a divine language does not characterize any tongue. 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 111

9 errata “Thought hinges on the defnition of words.” “Gold and Work” (1944) (SP, 350)

Pound’s early poetry indicates, unsurprisingly, that transcendent visions exceed language’s ability to fully delineate them. The rift between rap- ture and report cannot be bridged by any words we know. Yet this unfortunate state of affairs does not require us to abandon all hope. If we are to approach the gods more closely (that is, witness divine principles in action), then renovation of language can help narrow the gap. Hence Pound’s emphasis on the rectifcation of linguistic error. Yet even as he pursues that course of correction, we must once again ask if the principles he uses to guide himself are rooted in a precise and clearly stated set of diagnoses and procedures, or whether they depend on his inscrutable genius. Once the wisdom of bodies, eyes, and ears has been transposed to words, familiar problems arise. As soon as we try to recover great poets and savants of the past we are struggling with words in documents. When this occurs Pound’s academic background sometimes comes into play. Pound was the frst poet to attempt a work of epic length who had been trained in the discipline of modern philology. He was conver- sant with techniques for detecting textual error. And there are indeed moments when The Cantos stresses the scholarly repair of textual corruption. The most salient of these we have already noted: the question about “noigandres” that Pound puts to “old Levy” in the summer of 1911. The young scholar stops in Freiburg to meet the older master, who turns out to be a model of scholarly energy and persistence in fer- reting out textual corruption. Not only does Levy walk “halfway across Freiburg” to Pound’s hotel room to examine his transcription of a bit of Provençal manuscript, we also learn that Levy pondered for six months the meaning of “noigandres,” eventually perceiving that this unique word resulted from scribal mistranscription. What we may overlook, however, is the fact that Levy, not Pound, has restored the correct reading. The Cantos seems to regard worry over small corruptions and the labor of removing them not to be its responsibility. It prefers to worry about massive errors rather than small ones.38 (Incidentally, the account that the canto gives of Emil Levy depicts him as a seer in the Poundian mold. Levy’s struggle with “noigrandres” is cast as a private one having 112 B. AHEARN no apparent connection to the history of Provençal scholarship or to other eminent philologists. The canto implies that it takes a maverick scholar to solve the puzzle. Hidebound academics need not apply.) In cases where Pound seems to be focusing on minute textual error, we fnd that he treats it rather cavalierly. A case in point occurs in Canto 96 (1956).

Is this reproof warranted? Has the “Professor” blundered? In order to assess Pound’s judgment, we need to begin at the beginning, which in this case is around the turn of the tenth century. During the reign (886– 912) of the Roman emperor of the East, Leo the Wise, a book of regulations regarding guilds was compiled—The Book of the Eparch. Modern scholars commenced examining it in the late nineteenth century, when a professor of Greek, Jules Nicole (1842–1921), chanced upon it in a Genevan library. (He is the “Professor” to whom Pound refers.) The canto in which Pound discusses Nicole’s translation also contains a few passages from The Book of the Eparch. One of these passages occurs in a law concerning the skills required of notaries. The law stipulates that no one can become a notary who has poor handwriting. Here is Pound’s version:

and have a clear Handschrift and be neither babbler nor insolent, nor sloppy in habits, and have a style. Without perfect style might not notice punctuation and phrases that alter the sense, …. (C, 666)

Pound has selected a passage that stipulates correctness on a small scale. He seems to endorse this attention to minute detail, but the question remains as to whether he himself feels bound by similar obligations. The particular passage that caught Pound’s eye refers to the requirement that goldsmiths must obtain the consent of the eparch before a candidate can be admitted into their guild: “Défense 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 113

également d’admettre personne dans la corporation des orfèvres sans l’aveu du préfet,” as Professor Nicole translates. Carroll F. Terrell explains in his essay, “The Eparch’s Book of Leo the Wise,” that the French phrase ending that sentence translates a Greek phrase: “ .” Terrell remarks, “The French ‘aveu’ means ‘avowal’ or ‘confession.’ The Greek preposition ‘aneu’ means ‘without.’ Since Professor Nicole transcribes and translates the word cor- rectly in the phrase ‘without the assent of the eparch,’ it looks as if he has made no error, but that accidentally the Greek ‘aneu’ and the French ‘aveu’ seemed to suggest one. Nicole’s ‘sans l’aveu de prèfet’ quite adequately carries the sense of the Greek: “ which we may render as ‘without the knowing-assent of the Eparch’” (1973, 234). Terrell fnds the erroneous scholar here to be not Nicole— but Pound. Terrell supposes the similarity of the Greek “ ” and the French “aveu” led to Pound’s confusion. Terrell therefore corrects Pound’s correction of Nicole. To recapitulate: In Canto 96 Pound seems to point out an error in Nicole’s translation. Terrell, however, fnds that Pound has himself erred by fnding a mistake where there is none. But Terrell overlooked another possibility. Pound could simply be noting that the “nice use” of aveu (French) was inspired by the manuscript’s (Greek). Pound could be implying that Nicole did what he (Pound) had done in some of his own translations. Consider, for example, Pound’s retention in “The Seafarer” of the Anglo-Saxon word “stern” (a tern), but with a change of meaning, that is, as a reference to the aft end of a ship. Thus Pound might be offering sardonic congratulations to Professor Nicole, with the expectation that Nicole would be condemned by pedants. After all, Pound’s versions of Propertius had been roundly rejected as incompetent by Professor Hale. Whether Pound faults Nicole or praises him, he does not restrict himself to the modes of scholarship he learned in the “beaneries.” He desires more latitude than commonly accepted practices of textual scholarship allow. Therefore the treatment of textual error in The Cantos varies according to how a particular text fts with others and with the poem’s larger considerations. Most of the time those texts and considerations trump minute and scrupulous textual emendation. Pound favors the big picture. The gremlin of textual error also rears up in Canto 39 with respect to a Latin translation of a few words from the Odyssey: “Came here with Glaucus unnoticed, nec ivi in harum / Nec in harum ingressus sum” 114 B. AHEARN

(C, 194). This is Eurylochus speaking. As Terrell notes, Eurylochus “did not enter the house of Circe, as did the rest of the men, [and so] he was free to report back to Odysseus” (1980–1984, I: 161). Terrell goes on to point out an error. “The problem with the Latin passage, however, is that the word ‘harum’ refers to a kind of plant. To be correct, the word should be ‘haram’ meaning ‘pigsty.’” Terrell traces the source of the mistake. “Pound uses ‘harum’ rather than ‘haram’ for ‘pigsty’ because the word occurs thus in his source: Clark and Ernestus Latin version, 1st printing, 1804.” (Terrell himself slightly errs; the edition of Samuel Clark’s Latin translation of Homer—Homeri Opera Omni—that Pound used was printed in 1814.) It is worth asking why Pound uses Clark and Ernestus at this point rather than Andreas Divus. As Pound notes in “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer,” the Latin version offered by Ernestus and Clark indicates that, “it is nearly impossible to believe that Clark and Ernestus were unfamiliar with Divus” (LE, 265). In this essay, Pound offers a passage from Divus and compares it with the same passage rendered by Clark and Ernestus. Even though Pound fnds no explicit acknowledgment on the part of Clark and Ernestus that they are relying on Divus, Pound clearly believes that they did. By including their mistake in the canto, Pound could be tacitly pointing to the mistakes that transcribers and translators make. Although translators perform a noble service, there will be moments when they nod. Do these small errors, however, seriously compromise the text? Pound seems not to think so. Of course Terrell could be correct, and Pound simply repeats the textual corruption. In either case, Pound declines to be ruled by the current standards of textual scholarship. The Cantos again becomes the site of a textual error in Canto 43.

To the serenissimo Dno (pronounced Domino) and his most serene aftercomers things, persons et omnia alia juva whatever and the cash in the Pawn Shop. (C, 215)

Terrell points out that the original Latin phrase concludes not with “juva” (“aid”) but with “jura” (“rights”) (1980–1984, I: 172). Be that as it may, the canto breaks off its attention to the document with the casual “whatever.” The canto appears to have lost patience with the 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 115 document because it is mostly boilerplate. Why pay much attention to detail when those details have become no more than parts of a form letter? Fidelity thereto would be a waste of time. “Whatever” in Canto 43 suggests that Pound does not fret unduly over small errors such as the distinction between harum and haram. Their presence in The Cantos may be simply intended (if intention there be) to remind us of the inevitabil- ity of error. Despite Pound’s frequent insistence that particulars count, he ignores what he regards as inconsequential errors. What does concern Pound, however, is malicious self-interest that generates error. John Adams has an eye on this lamentable trait when in Canto 71 he refers to a currency “depreciated by swindling banks” (C, 414). The theme of malicious error (as opposed to innocent mistake) saturates The Cantos. Pound offers example of such criminal deviance in the frst of the Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI (1934).

A tiel leis … en ancien scripture, and this they have translated Holy Scripture … Mr Jefferson and they continue this error. (C, 156)

Pound has adapted a passage in a letter (24 January 1814) from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.

Finch begins the business of falsifcation by mistranslating and misstat- ing the words of Prisot thus: “to such laws of the church as have warrant in Holy Scripture our law giveth credence.” Citing the above case and the words of Prisot in the margin, Finch’s law, B. I, c, 3, here then we fnd ancien scripture, ancient writing, translated “holy scripture.” (1905, 14: 73)

As Jefferson sees it, Finch tried to erase the distinction between civil law and biblical law, a distinction that needed to be maintained if citizens of the United States were to uphold the Constitutional prohibition against an established church allied to the state.40 Pound, following Jefferson, points to what may be deliberate introduction of error rather than inad- vertent error. The Cantos deplores malicious twisting of facts, or suppression of facts so as to lead others into error. Consider Canto 46: “a great deal still in the school books, placed there / NOT as evidence. Placed there to distract idle minds….” (C, 234). (Pound broadcast this canto 116 B. AHEARN in its entirety from Rome on 12 February 1942.) And in Canto 89 we are told, “Without historic black-out / they cannot maintain perpetual wars” (C, 595). Likewise, Canto 103 claims, “The slaves were a red herring….” (C, 732). This last statement refers to the U.S. Civil War. For Pound, the war really hinged on the question of who had the authority to issue money. Even though, the Constitution vests the authority in the federal government, Pound was certain that a cabal of private investment bankers had usurped the federal role. These bankers colluded with arms manufacturers—and other business interests that would proft from a war—to suppress the truth. Hence the reference in Canto 89 to the “historic black-out.” It is bad enough that the careless and the inattentive propagate error; far worse are those who deliberately foster it. Pound highlights the problem of error by explicitly referring to it, or by offering examples of it, at the beginnings and endings of sections of The Cantos. As we have seen, he did so in the frst ur-Canto, pointing out an anachronism in Browning’s Sordello: “For that great font Sordello sat beside-- / ‘Tis an immortal passage, but the font?-- / Is some two centuries outside the picture” (P, 229). Pound also inaugurates the Adams Cantos by mentioning error. In the frst of the Adams Cantos (62) he inserts this passage.

‘Acquit of evil intention or inclination to perseverance in error to correct it with cheerfulness’. (C, 341)

Pound has condensed a portion of Charles Francis Adams’s preface to his ten-volume edition of The Works of John Adams. Adams (Charles) defnes error broadly. It includes biographical and historical faws.

Infallability in such a department of investigation is altogether out of the question. The writer has detected too many mistakes in his own work, and observed too many in the productions of others, to seek to cherish a spirit of dogmatism. Hence if it should turn out that he has fallen into any essential error, or been guilty of material injustice, he trusts that he may be acquitted of evil intention in the beginning, or inclination to persevere in it against evidence. Should any such be shown to him, he stands ready to acknowledge it with candor and to correct it with cheerfulness. (Adams 1850–1856, I: vi–vii) 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 117

Readers encountering Canto 62’s selection from this passage will be unaware that they are hearing the voice of Charles Francis Adams or to what he refers. The rendition therefore becomes a general assertion of willingness to amend erroneous practices or assumptions. It serves as a good introduction to John Adams because it highlights one of his key virtues. In the Adams Cantos, Pound sketches John as an honest, upright patriot, determined to reduce the number of his errors and the errors of others. In this regard he becomes aligned with Pound himself. John Adams’s broad and penetrating vision of error helps explain why he, rather than his son or grandson, is the central voice of the Adams Cantos. Pound did not admire all the members of the Adams family unreservedly. John Quincy Adams, for example, does not quite fll the shoes of his father. Pound considered him a well-intentioned statesman who failed to grasp the central importance of economic issues—and errors—in the life of the nascent republic.41 In the last Adams Canto (71) John Adams discusses errors that arise from ignorance and obscurity: “Their inexperience, so superfcial their reading…” (C, 415); “Histories are annihilated or interpolated or prohibited…” (C, 416); “No gentleman of talent has undertaken this history” (C, 417). He also points out that self-interest and a reluctance to venture beyond dogmatism contribute to the perpetuation of ignorance. “Civic polity ecclesiastical bigotry / destroy everything that cd/ give true light or clear insight / into antiquity …” (C, 417). Finally, Adams rails against “‘Ignorance of coin, credit and circulation!’” (C, 421). The Adams Cantos began by announcing a general desire to rectify error; they end with a canto in which John Adams points to specifc kinds of error. Thus the Adams Cantos replicate one of the aims of The Cantos as a whole, namely, to point out particular forms of error so that they may be corrected. In the larger scheme of The Cantos, John Adams takes his place along with Arthur Griffth and Mussolini as one of the seers capable of “inevitable swiftness and rightness in a given feld” (K, 105–106). When The Cantos takes up the problem of error, it often does so in a melodramatic fashion. On the one hand we have such champions as Jefferson and John Adams combating error. On the other hand we fnd iniquitous fgures who display varying shades of villainy: Baldy Bacon, Metevsky, Alexander Hamilton, et al. These promoters of error are inventive and unfagging.42 To combat them, the investigators and correctors of error must display an equally energetic championing of the true and the good. It is worth noting that Pound rarely offers 118 B. AHEARN instances where righteous zeal hurries one into error. The Cantos hardly ever shows wise men allowing their virtue to lead them astray. But it happens often enough. Bunyan was alert to this problem; Christian’s eagerness to reach the Celestial City sometimes leads him to take shortcuts, always a decision he soon regrets. Canto 39 offers a rare lesson in the slipperiness of good intentions. The fgure of Circe returns from Canto 1. As several lines in the canto indicate, Circean allure stems from erotic attraction: “Song sharp at the edge, her crotch like a young sap- ling” (C, 194); “A girl’s arms have nested the fre” (C, 196). In most of Pound’s poetry, Eros has positive connotations; it often accompanies vitality and vision. In Canto 39, however, it becomes a distraction and consequently a source of error. Odysseus dallies with Circe, delaying his return to Ithaca. The canto mutes aspects of Eros that are productive and life-sustaining. Instead we fnd Eros consorting with images of stu- pefed lethargy.

When I lay in the ingle of Circe I heard a song of that kind. Fat panther lay by me Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating, All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards, Lions loggy with Circe’s tisane Girls leery with Circe’s tisane. (C, 193)

Panthers and leopards are not normally fat. This anomaly signals something amiss in Circe’s realm. Excessive indulgence in the erotic leads to immobility, mental torpor, and dull repetition. Every virtue can, if carried to an extreme, become its opposite. But Canto 39 seems an exception in Pound’s account of error. Until the Drafts and Fragments section, we rarely see any admission in The Cantos that Pound’s ardor for truth, beauty, and justice has led him or one of his heroes astray. As Pound sat in the DTC near Pisa, refecting on his career, he tended rather to validate his choices, as he does at the close of Canto 81.

But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 119

or from a fne old eye the unconquered fame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffdence that faltered … (C, 521–522)

It is possible to read the passage—as we have already done—strictly in terms of literary tradition, a tradition embodied in Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Such an interpretation would enable us to isolate Pound’s political and economic convictions from his literary ones. Hugh Kenner and other critics strove mightily to do just that in the 1950s and 1960s. They avoided Pound’s insistence that his writing was all of a piece, and that the political, economic, and literary threads were interwoven. If we assent to Pound’s view, then “diffdence” could apply not only to his encounters or missed opportunities with regard to literary history; it could also pertain to other interests he pursued. Yet nowhere do the Pisan Cantos indicate that one’s curiosity, fervor for justice, compas- sion for the peasant with the “bent shoulders” (C, 425), or other laud- able qualities and motives might lead one into error. Instead, the Pisan Cantos affrm the rightness of their author’s choices. Such errors as he may have committed are dismissed as trivial.

10 confucius but above all to be precise at the gulf’s edge or on thin ice. (Pound 1954, 111)

Pound thought that no one had perceived the proper role of government (of self, of family, of nation) more clearly than Confucius. To a large degree, Pound attributed Confucius’s wisdom to his reverence for precision. Peter Makin has argued that “All Pound’s arguments for ‘precision’ depend on the assumption of an awareness that is inner, hard to get at, and unique. They all depend on the idea of a rigorous effort towards self-knowledge. And this corresponds to the effort of self-search and inner discrimination that the Confucian texts, as Americanized by Pound, urge on us” (2005, 180). The self-knowledge that Pound and his Confucius demand, however, requires the rejection of a considerable body of external data. There is a great deal of misinformation, cliché, and 120 B. AHEARN prejudice (that is to say, error) that must be cut out. Self-knowledge may be attained once that surgical excision has been accomplished. As Makin puts it, “‘precision’ … is a matter of ‘shades and degrees of the ineffable’ (Spirit of Romance, 87), whose reality the writer must himself be sure he knows, within himself, before he starts to write, since there is no periodic table he can check them against” (180). If no periodic table exists against which the seer can measure his or her insights regarding the ineffable, we are once again left with the seer whose authority about what constitutes precision and what leads to error rests ultimately on self-assurance. Confucianism bears directly on Pound’s treatment of error. He could claim to have put error in its place because he had steeped himself in the works of Confucius, who affrmed that it was possible to diminish erroneous words and thoughts. This shrinking of error comes about in large part through the cultivation of verbal precision. Pound’s Confucius frmly urges the precise defnition of words—and connecting those words with things, whether those things be material or intangible.43 Pound’s translations of Confucius contain numerous passages emphasizing the crucial importance of matching words with the particulars of a situation. Once this rectifcation of language has been accomplished, we can then reform ourselves and, ultimately, our polity. “Having attained this precise verbal defnition [aliter, this sincerity], they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having attained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium” (Con, 33). Similar examples abound: “the great gentleman must fnd the precise verbal expression for his inarticulate thoughts” (51). “and for attaining this precision of speech with yourself there is a way; he who does not understand what the good is, will not attain a clear precision in defning himself to himself” (167). “He who defnes his words with precision will perfect himself…. (177). “He said: is this the end of it? I have seen no one who can see his errors and then go into his own mind and demand justice on them in precise, discriminating words” (213). 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 121

Pound’s Confucian translations posit two kinds of precise terminology: (1) that which enables us to clearly utter our thoughts and (2) that which matches words to outward circumstance. In either case, it is essential to refne our language. We can then use our senses to further the marriage of verba with res.44 Although the last passage above shows that Pound fnds Confucius aware of error, the word “error” rarely appears in his Confucian translations. Much more common are the words “precise,” “precisely,” or “precision.” Pound’s Confucius prefers to indicate the right path rather than harp on the ways one may deviate from it. This Confucius teaches us that fxing our gaze on error diverts our energies from more productive enterprises. Pound’s own impatience with those who dwell on error appears in a note at the beginning of his translation of The Analects.

And the study of the Confucian philosophy is of greater proft than that of the Greek because no time is wasted in idle discussion of errors. Aristotle gives, may we say, 90% of his time to errors, and the Occident, even before it went off for seven of more centuries into an otiose discussion of fads and haircuts (vide “The Venerable” Bede), had already started befuddling itself with the false dilemma: Aristotle OR Plato, as if there were no other roads to serenity. (Con, 191)

Pound applauds the Confucian emphasis on the means by which well-intentioned men (women are barely mentioned in the text) can bring benefcial order into their lives and the lives of others. Pound implies that so long as one persistently concentrates on those means, then error will be reduced to a minimum. Once reduced to that minimum, we can safely ignore it or give it only the scant consideration it deserves. In the Analects we fnd this focus on the positive: “Confucius replied: There was Yen Hui who loved to study, he didn’t shift a grudge or double an error [L. repeat a fault]” (Con, 124). Studying virtues and how to attain them cannot insure against error, but it can insure that one’s errors will dwindle since they are less likely to be repeated. Against this passage we can set another that confrms its implication.

1. Chu Po-Yu sent a man to Confucius. 2. k ung-tze sat with him and questioned him: what’s your boss doing? Replied: “My big man wants to diminish the number of his errors, and cannot.” The messenger went out. Kung-tze said: Some messenger, isn’t he? (Con, 259) 122 B. AHEARN

If Chu Po-Yu has directed his energies to cataloging his errors and striving to reduce their number, he has made a mistake. Attacking errors by focusing on them merely fritters away our time, since the most expedi- tious way to reduce error is by strengthening virtue. Pound’s discovery that Confucius emphasized the maintenance and cultivation of virtue consists with what we have already seen in Pound’s attitude toward minor textual error. Just as we should not dwell on the distinction between jura and juva, we should not worry about minor errors. Rather, we should aim to increase virtue.45 But how do we cultivate virtue? Confucius, or at least Pound’s Confucius, seldom offers detailed instructions. He tends to be vague rather than precise. For example:

Kung said: Hui’s mode of action was to seize the unwavering axis, coming to an exact equity; he gripped it in his fst, and at once started using it, careful as if he were watching his chicken-coop, and he never let go or lost sight of it. (Con, 109)

In this passage the “fst” and the “chicken-coop” vividly contrast with the “unwavering axis.” One might picture the axis as a spinning top or perhaps a gyroscope, but this would not be consistent with its abstract nature. It seems impertinent to ask about the nature of the unwavering axis, or where to fnd it. Even the “fst” gives us pause. If the “fst” is symbolic rather than literal, what is it? Furthermore, what would constitute holding on to the unwavering axis? Such questions are not addressed. (It is worth recalling that Pound once advised against mixing “an abstraction with the concrete” [Pound 1913, 201].) Elsewhere Confucius recommends respect for and careful fulfllment of the “rites,” keeping calm when facing danger, practicing the Golden Rule, not being greedy, and so on. For the most part, the advice Pound’s Confucius offers amounts to a feast of platitudes. Pound’s claim at the beginning of his translation, that “the proponents of a world order” (Con, 19) would do well to study Confucius, is undoubtedly well intentioned. It may even be good advice. But we are left puzzled. What are the precise steps that would lead to the new golden age? How do we found a new world order on uncontroversial banalities, the like of which are to be found in fortune cookies?46 Pound, as we have noted, repeatedly fnds Confucius advocating “precision.” Confucius says that “the men of old … sought precise verbal 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 123 defnitions of their inarticulate thoughts” (Con, 30–31). Yet Pound’s Confucius seldom offers specifc instruction about what to do in certain situations. Most often we fnd these kinds of admonitions: “A proper man extends his study of accomplishment, he brings it into close defnition for the rites, and that may enable him to keep from divagations (from overstepping the edge of the feld)” (Con, 217–218). In defense of Pound and Confucius, however, we could cite an obvious reason for such vagueness. To be excessively precise about behavior might be a grave mistake. Confucius’s partisans could reasonably argue that he understood that a detailed list of ways to behave could not take into account all the ramifcations of specifc cases; he therefore had to content himself with a few general rules true for any time or place. So when Confucius urges us to “defne … words with precision” (Con, 177) he indicates the importance of sedulous attention to our language. What that language is, and what precision means at a given time and place, are matters impossible to predict. Pound seems to suppose that anyone interested enough in Confucius to study him will already love virtue. Such a student could be relied upon to take to heart the advice about examining one’s language. Although Pound’s Confucius urges verbal precision, it is fair to ask whether his statements are precise. The most charitable observation about his precision would be that it is somewhat hazy. His words require great latitude of interpretation. When Confucius remarks in the Analects, “The proper man is not absolutely bent on, or absolutely averse from anything in particular, he will be just” (Con, 207), the abstract nature of his defnition leaves us groping for a meaning we can apply to specifc situations. How do we know a proper man when we see one? How are we to estimate whether he promotes justice? Pound’s Confucius leaves such questions unanswered. He seems to assume that it takes one to know one, that the proper man will be easily recognized by other proper men. Furthermore, Confucius seems to assume that all proper men have the same estimate of what constitutes a just action. Such a view accords with Pound’s conviction that men of genius and “honest men” will come to similar conclusions.47 In Guide to Kulchur Pound reiterates the necessity for verbal clarity and invokes Confucius. 124 B. AHEARN

Tseu-lou asked: If the Prince of Mei appointed you head of the government, to what wd. you frst set your mind? Kung: To call people and things by their names, that is by the correct denominations, to see that the terminology was exact. (K, 16)

Pound also locates such exactitude in certain Western poetry and prose when he refers to the “quite H. Jamesian precisions of the Odyssey” (K, 31). In short, Confucius recommends what some Westerners have also done. Thus Pound offers a way of translating the meaning of Confucius in Occidental terms. (Pound does not, however, descend to the level of minute analysis. He expects the intelligent reader to do that independently.) The vision of Western history that Pound presents in Kulchur has the virtue of simplicity. Over the millennia there have been a few perceptive minds that recorded their understanding of the proper relation between word and thing, a relation that also depends upon a proper perception of the relation between humanity and nature. Civilization falters when these eternal verities are misconstrued, either through mistaken thought or through selfshness that corrupts the relation between humanity and nature. Pound believed in eternal verities, which is what he means when he frmly states, “I assert that the gods exist” (K, 299). He presents his faith more elaborately when he remarks, “The worship of the supreme intelligence of the universe is neither an inhuman nor bigoted action. Art is, religiously, an emphasis, a segregation of some component of that intelligence for the sake of making it more perceptible” (K, 189–190). The key word here is “segregation.” Great art cannot function unless it clearly discriminates components of the intelligence. It has frequently been noted that Pound associates sharp and clear discrimination with service to the “supreme intelligence,” and that obfuscation and indiscriminate language obstruct apprehension of the supreme intelligence. What attracted Pound to Confucius was not simply Confucius’s insistence on the proper use of words. Pound saw in him several of his own cherished beliefs confrmed: (1) there is a “way”; (2) a few intelligent men perceive aspects of it; (3) these intelligent men are generally in agreement about the nature of virtue; and (4) the values these men espouse transcend local times and places. Nevertheless, the matter of what constitutes the “way,” and what manner of intelligence discerns it, remains subject to Pound’s interpretation. One critic observes that, “Pound “saw” almost everywhere in the Confucian texts what he believed to be “original” and unexplored ideas, and constantly 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 125 came up with readings that no Confucian interpreter in the Chinese tradition would have wished to produce, or even dreamed of producing” (Lan 2001, 26). Seen in this light, Pound’s Confucius turns out to be a projection of Pound’s concerns and attitudes. This happy coincidence of Confucianism and Pound’s perceptions was forecast as early as 1914, when Pound declared, “This dependence on self is the core of Confucian philosophy” (EPPP, 1: 320). Ultimately the interpretation of Confucian dicta rests on Pound’s faith in his own honest, penetrating intellect.

11 serendipity In Canto 53 Pound briefy highlights episodes from the life of Confucius. For instance, we learn what happened when he took up min- isterial responsibility.

Then Kungfutseu was made minister and moved promptly against C. T. Mao and had him beheaded that was false and crafty of heart a tough tongue that fowed with deceit A man who remembered evil and was complacent in doing it. (C, 273)

Once again Pound emphasizes the link between bad government and the corruption of language, or, perhaps more to the point, the zeal of Confucius for sound language. (One wonders, however, if the punish- ment fts the crime. Also, to what extent should the passage be read in the context of contemporary events? Pound’s tacit approval of Kung’s prompt decapitation of Mao refects Pound’s willingness to condone the severities of certain political regimes in the 1930s.) The Chinese cantos frequently return to the necessity of keeping words clean and straight. Among admonitions from early Chinese history presented in Canto 52, we fnd, “Call things by the names” (C, 261). Many centuries later, Fou-Y warns, “they [Buddhists] use muzzy language / the more to mislead folk” (C, 285). The Chinese cantos stress the confict between followers of Confucius and the devotees of Buddha. This rivalry takes on a melodramatic cast; the Confucians are consistently heroic and the Buddhists invariably villainous. The Chinese cantos assume that Confucius had laid down the principles by which a proper course of conduct could be attained by individuals, families, bureaucrats, and the 126 B. AHEARN emperor. When the Chinese follow Confucian teaching, the nation aligns with divine law. Buddhists, however, keep interfering with the propaga- tion of Confucian wisdom. Pound implies that Buddhism denies that humanity can discern divine intention, and therefore Buddhism exaggerates the role of chance in human affairs. In Canto 54 Buddhists are associated with good fortune that comes from chance rather than earnest application of Confucian thought: “buddhists, hochangs, serendipity” (C, 283). In Canto 85 Pound again warns that depending on random luck to produce benefcial results is folly: “No serendipity” (C, 548). In the summer of 1952, he wrote to Wyndham Lewis to the effect that,

of course all forms of idiocy hv/ also appeared (in China) and largely got registered in ideogram / serendipity/ chinoiserie etc./ vs/ the sanity. (1985, 271)

As we have seen, precision that keeps us on the true path—and mini- mizes the incidence of error—depends on adhering to divine law and maintaining one’s clear, steady vision of that law. Serendipity, however, implies that good fortune arises from neither of these practices. The Cantos depends upon Pound’s belief that humanity can perceive rules, laws, and principles that direct us in the ways of good conduct. So long as we apply ourselves to these precepts, chance will play a negligible role.48 Yet the Drafts and Fragments of The Cantos question that faith. If Pound was right about our ability to act according to divine intention, why does the termination of The Cantos contain so much doubt? The last canto Pound deemed complete, Canto 116, invokes error three times. In its retrospective summation, the canto fnds The Cantos (and perhaps all of Pound’s work) fawed.

Many errors, a little rightness, to excuse his hell and my paradiso And as to why they go wrong, thinking of rightness And as to who will copy this palimpsest? 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 127

al poco giorno ed al gran chercio d’ombra But to affrm the gold thread in the pattern (Torcello) al Vicolo d’oro (Tigullio) To confess wrong without losing rightness: Charity I have had sometimes, I cannot make it fow through, A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour. (C, 817)

Yet the canto also intimates that the shortcomings of The Cantos may not be the poet’s fault, but arise from an inherent human inability to comprehend and display beauty, honor, and justice in all their glory. Canto 116 comes close to stating that the fall into error inevitably results from the pursuit of splendor. We stumble along, mostly blind, and frequently fall victim to treacherous lights. We may mistake these local and delusive lights for the gleam of the transcendent. The canto could be suggesting that human frailty can never accomplish more than “a little rightness.” But as the canto closes, it repeats the word “little” and provides an inter- nal rhyme for “right” with “light”: “A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.” Even though The Cantos cannot measure up to the poet’s early ambitions for it, all is not lost. The entire poem, and perhaps any portion of it, constitutes a “rushlight” that refects on a small scale the “splendour” to which it aspires. At least Pound can grasp a sim- ulacrum or portion of the right/light. Even as the possible paths diverge and ramify, there is still the right one to follow, the golden way (“al Vicolo d’oro”). We are not condemned to be slaves of chance, although “mere Serendipity hunters” (K, 263) may think so. Early in Christian’s journey to the Celestial City, he comes upon “three men fast asleep, with fetters at their heels” (Bunyan 1966, 43). These three—Simple, Sloth, and Presumption—reject Christian’s counsel and will never perceive their errors. The episode is one of many in The Pilgrim’s Progress where the mistakes of others prove instructive to Christian. But his own errors prove most important of all and inspire Christian to warn those who will follow in his footsteps. After he and Hopeful escape from Doubting Castle, 128 B. AHEARN

they began to contrive with themselves what they should do at that Stile, to prevent those that shall come after from falling into the hands of Giant Despair. So they consented to erect there a Pillar, and to engrave upon the side thereof this Sentence, over this Stile is the way to Doubting-Castle, which is kept by Giant Despair, who despiseth the King of the Celestial Country, and seeks to destroy the Holy Pilgrims. Many therefore that followed after, read what was written, and escaped the danger. (122)

Bunyan’s pilgrims make errors, but every error overcome moves them nearer to the divine. Perhaps committing error is not simply being wrong, but the sine qua non that makes rightness possible. It may be that error is productive. But to what extent does Pound fnd it so? At frst glance it would seem that he only envisions the faults, corruption, and degradation that follow error. We could read the opposition of error and rightness in Canto 116 as simply that—opposition. It would be reasonable to suppose that The Cantos treats the two categories as antithet- ical, never to be reconciled. Interpreting The Cantos that way would be to follow Pound’s frequent tendency to see matters in terms of black and white. Yet some cantos draw our attention to cases in which error leads to surprisingly positive results. The Honest Sailor in Canto 12, who has led a quite unremarkable life, is persuaded by doctors and nurses that he has given birth to a son. Upon hearing this he acquires ambition. He devotes the rest of his life to building up a shipping line that he can bequeath to his child. His “son” is in fact the offspring of a whore who dies at his birth. Absent the practical joke on the Honest Sailor, the infant most likely would have had little to look forward to. In Canto 13, the erroneous practice of the “sage” who sits by the roadside and pre- tends to receive wisdom becomes an example of nonproductive sloth. Kung berates him, it seems, partly as a lesson for his disciples. Error has its uses, if only as productive of contrary examples. It is worth noting, also, that the sequence of Cantos 11, 12, and 13 refects a fortunate historical error. Canto 11 ends in Italy in the latter years of Sigismondo Malatesta, years that overlap with the early life of Christopher Columbus. Thirty years after the death of Malatesta, Columbus sailed into the empty reaches of the Atlantic toward the Indies. On his way, however, he ser- endipitously encountered the Americas. During his second voyage he even discovered Cuba, which appears in Canto 12 (the frst “American” canto). Had Columbus been able to pass through the Americas he would have eventually reached China, the scene of Canto 13. Thus an 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 129 erroneous European assumption about routes to the Orient, and consequent exploration to the West, helps shape the order of the three cantos. Columbus’s happy error even has ramifcations beyond these three cantos. Europe, China, and the Americas are reunited in Cantos 48, 49 and 50. Here, however, we move from Italy to China (“For the seven lakes”) and only then to the Americas (“‘Revolution’, said Mr. Adams”). The geographical sequence of Cantos 11, 12, and 13 is replaced by a temporal one. The best of the Old World is clarifed and adapted to the needs of the New. The Cantos then repeats this transition from Italy to China to the Americas on a larger scale. Canto 51 ends with a reference to the League of Cambria (an alliance against Venice, which had pros- pered thanks to trade with the East), and what follows are the China cantos (52–61) and the Adams cantos (62–71). Instead of replicating the consequences of Columbus’s error, these two later sequences stipulate China and the Americas as sites where wise men such as Confucius and John Adams combat error. The Cantos’ lavish attention to these later sequences suggests that the tradition of wisdom handed down across time and space is far more important than particular local errors—even errors of Columbian magnitude. The Cantos treats the trinity of Italy, China, and America as a theater in which both innocent and malicious error continually arise, to be repelled by a few champions of virtue. The frst person in The Cantos specifcally identifed as American is Baldy Bacon, who exhibits the wil- iness of Odysseus but, alas, lacks his admirable traits.49 The specter of malicious error has come to life in Baldy, who practices currency manipulation and may also be complicit in insurance fraud. Columbus’s error and consequent discovery have made a place for Baldy to practice his schemes. In the next two sequences, however, we see that Columbus’s error also prepared the way for John Adams. It is safe to say, at least, that for Pound error does not always and everywhere lead only to mal- feasance and disasters. After all, would the young Pound have sought out “old Levy” had it not been for the erroneous “noigandres”? In The Cantos, error and virtue are never far apart. Pound seldom invokes one without adverting to the other. In 1972, when Pound wrote a short introductory note to his Selected Prose, he singled out several errors on his part. The most notable of these concerned usury: “I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE” (SP, “Foreword”). (Pound echoes the Bible, since he consciously or unconsciously recalls St. Paul’s frst epistle to Timothy, 130 B. AHEARN which advises that the love of money is the root of all evil.) Pound thus absolved himself of being guilty of malicious error. Such errors as he did commit, the Foreword indicates, came from good intentions gone awry. Would Pound have found his focus, however belatedly, had he not frst gone down the erroneous path? Hugh Kenner claimed that a crucial turning point in Pound’s career came as he arrived at a “plausible misunderstanding of Chinese poetry” at the moment when he “needed to believe that an ancient authority completely outside Western experience had delivered to an extensive civilization such a language and such a poetic as he himself groped toward. Nothing else would have lent him the courage to persevere as he did” (Kenner 1975–1976, 96). Here courage is the child of error. We might also put this question of instructive error in another way; is there a place for fortunate chance in Pound’s work? Does he experience serendipity? A well-known passage in Canto 81 has at times been taken as Pound’s acknowledgment of his errors.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down they vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down they vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance. (C, 521)

Some readers fnd Pound’s mea culpa in this passage; he recognizes and regrets his vanity. Pound’s unexpected capture and imprison- ment would therefore be an example of serendipity because he might not otherwise have arrived at this insight. Yet the passage can equally be judged a reproof of other people’s vanity; Pound derides the vanity of the conquering Allies. Or it can be read as a general homily applied to all humankind. If we look at the rest of the canto, however, we do fnd instances of what might be called serendipity. For example, an observation near the passage that accuses humanity of being “Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity” (C, 521) is at odds with the charitable act referred to a few pages earlier: “What counts is the cultural level, / thank Benin for this table ex packing box. / ‘doan yu tell no one I made it’” 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 131

(C, 518–519). An African-American, whether inmate of the DTC or one of the guards, has made a table for Pound. And this act of charity is even more signifcant because, as the maker’s comment indicates, his generosity could land him in trouble. In the same canto another unexpected benison comes to Pound: “there came a new subtlety of eyes into my tent” (C, 520). This mysterious vision of eyes seems to bring the message to the beleaguered poet that “What thou lovest well remains” (C, 520). Another act of charity is recalled early in the Canto: “and Dolores said: ‘Come pan, niño,’ eat bread, me lad” (C, 517). Such passages record the surprising recurrence of solace in the face of large and small catastrophes. Yet on the whole this canto cannot be said to clearly indicate that it is Pound’s personal error that has led him to this plight and to the attendant revelations of the power of charity—whether quotidian or supernatural. In fact, the concluding passage of the canto affrms that Pound was right to pursue his ideals.

To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fne old eye the unconquered fame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffdence that faltered … (C, 522)

The honorable course requires steering frmly toward ideals that have nothing to do with bolstering one’s vanity, one’s prestige, one’s celeb- rity, or one’s purse. Furthermore, as Canto 80 suggests, the journey will educate. In the canto Pound recalls that “leaving America” in 1908 he had $80; when leaving England in 1920 he carried “a letter of Thomas Hardy’s,” and when seized by Italian partisans in 1945 he had in his pocket, “one eucalyptus pip / from the salita that goes up from Rapallo” (C, 500). This summary of values starts with mere money, moves to literary worth, and ends with organic potential. But does chance play a signifcant role in Pound’s quest? Once Christian begins his journey to the Celestial City, he is on a path that, if he does not wander from it, will eventually take him there. When he does stray from it, only trouble follows. The correct path is also attended by helpful beings, such as Watchful and Discretion, who offer Christian wise counsel. Bunyan’s world makes no allowance for 132 B. AHEARN serendipity; good fortune is strictly limited to the true way. Pilgrims are blessed because they proceed on the path to salvation; they court perdi- tion when they deviate from it. For the most part, Pound also denies serendipity. He is not, however, as strict as Bunyan. There are, as we have seen, times when chance favors the bold. Yet it seems that only those who passionately pursue the good will be alert to the offerings of chance. For Pound, error, even malicious error, will plague the hero. Often errors are minor impediments, but they can also spur one to greater endeavor. To stray from the precise path may be nothing but a mistake; it also may have fruitful consequences. But one can never foresee which result to expect. However frmly Pound believes in “the way,” divine order, and higher illumination, his work often recognizes that there is in human affairs a degree of inevitable error, inevitable straying from precision. As we shall see in the next chapter, Robert Frost seizes on this slippage, this tendency toward deviation from the precise, and makes much of it.

Notes 1. An enthusiast pointed out the freedom conferred on the bicyclist, although at the same time he suggested that the bicyclist became rather like a machine. “By the use of the Bicycle, every healthy man—certainly every healthy young man—can make himself, in a great measure, independent of railroads and cabs, omnibuses, and tramway cars. Every man can, indeed, become his own locomotive” (Anonymous 1882, 8). 2. The major studies are Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London and New York: Methuen, 1981); Martin A. Kayman, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1986); and Kimberley Kyle Hovey, Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Science (University College London: doctoral thesis, 2009). 3. Bacon insisted on the need for cooperation among scientists. “Then let them see from these tokens we give what may be expected from men who have abundance of leisure, and from cooperative labours and from the passage of time; especially on a road which may be traveled not only by individuals (as in the case of the way of reason), but where men’s labours and efforts (particularly in the acquisition of experience) may be dis- tributed in the most suitable way and then reunited” (2000, 88). Vance Crummett, who examined Pound’s copy of the Novum Organum, concluded that “the Pound who has ‘read at’ the Novum Organum has thoroughly absorbed Book One and read, though concerned himself 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 133

less with, Book Two” (1995, 36). Pound’s greater interest in Part One was probably due to Bacon’s denigration of scholasticism. Part Two is the portion of the Novum Organum where Bacon advises how scientifc investigation should be conducted. 4. Pound 1974, 89. 5. Bob Perelman notes that the anecdote of the fsh “looks initially like a commitment to empiricism [but it] has led instead to an authoritarian idealism” (1994, 53). 6. Robert Scholes pointed out that Lane Cooper’s Louis Agassiz as a Teacher (1917) was the likely source for Pound’s fsh story. He also suggested that Pound’s insistence that poetry should be studied by means of scientifc comparison had its origin in a statement by Cooper: “We study a poem, the work of man’s art, in the same way that Agassiz made Shaler study a fsh, the work of God’s art; the object in either case is to discover the relation between form or structure and function or essential effect” (Cooper 1945, 3–4). Scholes also contends that the student, rather than seeing objectively, “is learning how to produce a specifc kind of discourse, controlled by a particular scientifc paradigm” (1984, 654). 7. Kathryn V. Lindberg’s summary judgment of ABC of Reading underscores the instability of Pound’s “objective” and “scientifc” approach to literary evaluation. “Pound’s ‘reading’ hardly puts an end to reading or provides us with a program to govern our readings. The pluralism— the very grammatical pluralness—of his hierarchies and methods generates more questions than it answers, more transformations than it can name or tame” (1987, 60). Given this unstable methodology, ultimate authority for judgement lies not in the method but in the proprietor of the method—Ezra Pound. Alan Durant takes a similar view when he describes Pound’s mode of assessment as presuming “a natural world of extraordinarily simple self-evidence, where we need only look to know” (1981, 84). 8. “This was the pivotal insight of the Scientifc Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends upon current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries” (Schulz 2010, 32). That error is not only inevitable in, but necessary to, the process of scientifc discovery is also intimated by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics: “Even though our very successful theory of electrons and light can be deduced from the modern standard model of elementary particles, which may (we hope) in turn eventually be deduced from a deeper theory, however far we go we will never come to a foundation based on pure reason. Like me, most physicists today are resigned to the fact that we will always have to wonder why our deepest theories are not something different” (Weinberg 2015, 247). 134 B. AHEARN

9. Both sentiments are also recorded in The Cantos. Griffth’s remark appears in Canto 19; Mussolini’s question is partly recalled in Canto 89. Another comment by Mussolini to Pound, memorialized at the beginning of Canto 41, serves as proof that “the Boss” was “catching the point before the aesthetes had got there.” 10. Elsewhere, Pound associates his intuition with mathematical truth. “I passed my last exam in mathematics on sheer intuition. I saw where the line had to go, as clearly as I ever saw an image, or felt caelestem intus vigorem” (1974, 91). 11. “[The] true science, true thinking is ideogrammic in the sense that the general is composed of defnite particulars known directly by the thinker” (1996, 158). 12. Pound’s mysterious visionary power led Joseph Kronick to comment, “What proves so unsettling in Pound is his insistence that a relative handful of isolated facts reveals a pattern in history that normally remains obscure to anyone but the artist” and “What makes him so disturbing is his apparent insistence on his privileged position as interpreter” (1984, 172 and 179). Kronick’s unease may be contrasted with Hugh Kenner’s earlier admiration for Pound’s acute perception: “The Cantos are at one level a notebook of insights. Over and over again during forty years and more, events have arranged themselves in an intelligible posture before the eyes of this indefatigable spectator; his habit of tagging these epiphanies with their addresses and dates testifes anew to his respect for the ‘given’” (1985, 206–207). Pound himself assumed that the true artist possessed a rare talent for detecting what Michael Golston describes as “The rhythms of music [that] carry the blood beat of the folk, whose bodies are intimately bound to and informed by the land and its climate… (2008, 121). As Golston also points out, Pound believed that “poetic rhythms therefore register not only emotion and instinct, but the economic factors motivating and mobilizing them” (133). Pound’s whole body, registering rhythms in the present and rhythms persisting from the past, provides the basis for his authority. 13. Augustine addressed the question of whether Christian women who committed suicide rather than have their chastity violated were saved or damned. He cautiously suggested that they might not necessarily be con- signed to Hell. “It may be that they acted on divine instruction and not through a human mistake—not in error, but obedience. This is what we are bound to believe in Samson’s case” (1984, 37). Augustine also found that war was not invariably an example of human error, since “God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind” (6). My association of error with Christian theology departs from the general scholarly tendency to inspect error through the lens of 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 135

post-Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics. For example, Tim Conley, in his Joyce’s Mistakes (2003), navigates the ocean of error by referring to such landmarks as Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, George Steiner, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 14. “The Tree” is one of the poems in the hand-bound book Pound made for Hilda Doolittle, Hilda’s Book. Michael King dates the poems as having been composed in 1905–1907 (Doolittle 1979, 68). 15. “Nathless” also appears in poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“The Romance of the Swan’s Nest), D. G. Rossetti (“Sestina: Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni”) and Wilde (“Vita Nuova”). American poetry also found a use for it; see Sidney Lanier’s “The Bee.” 16. Ford explained that the Poetic Vernacular “has nothing to do with any living, practicable or spoken speech.” It was a specialized vocabulary for poetry. “You might, I mean, write of dishes succulent but not of sauce- pans; of waxen candles, not of gas-mantles; of silken petticoats, not of unmentionables” (1921, 144). 17. Pound’s extreme distaste for Old Testament monotheism is refected in his remark that, “The Jewish conception of a maniacal sadist ruling all things is NOT a necessary component of thought” (1996, 142). 18. In the San Trovaso Notebook (1908), Pound called “The Tree” “an attempt to express a sensation or perception which revealed to me the inner matter of the Daphne story” (1976, 322). Suffce it to say that the “inner matter” remains unstated in the poem. To attain it, one frst must have the “sensation or perception.” 19. The innate ability of the individual to attain glimpses of spiritual truth is a staple of Neo-platonism. “For Plotinus, man’s true self is already saved in a traditional Christian sense. After all, man already exists on a spiritual level, he only needs to become aware of this. However, in order to do so he is not dependent upon an act of God: he himself is solely responsible for his own well-being and for attaining insight into a higher reality” (Liebregts 2011, 57). 20. Edwards displayed the same liking for the woods as an adult. “Once, as I rid out into the Woods for my Health, Anno 1737; and having lit from my Horse in a retired Place, as my Manner commonly has been, to walk for divine Contemplation and Prayer; I had a View; that for me was extraordinary, of the Glory of the SON OF GOD; as mediator between GOD and Man; and his wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet Grace and Love, and meek and gentle Condescention” (2013, 692–693). 21. Teresa Winterhalter observes that “Pound’s use of language is meant to transcend its historical base. In order to make these cantos hold together, we must place Pound as the creator of new meaning, an original actor of historical drama, rather than as a replicator of the past” (1992, 118). 136 B. AHEARN

While this is valid to a great degree, my argument in this section of the chapter is that Pound leaves traces in his poetry of the diffculties he encounters when molding history, diffculties that underscore the fact that the poet as “original actor” is free to err. 22. Pound’s earliest extant manuscript version of this passage from the Odyssey is part of a holograph draft of 73 pages. He relegates the passage to the end of the draft, pages 61–73. Beinecke Library, Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, box 70, folder 3103. 23. The Strand Magazine for May 1902 featured an article about “Sailing on Land.” The author asked, “Who would not be surprised, or even awed, by the remarkable spectacle of a trim craft, such as ordinarily belongs to the sea, skimming over this barren place [the Mojave Desert] where not a drop of water ever falls?” In the frst chapter of Zona Gale’s novel, Romance Island (1906), the protagonist “glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass.” 24. Dual occurrences and error are a feature of the beginning of The Cantos. We have to re-read the beginning of Canto I to see the more correct meaning for “craft.” Pound repeats the textual error about “A second time.” Dionysus had two births because of an error; Semele mistakenly required Zeus to appear in his true form. 25. Furthermore, it anticipates Pound’s own unhappy comments, late in life, about The Cantos. 26. Kathryne V. Lindberg briefy touches on the pedigree for this aspect of Pound. “In passing on to The Natural Philosophy of Love we might note that both the notions of sensuous wisdom and the endeavor to make philosophy sensuous—or more appropriately, sensual—brings Pound, by way of Gourmont, into relation with Nietzsche… ” (137). One might add that Byron is another poet who considered the senses and the body as a form of wisdom, but Pound did not think highly of Byron. In ABC of Reading he challenges the student to “Try to fnd a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects” (79). Pound’s advice to Hugh Kenner, “You have an obligation to visit the great men of your own time” (Kenner 1982, 16), implies that vital aspects of greatness are only accessible during physical confrontation. 27. Pound prefers to see the abstract embodied. As Daniel Albright has remarked, “Pound’s imagination seems to have been caught by electro- magnetic forces insofar as they manifested themselves palpably, metaphorically, as ‘the rose in the steel dust’” (1997, 201). 28. Max Nänny argues that The Cantos is “deeply indebted to the oral poetry of the past” (1977, 16), and he cites Pound’s remark that “The culture of an age is what you can pick up and/or get in touch with, by talk with the most intelligent men of the period” (K, 217). Pound’s aim in The 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 137

Cantos, Nänny contends, is “an attempt at assuring ear-witness, frst-hand authenticity of statement” (1979, 382). Nänny does not, however, discuss the gap that opens when Pound shifts from (a) recording what he himself has heard, to (b) inserting documents, especially ones that predate living memory. 29. Max Nänny offers one explanation for why we should discount small differences in recorded conversation. “Against such, traditionally highly valued, left hemisphere arts of verbalization as rhetoric and logic Pound put a right brain ‘trust in things more than the word,’ a trust which is more typical of some Eastern (e.g. Zen) cultures. To him it was, hence, ‘nonsense to consider words as the only “essentials” of thought’ and he regarded ‘verbal manifestations’ to be of ‘very limited use,’ taking the right brain stance that in a complex world ‘any intelligent man has understood a great deal more than he has ever read or written or ever pushed into verbal manifestation in his own mind’” (1988, 100–101). Yet one could point to a wide variety of places in Pound’s work, whether poetry or prose, where he clearly values the specifc sounds emitted by various individuals. 30. Pound’s faith in the body leads him at one point to suggest that sexual differences have an effect on poetry. “I think the Sapphic rhythm is biological and organic, I think it is due to the structure of the female body and for that reason the male fnds it very diffcult to use” (1996, 94). 31. Johanna Winant characterizes the development of the frst three cantos in terms of “fables that show how an explanation is developed” (2015, 178). She also contends “Each successive canto takes fewer lines to tell the story of forming an explanation than the previous canto took, but also, for each character, the gap between desiring an explanation and explaining the events or phenomena is briefer than it was for the previous character” (185). To put it in other terms, what happens in each canto is a progressive narrowing of narrative. We move from a world where oral- ity dominates social institutions to a world where writing binds people together. Pound implies that the free range of discourse has diminished. Socrates pointed to the same problem in the Phaedrus. The poet/hero speaking enjoys a more comprehensive range than the poet/hero hob- bled by inscription. 32. Thomas Carlyle reported, “My wife has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.” 33. One can, of course, treat Pound’s relation to Sordello as strictly textual. For example, Michaele Giesenkirchen takes this approach when she observes, “Dante and Shelley are to Browning’s Sordello what Sordello is to the Purgatory and eventually Browning to the Cantos, a ghost 138 B. AHEARN

conjured up feetingly, but whose work offers itself throughout for use and revision to the poet” (2001, 629). Such a reading of Pound’s relation to past poets and their productions—while certainly valid—discounts his investment in materiality. 34. Even documents that are forgeries can be valid, according to Pound, so long as they are consistent with his perceptions and conclusions. Speaking over the radio on 20 April 1943, he remarked, “If or when one mentions the Protocols alleged to be of the Elders of Zion, one is frequently met with the reply: Oh, but they are a forgery. Certainly they are a forgery, and that is one proof we have of their authenticity.” He went on to defend their authenticity by alleging that “the program contained in them has so crushingly gone into effect to a point, or down to a squalor” (1978, 283). 35. A completely opposite conclusion is drawn by Marianne Korn: “The poem successfully asserts the ability of the poet to achieve full understanding of the past through its physical remains in the present” (1981, 572). My position is more closely aligned with that of Adena Rosmarin, who contends that “the central and inevitable paradox of all acts of historical imagination [is that] they free us from the present even as they heighten our awareness of its ineluctable presentness” (1982, 11). 36. Beinecke Library, Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, box 72, folder 3247. The manuscript entry echoes Pound’s statement in “Religio” (1918): “A god is an eternal state of mind” (SP, 47). 37. The remarkable compaction of transitions becomes even more striking if we compare Pound’s “The Coming of War: Actaeon” with Lionel Johnson’s “The Coming of War” (1889), one of the poems that Pound included in his edition of Johnson’s poems that he edited in 1915, the same year he wrote “The Coming of War: Actaeon.” Johnson’s poem contains none of the shifting attributes that Pound employs, as its initial lines demonstrate.

