Robert B. Silvers Lecture: Helen Vendler

December 8, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Auditorium

ROBERT SILVERS: I’m Robert Silvers. I’m the editor of the New York Review of Books. I want to welcome you here tonight. Before these lectures happened I’d felt an editor like myself should try on the whole to work with writers and stay out of sight. Somewhere in the middle distance, you might say. But when the late Max Palevsky, the great philanthropist, he was a scientist, an inventor, builder, made the startling suggestion that I do something in my name— editor, a reader of the Review, he was—I was not only touched by this generosity, I felt an editor’s impulse to do something to honor writers I greatly admire and do so in a way that would involve the two institutions that meant the most to me, the New York Review and the New York

Public Library, which seems to me one of the most admirable institutions we have, a truly democratic source of the mind of the city, and so I must say thanks to Tony Marx, who has been keen to continue these lectures, and to Paul Holdengräber, who’s in charge of lectures, and to the

Library for making all of this possible, and thanks to Max.

Now, after talks, talks we’ve had by Zadie Smith and Derek Wolcott, John Coetzee, Lorrie

Moore, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others, I was particularly happy when

Helen Vendler said she would give this year’s lecture. No one is respected more for their understanding and criticism of the poetry of our time. It seems a towering challenge even to

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 1 describe the extent of her work. I can start very selfishly by saying that she’s written some fifty- eight contributions to the New York Review of Books since 1975, and one of those early contributions was not about poetry at all, but about freedom of expression at Boston University, where she then taught. She summed up a deeply disturbing situation at that university where the president and some others were not tolerant of dissent, where there was interference with student and faculty opinion, and critical statements were not seen as acceptable.

Now, there was in what we published—and it wasn’t very long by—Helen a particularly calm and yet implacable fierceness about her defense of freedom of expression. It was not at all surprising that she soon moved to Harvard. There was, in what we then published by Helen, a particularly calm and unflinching tone and that tone of a quest for truth, and it remains an underlying current in the very different work she went on to write for us. And that work included appreciation and carefully weighed perceptions of the work and practically every important poet of the last century and this one, beginning with Robert Lowell and James Merrill in the late seventies.

She’s written literally dozens of books and anthologies on, among others, Emily Dickinson and

W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early on, she wrote for us about Wallace

Stevens, one of the central figures in her own critical universe, and she recalled writing about what she said were his—and I’m quoting—“his wonderful constructions. Tempting. Seductive.

Impertinent. Resistant. Teasing.” And these often-elusive qualities are ones that we find again and again in her own widely varied studies, whether of Elizabeth Bishop or Amy Clampitt or

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 2 John Ashbery or James Schuyler or Seamus Heaney or John Berryman or Lucy Broido or Robert

Frost or Marianne Moore.

There seems no limit to her range or her ability to capture the unseeable. As when she wrote of

Czesław Miłosz that his poems, and I’m quoting, “are so powerful that they burst the bounds in which they are written.” We can feel, we can feel the presence in her writing of what she once called “the other side of consciousness, of things that present themselves as knockings, voices, faces, memories, tireless eliciting of the poet and the reader,” and we feel that Helen can transcend what she has called “the well-defended wall between the haunted night of the mind and its rational day.”

And over the years we sense her own work as she wrote about Seamus Heaney, and I quote, her own work becoming “ever fuller and freer with expanding linguistic and literary power.” Helen once wrote of the poet who wants to have things out, as she put it, “out on the highest premises.

Refinement is as natural to that mind as breathing.” And so I think all of us have felt that in reading Helen’s work. We felt that we have had the gift of being lifted to the highest level of perception of the poetry of our time. Helen Vendler.

(applause)

HELEN VENDLER: I am delighted and honored to be giving the Robert Silvers Lecture this year. Like others, I can testify to Bob’s unerring perception of what an essay needs in the way of clarity or subtlety, expansion or cutting. From my many years of sending reviews to Bob, I offer

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 3 a single anecdote of his editing. It was very funny. Normally I sense from inside when I’m reaching the end of a piece and then I send it off as I once did with a new review of—I’m sorry, a review of a new book of Seamus Heaney’s. That review without my noticing it had become weirdly long. When it arrived at Bob’s desk, he called me in some perplexity. “Helen,” he said gently, “I think this is a chapter from a book you want to write,” and of course it was and I did.

