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ON LOCATION: THE POETICS OF PLACE IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Keith Gordon Manecke, M.A., B.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2003 Dissertation Committee: Professor Sebastian Knowles, Adviser Approved by Professor Elizabeth Hewitt _____________________________ Professor Brian McHale Adviser English Graduate Program ABSTRACT This project examines the focus on local, American spaces by five modern poets— Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. I argue that these poets seek a poetics that can incorporate both the cultural emphasis of Eliot and Pound’s “high modernism” as well as the material emphasis espoused by modernism’s avant-garde and Objectivist poets, such as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky. The poets of my study seek to disassociate their work from the ideological appeals to tradition made by Eliot and Pound, thus lessening the influence of cultural traditions on contemporary experience. Yet the poets of my study do not envision their work as a-cultural or a-historical. Instead they desire to know the cultural forces that shape their experience in a localized context. The locations that these poets consider are varied: the Brooklyn Bridge in New York; the Passaic Falls in Paterson; the cities of New Haven and Gloucester; or the coast of Nova Scotia and the foreign locales of Brazil. Yet these poets share an interest in local places as poetically generative sites where the immediacy of the present moment converges with the imperatives of culture and history. Thus, this focus on local places allows these poets to forge a poetics more fully responsive to the cultural and material impulses that shaped modern poetry. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my adviser, Sebastian Knowles, for his tireless support of this project from beginning to end. For similar diligence I would like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, past and present: Beth Hewitt, Brian McHale, Steve Yao, and Tony Libby. Thanks to Dave DeFries for invaluable logistical support and to Wendy Matlock for showing that it can be done. And special thanks to Kristina Emick for everything else. iii VITA 1995 B.A. English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1997 M. A. English, University of Wyoming 1996-7 Graduate Teaching Associate, University of Wyoming 1998-2003 Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. Manecke, Keith. “Wallace Stevens’ ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’: The ‘Inescapable Romance’ of Place.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 27.1 (Spring 2003): 80-96. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………….………………………………………ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………iii Vita…………………………………….………………………………………………..iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1. “Beyond the Print that Bound Her Name”: Hart Crane’s The Bridge and the Challenge of Cultural Representation………………………………………….20 Chapter 2. “A Place Formerly Unsuspected”: William Carlos Williams and the Discovery of Culture in In the American Grain and Paterson………...……….63 Chapter 3. Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: The “Inescapable Romance” of Place……………………………………………………………110 Chapter 4. “The Planting Shall Be on the Widest Possible Ground”: Placing the Poet in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems………………………………………...139 Chapter 5. “What is Geography?”: Locating Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry of Place……173 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….217 List of References……………………………………………………………………..225 v INTRODUCTION You know, I think, enough of me to understand that I have no belief in the continuity of history. To me the classic lives now just as it did then—or not at all…Everything we know is a local virtue—if we know it at all… —William Carlos Williams, a letter to Kay Boyle from 1932 It is the poet who lives locally, and whose senses are applied no way else than locally to particulars, who is the agent and the maker of all culture. It is the poet’s job and the poet lives on the job, on location. —Williams, a letter to Horace Gregory from 1944 The poetics of place in modern American poetry—as practiced by Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and Elizabeth Bishop—constitutes a vital strain of modernism that attempts to combine a broad cultural relevance with a focus on immediate, local conditions of experience. This poetic approach arises in part as a response to the heavily traditional, internationalist poetics made prominent by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound during the formative years of the modern period as a way to reflect their sense of the cultural upheavals and realities of that era. The five poets of this study desire a similar cultural import for their work, but instead seek it by grounding their work in the immediate, physical conditions of local places and landmarks. From this initial focus on the local these poets offer a culturally relevant poetry rooted in the values of their present moment rather than the past. Crane, Williams, Stevens, Olson, and Bishop also share a desire to privilege immediacy and concreteness 1 in their verse, both in its textual form and its thematic content. It is between these poles of modernist poetics, the conceptual pull of culture and the material pull of concreteness, that the poetics of place comes into practice. The principles that Williams articulates in the epigraphs above—first, his disbelief in “the continuity of history” and, second, the vital role of “local” “particulars” for the “maker[s]” of “culture”—nicely encapsulate the essential qualities most often associated with modern poetry, particularly during the early years of the twentieth century. Despite the great diversity of work from this period, two impulses can be identified as essentially “modernist”: first, a desire on the part of modernist poets to achieve formal innovations that would reflect the newness of their cultural moment (rather than their historical precedents); and, second, a desire that their work possess a greater immediacy, a more vital connection to one’s experience of contemporary reality. These two impulses are intricately intertwined, and this connection can be seen in the early theorizations of a modernist poetics by one of the period’s most crucial figures, Ezra Pound. Pound’s famous exhortation to “make it new,” as well as his equally famous Imagist “principles”—“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’”; “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”; “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” (3)—reflect his desire to break free from what he saw as the derivative, worn-out forms that had dominated poetry through the nineteenth century. Pound believed that directness, economy, and musical rhythm would allow poetry to avoid the sloppiness and imprecision that he attributed to poetry’s residual “Romantic slither.” 2 Pound’s comments represent the modernists’ desire to move beyond the formal and thematic expectations of the past in order to discover a poetry that would be more reflective of the unique conditions of the modern era.1 Yet something changes between Pound’s early formulation of a modernist poetics, first published in 1913, and Williams’s insistence on reaffirming these values in the 1930s and 1940s, explicitly against the direction in which Eliot and Pound had guided modern poetry. Williams simple answer to what that “something” was would be Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922, which Williams considered a “great catastrophe to our letters,” for it “gave the poem back to the academics” (A 146). Eliot’s highly allusive poem, drenched in the fragments of Western culture’s centuries of tradition and famously edited by Pound, solidified a poetic approach that he had been cultivating in the decade preceding The Waste Land—an approach heavily reliant on classical and pre-romantic European literary sources as the criteria by which to judge the success of contemporary works. Pound, too, had begun to stray from his early Imagist principles, and by the twenties was well into his work on The Cantos, his “poem including history”—a work that could convey the full range of cultural experience that Pound wished to explore, including the economic, political, and cultural precedents that he believed had shaped his contemporary age.2 The classical and internationalist approach to literary modernism that Eliot and Pound crafted in the teens and twenties did attempt, in its own way, to be responsive to the experiential realities of the modern era. In the classical and pre-Romantic sources that they favored, Eliot and Pound saw methods for aesthetic production that would allow for a more coherent and concrete response to the many complex elements of their world. Yet Eliot’s and Pound’s reliance on established cultural traditions to validate their 3 work—whether the classical Greek and Latin traditions, or the traditions of the Italian Renaissance and Confucius-era China—represents, to the poets of this study, too great a commitment to what is distant and abstract from the contemporary conditions of the modern era. Eliot’s and Pound’s emigrations from America to Europe compounded the problem, as their conceptions of modern poetry as an extension of the Western tradition failed to afford an appropriate uniqueness to the American modernist situation. Eliot’s reliance on a traditional framework for revealing the meaning in his contemporary era appears most explicitly in his famous discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses and its use of the so-called “mythical method” (SP 178). As Eliot puts it, Joyce’s method of overlaying the story of the Odyssey upon contemporary events “is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (SP 177).

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