Gather the people, for the battle breaks: From camping grounds above the valley. Gather the men-at-arms, and bid them rally: Because the morn, the battle, wakes. High throned above the mountains and the main, Triumphs the sun: far down, the pasture plain To trampling armour shakes. (Johnson 1915, 56–57)

38. Christine Froula judges that “mistakes were matters of relative importance to Pound, to be weighed against other considerations” (1984, 142). 3 EZRA POUND AND ERROR 139

39. Pound’s source, the letter from Jefferson to Adams, cites the passage as beginning “A tiels leis.” Both the Farrar, Rinehart edition of Eleven New Cantos (1934) and the Faber edition of A Draft of Cantos XXXI–XLI (1935) read “tiels.” Later editions of The Cantos, however, read “tiel.” 40. Jefferson refers to Sir Henry Finch (c. 1558–1625), author of a study of the English common law, Law: Or, A Discourse Thereof (1627). Jefferson owned a copy of the 1759 London edition. 41. Alec Marsh explains that Pound had arrived at this estimate of John Quincy Adams well before composing the Adams Cantos. “For [John Quincy] Adams slavery, not money, was the most crucial issue in American politics because it was literally the most damning. Unless we could abolish slavery, we could not exist in God’s favor. JQA, in any reading, is a Calvinistic moralist, a man of great integrity and great ability, but not—Pound believed—the man of action America needed” (2005, 61). 42. In a 1936 article in the New English Weekly, Pound made it clear he recognized a distinction between malignant error and error that arose from ignorance. “To the lies and distortions of the enemies of mankind we can oppose contempt, but to the honest errors of our friends we must offer something better” (EPPP, 7: 113). 43. Mary Paterson Cheadle points out how early Pound emphasized this aspect of Confucianism. “In ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938), written after his frst intense study of the Confucian classics in the summer of 1937, Pound listed four characters that, although usually translated as ‘sincerity,’ he believed pertained more specifcally to precise verbal defnitions” (1997, 64). 44. “Though he would have agreed that the rectifcation of names was most important as it pertained to men and women in their social relations, customs, and functions, Pound understood it in this latter, fuller sense, of a direct relationship not only ethical, between social station and correct behavior, but also logical, between word and thing” (Cheadle 1997, 67). 45. A slightly different version of the passage appears in Walden in the chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” There, however, Thoreau deems the messenger “worthy” because he gives an account of his master that focuses on eternal aspects of human nature rather than the ephemeral news of the day. “What news! how much more important to know that which was never old! ‘Kieou-pe-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung- tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the 140 B. AHEARN

philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!’” (1985, 398). 46. Cheadle also notes the diffculty of applying precision to Confucius. “Coming to a practicable, ‘precise understanding’ of the Pivot, however, is a diffcult task. Even the passages pertaining to government, which might be expected to contain some practical specifcs, are general rather than particular” (1997, 86). 47. Feng Lan, however, fnds that Pound’s treatment of Confucius reveals a disturbingly elitist attitude toward language. “According to Pound’s theory of language, the only person who has both access to truth and the ability to articulate it is one who has succeeded in situating himself in the ‘process of heaven.’ That is this person must possess the virtue of verbal precision, namely cheng or ‘sincerity,’ because by attaining ‘absolute sincerity’ he becomes something approximating an all-knowing ‘numen,’ and thus can ‘effect changes’ by speaking out his discoveries (Con, 175–7)” (2005, 80). 48. Pound’s relation to serendipity has been discussed by Edgar M. Glenn. He tends, however, to enlarge the defnition of the term to such an extent that no longer has a useful specifcity. Furthermore, he sometimes uses “serendipity” where the more appropriate term would be “artistic choice,” as in the following passage: “And Pound’s ‘dark eyelids’ is a bit of serendipity that snaps his Aphrodite out of classical and Renaissance treatments of her and into the world of twentieth-century cosmetics and perhaps other fads, for example, the vamp” (1998, 19). Finally, “serendipity” as Glenn uses it also encompasses what the reader may conjecture about Pound’s poetry. 49. Baldy Bacon appears as an “offce boy” in what seems to be the earliest surviving manuscript for any portion of The Cantos (Beinecke Library, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS, box 70, folder 3103). CHAPTER 4

Robert Frost and “Something”

1 something What a place for romance where everything is as vague as a rainbow faded in mid-air. —Robert Frost, “Petra and Its Surroundings” (1891) (CPRF, 9) We want to know if there is a Something and our wanting to know is probably all there is. (NRF, 63)

In his ABC of Reading, Pound laments the Western tendency to think abstractly. “In Europe, if you ask a man to defne anything, his defnition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction” (ABC, 19). Pound offers the example of what would happen if he challenged someone to defne the color red. The puzzled man on the street would likely say it is a color. If pressed further, he would defne color as a “vibration or refraction of light.” Finally, says Pound, he would somewhat helplessly assert that a vibration is “a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a mode of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.” Pound characterizes this straying from the path of precision as utterly graceless. The intellects of Occidentals evaporate into abstract terminology.1

As Pound implies by his use of the phrase, “something of that sort,” the Western habit of defning by means of greater and greater generalization ends in the cul-de-sac of “something.” Pound was not the only poet who noticed this progression to terminal vagueness. Six years before ABC of Reading, Robert Frost had dram- atized the habit in “West-Running Brook” (WB, 35–38). The poem takes the form of a dialogue between a husband, Fred, and his wife, who remains unnamed. (A third voice sets the scene and offers some spare commentary.) They are standing or strolling near a rural brook. Fred’s wife notices a wave in the brook, created by the stream fowing against a rock. She declares that the wave shows that the brook is “waving to us with a wave / To let us know it hears me.” Like many an observer in Frost’s poetry, she anthropomorphizes nature. Furthermore, she fnds the wave conscious of the present moment, aware of them, and longing to communicate. Fred will have none of this. He sees the wave as a signifer pointing backward to “the source.” While his wife tends to remain grounded in immediate time and space, his musing on the signifcance of the wave takes his thought to remoter regions, to the time when “rivers … Were made in heaven.” Not content with that extravagance alone, Fred makes grand claims about the nature of nature. He describes the motion of the universe as a series of linked exchanges.

Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun.

Fred confdently names each element in the system of exchanges until he reaches the limit of his ability to articulate: “And there is something sending up the sun.” Fred, like Pound’s harassed “European” attempting to defne the color red, fnds himself at a loss for words. His dis- quisition fades away into “something” or, as Pound puts it, “something of that sort.” Both Pound and Frost, then, are intrigued by abstraction that ends in being inarticulate. But would Frost necessarily concur with Pound’s condemnation of it? Fred’s wife, who patiently listens to his lengthy explanation of how the universe works, does not disagree with him, even though the poem has made it quite clear that her approach to reality differs from his. After his peroration she merely adds, “Today will be the day / You said so.” She acknowledges his point of view without 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 143 necessarily condoning it or condemning it. (The poem’s third voice is silent. It could have praised or ridiculed Fred, had Frost so desired.) Pound complains about the drift toward abstraction; Frost simply displays it. Like Fred’s wife, he seems content to let Fred be Fred. In other poems and essays, however, Frost had a good deal more to say about the inarticulate—the apparently desperate resort to “something.” We might look, for example, at passages in one of his major essays, “Education by Poetry” (CPRF, 102–111). Here Frost samples several “mixed metaphors” drawn from “the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics” (105). He particularly notes one statement drawn from a source he does not identify: “In the neighborhood of matter space is something like curved” (105). Frost then savors the phrase “something like” with malicious glee. “Isn’t that a good one! It seems to me that that is simply and utterly charming—to say that space is something like curved in the neighborhood of matter. ‘Something like’” (105–106). In this case, the maker of the metaphor treated “something” as a universal adhesive that would easily bind together the two ill-consorting halves (space plus curvature) of the metaphor. Frost implies that an analogy, simile, or metaphor that relies on so vague a word as “something” amounts to a fasco. Frost’s amusement at the metaphor is the response of a master craftsman when presented with the work of a hapless apprentice.2 By this point in his career, however, Frost had published a number of poems—some of them his best-known ones—in which the word “something” fgures prominently. Why should this be so?

2 A Somewhat Phenomenological Approach to “Something” “Something” turns up fairly often in Frost’s poetry because it exemplifes a recurring insistence in his work, an insistence on the value of the indef- inite. As we trace the appearance, deformation, and reformation of the indefnite in his poems, we begin to see a little better how Frost is situated as a literary modernist. He clearly shares with his contemporaries a fascination with the objects and structure of immediate experience, whether those objects and structures be tangible phenomena or mental ones. Thus, in Joyce’s Ulysses, we know in elaborate detail what Leopold Bloom eats, wears, carries in his pockets, and so forth. We also track 144 B. AHEARN the fuctuations of his thought. Literary modernism’s attention to the constituents of the mundane has its counterpart in the way such philosophers as Bergson, William James, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty were intrigued by how we express and describe objects that impinge on our consciousness. I hope to show in this chapter that a broadly phenomenological approach to Frost’s poetry illuminates some of his basic concerns and methods. Other approaches, such as ones that emphasize themes, cultural issues, and so forth, are of course pertinent. Phenomenology, however, grapples with the relation of consciousness to everyday experience; it has a special relevance to Frost precisely because his poetry so often focuses on that relation. It is useful at this point to examine two philosophers who are sometimes linked with Frost and who were notable in the development of phenomenology: Henri Bergson and William James. When Frost’s critics discuss philosophical infuences on his work, they sometimes cite Fred’s remarks about the “something sending up the sun” as Frost’s reference to Bergson’s élan vital.3 Yet we need not read Fred’s comments as Frost’s wholehearted acceptance of Bergson. Fred’s views about “something” may indeed indicate he is a convert to Bergsonism but the form of his exposition is mechanical. He produces a standard formula—“runs down in sending up”—which repeats itself with slight variation. The variables are the interchangeable nouns that fank the formula. Their placement is also predictable; the noun at the end of the line becomes the frst word in the next line. The clanking we hear when Fred endorses élan vital contradicts its spirit. If Frost believes in élan vital, he has chosen a poor spokesman to proclaim its validity. Nevertheless, Frost would have recognized in élan vital a conception that successfully evaded scientifc analysis. Élan vital could not be measured by scientifc instruments and was not subject to mathematical treatment.4 The hypothesis worked as Bergson intended it should, as a response to mechanistic models of the universe. Élan vital appealed to Frost as an affrmation of how vagueness, of imprecision, could evade the rigid confnes of calculation. But Bergson also considered another concept that seldom appears in discussions of Frost: the function of habit. Bergson emphasized its pre- dominance. “Yet our whole life is passed among a limited number of objects which pass more of less often before our eyes: each of them, as it is perceived, provokes on our part movements, at least nascent, whereby we 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 145 adapt ourselves to it. These movements, as they recur, contrive a mechanism for themselves, grow into a habit, and determine in us attitudes which automatically follow our perception of things. This, as we have said, is the main offce of our nervous system” (Bergson 1911, 96). We usually take habits for granted. We do not concentrate on skills which, although they are often complex, are no longer attended to once they are learned. They recede from our intellectual focus. It is frequently the case, however, that Frost brings them to our attention. Habits are the seldom inspected background, which, when foregrounded, become Frost’s springboards for detailed articulation. In Frost’s early volumes, we see how a habitual physical act (mending wall, turning hay, and picking apples) is held up for inspection by the poem’s narrator, leading to unusual insights about the act itself. It is also important to note that Frost extends the defnition of habit to mental habits, ones that are often signaled by clichés. In Psychology: Briefer Course (1892), William James devotes an entire chapter to habit. Frost would have studied this chapter. “During his sophomore year [at Harvard], Frost strengthened his dualistic philosophy of mind or spirit and matter, and his insights into both religion and science, through reading James’s textbook, Psychology: The Briefer Course, a text that he used in teaching at Plymouth in 1912” (Stanlis 2007, 34). As James sees it, habit allows us to deal with the external world economically. Habit “simplifes our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue” (James 1992, 140). Thanks to habit, we do not have to learn how to walk all over again each morning. James also identifes other important features of habit. It is fundamental to “such functions as the association of ideas, perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the will, etc. etc.” (137). So pervasive are the effects of habit, James argues that we see its infuence in areas where we do not consciously recognize habit at work. He contends that habitual behavior is essential to the maintenance of social order. “It alone is what keeps us with the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor…. It keeps different social strata from mixing” (145). Custom, tradition, morals: these are all habit write large. James’s comments on how habit keeps each member of a class in his or her place anticipate some encounters in North of Boston. In “The Death of the Hired Man” we recognize how Silas’s career has bound him to farm labor, while Harold Wilson, for whom haying is only temporary employment, and who is relatively young, has already become 146 B. AHEARN used to the habits acquired in college. This minor dissonance of class distinction in “The Death of the Hired Man” is amplifed in “A Hundred Collars” (NB, 31–42). “The Doctor,” a “great man,” fnds upon returning to the small town where he was raised that “he sees old friends he somehow can’t get near.” The Doctor’s mild discomfort at this social gap becomes exacerbated when he meets Lafe, whom the Doctor sees initially as “a brute.” More important for our purposes, however, than the infuence of habit on the social order, are James’s observations about habit’s benefcial effects on consciousness. “The more of the detail of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (1992, 146). Despite James’s positive description of the function of habit, Frost recognized that in many cases habit was not a liberating activity but an imprisoning one. Habit can become a substitute for thought. Or rather, mental habits can replace freer intellectual adventure. How do we, then, evade the numbing effects of habit? In part through an examination of our own stream of thought with the aid of aesthetic forms. Press habit into an aesthetic mold and it suddenly becomes more visible and more available to questioning. In Frost’s poetry the question mark is frequent, as are words such as “where,” “when,” “who,” “why,” and the like. What sets Frost apart from his contemporaries is the degree to which the questions he poses are about the gray, the inarticulate, the taken for granted, the “something” that is commonly imprecise. Habitual action, whether physical or intellectual, intrigues Frost as a realm of behavior that, because it is commonly indistinct, commonly not in the forefront of consciousness, becomes a fertile ground for poetry. As he wrote to Louis Untermeyer in 1916, poetry begins in “a tantalizing vagueness. It is never a thought to begin with” (LRF, 1: 410). Frost’s critics, even those who do not count themselves as strict phe- nomenologists, have made good use of phenomenology. It has proven effective in showing how, for example, the fgure of home, the domus, is elaborated. Frank Lentricchia, for one, writes at length about the fgure of the house. It, along with the brook and the woods, is one of the crucial trinity of spaces that Lentricchia sees Frost returning to time and again in his mensuration of “the needs and desires of the self” (1975, 18). Lentricchia recognized that in Frost’s poetry the self’s encounter with the world begins tentatively. “The poet begins, Frost suggests, in his engagement with the linguistic medium, with a vague and 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 147

‘tantalizing’ sense of something—a sense of something, but never a grasp of it. That something—the poem’s object—is fully contextualized in the meandering course of composition” (132). My interest diverges from Lentricchia’s in that my focus remains fxed on the ways in which those “somethings” are nurtured and developed into something more legible. Lentricchia’s scrutiny, however, is more attentive to what the development of the poem informs us about Frost’s relation to the world, which Lentricchia sees as a psychological relation. For Lentricchia, the struggle to create that is recorded in the poems shows that Frost constructed “a world answering to the psychic needs of its shaper,” the result being poems that “the poet fnds therapeutic” (144). (To the extent that he fnds traces of Frost’s inner self in the poems, Lentricchia departs from orthodox phenomenology.) I am not so much interested in what the poems do or do not reveal about Frost’s anxieties and desires as I am in the ways in which he brings initial vagueness into sharper relief. In short, my focus is on an aesthetic process. Frost repeatedly focuses on seemingly unpromising phenomena. What happens when the poems take up snow, a barren feld, night, or something ephemeral glimpsed at a distance? Equally important is what happens when the poems deal with commonplace verbal material: cliché, doggerel, and well-worn poetic conventions. Frost deliberately handles material that has no intrinsic merit, material even less promising than that surrounding Stevens’s Man on the Dump. One of Frost’s favorite ploys is to articulate the indefnite. That strategy, however, requires a steady supply of the indefnite. When Frost wrote, “Nature is a chaos” (NRF, 46), he was not so much lamenting the blooming and buzzing confusion we are born into, but relishing the cornucopia of material always at the poet’s disposal. In other words, Frost lavishes attention on the indefnite (often designated by the word “something”) because it is a necessary raw material. He reserves his contempt not for it but for those who don’t know how to properly refne it. The focus of this chapter will be on the ways in which Frost handled the indefnite, the imprecise. To put it simply, what use did Frost make of indefnable “somethings”? Early in his career, when Frost was trying to make a name for himself, he was well aware that some of his contemporaries had found it useful to be identifed with such literary movements as Futurism, Imagism, or Vorticism. Frost, however, in casting about for his own trademark, came up with a novel phrase: the “sound of sense.” We need not inspect all of the accounts he offered in letters, interviews, and lectures, but one 148 B. AHEARN example he gave bears on the uses of the indefnite. As he explained in a letter to John T. Bartlett (4 July 1913), “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words” (LRF, 1: 122). Frost points out that normally we do not consciously attend to the “sound of sense.”5 He implies that if we want to bring the “sound of sense” into focus we must suppress the semantic content (“cut off the words”). What had been defnite in the conversation, the individual words, becomes blurred; what had been unconsciously attended to—the sound—comes to the fore. Thus a more sophisticated appreciation of language requires that what had been clearly defned must be rendered indistinct. Furthermore, Frost’s sense of himself as a poet with a unique style requires investment in the imprecise. As he boasts in the same letter, “I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense” (LRF, 1: 122). Frost’s account of how he plays traditional meters against the sound of sense stipulates an “infnite play of accents in the sound of sense.” In short, the sound of sense is an endless resource. Frost’s celebration in his letter to Bartlett of the indefnite as a rich vein has counterparts in many of his poems. We fnd in them personae who encounter the imprecise or the indefnite and, rather than fnding themselves at a loss for words, or falling back on a terminal “something,” are able to construe or invent articulate meaning. An early instance of this little drama of creation is “Mowing” (BW, 36) from A Boy’s Will.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of fowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 149

“Mowing” is the frst poem in Frost’s oeuvre where the speaker engages in labor. Yet the work of mowing becomes simply the necessary prerequisite for the work of meditation—meditation on the indefnite.6 The poem uses the word “something” twice. In both instances, “something” refers to the message whispered by the scythe as it sweeps through the grass. The very indefniteness of the sound moves the mower to speculate about various meanings. “Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, / Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—.” The sound of the scythe becomes a blank tablet upon which the fancy of the speaker can inscribe meaning. The speaker shows a predilection for the concrete, since the scythe’s whispering reminds the speaker of his surroundings. The scythe speaks of “the heat of the sun” and “lack of sound,” both instances of immediate sensory experience. The speaker knows that other kinds of messages might be derived from “something” (such as fantasies about “easy gold”) but he consciously rejects them. The third and fnal interpretation that the speaker draws from the scythe is the sententious observation that “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” A concentration on the vague whispering does not move this speaker to idle dreams, which could certainly be an option for someone engaged in repetitive work. For this speaker, the use of vagueness is to return us to defnable fact. But the poem hints that he could not have arrived at that conclusion without the imprecise whispering—the “something”—that was a byproduct of his labor. “Something” becomes a plen- tiful resource—like the “sound of sense” itself—that leads the mower to more deeply contemplate his acts.7 To some degree “Mowing” explores an attitude expressed in the frst poem of A Boy’s Will, “Into My Own” (BW, 11). Here the speaker wishes for a realm that transcends his immediate experience and that would allow him infnite, indefnite travel. The expression of that desire takes the form of a longing for what is imprecise.

One of my wishes is that those dark trees, So old and frm they scarcely show the breeze, Were not, as ‘twere, the merest mask of gloom, But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

In wishing that the “dark trees” he observes could stretch “away unto the edge of doom,” the speaker evinces distaste for the immediate, the local and the specifc. Thus the poem presents him as sharply 150 B. AHEARN distinguished from the fgure in “Mowing,” who relished aspects of his immediate surroundings. This phrase also resembles the phrase Frost would ridicule in “Education by Poetry,” “something like curved,” in that it marries incompatible entities; it couples something concrete (an edge) with an abstraction (doom).8 We should keep in mind, however, that it would be characteristic of a “boy” that he could relish the imprecise as a solution to his present dissatisfactions. A further complication to this juvenile longing is that in seeking the apt phrase that will illustrate his desire for an indefnite space, the boy has chosen one with a quite defnite history. It occurs in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (which appears in Frost’s beloved anthology, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury): “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”9 So the phrase with which the boy expresses his desire for the imprecise has a precise origin. The boy’s inclination toward the indefnite has unwittingly led him back to the specifc. At the commencement of his frst volume of poems, Frost already indicates the attraction of the imprecise as an escape and the surprising reversion to its opposite. As Frost’s critics have pointed out, the speaker never acts on his impulse. His running away is purely imaginative. The imagery of the poem rein- forces the emphasis on the folly of seeking solace in the indefnite. The most vivid image of the poem (“where the slow wheel pours the sand”) evokes the boy’s familiar surroundings. Other poems in A Boy’s Will demonstrate the utility of the imprecise. It has, for example, a temporal dimension, one present but over- shadowed in “Into My Own.” That poem’s speaker projects himself not only spatially but temporally, since the journey is anticipated rather than underway. In contrast, the speaker in the second poem, “Ghost House” (BW, 12–13), summons fgures from the past. They are the ghosts of former denizens of the vanished house from “many a summer ago.” Furthermore, where the concerns of the speaker in “Into My Own” are mostly self-centered, the speaker in “Ghost House” turns to others— even if they are spectral. Thus Frost begins A Boy’s Will with two poems that indicate how concentration on the imprecise can produce quite varied results. Another way in which “Ghost House” acts as a coun- terweight to “Into My Own” is in its treatment of detail. As we have seen, “Into My Own” begins mostly with generalizations about “dark trees,” “mask of gloom,” and “edge of doom.” Only later does it turn its attention to particular details in present time and space. “Ghost House,” however, is thick with local detail: “cellar walls,” “wild raspberries,” 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 151

“grape-vines” and more. This speaker has much more to say about specifc features in the surrounding scene. Yet eventually his attention strays from those elements to a shadowy group of the silent dead. The fact that the speaker does not know “who these mute folk are” allows him to fll in their company with projections of his own desires, as he singles out two of them, who “close-keeping, are lass and lad.” As in poems yet to come, the speaker’s musing on vagueness (as indicated by their appearance under the muted light of a “small, dim, summer star”) allows him to fnd within that vagueness a refection of his own preoccupations. The two poems take different routes to the specifc but in both cases the path must at some point pass through the indefnite. Critics have noted that the title of A Boy’s Will hints at the immatu- rity of the speaker.10 If this were all the volume offered, it would make for monotonous reading. What the frst two poems show, however, is how Frost uses subtle variation to dramatize a personality’s tentative growth. The poems in A Boy’s Will display an introspective imagination that must frst measure its own dimensions, and test social connection, before it can venture into robust relations with others. As Frost urges in “Education by Poetry,” “Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please” (CPRF, 110). A Boy’s Will shows the emergence through introspection of the ‘person.’ Things that are imprecise become part of the canvas on which the speaker can try out representations of himself in exploring or constructing his emerging sense of selfhood. In effect, the frst poem in the collection, “Into My Own,” announces this as a central project of the volume, since the vague vastness into which the speaker projects himself would return him to his present location where unnamed acquaintances or family “would not fnd me changed from him they knew.” Even if we suspect he could be mistaken about remaining the same, nevertheless the poem anticipates that the return from this journey will occasion examination not of what he saw or felt, but of the constituents of his self. The uses of the imprecise and indefnite continued to intrigue Frost. Two poems in particular, “For Once, Then, Something” and “A Considerable Speck,” revisit the scene of a longing for “something.” In both, however, the speaker seems more mature than in A Boy’s Will; he more willingly expresses doubt and uncertainty. The attractions of the indefnite and abstract are again on exhibit in “For Once, Then, Something” (NH, 88). This time, however, a degree of coercion has been added. The speaker reacts to the “taunts” 152 B. AHEARN of “others” who fnd him too much attached to his own point of view. They urge him to shake off what appears to be arrant solipsism.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

He enjoys a close, detailed view of the immediate scene but “others” want him to extend his vision. The “others” are never named but they might be critics and reviewers who dismissed Frost as a regional poet because he so thoroughly draws on his rural New England experience for inspiration. Unlike Eliot and Pound—advocates of impersonality on the part of the poet—he seems incapable of ranging into the distant past or into alien cultures.11 If he could minimize his personal history, perhaps he could produce major poems. Willing to try and please the “others,” the speaker attempts to diminish his customary perspective.

Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

He substitutes the picture he usually sees with one that is faintly risible. The resulting image resembles the famous “Kilroy was here” doodle. At any rate, the attempt results in a glimpse of “something.” (The word occurs four times in the poem, if we include its appearance in the title.) His direct scrutiny of that “something” in an attempt to resolve it into a clearly defned entity, however, fails.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out.

These lines suggest that it may lie in the nature of some things to remain obscure.12 They could also imply that the desire for explicit 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 153 verbal defnition of the object cannot succeed in all cases, since “blotted” describes what sometimes happens in the course of writing. We can see much in the world around us but not everything. The poem hints that there are limits to the degree of clarifcation humanity can expect. Indeed, the weight of “rebuke” suggests nature deliberately conceals itself from too intense a scrutiny. We fnd an analogous observation in Frost’s comment, “I can see in the nature of things the certain baffement of reason” (NRF 53), a remark that also sheds light on the last stanza of “Reluctance,” where “reason” appears incompatible with both human emotions (“love”) and nature (“a season”). Frost recasts this scene of inspection in a later poem, “A Considerable Speck” (CPPP, 324). The elusive white object in “For Once, Then, Something” has now expanded to fll the feld of view. It is the blank sheet of paper on which the poet begins to inscribe. The word “something” is absent from the poem, but the object under examination, like the white gleam in “For Once, Them, Something,” also proves minute and hard to discern. The variable white glimmer at the bottom of the well seemed inanimate. Here, however, inanimate “truth” has been replaced by a tiny, self-propelled “speck” of life. The mysterious, microscopic object also differs in that it comes to his attention accidentally, rather than through the pointed criticism of “others.”

A speck that would have been beneath my sight On any but a paper sheet so white Set off across what I had written there.

Frost begins the poem by noting that his awareness of this minuscule being depended upon a uniform blankness, for it is “A speck that would have been beneath my sight / On any but a paper sheet so white.” The background blankness reveals the speck. As with the “sound of sense,” his view of the speck requires the suppression of competing detail. Just as the semantic content diverts our attention from the accompanying sound, here the presence of printed or penned words would conceal the speck. The speaker, contemplating the insect, discovers that it appears to manifest a variety of human attributes: “suspicion,” “loathing,” “terror,” “cunning” and “desperation.” 154 B. AHEARN

It paused as with suspicion of my pen, And then came racing wildly on again To where my manuscript was not yet dry; Then paused again and either drank or smelt— With loathing, for again it turned to fy.

As the writer wryly comments about the speck’s assessment of his lines on the page, “Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.” The tongue in cheek concluding quatrain of the poem, in which the poet fnds the diminutive intelligence within the speck comparable that of many scribbling authors, partly conceals what should be obvious: that the imputation of any of the human attributes the poem lists is a fanciful act. Who can say whether such designations as “cunning” and “terror” can be justly applied to any non-human life? Do such terms have any meaning outside of human affairs? Furthermore, the poem strongly implies that what we call intelligence, creativity, or wit, is rarely found in writing. The use of words may be a form of endeavor and invention that few actually master. Humanity seems to have been gifted with a sophisticated instrument that we can only fumble at. But this fact, if it is a fact, makes all the more valuable those texts in which language is mastered. The imprecision of language makes the exceptions precious. Adventures of exploration and discovery in what would seem to be unpropitious places (such as in the manuscripts of would-be poets) occur quite often Frost’s work. “A Considerable Speck” resembles a miniature version of “The Wood-Pile” (NB, 133–135). The settings for the poems—a winter landscape and a sheet of paper—make for a uniform imprecision. That sameness is interrupted by the intrusion of animate creatures, in the frst case an insect, in the second case a bird. Just as the observer in “A Considerable Speck” imputes awareness and human attitudes to the insect, so the woodland wanderer does the same with the bird in “The Wood-Pile.” At the beginning of the poem, the speaker fnds himself in a sort of limbo, where most of what he sees is barely defned.13

Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day, I paused and said, “I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.” The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went down. The view was all in lines 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 155

Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

Winter has bleached out contrasts of color, leaving the gray tone. The speaker also notes that the vegetation in the frozen swamp provides no landmarks. And the comment, “The view was all in lines,” may remind us what is true of all poems when frst seen. The view on the page is all in lines before we focus on the individual words and phrases that make each poem unique. The wanderer facing the leafess trees fnds himself in much the same position as a reader confronted with uniform lines on a page.14 A living, moving object emerges from this etiolated scene: “a small bird few before me.” One detail about the bird that catches the speaker’s attention is its difference in terms of color; it has a white feather in its tail. We have made a small but signifcant advance from gray. The speaker then invests the bird with even more specifc and distinctive characteristics—by personifcation. The speaker imputes motivation to the bird, who is “like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself.” The type of bird (genus, species, common name) remains unspecifed; instead we are summarily invited to treat it as if it were human. The speaker’s motivation becomes evident. In the absence of a surrounding defnition, the speaker has flled that space with human qualities. In the second half of the poem he discovers the woodpile, the only human artifact in the landscape. That is enough for the speaker to dismiss the bird, saying, “I forgot him and let his little fear / Carry him off the way I might have gone.” Although the speaker could not or would not name the bird, he immediately names the type of wood: “It was a cord of maple.” As he draws close to this human construction, his vocabulary acquires greater specifcity. His need to invest the landscape with human attributes moves the speaker to add the superfuous information that the cord was “four by four by eight.” (Once the speaker has identifed it as a cord, he need not specify those numbers. A cord of wood is four feet by four feet by eight feet. It is as if he were to say that it was a yard wide, and then add that it was thirty-six inches from side to side.) Wintry nature offers no such precise measure; only humanity does. The speaker seems inclined to defne humans as defners. The fnal gesture of the poem toward flling the landscape with explicit detail occurs 156 B. AHEARN when the speaker attributes certain personality traits to whoever cut and stacked the wood. For the speaker, the cord’s remoteness and its long neglect means that the stacker must be “Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks.” There could be any number of reasons why the woodpile has been forsaken, reasons having nothing to do with character but our speaker never introduces them. The fact that he ignores such obvious possibilities (incapacitation, migration to a warmer climate, death) invites us to pay closer attention to what he says about the woodcutter. The innocuous word “turning” echoes “turn” in the poem’s second line. There the speaker hesitated when faced with the relative blankness of the landscape, unsure whether to persist in confronting it. He felt a momentary impulse to “turn back from here” and thus escape vagueness. But instead of returning to the well-defned site of hearth and home, he decides to go on, to turn away from home. In short, the speaker at the beginning of the poem displays the longing for something other than the familiar, known, and accomplished that he identifes as the defning trait of the absent woodsman. Like the woodsman, he too seems to relish fresh tasks. The irony is that in venturing far from home he fnds a mirror to himself. It appears that abstracting oneself from the specifc and familiar dis- patches one to a zone where precision fades into imprecision. One might suppose that the winter wanderer of “The Wood-Pile” has fallen into error. Yet for Frost, error is not always an irretrievable lapse from the true path. What counts is what we make of the imprecise. Saturation in the imprecise need not leave us foundering. As soon as one crosses into that limbo, a countervailing current carries us back to the known. “The Wood-Pile” enacts this circuit. The exact direction of the circuit, however, is a bit more complex. Insofar as the beginning of “The Wood-Pile” may be taken as an allegory about composition, we should take note of Frost’s advice that a writer should “Set into the sentence anyway and show your resourcefulness in the way you get out. Just so of the poem” (NRF, 264). One could say that “The Wood-Pile” demonstrates just such a commitment to the unpromising, and dexterity in fxing on details that lead to a satisfactory denouement. Of course, if this were only the case, then the poem could end with the description of the woodpile. But the poem goes on to speculate about the nature of the woodchopper, and this alters the poem’s focus. Before the wanderer encounters the woodpile he muses on nature. After discovering it he dwells on human nature. So the woodpile is a pivot on which the poem turns. On either 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 157 side of the woodpile are the two realms that Frost often posited, the Outside (nature) and the Inside (humanity). As “The Wood-Pile” indicates, “turning” echoes often in Frost’s work. In one respect, “turning” refects the shifting attention of a consciousness. It represents searching for externals that can offer reassurance about one’s self and one’s activities. It can link the self to others, as we shall see when we take up “The Tuft of Flowers.” Turning can also be a literal or a fgurative return to the point where we started. “Turning” is frequently a turning back. This excursive circuit, so prominently a part of “Into My Own” and “The Wood-Pile,” appears in the poem immediately following “The Wood-Pile”—“Good Hours” (NB, 137). Once again we accompany a persona who has, apparently, nothing better to do than to take a stroll. Of course agricultural labor is at a low ebb in winter; habitual chores that kept one busy in the rest of the year have diminished. Hence the suggestion in both “The Wood-Pile” and “Good Hours” that the speaker has time on his hands. “Good Hours,” however, offers quite a different setting. Instead of trudging through a feature- less swamp, this persona paces through a village. Yet the poem’s frst two stanzas indicate that this individual has an oddly tenuous relation to the village, since he has only an exterior and momentary glimpse of social communion. He shares with the speaker of “The Wood-Pile” a desire for something apart from home. In this case, however, desire rapidly fades.

I had for my winter evening’s walk-- No one at all with whom to talk, But I had the cottages in a row Up to their shining eyes in snow. And I thought I had the folk within: I had the sound of a violin; I had a glimpse through curtain laces Of youthful forms and youthful faces. I had such company outward bound. I went till there were no cottages found. I turned and repented, but coming back I saw no window but that was black. Over the snow my creaking feet Disturbed the slumbering village street Like profanation, by your leave, At ten o’clock of a winter eve. 158 B. AHEARN

We do not know why the speaker bypasses an attractive interior. When he says, “I thought I had the folk within,” however, it suggests he believes he can enjoy the benefts both of social contact and excursive freedom. Yet even if he does, the enjoyment of social ties seems strangely dependent on immediate sights and sounds. To put it another way, he has not internalized the social net he describes. The poem may even imply that our need for contact with immediate human surroundings is so powerful that most of us cannot long sustain their absence. (There are a few hermits in Frost’s poetry, but very few.) Village life impinges on his senses, but when it disappears it leaves him bereft. His happy possession of both society and solitude abruptly collapses when he passes out of sight of the cottages. He marches to the edge of the village only to turn back. At the same moment the attraction of the exterior suddenly vanishes. Indeed, the speaker reports nothing about what he might fnd or hope to fnd. He simply proceeds “outward bound,” as if undertaking a lengthy sea voyage. (One can read “Good Hours” as a humorous variation on “The Wood-Pile,” in which the grave issues in that poem are modulated here in a lighter key.) What might lie outward remains obscure. His turn back to the village is simply stated. “I turned and repented.” “Repented” implies a transgression. Although he has not left the community physically, he has perhaps committed a venial sin in assuming that he can have both the good of freedom and the beneft of social bonds. Hence the weight of consciousness of sin suggested by “repented.” It seems there are consequences attendant on the sin of departing from the community. First, he has stayed outside the village so long that he is too late to recover social ties: “I saw no window but that was black.” Second, his location outside the community troubles its repose, since the sound of his feet on the snow “Disturbed the slumbering village street.” The poem implies the danger of yielding to the attractions of the imprecise, to go beyond the fane (hence “profanation”) of the ordered community. Once again, as in “The Wood-Pile,” the speaker needed to discover his need for the human world. The value of the imprecise is that it impels him to return whence he started—to the community. Whether he has learned anything from his excursion depends a good deal on how much stress one places on “profanation.” As we have seen, the drama of human venturing into the imprecise, into that “something” or what lies “outward,” is not simply a story of 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 159 getting lost. The apparently erroneous excursions Frost’s protagonists make often leave them “Only more sure of all I thought was true” (BW, 11). A crucial element in the drama is the reversal toward that which we can precisely know. The turns and returns Frost’s protagonists make bear examination. The search for and discerning of the specifc in an apparently amorphous zone sometimes takes the form of a rotational perspective. The observing consciousness typically takes a gradual, panoramic turn that reveals one new item after another. In this light, we can see that the notion of a “turn” in “The Wood-Pile” has two distinct meanings. First, there is the impulse to turn back to the already known, as when the speaker considers that he might “turn back from here,” a turn he rejects. Second, there is the sort of turn toward discovery symbolized by the absent woodsman who so readily turns to fresh tasks. This productive turn occurs in a poem from A Boy’s Will, “The Tuft of Flowers” (BW, 47–49). Here we fnd a solitary worker turning to a fresh task: turning the grass to dry. As the poem begins, however, he fnds himself feeling isolated rather than invigorated by his labor.

I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene. I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been, -- alone, ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’

The repetitive labor consequent upon coming after the initial cutting qualifes as the frst kind of turning; a rehearsal of what has gone before. The dull repetition might be enlivened or at least varied by the presence of another, but the speaker’s predecessor in the feld remains elusive. And the speaker quickly draws a generalization about human relations from his momentary plight. The appearance of a butterfy, however, diverts his attention from the task at hand. 160 B. AHEARN

But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfy, Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night Some resting fower of yesterday’s delight. And once I marked his fight go round and round, As where some fower lay withering on the ground. And then he few as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me. I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; But he turned frst, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of fowers beside a brook,

“Turning” then takes on its other meaning that of a tentative exploration outside the routine. The speaker imputes memory and intention to the butterfy. The fight of the butterfy may be random or purposeful (who can say?), but its motions are erratic and busy enough that the speaker can extract from them whatever signifcance he desires. Its variable path through the air becomes a “something” available for interpretation. Yet clearly the meaning discerned by the speaker results from his dissatisfaction with his situation. More important, his attention to the butterfy draws him out of his doleful belief that his lonely position symbolizes the ultimate solitude of everyone. The butterfy functions in much the same way that the whispering of the scythe does in “Mowing.” Both the whispering and the butterfy’s motions prompt the laborer’s imaginative groping. Furthermore, as in “The Wood-Pile,” the speaker makes unwar- ranted assumptions about the worker who occupied the scene before him.

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. I left my place to know them by their name, Finding them butterfy weed when I came. The mower in the dew had loved them thus, By leaving them to fourish, not for us, Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him, But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 161

In assuming that the reaper who cut the grass had left the fowers “out of sheer morning gladness,” the speaker fnds common emotional ground with him. This enables the speaker to recast human relations as fundamentally social rather than solitary. As in “The Wood-Pile,” the speaker never considers alternative explanations for the artifact left behind, such as the possibility that the reaper was momentarily inattentive and failed to notice the fowers he left standing, or that the reaper is occasionally indolent or incompetent. “The Tuft of Flowers” and “The Wood-Pile” are in part Frost’s variations on a theme. The theme is what happens when an individual looks for a human relation in an unpromising setting. There are several notable differences. One poem is a scene of labor and the other is a scene of idleness. One poem is set in summer, the other in winter. In “The Tuft of Flowers,” the message arises from what the reaper has not done. In “The Wood-Pile,” the message springs from what the woodsman has done. But both poems focus on what the speaker will evoke from imprecise materials to satisfy his longing for companionship. “Something” constitutes the indispensable vagueness from which consciousness summons meaningful form.

3 “Something” and Science I like a mystery that can’t be solved…. (NRF, 214)

Frost was clearly intrigued by how individuals encounter the indefnite, examine it, and arrive at a conclusion. None of the poems we have considered thus far, however, have speakers who come to the scene armed with an ideology or strategy for assessing “something.” In contrast to poems featuring innocent protagonists, Frost offers a few poems in which personae use scientifc models to test their experience. It would seem at frst glance that these protagonists would fare better than their more naïve counterparts. Nevertheless, when Frost considers humanity’s love affair with science and technology, he calls into question the advantages they appear to offer. Fred in “West-Running Brook” is a case in point. His mechanistic model of the cosmos leaves him stuck in the cul- de-sac of “something.” Perhaps a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It could be said that he ends up in worse shape than the boy in “Into My 162 B. AHEARN

Own” or the wanderer in “The Wood-Pile.” At least they, in their separate ways, achieve a more detailed vision than a mere “something.” Frost takes on science directly in his essay, “Education by Poetry.” He claims that numbers are the foundation of science.

Once on a time the Greeks were busy telling each other what the All was— or was like unto. All were three elements, air, earth, and water (we once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All was substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Number of what? Number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had science, and all that has followed in science. (CPRF, 104)

This observation then leads Frost to his scornful dismissal of the “something like curved” metaphor for Einsteinian space. Since science is based on numbers, then such an imprecision of statement about the cosmos is inadmissible. “Something” and numbers are incompatible. It has been well established by Frost scholars that he was keenly interested in science, and that early in his life he struggled with the consequences of Darwinism.15 Once Frost decided, however, that science followed from a metaphorical act, he no longer felt overwhelmed by its claims. For Frost, science no longer defned reality but was itself produced by a still higher power—the power of the mind to produce metaphors. As Robert Bernard Hass suggests, Frost may have been inspired by his reading of Bergson “to probe beneath the surface of intellectual conventions to recover the creative forces that impel nature forward in a process of continual becoming” (2002, 12). Indeed, such an approach suggests that the mind, ceaselessly renewing its suppositions about the nature of reality, corresponds to the constant becoming of nature. As Frost once observed, “All is observation of nature (human nature included) consciously or unconsciously made by our eyes and minds developed from the ground up. We notice traits of nature—that’s all we do” (NRF, 493). Implicit in this statement is the conviction that the act of noticing is both continuous and volatile. Noticing requires the fexibility to change our conceptions. Hass argues that Frost’s career demonstrates this readiness to change; he identifes fve separate stages in Frost’s attitude toward science (2002, 18). 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 163

Yet does Frost’s relishing of the imprecise, the “something,” bear on his thinking about science? When Frost writes that we notice “traits of nature,” does the imprecise count as one such trait? In “Education by Poetry” in the paragraph immediately following his amused citation of “something like,” Frost examines recent developments in physics. In this paragraph, Frost fnds that physics at the atomic scale has produced a metaphor that endorses free will.

Now, just so the scientist says of the particles of matter fying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what individual particles will come, but you can say in general that a certain number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that the individual particles can come freely. I asked Bohr about that particularly, and he said, “Yes, it is so. It can come when it wills and as it wills; and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable. But it is not so of the action of the mass. There you can predict.” He says, “That gives the individual atom its freedom, but the mass its necessity.” (CPRF, 105)

In October 1923, Niels Bohr gave four lectures at Amherst College. The Amherst Student reported on each one. The series was evidently popular. The fnal lecture, said the Student, “was well attended by faculty, students and townspeople, as considerable interest has been aroused through the disclosures made by Professor Bohr.” We do not know whether Frost attended any of the lectures. The Student does not mention the names of attendees. But on the same page that reports Bohr’s frst lecture, the Student also alerted its readers that “Robert Frost to Read from Poems Wednesday” (October 17). In the frst two lectures, according to the Student, Bohr outlined the history of theories about the structure of the atom. In the account of the third lecture, we fnd the frst mention of “quanta.” The concluding lecture, as reported by the Student, introduced the audience to contemporary theories. “The elaboration of the quantum theory was pointed out in great detail, showing the remarkable verifcation of this theory. Slides were used to discuss the particularly fne structure of hydrogen lines, the spectro-diagram of the Stark and Seeman [the reporter evidently misheard the name ‘Zeeman’] effects being the most important part of the lecture. Professor Bohr also gave an elementary exposition of the correspondence principle, which 164 B. AHEARN was followed by a discussion of the quantum theory to systems of several electrons.” None of the four newspaper reports mention what intrigued Frost, namely the evident impossibility of predicting simultaneously both the location and the number of atomic particles. Frost’s own account in “Education by Poetry” indicate that he brought it up in conversation with Bohr. Frost’s reduction of science to a numbers game invites comparison to Pound’s reduction of science to a strategy of making objective comparisons. In both cases, the poets are less interested in engaging with the manifold complexities of scientifc practice than reducing science to manageable size. Science can then be handled as needed.16 Pound wants it to appear that scientifc investigation provides a model for his critical tactics. Frost compels science to surrender to his insistence that all thinking is metaphorical. Frost sounds a cautionary note, though, when he remarks that mathematical thinking might not be completely metaphorical. Even here, however, he speculates that he could “bring it in” to the arena of metaphor. His slight doubt about mathematics is worth consideration, because in several poems numbers prove quite signifcant. It is as if Frost wants to test the effcacy of numbers. One of these poems, “I Will Sing You One-O” (NH, 73–75), fnds the speaker sleepless in bed on a night when a blizzard rages outside.

It was long I lay Awake that night Wishing the tower Would name the hour And tell me whether To call it day (Though not yet light) And give up sleep. The snow fell deep With the hiss of spray; Two winds would meet, One down one street, One down another, And fght in a smother Of dust and feather.

The storm’s disharmony and confict exemplifes that blurriness and vagueness we have met before in Frost’s poetry. The imprecise landscape 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 165 at the beginning of “The Wood-Pile” was static. Here, however, we have dynamic imprecision. Thanks to the enveloping storm, the speaker cannot tell whether it is night or day. He waits for the tower clocks to make that distinction. Already the poem shows the yearning for clarity and precision, a salvation that will come in the form of a number.

Then came one knock! A note unruffed Of earthly weather, Though strange and muffed. The tower said, “One!”