I am grateful for all that Bob has taught me about writing for the general public and for the many reviews he’s commissioned, all of them provocations to thought and often to further writing. I added on your handout the best poem about editing. It’s at the last page. In this poem, God is the editor who cuts and shapes our lives so that we will be beautiful and fit for paradise from all the cutting and shaping. And you can see that it’s one of those clever poems, and more than clever, inspired, I think. And it’s called “Paradise,” and of course God as the editor is always right, shaping us for our most beautiful contours.

I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW

Among thy trees, which in a ROW

To thee both fruit and order OW.

What open force, or hidden CHARM

Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM,

While the inclosure is thine ARM.

Inclose me still for fear I START.

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 4 Be to me rather sharp and TART,

Then let me want thy hand and ART.

When thou dost greater judgments SPARE,

And with thy knife but prune and PARE,

Ev’n fruitfull trees more fruitful ARE.

Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND:

Such cuttings rather heal then REND:

And such beginnings touch their END.

Now, it seemed to me that a lecture in honor of Bob Silvers should be somehow about editing and I decided to talk about the record of poets editing their own work when they’re searching, as young Keats said, “round the poles” to make the poem a work of art. W. B. Yeats, replying to friends who deplored his late revisions of early verse, which they had cherished, said the definitive word in what is entailed in poetic second thoughts. “Those friends that have it I do wrong whenever I remake a song should know what issue is at stake. It is myself that I remake.”

Or, as John Berryman put it more surgically in The Dream-Songs: “I am obliged to perform in complete darkness operations of great delicacy on myself.”

I’ll be offering examples from several poets about these operations of great delicacy. The first injunction of poetic self-editing, as in the self-editing of any work of art, is a moral one. To do open-heart surgery in the darkness means to restore the uprightness of the self. “How hard,” says

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 5 Yeats, “is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of style.” One daunting aspect of poetic self-editing is the number of planes that must be under revision at once. The elementary ones of syllable, rhyme, rhythm, and stanza form. The basic ones of plot and the conduct of the plot, the navigational ones of space and time, and the emotional ones of veracity and tone, generating, in Seamus Heaney’s words, a work that is “not tract, not thesis.”

Revision can be minimal in what we sometimes consider the simplest case, it may add or delete a single word, as in my first example coming up from Dickinson, and revision can be maximal. In the most complex case, a revision may create and add a substantial new portion to an already finished poem, as we’ll see in my example from Milton. In the case of poetry, the work of revision is theoretically endless. As Valéry said, poems are not finished but abandoned. Revising even a single word is a complex act. Finding the mot juste is never simple.

Emily Dickinson does her most elaborate piece of single-word revision when she considers thirteen possible adjectives for a single noun. Thinking of her own nephew’s response to church sermons, she rebukes the preacher whose staid retelling of Bible stories bores his young audience. Why can’t a sermon offer to the boys versions more excitingly named of those stories of the Bible and therefore more attractive? Why shouldn’t descriptions like these enliven the sermon: Eden, the Ancient Homestead. Satan, the Brigadier. Judas, the Great Defaulter. David, the Troubador. However, on rethinking the problem of attracting the young, Dickinson decides it’s not plot excitement that would make the boys listen, it’s rather an elusive quality in the teller himself. “Had but the tale” and she first said “thrilling.” “Had but the tale a”—mm-mm, she

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 6 didn’t like thrilling, it’s too clichéd. “Had but the tale a mm-mm teller, all the boys would come.”

What is that quality?

I’ve reproduced on the handout the thirteen adjectives as Dickinson lays them out for the choosing. Some of those adjectives—sorry, looking for my own handout, you can see that I’ve copied from her manuscript, this is exactly the way it appears in the manuscript—typic, hearty, bonny, et cetera, breathless, spacious, tropic, warbling, ardent, friendly, magic, pungent, warbling, winning, mellow—thirteen of them, and they are not synonyms.

Some of those adjectives suggest why the audience might respond to the teller—he would be thrilling, winning, pungent, bonny. Other adjectives, perhaps more appropriate to a scout leader, include friendly, mellow, and hearty. Yet others suggest that the teller might exhibit religious fervor—ardent, breathless, even magic. Still others suggest qualities belonging to the teller’s rhetoric—had but the tale a typic teller, a tropic teller, a spacious teller. What is it fundamentally that attracts an audience to a tale? And a threatening tale at that. Boys that believe are very lonesome, other boys are lost.

Reviewing her options, Dickinson finds something disingenuous in a teller who takes pains to be one of the boys in his friendliness, his heartiness, and she doubts that religious fervor, no matter how ardent, will win over the boys. There is one adjective I haven’t yet mentioned, it’s the one

Dickinson wrote twice among her alternatives and the one she finally adopted. It has nothing to do with the personal qualities of the preacher or his religious feelings or his efforts to make

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 7 friends with the boys or his exciting melodrama or the rhetorical gestures, “typic,” “tropic,”

“spacious,” that he might employ.

The chosen adjective in Dickinson’s fair copy is the unexpected word “warbling.” Who warbles in a pulpit? Dickinson makes her point immediately by a telling comparison—“Orpheus’ sermon captivated/It did not condemn.” But she’s also remembering Milton’s characterization of

Shakespeare in his poem “L’Allegro” about the happy or the contented man. When the contented man goes to the theater at night to hear “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, warble his native wood-notes wild.” It was the comedies, it was before the tragedies. Both Dickinson and Milton insist on the manner—on the warbling—rather than matter, religion, history. It is both, sorry, both Dickinson and Milton insist on manner rather than matter, it is shaped via linguistic music that charms the audience. The nightingale warbles, Shakespeare warbles, Orpheus warbles. The clergyman then must warble too. Whether he can is Dickinson’s sardonic question.

A poet loves being given a task. To Dickinson contemplating her adjectives, the muse says, “to finish a poem, you need to find a two-syllable adjective in a trochaic rhythm, with some sonic connection to ‘tale’ and ‘teller.’” “Had but the tale a mm-mm teller.” The poet’s first response is,

“I’ll find a trochaic t-word to alliterate with ‘tale’ and ‘teller,’” and she launches “typic” and

“tropic.” However, she ultimately decides against those punctual t’s—“typic,” “tropic”—and c’s.

She finally decides on a liquid “l” and chooses “warbling,” replicating the liquid “l” of “tale” and

“teller,” “had but the tale a warbling teller.” Dickinson’s pondering of adjective after adjective suggests the flood of intellectual or moral alternatives that are generated when a poet searches

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 8 for truth. She is not assembling a group of synonyms. Rather each of her possible choices suggests a different angle from which to predict the success of a sermon.

But lest we think from this example that revision amounts merely to finding a single better word,

Dickinson offers in another poem an anecdote rebuking the poet’s original misguided notion that it’s merely a single word that she’s lacking. As she had in “The Bible as an Antique Volume,” she repeatedly searches philology looking at possible candidates for the mot juste, wishing to nominate one to that office, but every one of the verbal candidates in waiting that she has around is imperfect. Vexed by frustration, she almost succumbs to the temptation to compromise her standard of truth and take what is available.

Shall I take thee, the Poet said

To the propounded word?

Be stationed with the Candidates

Till I have finer tried—

The Poet searched Philology

And when about to ring

For the suspended Candidate

Why not settle for a word, she thinks, already propounded, standing by among the other candidates? Then she realizes, abashed, that it is not a word that is missing but rather a particular element of her original vision for the poem. To fill the spot the poet must reclaim the whole

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 9 vision, retrace her steps, revisit the original vision, and explore it until she finds the whole neglected territory and acknowledges that territory. When she does retrace her steps and repossess her imaginative vision from the inside, the word she lacks appears all by itself.

There came unsummoned in—

That portion of the Vision

The Word applied to fill

Not unto nomination

The Cherubim reveal—

The cherubim, the highest of the orders of angels, can’t be commanded to reveal the right word.

You can’t nominate a candidate and have the angels approve. The right word isn’t languishing among the propounded candidates waiting to be nominated. The right word reveals itself unsummoned once the poet revisits a hitherto opaque and therefore neglected portion of her original vision. Because the vision proper inhabits the realm of the highest angels, it is only when the poet ascends to that realm and reexamines her vision, admitting to herself that it is not a word she lacks, but an as-yet-unexplored area of inspiration, that the cherubim act and the word arrives to complete the poem.

I’ve been speaking of revision as if the poet is alone in the task, but sometimes, as we know, the poet reaches out to a stimulating collaborator. The most famous—this is a parenthesis—the most

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 10 famous modern collaborator was Ezra Pound in his savage editing of the manuscripts of The

Waste Land, where with a single word, “putrid,” he rejected a whole passage and Eliot deleted it.

Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan, married to Dickinson’s brother Austin. Dickinson’s sister-in- law Susan was the poet’s first reader, and when Susan was dissatisfied with the second stanza of the now very famous poem “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers,” Dickinson—when Susan was dissatisfied, Dickinson furnished a glittering proliferation of new possibilities. The first stanza is the same in all four versions, except that Dickinson wrote “lie” instead of “sleep.” The first version: About the dead, half of whom were named Dickinson, who were lying in the Amherst courtyard where Dickinson herself would be buried in her family plot. She looks around.