The poem might as well end here, having achieved a moment of unity and clarity but not so. Even as the clock strikes its reassuring note that sound comes across as “strange and muffed.” The storm cannot be so easily dismissed. The snowstorm’s characteristics uncannily refect a detail in Frost’s encounter with Bohr, which occurred in the same month the poem was frst published.17 Frost recalls that their conversation touched on experiments in a physicist’s laboratory in which there were “particles fying at a screen.” The microscopic bits of elementary matter bombarding the physicist’s screen have their counterpart in “the storm / That struck en masse / My window glass / Like a beaded fur.” It seems likely that Frost saw those lines in his poem as a version of what Bohr confrmed in their conversation. The lines stipulate the stark difference between the seemingly chaotic action of the earthly storm and the exact precision of the cosmos. The contrast between the radically imprecise storm and the immaculate perfection of the heavens, however, is not without its complications. There is an intermediary between the cosmic and the terrestrial. The poem fnds the cosmos mathematically linked to earthly timepieces. As the clocks in the towers strike the hour at one o’clock in the morning, the poem unites them with the universe.

In that grave One They spoke of the sun And moon and stars, Saturn and Mars And Jupiter. Still more unfettered 166 B. AHEARN

They left the named And spoke of the lettered, The sigmas and taus Of constellations.

As Frost well knew, “universe” means “one (thing) turning.” The universe turns; clocks turn their hands. While the lines about the storm blowing outside the sleeper’s bedroom suggest a world of seemingly chaotic action, these lines point to a perfectly regulated and predictable cosmos—one linked to mechanisms here on earth. The heavens and our clocks seem aligned. The poem’s desire for a grand vision of unity, as expressed in its title, is, however, subverted by a signifcant omission. “I Will Sing You One-O” never uses the world “universe.” As the poem develops, the vision of a reality governed by a network of fnely tuned connections fades away. The poem does not even use “cosmos,” although it comes close with the adjective “cosmic.” Fuzziness, imprecision, and unpredictability on a small scale but clockwork precision on a large scale: such is the bifurcated vision the poem presents in its frst half. That contrast of course refects the distinction in contemporary physics that Frost alludes to in his account of what Bohr told him; the laws of Newtonian physics still hold good for large objects, but on an atomic level we need a different set of rules. It seems humanity may have to drop the term “universe” and replace it with “bi-verse” or “di-verse.” Or perhaps we could save the day by reminding ourselves that however many “verses” we stipulate, at least they all are understandable in terms of numbers. Yet numbers have a way of proliferating beyond the tidy unity of “one.” Before we realize it, we have lost the comforting “one” for the divisive realm of “two.”

Two winds would meet, One down one street, One down another, And fght in a smother Of dust and feather.

It so happens that numbers are as ready to serve a vision of discord as they are to indicate harmonious order. The poem, having portrayed the outer cosmos in terms quite similar to those found in familiar metaphors of God as a watchmaker, then 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 167 proceeds to question that depiction of the universe. The second half of the poem strongly implies that a view of planetary and galactic motion as mechanically perfect is nothing more or less than a fantasy. As the poem nears its conclusion, it speculates that the “utmost star” fnds itself caught up in “whirling frenzies,” even though it is “set so far” that to human perception it appears to be “standing / In one self station.” In short, the brief shindy erupting when the two winds collide is the star’s permanent state of being. Having determined that the music of the spheres is cacophonic, the poem widens its scope to include human affairs. The speaker comments that the fuctuating star that seems such an enduring, unchanging beacon, has looked stable “Since man began / To drag down man / And nation nation.” By broadening the poem’s perspective, Frost implies that the minor skirmish of the two winds mimics on a small scale the nature of perpetual human confict, and both refect the “whirling frenzies” of the utmost star. And by turning to human affairs at the end, Frost also hints that the desire for perfect harmony points to the fractures and conficts evident in human nature and human history. So long as we experience and commit chaotic acts, so long shall we yearn for a perfection transcending those acts. Or, to put it more generally, although we live and die under the sway of the loose, the conficting and the imprecise, we do our best to deny it, suppress it, fend it off, or pretend it is precise. The title of “I Will Sing You One-O” holds out the promise of a uni- tary vision, a vision that the poem proceeds to strip away. The very concept of number as a way to comprehend the universe seems questionable. Is numerology at the service of unity or multiplicity? It seems it could be used to further either perspective—the one announced at the beginning of the poem, or the one that the poem turns to in its second half. Numbers, it seems, are not a safe and reliable haven from human perplexity but simply another human instrument susceptible to human alteration and human whim. But perhaps we would fare better with numbers on a more manageable scale. An earlier poem from New Hampshire, “The Census-Taker” (NH, 24–25), offers an alternative to the extravagance of “I Will Sing You One-O.” Here numbers function effectively; luckily for the census taker, he has only people to count, not constellations, comets, or particles in a cloud chamber. As the poem begins, the word “one” proves useful. 168 B. AHEARN

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women….

The problem facing the census taker, however, is that his census ends too quickly. The number one fails him because there is no one to count. The poem emphasizes the degree to which the territory he covers has become a wasteland. The census taker comes upon “The only dwelling in a waste cut over / A hundred square miles round it in the mountains.” This landscape proves even more unvarying than what we saw in “The Wood- Pile.” In the frst third of the poem the census taker fnds the landscape lacking even the minimal objects that might inspire refection or invention—except for the abandoned house. He falls back on inventorying its contents. Speakers in earlier Frost poems are adept at seeing visions of ghosts in desolate habitations but the census taker only hears them.

The people that had loudly passed the door Were people to the ear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men there.

The poem’s title shows that the speaker is compiling the raw data for statisticians. To an important degree, therefore, he is in the service of numbers. That is, after all, his occupation. To the extent that numbers preoccupy him, he is a cousin to the speaker in “I Will Sing You One- O.” Both speakers repeatedly use the word ‘one’ to indicate their allegiance to numbers and their faith in numbering as a way of assessing and understanding reality. The census taker uses the word “one” or “anyone” ten times. Since the census taker does not concern himself with the fate of numbers on a cosmic or microscopic scale, there is a chance that his local concern with numbers will not lead him to the somewhat calam- itous conclusion that human history consists of nation tearing down nation. We fnd, however, that the census taker has been troubled by another way of looking at the sterile territory he surveys. Although he sees no bones in or around the house, and certainly no men to count, 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 169 he remarks, “I armed myself against such bones as might be.” As soon as he admits his fear of the unseen, he hastens to add a qualifcation: “Not bones, but the ill-ftted window rattled.” The census taker defnes the sterility of the terrain, marked by countless tree stumps, as emptiness, or, as he fnally declares, a “desert.” But his momentary dread of the unseen suggests that this minimal landscape through its very emptiness disturbs his imagination. “The Census-Taker” and a few other Frost poems suggest there are degrees or areas of vagueness so sterile that they terrify. The imprecise, as we have seen, can be a zone or perspective that can return us to the familiar. But it also has the power to unset- tle and frighten. The census taker, we might say, has pushed beyond the communal space of the speaker in “Good Hours,” much to his discomfort. And numbers, such as “A hundred square miles” only intensify his unease. “The Census-Taker” reminds us that although the imprecise is a perpetually available and even necessary phenomenon, an excess of it can prove terrifying. The census taker, however, fnds a modicum of relief in utterance as he pronounces an epitaph for the district: “The place is desert and let whoso lurks / In silence, if in this he is aggrieved, / Break silence now or be forever silent.” The word “desert” returns as part of the title of “Desert Places” (FR, 48), in which the expanse of clear-cutting we saw in “The Census- Taker” has been replaced by the covering of snow that obliterates details in a feld.

Snow falling and night falling fast oh fast In a feld I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Snow, in a variety of forms, fascinates Frost. For one thing, it serves as an excellent natural equivalent for “something,” in that it is white—like the ambiguous glimmer in “For Once, Then, Something.” Snow also resembles a blank sheet of paper waiting for the poet to inscribe form upon it. The terror that can arise from the mind’s confrontation with blankness becomes the subject of “Desert Places.” One needn’t go in search of a white whale or a white crow to experience metaphysical vertigo; a local feld in winter will do just as well. This poem’s snow becomes an engulfng blankness. That blankness evokes the desiccation of poetic imagination, or, at the very least, 170 B. AHEARN writer’s block, in which the poet fears having “no expression, nothing to express.” Even the verbal challenge to emptiness that we saw in “The Census-Taker” may be impossible. Frost’s love for Wordsworth’s poetry did not blind him to the fact that the poets of his generation were uneasy about the gradual fading of Wordsworth’s zest and youthful inspiration, a dismal prospect that the waning powers of Tennyson and Browning seemed to confrm was the inevitable fate of older poets. The fear of imaginative death, however, dissipates as the poem proceeds. By the poem’s end this threat has itself become the raison d’être of “Desert Places.” Frost expresses brilliantly the fear of having nothing to express. Hence the note of sardonic triumph on which the poem closes, where he dismisses astronomer’s discoveries about the emptiness of an ever- expanding universe.18

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

In Frost’s lifetime the ability to measure the depths of the universe, and the consequent increase of empty space within the universe, increased exponentially. The book on astronomy that Frost names in his Paris Review interview as one that when he was young he “hovered over, hung around” (CPPP, 833), Richard A. Proctor’s Our Place Among Infnities, mentioned that the history of astronomy over the last few centuries was marked by “the increase of the estimated scale on which the sidereal system is built,--the increase in our estimate of the size and brightness of individual orbs, and the yet more surprising increase in our estimate of the distances which separate orb from orb” (Proctor 1876, 183–184). Proctor does not take up the question of whether the universe is expanding but he does emphasize that our estimates of the size of the universe have been growing. Yet he goes on to suggest that this awareness may have reached its limits. He takes up the diffculty of measuring the distances of the stars. “Even the mighty instruments of our own day, wielded with all the skill and acumen which a long experience has generated, have not suffced to enable us to measure the distances of more than about a dozen stars. Nor probably will it ever be possible for man to count by the hundred the number of stars whose distances 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 171 are known” (188). Vast as the universe was, there seemed to be no way to increase its vastness. But Proctor was a poor prophet. During Frost’s student years (1897–1899) at Harvard, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory was Edward Charles Pickering. Under his leader- ship, the Observatory made great strides in cataloging many thousands of stars. Yet determining the location of the stars in relation to the earth and to each other was hampered by the fact that it was impossible to calculate the distance of those that were more than fve hundred light years away (Lightman 2005, 114). One of the workers at the Observatory, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, made a discovery about variable stars that enabled that distance to be extended to hundreds of thousands of light years. Building on her work and that of others, in 1924 Edwin Hubble determined that nebulae, those faintly glowing cosmic features, were in fact separate galaxies, the nearest of which he calculated was 900,000 light-years from our galaxy (Lightman, 236). In 1929 Hubble published his most momentous discovery, that the galaxies were moving away from one another. (“Desert Places” was published fve years later.) Among other things, this meant that the amount of “empty spaces” in the universe was constantly increasing. The poem ends with paradoxical comfort.19 We can dismiss the fear aroused by the vast, inhuman emptiness of the universe. But we accomplish this by situating the wellspring of terror in ourselves. Terror has not been eliminated, merely displaced. Once again, however, this dubious triumph requires the presence of the imprecise, both as outward, physical manifestation (descending snow that obliterates detail) and as an interior emptiness. What those inward desert places are we do not know, since the poem does not name them. And of course the refusal to specify them allows the reader’s imagination to envision a variety of horrors. The two critics who have discussed Frost’s deliberations about science most extensively, Robert Faggen and Robert Bernard Hass, have, between them, commented on the poems we have considered thus far. But they pass over another one that also explores the power of science: “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road” (NH, 109).

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood Throws down in front of us is not to bar Our passage to our journey’s end for good, But just to ask us who we think we are 172 B. AHEARN

Insisting always on our own way so. She likes to halt us in our runner tracks, And makes us get down in a foot of snow Debating what to do without an axe. And yet she knows obstruction is in vain: We will not be put off the fnal goal We have it hidden in us to attain, Not though we have to seize earth by the pole And, tired of aimless circling in one place, Steer straight off after something into space.

The octave sketches a few people’s discomfture in the face of nature’s obstruction (the double reference to “she” hints that nature is mater- nal). The sestet expands the scene. It displays humanity’s tendency to charge ahead. “Progress” seems more important than direction. The poem thus anticipates remarks by Frost in the posthumously published version of “The Future of Man,” in which he locates an energetic progressive impulse in science. “The challenge of science to government takes the form of asking What will you do with our latest? Will you use it as a weapon or a tool or both? If you ignore it, we shall go elsewhere with it and try it on your rivals. If you suppress it we will do the same” (CPRF, 209). In the essay, Frost sketches a confict between (a) humanity’s exuberance in its increasing command of natural forces and (b) our sense of necessary constraint. “The great challenge, the eternal challenge, is that of man’s bursting energy and originality to his own governance. His speed and his traffc police” (208). The essay situates the confict within humanity itself but “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road” presents the confict as being between an ardent human race and a cautionary nature. Albeit nature’s representative is a “tempest,” this energetic and wild face of nature serves nature’s conservative tidiness, which seems concerned with keeping things more or less intact.20 Humanity’s insistence on disregarding natural conventions fnds a counterpart in the poem’s technique. Frost indicated on more than one occasion that he fussed over the relation between sentences and stanzas. As he told Richard Poirier, “I’m always interested, you know, when I have three or four stanzas, in the way I lay the sentences in them. I’d hate to have the sentences all lie the same in the stanzas” (CPPP, 890). “On at Tree Fallen Across the Road” demonstrates just this concern 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 173 with sentences and stanzas. The poem has four stanzas but only three sentences. The frst sentence exceeds the bounds of the frst stanza; it laps over into the second stanza. The second sentence, however, tamely terminates at the close of the second stanza. This is appropriate, since here we fnd the travelers obliged to stop at the behest of nature and its arrangements. The third sentence bounds through the third stanza and spends its energy in the remaining lines of the poem. (Frost emphasizes the formal bounds between stanzas by separating them with white space.) The extent of the frst and third sentences and their refusal to be stymied by stanzaic patterning must also be weighed against the fact that they live in a traditional sonnet. The meter and rhyme scheme are Shakespearean. Frost frequently proved he was capable of inventing unique rhyme schemes for his sonnets. Here, however, his use of the Shakespearean model renders all the more signifcant the unruliness of the frst and third sentences. The push of the sentences against stanzaic boundaries refects humanity’s impatience with the way things are. One noteworthy aspect of the frst stanza is the high percentage of plural pronouns. This is appropriate for a poem that focuses on the “progressive” direction of a self-conscious and self-important humanity. We begin with six pronouns in stanza one (“us,” “Our,” “our,” “us,” “we,” “we”), continue with three in stanza two (“our,” “us,” “us,”), and end with four in stanza three (“We,” “We,” “us,” “we”). In the closing couplet, however, there are none. Frost’s disposition of pronouns might at frst seem innocuous, but since the closing couplet forecasts the day when humanity’s technological prowess becomes so sophisticated that it can move the earth anywhere we choose, the disappearance of references to humanity in those last two lines may be ominous. After all, the couplet describes humanity wresting the earth out of its orbit. What then becomes of humankind? In exchange for “aimless circling,” we will choose to “steer straight off after something into space.” No doubt when that day comes, the effort will be touted as a brave and even noble quest. Yet the poem does not seem to regard it as glorious. It foresees the day when humanity will regard orbiting the sun as a tiring routine. The vagueness of “something” suggests that humanity will be eager to go just for the sake of going, rather than judiciously deliberate about the goal. The absence of plural pronouns in the closing couplet may intimate the fate of humanity when it abandons the sun: the earth will become a desolate ball of ice. (The “foot of snow” in stanza two intimates the chill of outer space.)21 174 B. AHEARN

The poem’s sub-title, “To hear us talk,” is of course ambiguous. It suggests both (a) a recognition of human pomposity and self-congratulation and (b) the desire of nature to encourage humanity in conversation. This second meaning looks back to “some of the best things we ever said,” the talks on winter nights in “The Star-Splitter.” In Frost’s world, talk can often be much more salutary than action. In “Mending Wall,” the narrator hopes to rouse his neighbor to a witty exchange on the nature of the something that disrupts the wall. When nature blocks our way with a fallen tree, she hopes that something benefcial—or at least not catastrophic—will result from our “debating.” Whether the expedition into space is suicidal or admirable (exemplifying what Frost elsewhere termed the “Promethean defance of the unknowable” [Cook 1974, 188]) the reader must decide. The road taken into interstellar space might be what saves us. But we should not be surprised at the ambiguity within the poem. Frost enjoyed playing with sharp contrasts, as we saw in “For Once, Then, Something,” in which the whiteness was either common quartz or elusive truth. As he told an audience at Breadloaf, “One of the dreams, of course, is that there is some sort of an element—hydrogen or something—that is the one thing we could all be, you know, that there is some oneness somewhere. Far as you get, there is none—the amoeba, you think of, and the amoeba while you’re looking at it needs a psychiatrist; it’s got something going on, another person, going on inside it. See. It’s barely containing itself. It’s doubleness right there” (Cook 1974, 134). After all, the “something” in “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road,” could turn out to be a worthy object. The poem may invite a caustic view of human ambition but it leaves open the possibility of a more positive estimation. With respect to science, as with other disciplines and phenomena in Frost’s art, “something” displays an unremitting doubleness.

4 “Something” and Others When Frost’s poems focus on individuals confronting blankness or numbing monotony, they also hint that this encounter has a social aspect, even if that aspect consists merely of the nebulous “they” of “Into My Own,” “Desert Places,” “For Once, Then, Something,” or the fancied “fay or elf” of “Mowing.” (Indeed, the multiple “whis- perings” of the scythe could be read not simply as the speaker’s various thoughts but his need for other voices—for companionship. This 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 175 possibility becomes explicit in “The Tuft of Flowers,” where the speaker immediately longs to see and speak to his coworker.) The speaker in the poems may accept or reject what these others demand or offer, but their presence continues to remind us that they have a part to play. Even the glimpse of “youthful forms and youthful faces” in “Good Hours” designates a social world that contrasts with the blankness and blackness surrounding it. “The Onset” (NH, 90), a poem that bears comparison with “Good Hours” and “Desert Places,” begins with a familiar Frostian scene.22 An anonymous someone fnds himself or herself alone in or near wintry woods. As in “Desert Places,” this someone confronts a perilous indefnition. The frst stanza shows the speaker as verging on annihilation when confronted by the frst snowfall of the season.

Always the same, when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, I almost stumble looking up and round, As one who overtaken by the end Gives up his errand, and lets death descend Upon him where he is, with nothing done To evil, no important triumph won, More than if life had never been begun.

The only “song” the falling snow produces is an unmodulated, sinister “hissing.” The scene itself is murky since the surroundings are “dark woods” at night. Unvarying sameness confronts the speaker’s ears and eyes; clarity and precision have been obliterated. The advent of winter seems determined to erase human awareness and achievement. The speaker’s surroundings bear in on him with dark intent.23 Rather than succumbing to annihilation, however, the speaker extri- cates himself from this predicament by recalling his human capabilities. Redemption arrives in the second stanza.

Yet all the precedent is on my side: I know that winter death has never tried The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep 176 B. AHEARN

As measured against maple, birch and oak, It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak; And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That fashes tail through last year’s withered brake And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake. Nothing will be left white but here a birch, And there a clump of houses with a church.

Salvation from a nihilistic nature requires several responses. First, the speaker summons memory to his aid. He can remember comparable moments in the past and the eventual disappearance of winter. Weighing the present against the past allows him to escape the apparently irresistible tide of dissolution. If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Second, the designation of past memories in terms of “precedent” allies the speaker with a legal locution, and thus with language rendered narrowly precise. Third, the speaker responds to the nebulous gloom surrounding him by invoking “measure” (echoing “measured” in “The Wood-Pile”) and transforming the “dark woods” into individual types of trees: “maple, birch, and oak.” Fourth, he dismisses the gloom and imagines a daylight scene that culminates with an image of community: “a clump of houses with a church.” In addition, the use of “clump” nods toward a reconciliation of the natural and the human, since the word often refers to a grouping of vegetation. Another poem in which an observer faces snowy woods, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (NH, 87), anticipates the scene of “Desert Places.” Both are composed of four quatrains, the rhyme scheme is similar (but not identical), and the actions depicted are comparable: a traveler pauses to comment on the falling snow. The two poems, however, differ markedly with respect to the observer’s relation to those not present. In “Desert Places,” the observer dismisses those (presumably astronomers) who underestimate his power to create his own terrifying emptiness. It seems no other individual or group can deepen or allevi- ate his interior nihilism. In “Stopping by Woods,” the observer begins and ends the poem by recalling his commitment to social contracts. In the frst lines of the poem he mentions a fact that seems to have nothing at all to do with his brief pause: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” The poem points out that some portions of nature are thoroughly embedded in human relations. Even these woods, distant from 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 177 the village, are subject to a legal fction regarding possession. Thus the frst line of the poem anticipates the concluding quatrain’s reminder that “I have promises to keep.” The prospect of an escape into nature may enchant but for this speaker the obligations entailed by being part of a human community prove stronger. Indeed, the allure of amorphousness and boundlessness becomes, as in “Into My Own,” that which necessarily precedes the return to present complexities. The frequency with which Frost depicts individuals who court or simply encounter the imprecise, the “something,” and the frequency with which that meeting results in a return to familiar, more specifc ground, becomes even more striking when we look for exceptions to that scenario. Perhaps the starkest of these exceptions is “Acquainted with the Night” (WB, 31). Here Frost sketches a persona who is unwilling or unable to perform the saving acts of remembrance and prediction, specifcation, and allegiance to community. The voice in this poem shares a number of similarities with other Frostian speakers. He (if it is a he) has been on excursions and returned: “I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.” In addition, as the remark about choosing to walk in the rain indicates, this speaker persistently seeks a world ruled by the indeterminate. He notes a “luminary clock.” In “I Will Sing You One-O” clocks tolled a specifc number but this one “proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” Furthermore, it could be that the “clock” is no clock at all; it might be the moon. Where other Frost poems provide a measure of relief from emptiness, threat, and terror, this one does not. It declines to provide some small or large measure of reassurance in the face of an imprecision that threatens to engulf. The speaker seems to be a homeless, landlocked Flying Dutchman. So far as we can tell, he perpetually prowls through the purlieus of the night. The poem ends where it began, with the repeated line, “I have been one acquainted with the night.” We are near Dante’s hell, where the souls of the damned are condemned to an eternity of repetition. And Frost points us toward Dante by using terza rima and separating the stanzas as isolated tri- plets. Yet if the bare form is Dantean, the content differs. This poem lacks the strong and persistent Dantean focus on detail. The Inferno provides a multitude of sharp distinctions, an offering deliberately with- held in this poem. We can say little about this persona other than that he wanders and avoids revealing himself. In this respect he also varies sharply from Dante’s damned, who often need little encouragement to tell their stories. This wanderer, however, when he encountered “the 178 B. AHEARN watchman on his beat / […] dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” The speaker might be a distant relation to Poe’s Man of the Crowd, an elusive and symbolic wraith. In Poe’s tale, at least his mysterious fgure seeks crowds; in Frost’s poem the speaker prefers deserted streets. In “Acquainted with the Night” he seems to represent the triumph of the imprecise. This persona, unlike so many other Frostian narrators, never gravitates to a place, person or object where he can allay imprecision. As he pursues his way, no saving defnition appears. He is “something” embodied. “Acquainted with the Night” is one of the few Frost poems located exclusively in a city. And this city has hardly any natural features. Those aspects of nature that are present—night and rain—are those which contribute to vagueness and imprecision. Darkness and rain hide or blur detail. In other poems, where Frost dramatizes the confict between imprecision and specifcation, he can call on nature not only to stand for imprecision (as in the falling snow in “The Onset”) but also to aid the happy acquisition of saving detail (as in the bird and the cord of maple in “The Wood-Pile”). But in Frost’s urban settings those elements of nature that could supply saving detail are absent. There is even a suggestion in another urban poem, “A Brook in the City” (NH, 98), that cities are fatally fawed, in that they inevitably suppress nature’s benefcial aspect. The beginning of the poem even hints that it is precisely those otherwise helpful human inventions, such as mathematics that overwhelm nature.

The farm house lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook? I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength And impulse, having dipped a fnger length And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed A fower to try its currents where they crossed.

These lines suggest that urban planning represents the triumph of number, at the expense of a happy, organic marriage of man and nature, as seen in the tender image of the original relationship between the house and the brook. Arithmetic and geometry are well and good so 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 179 long as they do not replace nature. Frost presents a schema in which sanity requires a balance between nature and human instruments. The speaker’s dipping his fnger into the brook illustrates such a balance. Without that balance, the relation becomes distorted. The delicate imposition of human forms in conjunction with nature leads to a healthy equilibrium. If either half of the components becomes too dominant, trouble follows. Frost describes such a problem in the poem’s second half.

The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone In fetid darkness still to live and run— And all for nothing it had ever done Except forget to go in fear perhaps. No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder If from its being kept forever under The thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.

The benefcial presence of the brook has been lost, since its relation to humanity has been reduced to lines on “ancient maps.” The poem suggests that natural indefnition, which serves in so many other instances to spark meditation (as a brook does in various Frost poems), has been erased because nature itself (symbolized by the brook) has been so well suppressed. The sleepless inhabitants of the city have rejected the natural indefnition that they need to spark exploration of their humanity. Thus far we have considered the drama of the self encountering, struggling with, making use of, or succumbing to the imprecise in poems where other people are absent, implied, or barely present. There are, however, many poems in which Frost considers what happens when two or more people confront “something.” In “Mending Wall” (NB, 11–13), the ritual of replacing fallen stones creates an opportunity for embroidering complex meaning around the act of labor. This time, however, the labor is explicitly social. Indeed, the title, “Mending Wall,” aligns the two men with their rural farming community; farmers express in succinct words and phrases their daily, 180 B. AHEARN seasonal, or annual chores: milking, loaming, making hay, and turning the grass. Although the beginning of the poem posits a shared labor and perhaps a shared outlook, the drama of the poem depends upon the tension between their differing responses to the task. The speaker indicates early in the poem that one can approach the mending merely as an uncomplicated, repetitive, and routine task. The verse exemplifes such an attitude in four, plodding iambic pentameter lines. They amount to what Frost considered doggerel.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.

The humdrum, monotonous rhythm suggests their activity amounts to a bare, dull formality. But the poem’s frst lines have already established the speaker’s dissatisfaction with arid routine. Beginning the poem with a trochee rather than an iamb allies the speaker with disruptive energy.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

While some critics presume that Frost has a specifc notion of what that “something” is that disrupts walls, namely a pun on his own name, such specifcity runs counter to the speaker’s tendency to avoid fxity, to escape the constraints of doggerel. He substitutes a variety of playful designations for the vagueness of “something.” The speaker’s reason for doing so becomes clear when he repeats the poem’s initial line at line 35. It becomes evident that “something” has become a container that the speaker flls with his witty and fanciful attitudes toward the rite of mending. The failure of “something” to be rendered specifc has been more than compensated for by the speaker’s imaginative and varied interpretations of their labor. Nature remains mute, thus allowing humans to invest the scene with meaning. The speaker hopes that the neighbor will share his playfulness that conjures up meaning in the face of nature’s mysterious reticence (“No one has seen them made or heard 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 181 them made”). The speaker, however, is disappointed. The neighbor’s response to their actions—“Good fences make good neighbours”— implies his unwillingness or inability to speculate about “something” and jog himself out of the rut of hoary aphorisms. The neighbor’s dependence on the old saying suggests a rigidity, a stoniness, in his outlook. The speaker’s fear that one’s occupation may promote fossilization (as hinted at in the line, “We wear our fngers rough with handling them”) has come true—in the case of his neighbor. The speaker’s anxiety that one might shrink to the limits of one’s occupation motivates his multiple attitudes.24 He has saved himself from conforming to the confnes of his labor. But he has no solution for his neighbor’s stolid outlook. If the speaker were to suggest different views of the act of wall mending, it would not prompt thought, but merely supplement his neighbor’s stock of sayings. This is why the speaker comments, “I’d rather / He said it for himself.” The speaker cannot provide his neighbor with a talent for originality. The neighbor must fnd that in himself. “Mending Wall” concludes with the neighbor having the last word. The aphorism, “Good fences make good neighbors,” refects an age-old need to carefully demarcate property lines, thereby minimizing quarrels about ownership. The neighbor’s insistence on clinging to the phrase hints at the social beneft arising from carefully maintaining clear distinctions. But clarity of distinction, if carried too far and maintained too long, deprives us of the benefts available in indistinct “somethings.” Furthermore, the failure of the labor of these neighbors to generate a meeting of minds represents a defeat for neighborliness. The neighbor may believe that by clinging to his father’s saying he furthers social harmony, but the poem dramatizes how his stolidity impedes the neighbor from better knowing his fellow laborer and himself. “The Mountain” (NB, 24–30), the second poem following “Mending Wall,” plays another variation on “something.” The poem hints at a relation to “Mending Wall” when the traveler comments that he “felt it [the mountain] like a wall / Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.” The mountain, a highly magnifed version of the wall, similarly invites imaginative handling. This time, however, we are not dealing with a gnomic “something” that jostles the wall; now the wall/mountain itself stands in for “something,” thanks to its obstructive nature. The mountain becomes “something” writ large. (Frost fnds another use for literal obstruction in “West-Running Brook,” where the sunken rock in the brook helps create the wave that attracts the notice of Fred and his wife.) 182 B. AHEARN

As the poem unfolds, we discover that the mountain offers more than simply a physical barrier. It takes on mysterious, even mythic dimensions. It scintillates with tinges of both the sublime and the beautiful; the traveler’s thoughts suggest it can be read in just those terms.

‘There ought to be a view around the world From such a mountain—if it isn’t wooded Clear to the top.’ I saw through leafy screens Great granite terraces in sun and shadow, Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up— With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet. Or turn and sit on and look out and down, With little ferns in crevices at his elbow.

When the traveler questions the native farmer about the mountain, the native remarks that he himself has not been to the top, although he says, “I’ve been on the sides.” He claims to know the top only by hearsay. His imprecise notions of the topography are distilled in a word he uses twice: “somewhere.” Like the speaker in “Mending Wall,” he seizes on vagueness as an opportunity to exercise his fancy. He notes that the mountain seems to defy the law of gravity: “There’s a brook / That starts up on it somewhere—I’ve heard say / Right on the top, tip-top—a curious thing.” Near the end of the poem we fnd that even the name of the mountain rests on a shaky foundation. “We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right,” says the native. Latent in that remark is the recurring problem of the relation between nature and language. Does language arise from our perceptions of nature as natural creatures? Does language amount instead to a separate reality distinct from nature, perpetually doomed to pursue its own isolated track? The speaker in “Mending Wall” offers the possibility that linguistic dexterity can be analogous to natural fertility when he says, “Spring is the mischief in me.” An echo of this potential alliance between nature and language appears in “The Mountain” when the native sums up their conversation by noting that “all the fun’s in how you say a thing,” thus implying a correspondence between rhetorical agility and the mountain’s tendency to exceed conventional geologic norms. The native even allows for a familial relation between the mountain and the people at its base, when he speaks of the 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 183 houses in his village as being “Like boulders broken off the upper cliff, / Rolled out a little farther than the rest.” Although the native fnds ways to suture humanity and nature, there are indications in the poem of an alternative, nearly disastrous, rupture. The traveler encounters the mountain and the native during a dry season, but early in the poem the traveler witnesses the destructive power of nature. He fnds havoc magnifed beyond the minor damage that “something” inficts on walls. The traveler fnds at the base of the mountain a calmly fowing river.

The river at the time was fallen away, And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones; But the signs showed what it had done in spring; Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.

Even at this season the river hints at violence when it presents a “widespread brawl.” And the detail about “ridges of sand and driftwood” associate the violence of the food with oceanic power. Although the poem uses the native to avert our eyes from the destruction associated with the mountain and nature, there is enough suffcient hinting about nature’s power to ravage humanity’s domain (“good grassland”). It would require only a change of tone for the native’s comments about the boulders to lead us to the avalanche of “On Taking from the Top to Broaden the Base” (FR, 51), in which an innocent household is erased: “Before their panic hands / Were fghting for the latch, / The mud came in one cold / Unleavened batch.” As this poem and “The Mountain” indicate, nature’s “something” can be excessive. Yet Frost portrays that excess as intermittent, not the norm. Storms, foods, avalanches, and similar events are part of the natural process, but nature typically proceeds in a quiet, subdued fashion. Frost elsewhere sometimes teases out the analogy between human activity and natural scene in such poems as “Evening in a Sugar Orchard” (NH, 102), where sparks from a fre can imitate “Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.” Yet we should not be too quick to suppose Frost posits a seamless continuity between human action and natural processes. In “The Bonfre,” where the fre that has gotten out of control is compared to warfare, we must remember that it was the speaker— not lightning—that started the fre in the frst place. The gap or gaps 184 B. AHEARN

Frost sometimes describes as dividing humanity and nature are further instances of the imprecision that colors their relation. A later poem in North of Boston, “The Generations of Men” (NB, 83–96), again takes up the trope of a meeting of minds. This time, however, the meeting or failure to meet does not involve two men but a young man and woman (whom the poem refers to as a “girl”). The poem also revisits the kinds of speculation we observed in the single speaker in “Ghost House.” These members of the Stark clan meet and speculate about their kinship. Their genealogical relationship is made imprecise by the fact that they have almost nothing defnite to examine. Their elders have located the origin of the Starks in “an old cellar hole in a by-road.” In other words, the young man and young woman are inspecting what is nearly—but not quite—a void. The poem stipulates that the cellar hole and its surroundings are defcient in articulate structure.

The situation was like this: the road Bowed outward on the mountain half-way up, And disappeared and ended not far off. No one went home that way. The only house Beyond where they were was a shattered seed-pod. And below roared a brook hidden in trees, The sound of which was silence for the place.

This description constructs a space containing indefnite sights and a sound “which was silence.” Yet the young man and woman can use both to exercise their fancies. She sees a little boy; he sees Granny Stark. In a step beyond what happened in “Ghost House,” the young man suggests they supplement their visions of ghosts with auditory phenomena: “We have seen visions—now consult the voices.” The young man mentions that the voices he hears do not arise out of absolute silence, but from repetitive, meaningless noise (as was the case in “Mowing”). “Something I must have learned riding in trains / When I was young. I used to use the roar / To set the voices speaking out of it, / Speaking or singing, and the band-music playing.” The evocation of voices from the sounds of a railroad train verges on poetic creation, or at least amounts to a step in that direction. The young man continues his aural necromancy and summons the voice of Granny Stark, who, at the end of her snatch of dramatic monologue, commands, “Son, you do as you’re 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 185 told! You take up the timber-- / It’s as sound as the day when it was cut-- / And begin over--.” Granny thus endorses what the young man has already suggested to the girl that their best course would be to take a remnant, a timber, from the old homestead and incorporate it into a “summer dwelling.” We never learn what becomes of these two “young folk,” but their meeting may be the beginning of their courtship.25 They might become husband and wife and begin a new generation. In short, the interest in the older members of the Stark clan in the family’s origins becomes an opportunity for the younger ones—the young man, at least—to look to the future replication of the family. In addition, the drama of “The Generations of Men” (the title puns on ‘generations’ to mean ancestral succession, procreation, and imaginative creation) exemplifes Frost’s theory of poetic creation. It is not simply that one can, in a pinch, make something out of nearly nothing. Making something out of what others dismiss as nearly nothing is rather the essence of artistic creation.26 The poet fnds gold in what others ignore, take for granted, or consider trivial. Frost can consider “something” both on a small scale (a wall) or a large one (a mountain). In a poem from New Hampshire, “The Star- Splitter” (NH, 27–30), Frost mingles both perspectives. As in “I Will Sing You One-O,” the poem considers cosmic distances but also looks to our immediate surroundings. Both the immense and the modestly scaled can attract our attention, but Frost’s imaginative excursions return us to human measures. “The Star-Splitter” dramatizes that turn back to local views. Brad, an unsuccessful farmer, takes drastic action in order to satisfy his zeal for long-range vision. “He burned his house down for the fre insurance / And spent the proceeds on a telescope / To satisfy a life-long curiosity / About our place among the infnities.” The nature of Brad’s criminal indulgence is noteworthy. The amateur astronomer destroys his home, a place so frequently the site in Frost’s poetry of contention that can be amiable or bitter. Whatever its nature, that contention stimulates understanding about ourselves and others— whether that knowledge be for good or ill. In other words, this amateur astronomer has sacrifced one of the primary sites of awareness. The poem indicates that Brad may have done so precisely because he wants to avoid introspection. We have already noted how Frost’s speakers often tend to project their own preoccupations onto nature or natural artifacts. Brad does the same in this poem but on a larger scale. He tends to see nature as intrusive and potentially threatening. He specifcally 186 B. AHEARN sees Orion as judgmental and reproving, since the constellation “looks in on me / Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something / I should have done by daylight.” Brad’s failings as a farmer provoke his resent- ment against nature. He says that even the wind sometimes “make[s] fun of my way of doing things.” His latent sense of his own shortcomings produces a mild paranoia. He translates his guilt into nature’s malevolence. Brad’s scheme to take revenge on nature with his telescope has limited success. Brad and the narrator peer “Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, / At a star quaking in the other end.” The view through the telescope resembles the view down the well in “For Once, Then, Something.” Both poems invite us to consider the benefts and disadvan- tages of viewing reality through a cylinder. When looking down the tube of the well, the viewer was rewarded with a glimpse of something white, which then was quickly blurred. The view upward offers little more. The payoff turns out to be quite similar. In both poems the viewer squints at something white and blurry. Where in “For Once, Then, Something,” it had been water that obscured clarity, in “The Star-Splitter” atmospheric distortion makes stars scintillate. Nevertheless, Brad’s friend, who joins him at the telescope, is not disappointed. The location from which they view the stars (outdoors in the snow on a frigid winter evening) seems unpromising, but his visit with Brad results in a conversation in which they “Said some of the best things we ever said.” The talk of the two stargazers relegates the canopy of the heavens—and Brad’s animus against nature—to a subordinate position. Speech has replaced sight, as it did in “The Mountain,” an exchange that failed in “Mending Wall.” The poem also expands the conversation to a wider social range. The voice of the narrator in “The Star-Splitter” takes on the communal accents of the village as a whole. When he reminds us fve times that Brad had burned down his house to acquire the telescope, he mutates into the collective voice of the gossipy villagers as they repeat to one another the tale that identifes Brad in the community’s mind. Speech, whatever its origins, displays more vitality and fexibility than sightings of “a star quaking.” The closing fve lines of the poem—separated by a space from the rest of it—call into question Brad’s investigation of the stars, and, by extension, of any attempt to see more in the natural realm than refections of what one already knows. 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 187

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?

The reference to the “smoky lantern” perhaps takes us back to Diogenes. The passage intimates that the urge to look outside our selves was just as ubiquitous and just as futile in antiquity as it is today. “The Star-Splitter” is only one of a number of poems in New Hampshire that take up the theme of the nature and result (if any) of humanity seeking answers in the remote or uncommon. The theme runs through “A Star in a Stone- Boat,” “Maple,” “Paul’s Wife,” “Two Witches,” “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books,” “For Once, Then, Something,” “Two Look at Two,” and others. Many of these poems suggest the necessity of fnding or creating an indefnite “something” from which or against which renewed vision or lively talk can emerge.

5 “Something” and Narrative In “Mending Wall,” “The Mountain,” and “The Generations of Men” there are moments when demonstrations of rhetorical fertility and fexibility almost create a narrative. The farmer in “Mending Wall” considers suggesting to his neighbor a supernatural cause for the damage to the wall: “I could say ‘Elves’ to him.” At that moment the poem verges on turning into a folktale. The farmer might enliven their labor with a fable such as those that Yeats discovered among the Irish peasantry. The native in “The Mountain” also seems at several points about to launch into elaborate legends about the mountain. We have seen, for example, that he begins to cloak the mountain in myth by remarking how it fouts the law of gravity: “There’s a brook / That starts up on it somewhere—I’ve heard say / Right on the top, tip-top—a curious thing.” But then he demurs. “It may not be right on the very top.” As soon as he offers this curious fact, he withdraws it. He also begins to satisfy the traveler’s curiosity by remarking, “One time I asked a fellow climbing it / To look and tell me later how it was.” But this thread breaks off as well; the native reports that the “fellow” “never got up high enough to see.” A similarly abortive moment occurs in “The Generations of Men.” The young man, sensitive to the young woman’s cautious nature, silences the voice of 188 B. AHEARN

Granny Stark just when it seems Granny might specify how to go about starting a new generation of Starks. Other poems, however, feature personae who create or react to powerful tales. In “The Witch of Coös” (NH, 56–61). Frost shows how a story can impose lifelong fear. The poem seems in part an expansion of elements in “The Census-Taker.” The protagonist, the witch, demonstrates a facility for making a well-defned something out of nothing, a talent only meagerly shown by the census taker. Although at frst he speculates that the door swinging on the empty house might be opened and shut by invisible “rude men,” he does not elaborate this thought into something comparable to the witch’s baroque fantasy, which comes complete with freworks: “A tongue of fre / Flashed out and licked along his upper teeth. / Smoke rolled inside the sockets of his eyes.” An obvious point of comparison that points up their differing talents is the “rattling” that the census taker dismisses. He convinces himself that no ghosts or animated skeletons will trouble him; he declares, “Not bones, but the ill-ftted window rattled.” In the case of the witch, however, part of her proof that the dead can return lies in the sound like the “rattling of a shutter” that the bones of the skeletal fgure imprisoned in the attic make by “Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fngers.” The witch makes use of a sound imprecise enough so that it can be either commonplace or uncanny, depending on one’s interpretation of the cause. “Rattling” for the census taker is something to be explained away; for the witch it offers recurring validation of her Gothic tale. Moreover, the witch demonstrates that she need not rely on ordinary sounds. She can, if she wishes, turn nothing into an articulated something. She acti- vates the unseen and unheard by convincing her husband, Toffle, that the skeleton that stalked out of the cellar now lurks in the bedroom, although it is invisible and inaudible.27

I pushed myself upstairs, and in the light I could see nothing. ‘Toffle, I don’t see it. It’s with us in the room though. It’s the bones.’ ‘What bones?’ ‘The cellar bones—out of the grave.’ That made him throw his bare legs out of bed And sit up by me and take hold of me...... The steps began to climb the attic stairs. I heard them. Toffle didn’t seem to hear them. 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 189

We do not know why Toffle would believe his wife’s hair-raising tale but two aspects of their history may explain his credulity. First, although we do not know when her talent for communicating with the unseen world frst appeared, the witch may already have that reputation. Second, she may be exploiting Toffle’s latent guilt. We learn that she was caught in fagrante by Toffle, and that he murdered her lover. Perhaps his conscience cannot rest easy. His wife, if realizing this, may have concocted the story of the invisible and inaudible bones to exact revenge. Such a motive may also color her narrative’s imagery. At one point she portrays Toffle as ludicrous, with his bare legs and his clutching at her in terror. Whatever her motives, the witch has spun a tale so convincing that Toffle, as he lies in bed, must frequently suppose that the skeleton of the man he murdered stands only a few feet from the headboard.

If the bones liked the attic, let them have it. Let them stay in the attic. When they sometimes Come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed Behind the door and headboard of the bed, Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fngers, With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter, That’s what I sit up in the dark to say— To no one any more since Toffle died.

We may suppose that it never occurs to Toffle to reassure himself that he hears only a shutter blown by the wind. Or if he raises that possibility, his wife is there to remind him about the “chalky fngers.” His wife’s tale replaces the natural explanation with a supernatural one. The narrator listening to the witch and her son uncovers no physical evidence to confrm her story. As he departs he records the name on the letterbox—Toffle Lajway—a script telling a truth (it confrms the name of the witch’s husband) as well as a lie (Toffle no longer receives mail). Although the witch claims to have a piece of the skeleton’s fnger bone in her button box, her search for it turns up empty. Frost no doubt knew that in the history of American Spiritualism solid physical evidence and demon- strable fact tended to evaporate. For “The Witch of Coös” he may have had in mind the report that human bones and teeth were found in the cellar of the home of the Fox sisters. This physical evidence was taken as confrma- tion of the Fox sisters’ claim that they had been in contact with the spirit of a murdered peddler whose corpse was buried in the cellar of their farm- house. The location of the gruesome remains, however, has been lost.28 190 B. AHEARN

“The Witch of Coös” presents a witch whose power rises from her talent as a fabulist. In her case, she seems bent on using that power to plague her husband with a constant reminder of her infdelity and his crime. But her husband is not the only individual under her sway. She never explains the presence of her son in the household, but it is odd. We note that he acts as her interlocutor, taking her cues. He has not made a separate life for himself, even though he must be at least forty years old. It gradually becomes clear that the witch has used her imaginative powers to control those around her. In most other Frost poems, such skills refresh an individual, a family, or a community. Here, however, they serve her domineering will. “Snow” (MI, 76–98), in Frost’s previous volume, Mountain Interval, presents a fgure who, like the Witch of Coös, has a way with words. Meserve, a self-ordained preacher, proves skilled in the power of persua- sion. On this occasion, however, he keeps his imaginative powers under some restraint. We see in Meserve the ability to weave tales or compose parables, but he holds back from imposing his will on others, in this case the couple who have offered him shelter from the storm. Yet the poem hints in its frst lines that Meserve intends this interruption of his journey to be more than an awkward hiatus, that he has an additional motive.

The three stood listening to a fresh access Of wind that caught against the house a moment, Gulped snow, and then blew free again—the Coles Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep, Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.

“Access” is an unusual word to describe a gust of wind, but as the poem continues we fnd that it well defnes what Meserve really wants from Fred and Helen Cole—a tentative meeting of minds. Achieving this will not be easy, since “belittled” describes not only Meserve’s appearance but Helen’s initial attitude toward him; she acidly refers to his “wretched little Racker sect” and classifes him as one of a breed of “pious scalawags.” Meserve cannily begins his conversation with the Coles by appeal- ing to their common plight. Both he and the Coles live far enough from the village that they are uneasy about the power of the storm to threaten their very lives. Meserve characterizes the snow piling up against a window as “Some pallid thing” that has “broken its white neck of 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 191 mushroom stuff / Short off, and died against the window-pane.” Helen Cole quite rightly calls this “nightmare talk.” We can see in Meserve’s fanciful and gruesome description the germ of what could become a full-blown tale of terror. He might, if he chose, pursue a narrative line that would emulate that of the Witch of Coös. Meserve, however, has something else up his sleeve. Earlier in the poem, he demonstrates a witty turn of mind that makes of snow what he will. His frst remark reveals his facility with metaphor: “You can just see it glancing off the roof / Making a great scroll upward toward the sky, / Long enough for recording all our names on--.” The metaphor about the scroll that contains “all our names,” hints at Meserve’s ulterior motive for stopping with the Coles. His ostensible reason is to rest himself and his horses before he continues homeward, but as the poem develops it seems more the case that he wants to establish or repair relations with the Coles. In his encompassing gesture of suggesting that the snow could be a scroll on which their names are united, he anticipates a renewed social bond. For Meserve, the exercise of “playing our fancy” about the snow is not merely a pastime, but a salutary means for engaging with others. The poem indicates there was once a close relation between Meserve and Helen Cole, a relation that has ruptured. Fred invokes this tie and suggests that Helen has a particular infuence with Meserve.

Don’t let him go. Stick to him, Helen. Make him answer you. That sort of man talks straight on all his life From the last thing he said himself, stone deaf To anything anyone else may say. I should have thought, though, you could make him hear you.

Meserve himself touches on the history between himself and Helen when, as he is about to go to the barn (ostensibly to check on his horses, but also to grant the Coles privacy in which to discuss how much they are willing to accommodate him), he says, “I guess I know my way, / I guess I know where I can fnd my name / Carved in the shed to tell me who I am / If it don’t tell me where I am. I used / To play--.” After his return from the barn, Meserve telephones his wife and insists on venturing once more into the blizzard so that he may be home that night. Before departing, however, he once again puts his imagination to work. 192 B. AHEARN

As he sits with the Coles, he draws their attention to an open book in which one page stands up, wavering indecisively.

That leaf there in your open book! It moved Just then, I thought. It’s stood erect like that, There on the table, ever since I came, Trying to turn itself backward or forward, I’ve had my eye on it to make out which; If forward, then it’s with a friend’s impatience— You see I know—to get you on to things It wants to see how you will take, if backward It’s from regret for something you have passed And failed to see the good of.

In this passage, Meserve employs the imprecisely trembling leaf to bring together several aspects of his relation to the Coles. On the one hand, they have offered him shelter for the night, feeling as they do impelled by common charity to save him from risking his life. On the other hand, they are curious about Meserve’s abilities and courage in the face of the storm. Furthermore, the leaf comes to represent the many times Meserve has passed the Cole farm and failed to stop to “see the good of.” In short, Meserve uses the leaf as a metaphor for both the Coles’ attitude toward him and his previous indifference to them. Once again he demonstrates his talent for extrapolating from commonplace “somethings” in unexpectedly insightful ways.29 This imaginative dexterity prompts Fred Cole to say, “He had the gift / Of words, or is it tongues, I ought to say?” to which his wife replies, “Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?” “The Witch of Coös” exemplifes a narrative that seeks to dominate all within its range, while “Snow” represents a wisely restrained narrative power that invites others to participate. “Maple” (NH, 31–36) shows people tantalized by a possible narrative but never able to come to grips with it, and in so doing reverses the trajectory of “The Witch of Coös.” Whereas the Witch skillfully shapes a fanciful tale out of a repressed memory, Maple’s story shows us someone who fails to create a narrative out of a bare “something.” When Maple asks her father about her unusual name, his response is less than fully forthcoming. 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 193

She put her fnger in your cheek so hard It must have made your dimple there, and said, “Maple.” I said it too: “Yes, for her name.” She nodded. So we’re sure there’s no mistake. I don’t know what she wanted it to mean, But it seems like some word she left to bid you Be a good girl—be like a maple tree. How like a maple tree’s for us to guess Or for a little girl to guess sometime. Not now—at least I shouldn’t try too hard now. By and by I will tell you all I know About the different trees, and something, too, About your mother that perhaps may help.