Of course, her relatives were all Christians, as was her family. She was the one who refused to go to church and the one who refused to come forward at Mount Holyoke and say that Jesus was her savior and she fled, she left after one year. Everybody else was pious. And so she thinks of the dead now finding out that there isn’t any afterlife after all.

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

Untouched by Morning

And untouched by Noon—

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—

Rafter of satin,

And Roof of stone.

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 11 Light laughs the breeze

In her Castle above them—

Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,

Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence—

Ah, what sagacity perished here!

She, as the poem opens, as the poet satirizes the credulity of her Christian forebears who descended to their graves believing in an afterlife in heaven, she imagines that the deluded dead think themselves safe from time’s daily dangers, morning, noon, against the dead unable to hear breezes, bees, and birds, Dickinson sets nature ignorant in its laughing, alliterating energy to mock the complacent Christian sagacity that believed in a personal resurrection.

Replying to Sue’s note criticizing the second stanza, Dickinson writes back “perhaps this verse would please you better, Sue.” She then offers the first of her fiercely brilliant variations, creating an alternate setting for the pious Christian dead. If their first backdrop, emphasizing their immobility, was nature’s lightness and vigor, the second backdrop, abandoning mockery of

Christian delusion, offers not the human-scaled morning and noon, but an epic backdrop of huge cosmic motion and extended historical time, all taking place in an infinite silence that reduces human death to insignificance.

Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—

Worlds scoop their Arcs—

And Firmaments—row—

Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender—

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 12 Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—

As she implicitly revises the view that the dead inhabit a human-scaled solar time, Dickinson places them within vast interstellar space and lengthy historical time, into which human life, no matter how regal, disappears soundlessly, invisibly, unremarked. When Sue was dissatisfied with this second stanza as well, Dickinson, asking, “Is this frostier?” Created a third version of the afterlife, this time rendering the dead as the Biblical tribes of Exodus, now silent, blind, paralyzed, eclipsed, and fastened in tents that the cold has turned to marble. In this wintery desert where the last words of the dying have left only echoes, the dead are destined never to view the promised land.

Springs—shake the sills—

But—the Echoes—stiffen

Hoar—is the Window—and

Numb—the Door

Tribes of Eclipse—in Tents of Marble

Staples of Ages—have buckled—there

Dickinson added in her own fair copy yet another version, one not submitted to Susan’s collaborative judgment. In this last variation on the afterlife, or the absence of the afterlife, the backdrop is no longer indifferent local nature nor large astronomical and historical motions nor an arrested caravan of tribes but rather a thawing Arctic zone. As the spring sun diffuses its

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 13 warmth, even Northern frosts begin to move, unhooking themselves from their frozen immobility, while deep hidden icicles, sensing the warmth of spring, crawl towards it like snakes issuing from their polar caverns. Dickinson chills even the life-giving powers of the spring sun with the foreseen disappearance of both frosts and icicles as the warmth makes them vanish and the deep night of the sealed sarcophagus refutes the suns of every successive dawn.

Springs—shake the Seals—

But the silence—stiffens—

Frosts unhook—in the

Northern Zones—

Icicles—crawl from polar

Caverns—

Midnight in Marble—

Refutes—the Suns—

With the word “refutes” Dickinson makes the Christian doctrine of the resurrection into a premise—I think I said promise, hold on—sorry, proposition. Dickinson makes the Christian doctrine of the resurrection into a proposition in theological logic, one that is refuted in every instance by the philosophic universality of death. There was an optimism in the satisfactory finding of warbling, the first poem, and in the ecstatic recaptured vision of the second.

Both of those endings imply that a poem can be resoundingly concluded, but the four versions of the second stanza of “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” prove Dickinson’s imagination to be

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 14 almost unnaturally fertile in reconceiving a concept. Had there been yet another objection from

Sue the poet would have been goaded into yet another backdrop for death. Dickinson’s second stanzas, all four of them, re-create and reconceive a single concept, here the concept of the horrible deadness of the dead becoming more horrible as the versions proliferate.

Poets editing their poems necessarily undertake the efforts required by the editing of prose. They must scrutinize levels of logic, coherence of argument, variation in diction, imaginative clarity, propulsive force. And like prose, poetry often requires deletion and additions and stimulates considerations of length but the poet’s choices, that’s all true of prose and poetry, but the poet’s choices are governed by and constrained by something extra, an aesthetic principle different for each poem, so that each one will be unique and unrepeatable, an aesthetic principle different for each poem that is the source of poetic individuation and originality.

The poet’s aesthetic decisions, to delete, to supplement, to shape, to obey or disobey a meter, to mimic the vicissitudes of the mind, even to begin in prose and end as poetry, all of these decisions are arrived at invisibly as from the poet’s repertoire, vast repertoire, sound and meaning alike, there arise promptings that approximate obedience to an inner contour, perhaps not entirely obvious even to the poet as yet but which nonetheless must be replicated in words.

Every accomplished and moving poem has therefore a will of its own. One poem will want to grow from a lyric to a sequence, while another will want to shrink to a single line, and as the poet listens to those desires issuing from the evolving poem, possible revisions arise and are adopted, minimizing or maximizing themselves to arrive at the poem’s final shape. The most aggressive

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 15 minimalism, one end of the scale, in which a broad history is condensed into a single line, has its own successes both comic and tragic. Ashbery’s stately title “The Cathedral Is” dissolves in a sardonic anticipation of the future, “Slated for demolition.” There the single line is comic but it need not be.

The most moving single-line poem I know is W. S. Merwin’s “Elegy,” six words: “Who would I show it to?” The six simple unpunctuated words amazingly create on the page four extended life moments: the continued past when the poet always showed a new poem to that friend and a recent past when the friend died and a limitless present lamenting that death and a hypothetical but aborted future in which the poet would want to write a new poem but would be stopped by grief at the absence of his best reader.

I’m skipping a piece about Marianne Moore for shortness but it’s about her cutting a thirty-line poem called “Poetry” to three lines. And to reduce a poem to one tenth its size is a very violent act, but the epigraph to her complete poems, Collected Poems, warns us that “this condensation is not a printer’s error but an example of her own Puritan will, which refuses her own subversive delight in the fiddle of her chosen form.” Some self-editing is less literary than ethical. We may recall Auden’s “We must love one another or die” corrected later to “We must one another and die.” But the original “or” sprang from and was true to the poet’s fear of the inevitable war that

Hitler’s annexing Austria would occasion. Since lyric, as Wordsworth said, is “the history of feeling,” you must, the poet must, replicate that feeling of desperation, “we must love one another or die,” the alternatives of love and war, the poet cannot discard his feelings in favor of philosophic cliché.

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 16 Other substantial moves towards the minimal, as when Dickinson rejects a whole group of stanzas, occur when the poet realizes that she has been writing on autopilot, producing characteristic lines rather than inspired ones. Inspiration, says Hopkins, produces the highest

Olympian form, as he calls it, of poetic language, but there is a second and lesser kind. “The second kind,” says Hopkins, “I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written, is it spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind not as in the other case of Olympian poetry, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius raises him above himself.”

Dickinson, whose aesthetic law was one of inspired minimalism, rarely descended to the

Parnassian, but she was always prepared to delete any stanza that she found uninspired. Where deletion on moral or aesthetic grounds is a self-amputation, addition in the poem, adding another piece, is the “growing of another self,” as Yeats said, or another heart. Why, we ask, would a poet still feel after writing an inspired poem and making a perfect fair copy of it, why would he feel that something is missing?

Milton’s “Lycidas,” the greatest elegy in English, like previous classical and Christian elegies, includes the usual social forms of mourning—a group of mourners, a dirge, a eulogy of the dead, a rebellion against fate, and a resurrected hope for the lost friend. In his fair copy, Milton has already given several lines to the classical gesture of strewing flowers on a grave, a gesture here rendered impossible because Lycidas’s death by drowning has—premature death, he was a school fellow, a college fellow of Milton’s, an adolescent—strewing flowers is here rendered

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 17 impossible because Lycidas’s death by drowning has deprived the mourners of a body to bury.

The grieving poet pretending for a moment that an actual hearse is really before him, calls on the pastoral muse to bring and strew a tribute of flowers and bids the landscape itself cooperate in the gesture. This is the fair copy. Milton, as you can see on the handout, puts a little arrow in for the addition he wants to—he puts it in later after he has written the addition, this is where it goes.

So I’ll read first the fair copy. And he was content enough with the poem as he had it in his hands to write it all out in a fair copy, in lovely handwriting, and just leave it there as his record of the poem, and then the second thoughts came. This is what it first said and continues to say because the addition is inserted.