As time passes, however, her father never fulflls his promise to tell Maple “something” about her mother. He hopes she will forget to speculate about her unusual name. But years later, when she is employed as a secretary in “the highest city built with hands,” a man in the offce remarks to her, “Do you know you remind me of a tree-- / A maple tree?” It turns out he thinks her name is Mable. When she tells him her true name, they are moved to wonder at his inexplicable insight.

They were both stirred that he should have divined Without the name her personal mystery. It made it seem as if there must be something She must have missed herself. So they were married.

The “something” her father held back has returned, but now this “something” has become the joint possession of the newlyweds. Frost’s diction here begins to indicate how the tantalizing hold of “something” begins to fascinate them. “Divined” hints at an almost sacred aspect of this “something.” The hint is broadened when we learn that Maple and her new husband “went on pilgrimage once to her father’s.” On their arrival, Maple tells her husband of the time she found a maple leaf used as a bookmark in the family Bible, and that “all she remembered / Of the place marked with it—‘Wave offering, / Something about wave offering, it said.’” This “something” proves none too helpful, since the Old Testament mentions wave offerings three times in Exodus, nine times in Leviticus, and twice in Numbers. Whether the maple leaf in the Bible bears any relation to Maple’s name remains obscure. 194 B. AHEARN

“Something” continues to proliferate in the poem when her husband tells Maple that the origin of her name “may have been / Something between your father and your mother / Not meant for us at all.” When Maple persists in wondering why her father has kept the secret of the name from her (if there is a secret), her husband speculates again. It “may have been / Something a father couldn’t tell a daughter / As well as could a mother.” Although they abandon the search, the poem discusses ways in which maple trees might have inspired her name. They, like her mother giving birth to Maple, produce something of value when late in winter “the maples / Stood uniform in buck- ets.” There may also be a parallel between the death of her mother and the survival of Maple and the fact that “It was the tree the autumn fre ran through / And swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark / Unscorched, unblackened, even, by any smoke.” A third possibility that the poem raises but which Maple and her husband are reluctant to entertain because it is “a thing so bridal” is the way a maple tree can resemble a bride disrobed and ready to receive her husband.

Once they came on a maple in a glade, Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up, And every leaf of foliage she’d worn Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet.

The only way that Maple and her husband can end their fruitless search is by dropping it. The “something” at the root of her name has been too indefnite; or rather, its excessive imprecision invites too many possible interpretations, no one of which has more validity than any other. Yet the poem also suggests that this may not be the case, that “something” in even its most meager form can be suffcient, if we only have the courage to make a rudimentary “something” more explicit. Just before Maple and her husband abandon their quest, the poem comments:

They hovered for a moment near discovery, Figurative enough to see the symbol, But lacking faith in anything to mean The same at different times to different people.

This commentary suggests that the fault does not lie with Maple’s father or mother, or with the web of relations that constitute nature and 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 195 humanity, but with individuals who cannot summon from within themselves the necessary “faith” needed for salvation. As we have seen, however, there are poems in which Frost shows that some narratives, even complete, well-rounded ones, are the stock in trade of dominating personalities. We should hesitate to buy into another’s narrative, Frost argues in “Education by Poetry” and other essays. He contends that the most masterful narratives are expansions of bril- liant metaphors. To accept a master narrative is to blindly assent to the founding metaphor, which, were we to examine it more closely, we might reject. The example that Frost offers in “Education by Poetry” is Freudian psychology.

Take the way we have been led into our present position morally, the world over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a kind of thinking—to speak metaphorically—there is a kind of thinking you might say was endemic in the brothel. It is always there. And every now and then in some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it do so? By using all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain virtue. It uses honesty, frst,--frankness, sincerity—those words; picks them up, uses them. “In the name of honesty, let us see what we are.” You know. And then it picks up the word joy. “Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of our ancestors, the Puritans … Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of the kill-joy Puritan …” You see. “Let us,” and so on. And then, “In the name of health …” Health is another good word. And that is the metaphor Freudianism trades on, mental health. And the frst thing we know, it has us all in up to the top-knot. (CPRF, 106)

Elsewhere, in a 1936 letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost claims that Marxism is basically a metaphor based on the family and that Darwinism is likewise rooted in simple analogies.

I am content to let it go at one philosophical observation: isn’t it a poetical strangeness that while the world was going full blast on the Darwinian metaphors of evolution, survival values and the Devil take the hindmost, a polemical Jew in exile was working up the metaphor of the State’s being like a family to displace them from mind and give us a new fgure to live by? Marx had the strength not to be overawed by the metaphor in vogue. Life is like battle. But so is it also like shelter. (CPPP, 753–754) 196 B. AHEARN

If we keep in mind Frost’s warning about large, framing narratives that are overblown metaphors, it becomes clear that Meserve’s disinclination to extend his narrative threads exemplifes charitable restraint. Meserve shows his respect for the integrity and independence of the Coles by not seeking to impose a larger narrative on them. They must decide for themselves whether to accept or decline Meserve’s offer of a deeper relation, which in time might grow into a story of two families intertwined in mutual friendship. A few Frost poems take up the matter of master narratives that affect not just a family, neighbors, or co-workers but humanity at large. “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road,” for example, takes up the notion that humanity is destined, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, to be pioneering, to boldly “seek a newer world.” We have already considered the poem in the light of humanity’s scientifc powers, but we can also examine it from a different perspective, namely, as a portrait of two narratives: one suggesting a termination of itself and the other stipulating a necessary turning and returning. The problem faced by the unnamed party of travelers is simple: nature, or perhaps some power behind nature, has interrupted their journey. The poem fgures snow as part of nature’s obstructive tendency, which humanity has overcome with its sleigh runners and “runner tracks.” A mere “foot of snow” presents no serious impediment; humanity easily impresses its marks on the blankness of the snow. If nature cannot stife human intentions with snow, it raises the stakes by providing a more diffcult obstacle. The fallen tree produces a less visible but more articulate response: the verbal debate. Once more, Frost returns to the theme of obstruction as an inducement to the creation of form. In humanity’s response to both snow and fallen tree, we see that the graver the obstacle, the more defned and sophisticated the form of response. We might say that the poem itself, in its depiction of the struggle between the natural and the human, has already indicated the victory must go to the human, since it casts the contention in terms of verbal confict. The tree fallen across the road is not just a fallen tree but a form of communication: “to ask us.” And the poem also posits human activity as essentially verbal, in that it stipulates our insistence as what has riled nature. But as the poem indicates in its fnal line, the striving that characterizes human prowess and power over nature may well end in the inarticulate, in the pursuit of a nebulous “something.” To a degree, the poem’s hint that all our articulation may lead to the indefnite (and a frozen end to the human race) echoes Fred’s highly 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 197 elaborate and well-articulated passage from the concrete to a terminal “something” in “West-Running Brook.” Note also that what might be regarded as “aimless circling” can be considered quite differently. In Meserve’s words, “Our very life depends on everything’s / Recurring till we answer from within.” The globe’s “aimless circling” could well be the eternal recurrence that humanity needs for its enlightenment. There seems to be a narrative that heads “straight off”; another narrative exhibits a continual recycling. The one likely ends in silence; the other promotes further discussion and the prospect of more elaborate human creations. During the 1930s, Frost took special notice of political narratives that promised collective salvation for those suffering from the Great Depression. He had a variety to choose from, including Communism, Fascism, Socialism, the New Deal, Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” program, and Upton Sinclair’s EPIC plan (End Poverty in California). In A Further Range Frost considers whether the worldwide economic crisis requires drastic measures. In each poem, however, the answer is no. He rejects master narratives; their solutions are worse than the problems because those who construct such narratives are too certain they have taken everything into account. They are too positive that human needs and actions can be mapped on their grid, much as the Prefect in “The Purloined Letter” was initially certain that mathematical reasoning would locate the letter’s hiding place. Furthermore, central planning inhibits or destroys the independent spirit that will eventually save individuals. As he suggests in “A Roadside Stand” (FR, 32–33) government’s answer to the plight of farmers is to regulate them so that they will be ft for collective life.

It is in the news that all these pitiful kin Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in To live in villages next the theatre and store Where they won’t have to think for themselves any more; While greedy good-doers, benefcent beasts of prey, Swarm over their lives enforcing benefts That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits, And by teaching them how to sleep the sleep all day, Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way. 198 B. AHEARN

The poem deploys some carefully calculated ironies. To say that the farmers are “pitiful” is to foist upon them an adjective they would not necessarily adopt themselves. What Frost makes clear is that the term implies a point of view extraneous to the farmers; their economic diffculties render them “pitiful” to those who are better off. (A close look at the voices of the farmers earlier in the poem makes it clear that if there is anything pitiful about them, it is that they have come to believe that meretricious values—exemplifed by the “motion pictures’ promise”—are what they require.) The phrase “in the news” hints that the depiction of the farmers as pitiful emanates from the media or the government or both, not from the farmers. “In the news” also hints that the implied audience for the poem is not farmers, who are to be the objects of governmental concern. “Calculated” hints not only at the New Deal’s massive central planning but also suggests the related statistical incubus that will be imposed on people’s lives and livelihoods. The poem glances back at “A Brook in the City,” where the need for numbers—a hallmark of the urban—ends in troubled sleep. Long before A Further Range, Frost mistrusted the expansive narratives purveyed by well-meaning sociologists, urban planners, and govern- ments. In his depiction of Baptiste and his family in “The Axe-helve” (NH, 37–40), Frost pits Baptiste’s skill with woodworking against the indifferent but precise stamp of the machine.30 As Baptiste demonstrates to his neighbor/narrator, the machine pays no attention to important individual characteristics.

“Made on machine,” he said, ploughing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. “You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off. Den where’s your hax-ead fying t’rough de hair?”

The image of the dollar sign in association with the machine-made handle reminds us that the assembly line offers cheaper goods. It also, however, raises the question of whether the shortcuts that the assembly line entails proft the owner of the assembly line more than the buyer of its products. It intimates Frost’s doubt that mass production and mass consumption are on balance benefcial to humanity. The hickory 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 199 wood that Baptiste uses to make his axe handles resembles the sound of sense. The wood and the sounds are the necessary raw material. The wood has peculiarities of shape that require skill to bring the handle to completion. Baptiste must carve with the same care that the poet shows in modifying the language of his neighbors. Yet there is another dimension to the poem that deserves attention. When Baptiste frst approaches and gently takes from him his machine-made axe, the neighbor wonders whether “There might be something / He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor / He might prefer to say to him disarmed.” Later, when the neighbor visits Baptiste in his home, the neighbor wonders if Baptiste’s motive for inviting him could be merely selfsh. Might Baptiste have “Something to sell?” “Something” in both these passages stands for something less than ideal relations between neighbors. It carries with it shades of reproof and mercenary motive. These are possible narratives of relations between himself and Baptiste. Like the machine-made axe handle, they suggest conventional suspicions. Here “something” does not stand for a rich range of possibilities but its opposite: close-minded mistrust. The neighbor might reject the invitation but his curiosity overcomes standard misgivings. And his risk-taking is rewarded. He fnds fertile ground for speculation in the home of Baptiste, where Baptiste’s wife “rocked a chair / That had as many motions as the world.” Here he encounters the circularity, turning and recycling that Frost associates with fruitfully continuing narrative. The title, A Further Range, suggests that Frost looks beyond the fer- ment of the decade for age-old solutions to human problems. Hence the reversion to the pastoral mode in “Build Soil.” Yet the fnal poem in the volume, “A Missive Missile” (FR, 101–102), indicates that even the long-range view has its limitations. Frost denies that even his extended perspective can master all human history. There had been hints of this in his essays and addresses. Frost’s “Letter to The Amherst Student” (1935) cautions that our own age so colors our understanding that we cannot attain a clear vision of other ages. “Ages may vary a little. One may be a little worse than another. But it is not possible to get outside the age you are into judge it exactly” (CPRF, 114). There are a great many well- intentioned people whom Frost sees as temporally shortsighted, such as the fgure in his Introduction to Sarah Cleghorn’s Threescore (1936): “Some of us have developed a habit of saying we can’t stand a reformer. But we don’t mean it except where the reformer is at the same time a raw convert to the latest scheme for saving the soul or the state. The last 200 B. AHEARN we heard of him may have been two or three fashions ago as one of the ultra-arty insisting that we join him in his minor vices at his wild parties” (CPRF, 124). Having disposed of the shortsighted “raw convert,” Frost experiments with long-range views in “A Missive Missile.” Of all the poems in A Further Range, this one ranges the farthest: “a million years to be precise.” The poem presents a scene reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Both spectators examine relics from antiquity. But Frost’s counterpart to Keats’s sylvan historian survives from an even more ancient world than Attic Greece.

Someone in ancient Mas d’Azil Once took a little pebble wheel And dotted it with red for me, And sent it to me years and years— A million years to be precise— Across the barrier of ice: Two round dots and a ripple streak, So vivid as to seem to speak.

Keat’s urn has a busier surface than Frost’s minimally fgured stone, but the two poems’ inspectors follow the same approach. They examine the artifact and puzzle over how to interpret it. In both cases, unfortunately, the cultural context that would enable an accurate reading of the artifact’s insignia has vanished beyond recovery. To put it another way, the web of metaphors that constituted meaning for the lost culture has disintegrated and cannot be rewoven by modern minds. Keats at least had the advantage of seeing people engaged in broadly recognizable activities: making music and walking in a procession. Frost’s observer, however, cannot be sure that the Azilians did anything of the sort. Did they even have a conception of artistry? Had they any knowledge of the wheel? Perhaps the notion that the circular stone would have resembled a wheel that they could roll into futurity would never have occurred to the Azilians, but is a modern imposition. We are on familiar Frostian ground. Where signifers are absent or meager, the speaker can only impose his own constructions on the “something” he confronts. Thus the “two round dots and a ripple streak” acquire meanings that are familiar to him and his culture. The symbols—indeed, are they symbols?—become either signs of grief 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 201

(tearful eyes and a sigh), or drops of blood and a jagged blade. Late in the poem the speaker concludes that the symbols can only be read according to his own lights. “The meaning of it is unknown, / Or else I fear entirely mine, / All modern, nothing ancient in’t.” But perhaps all is not lost. There is another person in the poem who might have the expertise to unlock the meaning of the stone—the archaeologist. He, however, remains strangely passive. We might expect he would exercise his authority and intervene with some wise insights from his discipline’s arduously acquired knowledge. But he does not. Although the poem refers to him as “no common messenger” whose “badge of offce is a spade,” he simply unearths antiquities. These artifacts, however, are too abstracted from the original context that lent them meaning. They remain open to endless interpretation. The delving archaeologist reminds us of another man who uses a spade, Tityrus in “Build Soil” (FR, 85–95). Tityrus advises Meliboeus to “Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself / Until it can contain itself no more.” Although Frost has foremost in mind political developments of the time (1932), the poem also hints that turning and returning the soil in on itself is the opposite of what the archaeologist does. Rather than cultivating the remote past or radical economic and political solutions, that is to say, yearning for answers alien to one’s experience, “Build Soil” urges the examining and turning over—into new combinations—of what is already at hand. Frost implies here, as elsewhere, that the only fertile ground for discovery already lies within reach. “Education by Poetry,” in making metaphor the ground of thinking, does the same. The discovery of all possible human meaning for our age is already implicit in the ability of the mind to generate metaphors from images, objects, persons, and social confgurations we already know. Yet the discovery of meaning, so far as Frost sees it, remains temporary. This is true for his poems as well. He consistently declined to reduce them to a permanent, para- phrasable form. As he wrote in one letter, “My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless” (LRF, 2: 615). This remark suggests Frost’s respect for the “something” out of which he forms the measured and the articulated. But it also suggests that the poems contain elements of the inchoate for the reader as much as they accomplish form and design. Facing the poems, we are in the position of the traveler and the native as they contemplate the Mountain. 202 B. AHEARN

6 Articulating Something Most people can’t nail what fits by can’t tell how they feel about it or haven’t the masterful will to get round it in expression. (NRF, 303)

When faced with “something,” Frost persistently wrestles with it until it yields distinct features but one cannot handle “something” unless it displays at least a rudimentary confguration. He would agree with William James, who stipulates in Psychology: Briefer Course, “Perception is of defnite and probable things” (1992, 298). Frostian negative capability not only hews to the concrete, it is clear that the extraction of the concrete from the imprecise occurs not in the recesses of the poet’s mind, but in the poem itself. Even if it did occur in Frost’s mind, we have no access to his mind other than through his words. For Frost, expression that really counts as signifcant expression must be verbally rich. Mere exclamations do not go far enough, as he insists in “Education by Poetry.”

There is the enthusiasm like a blinding light, or the enthusiasm of the deaf- ening shout, the crude enthusiasm that you get uneducated by poetry, outside of poetry. It is exemplifed in what I might call “sunset raving.” You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is oh’s and ah’s with you and no more. (CPRF, 104–105)

Beyond the “oh’s and ah’s” lie the thousands of words and combinations of words waiting to be arranged. For Frost, the articulation of the indefnite must be a linguistic struggle. As if to underscore this fact, Frost’s poems often suggest parallels between the dramas within them and the act of writing. As we saw at the beginning of “The Wood-Pile,” the wanderer encounters a landscape in which “the view was all in lines,” a remark that would also be true of the frst few lines of a poem being composed on a sheet of paper. The wanderer hesi- tates about whether to continue into this apparently unpromising landscape, just as the poet in beginning a poem might doubt whether that beginning held enough promise to continue. In other poems, traces or tracks also suggest the necessity of inscribing defnition. Consider, for example, the last poem in Frost’s last book, “In Winter in the Woods Alone,” where the poet heading homeward notes, “I link a line of shadowy tracks / Across the tinted snow” (CPPP, 478). Or we might 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 203 glance back at “A Patch of Old Snow” (MI, 17), which makes the connection between snow and writing explicit.

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner That I should have guessed Was a blow-away paper the rain Had brought to rest. It is speckled with grime as if Small print overspread it, The news of a day I’ve forgotten— If I ever read it.

Writing, or at least the result—written words—has a momentary analogy with natural activity. There are other poems that subtly tie the labor of being a poet to aspects of the natural world. In “The Oven Bird” (MI, 35), for example, Frost draws a parallel between the bird’s response to ebbing seasonal vitality and his own place in literary history. This sonnet takes up the theme of the place of the sonnet in modern poetry quite explicitly in its last line, where the Oven Bird is posited as wondering “what to make of a diminished thing.” Frost’s poem is deliberately rich in hinting at the diminished things to which the line could refer. On the most obvious level, the bird attempts to make something of the declin- ing vitality of the year. Beyond the obvious there may be a self-referen- tial, biographical aspect to the poem. Frost not only comes late in the history of Western poetry, he also achieves literary fame later than most poets. But there is still another aspect of lateness implied by the poem. Part of the problem in writing a sonnet is to make something new out of a poetic form whose possible effects have been exploited for centuries. In that sense, taking up the sonnet form is making something of a thing diminished because master poets have already thoroughly explored what can be done with it. Frost also reminds us of the “diminished” possibilities of the sonnet by placing “The Oven Bird” as the third in a sequence of three sonnets. Frost foregrounds in “The Oven Bird” the diffculty a modernist faces in articulating the sonnet in a fresh way, a challenge generally avoided by some of his notable contemporaries: H. D., Eliot, Moore, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. People in Frost’s poems often are faced with the problem of articulation. In his early poetry the speakers struggle to avoid, invigorate, or 204 B. AHEARN invent aphorisms and clichés. In “The Death of the Hired Man,” Mary offers a new aphorism—“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (NB, 20). Warren responds with a modifcation: “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” In this marriage both couples avoid depending on cliché handed down from generation to generation. Their dialogue produces new homilies that represent their fexible response to Silas’s return and its demands on their charity. Other, less fortunate personae in Frost, fnd that inherited generalizations fail to help them respond to changing circumstances, or, what is worse, inhibit them from seeking benefcial change. Thus the farmer takes the repetition of “Good fences make good neighbors” as symptomatic of his neighbor’s frozen intellect. Another paralyzed fgure is the unnamed wife in “A Servant to Servants” (NB, 64–72), whose repeated everyday burdens have left her physically and emotionally drained. What imaginative energy remains only allows her to verbalize her surroundings as a prison. The landscape she sees out her window, for example, is dominated by a lake, which she describes as “Like a deep piece of some old running river / Cut short off at both ends.” Her observation about the lake indicates that it mirrors her condition. Just as Lake Willoughby resembles an abbreviated section of a river that once ran freely, so is her life curtailed. She recognizes how other people’s demands have stunted her, but what is more important, her capacity to envision a greater freedom has withered. Her monologue shows hints of her imaginative grasping for a way out of her servitude. When her visitors report that they heard about the lake in a book about ferns, she comments: “In a book about ferns? Listen to that! / You let things more like feathers regulate / Your going and coming.” Her simile likening ferns to feathers suggest how being free as a bird would appeal to her. The originality of the simile suggests she might have some of the play of mind one sees in other personae, such as the farmer in “Mending Wall” or the native in “The Mountain.” Yet her clutching at ways to describe a mode of escape remains only weak and tentative. Embedded in her discourse are bits of advice borrowed from her husband, who seems even better supplied with cliché than the neighbor in “Mending Wall”: “Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. / He says the best way out is always through.” Later in the poem she remarks, “I s’pose I’ve got to go the road I’m going.” Although she does not ascribe this aphorism to Len, it resembles the ones she attributes to him. The irony in each of these clichés is that the metaphor of a journey is 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 205 being used to imprison her. Were she to examine this contradiction she might begin to realize, as Frost puts it in “Education by Poetry,” how she had failed to be “at home in the metaphor” (CPRF, 106). Still another poem from North of Boston, “Home Burial” (NB, 43–49) also suggests that a marriage in which partners cannot remodel aphorisms is a marriage in name only. The husband, like Len, is the one who deploys clichés, such as “Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. / But two that do can’t live together with them” and “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.” His wife’s estrangement from him is indicated not only by her refusal to alter his comments but by her refusal even to counter them with aphorisms of her own. Their marriage has collapsed to the point where she rejects what he says and his manner of speaking. Frost delights in embroidering discourse around the most unprepossessing materials. Some are commonplace, such as routine farm chores or a worn-out hired man. Others are nebulous: gleaming and transient whiteness at the bottom of a well; a distant light in a desert. His rumi- nating on these vague somethings is often paralleled by personae who contemplate the dead and their remains. If the remains are almost nil, as in “Ghost House” or “The Generations of Men,” it is up to the living visitor to imaginatively resurrect them. Indeed, the very contemplation of death (which might be said to be the ne plus ultra of imprecision, since we cannot be certain what, if anything, remains of the soul or consciousness after death) becomes a fruitful ground of speculation and invention. The ephemeral dead of “Ghost House” and “The Generations of Men” are fair game for fanciful recreation by later generations, and Frost does much the same with those who have recently passed on. One poem that demonstrates this is “The Black Cottage” (NB, 50–55). The narrator’s guide in the poem is a Christian clergyman. He introduces the narrator to the remnants of a life, the black cottage once the home of the widow whose husband “fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg.” The clergyman apologizes for not knowing which battle claimed the husband. “I ought to know—it makes a difference which: / Fredericksburg wasn’t Gettysburg, of course.” This somewhat casual aside touches on a signif- icant and perennial fact—time gradually erases our memory of history’s details. The unique knowledge of each generation ebbs away. The widow is no longer alive to tell us at which battle her husband fell, and when her children die there may be no one left who will remember. The clergyman’s admission anticipates the beginning of “Directive,” which takes 206 B. AHEARN us to a time and a deserted village “made simple by the loss / Of detail” (CPPP, 341). As if to compensate for this erosion, however, the minister recalls the widow and her cottage by rotating them through a variety of perspectives. Initially, he suggests that the cottage should be valued for being picturesque.

We chanced in passing by that afternoon To catch it in a sort of special picture Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees, Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass, The little cottage we were speaking of, A front with just a door between two windows, Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black. We paused, the minister and I, to look. He made as if to hold it at arm’s length Or put aside the leaves that framed it in. “Pretty,” he said.

The cottage, refreshed by the rain and surrounded by vegetation, looks worthy of inclusion in a Currier and Ives engraving or a print by Wallace Nutting. Rather than continuing in this vein, the minister next considers how the cottage and the widow are part of American history, specifcally the Civil War and its meaning, including the vexed question of race. The specifc signifcance of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg pales in comparison to the larger issues that engulfed the nation. The minister then diverges into a short commentary on the changes that have overtaken religion in the past century, and how his sermons, if they were to “please the younger members of the church” would gravely disturb the widow. He then waxes philosophic about “the truths we keep coming back and back to,” adopting a neo-Platonic stance. Finally, and extravagantly, he invokes an exotic Near Eastern scene featuring “Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly / Sand dunes held loosely in tam- arisk / Blown over and over themselves in idleness.” The minister has brought the widow back to life in the sense that her history can be connected to—become part of the context of—a rich variety of considerations. Details are and will continue to be lost; her sons will die and the clergyman will also. For the moment, however, what details remain can be used to recall the widow by aligning her with the larger sweep of history. We see, however, in the evocation of oases and sand dunes, the 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 207 widow receding into invisibility. The clergyman’s attempt to recover the departed is admirable in that it attaches her to a variety of mythic or aesthetic motifs but even as he does so, her identity diminishes. The clergyman’s narrative, or narratives, reclaims her only temporarily and sketchily. She is gradually dwindling into more and more of a “something.” In the long run, even the profound and powerful aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, or mythical frames that the clergyman manipulates may become lost to humanity. Thousands of years hence they could be no more recognizable than the curious markings visible on the stone in “A Missive Missile.” The nature of meaning itself may radically alter, as the puzzled interpreter suggests: “If only anyone were sure / A motive then was still a motive.” “Motive” is a Latinate word, the only one in those two lines. Frost’s verse strongly prefers that portion of English that stems from Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Consider, for example, “Into My Own.” It contains no words of Greek or Latin origin. We fnd none of those until the fourth poem in A Boy’s Will, “A Late Walk” (BW, 17). Its penultimate line, “Of the last remaining aster fower,” stands out because ‘aster’ derives from the Greek word for star. In the next poem, “Stars” (BW, 18), words derived from Latin are prominent: “congre- gate,” “tumultuous,” “fate,” “invisible,” and “Minerva.” It is also the frst poem in the collection that focuses on extremely distant objects. The four previous poems have been populated with woods, abandoned houses, felds, birds, and a bridegroom and bride. The noticeable increase in Latin elements suggests a linguistic distinction between the immediate and the remote. The Anglo-Saxon words common in everyday discourse are linked to objects near at hand. Distant objects are associated with words descended from Latin and Greek that are used for scientifc, philosophical and academic speculation. To put it simply, the more abstracted the poem becomes from the immediate physical object, the greater the tendency for the language to shift to the Greek and Latin end of the English spectrum. And the greater the abstraction, the greater the tendency toward imprecision that becomes diffcult or impossible to recast in articulate form. Another reason for Frost’s preference for the Anglo-Saxon side of English lies in its cooperation with the “sound of sense.” Since this portion of English vocabulary is closely allied to everyday speech, it more closely cleaves to the “sound of sense.” Multi-syllabic words rooted in Greek or Latin are more distantly related to the English sound of sense. If Frost is correct when he contends that every language exhibits its own 208 B. AHEARN unique sound of sense, then English words derived from Greek and Latin should be less amenable to inclusion in the English sound of sense. Their tendency to retain their own sound, perhaps due to the fact that traces of the “sound of sense” of ancient Greek or Latin still adheres to them, renders them resistant to changes in tone and infection. Even if they retain no remnants of the Greek or Latin sound of sense, it may well be that English has some diffculty in accommodating a word such as “tumultuous” into its sound of sense simply because the word would so seldom be used in speech. Frost’s examples of the sound of sense mostly use short, commonly spoken words, and even though he does not discuss how words derived from Greek or Latin ft into this sound of sense, the implication is that they do not ft well. In his demonstrations of how such simple words as “oh” fexibly offer different meanings as part of the sound of speech, Frost implicitly reserves such variety mostly for short Anglo-Saxon words. Words rooted in Greek or Latin would therefore display a relative rigidity, which may be associated with the “marble” of the statue of Minerva in “Stars.” That poem contrasts the eternal fxity of marble with the nearly liquid “snow, / Which fows.” Thus the stiff Greek and Latin element contrasts with the more fuid Anglo-Saxon. Frost further makes his point by using only Anglo-Saxon words in the phrase, “snow / Which fows.” It seems that the sound of sense inhabits, in all its variety, the short, more frequently used expressions. The sound of sense fows in, around, and through them because these short, common words are always fuently combining and recombining in the “cave of the mouth” (LRF, 1: 355). The cave of the mouth is at once the cave of one’s own mouth and the cave of all the mouths speaking one’s language. But articulation of the sound of sense has, for Frost, a defnite temporal limitation. Once English is so transformed as to be a dead language, the sound of sense will die with it. Meaning in its best sense— meaning that is inextricably part of the sound of sense—has a limited life span. Limitation itself is a common thread in Frost’s work, perhaps most explicitly in “The Lesson for Today” (CPPP, 318), which proclaims, “all ages shine / With equal darkness.” Frost’s sense of human limitation, and the means by which we deal with it, distinguishes him from Pound. Pound’s version of imprecision is basically a straying from a divine order, an order that is eternal. He strove mightily to repair such error, and if, as he writes in old age, he himself made errors in that effort, nonetheless the divine lives and acts eternally. Frost, however, sees the divine is a cultural construction that must vary 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 209 from eon to eon, and eventually die out when humanity as we recognize it vanishes. As Frost sees it, all things must pass, including the ways we have of responding to “something.” Together, Pound and Frost well represent the differing perspectives of the idealist and the skeptic.

Notes 1. Pound proposes a cure for the fight into abstraction. All assertions, statements, and claims must be checked against “the known objects or facts” (ABC, 26). Yet Pound implies that “objects” and “facts” are relatively plain and simple. His faith in their clarity glosses over the slipperiness of such terms. 2. One critic assumes Frost was “expressing his pleasure in the ‘something like’ of Einstein’s curved space” (Rotella 1987, 173). Yet A. S. Eddington, whose work we know Frost was familiar with, pointed out that merely to invoke “space” is problematic. Eddington says that it is “a rather vague term” (1921, 10). He also, in a chapter titled, “Kinds of Space,” notes that “curves in ordinary space … may be curved like a circle, or twisted like a helix” (91). As Eddington observed elsewhere, “The system of location in space, called a frame of space, is only part of a fuller system of location of events in space and time. Nature provides no indication that one of these frames is to be preferred to the others” (1928, 61). Given the existence of multiple “frames” of space and time, to speak glibly of “space” without further defnition does little to enlighten the reader. An expression which matches the vague “something” to a vague “space” falls into the category of the nearly useless. 3. See, for example, Poirier (1977, 266–267) and Douglass (1986, 171–172). 4. See Frost’s comments about Bergson in a letter to Louis Untermeyer in 1917: “You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate” (LRF, 1: 519). For Frost, Bergson was one of those savants who specialized in producing that which “didn’t quite formulate,” thus confounding orthodox scientists. Frost would have noted such Bergsonian statements as this: “Organic creation … the evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to a mathematical treatment” (Bergson 1913, 20). 5. Although Frost understands that meaning is composed of a variety of elements, in a 1915 interview he was quoted as saying, “the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively 210 B. AHEARN

familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed” (Frost 1966, 6) (my italics). 6. One critic shrewdly notes, “For Frost, the act of the mind seeks always a correlative in an act of the body. Physical motion is not progress; it may even be an illusion, but it remains for Frost the medium of which we must make the most” (Wyatt 1980, 88). My own view is that Frost’s poems often suggest that the act of the body enables the act of the mind. 7. One doubts whether whispering deserves to be included in the sound of sense. Could it be heard behind a closed door? Greg Kuzma, in a trenchant examination of “Mowing,” notes, “What is a whisper after all but strong breathy talk without a volume of sound, words that hiss with breath but have none of the personal tone by which we recognize voices” (Kuzma 2014, 17). To the extent that whispering stands for an indefnable communication, it provides even more matter for speculation than speech that partakes of the sound of sense. 8. That ominous phrase, “edge of doom,” sounds suspiciously like what Pound had condemned in his promotion of Imagism; it couples the concrete with the abstract. Pound’s introduction of Imagism preceded the publication of A Boy’s Will by a matter of weeks. 9. The end word in the preceding line, “gloom,” has a long poetic pedigree, starting with Milton. 10. On the same day (1 April 1913) that David Nutt issued A Boy’s Will, Macmillan published Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others. The coincidence of date and title word invites us to compare the two. James’s recollections defne his juvenile self as constantly in relation to the many “others” who impinge on his awareness. Frost’s boy prefers to regard others at a distance or not at all. 11. In a 1923 interview, Frost acknowledged that some of his critics objected to his narrow perspective. “Men have told me, and perhaps they are right, that I have no ‘straddle.’ That is the term they use: I have no straddle. That means that I cannot spread out far enough to live in flth and write in the treetops. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I am so ordinary” (Frost 1966, 48). 12. In a notebook entry, Frost suggests that a poem should not be too explicit because that would alienate it from the way in which humanity and nature habitually act. “Performance in poetry and in life is recognition and admission of the fact that things are not to be too well understood” (NRF, 658). 13. One critic fnds the opening scene alarming. “Frost’s wood is frozen, grey, and snowy, and by lacking clear defnition it threatens the absorp- tion or erasure of the self” (Doreski 1992, 36). What I emphasize, 4 ROBERT FROST AND “SOMETHING” 211

however, is the degree to which Frost fnds indefnition useful rather than threatening. 14. David C. Ward sees in the lines of trees an autobiographical signifcance. “It is irresistible to conclude that Frost, a man determined to make an impact on the landscape of American poetry, is confating the monotonous vista of the lines of trees with the forest of boring, repetitive verse produced by his contemporary Anglo-American writers” (2009, 14). 15. The most important studies are Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (2001) and Robert Bernard Hass, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Confict with Science (2002). 16. various comments by Frost speak to his desire to keep science in check. “Science is nothing but practical experience carried to a greater extent” (NRF, 378); “All science [is] domestic science” (NRF, 375); “Science is penetration and insight. It can’t go much ahead of invention and the uses we put it to” (NRF, 352). 17. “I Will Sing You One-O” was frst published in the Yale Review in October 1923. 18. “Desert Places” was frst published in the American Mercury in April 1934. 19. Robert Bernard Hass sees only defeat in the last stanza, since “the falling rhythms and faltering extra syllables of the last stanza betray the poet’s posturing as his confdence gives way to a more comprehensive fear” (2002, 99). 20. The balance of contraries was, as Frost critics have long observed, one of his favorite insights. When asked to defne poetry in a 1954 interview, he came up with an analogy. “It’s like a wild-game preserve … It’s where wild things live. This is the ultimate in poetry, and it has to be there” (Frost 1966, 137). The essential components of the analogy are double: wildness and a boundary that contains it. 21. Near the end of his life, in a 1960 interview, Frost expressed approval of cosmic arrangements. “Do you know what the sun does with the planets? It holds them and holds them off. The planets don’t fall away from the sun, and they don’t fall into it. That’s one of the marvels: attraction and repulsion. You have that with poetry, and you have that with friendships” (Frost 1966, 245). 22. “The Onset” was frst published in the Yale Review in June 1921. 23. The despairing metaphor beginning in line 7, “As one who overtaken by the end,” suggests the grim fate of the knight in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The reference to the “dark woods” also recalls the selva oscura in which Dante fnds himself lost at the beginning of the Inferno. The traces of literary allusion in “The Onset” are of two kinds. On the one hand we fnd faint echoes of Dante, Shelley and Browning. On the other hand are references that link this poem to other Frost 212 B. AHEARN

poems. This return of images from elsewhere in his poetry suggests that Frost wants to blend his literary efforts with those of past poets. Frost becomes a constituent in a community of poets, thus adding another layer of social bonding to the poem. 24. When speaking to students at the Browne and Nichols School on 10 May 1915, Frost used “Mending Wall” to illustrate a variety of tones of “live speech”: “challenging,” “threatening,” “playful,” “incredulous” (CPPP, 689). 25. The conclusion of the poem hints at one of the beliefs Frost mentions in “Education by Poetry”: “The love belief, just the same, has that same shyness. It knows it cannot tell; only the outcome can tell” (CPRF, 110). 26. See Frost’s “Letter to The Amherst Student”: “To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing” (CPRF, 115). 27. The spelling “Toffle” shows how his name (Theophile) is pronounced. One of the sly jokes in the poem is that Toffle’s unhappy fate indicates he is not loved by God or the gods. 28. E. W. Capron’s Modern Spiritualism (1855) reports that initial digging in the cellar of the Fox home in April 1848 was stymied by groundwater. Later attempts that summer, however, uncovered “several human teeth and a few bones, and some hair, which evidently came from a human head, although no connected bones or a skull were found” (Capron 1976, 53). 29. In an essay that brilliantly analyzes the poem as concerned with rhetorical and hermeneutic issues, Walter Jost notes, “The way he [Meserve] talks, its forms and conditions, is peculiar, even extraordinary” (1997, 35). 30. “The Axe-Helve” frst appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1917. CHAPTER 5

Marianne Moore and Ac-/cident

1 Precision à la Moore And I knew such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell, God knoweth). How that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. 2 Corinthians 12: 4–5

“We are striving always for that wh[ich] is unseen.” Marianne Moore’s entry for 3 February 1915 in her Religion Notebook (Rosenbach 1252/25 AMs 1914)

“I learn that we are precisionists,” declares Marianne Moore’s poem “Bowls.” Her critics follow suit, fnding it nearly impossible to write about her poems without recourse to “precise,” “precisely,” and “precision.” She herself frequently invoked the virtue of precision in her letters and such essays as “Feeling and Precision” (1944). She also deplored a want of precision. Moore had a sharp eye for the slovenly; we fnd her mentioning in a 1933 letter to Pound that a portion of one of his man- ifestos “lacks your characteristic economy and precision” (SLMM, 301). She was, however, quick to praise those whose style demonstrated clarity. When reviewing T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems in 1936, she found his “precision is precision as triumphing over vagueness” (Prose, 333), thus praising Eliot for clearing up an unnecessary muddle. Here “precision” connotes a necessary and meticulous accuracy. If scrupulous neatness of

© The Author(s) 2020 213 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_5 214 B. AHEARN expression was all that Moore meant by “precision,” we could end our survey of it right here. But Moore’s approach to precision is not that simple. Given the sometimes famboyant expressions found in Moore’s poems, we might suppose that “precision” could mean a sparkling display of vocabulary discovered while thumbing through an unabridged dictionary. In another essay, however, when she praises Pound’s “instinct for precision,” Moore indicates that precision need not be a deft jug- gling of unusual words, but may be a quiet mastery of common expressions. “One of his best accuracies, it seems to me, is the word ‘general’ in the sentence in which he praises ‘the general effect’ of Ford Madox Ford’s poem ‘On Heaven’—avoiding the temptation to be spuriously specifc … ” (Prose, 401). Precision does not necessarily mean searching for the more rarifed expression when a more common one provides the most accurate description. Oddly enough, someone whose verse scintillates with such terms as “charitive,” “glyptic,” “incandescence,” “half akimbo” and “equine monster” suggests that such words and phrases do not necessarily foster what we normally consider precision. Even a quite ordinary word can contribute to help us avoid the pitfall of the “spuriously specifc.” In short, precision need not be the province of uncommon words and unusual diction. Moore hinted at the complications surrounding precision in her 1931 review of Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, when she cited with approval Pound’s contention that “you can be wholly precise in presenting a vagueness” (Prose, 274).1 Moore concurs that not all subjects will admit of the same degree of precision. Certain states of mind, for example, cannot be portrayed as clearly as one would describe a glass of water. Moore’s 1958 essay, “Subject, Predicate, Object,” also warns that “Wariness is essential where an inaccurate word would give an impression more exact than could be given by a verifably accurate term” (Prose, 505). Artists should learn when to restrain themselves lest they fall into the trap of being “spuriously specifc.” We must not demand more precision than the subject allows. Moore goes further, however, by suggesting that certain aspects of the real must remain off-limits to the artist. She touches on this when citing Pound’s explanation that precision is possible when presenting a vagueness; she returns to it again in her 1937 review of Wallace Stevens’s Owl’s Clover. “We are able here to see the salutary effect of insisting that a piece of writing please the writer himself before it pleases anyone else; and how a poet may be a wall of incorruptibleness against violating the 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 215 essential aura of contributory vagueness” (Prose, 348). At times the artist must resist the temptation to falsely clarify this “vagueness.” Rather, he or she should serve as a “wall” that prevents others from unwisely doing so. Moreover, the wall that shields vagueness is partly built with words that are precise, whether those words be common or unusual. Paradoxically, precision can foster “contributory vagueness.” In her review of Eliot’s Collected Poems, “vagueness” signifed stylistic misadventure, the failure of the poet to select the defning word. But this other vagueness, the “contributory vagueness” is different; the poet must be no more precise than the vagueness will allow. Moore’s careful distinction that points to two different valences for “precision”—one of which connotes clinical accuracy, the other indicating well-warded mystery—represents in miniature a recurring feature of her work: its paradoxical shape. One the one hand her poetry is impeccably precise; on the other hand its meaning is often obscure. Her poems often delineate uncommon patterns and connections; they are also often reluctant to stipulate their meaning. Moore presents a complex, supremely variegated world, but refrains from dictating to the reader what to make of it. She falls on experience with gusto, but at the same time shows a countervailing diffdence about foisting judgments on the reader. Anyone familiar with Moore’s work will not be surprised that she could employ precision for quite different ends, thus guiding us gently into paradox.2 Sometimes, as in the quotation near the end of “Marriage” (CP, 62–71)—“Liberty and Union”—she inserts what others have said, but refrains from commenting on the strain that might result when the demands of Liberty chafe against the requirements of Union. At other points she observes how incompatible qualities can be united, as in the fgure of the woman in “Those Various Scalpels” (CP, 51–52) who resembles a “cathedral tower of uniform / and at the same time diverse appearance.” Similarly, we learn in “Novices” (CP, 60–61) that the artist is the “only seller who buys, and holds on to the money.” Paradox leaves the reader uncertain about which interpretation to select. For example, part of a line from “The Monkey Puzzle” (CP, 80) tells us that “it will not come out.” At frst glance we may presume that this phrasing expresses annoyance at the intractable mysteriousness of the Monkey Puzzle. It could, however, also signify frustration at the ineradicable tendency of the intellect to demand meaning from nature. “It will not come out” neatly exemplifes anyone’s response to (1) an object or animal that remains stubbornly inaccessible, or (2) a stain that persists despite our 216 B. AHEARN best efforts to expunge it. I will have more to say about the presence of paradox in Moore’s poetry, but for now it will be suffcient to take note of it and observe that paradox often occurs in religious discourse. In Paradox in Chesterton, Hugh Kenner refers to “an older tradition which fnds paradox in the deepest mysteries and is driven to paradoxical language in the simplest statements of what it sees” (1947, 5). As Kenner argues, Chesterton was driven to paradox because his fundamentally religious sensibility led him to perpetually contemplate “the nature of Being which is unresolvable” (23). Moore’s remarks about vagueness and the suggestion that some of its forms evade inordi- nately precise defnition could be limited to technical strictures regarding the judicious use of vocabulary. But they additionally suggest an analogy with the human relation to the sacred. “Vagueness” is sometimes a function of words; it is, however, also a permanent feature of the divine. As one of her favorite authors, Richard Baxter, remarked, “Infnite love must needs be a mystery to a fnite capacity” (1909, 51). But to what extent, if any, does Moore’s poetry refect a religious attitude? Her critics have given scant attention to this question.3 A mere handful have asked how her faith infuenced her poetry. For the most part, Moore’s critics assume that her religious self should be cordoned off from her aesthetic self. Perhaps this is a proper response, even though Moore’s library included fve Holy Bibles plus a copy of The New Testament in Basic English (1941). And maybe we should overlook the fact that an entry for 24 April 1913 in one of her religion notebooks (“Faith is believing at the last gasp[,] and hope isn’t hope until all ground for hope has vanished—”) turns up nineteen years later in “The Hero” (CP, 8–9) as “hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has vanished.” Yet there are further hints suggesting that we should take her religious beliefs into account. When “Bowls” frst appeared in print (Secession, July 1923), the line “I learn that we are precisionists” was slightly different: “I learn that we are precisians.”4 The term “precisian” arises late in the sixteenth century and refers to dissenting Protestants, among whom were the Presbyterians, the denomination in which Moore was raised and to which she remained faithful throughout her life. (The word could be spelled variously. Michael Drayton, in Polyolbion [1612], refers to “our Precisions.”) Non-conforming Protestants objected to religious traditions, ceremonies, and rules of church governance that they believed were not authorized by holy scripture. Hence their being “precise” meant that they cut off these allegedly 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 217 illegitimate aspects of worship because there was no warrant for them in the Bible. Baxter offered an example of the kinds of reproofs that such strict interpretation drew from others. “Now every old companion and every loose fellow is putting up the fnger, and beckoning us to sin, and we can scarce tell how to say them nay. What, say they, will not you take a cup? Will you not do as your neighbors? Must you be so precise? Do you think none shall be saved but Puritans? What needs all this strictness, this reading and praying and preaching?” (1909, 154–155). It is worth noting that for Baxter—and for Moore—being “precise” can mean not engaging in certain activities.5 Baxter the precisianist refrains from practices required by the established Church; Moore the precision- ist abjures the notion that fnding just the right word clarifes all that is vague.6 In both cases, a salutary restraint is in order, a restraint lacking in the individual criticized in “To a Steam Roller” (CP, 84), who lacks “half wit” and therefore crushes “all the particles down / into close conformity… .” Precision/precisian: the same word that directs us to Moore’s love of precision can also point to a religious dimension to her work. A devout Christian, Moore believed in the sacredness of religious mysteries and that mortals should approach them with awe and humility.7 On occasion, she detected such restraint in other poets, even those who, unlike Herbert, Hopkins, or Eliot, were not obviously pious. She points out in her 1964 review of Reuben Brower’s The Poetry of Robert Frost that Brower has underestimated the religious dimension to Frost’s poetry: “A ‘sober preference for not knowing too much’ was basic in him but did he not affrm the only wholesome thing? ‘The strong are saying nothing till they see’” (Prose, 586). Moore applauds Frost’s diffdence in the face of mystery.8 Conversely, she was quick to condemn poets who chose the wrong track to the divine. Years before, in 1915, she had condemned Yeats’s extravagant and unorthodox exploration of the esoteric: “To my disgust I learn that Yeats has interested himself in spiritualism and is busying himself about that to the exclusion of everything else” (SLMM, 101). Spiritualism holds out the promise of direct contact with the supernatural and, therefore, a sharper clarifcation of its mysteries. Her objection to Yeats’s approach to the great beyond invites us to speculate that she conceives of the divine as being necessarily vague, and that precision can be used in the service of that necessary vagueness. For Moore, it is a mistake to assume that a more precise defnition will dispel mystery. Rather, words may be most articulate when they abet mystery. 218 B. AHEARN

Here the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident proves useful. Roughly speaking, Aristotle’s division of realities posits that things in the world around us manifest height, weight, color, density, age, and the like. These are the accidental qualities. The substance, however, lies apart from these particular attributes. The substantial is the essential defning characteristic that exists apart from the accidental factors. Christian theologians, such as Aquinas, adapted Aristotle’s terms and made the material world the realm of the accidental; spiritual realities became the substantial.9 For example, in 1551 the Council of Trent affrmed that, “First of all, the holy council teaches and openly and plainly professes that after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly, really and substan- tially contained in the august sacrament of the Holy Eucharist under the appearance of those sensible things” (Schroeder 1941, 72). Accidental, “sensible things” ascertained by touch, smell, taste, and sight were irrelevant after transubstantiation. That legacy of distinguishing between the substantial and the accidental continues to be a powerful distinction in Christianity, and it helps us to clarify some aspects of Moore’s art. Her religious sensibility seizes on the observable since it is a manifestation of the divine.10 But that same sensibility recognizes the diffculty—in a fallen world—of perceiving and judging. Hence the degree to which her art balances (a) delight at the achievement of insight with (b) wariness about perceptions that are facile or erroneous.11 Moore can be seen as participating in a long tradition of Christian— especially Protestant—reading of the accidental for clues about the substantial Providence that lies behind it.12 Thus Robinson Crusoe deliberates about whether the intervention of Providence might be responsible for the English barley he fnds growing on his island. In colonial America, we fnd William Bradford, in his history of Plymouth Plantation, frequently discovering that what seem to be fortunate accidents are in truth manifestations of providential care. A late instance of such interpretations of accidents occurs in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901).