Return, Sicilian Muse,

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast

Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use

Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,

On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,

Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes,

That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers,

And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

For so, to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 18

As he rereads his fair copy, Milton finds the flower-strewing gesture incomplete, although he has already given the psychological motive for the imagined, because factually impossible, strewing to interpose a little ease in the pain of our shaken thoughts and although he has mentioned various shapes and colors of flowers, he feels, somehow, that there is still something lacking.

What can it be? On a separate sheet of paper he assembles not one or two but ten more lines of flowers and cues them into the fair copy with an arrow at the point of insertion. And this is what he adds:

Bring the rathe primrose—that means early.

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine,

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flower that sad embroidery wears;

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

When we try to understand why Milton, already well supplied with flowers, it would seem, in his fair copy, felt compelled to add more, we perceive, as he obviously did, that the original flower

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 19 passage offers only unspecified blossoms, flowerets of a thousand hues and vernal flowers. That he now feels compelled to list individual species of flowers, but the new flower names—sorry, this is I’m sorry to say a medical issue, you must forgive me. And so he feels compelled to list individual species of flowers now, but the new flower names convey more than mere specification. For the most part, each individual name is inseparable from pathos. The early primrose dies forsaken, the cowslips are wan, the black markings on the flowers jet are sad. The immortal amaranth itself is commanded to shed its beauty, and daffodils are bidden to fill their cups with tears. As grief takes material form in tender flowers, an almost intolerable poetic conflict between tragedy and pathos takes place.

So far the poem had been dominated by Milton’s tragic words both about the sea’s destruction of

Lycidas’s corpse—“where’er thy bones are hurled,” the disarticulated corpse. The poem had been dominated by Milton’s tragic words on the corpse and by his bitter words on the spiritual corruption of the preaching bishops, those blind mouths who starve their flocks and leave them prey to “the grim Wolf with privy paw.”

This harsh orchestration, Milton has decided, needs to be rescued from his own immersion in despair, and he inserts powerful mollifying notes through the spring flowers. When Milton adds a cascade of lavishly and intimately named flowers he rights the aesthetic balance of his poem.

Tempering tragedy by the pathos of tribute, he repairs the anguishing site of Lycidas’s unsunk corpse “weltering to the parching wind.” Without the profusion of flowers the wounded voice of the elegy would have lacked the balancing intellectual judgment that maintains even in loss an objective view of nature and a fair distribution of diction. The flowers satisfy the moral

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 20 obligation of accuracy, establishing even in a tragic moment a sane, not distorted view of both nature and society.

The revision that spills out more and more beautiful flowers on the page is moral, aesthetic, decorative, emotional, and intellectual. It embodies the high aim of second thoughts in the poet’s critique of his own productions, to do justice not only to his immediate feelings but also to the world as it actually is, all of its beautiful flowers included.

Not all revisions are so grand or intense as Milton’s and few depart as his did from “Lycidas” from an already completed fair copy. Really hard to begin tinkering with your fair copy. On the contrary, a poet’s very first en court revisions attempting to encourage an embryonic notion into verse are often both revelatory and entertaining. Yeats quotes Aubrey Beardsley as saying of composition, “I make a blot and shove it about until something comes.” As a contemporary example of the blot and shoving about, I offer two of Seamus Heaney’s earliest worksheets for the poem eventually called “Alphabets.” Written for Harvard’s 1984 Phi Beta Kappa commencement ceremony.

The theme of Heaney’s poem is literacy itself. In elementary school the child first learns to write single letters, then to join them into English words. In secondary school he progresses from

English to Latin to Irish, encountering in Latin an unfamiliar imperial culture and in Irish uncial writing a new formation of letter shapes. In manhood, as he visits foreign countries, he realizes that literacy finally aspires to a global culture, resembling the stunning view of the astronauts seeing Earth from space.

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 21 As from his small window

The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,

The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

Like a magnified and buoyant ovum—

However, Heaney does not end “Alphabets” with the adult global view, which suggests an overoptimistic estimate of adulthood but rather writing now in the first person, he closes on the wonder of his own preliterate recognition that a formerly unintelligible group of letters can represent his own family name. This is the misprint, it shouldn’t be a name but rather our name, it’s his own family name. The astronaut’s view is as we travel back in time to childhood

like my own wide pre-reflective stare

All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

Skimming our gable and writing our name there

With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

When we look at Heaney’s editing of the drafts for “Alphabets,” it appears that the poem’s closing word, “letter,” is hovering in the poet’s mind as he begins, but which letters he asks himself, and as you look you’ll see Greek, English, Latin, Irish. Here the Beardsley blot that requires shoving about is the alphabet itself. Because it is the Phi Beta Kappa Society that is sponsoring the poem, Heaney’s first worksheet thinks to illustrate the Greek letters by imaginative simile, “Kappa like the Phi like a on the alphabets.” Another initial attempt tries

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 22 further visual similes from primary school and at the end tacks on a sound effect. “On the wall there are charts with a big A like two rafters and a crossbeam and a roof.” “Like new rafters before the roof goes on.” “Two rafters and a crosstie on his slate make the capital some call ‘ah,’ here A, capital A.” The notion of visual simile is shoved about until it loses energy and dwindles into overspecificity. “Small d is a hoop left of the upright, and small b a small apple hopefully.”

As the poet thinks he doodles on the page. Should the shapes he uses be those of lowercase letters or uppercase ones?

The next worksheet shows both. The unsuccessful hoops of “b” and “d” combine on the page as you can see in joint shapes go upside down and pile up into an eight, which with a tail becomes a cat. Only then can the poet begin to plan the full and satisfactory extension of the work. There are forty-three more worksheets, besides these two. Heaney’s primitive and abortive revisions of an embryonic poem still operate in hope and indeed the poem comes out at the end finished and alive, but Sylvia Plath, in an early poem called “Stillborn” envisages the ultimate end of hope when all possible revisions have been attempted and the poem still does not quicken. In distress

Plath conveys her view of her unviable poems, her deformed births, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. Two words, “and smile,” I left out of the fifth line here. She looks at the jar of formaldehyde and the embryos inside and says,

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.

They grew their toes and fingers well enough,

Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.

If they missed out on walking about like people

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 23 It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!

They are proper in shape and number and every part.

They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!

They smile and smile and smile at me.

And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

Her poems technically so finished from high school on have adamantly resisted revision, these ones, into breathing life. They were not abandoned, they are not forgotten, they have failed. The pickling fluid of memory preserves them as a grotesque residue, testimony that the poet was unable to rise to the occasion of her own original inspiration. They are dead and their mother near dead with distraction and they stupidly stare and do not speak of her. In their inertia, the stillborn poems cannot speak at all, neither of their maternal origin or of their own selfhood.

In a different tone entirely, but in a comparable moment Wallace Stevens, in a laconic retrospective remark, said justly, “Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.” (laughter)

Best remark on revision. Unlike Plath, however, Stevens destroyed his drafts, unwilling that their embryonic forms should survive to reproach him. A landlady did rescue one draft from the trash out back, we do have that, but he had thrown it away.

In their radical individuality of practice, some poets resort to improbable fashions of self-editing.

Yeats, for instance, more often than you would think sometimes writes the intended poem out in

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 24 prose and then tailors the prose into poetry. In the case of his penultimate poem, “Cuchulain

Comforted,” he in effect composed in two dialects, the prose is a dilatory colloquial narrative rendering of the hero’s entrance to the afterlife, where the poem, composed a week later, recounts the same plot but imposes on it the austere formal shape of Dante’s meter of the afterlife, terza rima.

Yeats’s prose draft, in wayward folktale style, is too long to cite here, but I give only the colloquial diction of the opening. “A shade, recently arrived, went through a valley in the country of the dead. He had six mortal wounds but he had been a tall, strong, handsome man.

Other shades looked at him from the trees. Sometimes they went near to him and then went away quickly. At last he sat down. He seemed very tired.” The poem stiffens this tale into a set of uncompromising and eerie events.

A man that had six mortal wounds, a man

Violent and famous, strode among the dead;

Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head

Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree

As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

Prose to Yeats’s mind has many ways of telling a tale, and he offers a version not in standard

English but in the oral Hiberno-English of folktales. Oral recitation is allowed to be indolent and

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 25 erratic, but an aesthetically successful poem, once complete, is invariable, unalterable. Its many atoms cohere inseparably into a single unity. As Mandelstam said, any period that means piece,

“any period in poetic speech, be it a line or a stanza or a complete lyrical composition must be regarded as a single word.” You can’t dislocate the parts any more than you can in a word—if you take out two letters it’s no longer the same word.