The following incident I have never related but once before, for the reason that I feared that people would not believe it. One morning I found myself in Providence, Rhode Island, without a cent of money with which to buy breakfast. In crossing the street to see a lady from whom I hoped to get some money, I found a bright new twenty-fve-cent piece in the middle of 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 219

the streetcar track. I not only had this twenty-fve cents for my breakfast, but within a few minutes I had a donation from the lady on whom I had started to call. (1901, 189)

Of course Washington’s comment about the incredulous response he might have received indicates how enfeebled had become the practice of seeing accidental good fortune as demonstrations of divine blessing. Plainly Moore’s poetry does not reveal a mind ready to accept accidental beneft as a clear sign of providential benefcence. Even if one regards the world as sacramental, this does not mean that all occurrences are to be taken as equally indicative of divine presence. As I shall hope to show, Moore practices a patient attention to phenomena combined with an equally careful scrutiny of the opportunities and pitfalls that attend human observation. She becomes a connoisseur of ways of seeing and understanding. Whether human concentration on the accidental leads to a grasp of the substantial is, however, uncertain at best. What do we make of Moore’s use of precision in light of the Aristotelian distinction between accident and substance? There are a number of ways in which precision seems to clarify the two. First, precision helps us to concentrate on the accidental. We can at least be precise about much of what we sense around us. At frst glance, this would seem to be an impediment to religious progress, which, after all, is directed toward the supernatural rather than the natural. But the case alters if one presumes that the accidental is the primary means—apart from holy scripture—by which we mortals gain some understanding of the substantial.13 This line of thought, for example, underpins natural theology. And, as we shall see, there is a place for natural theology in Moore’s poetry. Second, Moore uses precision to suggest that the accidental can sometimes point to a remote, substantial unity. Precision here often takes the form of suggestions or approximations of a dimly perceived unity. An acute perception of fragments can suggest the lineaments of the whole. Third, Moore sometimes uses precision to suggest vagueness. There is a moral dimension to this practice. Moore does not condone the pride that would assume it has grasped the substantial. Vagueness can be used to counter pride by suggesting how little we know; vagueness, to put it another way, promotes humility. In a fallen world, where precision of observation or demonstration is always limited, to depend too much on precision is to ignore the vagueness that perpetually shadows clarity. Fourth, precision also helps in the creation of paradox, a mode 220 B. AHEARN of understanding that shows how limited is our grasp of the substantial. Moore can precisely present two contradictory truths. We see in the precise delineation of accidentals two truths that are opposed, and we cannot select one over the other. Only in the mysterious realm of the substantial would they be seen as a unity. It may be objected that Moore’s poetry demonstrates a fne appreciation for scientifc discovery but has little to say about religious orthodoxy or dissent. Indeed, there are hints in Moore’s criticism that she associates cautious care about precise terms with the scientist’s devotion to accuracy. In her 1921 review of The Sacred Wood, she praised Eliot’s critical and “scientifc” approach. “Much light is thrown on the problems of art in Mr. Eliot’s citing of Aristotle as an example of the perfect critic— perfect by reason of his having the scientifc mind. Too much cannot be said for the necessity in the artist, of exact science” (Prose, 53). If we look more deeply into Moore’s appreciation of “the scientifc mind” we discover that one of the cardinal principles of scientifc pursuit, namely that there can be no end to our investigation of nature, has an analogy in theology.14 When Baxter took up the subject of natural philosophy, he pointed out that God’s handiwork is infnite.

How delectable is it to me to behold and study these inferior works of God, to read those anatomical lectures of Du Bartas upon this great dis- sected body, what a beautiful fabric is this great house which here we dwell in! The foor so dressed with various herbs and fowers and trees, and watered with springs and rivers and seas; the roof so widely expanded, so admirably adorned; such astonishing workmanship in every part! The studies of an hundred ages more (if the world should last so long) would not discover the mysteries of Divine skill which are to be found in the narrow compass of our bodies. (1909, 427)

Scientists and artists may produce ever more minutely detailed delin- eations of reality, but they can never exhaust Creation. In this respect, there is no confict between a religious and a scientifc approach. Both recognize the endless nature of elucidation.15 Where they diverge, however, is in the role the individual scientist or artist plays. The scientist selects an area of specialization and treads that narrow ground.16 This is one way to discern the lineaments of reality. The artist, however, casts a broad net and fnds nothing unworthy of attention. The frst person named in Moore’s Complete Poems is Dürer, to whom a desire to see 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 221 stranded whales is attributed. Of him and of all true artists it might be said that, in the phrase from “New York,” that “accessibility to experience” characterizes the artist’s broadly ranging eye. Such a general distinction (artists as omnivorous, scientists as tightly focused), however, is less important to Moore than the individual’s ability to delve into nature and emerge with a truth. Thus in “Rigorists” (CP, 96), Sheldon Jackson (1834–1909), Presbyterian minister and missionary, can “read in the reindeer’s face” the potential for their use by Alaskan natives. It is worth nothing, however, that Jackson stepped outside of his vocation (which he might have defned narrowly) to view from the perspective of animal husbandry those he hoped to evangelize. Moore’s poetry often privileges seeing over saying, and Jackson’s insight is an instance of this preference. What remains in doubt, however, is how well anyone can see or testify in a fallen world. It behooves us, then, to tread cautiously when in the presence of fundamental mysteries. Moore herself distrusts explanations that eliminate, subdue, or skirt paradox. Her fundamentally religious perspective sees life as a matter of questioning and assessing; we seldom arrive at unalloyed truths. Her poems refect this diffdent approach; they present the reader with options instead of affrmations. “Picking and Choosing” (CP, 45) exemplifes this tendency to leave the reader with choices. The frst two sentences make this clear.

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly, what one says of it is worthless.

That innocuous “it” causes just enough trouble. Does “it” refer to literature or to life? Subsequent lines do not help us to decide one way or the other. The poem’s assertion that “Literature is a phase of life” further complicates the matter by eliding the distinction between the two. After it subsumes “literature” under “life,” however, it undoes that categori- zation by focusing on the distinctive components of literature. Although the poem begins with the blanket term, “Literature,” it goes on to specify distinct forms of literature as practiced by the poet, the novelist and the critic. The poem itself commences with a style similar to that found in the familiar essay. It turns out that just as life has different phases, so does literature. Still another division, a pronominal one, appears when the poem praises Gordon Craig for his emphasis on his personal taste: 222 B. AHEARN

“with his ‘this is I’ and ‘this is mine.’” But the poem itself refrains from using “I,” preferring instead to speak with a communal voice, starting with “one” and ending in the second half of the poem with “We,” “one,” “us” and “we.” The poem opts for a variety of approaches rather than doggedly persisting with a single one. To put it another way, the poem advocates a broad rather than a narrow vision. Moore dislikes a too dogmatic, too orthodox approach. Of course, the preference to steer by one’s own light may lead one into the plight Swift satirized in “A Tale of a Tub.” By following one’s inner light one may lose touch with time-tested traditions. And there is always the danger that one’s inner light might not emanate from the divine but from a sinister quarter. Moore’s strategy for avoiding this problem may be skepticism of all zeal, even zeal that privileges Inner Light.17 Hence the continual cycling through pronouns such as I, we, us, one, in a bid to temper one’s own predilections by acknowledging the validity of others’. Moore privileges curiosity not just for its own sake but also for its tendency to defamiliarize and thus rout us from our complacencies. “Picking and Choosing” presents two opposed minds at work.

And Burke is a psychologist, of acute raccoon-like curiosity. Summa Diligentia; to the humbug whose name is so amusing— very young and very rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the top of a “diligence”!

Although the poem identifes Kenneth Burke as a psychologist, that identifcation should not be confused with the later contention in “Marriage” that “psychology, which explains everything, explains nothing” (CP, 62). One must distinguish between an “ist” (someone capable of fuently thinking and re-thinking) and a “logy” (which may ossify as a set of fxed principles). But the main thrust of these lines is that curiosity opens the mind to new perceptions. The incurious, however, when they approach new ground, fall into error. The novice translating Caesar has taken a word with a familiar meaning (a “diligence”) and superimposed its meaning on what appears to be a quite similar Latin word. The student has plastered what he or she already knows on something strange, rather than inspecting that strange word more closely and discerning its true nature. Moore would have as little respect for anyone who was satisfed with a dogmatic and infexible religion and who had closed his or her mind to any further alteration. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 223

Of course the same intellectual and artistic adaptability applies to Moore. Her frequent revisions to her own work demonstrate a reluctance to be satisfed with what she has produced. It parallels her conception of Protestantism, which, in an entry in her Religion Notebook 1913–1914 she characterized as “a belief in no institution as creed which is not in a constant process of disintegration [and] reconstruc- tion” (Rosenbach 1252/25 AMs 1914). It is also notable that her revisions were often deletions. She sometimes struck out whole lines in her poems. For Moore, revisiting her work became an opportunity for cutting out the unnecessary. Or, to put it differently, omission was an act of precision. Her famous comment, “Omissions are not accidents,” implies that the authorial restraint which takes the form of paring away the extraneous is not simply a mistake that occurs in the editorial process or at the printing house. “Accidents” in a poem can be compared to the accidental phenomena that are the penumbra of substance. Some accidental material that is too obscuring, or too feebly indicative of substance, may safely be discarded. Or it could be the case that she chooses to omit expressions that too rudely and directly impinge on the mysterious substance.

2 the Conservation of Mystery And he said unto them, unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. Mark 4: 11 To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

Although Moore’s poetry sticks in the mind partly because of its unusual words and phrases (“hypodermic teeth,” “basso-falsetto,” “sight- seeing hobo”), the titles of her poems are often commonplace: “The Fish,” “Style,” “Dream.” Sometimes the effect of the contrast between the outré vocabulary and the mundane title will be to call into question our understanding of the title word. The poems put pressure on conventional defnitions. We may come away from them less certain that the meaning we had taken for granted is adequate. One of her earlier poems, “The Fish” (1918) (CP, 32–33), is particularly curious about language 224 B. AHEARN and its limitations. After the Selected Poems (1935) has tallied a number of birds, including the Frigate Pelican, swans, and the Prize Bird of “To a Prize Bird” (CP, 31), it suddenly swoops down from air to ocean. We enter a realm that has been associated with the sublime since Longinus. Yet the poem does not approach the sublime in traditional fashion. Instead of invoking tempests or the sea’s vastness, the poem contents itself with a slow, gradual exploration of the near at hand. It does not rashly venture into the deeps, but rather dips its toe into the sublime. Yet even this tentative approach is enough to move the poem to a place where language fnds itself unhinged. (For Moore, the sublime and its effect is closer than we had presumed.) The poem’s leisurely underwater penetration into ever murkier regions produces a linguistic distortion. It is as if the refraction of light that displaces an object’s position in water has a linguistic analogy. Just as the observer on land who looks at a rock or a fsh within the water does not see its true location, so the landlub- ber attempting to speak of objects in the ocean cannot “locate” them as well as he or she could when speaking of terrestrial objects. English has a copious lexicon for describing the terrestrial or the avian, but falters when it tries to describe underwater phenomena. Our thesaurus of words for objects above and apart from the sea, even though fawed, has at least many more terms than exist for the underwater world. We lack the language of mermaids and mermen. In addition, mathematical specifcity departs from the poem quite early. In the frst stanza we fnd the word “one,” but thereafter the poem contains no more numbers. The increasing obscurity of the poem precludes numerical precision. Mathematics seems impotent in the face of submarine gloom. The poem initially treats the gap between terrestrial and aquatic defnition whimsically. “The Fish / wade / through black jade.” As Moore’s critics have remarked, fsh do not “wade.” Legs are required for wad- ing, and fsh are notably lacking in legs. The poem’s point of view at that moment appears to be landlocked, since it is creatures who spend all, most, or part of their time on land who have developed legs. Shortly after, the poem makes another point about the incompatibility of terrestrial terms when applied to the undersea world. It refers to the mussel shells as being “crow-blue.” The poem must resort to an avian color; it evidently knows no term for an aquatic color that fts. “The Fish” must borrow its vocabulary from the land to describe the sea. Such borrowing, however, comes at a cost. What we consider precise terms for objects in the surface world become distorted when applied to objects under the sea. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 225

The frequency of this borrowing also produces a high percentage of hyphens. The fanking poems of “The Fish” are “To a Prize Bird”— which has no hyphens (why would they be needed in a language that has a sophisticated terminology for domestic fowl?) and “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good And” (CP, 34), which has two hyphens. But “The Fish” has eight hyphens and three dashes, a striking contrast to the punctuation of the fanking poems. The hyphen becomes the signature punctuation mark of the poem because there is so much forced invention, or extension, of language beyond its familiar domain. After having borrowed color from the crow to describe the mussels— who live just across the border between land and sea—the poem continues this process. As the poem transfers names of color from land and air to delineate the undersea objects, it runs into diffculty. It begins to use categories from the land that do not ft well with underwater categories. Thus the “crabs like green lilies” are brought into focus in terms of a color borrowed from fowers, but the fact that lilies are rooted in place does not accord well with the mobility of crabs. If we glance back at the mussels, we note that the fxity of the mussels clashes with the aerial abilities of crows. Both similes are only partially successful. As the poem enters the sixth stanza it ventures into deeper waters and farther into linguistic obscurity. The more the light fades, the more words and phrases grow suggestive rather than tightly defnitive. The poem manages to seem specifc without actually being so. We are tempted to seize on these deceptive specifcs and see more than the stanzas allow. Thus critics of the poem are often divided about the exact nature of the object—the “defant edifce”— in the poem’s last three stanzas. Some see a reef; others see a cliff or a sunken ship. But how can there be a defnitive identifcation of the edifce when the focus is so blurry? The language of the poem occludes the edifce, keeping it vague. The end of the poem becomes a riddle.18 As the poem descends deeper beneath the waves, it also descends deeper into the origins of English literature. The end of the poem resembles an Anglo-Saxon riddle, the difference being that Anglo-Saxon riddles had satisfactory answers. The poem offers instances of order that entice the reader to expect a coherent shape for the “it” that lurks just out of reach in those last three stanzas. For example, we fnd that a preposition appears, is repeated, and then in turn is replaced by a different preposition that is repeated, and so 226 B. AHEARN on. The pattern is “through … through,” “on … on,” “of … of” and “on … on.” The repeating of prepositions is like the “Repeated / evidence” mentioned by the poem, repeated evidence that does not carry us beyond the evidence itself. (The repetitions mimic the ocean’s recurrences: one wave after another; tidal rise and fall.) It is not only objects that “slide each on the other”; parts of speech do so as well. Witness the slippage from “through” to “on” to “of” and back to “on.” This dynamic, however, pertains to an order that escapes our grasp. We cannot even be certain that “order” would be the correct word to apply. When the poem notes “All / external / marks of abuse are present on this / defant edifce-- / all the physical features of / / ac-/cident[,]” it even hints that something replete with accidental qualities must nevertheless point to the substantial, which remains tantalizingly evasive. The features of “The Fish” become even more distinctly indistinct when we compare it with its fanking poems, “To a Prize Bird” and “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good and.” “To A Prize Bird” seems to refer to a champion rooster.19 The poem takes for its subject a domesticated, fightless fowl. Here we have nature subdued to human requirements through selective breeding. So thoroughly is the bird a part of our domain that the poem even attributes human characteristics to it: “You know to think, and what you think you speak.” It has “much of Samson’s pride.” The poem emphasizes this attribute again, “Pride sits you well.” This second observation about pride rescues the bird from the danger of looking ridiculous. The tone of the poem is light, and nothing within its range is murky or dynamic. We are closer to the clarity, orderliness, and precision of still life, with the single command “strut” as the only indication of the bird’s motion. In fact, we do not see the bird strut; we only hear the command. The command itself, since it urges the prize bird to do what it often does, bespeaks a happy union of human intent and roosterly habit. The poem offers us a world in miniature where the human and the natural are happily married. In this and a few other poems, Moore keeps the mysterious under wraps. But this is the exception rather than the rule. One poem that most obviously explores our relation to and understanding of nature is “The Monkey Puzzle” (CP, 80). The poem begins by admitting its failure to specify the tree’s identity exactly; the tree is only “A kind of.” The poem seems slightly irritated by the tree: “it defes one.” Defance, however, implies a conscious resistance on the part of the tree, an attitude that can hardly be the case since vegetation does not 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 227 appear to have consciousness. The exasperation in “it defes one” stems rather from the longing to adequately encompass the tree and the subsequent frustration of that desire. Behind the exasperated tone lies the ambition to catalog nature. The poem’s remark that this is a place “in which society’s not knowing is colossal” suggests that the more appropriate attitude should be reverence, since mystery may contain something grander than we had supposed. Further consideration of the tree produces elements of paradox, such as its “complicated starkness,” which borders on being an oxymoron. The poem also remarks that “it will not come out,” meaning (a) the tree is so labyrinthine that it will not reveal itself to the examining eye, and (b) that the terms and analogies we apply to the tree fall short of defning it. As we have already seen, the phrase itself is paradoxical in a mundane way. “It will not come out” could be used to refer to something we cannot coax to emerge (a shy pup under the ottoman), but it also could point to something that we cannot get rid of (an indelible stain). Furthermore, the popular name of the tree is inappropriate since it is not puzzling to monkeys; the poem observes in its second line that the tree is “not of interest to the monkey.” When the poem concludes with the confession that “One is at a loss, however, to know why it should be here, / in this morose part of the earth,” the poem makes two points. First, we human beings, unlike monkeys (and, by extension, other sentient forms of life), are creatures who fnd that nature simultaneously invites and resists our curiosity. Second, we often tend to impose our human nature on external nature (as when we dub it “morose”). This second point leads to a further consequence. Insofar as we see a refection of ourselves when we look at nature, we are doomed never to see it for itself. Even when we suppress this tendency to fnd ourselves refected in nature, we habitually think metaphorically, thus defning the monkey puzzle tree by weaving a portrait composed of other parts of the world, both natural (it “is a tiger”) and artifcial (“glyptic work of jade and hard-stone cutters”). One sus- pects that the monkey puzzle tree represents nature itself, and that the poem gently admonishes us that we can never see the ding an sich. At any rate, the poem demonstrates that we habitually produce nature as a paradox, by combining parts of nature with portions of that which it is not (art). The utility of paradox as a token of the mysterious is also evident in “A Grave” (CP, 49–50), which appears about midway through the 1935 Selected Poems. It begins by noting a blocked view. 228 B. AHEARN

A Grave Man looking into the sea, taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself, it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you cannot stand in the middle of this; the sea has nothing to give but a well-excavated grave.

As with some other Moore poems, the title becomes part of the poem. Thus the title word “Grave” acts as both a noun and an adjective. The sea itself is the grave as burial place; the man is grave, suggesting a serious, sober interrogation of the sea.20 So the word combines the two major actors of the poem. As a noun it suggests an important aspect of the sublime, namely, the mystery of that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. As an adjective it implies the thoughtful human probing of matters that perpetually exceed our grasp. Another way of merging the two meanings would make the man himself a grave. In that case the poem would be echoing Biblical wisdom reminding us that we are dust and to dust we shall return. (Moore’s poetry often approaches the vicinity of religious aphorisms found in the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.) The poem takes a dim view of human ambitions, whether physical or intellectual. It reminds us that we cannot walk on water, as Jesus did: “you cannot stand in the middle of this.”21 Furthermore, one would be hard put to locate the middle of the ocean. Neither death nor the ocean happily accede to human demands for support or explanation. The poem points out a number of distinctions. It emphasizes, for example, the way in which the living prefer to ignore death.

the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others beside you who have worn that look— whose expression is no longer a protest; the fsh no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted: men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away— 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 229

The poem intimates that the fshermen’s labor distracts them from considering their workplace as a grave. Indeed, the poem at this point wants to remind them that “others beside you” have shuffed off this mortal coil. The rhetorical effect is comparable to that found in sermons on the theme of memento mori. Another distinction the poem draws is between humanity and nature at large. As it details the landscape of the poem, it presents nature as an entity that does not speak to us with requisite articulation. The “frs” lining the shore are “saying nothing.” Even the birds seem to mock human inquisitiveness about nature and death by “emit- ting cat-calls.” (That the birds sound like cats is another rude jolt to human expectations about how nature should behave.) The poem even regards the ocean as deceptive, since by the end of the poem it is “looking as if it were not that ocean in which / dropped things are bound to sink.” All in all, the poem could justly be read as emphasizing the gap between humanity and nature, a rift characteristic of humanity’s place in a fallen world. But is that the whole story? Although sometimes the poem points to the radical disjunction of humanity and nature, or humanity and the sublime, it also indicates moments of conjunction. One of these moments occurs as a homophone. The poem refers almost exclusively to the “sea.” Only in the last few lines does the poem use “ocean.” The choice of “sea” suggests a pun on “see,” a pun most detectable in the frst line, where we fnd the “Man looking into the sea.” Later the poem reverses the phrasing: “the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.” For much of the poem there is a large gap between “sea” and “see,” yet this opposition disappears on the level of sound.22 What we look at becomes identifed with the act of looking. Another instance of the conjunction of humanity and the sea occurs after the poem reminds us that the dead who have drowned or been buried at sea have been so dissolved that “their bones have not lasted.” Shortly after this stern reminder of the complete disappearance of these dead, however, we fnd the ocean’s waves delineated: “wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx -- / beautiful under networks of foam, / and fade breathlessly… .” While “phalanx” may strike us as a witty battlefeld reference to describe the advance of the waves, Moore has chosen a word that also has a precise anatomical meaning. It refers to the bones in the human hand. Bones that dissolved earlier in the poem have returned to grace the intricate wave formation. Humanity becomes united with nature by virtue of a common pattern. Also, the phrase “networks of foam” echoes the earlier 230 B. AHEARN mention of “men [who] lower nets.” In short, this section of the poem reverses the poem’s tendency to differentiate between humanity and nature; now there are indications of likeness between the two. The second description of the ocean, as we have seen, has the ocean “looking as if,” echoing the frst use of “looking” in which it was a man doing the looking. Also, in the middle of the poem the “men who lower nets” are “unconscious” albeit working, and in the end of the poem we hear of “dropped things” sinking “neither with volition nor consciousness.” Thus the state of not being conscious constitutes something common to the living and the dead. The poem wants to have it both ways; it notes the separation of humanity from nature and at the same time hints at ways in which they coincide. Paradoxically, we are both separate from nature and not. There is still another interpretation of the poem. In this reading the poem’s comments about nature and humanity would not be so much about differences and similarities, but about the mind’s predilection for seeing or making patterns. In this light, when the mind grows dissatis- fed with a universe composed of disconnected entities, it detects similarity in the midst of differences. The poem would therefore indicate that the mind, rejecting chaos, habitually perceives connections and patterns.23 The larger question is whether this tendency connects us to the divine. Perhaps when we face the sublime we either see or create patterns of connection, thus mimicking the comprehensive consciousness of God. Proponents of natural theology were accustomed to seeing, as William Paley put it, “the display of contrivance” as the means by which “the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity could be testifed to his rational creatures” (2006, 27). If one takes contrivance in nature as evidence of divine existence, one could also see a refection of divine ordering in the mental powers of those “rational creatures.” Coleridge suggested as much when he famously declared in the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, “The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the fnite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infnite I Am.” As above, so below. More sophisticated renditions of natural theology than Paley’s locate echoes of the divine in language itself. Thus in late Victorian England we fnd a refutation of the Darwinian universe (in which there is no apparent need for God to intervene) in Frederick Bateman’s Darwinism Tested by Language (1877). Bateman located divine infuence in the very nature 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 231 of language. He contended that nothing in the natural order of animal, vegetable, or mineral phenomena could account for so complex, so variable, and so intangible an instrument. Bateman concluded that language did not originate in the brain; rather, it must be a gift from God.24 More recently, Rowan Williams has also argued that we need not scrutinize natural structures to fnd traces of God’s benefcence. Our capacity to communicate, however, has a highly signifcant relation to the divine. “If our speech,” Williams suggests, “is consistently opening out on to the horizon of further questioning, we can begin to see how this trajectory, for practical purposes unlimited in prospect, may carry with it a shadow of the image of an infnite fow of activity characterized by what we can only think of as generosity. Or, in other words, the indeterminate diversity of representational possibility points us towards an abundance that is always bound up in understanding, always rooted in the intelligible, and also active in bestowing its activity on and in what it is not. The schema that is called up as these considerations are spelled out is, ultimately, that of an unlimited intelligence and love” (2014, 32). A similar appreciation of language as an emanation of the divine would help explain why Moore uses it as a precise instrument, thus celebrating this divine gift.25 Yet to quickly apprehend the operations of the divine in language smacks of vanity. Such a consideration would help explain why she so often refrains from being explicit and obvious. Moore would humbly recall that the human intellect hardly matches divine wisdom. We are in the vicinity of paradox once again. While language may point to divinity, it also may mislead us. If we wish to emphasize Moore’s doubts about the effcacy of language, we need look no further than “England” (CP, 46–47), which points to a variety of cultural and linguistic prejudices and biases. The poem’s frst line, with its comment about England as the home of “baby rivers and little towns” mimics the voice of someone who is excessively proud of such grand rivers as the Ohio and the Mississippi, and boasts of the swelling populations of Dubuque, Sacramento and Cleveland. As it proceeds, however, the poem switches voices to acknowledge the crit- icisms of foreigners commenting on America, which has “no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions; / the wild man’s land; grassless, linksless, languageless country.” This resembles a condensed version of the many British commentaries on American lacks, disparaging lists once famously imitated by Henry James in his study of Hawthorne. “No proof-readers” charges Americans with carelessness and extravagance. 232 B. AHEARN

“No digressions” points to American bluntness. “Grassless” suggests the view of America as wildly forested; it also implies American carelessness about lawns in contrast to English meticulous care for the greensward. “Linksless” decries a lack of American social and institutional ties, compared to the links associated with an established Church, a monarchy and an aristocracy. There may also be a note of condescension in the suggestion about a dearth of golf links in the United States. “Languageless” points out that the tongue of most Americans was imported from elsewhere. The poem’s middle section turns from these provincial judgments and instead foregrounds language differences as barriers. “The letter a in psalm and calm when / pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable, but / why should continents of misappre- hension / have to be accounted for by the fact?” The poem, having established that quite considerable opportunities for misunderstanding exist between cultures, nations, and languages, then proceeds to point out that even within languages different dialects and accents produce divisions. Precise use of one’s local discourse, it turns out, can frazzle communication. People are notably absent from “The Fish,” and “The Monkey Puzzle” emphasizes that the tree exists in a place (both literal and fgurative) where “society’s not knowing is colossal.” But other poems, such as “A Grave,” show that Moore is intrigued by the ways in which humanity itself reveals the mysterious. This is the case with the second poem in Selected Poems (1935), “The Hero” (CP, 8–9). The poem calls the roll of dead heroes: Joseph, Cincinnatus, Regulus, Washington, Moses. Most of them are long dead; none are contemporary. So far as the poem is concerned, it appears that the hero lives in the past. There may be some in the future, but the poem reserves judgment about merely potential heroes. Thus the poem does not detect heroic behavior in present actions; it recognizes it only in retrospect. It seems there are no contemporary heroes. To put it another way, the heroic cannot be defned by invoking indisputable examples from here and now. This abstraction from the present therefore renders heroism remote and baffing. The poem exemplifes the gap between the heroic and the quotidian by indicating that the “decorous frock-coated Negro” assigned to answer visitors’ questions at Mount Vernon speaks “as in a play.” The heightened formality of his appearance and the emphatic artifce of his performance accentuates the divide between everyday life and General Washington. Washington, an iconic fgure, can only be indicated by forms of behavior 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 233 that are expressly not routine. In the absence of the heroic Washington, he can only be summoned by enacting a ritual performance.

“Gen-ral Washington there; his lady, here”; speaking as if in a play—not seeing her; with a sense of human dignity and reverence for mystery, standing like the shadow of the willow.

Yet other details in the poem belie the notion that the hero, the heroic, and heroism lie far beyond everyday life. For one thing, the poem points out that we do not always recognize heroism.26 It may instead be taken for egotism or stubbornness. In the case of Joseph, the poem mentions he was “vexing to some.” He was particularly vexing to his brothers, who did not consider him especially blessed. But Moore does not limit her “some” only to them. It could include anyone who refuses to credit others as having a dash of the sacred. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, everyone possesses some degree of the sacred. It is called the soul. Moore’s own letters, moreover, hint her dissatisfaction with those who show insuffcient respect for souls. She wrote to Hilda Doolittle on 27 March 1921 to fault Robert McAlmon for a “lack of reverence toward mystery” (SLMM, 149). She then adds, “a failure to understand human dignity.” Does this imply a connection between Moore’s conception of mystery and her view of morality? It seems that those who discount mystery fail to understand the true dimensions of the human. “The Hero” does link a reverence for mystery and a respect for human dignity. The guide, when invoking General Washington and Martha, although “speaking / as if in a play,” exhibits a “sense of human dignity / and reverence for mystery,” the very qualities that Moore specifes in her letter. And it is worth emphasizing that the artifce of “speaking / as if in a play” is the means through which the sense of human dignity and reverence for mystery is accomplished. The poem raises the possibility that the heroic, due to its fundamentally mysterious origin, can inhere in anyone. Since the heroic does not originate in breeding, training, or any circumstance subject to statistical analysis, then anyone could conceivably display heroism. The last stanza of the poem depicts the hero as “brimming with inner light,” the source of which lies beyond our comprehension. When the last stanza 234 B. AHEARN of “The Hero” avers, “Moses would not be grandson to Pharaoh,” it implies a refusal by the hero to look to an earthly pedigree, however lofty, as the origin of the hero’s being and concerns. Moore further emphasizes the possibility that anyone can be heroic by following Joseph, Cincinnatus and Regulus with “Pilgrim having to go slow / to fnd his roll.” Throughout Pilgrim’s Progress, apart from the title page, the protagonist is consistently named Christian. By emphasizing “Pilgrim” instead of “Christian,” Moore broadens the possibility of heroism even beyond Christians. A pilgrim could be someone of almost any faith. So the poem pushes the potential for heroism beyond Bunyan’s dissenting Protestants to include everyone. Dissenting Protestants, to the extent that they emphasized God’s mysterious providence, opened the way for a radically democratic ethos. Bunyan’s response to being arraigned for presiding over “unlawful meetings and conventicles” in 1660 indicates how frmly he believed that the fundamentally mysterious workings of the spirit transcended orthodox customs, practices, and texts. The prescribed prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, he testifed, “was such as was made by other men, and not by the motions of the Holy Ghost, within our hearts” (1966, 118). By spurning those texts, Bunyan showed himself to be a precisianist and a champion of individual autonomy. Unimpeded autonomy freed the soul to merge with God. “The Hero” can be read as a response to a question arising in the poem preceding it, “The Steeple-Jack” (CP, 5–7). The poem notices the student, Ambrose, and the steeple-jack, but none seems to fully represent the heroic. Given different circumstance, the student might become heroic, and the steeple-jack risks his life as part of his job, but neither he nor the student has—so far as we can tell—committed himself to a higher calling. The heroic also seems merely implied by the “three-masted / schooner on / the stocks.” It is hard to imagine how heroic action could occur on a ship stuck fast on land. The schooner becomes the index of absent heroism in this town. Yet the poem insists that “The hero, the student, / the steeple-jack, each in his way, / is at home.” We can readily see how the student and the steeple-jack could be at home in the world described in “The Steeple-Jack,” but only when we read on into “The Hero” does it become clear how the hero can feel at home there. He or she might be unrecognized, but that would not mean there was no possibility for heroism. (The link between the two poems is also made by their references to “hope.” It is the last 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 235 word of “The Steeple-Jack,” and recurs in “The Hero”: “hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has / vanished.”) Our uncertain grasp of heroism even when it manifests itself should engender a deep humility as we face the mystery of its origin. It is not surprising that the poems that fank “The Hero” in the Complete Poems invoke settings (ocean and desert) that are associated with a category where heroism may be readily found: the sublime. “The Hero” also takes us into the Gothic (“deviating head-stones”), a genre traffcking in the sublime. But it gradually works its way away from the Gothic to the quotidian, making sure the reader understands that the sublime is not a rare phenomenon, but always present. Generally speaking, Moore’s critics treat her use of the sublime as if it were a purely literary or philosophical concept. They do not see any point in invoking its religious face. This is rather peculiar. Since the early eighteenth century, literary critics had pointed to Milton as exemplifying the inspiration a writer could draw from sacred texts. As David B. Morris observes, “Especially among the educated, who published and read the criticism of Paradise Lost, Milton’s characteristic sublimity seemed inseparable from his Christian subject” (1972, 45). But because Moore does not overtly engage with sacred writing in the same way that Milton or other “religious” authors did, it is generally presumed that the religious sublime has no bearing on her art. At the same time that Moore in these early poems in Selected Poems (1935) asks the reader to see the potential infuence of the mysterious, the sublime and the transcendent on our daily preoccupations, she is also clearly concerned with how such an understanding relates to behavior. Hence the emphasis on moral failings in “The Steeple-Jack.” The town contains no designated hero, but offers a “ft haven” for “presidents who have repaid / sin-driven // senators… .” Of course the town at the moment contains neither heroes nor villains. It is like life itself, where moral extremes are seldom experienced at frst hand. Our moral choices are typically on a smaller scale. Yet just because we are not frequently faced with crises of conscience does not mean our daily decisions are negligible. Heroism can take place on a reduced scale. Moral questions are also raised in “The Jerboa” (CP, 10–15), and in part they revolve around forms of governance. Moore not only fnds heroism possible on the scale of daily life, she sees that there is no facet of existence where it does not apply. In this perception she agrees with a contemporary theologian she read and with whom she corresponded, 236 B. AHEARN

Reinhold Niebuhr, who insisted, “every religious problem had ethical implications and every ethical problem had some political and economic aspect” (2015, 26). Moore would extend that list to include the arts as well. The frst part of the poem, “Too Much,” points to ancient civiliza- tions—particularly Egypt—where the few ruled the many. The poem indicates that this model of governance parallels Egyptian attitudes toward nature. Just as other human beings are “lesser” than the ruling class, so all other beings are inferior. The twelfth stanza even equates the mass of the population with inanimate tools: “Those who tended fower- / beds and stables were like the king’s cane in the / form of a hand.” Furthermore, Egyptian and Roman artistic perspective rests on a simple and pervasive distinction between large and small. The frst work of art the poem mentions is a diminutive bit of nature made large, a representation of a pinecone “with holes for a fountain.” This particular object that “passed / for art” suggests a large/small dichotomy evident elsewhere in the ancient world. We hear of “colossi,” “small eagles,” and “small frogs.” “The Jerboa” implies that a civilization that bases its art on size, whether infating or defating objects, will also be a civilization that regards human beings in gradations of worth, ranging from Pharaoh or Caesar down to slave, and organize its politics accordingly. The poem thus obliges the reader to note the analogies between art, politics, and morality. It also observes that those who “understood making colossi” were the same people who knew “how to use slaves.” Such an observation clinches a connection between ancient morals and ancient art. The title of the frst part of the poem—“Too Much”—suggests that humanity loses sight of the divine when it enjoys too much prosperity. Worldly comfort distracts us from otherworldly truth. The poem’s second half turns its attention to a member of a nomadic tribe, residents of a landscape notably lacking in “plenty.” Jacob sees in the desert “steps of air and air angels.” This vision is signifcantly vertical because the perspectives in the frst half of the poem are basically horizontal. The Egyptian/Roman imagination appears limited to the diminution or enlargement of what one sees daily—the commonplace objects around oneself. But Jacob’s vision transcends the quotidian, and his vision of steps, air, and angels requires a vertical scale. The poem thus refects a common Christian warning about the temptations associated with the here and now: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the fesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 237 world” (1 John 2: 16), and a countervailing remedy—faith in a supernatural redeemer.27 And in the poem’s second half, the word “free-born” (the antonym of “slave”) appears. The vertical vision, an Old Testament vision that transcends the quotidian, is now associated with the rights of the free. The poem equates freedom with a new morality transcending the visible world. It is also clear that not enjoying plenty was the necessary condition for Jacob’s vision. One may lament dearth and tribula- tion, but what we perceive as lack or suffering may be the very measure God doles out to make our salvation possible.28 The fgure of the Jerboa unites two of the poem’s concerns: one’s relation to the divine and the ideal of political freedom. In the frst instance, the perfect adaptation of the Jerboa to its seemingly inhospita- ble habitat represents the dream of returning to an unfallen world, distinguished by a seamless relation between self and world. In the second instance, the Jerboa also embodies freedom, since the Jerboa is called “free-born.” (Moore was not the frst to associate the Jerboa with liberty. Paul Revere published an engraving of the Jerboa in 1774, the same year in which the British Parliament passed the coercive Boston Port Act, a response to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773.) The Jerboa (who is also linked to “the blacks”) becomes an image of free action. The Jerboa, rightly understood, might be an indicator of divine moral intention, an intention that prefers to see human freedom develop over time. This possibility of course raises the question of whether and to what extent we should look to such natural phenomena as Jerboas for affrmations or indications of divine power. Is there a use for natural theology? Before we can grapple with that question, however, we must frst ask whether Moore thinks human beings are astute readers of nature.

3 estimation Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight. The Wisdom of Solomon 11: 20 Without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live. Nietzsche29

Although Moore clearly appreciates the usefulness of the specifc and the precise, she also recognizes their limitations. To some extent, she uses accuracy to reveal its own shortcomings. Thus far we have looked mainly 238 B. AHEARN at her sometimes skeptical approach to words. There is, however, a tendency on Moore’s part to question numbers as well as language, and she often does so simultaneously. This claim may seem strange in light of the fact that she often practiced the syllabic counting of lines to form stanzas unique to each poem. We might conclude (rashly) that this technique affrms Moore’s faith in arithmetic. It would be more accurate to say that she employs numbers when she can keep them under strict control. (The fact that she never repeated the same numerical scheme also suggests she was not aiming to create a syllabic formula that could be used by other poets.) The way her poems refer to numbers, however, suggests they should be used with caution. The frst three stanzas of “The Steeple- Jack,” the poem that begins her Selected Poems (1935), and which still came frst in her Complete Poems (1967) are dotted with numbers: “eight stranded whales,” “One by one in two’s and three’s,” “a twenty-fve- / pound lobster.” The most striking use of number occurs in the second stanza. Here the poem attempts to count seagulls in fight.30

One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep fying back and forth over the town clock, Or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings--

The counting of the gulls proceeds in a deceptively simple fashion, echoing the elementary enumeration of one, two, three. Yet the phrasing of “one by one in two’s and three’s” seems self-contradictory. If each gull is going one by one, evidently in single fle, how can they simultaneously be going by two’s and three’s? One is not two, nor is it three.31 (Except in Christian doctrine regarding the Trinity.) Nonetheless, the phrasing captures the fuid and constantly shifting arrangement of the members of the fock as they maneuver “around the lighthouse.” Occasionally the whole fock may alter so that individual gulls stand out one by one, but in a few moments they band together in smaller focks, which, in turn, disperse. In order to capture this shifting change, the poem needs to disrupt the simple order of one, two, three and our habit of counting in a simple, straightforward fashion. We are obliged to revise our verbalization of numbers at work in order to adequately mimic the fuidity of gulls in fight. A new calculus is required. That which seemed to be elementary and stable as simple arithmetic has turned out to be limited in its application. The use of specifc numbers here contributes to a necessary vagueness, a vagueness at odds with both the lighthouse (with its 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 239 regular light pulses) and the town clock. The poem, which seemed to begin so confdently with numbers, has rapidly skidded into uncertainty. If “The Steeple-Jack” has some diffculty with numbers when faced with gulls sailing around a clock, at least it can confdently deal with objects at rest, such as the whales on the strand or the hefty lobster. It seems that when numbers are attached to the sedate, all is well. We suppose, therefore, that we can venture into the still life of “Nine Nectarines” (CP, 29–30) with confdence.

Arranged by two’s as peaches are, at intervals that all may live— eight and a single one … .

“Arranged” suggests a mathematical plotting in nature, the kind of pattern that a student of natural theology could point to as evidence of divine purpose. After this satisfactory tallying, however, the stanza goes on to observe that sometimes “the opposite is seen-- / nine peaches on a nectarine.” However skilled we may be in manipulating numbers, we cannot predict what will grow from the pit of a peach or a nectarine. The tree that results from the planting of a peach will produce peaches or nectarines. The same holds true when we plant the pit of a nectarine.32 Nature evidently does not distinguish between these two similar fruits, or at least does not distinguish them the same way our language does. While the poem can match mathematics with a static image, a rift has opened up between what nature does and our expectations of what it will produce in future. Whereas the problem with the gulls was ftting numbers with a present pattern, the diffculty here is that present numerical order gives no assurance of its future content. Nature seems to have a mathematic, but one which does not always coincide with ours. At the end of the frst stanza, the poem subtly refers to another instance of a problem we are now familiar with: language has trouble accommodating itself to nature. The coloration of the leaves on the porcelain is “green or blue or / both, in the Chinese style.” The poem recognizes that the Chinese do not make the same distinction between green and blue that prevails in the West. In China they are considered different shades of the same color. Western names for colors may seem “natural,” but they are as culturally determined as any other names we apply to the natural world. The poem implies an analogy between the way language handles color and the way nature handles the peach and 240 B. AHEARN the nectarine. Language, or at least the English tongue, prefers to use two words (peach, nectarine) for what nature seems to regard as a single fruit. Similarly, English employs two words (green, blue) where the Chinese can be content with one. Who is correct? Is nature wrong when it treats peaches and nectarines as the same? Does language then correct this mistaken confation? To complicate matters further, the shadow of the tower of Babel falls over the poem as it then designates some of the different names that correspond with the natural object: “peach-nut, Persian plum, Ispahan / secluded wall-grown nectarine” and the Chinese word Yu.33 Not only does the poem question our use of numbers, it also adverts to a familiar trope: the gap between nature and language. If nature comes from the hand of God, then our fallen language can only provide a distorted version of nature. In Moore’s poetry, divine ordination can be only partially recovered. She presents a world of incompleteness, as hinted at by further details in “Nine Nectarines.” We desire wholeness, but we get only portions of a whole. So the leaves of the tree are “crescent,” a “half-moon leaf-mosaic,” and subject to “curculio,” a weevil that leaves a crescent-shaped mark on the leaves. The stress on the crescent and the half-moon emphasizes the absence of the full moon. The poem intimates that we cobble together our perceptions from disparate, barely compatible (or apparently incompatible) pieces. Thus the poem fumbles while trying to describe the animal painted on the porcelain. The kylin looks like an “unantlered moose or Iceland horse,” and in the last stanza becomes a “common / camel-haired unicorn / with antelope feet and no horn.” A unicorn with no horn is of course something else, which the poem cannot or does not name.34 It passes over that conundrum in silence, merely using part of the unicorn as a detail contributing to a composite that approximates the kylin. These details remind us that the speaker of the poem approaches the kylin with a Western education. Kipling was wrong. It is not the case that East and West shall never meet, but that their meeting results in a unique amal- gam that is neither the one nor the other. We can discern a quadruple implication in “Nine Nectarines.” First, our faith in numbers may be exaggerated. Second, each culture and its language has its particular perspective. Third, no culture has a comprehensive and accurate view of reality that would be comparable to the divine view. Fourth, the combination resulting from the mixing of cultures produces a melange because we cannot match the divine view 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 241 of the created world—in which all is one. Yet this last thesis should be qualifed. It may be that an excessively strange vision is in fact the closest approach to the divine that mundane existence allows. The poem’s account of the kylin should not be summarily dismissed as a farrago of unrelated parts. We need only consult the Book of Revelation for similarly odd creatures. The ecstatic vision of the saint could be related to the version of the kylin offered in “Nine Nectarines.”35 The seventh poem in the Selected Poems (1935) likewise uses numbers and a variety of names. “The Frigate Pelican” (CP, 25–26), as the frst stanza tells us, can also be a “hell-diver, frigate-bird, hurricane- / bird,” although it may be that “swift is the proper word / for him.” Yet the reader may be excused if he or she lacks confdence in this maneuver. For example, the suggestion about using “swift” deliberately overlooks the fact that the word has already been used for birds of the family Apodidae. After considering this list of names, the poem resorts to defning the bird in terms of its aerial feats; the succeeding stanzas simply refer to it as the “frigate-bird.” The poem also turns its back on modes of interpretation that would attach the bird to traditional cultural symbols. The poem leaves behind such appellations as “hell-diver,” which would link the bird to the association early Christians made between the pelican and Christ, the Harrower of Hell. Instead, the poem prefers to identify the bird by what it does. If terminology perplexes the poem, at least it refrains from attempting to assemble the Frigate Pelican from a variety of other mythical or actual animals, as was the case with the kylin. The poem also scrutinizes the Pelican through two speculative frames. We hear the voice of the naturalist telling us of its feeding habits, of its aerodynamic ftness, and that it nests in a mangrove swamp. The poem also briefy introduces the voice of the literary scholar, who observes that the Pelican is not quite the “stalwart swan that can ferry the / woodcutter’s two children home” in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. This is a negative defnition, one that hints at the diffculty of defning the Frigate Pelican in satisfactory terms. The rift between humanity and the Frigate Pelican is also suggested by the poem’s use of numbers. The specifcation of “two” children is shortly followed by “one sheep” and a bit later by the observation that the Pelican “glides a hundred feet.” The difference between one and two and a hundred suggests the extent to which the Frigate Pelican evades our grasp. The association of “one” and “two” with birds and animals that serve human needs hints at how rudimentary is the human 242 B. AHEARN understanding of or mimicking of natural confgurations. The inimita- ble “marvel of grace,” the “majestic” Frigate Pelican, glides above the human sphere. The Pelican achieves unthinkingly in its very nature what human beings aspire to but cannot achieve, a fact suggested at the beginning of the poem. The Pelican “realizes Rasselas’s friends’ project / of wings uniting levity with strength.” “The Frigate Pelican” explores human limitation in the face of nature. As the poem confesses in the fourth stanza, “the unconfding frigate-bird hides / in the height and in the majestic / display of his art.” The obvious avian contrast to the Frigate Pelican among the early poems is the artifcial swan described in “No Swan So Fine” (CP, 19). In this short poem, numbers appear again. In addition to being an artifact, the swan was the property of, or at least became associated with, “Louis Fifteenth.” (The poem makes a small point about the king ending up as an adjective useful in the history of aesthetic taste.) The last sentence of the poem, “The king is dead,” is of course open to various interpretations, but one of these could well be that the elegant culture and art of the eighteenth century are no match for a living swan. Thus the title of the poem, which initially seems to rate the artifact more highly than its living counterpart, turns ironic. The cost of being fner than the living being is to be forever immobile. That which is dead, or never lived, is much easier to measure than the bird in fight. It is worth noting the extent to which Moore relies on the fact that “one” can be a reference to the self as well as a word selecting a particular item out of several. The swan, an artifact, is the “chintz china one.” Is the failure of numbers to offer a comprehensive view of the universe tantamount to the clogs that hamper any individual? Is that fate of being “one” the fate of separation from a supernatural arithmetic? In the book of Daniel we hear that Daniel’s interpretation of the writing on the wall is that “God has numbered thy kingdom, and fnished it” (5: 26), but it seems doubtful that God’s mathematic is the quite the same as that of fallen humankind. For that matter, Genesis mentions Adam’s god-given power of naming, but says nothing about a god-given power of counting. In the frst books of Genesis, counting is what God does in parceling out the seven days of Creation; mortal arithmetic, like mortal speech, represents a shoddy version of divine ordering.36 Numbers beyond seven occur only after the Fall. Our survey of Moore’s use of number should not overlook the third poem in Selected Poems (1935), “The Jerboa” (CP, 10–15). Rather than 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 243 displaying number at its beginning, as in “The Steeple-Jack,” it is stingy with numbers until its end. Until then it only pauses to note the “jas- mine two-leafed twig.” The grandeur of two ancient empires—Egypt and Rome—does not interest the poem enough to venture into the realm of numbers. The last two stanzas, however, saturate the Jerboa with numbers.

By ffths and sevenths in leaps of two lengths, like the uneven notes of the Bedouin fute, it stops its gleaning on little wheel castors, and makes fern-seed foot-prints with kangaroo speed. Its leaps should be set to the fageolet; pillar body erect on a three-cornered smooth-working Chippendale claw—propped on hind legs, and tail as a third toe, between leaps to its burrow.