In Yeats’s version of the idea of a poem as a single word, the earth itself becomes a single spoken word, an eternal flaming word because it issues by creative fiat from the realm of the highest element, fire. The wandering earth herself may be only a sudden flaming word, in clanging space a moment heard troubling the endless reverie. Because that coherence of elements is so powerful, the most perplexing critical problem for me is the poet’s deletion of an irreproachable line. In the poet’s draft as we look at the rough draft, the line that will be deleted, as far as we can see fits the theme, illuminates its stanza, falls beautifully upon the ear and has a rhythm and consonance with its emotion, but it has been banished.

I take as my final example here of poetic self-editing Keats’s initially baffling deletion in his

“Ode to Autumn” of an apparently impeccable line. The other revisions in the manuscript were all improvements, so I couldn’t doubt that Keats himself in sacrificing this exquisite line from the central stanza thought he was improving his ode. But what could have been his reason for the subtraction of a warm and thematically relevant scene as perfect in its details as any other in the poem. In the first, morning stanza of “To Autumn,” Keats had shown the first harvest, that of nectar, gathered by the deceived bees who think warm days will never cease. Now in the second

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 26 stanza it is noon, and the goddess autumn carries on her self-harvest in wheat and apples, the wheat her winnowed hair, the crushed apples her blood, as she sacrifices herself to produce the bread and wine, here cider, of the earthly paradise. Unlike other divinities, Autumn dwells among us, visible to any passerby, in the various places and postures of her self-harvesting. In this stanza we first see the goddess sitting on a granary floor where the grain will be threshed from the chaff, followed by her interrupted reaping and her completed gleaning. We last see her as she watches the final drops oozing from the cider press. Addressing the goddess Autumn, the poet says, wondering at her constant availability and visibility. “You used to have to wait and pray and have vigils and fasts before the god would appear, you hoped, but it was always a brief appearance, and immediately the appearance vanished, but Autumn is not like that, this natural goddess of the earth, addressing a goddess Autumn, the poet says,

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. Through her conspiring with the paternal sun, the first stanza has told us, the maternal autumn, season of mists, has given birth to the fruits of the earth. Because Keats desires to reproduce in poetry the complete arc of birth to death, morning to evening, center to periphery, it would seem quite an order for the noon scene in the granary to again mention the paternal sun, and Keats, seeing that plausibility after writing thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind inserts the line, “I

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 27 puzzled over, while bright the sun slants through the husky barn.” And then he rejected it, cutting as well a reference to the warm slumbers of the goddess. In short he deleted not only the sun’s brightness but the sun’s warmth, and I couldn’t understand his reasons for that elimination.

Although in the morning the maturing sun is veiled in mists, his fostering warmth is implicit in the growth of fruit and at evening his rosy color, borne by clouds, warms the stubble plains.

“Somehow,” Keats wrote two days later, “somehow a stubble plain looks warm.”

Why is the sun not allowed to illuminate the motes of floating chaff and to warm the slumbering goddess? In the deleted line, Keats manages the sensory details with care, as he always does, creating the echo of “bright” and “barn,” strongly juxtaposing “sun” and “slants,” and suspending the husks of grain to create the inner volume of the barn. The paternal sun, strangely obscured by mists at morning and clouds at evening is at those times inaccessible to the eye.

Must then the sun be obscured at noon as well?

I wondered at first whether Keats’s repression of noon light and warmth prophesied the coming dusk and chill of the evening, the third stanza, but in the last analysis, I felt that it is the liquid cadence of “thy hair, soft lifted by the winnowing wind,” which prevents the retention of the robust and energetic line “while bright the sun slants through the husky barn.” Its rhythm is no dying fall but rather a rhythm matching the strikes of the flail, since everything is being threshed to produce the husks and the grain, while “bright the sun slants through a husky barn,” that is not fading out. Its rhythm is no drying fall but rather a rhythm matching the strikes of the flail and out of tune with the rest of the stanza in which the reposing reaper does not reap, the brook- crossing gleaner does not glean, and the presser of apples does not press but merely watches. All

LIVEVendler_12.8TranscriptQUERIES 28 is aftermath, drowsy and static. The flail cannot be allowed its active work, and brutal work at that, so Keats sacrifices his beautiful line.

It is in such self-editings that we come closest to the imagination of the poet in the intense activity of conception. We see the poet’s mind advance from the first glimpses of a possible work of art, the cat, to the delight at finding the right general plan, I came among the alphabets, but then there must also be the querying of individual words, images, and rhythms, and then the adjusting of each of those multiple planes to an alignment with the others. In the miraculous transformation of a blank sheet of paper into echoing lines, we see an exacting self-scrutiny and self-correction that must be more imaginative, more stringent, and more precise than any act we perform in editing our prose. Thank you.

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