As Moore scholars have long noted, the observation that the Jerboa moves by ffths and sevenths becomes more signifcant when we consider that the frst two lines of each stanza are fve syllables long and that the last line of each stanza is seven syllables long. Also, the poem is in two parts. So Moore draws a connection between the progress of the Jerboa and the structure of the poem. One might almost say that the poem honors the Jerboa by adopting its numerical identity, that Moore wants to infuse the poem with quintessential aspects of the Jerboa. “The Jerboa” bears some interesting similarities to—and equally interesting differences from—“The Steeple-Jack.” The static use of number in stanza one of “The Steeple-Jack” (“eight stranded whales”) is mir- rored by the static use of number in the fnal stanza of “The Jerboa” (“three-cornered … third toe”). “The Jerboa” arrives at a happy con fuence of number and object. Furthermore, where the phrasing of “one by one, in two’s and three’s” muddles the relation between number and the gulls, “The Jerboa” has no such diffculty assigning a number to the movements of the Jerboa. Numbers usefully connect the Jerboa to art, although the poem specifes the art of music, where “The Steeple- Jack” emphasized the visual arts. References to music are rare in Moore’s 244 B. AHEARN poetry; we should therefore pay close attention when they occur. The poem has associated the Jerboa with the desert, but not just any wasteland. The Jerboa exists in a realm where visions of the divine are possible, and music has long been considered akin to the universal order. As Dryden put it in “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687), “From harmony, from heavenly harmony / This universal frame began,” and at the advent of the Last Judgment “The dead shall live, the living die, / And Music shall untune the sky!” The Jerboa’s leaps, translated to music, suggest it fts with the intentions of the Creator. It may be signifcant that the numbers associated with the Jerboa do not go beyond seven, the highest number that God found suffcient for his week of Creation. Furthermore, the triumphant use of number as the poem sweeps to its conclusion, demonstrates that numbering itself is a paradoxical enterprise. On the one hand it can amount to a clumsy attempt to enumer- ate nature (as with the gulls), but on the other hand it can be presented as a way to accurately gauge nature, in this case in the form of the Jerboa. Or at least numbering works so long as we have only a single Jerboa in view. Human manipulation of numbers on a large scale produces in “New York” (CP, 54) a phenomenon we might call statistical chauvinism: “it is not … / that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe.” Here the poem lightly touches on the ways in which nations, in this case the United States, pride themselves on statistics refecting increased economic production and fnd in those numbers a warrant for asserting greatness. “New York” to a small degree anticipates what a later poem, “In Distrust of Merits,” will amplify: a deep mistrust of nationalism. Indeed, Moore seems to look askance at collective action on a mass scale.37 The poem specifes certain numbers, but not large ones and certainly not with respect to mass production. The poem’s numerology shows a bias for the aesthetic and the zoological when it refers to the fur with “the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt.” In this description, numbers help identify the particularity of a natural object; moreover, this scrutiny does not amount to self-congratulation. No industrial or governmental enterprise produced that pelt. What one may make of that scrutiny the poem does not say. Moore seems to fnd it suffciently satisfactory to divert attention from statistical praise of American resources. She avoids leading the reader to a certain conclusion; to do otherwise would be inconsistent with her respect for religious and political freedom of conscience. Her approach suggests modesty; 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 245 she does not deem herself divinely inspired to reveal the Creator’s will. Instead she gently directs her readers away from unproftable avenues of thought. There is one Moore poem that specifcally takes up the matter of precision numbering, “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” (CP, 115–116). The poem begins as if it merely intended to report the latest development in accurate timekeeping. If it were to continue in this vein, it would accomplish little more than the leafet issued by the Bell Telephone Company that inspired the poem.38 Instead the poem quickly expands to include journalism, zoology, and Greek myth. As is common with Moore, cultural data do not exist in isolation. Human concerns typically branch out and become entangled with one another. This is why Moore distrusted self-contained explanatory disciplines. Such systems enable regularity, classifcation, and exact denomination, but at the expense of neglecting connections and links that, if considered, might disrupt the assumptions on which the systems are based. The middle of the poem turns to one of the basic axioms of science: “Repetition, with / the scientist, should be / synonymous with accuracy.” The sentence reminds us that one of the foundations of modern science is repeatability. Experimental results can only be confrmed when a subsequent trial using the same parameters produces the same results. The poem further explores this standard of repeatability in modern science. In the last stanza the poem invokes the myth of how Jupiter was rescued from being devoured by Chronos. The poem implies that this ancient myth begets one of the founding myths of modern science. That is to say, science and mathematics (Jupiter) contest the eradicating power of time (Chronos) by turning time into a continually repeating series of numbers. Repeated annihilation is reconfgured as infnite addition. The modern conception of time as endlessly repeated identical punctuation supports all the other differentiations that modern science discovers. The ancient trope of time as destructive has been replaced by a new one; cumulative, scientifc time becomes the basis for the proliferation of knowledge. Chronos represented constant destruction, modern science represents constant addition. Addition can take the form of ever more discriminatory parsing of time and ever more accurate measuring of temporal intervals. Once that is achieved, further scientifc dividends follow. The version of modern time as one that fosters the discovery of differentiations may also relate to the poem’s glance at language. 246 B. AHEARN

The poem observes that fne discriminations in sounds and phrasing (hinted at in the euphonious title of the poem) are essential to the articulation of meaning. The poem hints that both modern science and language share this dependence on distinction, although there is a bare- ness and simplicity about temporal distinction that pales in comparison to that of language. Or the poem could be hinting that the structure of language itself gave the hint to science about the importance of fne distinctions in time. If so, then numbers are the progeny of language, not its master. There is a suggestion of such an interpretation in a note in Moore’s hand that appears in a manuscript version of the poem. “Kronos in the later G[ree]k mythology, owes his very existence to his son, namely to Zeus Kronion, Kronion meaning the son of time” (Rosenbach Series I, box 2, folder 8). Moore’s source is Max Müller’s The Science of Language.39 Moore evidently saw in Müller’s comment the subordination of Kronos to Zeus. Numbers are useful to Moore because they lead to concerns beyond their local use in the poem. They serve to point up the limitations of human perspective and endeavor, but they also lead to a threshold where recognition of those limitations may suggest or intimate contours of reality at the edge of our capacities. When the precision of numbers fails us, we encounter territory where imprecision and novel amalgama- tions—however awkward or bizarre—point to powers and presences we only dimly perceive. Thus our numerical estimations (and other kinds of estimations) contribute as much by their inadequacy as by their potency. Moore’s poetry suggests our capacity to grasp realities, but also how those very means we use in grasping have their limitations. Her poetry offers hope for something more than we already know, so long as we keep in mind how limited are our means. Numbers are both useful as links to or between other forms of understanding than the mathematical, but they are also useful as a reminder of how far our forms of understanding fall short of being comprehensive. Moore’s treatment of forms of estimation, of which numbers are one component, suggests both the failures of such forms as well as their successes. Humans inhabiting a fallen world will inevitably fall short of apprehending the divine, but at the same time, we can say that the attempts to apprehend it are indicative of the struggle toward the divine. And any instance of that struggle can be deemed a cause for hope. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 247

4 footprints of the Creator I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of his Shooe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my Foot too. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part (1684)

“What see you when you get there?” asked Edwards. “Creation!” said Natty. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Karl Pearson described science as no more than “a classifcation and analysis of the contents of the mind” (1937, 49). He also stipulated that the physical characteristics of the human body both permit and restrict our capacity for understanding. As Pearson put it, “For the same two normal human beings the organs of sense are also machines of the same type and thus within limits only capable of conveying the same sense-impressions to the brain. Herein consists the similarity of the universe for all normal human beings” (45). Pearson’s description of science and the means by which humanity comprehends nature suggests both possibilities and impossibilities. On the one hand we can use our reason to endlessly organize, catalog, dis- till, theorize, and test what our sense-impressions convey. On the other hand, we can never determine why the universe exists. The question of purpose is ruled out as unanswerable. Moore’s Christian faith rebels against such a dead end. Although her work evinces a deep awareness of human limitations (in science and in other felds), it also frequently suggests that human experience exceeds Pearson’s mechanical registration and consideration of sense impressions. Her poetry often intimates that there is a supplement to sense-impressions and consciousness, an addition that points to the divine. (It would not be surprising if Moore saw the sin of pride in Pearson’s assessment that humanity—despite its limitations—possesses the highest form of consciousness in the universe.) Her model of how the mind works when confronting the universe makes room for something more than Pearson’s bleak portrait of the intellect imprisoned in the body. But before we take up that something more, it is necessary to emphasize once again Moore’s frm refusal to dismiss the limitations of human observation. She often calls into question our ability to see the world around us, much less the lineaments of the divine. She herself might call this Christian humility. There are various 248 B. AHEARN poems by Moore that take up the matter of limitations. We have already seen how Moore notes that language itself, supple and comprehensive as it is, can often fail us, a point Moore presses—as we have seen in “The Fish.” The poem following “The Fish,” “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good and” (CP, 34), immediately refers to the divine, “the gods,” in its initial quotation from Turgenev. In this case, however, “the gods” are contained in a literary text that is imported into yet another literary text—the poem. This should ensure their reduction to manageable size. But are the gods congenially present to humanity? The frst two stanzas of the poem hint at a problem Pound addressed in “The Return,” namely, how does one go about ftting the gods into a literary frame? Do they lend themselves to the same descriptive terms found in a still life or in the genre of animal portraiture? Evidently not. The discussion in “To a Prize Bird” suffced for a visible, tangible domesticated fowl, but this poem cannot bring the same perspective to the gods. So the poem differs from that about the prize bird, and shares with “The Fish” a high degree of obscurity. The poem does not clearly explain who these gods are nor what it means for them to have “revolved upon the axes of their worth” as if they were lumps of clay on a potter’s wheel. (The poem could be hinting that the gods in question are false gods, made by man—the hand of the potter—rather than vice versa.) The poem also presents without elucidation the “polished wedge / that might have split the frmament.” This resembles Zeus’s lightning bolt, but the poem never clinches that identifcation. Furthermore, this potentially powerful wedge echoes the mysterious “wedge / of iron” mentioned in “The Fish.” Both wedges are treated as formidable; both wedges escape precise defnition. The poem stipulates, however, that the wedge “threw itself away / and falling down, conferred upon some poor fool, a privilege.” The tone of voice here mixes the dismissive (“some poor fool”) with the respectful (“conferred … a privilege”). The point may be that the entrance of the divine into human perception is often mistaken for the advent of the inferior. Only a few recognize its superior origin. In Roman Catholic tradition, the Virgin Mary makes a habit of appearing to “poor fools.”40 This could be considered appropriate, since God chose her rather than someone of higher social standing to bring Christ into the world. The “poor fool,” tells “tales of what could never have been actual.” These are markedly different from the “drawl / of certitude.” The sublime makes little room for certitude. What can 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 249 be convincingly demonstrated to every reasonable person has the defect of being far removed from the divine, since the divine exceeds rational defnition. The sublime would therefore welcome the poor fool whose “by- / play was more terrible in its effectiveness.” So the three poems have marked a progression. “To a Prize Bird” displays nature domesticated and made useful and explicit. “The Fish” shows nature escaping our understanding. “In This Age of Hard Trying” draws out attention to someone whose attributes seem at least partly in touch with the sublime—as represented by those mysterious gods. What has been lost in precision has been more than compensated for by a nearer approach to the divine . In his Critique of Judgment Kant defned the sublime as that which “cannot be contained in any sensible form” (1992, 99). He maintained, however, that although we feel frustrated when we realize the failings or limits of reason, there is a recompense. At least we recognize that we have the power of reason. Much as she admires the power of reason, there are various passages in Moore’s poetry that seem to mock it. Consider, for example, those phrases in “The Fish” we have already noted, such as the sober comment about “repeated evidence.” “The Fish” displays the trappings of reason but little comes of them. Moore quietly intimates that we should be cautious in our celebration of reason and its fruits, however impressive those rational victories may be. A misleading triumph of reason appears in a poem from 1916 that comes near the end of Selected Poems (1935): “He Wrote the History Book” (CP, 89).

There! You shed a ray of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so terrifc, that I have been dumbfounded by it oftener than I care to say. The book? Titles are chaff. Authentically brief and full of energy, you contribute to your father’s legibility and are suffciently synthetic. Thank you for showing me Your father’s autograph.

Moore’s note to the poem tells us she adapted her title from a remark made by the small son of the distinguished historian, Charles McLean 250 B. AHEARN

Andrews (1863–1943). Andrews taught at Bryn Mawr when she was a student there, and in the autumn of 1906 she took his course in Medieval History. Moore’s critics agree that the poem calls into question assumptions about masculine authority, a pertinent reading since the writing of history, initiated by Thucydides and Herodotus, was predominantly a masculine enterprise well into the twentieth century. The galaxy of renowned historians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is telling: Gibbon, Macaulay, von Ranke, Michelet, Parkman, Henry Adams, Dilthey—not a woman among them. It seems that the precincts of historical investigation were jealously guarded against female encroachment. Yet the poem is also a telling jab at human pretension. The poem seizes on the article “the” that the child uses so innocuously. Too young to realize that there is more than one history, or version of history, he also seems oblivious to the fact that there can be more than one book about history. The chance remark by the son is the “ray of whimsicality.” The son bespeaks intellectual inquiry that would proffer its conclusions as unerring and indisputable. “Profundity” wearing the guise of absolute certainty has made Moore “dumbfounded” (speechless) “oftener than I care to say.” Her witty comment about being speechless more than I care to say underscores the fact that Moore does have things to say, but feels speechless before intimidating professional authority. A keyword in the frst stanza is “mask.” It helps the poem make a distinction between profundity and the appearance of profundity. (If we ask how to know genuine profundity when we see it, the poem does not respond.) There are also other meanings for “mask” lurking. It could be the word “the” itself, insofar as the defnite article precludes (a) other possible or potential versions of the truth or (b) rival authorities. At the end of the poem, when Moore thanks the boy for “showing me / your father’s autograph,” we see that more is meant than the boy’s act of showing her his father’s signature in the book. The boy himself is also the father’s autograph, not only genetically but also in terms of attitude. The boy’s naïve and complacent belief that his father has written the one and only history book suggests that he has observed in his father an air of assured mastery.41 The poem serves as a light reproof to human pretensions, specifcally to professional and masculine assumptions of authority. The brevity of the poem indicates how easily such claims can be punctured. When Moore takes up more general human approaches to the world, however, the poems are longer. The testing of our attitudes, reasoning, and 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 251 assumptions also makes the poems denser. In them, Moore often uses the sublime as a medium against which the intellect pits itself. It is also the case that while such poems present the limitations or blinders common to human perception, they also begin to hint at the ways our perceptions may carry us to the threshold of insight. This paradoxical mixture of (1) delight in language and Creation, combined with (2) mistrust of too facile a comprehension, is evident in “An Octopus” (CP, 71–76). This poem, like “A Grave,” surveys a sublime landscape. The title of the poem puts us momentarily in the vicinity of the ocean, but we are quickly transferred to terrestrial sublimity in the shape of Mount Rainier. The poem never refers to the mountain by that name, which commemorates a British admiral who never even saw the mountain. Instead, the poem warns us to be wary of presuming we can know the mountain: “Completing a circle, / you have been deceived into thinking that you have progressed.” And there is a further warning about our misplaced confdence in our own powers of estimation; the poem shows slight regard for computation. Early in the poem numbers are invoked as gestures of defnition: “twenty-eight ice-felds from ffty to fve hundred feet thick.” Numbers continue to be scattered ftfully through the poem, but without much emphasis, and without seriously helping to defne the mountain. Mathematical ordering hardly encompasses it. Still other descriptions early in the poem stress the limitations of our approaches. For example, we fnd at the end of the frst sentence that the glacier possesses “unimagined delicacy.” “Unimagined” strikes an equivocal note. One the one hand it suggests a way in which the mountain surpasses our conceptions. On the other hand it holds out the tentative promise that an exploration of the mountain may be an adventure in re-education or newly refreshed imagination. As in “A Grave,” Moore once again offers two sides of the coin of paradox: human separation from nature, but also the potential we have for reconceiving our relation to nature. Another equivocal remark appears in the fourth sentence. We fnd that the “rock,” the base for all the living and non-living features of the mountain, is “recognized by its plants and its animals.”42 Presumably, the humans perusing the mountain are tardy in achieving this recognition. But it could also be said that this phrasing indicates a convergence of the human with the natural, since recognition can be taken as a sign of consciousness shared by all things. We may need to expand the defnition of recognition so that it includes the totality of 252 B. AHEARN objects in the universe. What an astronomer would call the gravitational effect of the moon on the tides we might redefne as the recognition of the moon by the sea. By subtle shifts in vocabulary the poem opens up unforeseen conceptual vistas. Earlier we recalled that the sublime can be associated with divine mysteries. “An Octopus” muses on such mysteries, especially that of the consequences of the Fall: we are natural beings but not one with nature. Moore considers the Fall more bluntly in this poem’s companion piece, “Marriage,” but it also appears in “An Octopus” in various guises. Sometimes it peers out in the form of the effects of gravity, as in “the water drips down,” “the waterfall that never seems to fall,” or “rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak.” The last word of the poem is “waterfall.” One of the consequences of the Fall was the separation of human consciousness from the rest of the created world, and we fnd that rupture is another of the poem’s subjects. Yet, as in “A Grave,” the poem hints at correspondences uniting human activity and human consciousness with the landscape. We fnd, for example, that the glacier is “Deceptively reserved” and that the needles of the larches are “polite” because they allow sunlight through to their neighboring needles. The glacier and the larches do not have language as we understand it, but perhaps our terms can be appropriate when we lend them to nature. When we do this, as the poem does here, we may be echoing Adam’s power to name, a power uniting language with nature. But does our naming of nature amount to only a solipsistic gesture? We are apprised of the “Goat’s Mirror,” a lake whose name suggests that humans habitually look at nature and see the content of their intellects refected. This hint about seeing ourselves in nature is confrmed by what follows: “that lady-fngerlike depression in the shape of the left human foot / which prejudices you in favor of itself / before you have had time to see the others.” What more could a stalwart believer in Creationism ask for than the visible record of the Lord’s massive foot? These lines become especially signifcant in light of Victorian controversies about the meaning of the geological record. The reference to the “depression in the shape of the left human foot” recalls the arguments of those who found in that record the signs of divine creation, rather than merely natural alterations. The terrain of “An Octopus” is partly lit- tered with relics from nineteenth-century controversies about the meaning of nature. Hugh Miller’s Foot-Prints of the Creator: Or, the Asterolepis of Stromness (1849), attempted the refute the arguments for creation 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 253 through natural processes offered by Robert Chambers in Vestiges of Natural Creation (1844), a work Miller deemed “unfortunate in its facts, and not always very happy in its reasonings” (1849, viii). When considering the fossil bone of the ancient and extinct fsh, Asterolepis, Miller worried that recent trends in geological history would “fain trans- fer the work of creation from the department of miracle to the province of natural law, and would strike down, in the process of removal, all the old landmarks, ethical and religious” (36). It seemed that the rising tide of materialism would erase any divine footprints in the sands of time. Miller also contended that assigning the origin of life on earth to purely natural changes could not account for the introduction of an immortal soul. “And thus,” he concluded, “though the development theory be not atheistic, it is at least practically tantamount to atheism. For, if man be a dying creature, restricted in his existence to the present scene of things, what does it really matter to him, for any one moral purpose, whether there be a God or no?” (39). He argued that the geological record showed that the history of the globe was basically a series of stages in which the Creator was preparing it for the habitation of humanity and its immortal souls.

When the coniferae could fourish on the land, and fshes subsist in the seas, fshes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a ft habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully prepared for him,-- when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fxed and certain,-- the reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative fnger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiseled deep in the rocks. It fur- nishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation;-- these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to Him only. (313)

For Miller, the natural record shows the effects of divine intervention, but cannot tell us how or why the Creator works these miracles. We may safely assume that Moore was cognizant of the arguments for and against natural theology. As the daughter of a devout Presbyterian and the sister of a Presbyterian cleric she could hardly have avoided being aware of them. Moore’s familiarity with controversies associated with 254 B. AHEARN natural theology may also be inferred from the fact that “An Octopus” begins and ends with a description of a glacial feld.43 During the nineteenth century, a number of authors argued that God directly intervened in geological formation and deformation. In doing so, they frequently pointed to glacial action as one of the primary instruments with which the Creator made the earth ft for humankind. David Page, in his book, The Earth’s Crust: A Handy Outline of Geology (1864), mentioned that as part of this process of development, “in mountain regions, where glacier and avalanche accumulate, these, after grinding and wearing, discharge their disintegrated rock debris into the glen and valley below” (1864, 16). For Page, God was sculpting the earth on a grand scale. In this case, He was making valleys suitable for human habitation. Page commented that there was no doubt that the study of geology offered “to the theologians new evidence at every turning, of creative wisdom, goodness, and design” (121). Two decades later, Agnes Giberne, in her The World’s Foundations or Geology for Beginners (1882), expanded on the glacial means by which the Almighty shaped the globe, but cautioned that a fundamental mystery remained.

It seems a tremendous supposition that, after the prolonged ages already described of soft and warm climates over all the earth, even within the Arctic circle, there should have come a period of such amazing cold, as to bury Canada and a great part of the United States, Scotland, Switzerland, and a great part of France and England, under enormous glaciers, branch- ing in all directions, spreading through thousands of miles, covering all lower heights, and reaching two or three thousand feet up the sides of mountains. But on the other hand, although tremendous, it is not impossible. ‘Nothing is impossible’ with God. And as at present we know of no other possible cause for these strange facts and appearances, the glacier explanation is accepted as in all probability true. Another thing that we do not know is how this great change in the climate of the earth came about. By ‘how it came’ I am not questioning the fact that it came straight from God. But it is usually His will to work by means; and what means He employed to bring about the change we cannot tell. (1882, 193–194)

Other geologists were not persuaded that glacial action proved that God was sculpting the face of the earth in order to provide suitable accom- modations for the human race. They contented themselves with discussing how glaciers behaved. Their treatment of glaciers is refected in 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 255 such factual details as the poem records and which we have already cited: “comprising twenty-eight ice-felds from ffty to fve hundred feet thick.” Yet one wonders if another description of the glacier suggests a designer behind nature: “Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus.” The question of how Moore’s poetry might refect an interest in natural theology is complicated by the fact that the central document of the Presbyterian church, the Westminster Confession of Faith, begins by pointing out that there are multiple forms of divine instruction.

Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable, yet are they not suffcient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation. Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the fesh, and the malice of Satan and the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.44

The pious Presbyterian would have to accept the proposition that components of the natural world “manifest the goodness, wisdom and power of God.” While it is likely that Moore, who greatly respected scientifc acumen, would have no brief for Miller’s Creationism, it is also true that, as we saw earlier, she believed that science, religion, and politics were related. While she would not assent to Miller’s conclusions, she would be attracted to his linking of science with morals. (The problem of how to retain a robust ethical regimen absent an active deity was a key concern for proponents of natural theology.) Like Miller, she sees one world composed of interdependent parts, whether those parts be material or immaterial, natural or divine. She would have found more attractive the arguments of those Creationists who pointed to human intellectual power as evidence for the existence of God. Even before the publication of Vestiges of Natural Creation, such an argument was suggested by Henry Fergus. In his Class Book of Natural Theology (1838), he remarked, “To accustom ourselves to recognize the hand of God in the appearances of nature and the events of providence, to observe the adaptation of parts to each other, and the combination of means for 256 B. AHEARN the attainment of ends, is an exercise worthy of the high faculties which our Maker has bestowed upon us, and cannot fail to promote both our intellectual and moral improvement” (1838, vii–viii). Thus natural theology includes the operations of the human mind. God’s plan included more than just physical design; it also extended to the acute analyses that humanity would bring to that design. The difference between Fergus and Moore, however, would be that Moore would fnd more attractive the second part of Fergus’s proposition—the operation of the mind as a refection of divine intention. The pursuit of natural theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was characterized by the study of matter and its arrangement, but underlying that study was an assumption that material phenomena would confrm orthodox conceptions of God. Its proponents began with a metaphysical map and proceeded to select those aspects of nature that seemed to ft the contours of the map. Furthermore, the fact that science had yet to determine a great deal about the natural world was dismissed as not relevant. As Paley put it, “True fortitude of understanding consists in not suffering what we know to be disturbed by what we do not know” (2006, 43). Believers were to proceed with the faith that any future revelations from science would only provide further proof of the wise benefcence of the Lord. The assurance of the confrmed believers in natural theology would strike Moore as complacent. She distrusted any orthodoxy so rigid and domineering that it inhibited further illumination. She showed a lively sense of the competing claims of different truths. In a letter (2 September 1921) to Robert McAlmon she stipulated, “Religious conviction, art, and animal impulse are the strongest factors in life, I think, and any one in the ascendant can obliterate the others” (SLMM, 180). The intimation here is that sanity in mortals requires that fundamental human proclivities be maintained in equilibrium. An approach to nature that privileges a narrow religious interpretation would be unbalanced. We should therefore prefer a reading of nature that does not force it to conform to our notions of divine activity, but rather a reading that unsettles and jostles our tendency to see what we expect to see. Such an approach would help liberate us from staid preconceptions. And perhaps this jostling of our assumptions is in the end a better path to a dim appreciation of divine power at work. God is more than we know, and more than we can know, but there are degrees of knowing. On the other hand, of course, the danger of too much free thought has its own perils. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 257

In either case, we can expect to fnd in Moore’s poetry little that constitutes absolute conviction, even though she understands the yearning for such conviction. A seemingly innocuous aside near the beginning of “An Octopus” suggests the poem’s fascination with the mind’s desire to reconcile differences, even opposites, as it gropes for a higher synthesis. The poem describes the icy reaches of the glacier as being like “glass that will bend—a much-needed invention.”45 God, as Augustine and Aquinas maintained, is the single unifed Being. The soul’s bliss is to participate in that being. As Augustine indicates, “Further, the soul itself, even though it may be always wise—or it will be, when it is set free for all eternity—will be wise through participation in the changeless Wisdome, which is other than itself” (1984, 441). The soul’s desire for union with the divine propels the mind’s pursuit of ever higher syntheses. This pursuit aligns us, or potentially aligns us, more closely with the divine. In the case of bending glass, the mind wishes to combine the paradoxical opposites of stiffness and pliability while retaining translucence. We do our best to reconcile the discordant categories of our fallen state. Of course the danger exists that the attempt to see opposites reconciled runs the risk of applying a human bias that may not be a facet of nature or the divine. The human desire to see unity may be no more than that—a human desire. As the poem observes the lake of the Goat’s Mirror, it warns that the detection of human form in nature (“lady-fngerlike depression … left human foot”) in this instance “prejudices you in favor of itself / before you have had time to see the others.” We should not be too quick to see—or suppose we see—before we judge. The poem cautions restraint. Moore is unwilling to go so far as Emerson did, when he wrote, “There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, ft. This design following after fnds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row” (1903–1904, 12: 10–20). We have drawn close to a familiar paradox. One the one hand, we worry that humanity only sees refections of humanity when it looks outside itself. On the other hand, our human traits are the only instruments we have at our disposal to grasp what is outside ourselves. For that matter, these traits are all we can use when we turn our gaze inward. (Seen in this light, the two companion poems, “Marriage” and 258 B. AHEARN

“An Octopus” represent different emphases on the paradox. “Marriage” deals largely with human considerations about humanity. “An Octopus” fnds humanity trying to look outside itself.) The word “see” acquires weight through repeated use in the poem. It evokes a familiar theme: the desire to see nature truly and, if possible, to see evidence of the divine in nature. One passage suggests our proclivity for seeing nature in terms of human defnitions: “‘thoughtful beavers / making drains which seem the work of careful men with shovels,’ / and of the bears inspecting unexpectedly / ant-hills and berry-bushes.” But having reminded us once again of the human tendency to see itself refected when looking at natural activity (beavers are like men), the poem points out a possible means of escape from this house of mirrors. It mentions that the bears inspecting ant-hills and berry-bushes are unexpected. Either the human watcher was surprised to see them interested in ant-hills and berry-bushes, or the observer was not expecting to see the bears so suddenly. The poem implies that natural activity can expose the falsity of our expectations about how it functions. Nature, like that restless “Something” that keeps disrupting Frost’s wall, keeps deviating from models we apply to it.46 The introduction of the bears into the poem also suggests another way in which humanity can avoid seeing only itself in nature; nature sometimes declines to reveal itself at all. If portions of it remain a mystery (as does the divine), the tendency to see only the human in nature will be frustrated. Not only does the advent of the bears surprise, their habitual location remains unknown: “their den is somewhere else, concealed in the confusion.” Some scenes on the mountain suggest that careful observation can dispel conventional defnitions of nature, if only temporarily. The poem describes views that seem at odds with our common and pervasive assumptions.47 Consider, for example, “the waterfall which never seems to fall-- / an endless skein swayed by the wind, / immune to the force of gravity in the perspective of the peaks.” Here the force of gravity appears to have been suspended. Furthermore, since the water falls as a “skein,” the fuidity of water suddenly turns solid. Such exceptions to the customary laws of nature are found “in the perspective of the peaks.” The poem implies that the so-called laws of nature are human fabrications and that one way to become aware of this is to separate ourselves as much as possible from the human scene by venturing into untrammeled nature. There we can more easily liberate ourselves from our customary reverence for “natural” law. The phrase “perspective of 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 259 the peaks” therefore has a double import. First, it means the area outside of human bounds abundant with natural vistas that move us to question our customary defnitions of nature. Second, it refers to the non-human point of view that we can speculate about and perhaps approach, although never completely acquire. We can only ftfully peek at the peaks. When the poem begins to catalog the population of the mountain, its language at frst imitates the voice of a naturalist: “Big Snow Mountain is the home of a diversity of creatures.” The frst of these creatures, however, is human: “the mountain guide evolving from the trapper.” “Evolving” positions the mountain guide and trapper as animals, subject to Darwinian analysis, thus lumping together human and animal. The next creature named is “the nine-striped chipmunk.” The poem appears to make no distinction, or at least elides the distinction, between the human and the animal inhabitants of the mountain. It appears that the mountain guide and trapper have acquired the same perspective as the animals, since this section of the poem concludes, “‘They make a nice appearance, don’t they,’ / happy seeing nothing.” The quotation is identifed in Moore’s notes as words “Overheard at the circus” (CP, 273). Presumably, the comment about the “nice appearance” could apply to the circus animals, but they might just as well apply to gaudily costumed trapeze artists. The indiscriminate “They” confates the guide and the trapper with goats, bears, and chipmunks. Similarly, the “nice appearance” could refer to both the animals and the humans who make their living on the mountain. But what does the poem mean when it judges that they are “happy seeing nothing”? By this point in the poem we know that “seeing” connotes seeing anew. But seeing “nothing” suggests seeing nothing new. The animal and human inhabitants are so accustomed to their surroundings that they are not surprised, shocked, or in any way disturbed by the sights that the tourists fnd so novel. To note that they see “nothing” could be a roundabout way of saying that they are too placidly familiar with their surroundings. It would seem that the mountain dwellers, both human and animal, are immune to the lessons available to newcomers—to tourists. After all, our perspective needs a shock of non-recognition if we are to be thrust out of our compla- cency. Hence the need to depart from our customary locales. As the poem enters its third and fnal segment, it offers more instances of unexpected perspectives. It also continues to suggest their salutary effect. We are advised, “No ‘deliberate wide-eyed wistfulness’ 260 B. AHEARN is here / among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water.” The scene does not accommodate conventional, sentimental appreciations of nature. The scene calls for other attitudes, ones not sanctioned by readily available responses. The lessons of the mountain require that we discard the expectations we brought to it. The poem drives the point home by presenting passages that leave us uncertain whether the poem is directing our sight or leaving observation up to us. Consider, for example, these ambiguous lines: “a stone from the moraine descending in leaps, / another marmot.” Although the words are precise, the description leads to two equally plausible readings. First, we could say that the lines record two separate observations: of (a) a stone and (b) a marmot. Equally plausible is another interpretation, that the lines record an initial observation rapidly revised; at frst we think we see a tumbling stone; on closer inspection it turns out to be a marmot. The lines are a miniature version of the end of “The Fish,” where the “it” displayed by the poem could be various objects, depending on the viewer’s choice. “Contributory vagueness” indeed. Reading “An Octopus” is therefore, to a degree, a replication of traversing the mountain’s landscape. Not only does such a journey require an open mind, readers and travelers may well see differently when looking at the same scene. The poem and the mountain offer considerable freedom of determination. The poem’s fnal third also devotes a good deal of attention to “the Greeks” “enjoying mental diffculties.” We had not been expecting this. Nothing in the poem prepares us for the intrusion of Classical Greece. What logic brings them to the poem? One clue can be found in the faintly disparaging remark that “The Greeks liked smoothness, distrust- ing what was back / of what could not be clearly seen.” The poem suggests the Greeks were uncomfortable with mystery. In her Religion Notebook for 1913–1915, Moore wrote, “The Xtn relig[ion] is not rational. It is diametrically opposed to the Greek idea—‘all things in reason’” (Rosenbach Series VII, box 8, folder 03). After all, Aristotle, the fons et orgo of science, strove to replace mystery with explication. At this point, however, the poem agrees with Pound’s complaint that Western explication tends to veer into abstraction. The poem proffers for our inspection a rather abstract defnition of happiness: “an accident or a quality, / a spiritual substance or the soul itself, / an act, a disposition, or a habit, / or a habit infused, to which the soul has been persuaded, or something distinct from a habit, a power.” (The passage comes from Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.)48 The notably abstract nature of 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 261 the defnition clashes with the poem’s preference for immersion in the confusing but instructive environs of the mountain. Yet the poem also reminds us that at some point our inspection of the mountain’s details should be succeeded by consideration of their signifcance. A fruitful way to read “An Octopus” is as a consideration of natural accidentals. Moore’s poetry sweeps up accidentals, then uses these accidentals to point to substance that escapes direct naming. Philosophers, theologians, and divines (such as Baxter) may attempt to name the sub- stantive; the poem refrains from doing so, but at least here acknowledges such attempts. Baxter begins by defning happiness as an “accident,” which is to place it as a consequence of what we can observe and under- take, or what can befall us. But for a devout Christian, the most complete happiness must come from the divine, not emanate from fne dining, romance, or a job well done. Such quotidian happiness fades. Such was not the case before the Fall. The poem notes at the end of the passage, “such power as Adam had and we are still devoid of.” Adam before the Fall had direct awareness of God in the Garden, and so his happiness from that awareness was perpetual. Shortly after the reference to Adam we hear that authorities on the mountain have the power to deal with lawbreakers. “Disobedient persons being summarily removed.” The expulsion from Eden has a humbler parallel in this park. This leads the poem to a consideration of the necessity of rigorous discipline required “if one would con- quer the main peak of Mount Tacoma.” The poem intimates a parallel between religious discipline and mountaineering. It then extends the analogy to artistry. The mountain, we hear, is “damned for its sacrosanct remoteness.” “Remoteness” is a quality the poem had already mentioned. When summing up the Greeks, it remarked, “their wisdom was remote / from that of these odd oracles of cool offcial sarcasm, / upon this game preserve / where ‘guns, nets, seines, traps and explo- sives, / hired vehicles, gambling and intoxicants are prohibited.’” At least the “sarcasm” of the notice has the merit of specifcity. This seems to be what the poem means by “remote”; that is, the abstraction of Greek thought from particulars to a vaporous ideal. So the mountain is “damned” by some for its remoteness from neat conceptions about nature. Its remoteness is a perpetual and intrinsic unruliness that baf- fes those who want to impose a tidy substance on its accidentals. It is “damned” because its wildness renders it diffcult to reach and comprehend. The casual but noticeable use of “sacrosanct,” offers a glimpse 262 B. AHEARN of Moore’s restraint. It suggests but does not belabor the analogies the poem has been raising between exploring the mountain and religious endeavor. The poem overtly compares the sacrosanct mountain (one hears echoes of Ararat, Sinai, Pisgah and all sacred mountains in the Bible) to Henry James, “‘damned by the public for decorum.’” But the poem goes on to correct that comment, insisting that what James practiced was “not decorum, but restraint.” The perceptive reader would recognize that the power to handle human affairs with fnesse requires the artist to curb the urge to impulsively seize the subject, an urge that tempts anyone conscious of great assimilating power. We are too quick to be satisfed with conventional explanations of the natural world and equally complacent about orthodox views of the spirit. Perhaps the true test of power is that the possessor shrewdly reserves it for rare occasions. (Recall Moore’s approval of Frost’s “the strong are saying nothing till they see.”) The Old Testament offers a paradigm. Jehovah’s power has no limit, but He waits long and suffers patiently before loosing his wrath upon sinful humanity. The mountain and certain aspects of it (especially the octopus) also become exemplars of this power in restraint. The mountain, although it is a volcano (as the poem reminds us at the close: “the white volcano with no weather side”), rarely releases power in the form of an eruption; its last major explosion occurred 2700 years ago. The force of the glacier, “Creeping slowly” and certainly is another instance of power in restraint. God, the artist, the mountain: the poem lines up divine, human, and natural emblems of power qualifed by restrained release. The last part of the poem returns us to Eden, when it asks whether such language as we have is adequate: “Is ‘tree’ the word for these things / ‘fat on the ground like vines’”? We continually grope for a fully adequate language, one which would not only name every discerni- ble object but provide a unique name for every relation between objects. The fact that nature often discloses itself only grudgingly or not at all suggests still another use for nature. Is nature and our limited perception of it a training ground? Are our approaches to nature meant to ft us for the more important job of apprehending the divine, as Thoreau alleged? Indeed, there is a persistent strain in theology that sees the mortal world as a school intended for our instruction not in the ways of the mortal world, but as a preparation for our supremely important union with the divine. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 263

5 the Precise Paradoxes of “Marriage” Moore originally worked on “Marriage” and “An Octopus” as a single poem, only later dividing them. They remain, nevertheless, side by side in the Collected Poems. There are two important features of “Marriage,” that distinguish it from its mate. First, it focuses mainly on human institutions and activity rather than nature. Second, this inspection takes the form of a denser collage of voices than we fnd in “An Octopus.” There is simply a higher ratio of quotation. This second aspect follows from the frst. Since concerns about human relations are at the forefront, it is hardly surprising that we encounter a welter of human voices. We fnd, however, a third element in the poem that does not so obviously follow from the frst two and which relates it to “An Octopus,” namely, the presence of paradox. As we shall see, that interest in paradox springs from the poem’s questioning of how human culture functions in a fallen world. If, as G. K. Chesterton claimed, “The use of paradox is to awaken the mind” (1986–, 2: 153), Moore is particularly eager to use paradox to awaken us to the self’s entanglement in social settings. An example of how the poem directs our attention to the sociological rather than the natural world is in the emphasis on pronouns at the beginning of the poem. The frst sentence stresses “one,” the pronoun that suggests the suppression of idiosyncrasy in favor of an objective or communal point of view.

This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one’s mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one’s intention to fulfll a private obligation:

The poem uses “one” six times in the frst eight lines. It then switches to “I” in “I wonder what Adam and Eve,” and then offers yet another pronoun: “and we are still in doubt.” This mixing of pronouns raises the issue of point of view and the extent to which a person’s perspective can remain purely personal. “Marriage” implies that the personal is always entangled with the social. The poem points to the paradox of the self 264 B. AHEARN as being both individual and social when it mentions marriage as “public promises / of one’s intention / to fulfll a private obligation.” This precise distinction between the “public” and the “private” implies that the social constructions in which we participate are paradoxical and even contradictory. Furthermore, the poem professes to be uncertain whether to call marriage an “institution” or an “enterprise.” The frst defnition suggests a static form; the second lends its dynamism. Yet both of these opposed categories seem necessary for an adequate description. The poem’s uncertainty about how to describe marriage points to a related doubt. If one is not sure about the nature of the enterprise/ institution, one cannot easily gauge one’s personal relation to it. An additional anxiety about one’s attitude toward marriage hovers over the poem; marriage may be sacred, and one does not trife with the sacred. Although the poem’s opening lines do not treat marriage as sacrosanct, many religious faiths consider marriage an institution created by divine command. Clearly, it would be a sin to violate divine commandment, but how are we to determine whether marriage constitutes such a commandment? We can add a further complication. Are social customs a form of divine commandment? In a fallen world, human social structures are plainly less than divine, but one could also make the case that they are at least in part the result of divine command. After all, as Genesis 2: 18 reports, it was God Himself who declared, “It is not good that man should be alone.” And from that consideration came Eve and the rest of the human race. If our social arrangements stem from God’s creation of a social world, then what portion of social structure could be called substantial (or sacred) and what portion is accidental (merely secular)? These considerations and puzzles point to a question never stated in the poem but strongly implied. Are those who choose not to marry departing from the will of God? The poem seems to imply a sense of guilt on the part of the individual that the poem presents in the singular pronoun “I.” He or she has rejected the state of marriage, hence the indication in the second part of the frst sentence that the attractions (not to mention social compulsion) of marriage require “all one’s criminal ingenuity / to avoid!” The pronominal shift from “I” to “one’s” (rather than “my”) suggests a way out for the speaker. The choice of the pronoun “one’s” suggests that others have not married and will not marry. Thus the poem hints at some degree of social support for remaining single. If there is any sin in remaining single, it has become diluted or negated. Nevertheless, the adjective “criminal” suggests the social pressure to 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 265 marry, a pressure that arouses a sense of guilt (and guile) in the unmarried. Whether Moore herself felt any guilt about her unmarried state we cannot say. Nor is it clear whether any of the pronouns in the poem rise to the level of autobiographical reference. It may be worth noting, however, that Presbyterians do not consider marriage a sacrament. The poem proceeds to map questions about marriage on to the story of Adam and Eve, a story in which issues of obedience, sin, and ingenuity circulate. Moore brings the story up to date, but the old issues are still relevant. In Judeo-Christian tradition, the primal sin of Adam and Eve is followed by further opportunities for sinning. Adam, Eve, and their descendants inhabit a world in which both grace and sin abound. The poem’s meditation on the Fall takes the form of inspecting the version of events in Genesis, or perhaps more pointedly, the history of interpretation of those events, thus adding a long social perspective. The poem takes note of the orthodox account in which Eve is the frst to succumb to temptation: “that invaluable accident / exonerating Adam.” (Moore’s precise choice of vocabulary becomes more pertinent when we recall that “accident” is etymologically related to the Latin verb cedere, which is usually translated as “to fall.”) Thus Eve’s “accident” is her falling away from obedience. But the lines following cast doubt on the received account. They are sarcastic or at least fippant in describing Adam: “O thou / to whom from whom, / without whom nothing— Adam.” Such language is at least inappropriate and perhaps sacrilegious since the terms in that description should more properly be applied to the Creator. We recall, however, that Satan’s promise was that to eat of the fruit would transform Eve and Adam into gods. The overweening pride on Adam’s part suggested in these lines indicates that the sin of presuming to rival the Creator constantly recurs, generation after generation. The sin of pride is traditionally one of the most diffcult to subdue. “Marriage,” since it is more attentive to how human relations work than “An Octopus,” is deeply concerned with the nature of language. To be specifc, it takes up the question of how language functions in a fallen world. At the beginning of the poem we were introduced to a voice questioning linguistic usage: “perhaps one should say.” The poem describes Eve as not only beautiful but “able to write simultaneously / in three languages-- / English, German, and French-- / and talk in the meantime.” The poem thus credits her with the talent for ameliorating the fragmentation of the primal language of Eden. Such facility, however, reminds the rest of us that we live in a world of splintered rather than 266 B. AHEARN unifed discourse. Eve’s accomplishment points to a general disability; most people are fuent in only one language and therefore have diffculty communicating with speakers of another. This is hardly the most obvious of the poem’s parade of paradoxes. To take another example, when the poem describes Adam as “‘something feline, / something colubrine,’” we fnd that Adam is himself something like Satan, since “colubrine” means “serpent-like.” The poem suggests the human alienation from nature in a passage again concerned with language. “Plagued by the nightingale / in the new leaves, / with its silence-- / not its silence but its silences.” Adam frets over nature’s non-communication and is equally troubled by his failure to affect it: “‘He dares not clap his hands, / to make it go on / lest it should fy off, / if he does nothing, it will sleep; / if he cries out, it will not understand.’” Adam cannot speak to nature nor does nature speak to him. The only communication can be between Adam and Eve. But how easily and fuently do they converse? In the case of “Marriage,” Adam and Eve mostly talk past each other. The poem offers in its middle portions quotations from Adam and Eve that suggest the conficts between married couples, or at least attitudes that emphasize diffculties and opposition in marriage.

He says, “What monarch would not blush to have a wife with hair like a shaving-brush?” The fact of a woman is “not the sound of a fute but very poison.” She says “Men are monopolists of ‘stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles’— unft to be the guardians of another person’s happiness.”

The poem comments that “One sees that it is rare-- / that striking grasp of opposites / opposed each to the other, not to unity.” The poem implies that ideally united marriages are most uncommon, and goes on to suggest that such marriages are in fact unsettling to humanity. It compares them to “that charitive Euroclydon / of frightening disinterested- ness / which the world hates.” Euroclydon is the stormy wind from the Northeast that occurs in the eastern Mediterranean. It drives St. Paul 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 267 ashore in Acts 27. God demonstrates his love in a paradoxical fashion, in ways that can seem just the opposite. In this case, the life-threatening tempest is the instrument that redirects Paul to Malta, where he can best pursue his evangelical mission. If that wind manifests an inscrutable, divine intention, then the analogy between perfect marriages and the wind makes such marriages comparable to divine ordering. The intrusion of the divine into the world can indeed be “frightening.” Much in the Bible and religious history suggests the degree to which the incursion of the divine produces disorder, alarm, and terror. The phrase just cited—“charitive Euroclydon”—stands out because it is notably paradoxical. The phrase points to a larger aspect of the poem. When Moore focuses on human relations she becomes intrigued by the ways in which human relations and institutions abound with paradox. The most complex and supple human instrument is language. Yet the language of “Marriage” is often paradoxical, such as the line, “the fght to be affectionate.” Another example is a phrase Moore borrowed from Richard Baxter, “a good day and a bad.”49 The poem concludes with Daniel Webster’s stirring contention that the nation can enjoy both “Liberty and Union.” To put it simply, paradox arises when language tries to reconcile sharply different entities, ones we may dimly perceive are parts of a whole, but whose unity exists on a plane where we seldom venture. Paradox often arises because we and Moore are uncertain about the relation between the human and the divine. That relation is perplexing because we are, as Byron put it, “fery dust”: a most paradoxical condition. One part of us dwells in the realm of matter and the fve senses; another part, many believe, pertains to the kingdom of the spirit. The residents of a fallen world, as Bunyan knew, often resent and resist the call to pursue the divine. Hence the quotation beginning, “I am such a cow, / if I had a sorrow / I should feel it a long time.” In the frst place, the comparing of oneself to a cow emphasizes one’s separation from the divine and immersion in the mortal, natural world. In the second place, the pronoun “I” appears prominently in the passage, emphasizing the attitude that would preserve a sense of separate self by continuing or wallowing in an emotional state. To cultivate sorrow, however, is to persist in an emotion that, carried on excessively, separates us from the divine. Sorrow may be a steppingstone to a recognition that the fallen world and our attachment to it may be ephemeral, but when we cling to that emotion, perhaps any emotion, for too long, it has the opposite effect—it attaches us to the mundane world. 268 B. AHEARN

The Judeo-Christian tradition nonetheless insists that traces of the divine can be found in the world we see around us. As Psalm 19 declares, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the frmament sheweth his handywork.” Yet how do we know if what we discern below the frmament represents the divine? Might it not be something malevolent that masquerades as the sacred? Hence the continual diffculty of knowing when, where, and how long or how deeply to practice an attachment to the objects around us. A primary paradox of mortal existence is that both attachment and detachment are necessary. It is not surprising, then, that Moore’s poetry so often examines natural and human artifacts, and so frequently questions our ways of knowing or approaching them, as well as our ways of turning away from them. “Marriage,” besides considering human relations, also focuses on a facet of human existence that Moore often returns to in other poems—human beings as makers of artifacts and art (and the juxtaposition of those objects with nature). Thus at the end of the poem we fnd, “‘the Book on the writing-table; / the hand in the breast-pocket.’” The second line points to the human form— the hand and the breast.50 In short, the last line of the poem prepares for the next poem, “An Octopus,” and its emphasis on nature. But the frst line points to human productions or alterations of nature—a book and a table. We are reminded that the production of artifacts is a defning characteristic of that which is human. But does Moore see in homo faber a refection of deus faber? In the passage from her letter to Robert McAlmon we cited earlier, she seems to distinguish three separate categories: “religious conviction, art, and animal impulse.” But does she always think of these categories as separate as they seem to be here? Or is there a connection between religious conviction and art?

6 substance, Accident, Paradox He hath made every thing beautiful in his time. Ecclesiastes 3: 11

As we have seen, Moore’s poetry occasionally ventures into landscapes associated with the sublime. Yet it also turns again and again to scenes that contain or evoke the beautiful. Gardens, painted porcelain, ornaments, gilt coaches: her poems are sprinkled with a surprisingly large number of items that could be classifed as beautiful. However, another aspect of Moore’s poetry appears when we follow her gaze. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 269

The line between the beautiful and the sublime sometimes blurs. When we inspect the beautiful artifact, it keeps revealing its connection to larger forces. There is precedent for this. Edmund Burke long ago had linked the beautiful with supernatural benefcence when he wrote, “the infnitely wise and good Creator has, of his bounty, frequently joined beauty to those things which he has made useful to us” (Eliot 1909, 24: 87). The category of the Beautiful overlaps with the category of the Sacred. Moore’s scrutiny of human artifacts delineates with precise detail the ways in which they participate in economies that transcend the human. We also fnd that perplexing questions related to the function of language are unavoidable when dealing with artifacts. A reasonable place to begin examining Moore’s attraction to beautiful artifacts is with “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” (CP, 83). It has the merit of being relatively short and mostly focused on a single object. Unlike “The Fish” or “An Octopus,” this title does not refer to things that exceed our grasp. The title and the poem seem neatly allied. Yet if we are used to associating the beautiful with the tidily explicit, we are in for a disappointment. The poem’s language resists simple explication. A variety of meanings unfolds from the frst line, which informs us, “Here we have thirst.” What kind of thirst? Physical thirst or thirst for beauty? Thirst for the combination of beauty and utility? And how are we to read “we have”? It could mean “here is.” Or is it a way of saying “here, inspired by this object, a thirst arises in us”? Another complication arises from the rhyming phrase at the end of the second line: “from the frst.” First what? Does the poem mean that the object’s great antiquity shows that humanity from its very origins had a certain kind of thirst? (We can be certain of the persistence of physical thirst, but what about the persistence of aesthetic thirst?) Or does the poem assert that each individual human being starts life with a particular thirst? As if to compensate for the variety of choices facing the reader, the poem has from the frst been couched in a familiar type of discourse. By the end of the frst stanza, we realize that it resembles the rehearsed, informative rendition of a museum guide or guidebook. We have been offered a snippet of the rhetoric of the guided tour. That rhetoric turns out to be inadequate, however, because, like all descriptive rhetorics, it has its limitations. It is worth noting, moreover, that the rhetoric of the guided tour arose fairly late in Western history. Its ubiquity depends (1) upon the rise of an audience of primarily middle-class tourists and museumgoers, and (2) the notion that a middle-class education 270 B. AHEARN

(aping the Grand Tour of an earlier age) requires exposure to exotic places and curious specimens. In the nineteenth century such an audience acquires suffcient numbers to create a demand for explanatory assistance. Baedeker guidebooks and Cook’s tours fourish, and their rhetoric flters into general discourse.51 A discourse designed to encourage and satisfy middle-class cultural aspirations is much newer than the object it describes. The poem displays the language of introduction as much as it does the bottle itself. We are entitled, however, to ask whether such an approach cloaks rather than reveals the object. The ambiguities that appear when the poem addresses the fsh/bottle open up questions about that rhetoric. Its shortcomings raise the issue of what would count as a more adequate explanation. Perhaps if we directed other kinds of rhetoric at the fsh/bottle, we would have better success. For example, we could speak about it as an archaeologist would. Or we might adopt the tones of a connoisseur of glassware. Or we could listen to a glassblower explain the fne points of how the fsh/bottle might have been produced. But would any one of these peel away the layers of centuries to reveal the intentions of the creator? Are we not again in the position of Keats scrutinizing his urn and Frost mulling over his pebble? At some points, the poem emphasizes the differences between humanity and the rest of the natural world. The contention in the frst stanza that art has an “essential perpendicularity” suggests a sharp distinction between the human capacity to make art and the dearth of artistry in the natural world. The choice of the fsh as perpendicular artifact neatly contends with the fact that fsh typically move horizontally. If we recognize art by its “perpendicularity,” art also defes gravity, the ubiquitous natural force. Yet since the poem’s second stanza mostly concerns itself with “that / spectacular and nimble animal the fsh,” the poem implies that art, however distinct from nature, nevertheless depends upon nature. In one respect art is quite thoroughly dependent; the elements that make up the substance of the glass fsh are entirely natural. Although much modernist art emphasized its independence from nature, at least to the extent that art was no longer obliged to be mimetic, it could not create form without natural help. Even music relied upon instruments made of wood and metal. Modernism tended to sharpen the paradox that art, although something other than nature, could not exist apart from nature. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 271

As the poem comes to an end, the Latinate diction that had dominated the middle of the poem recedes, and words rooted in Anglo-Saxon stand out. Nature is associated with those blunt, mono- and di-syllabic words, art with the multi-syllabic words drawn from Greek and Latin. One obvious feature of this short poem is its emphasis on the Anglo- Saxon and Latinate elements of English. To put it another way, the high percentage of multi-syllabic Latinate words brings into the foreground the distinction between these components. English is a divided language, or at least a composite one. The paradoxical coexistence of art and nature has an analogy in the weaving together of the two strands of English, one of which aspires toward intellectual abstraction while the other hews close to material fact. The frst inclines toward substance, the second toward accident. “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” brief as it is, nevertheless points up the prevalence of paradox. It is true that art seems to transcend nature, but art cannot entirely escape nature. English aspires to abstract truth, but in every sentence that does so, we fnd that it remains allied to everyday and commonplace fact. Various rhetorics, such as the language of the museum guide or the archaeologist, are uncomfortable with paradox, because they are languages designed to highlight a narrow and therefore limited descriptive domain. These domains avoid, if possible, verbalization in which two contradictory statements must be accepted as equally valid. Prayer, on the other hand, welcomes paradox. Prayer is a way that humanity foregrounds its own limitations, including the limitations of language. Paradox acknowledges the divine and its superiority to our modes of comprehension. Paradox is most at home in religious and theological discourse. This may suggest that the poem approaches a religious meaning. Moore would not be the frst to suggest that artistic creation is a feeble but honorable attempt to echo the labors of the Creator. The poem’s indication that the origin of the glass fsh is in “thirst” and “patience” points to this possibility. Art, in other words, can be defned as a response to a felt lack, the lack of the sacred, lack of contact with the workings of the divine. “Patience,” of course, comes from the Latin patio, which is commonly translated into English as “suffering.” (It is cognate with “passion,” as in Christ’s Passion.) We suffer when we sense acutely our separation from the divine. Moore may also rely on her readers recalling that the fsh is an ancient symbol for Christ. 272 B. AHEARN

If we are wary of imputing a religious dimension to the poem, it is still the case that the poem points us in the direction of the sublime. It does so, however, indirectly by putting a great deal of emphasis on seeing. The fsh/bottle is “held up for us to see.” The second stanza refers to a “spectrum” and mentions that the real fsh are “spectacular”; both words originate in the Latin specere. The poem holds up art as a practice and a body of objects that humanity uses to see the world about us more intensely. Yet the poem’s second stanza also emphasizes the way nature prefers to hide. The scales of a living fsh “turn aside the sun’s sword by their polish,” thus demonstrating nature’s inscrutability—one aspect of sublimity. The intensity of our gaze is a gauge of nature’s obscurity. The poem implies that art produces the beautiful as a response to the sublime, which surrounds us and can only occasionally and in small portions be made accessible to humanity. The overwhelming and sometimes terrifying sublime creates a thirst for the beautiful. Traces of that thirst remain in the beautiful object. It tacitly points back to its origin. This is the latent paradox of the poem, that the sublime and the beautiful are inseparable. To put it in related terms, the accidental and the substantial are merely different aspects of the same phenomenon. “Camellia Sabina” (CP, 16–18) might be read as a reminder that although humanity no longer inhabits the Garden of Eden, we have put its fora and fauna to use as commercial products. Yet it also evinces a fascination with varieties of containment, such as the jar that, while enclosing plums, also incidentally displays within its structure “a bubble” of air. Somewhat more ample containers follow: “Certosa [Italian ham] sealed with foil”; “the camellia-house”; a vineyard; “the wire cage”; a tent; a wine cellar. Less tangible kinds of human containers are also present in the form of narratives, such as one about “Tom / Thumb, the cav- alry cadet, on his Italian upland / meadow-mouse.” Here we fnd a fairy tale scaling down humanity so that we can make nature tractable. The focus on structures that we use to manage objects extends to language itself, at least to written conventions, or at least to punctuation. At the end of the poem a parenthetical comment appears: “(Close the window, / says the Abbé Berlèse, / for Sabina born under glass.)” The poem wittily encloses the Abbé’s command for closure between parentheses. (The use of parentheses is anticipated by the phrase “in parentheses” in the poem’s second line.) “Camellia Sabina” is the only poem in Selected Poems (1935) to use parentheses. Since it immediately follows “The Jerboa” in all collections since 1935, it is worth noting the juxtaposition 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 273 of the untrammeled Jerboa with the constraints that populate “Camellia Sabina.” The poem seems to suggest, with its emphasis on forms of containment, that the ambition to control nature is one of the defning features of human behavior. Yet that control takes the form in this poem of constant alterations of natural conditions. It seems nature cannot be used or understood without bending it to human need. Here again we are confronted by a paradox. We can regard our relation to nature as one in which it can never be known other than as a function of human need, and therefore feel inclined to lament our misapprehen- sion of it. Or we can celebrate the intensity and the degree to which fallen humanity has taken seriously the divine charge to make use of nature. Moore’s poetry welcomes paradox and has little patience with attitudes and rhetorics that avoid it or try to suppress it. Indeed, it could be said that Moore considers the avoidance or misuse of paradox, or the ignorance of it, as childish. An instance of the misuse or perversion of paradox seems evident in these lines from “Critics and Connoisseurs” (CP, 38–39): “a / mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly bal- / lasted animal stand up, / similar determination to make a pup / eat his meat from the plate.” The child wants the pup to be both human and animal. The paradoxical urge, however, turns lopsided. The child insists that the “human” become the standard of behavior to which non-human animals should aspire. This would be an example of what the poem later dubs “ambition without understanding.” For paradox to be genuine both of the incompatible truths must be given equal weight. The child’s paradox becomes unbalanced, like the pup on its hind legs. The poem could also be regarded as a commentary on the adult misuse of paradox, even a lesson in the discrete use of the animal kingdom as a commentary on human behavior. Some of Darwin’s followers were prone to diminish or erase the distinction between human and animal behavior. Unlike the child, however, who wanted the pup to rise to the human level, they tended to reduce humanity to the plane of the animal. Like Frost, Moore rejects such a tendency. Moore prefers to maintain a profound difference between human beings and the animal kingdom. To diminish or erase that distinction is to lose sight of the paradox of human existence in a natural setting. On this mortal plane, we are caught between the divine (the substantial) and the natural (the accidental). To presume that we can or should easily gravitate to the one or the other is folly. 274 B. AHEARN

While living in corporeal form we are stuck between the natural and the supernatural. What then is our mission in life? Is it simply to await death? Religious tradition instructs us that our mundane existence should be a preparation for the life to come. For Moore, the moral world is our schoolroom, and so we should perpetually strive to see and to create (complementary activities, since creation can be a form of vision). The necessity for such exploration is exemplifed in many Moore poems, but perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in “New York.” As is so often the case with Moore, proper exploration requires the reassessment of our conventional attitudes and modes of expression. “New York” aims to upset conventional expectations from the start. Its frst line, “the savage’s romance,” asks us to consider a different point of view. In the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, in dime novels, and in the flms of Tom Mix, the romantic landscape is the reverse of the urban, the place where most members of the audience spend their lives. The poem, however, suggests that the resident of the forest or the prairie would regard the urban scene as romantic. Moore identifes a recurring human longing for a radically different existence. What seems at frst glance to be an oxymoron turns out to be plausible. Wherever we may live, our longing for something more satisfying makes that alien scene romantic. (Sinclair Lewis dramatizes this desire in Babbitt [1922]. Babbitt nurses a fantasy of carving out a manly life in the wilds of Maine. His fantasy evaporates when he discovers that his native guide dreams of moving to town and opening a shoe store.) The vocabulary of the poem requires us to consider phenomena that we usually see as radically different as surprisingly similar. In line 2, for example, the verb “accreted” suggests that we could compare the rise and spread of urban structures (skyscrapers, elevated railroads, bridges) to the organic growth in forests. The particular forms of industrial and organic growth are accidental, but the underlying structural similarities point toward the substance. At the same time, however, the poem asks us to make new distinctions where we had been accustomed to lumping things together. The middle of the poem refers to decorative artistry, but in so doing the poem makes discriminations. We fnd lines that point to simple ornamental forms and analogies, in contrast to the more complex natural patterns associated with furs: “It is a far cry from the ‘queen full of jewels’ / and the beau with the muff, / from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle.” The phrase “full of jewels” suggests a container flled to the brim. And the phrase “shaped like a perfume-bottle” indicates a culture accustomed to 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 275 restrict its decorative shapes to signifers of gentility. These Old World patterns stand in stark relief against natural models: “the ground dotted with deer-skins—white with white spots” that some art can accommodate itself to, “as satin needlework in a single color may carry a varied pattern.” We see here an echo of Ruskin’s entreaty that artists turn to nature as the treasure house of form. Nature, in short, exists not for plunder but for emulation. Moore ends her poem with a phrase that she attributes to Henry James: “accessibility to experience,” thus urging the cultivation of a point of view that hungers after new insights and expressions.52 When we move beyond the Selected Poems (1935), we fnd that Moore appears to reconsider the relation between art and science. The second poem in What Are Years? (CP, 96), “Rigorists,” begins in a familiar fashion. We hear the voice of a tourist who, upon returning, recounts what he or she has observed. This voice is infected by the vocabulary of science. The tourist invokes numbers to help defne the Lapland reindeer, who “can run eleven miles in ffty minutes.” Also, a key Darwinian word stands out at the end of the initial stanza: “fnding their own food; they are adapted[.]” We are in the domain of amateur zoology. This voice dominates most of the poem, and ends with a scientifc classifcation: “leonotopodium more / exactly.” Yet this scientifcally inclined tourist also makes unscientifc remarks about these animals. The speaker comments on the fact that although they can be seen as nicely adapted to the physical conditions of their environment, their owners like to ornament them with “saw-tooth leather lace.” The humans who rely upon the reindeer demonstrate a need to make art. Even the speaker, when commenting on the reindeer, invokes myth to picture them, referring to them as “Santa Claus’ reindeer.” The speaker cannot remain strictly confned to in the matter-of-fact rhetoric of scientifc expression, nor can the Laplanders refrain from decoration. A second voice dominates the last third of the poem, and the vocabulary here again shows an interesting mixture of discourses.

And this candelabrum-headed ornament for a place where ornaments are scarce, sent to Alaska, was a gift preventing the extinction of the Eskimo. The battle was won 276 B. AHEARN

by a quiet man, Sheldon Jackson, evangel to that race whose reprieve he read in the reindeer’s face.

This voice celebrates the vision and achievement of Sheldon Jackson, who, in an attempt to provide self-suffciency for Alaskan Eskimos, introduced reindeer from Lapland. In this last part of the poem another Darwinian word, “extinction,” appears. Jackson’s intervention averts the starvation of the Eskimos. But the poem also refers to Jackson as an “evangel.” The poem sees in Jackson’s project a reconciliation of scientifc and religious vocabulary. Both scientifc curiosity and religious terminology unite when we see active human desire to beneft others. Forms of human inquiry and service are the accidentals. When these forms are carefully inspected and compared, we can detect the substance common to them all. One should also add that Sheldon Jackson is tacitly compared to the tourist returning from Lapland. The poem points out that Jackson had an insight apparently not available to the tourist. Jackson contemplated the plight of the Eskimos “that race / whose reprieve he read in the reindeer’s face.” The tourist detects a variety of artistic and botanic phenomena in the reindeer, but it remains for this missionary to project practical assistance. The discipline Jackson has acquired in his capacity as a missionary enables him to see what could be done, The tourist lacks such discipline and such insight. It is worth noting, moreover, that the word Moore chooses to describe the result of Jackson’s efforts is “reprieve” rather than “rescue” or “saving.” The word reminds us of a truth acknowledged by Darwin as well as his religious detractors, namely, that the human race is not guaranteed to last forever. Once again science and religion fnd common ground under the banner of memento mori. Containers, whether physical (glass bottles, coaches, wedding rings) or intangible (nationalism, religions, poems) most appeal to Moore as foci for that which exceeds their ability to contain. The fnal line of “When I Buy Pictures” (CP, 48) stipulates that an entity she fnds most attractive “must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” “Acknowledge” indicates that the object must testify at least to some degree to the greater power to which it responds. The accidental must direct us to the substantial. And when that happens we should welcome rather than reject paradox, since paradox interweaves the accidental with the substantial. 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 277

Notes 1. Pound’scomment occurs in “The Serious Artist” (1913). 2. Zhaoming Qian refers to this phenomenon as “a hallmark of Moore’s poetics—her infatuation with juxtaposing opposed features to stir up a meaning we partly understand” (2003, 76). 3. Laurence Stapleton notes Moore’s “religious belief” (1978, 189), but does no more than that. Bonnie Costello points to Mary Warner Moore as providing “a ready arsenal of protestant morality” (108); in her conclusion she concedes that Marianne “derives, in both personal and literary ways, from Protestant morality” (248). This insight, however, Costello merely offers in passing. Taffy Martin mentions that Moore’s brother was a Presbyterian minister (1986, 10), but says no more about Moore and religion. Grace Schulman likewise refers to Moore’s having been “raised in a Protestant tradition” (1986, 172); she does not, however, draw out the implications of that fact. John Slatin acknowledges that Moore was “a devout Presbyterian and a theological descendant of Winthrop and Wilson and Edwards” (1986, 172), but he is most concerned with how she departs from their interpretations of nature. Margaret Holley affrms that Moore was a “moralist,” but “never allowed her personal church practice to enter her verse” (1987, 1). Cristanne Miller believes that Moore cannot be associated with “supernatural inspiration” (1995, 3), but grudgingly admits at one point that Moore’s “belief that no individual can adequately know about a subject of importance … may be based partly in Protestant Christianity” (41). Darlene Williams Erickson fnds that “doctrinally her Christianity is not evident in her poetry” (1992, 41). The absence of Presbyterian doctrine, however, is more than made up for by Moore’s determination that “She must refect the kingdom of God by her excellence” (145). Eventually Erickson asserts, “As a good Presbyterian, she saw the entire universe as an expression of the kingdom of heaven in the world” (171). A serious consideration of Moore’s religious faith and her poetry has been uncommon. Daniel Jenkins, not a literary critic, but a professor of theology, points out that certain “Presbyterian virtues” are refected in Moore’s work and that “she is very much a poet of the Reformed faith” (1984, 39). Jennifer L. Leader, in comparing Moore’s poetry about World War II with that of Edith Sitwell and Kathleen Raine, says, “For Moore, Sitwell, Raine, and others, morality mattered—they viewed it as part of the spiritual battle in which each individual is engaged” (1998, 65). Two critics who have gone more deeply into the matter are Jeredith Martin and Andrew J. Kappel. Martin fnds that “the study of nature for Moore is a religious act, akin to biblical exegesis” (1990, 23). 278 B. AHEARN

She sees Moore adopting some of the rhetorical and stylistic habits of Sir Thomas Browne in order to facilitate her “‘capacity for fact’ while insisting upon her Christian concerns” (31). Kappel justly refers to “the Protestant poet’s avoidance of a self-expressive poetic” (1990, 43), thus demonstrating that we do not have to turn to Eliot’s advocacy of impersonality to explain Moore’s aversion to autobiography. He also praises Moore for realizing “that modern poetic strategies and practices were suitable to religious purposes” (44). I disagree, however, with Kappel’s claim that “the human ability to know and understand … is always up to its task in Moore’s poetry” (48). He gets closer to the truth when he takes up her attitude toward reason: “She does not pretend to understand everything—that would be to commit the sin of intellectual pride, to confuse human intelligence with divine intelligence … ” (49). Where I depart from Martin and Kappel is in the emphasis I place on Moore’s questioning of our most basic means of understanding, including language itself. To a considerable extent she departs from the traditional Presbyterian reverence for human reason. 4. The word remained “precisians” when she included “Bowls” in Observations (1924); it continued to be “precisians” in both the Macmillan and Faber editions of Selected Poems (1935). Not until Collected Poems (1951) did it become “precisionists.” Some critics associate Moore’s reference to “precisionists” with the artistic style practiced by the American Precisionists (the best known being Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and Georgia O’Keefe). According to the NOED, that use of the word frst appears in 1927. Moore could have made the association in 1935, but did not. The change occurs in 1951, long past the heyday of the American Precisionists. 5. w hen Christian recounts his history to Charity in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he mentions that his family members told him he was “too precise, and that I denied myself of things (for their sakes) in which they saw no evil” (Bunyan 1966, 181). 6. Like the majority of Moore’s critics, Natalia Cecire, in her essay, “Marianne Moore’s Precision,” has little to say about Moore’s faith. Nor does she investigate the history of the word ‘precision.’ She does, however, fnd that Moore’s engagement with natural history results in “a poetic whose very commitment to knowledge as such lends it a darkly unknowable dimension” (2011, 85). This dimension turns out to have no apparent connection to religion. 7. Moore’s cautious approach is exemplifed by the gradual progress that the Collected Poems shows in the naming of Christ. “The Steeple-Jack” displays a church. In “The Hero” she refers to a Christian believer, a “Pilgrim.” In “The Jerboa” she mentions a Pope. So the frst three 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 279

poems move from the inanimate to the human to the head of the Roman Catholic Church. “The Plumet Basilisk” offers, without mentioning the fact, a creature who has been a symbol for Christ. In “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns” we are offered another symbol for Christ, but are also referred to “Virgin-Mary blue.” The name of Christ fnally appears in “The Student,” but in a Latin motto: “Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet / felici.” (“Christo et Ecclesiae” appears on the Harvard University seal.) “Christ and the apostles” are mentioned in “‘Keeping Their World Large,’” but Moore is citing someone else. Finally, in “Rosemary,” she names Christ directly. The gradual emergence of Christ in Collected Poems replicates the history of Christ as told in the New Testament. He remains hidden from public view for most of his life (although his birth is attended with some publicity, just as the frst three poems in CP point in his direction), and only late in life reveals himself. Moore’s ordering of her poems deserves more attention than it has received. 8. In pointing out the line from Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” Moore echoes a line from “Nine Nectarines”: “Prudent de Candolle would not say.” This reference to the botanist Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyrame de Candolle (1806–1893) indicates that Moore is prepared to applaud restraint in scientists as well as poets. The reference to de Candolle being “prudent” in not speculating about the peach being found wild is Moore’s adaptation of a sentence in de Candolle about another botanist, Carl Friedrich von Ledebour (1786–1851): “Ledebour, however, prudently adds, Is it wild?” (de Candolle 224). The importance of maintaining silence in the face of mystery has, from one point of view, more than simple a prudential value. “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health, when you destroy mystery you create morbidity” (Chesterton 1986–, 1: 230). 9. See the entry for 10 June 1914 In Moore’s Religion Notebook 1913– 1914: “The actual is the present h[ou]r; [the] real [is] the eternal pr[e- sent]” (Rosenbach 1252/25 AMs 1914). She also noted on the same day, “distinc[tion] between really & actually a philosophical one but a valid one.” Moore associates the ‘actual’ with observable nature (the accidental) and the ‘real’ with an underlying substance or action. Thus in her notebook (again, on the same day), she comments, “The sun did stand still for Joshua […] didn’t ACTUALLY stand still but did really stand still—in light of god’s eternally triumphant will.” 10. “For though the stick or the stone is an earthly vision, it is through them that St. Thomas fnds his way to heaven…” (Chesterton 1986–, 2: 537). 11. Moore’s wariness about the ways in which the ego can delude the self appears in an entry for 24 April 1913 in her Religion Notebook 1913– 1914. “Sheer self will has the power to disguise itself as devotion or absolute trust. Jesus tore off that disguise” (Rosenbach 1252/25 AMs 1914). 280 B. AHEARN

12. I am indebted to Ross Hamilton’s Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History, especially Chapter 5, in which he discusses accident in Locke, Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne. 13. Aquinas , in adapting Aristotle’s distinction, pointed out that accidentals are most familiar to us. “It is, for example, plain that accidents and notions and privations have little or nothing of being, yet these are more known to us than the substance of things, because they are closer to sense, since they, by their very nature, fall upon sense as proper or common sensibles” (Conway 1996, 193). 14. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, sketches the infnite avenue stretching before scientists. “Even though our very successful theory of electrons and light can be deduced from the modern standard model of elementary particles, which may (we hope) in turn be eventually be deduced from a deeper theory, however far we go we will never come to a foundation based on pure reason. Like me, most physicists today are resigned to the fact that we will always have to wonder why our deepest theories are not something different” (2015, 247). 15. Moore owned a copy of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation (London: Bertram Dobell, 1908). It contains her ownership inscription: “Marianne Craig Moore March 13, 1909.” Moore marked a few passages in the book, including one where Traherne begins to discuss how the world demonstrates God’s qualities: “First, His infnity; for the dimensions of the world are unsearchable” (93). Moore also wrote in the margin, “Dante” (Rosenbach MML F4.19). 16. Furthermore, science rejects any supernatural explanation for changes in material phenomena. “The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spot- less machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle” (Chesterton 1986–, 1: 227). 17. “Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light” (Chesterton 1986–, 1: 270). 18. Taffy Martin also points out that “Moore dissolves the scene in a food of ambiguity” (1986, 94). 19. Moore indicated in her note to the poem that she was thinking of George Bernard Shaw. But my focus is rather on how the metaphor of “Bird” enables a congruence between the human and the avian. 20. Moore was not the frst to suggest the ocean is a grave. The trope occurs most famously in The Tempest (“Full fathom fve thy father lies”). It also turns up in a work published in the year Moore matriculated at Bryn Mawr, Giberne’s The Romance of the Mighty Deep (1905): “A region of death in one sense it is and must be. All living creatures that die in the 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 281

sea, unless devoured by other creatures, sink to the bottom, there to fnd a tomb. Covered at frst by a vast winding-sheet of water, they may be slowly buried under the shifting mud and sand” (39). 21. In 1933 Moore commented on the initial impetus for the poem. “As for ‘A Grave,’ it has a signifcance strongly apart from the literal origin, which was a man who placed himself between my mother and me, and surf we were watching from a ‘middle’ ledge of rocks on Monhegan Island after a storm. (‘Don’t be annoyed,’ my mother said, ‘It is human nature to stand in the middle of things.’)” (Prose, 643). 22. Perhaps Moore’s poem gave a hint to Wallace Stevens for his variations on “she” and “sea” in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” 23. The notion of the mind as incessantly working to make connections between apparently dissimilar objects appealed to Pound and Frost. Pound frequently cited Aristotle: “Swift perception of relations the hallmark of genius.” Frost characterizes the mind as a metaphor maker in “Education by Poetry.” See also G. K. Chesterton’s insistence that “Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be detected” (1986–, 1: 238). 24. Bateman pointed out that no one had conclusively shown (at least by 1877) that any portion of the brain was the seat of language. The fact that some victims of brain injuries lost, wholly or in part, the use of language, was not enough to dissuade him from contending that “The instrument, i.e. the brain, may be damaged, and speech may become impossible, but that does not constitute the brain the seat of speech, although it is undoubtedly the instrument by which this attribute becomes externally manifested” (1877, 188). 25. Margaret Holley offers a view of language at odds with Rowan Williams’s. She contends, “Verse must be written against itself because intertextuality is not only a fact; it is also a closed, circular, and therefore limited system” (1987, 152). Her view is consistent with her contention that Moore’s religious faith plays a quite limited role in her body of work. For Holley, language understood rightly exhibits no trace of the supernatural. 26. Cristanne Miller argues that the guide is heroic (1995, 153–154). Where I differ from Miller is in seeing the poem as leaving open the possibility that anyone may be capable of heroism. 27. G. K. Chesterton echoes this sentiment: “Further, she [the Christian Church] has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment” (1986–, 1: 323). 28. “We look only on the blood and ruin and danger in our wars, but God sees these with all the benefts to souls, bodies, church, state, and poster- ity, all with one single view” (Baxter 1909, 278). 282 B. AHEARN

29. Helen Zimmern, trans. Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1917), 4. 30. The frst stanza names some things in motion--sea, air, waves--but the air cannot be seen and the sea and its waves are transposed to a static image, “the scales / on a fsh.” 31. In some drafts of “The Steeple-Jack,” Moore inserted commas in the line about the seagulls. In an early version we fnd, “One by one, in two’s in three’s, the seagulls keep.” In another rendition we see, “One by one, in two’s, in three’s, the seagulls keep” (Rosenbach, Series I, box 4, folder 23). By removing the commas, Moore emphasizes the diffculty of matching numbers to the motion of the gulls. Fiona Green remarks, “It’s not quite clear how the numbers add up in that frst line: do the seagulls fy singly, or in pairs or trios, or is it frst one and then the other?” (2018, 58). She adds that it is unimportant to consider the question. “To quibble over that would miss the point, however, because numbers have to do, in this stanza, with the rhythmic count from which English verse most commonly takes its measure.” 32. “The [nectarine] tree is indistinguishable from the peach tree, and can only be distinguished by the fruits. They develop either from a seed or a bud of the peach as a mutation, and conversely a peach may orginate from a seed or bud sport of the nectarine” (Brouk 1975, 188). In one of the sources Moore used for the poem, she would have read that “Darwin has given such a large number of cases in which a branch of nectarine has unexpectedly appeared upon a peach tree” (de Candolle 1959, 226–227). 33. Moore found in de Candolle’s discussion of the peach and nectarine ff- teen different names for the fruit. 34. St. Basil the Great, Tertullian, and St. Ambrose are among those who associate the unicorn with Christ. 35. Robin G. Schulze is quite correct when she argues that Moore “deplored the specter of human arrogance” (1989, 8) in humanity’s desire to master nature, but she is too ready to suppose that Moore assigned to nature an intrinsically positive essence which humanity sullies. As Schulze goes on to contend, for Moore, nature “had a being, a substance, and a spirit of its own” (25), which “presents a model for human endeavor” (26). From my perspective, however, Moore’s poetry commonly depicts nature in conjunction with or in the context of human intervention. Seldom do we fnd nature pure. When we do, Moore presents it as perplexing. If nature is fundamentally mysterious, we had best remain mute before its being, substance, and spirit. Rather than positing nature as a model for human endeavor, “Nine Nectarines” shows us “prudent de Candolle” who “would not say.” De Candolle is like those “strong” in Frost’s “The Strong Are Saying Nothing.” 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 283

Schulze is on frmer ground when she returns to the question of Moore’s use of nature in The Degenerate Muse (2013). Here she examines Moore’s poetry in the context of an anxiety prevalent in America early in the twentieth century, a concern that modern sophistication might lead to national degeneration. The alleged cure for degenerate tendencies was a return to nature. Schulze offers a convincing argument that some of Moore’s early poems refect both the anxiety and the remedy. Yet many of the poems that Schulze uses are ones that Moore later dropped from her collections. Such omissions suggest that as Moore reviewed her corpus she dismissed her earlier concern about degeneration and curative nature. Schulze also makes no attempt to align Moore’s account of nature with aspects of Moore’s religious faith. 36. God, while promising Abraham a multitude of descendants, reminds him that the human ability to count falls far short of taking the full measure of Creation. Thus in Genesis 13: 16, “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall they seed also be numbered.” To make sure Abraham understands mortal limitations, God repeats the lesson in Genesis 15: 5, “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.” 37. Moore would concur with Reinhold Niebuhr’s condemnation of those who put their faith in secular or religious mass movements. He is ada- mant about the “brutal character of the behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egotism in all intergroup relations” (Niebuhr 2015, 145). 38. An illustration of the leafet appears in the Marianne Moore Newsletter 5: 2 (Fall 1981), 16. 39. The complete sentence about Kronos and Zeus is: “Thus Kronos in the later Greek mythology, owes his very existence to his son, namely to Zeus Kronion, Kronion meaning originally the son of time, or the ancient of days” (Müller 1891, 2: 544). 40. Among the Marian apparitions approved by the Roman Catholic Church are those in which she made herself known to the peasant Juan Diego (1531); Bernadette Soubirous (1858); and Lucia de Santos, Francisco Marto and Jacinta Marto (1917). In these three renowned cases, at Gaudalupe, Lourdes and Fatima, none of the fortunate few were socially distinguished. 41. Andrews had married in 1895. His biographer met with his widow in the 1950s and, in the course of describing their married life, she shed some light on the poem. “She relieved her husband of most of the details of family responsibility and management. She released him in every way for 284 B. AHEARN

the pursuit of his work. There is, indeed, something symbolic in the story told of the meeting between Marianne Moore, the poet, then a student at Bryn Mawr, and the seven-year-old son of the historian. When Miss Moore asked the boy to identify himself, he said: ‘My name is Andrews. My father wrote the history books.’ It summarized the family life of a great historian. ‘At our home,’ said Mrs. Andrews in recalling her son’s innocence and perception, ‘we did nothing else but write the history books’” (Eisenstadt 1956, 35–36). This account of what the boy said differs from Moore’s note about the poem. From Observations (1924) onward, Moore’s note consistently reads, “book.” If part of the point of the poem is that the boy believes his father has summarized history, then the singular “book” serves Moore’s purpose better than “books.” An earlier account offers a slightly different version of what young John Andrews said. Moore wrote home on 11 February 1906, “Nellie [Ellen Shippen] asked John who he was. He said, I am John Andrews. My father wrote the English History” (“He Wrote the History Book,” Marianne Moore Newsletter 5: 1, 19–20). Moore’s deletion of the adjective “English” in her poem emphasizes the universality of the boy’s claim. Charles MacLean Andrews wrote The History of England for Schools and Colleges (1903). 42. Rowan Williams suggests a quite broad spectrum of communication in the natural world. “Matter itself becomes a specifc ‘situation’ of intelligible form, no more and no less; and the mythology of a ‘naturally’ meaningless or random materiality, a sort of residue of impenetrable physical stuff, becomes impossible to maintain… . Intelligence is not an afterthought; that a material evolutionary process should eventually come up with a material organism that sees and imagines itself, and makes certain material noises and gestures in the confdence that it is actively modifying its environment by sharing intelligible patterns with other organisms, suggests that the material process in question (and thus the entire material environment that generates it) is intrinsically capable of producing the actions we call understanding” (2014, xi). 43. An aerial view of Mount Rainier shows the individual glaciers spreading out from the summit like the arms of an octopus. 44. http://www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/WCFScripture Proofs.pdf. 45. The poem’s reference to the curious fact that glacial ice seems to “bend” as it migrates over rocky terrain may indicate that Moore was aware that for much of the nineteenth century this phenomenon puzzled geologists. As T. H. Huxley noted in his Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature (1877), “This sluggish motion of a glacier, and the way in which it accommodates itself to all the inequalities of the surface over which it 5 MARIANNE MOORE AND AC-/CIDENT 285

travels, long ago gave rise to the supposition that ice is a plastic or viscous substance, something like dough or even treacle, so that it can sink into a depression, or ride over a ridge, without losing its continuity. Yet, as a matter of fact, ice is so brittle that if you pull, or try to bend, it, it will snap, without stretching to any appreciable extent. How, then, can the apparent plasticity be reconciled with undoubted brittleness?” (158). 46. “Its [Christianity’s] plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected” (Chesterton 1986–, 1: 286). 47. This technique has a parallel in Thoreau as well. The removal to Walden Pond yields a harvest of novel perspectives. “Follow your genius closely enough,” he says, “and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour” (Thoreau 1985, 412). 48. Moore has selected phrases from this passage in The Saints’ Everlasting Rest: “God moves not man like a stone, but by enduing him frst with life, not to enable him to move without God, but thereby to qualify him to move himself in subordination to God the frst mover. What the nature of this spiritual life is, is a question exceeding diffcult: whether, as some think (but, as I judge, erroneously), it be Christ Himself in person or essence; or the Holy Ghost personally; or as some will distinguish (with what sense I know not), it is the person of the Holy Ghost but not personally; whether it be an accident or quality; or whether it be a spiritual substance as the soul itself; whether it be only an act, or a disposition, or a habit, as is generally taken; whether a habit infused, or acquired by frequent acts, to which the soul hath been morally persuaded; or whether it be somewhat distinct from a habit, i.e. a power; viz. potentia prox- ima intelligendi, credendi, volendi, &c, in spiritualibus, which some think the most probable and that it was such a power that Adam lost, and that the natural man is still devoid of; whether such a power can be conceived which is not reason itself; and whether reason be not the soul itself; and so we should make the soul diminished and increased as bodies; whether spirits have accidents as corporeal substances have” (Baxter 1909, 20–21). 49. The passage from Baxter is one in which he emphasizes how the soul in heaven will enjoy the steadiness and uniformity of divine love, as opposed to earthly humanity’s variable and contradictory attitude toward God. “His love to thee will not be as thine was on earth to Him, seldom and cold, up and down, mixed, as aguish bodies, with burning and quaking, with a good day and a bad” (Baxter 1909, 50). 50. Note, however, that even in the second instance it is arguable that the reference to a “pocket” shows the combination of the natural human form and human productions, in this case a garment. 286 B. AHEARN

51. w illiam Carlos Williams exploits the accents of this rhetoric with regard to museums in one of his early poems, “History” (1917). 52. Moore does not say where in James one fnds the phrase. Her mother, Mary Warner Moore, in her “My American Trip” notebook, copied a passage from Dixon Scott’s Men of Letters (1916) that contains the phrase. In reviewing A Small Boy and Others, Scott remarks, “All he [Henry James, Sr.] cared to produce was that condition of character which his son calls ‘accessibility to experience’” (Scott 1923, 96). See https://moore123.com/2011/08/23/new-york-henry-james-dixon-scott. Scott’s version of this phrase is slightly distorted. When James recalls the lack of consistency in his formal education in Chapter 16 of A Small Boy and Others (1913), he stipulates that despite the lack of “method,” the children of Henry James, Sr., “proved educable, or, if you like better, teachable, that is accessible to experience” (James 2011, 175). Robin G. Schulze discusses the phrase and its meaning in the poem (Schulze 2013, 219–221). CHAPTER 6

Afterword

Readers may well be wondering why this study examines the work of three American poets while leaving their British contemporaries untouched. The short answer is that Pound, Frost, and Moore responded to a common imperative, the demand that poetry be precise. Their counterparts across the Atlantic were not so inclined. British poets tended to (a) deplore collective action and (b) avoid using new terminology, such as “precision,” when applied to poetry. For fuller explanation of why the British and the Americans were divided on these points, we must frst visit a small New England village. Travelers to Windsor, Vermont, will note on its south side a massive old factory building resembling an infated barn. Next to it glides the millstream that once powered its revolving belts. This former factory houses the American Precision Museum, which has on display a variety of machines, most of which are lathes. (It also contains the Machine Tool Hall of Fame.) The Museum documents the history of the New England machine tool industry and its contribution to the national economy. Visitors are told how in the Connecticut Valley, starting in the 1840s, canny businessmen brought to perfection the art of manufacturing tools and weapons from interchangeable parts. No longer did individual craftsmen laboriously fashion lock, stock, and barrel. Machines that stamped and ground out the same components, each identical to the other, made possible the cheap, rapid production of what consumers wanted. The American genius for creating and assembling component parts lent new meaning to the national motto: E Pluribus Unum.

The founders and curators of the Museum may be pardoned for waxing enthusiastic about the accomplishments of Connecticut Yankee inventors and entrepreneurs, and ignoring dissenting opinions. The Museum takes no notice of such comments as those in “The Axe- Helve,” where Baptiste points out that the inferior axe wielded by his neighbor was “made on machine” and the handle might shatter at the next whack. Nor does it address the cost to life and limb Frost depicts in “The Self-Seeker” (NB, 118–132). In that poem, the “Broken One” describes in painful detail how he was mangled by a mill wheel. It is worth noting, moreover, that when the Broken One recalls the accident, he comments that precision does not necessarily count as a characteristic of the mill. Of the belt that runs the machinery, he says, “Some days he won’t stay on. / That day a woman couldn’t coax him off.” The very mechanism that runs the mill seems temperamental. Frost implies that precision in the service of a benign, perfectly coordinated, and function- ing whole seems to be an ideal aspired to rather than a goal achieved. The same might be said with respect to American political institutions. The prevalence of such symbols as the Liberty Bell, Uncle Sam, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore underscores the degree to which citizens of the United States have required icons that emphasize faith in the solidarity of the republic. Yet there is something odd about the parade of national symbols. Only a people uneasily aware of rifts in the body politic—whether in terms of region, race, ethnicity, or class—keep in stock so many reminders of common identity. This emphasis on unifying symbols counteracts and glosses over the divisions that have always been present. Do the many truly unite? Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose frequently return to this American paradox; the Preface to Leaves of Grass repeatedly envisions the nation as a diverse unity. The poems in Leaves of Grass themselves are distinctly various in their celebrations of city and country, North and South, past and present, and so on. Despite this plethora of differences, Whitman demands that we understand their totality as a multifaceted whole. Furthermore, he regards his project as complementary to the national experiment in democracy. The persistent mix of unity and diversity char- acterizing Leaves of Grass is coupled with claims about American exceptionalism. Whitman treats his poetic project and democracy as historically unparalleled. His conviction that American civilization is founded on a superior vision of human potential echoes Emerson’s assertion in “The American Scholar” that we “can read God directly” (1903–1904, 1: 91). 6 AFTERWORD 289

The Preface distinguishes America as quintessentially different from all nations past or present. “Other states indicate themselves in their deputies … but the genius of the United States [is] … always most in the common people” (Whitman 1982, 5–6). For Emerson and Whitman, the unique status of the United States calls for a unique poetry and unique criticism. To them we owe the notion that American poets must (1) practice an art fundamentally different from that of their British brethren and (2) be particularly attentive to the problem of reconcil- ing the claims of the many with the allure of an ideal unity. A poignant example of this second diffculty occurs in Pound’s Canto 116, which combines a confession of aesthetic failure with an affrmation of ultimate wholeness: “i.e. it coheres all right/even if my notes do not cohere.” This contention that American poetry differs so markedly from British poetry bears on the question of why precision and imprecision engaged the attention of Pound, Frost, and Moore, while their British contemporaries seemed only mildly or not at all interested. We shall shortly come to the matter of the differing responses to the demand for poetic precision, but for the moment it is necessary to pursue the matter of how American poets approach their mutual task. One of the salient differences between the Americans and the British has to do with their attitudes toward collective action. The collective approach to poetry has been more welcome in the United States, perhaps because the organizing of small societies has been a feature of American life since the Mayfower Compact. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “Thus in democratic nations, no matter what progress is made toward equality, large numbers of small private associations will always be springing up in the midst of larger political society” (2004, 710). De Tocqueville contrasted the rise of such organizations with the situation in Old World aristocratic regimes, where long-established institutions held sway. “The men who inhabit the United States were never separated by privilege of any kind. They never knew the reciprocal relation of inferior and master, and since they neither fear nor hate one another, they never felt the need to call upon the sovereign to manage the details of their affairs” (799). To put it simply, Americans were accustomed to collective self-reliance. Although Pound was inspired in part to create Imagism by the examples of the Symbolistes and the Futurists, he was also drawing on an American tradition. The collective impulse that de Tocqueville saw in the American scene also led to such coalitions as the Others and the Objectivists in the greater New York area, and the Fugitives and the 290 B. AHEARN

Agrarians in the Deep South. The American public was even prepared to take seriously, at least briefy, the Spectracists of Pittsburgh. (Edgar Lee Masters found it to be “at the core of things and imagism at the surface,” while John Gould Fletcher hailed their “vividly memorable lines” [Smith 1961, 6].) After World War II, the Beats and the New York School of poets continued the American habit of engendering literary schools. Actual schools, such as Black Mountain College and the Naropa Institute (home of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) helped further this tradition. Were one to continue further with American poets’ proclivity for testing the utility of precision, there are more than enough examples to consider. One might, for example, examine the ways in which William Carlos Williams emulates the careful workmen he watches in “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.” One might also inspect how Charles Reznikoff tinkered with the texts of judicial proceedings in Testimony: The United States, 1885–1915. Perhaps most obviously, Louis Zukofsky’s handling of mathematical formulae in “A”-8 and “A”-9 would be pertinent. Yet the possibility of pursuing such further investigation is itself suggestive. American poets are more inclined than British poets to suppose that they are engaged in a common pursuit. Such a belief can be traced back to Whitman, but perhaps it has its origins even earlier in the nineteenth century. Consider Poe’s account of the composition of “The Raven” in “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he claims that the “work proceeded step by step, in its composition with the precision and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem” (1984 Essays, 15). Such a description renders null and void the elements of intuition, accident, unconscious infuences, and any of the other factors that might be associated with the ecstasy of inspiration. Poe’s delineation of the art of composition makes poets into engineers of words.1 Just as engineers share assumptions and rules about natural forces and materials, so the poets should likewise agree about ways in which words, sounds, and images work together. Poe implies that poets should create in light of commonly agreed-upon standards. E Pluribus Unum had an aesthetic dimension. Many poets would, or should, concur regarding the fundamentals of composition. If American poets were to follow common procedures, it seemed logical that they would be especially aware of one another’s practice. Perhaps the clearest instance demonstrating how carefully American poets attend to each other’s work is the response to The Waste Land. Both British and 6 AFTERWORD 291

American poets read it, but only the Americans felt its presence deeply enough that it altered—to a greater or lesser degree—the contours of their art. Spring and All (1923) blatantly announces that it is a reply to Eliot. Few contemporary readers would have missed the point of Williams depicting a literal waste land in the frst poem, or have won- dered to whom Williams referred when he scorned the “Plagiarists of Tradition.” Less well remembered are certain details in New Hampshire (1923), details omitted by Frost in later printings. Readers of 1923 would have noticed the title page announced that they were about to read “A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes.” In the Table of Contents, the title poem, “New Hampshire,” was followed by a section of “Notes” (fourteen long poems) and a collection of “Grace Notes” (thirty short poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). “New Hampshire” featured footnotes directing readers to other poems in the volume. For example, the lines about New Hampshire having “one witch—old style,” are followed by a numeral directing us to the bottom of the page, where this footnote appears: “Cf. page 56, ‘The Witch of Coös.’” Frost offers his audience only the second contemporary poem in history to arrive already equipped with notes. The difference between The Waste Land and New Hampshire, however, is instructive. The notes and footnotes circulate within and between Frost’s poems; they never refer to works extraneous to the volume. In his own way, Frost suggests that he agrees with Williams that the American scene displays enough material to warrant a poet’s attention, and that one need not go far afeld to anthropology, the Classics, or Sanskrit. The next response to Eliot was by Louis Zukofsky, in “Poem Beginning ‘The’” (1927). Every line is numbered, and at the conclusion we fnd an extensive list of allusions, a list even more diverse than those in the notes to The Waste Land. As Zukofsky wrote to Pound in 1930, “The was a direct reply to The Waste Land—meant to avoid T.S.E’s technique, line etc ….” (EP/LZ, 78). The last notable American poet to write with Eliot’s poem in mind was Hart Crane. A number of critics have noted that portions of The Bridge (1930) clearly respond to The Waste Land.2 Williams, Frost, Zukofsky, and Crane, each in his own way, deemed that The Waste Land required some response. Yet if we survey British poetry in the decade that followed its publication, we search in vain for works that take it as seriously and as extensively as American poets did. The suggestion that American poets were more disposed than their British counterparts to see themselves as engaged in a mutual, collective 292 B. AHEARN effort may also explain why the Americans were much more inclined to emphasize certain novel terms. It was as if these engineer-poets were proclaiming new discoveries in the methods and materials of dealing with word and image. When Pound introduced Imagisme, he emphasized that there was already a “group” engaged in its practice. The innovative term was pointedly coupled with a collective effort. Two decades later, Zukofsky used the same tactic in proclaiming that there was an “Objectivist” school of poets. In the issue of Poetry he edited, one of the two essays in which he promoted himself and them was entitled “Sincerity and Objectifcation: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” While introducing these twin terms, Zukofsky concentrated on Reznikoff, but also indicated how they applied to the poems of E. E. Cummings, Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot. Some of the poets named would have been surprised to fnd themselves cheek by jowl with others Zukofsky listed; nevertheless it was clearly the case that Zukofsky thought that they should be, since all were to some degree practicing “sincerity” and “objectifcation.” Not surprisingly, he thought their achievements warranted a change in customary critical terminology. After all, this is what American poet-critics did. Even Eliot, immersed though he was in a British literary milieu, cautiously tried to edge literary terminology in new directions. Unlike his contemporaries on the British literary scene, he was more prone to introduce new terms, such as “objective correlative,” or charge older terms with new meaning (e.g., “impersonality,” “tradition”). Eliot’s attempt to alter the discourse of criticism can be considered an American trait. As is well known, his compatriot Ezra Pound was even more eager to enliven critical vocabulary, although British critics were not all that keen to adopt such terms as melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, and seemed altogether oblivious of his theory regarding the Great Bass. In the States, there was no lack of new terminology applied to poetry. Thus Vachel Lindsay hailed the “New Localism,” under which poets (and other artists and artisans) would “strive to make the neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and holy with their special art” (1988, 1: 158). William Carlos Williams offered his own special defnition of the “Imagination” in Spring and All, and later would proclaim the importance of the Variable Foot. Even after a new generation of poets had arisen, the impetus for inventing new critical terminology had not yet exhausted itself. In 1950 Charles Olson charted a new course for poetry under the fag of Projective Verse. 6 AFTERWORD 293

It is characteristic of the divide between British and American poets that the coinage of new words—or novel application of old words— while welcomed by Americans was generally avoided by the British. British poet-critics’ accounts of contemporary poetry are marked by a conservative vocabulary. It is striking, for example, how persistently they invoke the well-worn term “beauty” as an important signifer. Edwin Muir discerned that in “Ash Wednesday” and the Ariel poems that Eliot had fashioned “works of great beauty” (1988, 62). Walter de la Mare said of reading Tennyson, “It is diffcult to keep back our tears at the verbal truth and the beauty revealed” (1940, 43). Herbert Read, while lamenting that contemporary civilization was “mechanical,” that there was no beauty in machinery, and that poets were “trapped,” nevertheless, under the hand of the true poet, “Beauty emerges” (1972, 174). Charles Williams approved of the “large … number of poems of beauty and power” to be found in the work of W. B. Yeats (1930, 69). It proved unfortunate, however, according to Harold Monro, that the “beauties” of Pound’s verses were “disguised among intricacies and willful complications” (1920, 90). Generally speaking, British poet-critics of the early twentieth century regarded neologisms as contributing to intricacies and complications. As they saw it, poetic composition did not lend itself to technical innovation. In part this was because they tended to regard the creation of poetry as a fundamentally mysterious activity, an activity immune from dissection. As A. E. Housman remarked near the end of his life, “Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual” (1961, 193). We fnd Edwin Muir offering a similar account of poetry as being generated in a sphere beyond the reach of critical analysis. Commenting on Scottish ballads, he says, “There is here nothing but a fnal clearness of vision which fnds of itself, as by some natural, or rather, supernatural process, an absolute reality of utterance which does not need the image” (1987, 15). To say that the “supernatural” was intrinsic to the birth of a poem was to imply that our analysis of it must always fall short of accurate description. But one might also regard the creation of poetry as something so commonplace that words were equally ineffcient in describing the event. When Walter de la Mare asked W. H. Davies about how he wrote his poems, Davies answered as follows. 294 B. AHEARN

This being a plain and simple question, I began in this way—“First, an idea comes to me.” But I had no sooner said this than De la Mare asked quickly—“What do you mean by ‘an idea comes to you’”? The reader will understand my confusion in trying to explain a thing that was so obvious. (Davies 1929, 28)

Davies was at a loss for words because the experience of having an idea was prior to verbalization. De la Mare seems to have been satisfed by Davies’s answer, or lack of answer, because he agreed that the composition of poetry was peculiarly tied to individual personality, and the nature of this tie was inexplicable. “Even more inviting is the affrmation [by Dr. Johnson], ‘A man is to have part of his life to himself,’ implying that one’s being a poet is a more intimate affair than any attempt to reveal that one is, even to oneself. Indeed a poem also is born rather than made” (De la Mare 1940, 173–174). British poet-critics seemed to agree that the source of poetry was inexplicable, whether because it was impen- etrably occult or because it was a simple function of being alive. If the birth of a poet and poetry were beyond the range of our analysis, it followed that efforts to improve the process were misguided at best, harmful at worst. Hence we fnd the same generation of poet-critics deploring any coterie that ventured to suggest improvements in the composition of poetry. Harold Monro caustically recounted how a young poet circa 1920 would fnd a group useful in furthering his career, if not his art.

It will be well for him soon to attach himself to some group. Thus he may strengthen his position socially, besides intellectually, and be saved the trouble of reading. The Group will pass remarks on books it has not read, of which he will pick out the cleverest for his own use. The Group also will teach him quickly to talk extremely cleverly about modern painting. And it will publish a periodical, or anthology, in which his poems will be printed. (1920, 11)

Likewise, the efforts of groups of poets in the nineteenth century were considered nugatory. When poet-critics looked back at previous movements, they characterized such endeavors as feeble. Monro said of the Rhymers’ Club that they “flled the transition period of the 1890’s with dignity but no great distinction” (17). Sometimes it was hard to discern whether groups or movements even had much effect on their members. 6 AFTERWORD 295

William Michael Rossetti, looking back at the pre-Raphaelites who had contributed to the Germ, commented, “their products … from the frst, differed greatly; and these soon ceased to have any link of resemblance” (1901, 7). Even Edith Sitwell, who generally praised the accomplishments of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, had little use for groups of poets. “Then arose Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s practical Jaeger school of verse. Many things were discovered, the only thing that was not discovered was poetry. At the same time, a school of American-Greek posturants, resembling not so much marble statues as a white-tiled bathroom, began to exude a thin stream of carefully chosen watery words” (1970, 19). If Sitwell was mild in her disapproval of schools and movements, the same cannot be said for other poet-critics of her generation. In 1927, when Robert Graves and Laura Riding looked at Imagism and its productions, they found it “a stunt of commercial advertisers of poetry to whom poetic results meant a popular demand for their work, not the discovery of new values for poetry that was wanted by the time” (Graves and Riding 1927, 117). Three decades later, in the Clark Lectures for 1954– 1955, Graves had second thoughts about Imagism. He now saw it as less of a publicity stunt; rather, it was a botched attempt to alter the course of poetic tradition. “With T. E. Hulme and others he [Pound] issued the Imagiste manifesto, which offered a hard, precise image as the summum bonum of poetry; but Imagism never caught on here. It seemed both precious and metrically undisciplined, and (worse) could not be har- nessed to the war effort of a nation in arms” (Graves 1995, 229). On the whole, the aversion to groups, schools, and movements was predictable. In 1911 Ford Madox Ford (then Ford Madox Hueffer) had identifed a stubborn individualism in British literary life.

For it is one of the saddening things in Anglo-Saxon life that any sort of union for an aesthetic or for an intellectual purpose seems to be almost an impossibility. Anglo-Saxon writers as a rule sit in the British Islands each on his little hill surrounded each by his satellites, moodily jealous of the fame of each of his rivals, incapable of realizing that the strength of several men together is very much stronger than the combined strengths of the same number of men acting apart. (Ford 1911, 23)

If we look for poet-critics who are favorably inclined to collective efforts, they are scarce on the ground. Hugh MacDiarmid is an exception. As a Scot who was particularly drawn to the poetic legacy of Scotland, 296 B. AHEARN he had no bias toward the English emphasis on the poet as a unique individual whose genius shied away from groups, schools, and movements. As a communist, he was receptive to the belief that revolutionary change came about precisely through such collective action. In 1932 MacDiarmid complained about “the unworthy and incompetent attitude of almost all of our poets to their art” (1992, 95), and suggested a remedy for the problem. He urged the poets of the British Isles to unite to ensure that their works were reviewed by “worthy critics.” “It is one of the weaknesses of the situation,” he added, “that responsible poets do not league themselves together to such ends” (1992, 95). It was also an indication of how far MacDiarmid had strayed from orthodox English attitudes about poetry that he disagreed with the notion that the creation of poetry was fundamentally a mysterious operation that was not open for discussion. He linked the deplorable state of poetry to a failure to analyze poetry more closely. “Signifcant in this connection is the lack of technical discussion …” (1992, 95). If we ask, however, what MacDiarmid offered along the lines of technical discussion, we are left with little in the way of explicit contributions. His comments about the work of other poets offer scant commentary on their technique. The sonnets of John Ferguson, for example, are praised for the “extreme directness of their diction,” while Conrad Aiken’s poems are dismissed as “a Sargasso sea of beautiful if insignifcant sound” (1996: 14, 211). But MacDiarmid offers no further detail about such phenomena. MacDiarmid’s call for collective action suggests that British con- servatism with respect to poetry could only be dislodged, if at all, by a strong ideological infuence. We fnd further evidence to this effect when we compare Zukofsky’s introduction of the Objectivists in 1931 with Michael Roberts’s preface to his anthology, New Signatures (1932). In both cases they were introducing young poets (although in Zukofsky’s case he also included William Carlos Williams). When we examine Roberts’s account of these new poets, we fnd he exhibits a slight inclination toward welcoming some new terminology, although he himself does not coin new expressions. Roberts makes a concession to new terminology by adopting Pound’s emphasis on precision—twenty years after the fact. “It is safe to say that Mr. Eberhart’s poem possesses that precision and economy, that aptness of imagery and rhythm, which is demanded by those who read poetry for its elegance …” (1932, 14). It is perhaps appropriate that since an American—Pound—had thrust “precision” 6 AFTERWORD 297 into the mix of critical terms current in the literary world, that Roberts applies it to the only American poet in his anthology. Roberts also uses one other notable critical term: impersonality. But he makes it clear that the kind of impersonality he prefers differs from what Eliot had stipulated in 1919. This sort of impersonality is not simply the renunciation on the part of the poet of his or her own private emotions, but an impersonality “that comes not from extreme detachment but from solidarity with others” (19). Roberts had taken Eliot’s concept and altered it to suit a particular political attitude. “It is natural that the recognition of the importance of others should sometimes lead to what appears to be the essence of the communist attitude …” (18–19). Much as Eliot would have been surprised to have been included among the Objectivists, he doubtless also would have been dismayed to discover that impersonality now served ends that Eliot deplored. Be that as it may, when Roberts uses “precision” and “impersonality,” he has adopted or adapted terms already available. He shows no interest in supplying new ones. In short, while both he and MacDiarmid are impatient with British aesthetic stodginess, neither signifcantly modifes the critical vocabulary then current. Edith Sitwell was by far the most comprehensive examiner of technical accomplishments in poetry. In Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934), although she deplores groups, schools, and movements, she is most attentive to how images and sound contribute to a poem’s total effect. When she discusses Gerard Manley Hopkins, she not only praises his “acute and piercing visual apprehension,” but also admires his attention to “vow- els, alliteration, assonance, dissonance” (1970, 58: 64). While Sitwell is exceptional in the degree to which she scrutinizes how image and sound operate in poetry, she nonetheless limits her critical vocabulary to traditional terminology. Her disinclination to invent or adopt new terms (such as Imagist “precision”) leads her to rely on a vocabulary that would have been familiar to readers in the nineteenth century. She often invokes “beauty” as a criterion. Yeats’s poems have a “strange beauty”; T. S. Eliot, although he writes quite differently, creates a “miraculously beautiful movement” (85, 121). Sitwell’s conservative bent leads her to claim that modern elements in poetry nonetheless represent a continu- ation of past achievements. She comments that readers alarmed by the revolution in poetry, in which “life was forming itself into new rhythmic lines,” should not feel distressed. The new rhythms were “a logical development of those to which they were accustomed” (180). 298 B. AHEARN

The British poet-critics, in their general belief that the creation of poetry is a private, even occult, matter, in their aversion to poetic schools or movements, and in their reluctance to discuss poetic technique, are at odds with their American cousins. In retrospect, it becomes clear that these attitudes sometimes put them at a critical disadvantage. Take, for example, the matter of tradition, which Eliot considered in his most famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). It begins, “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.” He may have had in mind some recent criticism, such as a review (July 1917) of Prufrock and Other Observations which commented, “We do not wish to appear patronizing, but we are certain that Mr. Eliot could do fner work on traditional lines” (Brooker 2004, 7). But Eliot was also prophetic. In the Clark Lectures of 1954–1955 we fnd Graves disparaging Ezra Pound because he “had no inkling of English tradition” (1995, 228). As Eliot had observed, the British could use “tradition” as a cudgel to belabor a poet for his or her defciencies. Yet the British were of two minds about tradition. Since many British poet-critics believed poetry emerged from a mysterious place within the poet, they were sometimes reluctant to emphasize tradition as crucial to the creation of the poem. Thus Herbert Read in 1938 pushed into the background the notion of an English poetic tradition by insisting, “there is not one literary tradition, but many traditions” (1951, 122). But he could also, when summarizing the rise and development of free verse, observe that it was not an aberration but true to “the theory of all essential English poetry” (1951, 49). Was there in fact a strong distinction between tradition and the essential? It looks like Read wanted to have his cake and eat it too. If he was somewhat fuzzy about how the traditional differed from the essential, it suggests that new, or at least more specifc terminology, was needed. Such a want the Americans were ready to supply. As we have seen, the American appreciation of the utility of organizing in small groups contrasted sharply with the British aversion to groups, schools, and movements. And the British antipathy toward such collectives was matched by a long-standing distrust of American culture. When Harold Monro considered current poetry in Some Contemporary Poets (1920), he commented on the work of forty-seven poets. Only two of these, Pound and H. D., were Americans, and both had made their reputations as expatriates living in London. Meanwhile, in the United States, Edwin Arlington Robinson was still active, and Robert 6 AFTERWORD 299

Frost (who made his initial reputation in England) had published his third book of poems, Mountain Interval, four years earlier. Also notably absent from Monro’s survey was T. S. Eliot, whose Prufrock and Other Observations had appeared in 1917. A decade after Monro’s summary of the state of poetry, Charles Williams offered a narrower range of poets in his Poetry at Present (1930). He commented on the work of eight- een poets, only one of whom was American: Eliot. In a brief biographical note, Williams alerted his readers to the fact that Eliot was “born in 1888, and an American by birth” (1930, 163). Despite this handicap, Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England and his renunciation of his American citizenship in favor of British citizenship appears to have made him worthy of consideration as a contemporary poet. Ten years further on, in Pleasures and Speculations (1940), Walter de la Mare criticized the work of Rupert Brooke, the Georgian Poets, and Tennyson, but works by Americans, whether in prose or poetry were notable by their absence from his agenda. So far as one can tell, for de la Mare the New World remained undiscovered. Not all British authors were so parochial. In their Survey of Modernist Poetry, Robert Graves and Laura Riding while listing Carl Sandburg as one of the poets belonging to a “dead movement,” singled out E. E. Cummings and John Crowe Ransom as belonging to a “live movement” (1927, 100). What readers in 1927 might not have known, however, was that Riding, born in New York City, had started her literary career by associating herself with the Fugitives, of whom Ransom was one of the leading lights. It appears that the British aversion to movements had in this case been tem- pered by the intervention of someone who was part of a movement. But such appreciations of contemporary American poetry were not common.

Coda There is no British Precision Museum. One can, however, fnd a tribute to precision looming in a corner of the Science Museum in South Kensington, London. There visitors can marvel at the machine that Babbage projected but could never realize in his lifetime: Difference Engine Number 2. Its fve tons of cast iron, steel, brass, and copper demonstrate what might have been had the funding been available, since Victorian machinists were capable of meeting Babbage’s demands on their skill.3 But Difference Engine Number 2 was not completed until 1991, one hundred and twenty years after his death. A few feet 300 B. AHEARN away, in a glass jar, reposes half of Babbage’s brain. A close inspection reveals its pliable, well-preserved convolutions that contrast sharply with the Difference Engine’s glittering majesty of cogwheels and rotating shafts. The Science Museum placards offer no explanation for why part of Babbage’s brain sits in such close proximity to the machine he envisioned. Perhaps viewers are tacitly reminded that it was the mysterious operations of a single mind that gave rise to the Difference Engine. No matter how triumphantly scientists and mechanical engineers produce precision instruments, the originating power of the intellect reigns supreme. Just as the British poet-critics who were contemporaries of Pound, Frost, and Moore, deemed poetic inspiration unfathomable— either because it was too deep or too shallow—so the Science Museum’s exhibition of Babbage’s brain implies that the most remarkable of inventions arise from an organ whose operations remain baffing. How is it that consciousness arises from cell membranes, neurons, and synapses? The world awaits a precise answer. We have yet to part the curtain shrouding this mystery.

Notes 1. A century after Poe, Wyndham Lewis applied the metaphor of poet as engineer to Pound. “Ezra Pound is to my mind, frst and last, a technician: so it is this gospel of a sort of literary mechanics that was to be expected of him. He is the knowing craftsman, generously imparting the tricks of his trade” (1987, 56). 2. See, for example, George S. Lensing, “Hart Crane’s Tunnel from The Waste Land,” Ariel 6:3 (July 1975), 20–35. 3. Doron Swade affrmed that “parts could be made to practically any required precision in Babbage’s time” (2001, 231). Works Cited

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A “The American Scholar” (Emerson), Abercrombie, Lascelles, 67 288 Abraham, 283n Amherst College, 163 Abstraction, 141, 207, 209n, 260–261 Amherst Student, 163–164 Accident, 218–223, 226, 260–262, Analects (Confucius), 121, 123 264–265, 271–274, 276, 279n, Andrews, Charles McLean, 249, 284n 285n. See also Substance Andrews, John, 284n Accident (Hamilton), 280n An Answer to the Question ‘What is Acoetes, 91, 97 Poetry’? (Hunt), 42 Actaeon, 110 Apollo, 81 Adam, 84–85, 242, 252, 261, Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 218, 257, 265–266 280n Adams, Charles Francis, 116–117 Aristotle, 218, 220, 260, 280n, 281n Adams, Henry, 250 Arithmetic. See Mathematics Adams, John, 115, 117–118, 128– Arnaut, Daniel, 47, 97, 104–106 129, 139n Arnold, Matthew, 13, 42–43, 56n Adams, John Quincy, 24–26, 117, works; “Dover Beach,” 13; 139n Introduction to The English Agassiz, Louis, 30, 68–74, 93 Poets, 43; “The Study of Agrarians, 290 Poetry,” 42 Aiken, Conrad, 296 Arrowsmith, Rupert, 54 Albright, Daniel, 136n Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 40 Aldington, Richard, 77 “The Art of Fiction” (Besant), 66 Ambrose, St., 282n “The Art of Fiction” (James), 66 American Exceptionalism, 288 Aspects of Modern Poetry, 297

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 317 under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8 318 Index

Asterolepis, 253. See also Fish 280n, 281n, 283n, 285n, 288; Astronomy, 25–27, 34, 166–167, Jacob, 236; Jesus Christ, 228, 169–171 241, 248, 271, 278n, 282n; Atmosphere, 9–13, 29, 55n, 186 Joseph, 232–233; Mary, 248, Augustine, Saint, 79, 85, 134n, 257 283n; Moses, 232; Paul, 85, Autobiography (Chesterton), 67 129, 267; Satan, 266 Places; Eden, 12, 80, 85, 261, 262, 265, 272; Malta, 267 B Bicycles, 66 Babbage, Charles, 15, 27, 31–33, Binyon, Laurence, 54, 59n 299–300. See also Difference Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 41, Engine Number 2 230 Babbitt (Lewis), 274 Black Mountain College, 290 Bacigalupo, Massimo, 78 Blair, Hugh, 49–50, 59n Bacon, Baldy, 117, 129, 140n Blake, William, 103 Bacon, Francis, 35–37, 43, 69, 132n Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 93, 119, 131 Bagehot, Walter, 43 Bohr, Niels, 163–166 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 29, 30 Book of Common Prayer, 228, 234 Basil the Great, Saint, 282n Book of the Eparch, 112 Bateman, Frederick, 230, 281n “The Borrowed Lady” (Bertran de Baxter, Richard, 216–217, 220, Born), 106 260–261, 267, 281n, 285n Bouvard, Alexis, 27 Beats, 290 Bradford, William, 218 “The Bee” (Lanier), 135n Bradley, F.H., 61, 101, 102 The Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 51 The Bridge (Crane), 291 Bell, F.A., 132n Brimblecombe, Peter, 55n Bell Telephone Company, 245 Brooke, Rupert, 299 Bergson, Henri, 143–145, 162, 209n Brouk, B., 282n Bertran de Born, 105, 106 Brower, Reuben, 217 Besant, Walter, 66 Browne, Sir Thomas, 79–80, 82–83, Biblical Events, Personages, and Places 278n Events; Euroclydon, 266; The Fall, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 135 79–80, 85, 252, 261, 265 Browning, Robert, 53, 96, 99, 116, Personages; Abraham, 283n; 137n, 170, 211n Adam, 84–85, 242, 252, 261, works; “Childe Roland to the Dark 265–266; Daniel, 242; Eve, Tower Came,” 211n; The Ring 84–85, 264–266; God, 29, 33, and the Book, 89; Sordello, 89, 46, 56n, 79–80, 84–85, 104, 99, 116 135n, 166, 212n, 213, 218, Buchanan, Robert, 95 220, 223, 230–231, 234, 237, Buddhism, 126 240, 242, 244, 248, 253–257, Bunyan, John, 81, 83, 118, 127, 131, 261–262, 266–268, 277n, 234, 247, 267 Index 319

Burke, Edmund, 269 Circe, 90, 92, 118 Burke, Kenneth, 80, 222 Clark, Samuel, 114 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 10, 41, Class Book of Natural Theology 106, 136n, 267 (Fergus), 27, 255 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41, 230 Collins, John Churton, 31, 34 C Collins, Laurence, 33 Caesar, Julius, 24, 100, 102, 222 Columbus, Christopher, 128–129 The Caged Panther (Meacham), 61 “The Coming of War” (Johnson), Camoens. See de Camões, Luís 138n de Camões, Luís, 46 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 2 Campbell, George, 48–50 “The Conception of the Campion, Thomas, 40 Subconscious” (Hart), 50–51 Candolle, Alphonse de, 279n, 282n Confucius, 65, 119–126, 129, 140n Capron, E.W., 212n Conley, Tim, 135n Carlyle, Thomas, 137n Cooper, James Fenimore, 247, 274 Carman, Bliss, 67 Costello, Bonnie, 277n Catullus, 89 Council of Trent, 218 Cavalcanti, 47, 50 Course of Lectures on Oratory and Cecire, Natalia, 278n Criticism (Priestley), 49 Centuries of Meditation (Traherne), Cowper, William, 51 280n Craig, Gordon, 221 “Certain Notes of Instruction Crane, Hart, 2, 291 Concerning the Making of Creevy, Patrick J., 56n Verse or Rhyme in English” Critic as Scientist (Bell), 132n (Gascoigne), 40 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 249 Chadwick, Sheldon, 57n Crosby, Alfred W., 34–35 Chambers, Robert, 253 Crummett, Vance, 132n Charles Babbage and his Calculating Crusoe, Robinson, 218 Engines (Morrison and Morrison), Cummings, E.E., 292, 299 31 Currier and Ives, 206 Cheadle, Mary Paterson, 139n The Chemical History of a Candle (Faraday), 29 D Chen Po-Yu, 121 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 2 Chesterton, G.K., 67, 216, 263, Damon, 81 279–281, 285n Dance, 66–67 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), Daniel, 242 106 Dante, 45–47, 97, 137n, 177, 211n, Chronos, 245–246 280n El Cid, 99 Darwin, Charles, 67, 282n Cincinnatus, 232, 234 320 Index

Darwinism, 162, 195, 259, 273, Edison, Thomas, 29 275–276 Edwards, Jonathan, 86, 135n Darwinism Tested by Language Einstein, Albert, 209n (Bateman), 230 Eisenstadt, A.S., 284n Daston, Lorraine, 70–71 Élan vital, 144 Davenport, Guy, 61 Eliot, George, 10 Davies, W.H., 293 Eliot, T.S., 38, 152, 203, 213–215, Davis, Stuart, 278n 217, 220, 278n, 290–292, Davy, Sir Humphry, 23, 29 295–299 The Defence of Poetry (Sidney), 40 works; “Ash Wednesday,” 293; Defoe, Daniel, 280n Collected Poems, 213, The Degenerate Muse (Schulze), 283n 215; Prufrock and Other De la Mare, Walter, 293–294, 299 Observations, 298–299; The Demuth, Charles, 278n Sacred Wood, 220; “Tradition Descartes, René, 35 and the Individual Talent,” Difference Engine Number 2, 298; The Waste Land, 290–291 299–300 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 257, 288 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 250 “The Eparch’s Book of Leo the Wise” Diogenes, 187 (Terrell), 113 Dionysus, 91, 97, 136n Erickson, Darlene Williams, 277n A Discourse of English Poetrie (Webbe), Essay of Dramatic Poesy (Dryden), 40 40 An Essay on Man (Pope), 39 Discourses (Reynolds), 52 Euroclydon, 266 Divus, Andreas, 91, 114 Eurylochus, 114 Don Juan (Byron), 89 Eve, 84–85, 264–266 Doolittle, Hilda, 233 Evelyn, John, 10 Doreski, William, 210n Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Science Douglass, Paul, 209n (Hovey), 132n Drayton, Michael, 216 Drinkwater, John, 67 Dryden, John, 40, 43, 244 F Durant, Alan, 133n Faggen, Robert, 171, 211n Dürer, Albrecht, 220 The Fall, 79–80, 85, 252, 261, 265 Faraday, Michael, 29 Fergus, Henry, 27, 255 E Ferguson, John, 296 The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Ficke, Arthur Davison, 67 Tennyson (Collins), 31, 33 Fielding, Henry, 280n The Earth’s Crust (Page), 254 Finch, Sir Henry, 115, 139n Eaves, T.C. Duncan, 78 Fish, 69–73, 133n, 224, 253, 271 Eberhart, Richard, 62, 296 FitzGerald, Edward, 86 Eddington, A.S., 209n Flaubert, Gustave, 9, 50, 54n Eden, 12, 80, 85, 261, 262, 265, 272 Index 321

“The Fleshly School of Poetry” 153; “The Death of the Hired (Buchanan), 95 Man,” 145, 204; “Desert Fletcher, John Gould, 290 Places,” 169, 171, 174, 176, Flint, F.S., 44–45 211n; “Directive,” 205; Fog. See Atmosphere “Education by Poetry,” 6, 143, Foot-prints of the Creator (Miller), 150, 151, 195, 201–202, 212n, 252–253 281n; “Evening in a Sugar Ford, Ford Madox, 10, 50, 77, 83, Orchard,” 183; “For Once, 97–98, 135n, 214, 295 Then, Something,” 151–153, “Francis Furini” (Browning), 53 169, 174–175, 186, 187; “A Fresnel, Augustin, 56n Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Freud, Sigmund, 104 Ears and Some Books,” 187; A Frobenius, Leo, 64 Further Range, 197–200; “The Frost, Robert Future of Man,” 172; “The astronomy, 167–171 Generations of Men,” 184, habit, 144–146 187–188; “Ghost House,” mathematics, 143, 178–179, 209n 150–151, 184; “Good Hours,” mentioned, 12, 29, 86, 141, 157–158, 175; “Home 217–238, 258, 262, 270, 273, Burial,” 205; “A Hundred 279n, 281, 282, 288, 291, Collars,” 146; “I Will Sing 298–299 You One-O,” 164–167, 177, metaphor, 143, 162–164, 192, 185, 211n; “Into My Own,” 194–196, 200, 201 86, 149–150, 157, 174; “In narrative, 188–197 Winter in the Woods Alone,” phenomenology, 144, 146 202; Introduction to Sarah sound of sense, 148–149, 153, 199, Cleghorn’s Threescore, 199– 207–208, 210n 200; “A Late Walk,” 207; “The turning, 157–160, 201 Lesson for Today,” 208; The works; A Boy’s Will, 148–151, 159, Letters of Robert Frost, 1, 146, 207, 210n; “Acquainted with 148, 208, 209n; “Letter to The the Night,” 177–178; “The Amherst Student,” 199, 212n; Axe-helve,” 198–199, 212n, “The Literate Farmer and the 288; “The Black Cottage,” Planet Venus,” 29; “Maple,” 205; “The Bonfre,” 183; “A 187, 192–195; “Mending Brook in the City,” 178–179; Wall,” 179–181, 186, “Build Soil,” 199–200, 201; 203–205, 212n; “A Missive “The Census-Taker,” 167–170, Missile,” 199–200, 207; “The 188; The Collected Prose of Mountain,” 181–184, 186; Robert Frost, 141, 143, 151, Mountain Interval, 190, 299; 162, 163, 172, 195, 199, “Mowing,” 148–150, 160, 200, 202, 205, 212n; “A 174, 210n; “New Hampshire,” Considerable Speck,” 151, 291; New Hampshire, 167, 322 Index

185, 187, 291; “Neither Our Galison, Peter, 70–71 Far Nor In Deep,” 279n; Gascoigne, George, 40 North of Boston, 145, 205; The Gautier, Théophile, 87 Notebooks of Robert Frost, 141, Gay, John, 51 147, 153, 156, 161, 162, 202, The Gay Science (Dallas), 2 210n; “On Taking from the Genesis, Book of, 84–85 Top to Broaden the Base,” Georgian Poets, 299 183; “On a Tree Fallen Across The Germ, 295 the Road,” 171–174, 196–197; Gibbon, Edward, 250 “The Onset,” 175–176, 178, Giberne, Agnes, 254, 280n 211n; “The Oven Bird,” 203; Giesenkirchen, Michaele, 137n “A Patch of Old Snow,” 203; Glaciers, 251–255, 257, 262, 284n “Paul’s Wife,” 187; “Petra Glenn, Edgar, 140n and Its Surroundings,” 141; Going by Contraries (Hass), 211n The Poetry of Robert Frost, The Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 150 217; “Reluctance,” 153; “A Golston, Michael, 134 Roadside Stand,” 197–198; Gourmont, Remy de, 136n “The Self-Seeker,” 288; “A Graves, Robert, 295, 298 Servant to Servants,” 204; Green, Fiona, 282n “Snow,” 196–197; “A Star in Griffth, Arthur, 75, 96, 117, 134n a Stone-Boat,” 187; “Stars,” Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 1 207; “The Star-Splitter,” 174, 185–187; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” H 176; “The Strong Are Saying Hale, William Gardner, 61, 113 Nothing,” 282n; “The Tuft of Hamilton, Alexander, 117 Flowers,” 158–161, 175; “Two Hamilton, Ross, 280n Look at Two,” 187; “Two Hamilton, William Rowan, 34 Witches,” 187; “West-Running Hart, Bernard, 50–51 Brook,” 142–143, 177, 181; “Hart Crane’s Tunnel from The Waste “The Witch of Coös,” 188– Land” (Lensing), 300n 189, 291; “The Wood-Pile,” Harvard College Observatory, 171 12, 160–161, 165, 168, 176, Hass, Robert Bernard, 162–163, 171, 178, 202 211n Froula, Christine, 63, 65, 138n Hazlitt, William, 54, 59n Fugitives, 289, 299 works; “On Criticism,” 59n; Fumifugium (Evelyn), 10 “On Hogarth’s Marriage Futurism, 289 A-La-Mode,” 52; “On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin,” 52 G H.D. See Doolittle, Hilda Gale, Zona, 136n Heaviside, Mary, 32 Galileo, 3, 22 Heidegger, Martin, 144 Index 323

Herbert, George, 217 J Hermes, 85, 109 Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied “Hermes of the Ways” (Doolittle), Poetics, 290 103 Jackson, Andrew, 26 Herodotus, 250 Jackson, Sheldon, 276 Herschel, Sir John, 34 Jacob, 236 Herschel, Sir William, 34 James, Henry, 50, 66, 95, 105–106, Hill-Miller, Katherine C., 56n 124, 210n, 262, 275, 286n The History of England for Schools and works; “The Art of Fiction,” 66; Colleges (Andrews), 284n Italian Hours, 105; “Siena Hitchcock, Alfred, 55n Early and Late,” 106; A Small Hogarth, William, 52 Boy and Others, 210n, 286n Holley, Margaret, 277n, 281n James, William, 100–102, 143–146, Homer, Winslow, 17 202 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 217, 297 works; Pragmatism, 100; Psychology: Hopper, Edward, 17 Briefer Course, 145, 202 Housman, A.E., 293 Jefferson, Thomas, 115–117, 139n Hovey, Kimberley, 132n Jeffrey, Francis, 41–42 Hubble, Edwin, 171 Jenkins, Daniel, 277n Hulme, T.E., 8n, 44–46, 53 Jesus Christ, 228, 241, 248, 271, Hunt, Leigh, 42 278n, 282n Husserl, Edmund, 144 Johnson, Lionel, 138n Huxley, Thomas Henry, 59n, 67, Johnson, Samuel, 10, 38–39, 55n, 87 284n works; A Dictionary of the English Language, 38–40; Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, I 40, 49; “London,” 10, 38; The Imagism, 289, 292, 295 Rambler, 55n; “The Vanity of “Imagisme” (essay by Pound and Human Wishes,” 38, 87 Flint), 38 Joseph, 232–233 Imprecision, 3, 78, 109, 147, 149– Jost, Walter, 212n 157, 160–162, 164, 168–171, Joyce, James, 143 176–179, 182–185, 188, Joyce’s Mistakes (Conley), 135n 192–194, 199–202, 205–208, Jupiter (god), 245, 248. See also Zeus 214, 217, 225–230, 238–241, 246, 248, 259, 289 “In a London Drawing Room” K (George Eliot), 10 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 249 “Instructions for the Lightkeepers Kappel, Andrew J., 277n of Northern Lighthouses” Kayman, Martin, 50, 132n (Stevenson), 19 Kazin, Alfred, 82 Irwin, John T., 57n Keats, John, 34, 200–201, 270 324 Index

works; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Lewis, Sinclair, 274 200; “On First Looking into Lewis, Wyndham, 61, 77, 126, 300n Chapman’s Homer,” 34 Liberty Enlightening the World, 29 Kenner, Hugh, 31–32, 61, 119, 130, “Liberty Enlightening the World” 134n, 216 (Stedman), 57n works; The Counterfeiters, 31; Liebregts, Peter, 135n Paradox in Chesterton, 216 Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Woodberry), Kermode, Frank, 58n 18 Kimpel, Ben D., 78 “The Lighthouse and the Press” Kipling, Rudyard, 240 (Chadwick), 57n “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Lighthouses, 20–27, 29–30, 34, Knowledge by Description” 56–57n, 238 (Russell), 101 Lindberg, Kathryn, 133n, 136n Korn, Marianne, 138n Lindsay, Vachel, 292 Kronick, Joseph, 134n Linnaeus, 71 Kronos, 283n Locke, John, 280n Kuzma, Greg, 210n The Lodger (Lowndes), 11 “London’s Summer Morning” (Robinson), 10 L Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 29–30 The Land of Mist (Conan Doyle), 2 Long, Huey, 197 Landor, Walter Savage, 44 Longinus, 224 Lan, Feng, 125, 140n Louis Agassiz as a Teacher (Cooper), Lanier, Sidney, 135n 133n Lardner, Dionysus, 32 Lowell, James Russell, 96 “Laus Veneris” (Swinburne), 83 Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc, 11 Lawrence, D.H., 295 Lusiads (Camões), 46 Leader, Jennifer L., 277n Leaska, Mitchell A., 56n Leavell, Linda, 55n M Leavitt, Henrietta Swan, 171 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 250 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres MacDiarmid, Hugh, 295, 297 (Blair), 49–50 Machinery, 2, 17–18, 24, 32, 67, 132, “Lectures to Women on Physical 198–199, 247, 280n, 288, 293, Science” (Maxwell), 28 300. See also Mechanical action Ledebour, Carl Friedrich von, 279n Made in America (Steinman), 4 Lensing, George S., 300n Maent, 106 Lentricchia, Frank, 146 Makin, Peter, 119 Leo the Wise, 112 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 93, 100, 102, Letters from the Earth (Twain), 84 128 Levitt, Theresa, 56n Mangles, James Henry, 32 Levy, Emil, 111, 129 “The Man of the Crowd” (Poe), 178 Index 325

“The Man on the Dump” (Stevens), Mond, Alfred, First Baron Melchett, 147 94 Mao, C.T., 125 Mond, Sir Robert Ludwig, 94 Marian apparitions, 283n Monro, Harold, 293, 294, 299 Marianne Moore Newsletter, 284n Moore, John Milton, 12, 55n Marsh, Alec, 139n Moore, John Warner, 277n Martin, Jeredith, 277n Moore, Marianne Martin, Robert Bernard, 31–33 accident, 219, 226, 260–262, Martin, Taffy, 277n, 280n 264–265, 271–274, 276, 279n, Marxism, 195 285n Mary, 248, 283n the Beautiful, 269, 272, 275 Masters, Edgar Lee, 290 mathematics, 224, 237–246, 251, Mathematics, 1–5, 23, 26–27, 35, 67– 275, 282n 69, 76, 134, 143, 144, 161–169, mentioned, 12, 30, 292, 300 178–179, 197–198, 209n, 224, paradox, 215–216, 219, 221, 226– 237–246, 251, 275, 282n, 290 227, 230, 231, 244, 251–252, Mathews, Elkin, 53 257, 263–264, 266–273, 276 Maxwell, James Clerk, 3, 28–29, 34, religion, 215–223, 230–231, 233– 67 237, 240–241, 243, 247–249, McAlmon, Robert, 233, 256, 268 252–257, 260–262, 264–268, Meacham, Harry, 61 271, 276, 277n, 279 Mechanical action, 56n, 144, 167, the Sublime, 224, 228–230, 235, 247, 293, 299–300. See also 249, 251–252, 268, 272 Machinery substance, 12, 30, 218–220, 223, Men of Letters (Scott), 286n 226, 260–262, 264, 271–274, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 144 276, 280n, 282n, 285n Merwin, W.S., 6 works; “Bowls,” 213, 216, Metamorphoses (Ovid), 81, 98 278n; “Camellia Sabina,” Metevsky, 117 272; Collected Poems, 278n; Michelet, Jules, 250 Complete Poems, 220, 235, Miller, Cristanne, 277n, 281n 238; The Complete Prose of Miller, Hugh, 252–253 Marianne Moore, 213–215, Milton, John, 21–22, 51, 83, 210n, 217, 220, 281n; “Critics and 235 Connoisseurs,” 273; “Dream,” Minerva, 207–208 223; “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Mirror Galvanometer, 28 Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” Mix, Tom, 274 269–271; “England,” 231– The Model of Poesy (Scott), 40 232; “Feeling and Precision,” The Modernism of Ezra Pound 213; “The Fish,” 223–224, (Kayman), 132n 232, 247–249, 260, 269; Modern Spiritualism (Capron), 212n “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks,” 326 Index

245–246; “The Frigate Are Years?, 275; “When I Buy Pelican,” 241–242; “A Grave,” Pictures,” 276 227–230, 251–252, 281n; Moore, Mary Warner, 277n, 286n “The Hero,” 216, 232–235, Morris, David B., 235 278n; “He Wrote the History Morrison, Emily, 31 Book,” 249–250; “In the Morrison, Philip, 31 Days of Prismatic Color,” 12; Morse, Samuel F.B., 2 “In This Age of Hard Trying, Moses, 232 Nonchalance Is Good And,” Muir, Edwin, 293–294 225–226, 248–249; “The Müller, Max, 246, 283n Jerboa,” 235–237, 242–244, Mussolini, Benito, 75, 82, 94, 96, 272, 278n; “Keeping Their 117, 134n World Large,” 279n; “Light The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, 11 Is Speech,” 30; “Marriage,” 215, 222, 252, 257, 263–267; “The Monkey Puzzle,” 215, N 226–227, 232; “New York,” Nänny, Max, 136n 221, 244–245, 274–275; Naropa Institute, 290 “Nine Nectarines,” 239–241, The Natural Philosophy of Love 279n, 282n; “No Swan So (Gourmont), 136n Fine,” 242; “Novices,” 215; Natural theology, 219, 230–231, 237, Observations, 278n; “An 239, 252–256 Octopus,” 251–252, 254, Nature, 151–156, 159–160, 162, 167, 255, 257–263, 268; “Picking 172, 174–180, 182–185, 187, and Choosing,” 221, 222; 196, 221, 223, 225–230, 237, “The Plumet Basilisk,” 279n; 239–242, 244, 252–262, 268, “Rigorists,” 221, 275–276; 270–274, 279n, 285n “Rosemary,” 279n; “Sea Neptune (dog), 21 Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” Neptune (planet), 27 279n; Selected Letters of New Age, 44–45, 47, 58n Marianne Moore, 213, 217, New Signatures, 296 233, 256; Selected Poems, 224, The New Testament in Basic English, 227, 232, 235, 238, 241, 242, 216 249, 272, 275, 278n; “The Newton, Sir Isaac, 21–22, 41, 57n Steeple-Jack,” 234–235, 238, New York School, 290 239, 242–244, 278n, 282n; Nicholas of Cusa, 9 “The Student,” 279n; “Style,” Nicole, Jules, 112–113 223; “Subject, Predicate, Niebuhr, Reinhold, 236, 283n Object,” 214; “Those Various Nietzsche, Friedrich, 136n, 237 Scalpels,” 215; “To a Prize North, Michael, 63–65 Bird,” 223–226, 248–249; “To Novum Organum Scientiarum a Steam Roller,” 217; What (Bacon), 35, 132n Index 327

Numbers. See Mathematics 257–258, 263–264, 266–268, Numerals. See Mathematics 270–273, 276 Nutting, Wallace, 206 Paris Review, 170 Parkman, Francis, 250 Pater, Walter, 43 O Paul, Saint, 85, 129, 266 Objectivists, 289, 292, 296–297 Pearson, Karl, 67, 247 Objectivity, 67, 70–74, 78, 133n Pentheus, 97–98 Observation in the Art of English Poesie Perelman, Bob, 133n (Campion), 40 Phaedrus (Plato), 137n Observatories, 24–27, 34 Phaethon, 81 Odysseus, 90–92, 98, 108, 114, 118, Philosophy of Rhetoric (Campbell), 49 129 Physiography (Huxley), 284n The Odyssey, 90, 97, 113, 124, 136n Pickering, Edward Charles, 171 O’Keefe, Georgia, 278n The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 81, Olson, Charles, 292 118, 127, 132, 234, 247, 278n “On Appearance, Error and Pleasures and Speculations (de la Contradiction” (Bradley), 61 Mare), 299 “On Heaven” (Ford), 214 Plotinus, 135n “On Milton’s Versifcation” (Hazlitt), Plymouth Plantation, 218 51 Poe, Edgar Allan, 22–24, 27, 30, On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 51 136n, 178, 300n O’Sullivan, Vincent, 45 works; The Journal of Julius Others, 289 Rodman, 24; “The Our Place among Infnities (Proctor), Lighthouse,” 18–21, 23; “The 170 Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Ovid, 81, 98 23; “The Philosophy of Composition,” 57, 290; “The Purloined Letter,” 23; “The P Raven,” 58, 290; “To Helen,” Pacioli, Luca, 34–35 27; “To Science,” 21–22 Page, David, 254 Poetic Vernacular, 83, 135n Paideuma, 64–65 Poetry, 292 Painting in the Far East (Binyon), 53 Poetry at Present, 299 Paley, William, 26, 230–231, 256 Poirier, Richard, 172, 209n Palgrave, Francis Turner, 150 Polyolbion (Drayton), 216 Panofsky, Erwin, 35 Pope, Alexander, 22–23, 39–40, 43, Paquin, 130 50, 54 Paradise Lost, 22, 51, 83, 235 Pound, Ezra Paradox, 214–216, 219, 221, 226– Confucius, 119–125 227, 230, 231, 244, 251–252, criticized as wrong, 61–65 328 Index

doubts, 103–108 89, 116, 134n; Canto 96, economics, 62, 75, 79, 82, 94, 117, 112–113; Canto 103, 116; 119, 134n Canto 116, 79, 81, 128–129, errant language, 109–110 289; Canto 120, 82; The great men, 74–78 Cantos, 63, 65, 78, 82, 88–91, history, 65, 77, 105–107, 124, 125, 96, 99, 102, 108, 111–112, 134n 114–119, 126–129, 134, intuition, 77–78, 134n 140n; Cathay, 91; Chinese mentioned, 12, 36–38, 43, 44, Cantos, 64, 119–123, 125, 46–48, 50–52, 54, 61–132, 129; “The Coming of War: 152, 203, 209n, 213–214, 248, Actaeon”, 109–110, 138n; 260, 277n, 281n, 288–293, Confucius, 120–123; A Draft 295, 299–300 of XXX Cantos, 214; A Draft modernity, 63–65, 132n of Cantos XXXI-XLI, 139n; obsession with error, 79–91 Drafts and Fragments of Cantos paideuma, 64–65 CX-CXVII, 118; Eleven New recovering the past, 99–103, Cantos XXXI-XLI, 115, 139n; 105–107 “The Encounter”, 92; “Famam science, 65, 67–70, 72, 74 Librosque Cano”, 87, 88; “A textual corruption, 111–114 Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” unerring body, 92–99 50; Gaudier-Brzeska, 70; “The vision, 69–71, 88, 97–99, 102, Garret”, 92, 108; “A Girl”, 93; 106–110, 117, 118, 131 “Gold and Work”, 111; Guide works; ABC of Reading, 37, 69, to Kulchur, 62, 74, 123–124; 71, 72, 74, 86, 133n, 136n, Hilda’s Book, 83; “Hugh 141; Adams Cantos, 116–117, Selwyn Mauberley”, 86–88, 139n; “April”, 107; Canzoni, 95, 97–98, 104; “I Gather 61, 98; Canto 1, 90, 108, the Limbs of Osiris,” 47–48, 118; Canto 2, 65, 90, 91, 97, 50; “Imagisme,” 60n; “In a 99, 108; Canto 3, 108; Canto Station of the Metro”, 70; “An 10, 93; Canto 11, 128–129; Introduction to the Economic Canto 12, 128–129; Canto Nature of the United States”, 13, 128–129; Canto 19, 134n; 79; Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, Canto 20, 79; Canto 31, 115; 77; Lustra, 62; “Mang Tsze”, Canto 39, 113, 118; Canto 139n; “Near Perigord”, 106– 41, 134n; Canto 43, 114–115; 107, 110; “On His Own Face Canto 46, 115; Canto 48, 129; in a Glass”, 103; “Papyrus,” 5; Canto 49, 129; Canto 50, “Paracelsus in Excelsis”, 110; 129; Canto 51, 129; Canto 52, The Picture, 87; Pisan Cantos, 125; Canto 54, 126; Canto 62, 119; “Portrait d’une 62, 116–117; Canto 71, 115, Femme”, 92, 96, 103; “The 117; Canto 80, 94, 131; Canto Prose Tradition in Verse,” 50; 81, 118–119, 130–131; Canto “Provincia Deserta”, 88, 90, Index 329

104–107; “Psychology and the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), Troubadours,” 50; “Religio”, 79–80 138n; “The Return,” 109–110, The Psychology of Insanity (Hart), 59n 248; Ripostes, 93; San Trovaso Puttenham, George, 40 Notebook, 135n; “The Seafarer”, 113; Selected Prose, 93, 129; “The Serious Artist,” Q 47, 68, 277n; The Spirit of Qian, Zhaoming, 277n Romance, 1, 46–48, 120; “The Quest Society, 48 Teacher’s Mission”, 68, 72; “Three Cantos”, 89–90, 108; “Translators of Greek: Early R Translators of Homer”, 114; Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 62 “The Tree”, 83, 85, 86, 93, Raine, Kathleen, 277n 107, 110; “A Visiting Card”, Rainey, Lawrence, 102 94, 96; “Vorticism”, 109; “The Raitt, Suzanne, 8n White Stag”, 93; “The Wisdom Ranke, Leopold von, 250 of Poetry”, 67 Ransom, John Crowe, 299 “Precisian,” 39, 278n Read, Herbert, 293, 298 Precision, 3–5, 28, 31, 34, 54, 58n, Regulus, 232, 234 66–68, 74, 78, 81, 94, 97, Religion, 7, 206, 276. See also Baxter; 110, 119–124, 126, 132, 165, Biblical Events, Personages, and 175, 213–220, 223, 224, 226, Places; Book of Common Prayer; 229, 231–232, 234, 245, 246, Bunyan; Chesterton; Moore, 248–249, 260, 264, 265, 269, Marianne; Natural Theology; 278n, 287–290, 296–297, 299n, Niebuhr; Paradise Lost; The 300n Pilgrim’s Progress; “Precisian”; art, 54 Presbyterians; Pseudodoxia literature, 54 Epidemica; Saints; The Saints’ rhetoric, 54 Everlasting Rest science, 54 Revere, Paul, 237 Precisionism (in painting), 4, 278n Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 52, 53 Precision Museum, 287–288 Reznikoff, Charles, 290, 292 Presbyterians, 216, 221, 253, 255– Rhymers’ Club, 294 256, 265, 277m Richard the Lionhearted, 106 Priestley, Joseph, 49 Riding, Laura, 295, 299 Prince of Mei, 124 Rittenhouse, Jesse B., 62 Proctor, Richard A., 170–171 Robert Frost and the Challenge of Projective Verse, 292 Darwin (Faggen), 211n Propertius, 61, 113 Roberts, Michael, 296–297 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 79–80, Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 298 138n Robinson, Mary, 10 330 Index

Rohmer, Sax, 11 Schulman, Grace, 277n Romance Island (Gale), 136n Schulz, Kathryn, 133n The Romance of the Mighty Deep Schulze, Robin G., 282n, 286n (Giberne), 280–281n Science, 1–6, 14–18, 20–38, 41, “The Romance of the Swan’s Nest” 57n, 65–74, 211n, 260. See also (E.B. Browning), 135n Agassiz; Astronomy; Bacon, “Romanticism and Classicism” Francis; Darwinism; Glaciers; (Hulme), 45, 47 Lighthouses; Machinery; Rosmarin, Adena, 138n Mathematics; Mechanical action; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 43, 47, 86, Precision 95, 135n Science Museum, London, 299–300 Rossetti, William Michael, 295 The Science of Language (Müller), 246 Rotella, Guy, 209n Scott, Dixon, 286n The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Scott, Sir Walter, 95 (FitzGerald), 86 Scott, William, 40 Ruskin, John, 12–13, 55n, 66, 95, Scudder, Samuel, 73 275 Secession, 216 works; “Of Kings’ Treasuries”, Sellaio, Jacopo del, 87 95; “The Storm-cloud of the Semele, 136n Nineteenth Century,” 13; The “Sestina: Of the Lady Pietra degli Two Paths, 12–13 Scrovigni” (Rossetti), 135n Russell, Bertrand, 101–102 Shakespeare, William, 41, 150 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 72 Shaw, George Bernard, 280n S Sheeler, Charles, 278n Saints Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 137n, 211n Ambrose, 282n Shifting Gears (Tichi), 4 Aquinas, 79, 218, 257, 280n Sidney, Sir Philip, 40 Augustine, 79, 85, 134n, 257 Sinclair, Upton, 197 Basil the Great, 282n Sitwell, Edith, 277n, 295, 297 Paul, 85, 129, 266 Slatin, John, 277n Saintsbury, George, 43–44 Smeaton, John, 27 works; “Dante and the Grand Smeaton and Lighthouses, 16–17, 20 Style,” 44; “Milton and the Smith, Sydney, 32, 42 Grand Style,” 44 Smoke. See Atmosphere The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Baxter), Socrates, 137n 260, 281n, 285n Some Contemporary Poets (Monro), Sandburg, Carl, 299 298 Sappho, 5 “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” Satan, 266 (Dryden), 244 Scholes, Robert, 133n Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare), 150 Index 331

Sordello, 99, 100, 102, 137n works; “The Splendour Falls on The Soul of London (Ford), 10 Castle Walls,” 28; “Ulysses,” Spectracists, 290 196; “The Vision of Sin,” Spencer, Herbert, 67 31–33 Stanlis, Peter J., 145 Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Martin), Stapleton, Laurence, 277n 31 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 57n Terpsichore, 66 Steegmuller, Francis, 54n Terrell, Carroll, 91, 112–115 Stein, Gertrude, 63 Tertullian, 282n Steinman, Lisa M., 4 Testimony: the United States, 1885– Sterne, Laurence, 280n 1915 (Reznikoff), 290 Stevens, Wallace, 147, 203, 214, 281n Thompson, Francis, 45 works; “The Idea of Order at Key Thomson, William, First Baron Kelvin, West,” 281n; Owl’s Clover, 214 28 Stevenson, Alan, 19–20 Thoreau, Henry David, 139n, 262, Subconscious Phenomena (Münsterberg 285n et al), 51 Thucydides, 250 Substance, 218–220, 223, 226, Tichi, Cecilia, 4 260–262, 264, 271–274, 276, Tiresias, 91–92, 108 279, 280, 282n, 285n. See also Tocqueville, Alexis de, 289 Accident To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Summa de Arithmetica, Proportioni et Pound’s Cantos (Froula), 63 Proportionalita (Pacioli), 35 Traherne, Thomas, 280n Survey of Modernist Poetry (Graves and Trees, 83–86, 93, 104–105, 107, 149, Riding), 299 155, 176–177, 194, 211n Swade, Doron, 300n Tseu-lou, 124 Swift, Jonathan, 1, 10, 222 Turner, J.M.W., 17 works; “Description of a City Twain, Mark, 84 Shower,” 10; Gulliver’s Travels, Tyndall, John, 34 1; A Tale of a Tub, 222 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 43, 83, 95–96 U Sylvester, James Joseph, 34 Ulysses (Joyce), 143 Symbolisme, 289 Untermeyer, Louis, 146, 195, 209n Up from Slavery (Washington), 218–219 T Uranus, 27, 34 Telescopes, 22, 26, 30, 185–186 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 280n Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 28, 30–34, V 55n, 170, 196, 293, 299 “Venus and Adonis” (Shakespeare), 41 Le Verrier, Urbain, 27 332 Index

Vestiges of Natural Creation Winant, Johanna, 137n (Chambers), 253, 255 Winterhalter, Teresa, 135n Virgil, 81 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 144 “Vita Nuova” (Wilde), 135n Woodberry, George E., 18 Woolf, Virgina, 16, 18, 24, 56n works; “Scenes from the Life of a W British Naval Offcer,” 56n; To Walden (Thoreau), 139n the Lighthouse, 14–18 Ward, David C., 211n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 9–10 Washington, Booker T., 218 Wordsworth, William, 2, 9–10, 22, 41, Washington, George, 232–233 89–90, 170 Washington, Martha, 233 works; “Composed Upon Waverley (Scott), 95 Westminster Bridge, September Webbe, William, 40 3, 1802”, 10; The Excursion, Webster, Daniel, 267 41–42; The Prelude, 22, 41, Weinberg, Stephen, 3, 133n, 280n 89–90 Westminster Confession of Faith, 255 Works of John Adams, 116 “What is the Real Julius Caesar?” The World’s Foundations (Giberne), (Bradley), 101 253–254 “Where Memory Faileth: Forgetfulness World War I, 79, 88, 92, 95 and a Poem Including History” World War II, 79 (North), 64 Wright, Joseph, 29 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3 Wyatt, David, 210n Whitman, Walt, 26, 30, 288–289, 290 works; Leaves of Grass, 288–289; “Song of the Exposition,” 30; Y “When I Heard the Learn’d Yeats, William Butler, 217, 293, 297 Astronomer,” 25–26 Yen Hui, 121 Wilde, Oscar, 43, 135n Williams, Charles, 293, 299 Williams, Rowan, 230–231, 281n, Z 284n Zeus, 85, 136n, 245, 246, 283n. See Williams, William Carlos, 26, 62, 203, also Jupiter 286n, 290–293, 296 Zukofsky, Louis, 79, 80, 290–292, works; The Embodiment of 296 Knowledge, 26; “Fine Work works; “A”-8, 290; “A”-9, 290; with Pitch and Copper,” 290; “Poem Beginning ‘The,’”, 291; “History,” 286n; Spring and “Sincerity and Objectifcation,” All, 291, 292 292 Wilson, Woodrow, 88 Zwerdling, Alex, 56n