PUBLIC ENEMIES Transience, Lyric, and Sociality in American Poetry By Christopher Patrick Miller A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor C. D. Blanton (Chair) Professor Charles Altieri Professor Anthony Cascardi Summer 2017 ABSTRACT Public Enemies: Transience, Lyric, and Sociality in American Poetry By Christopher Patrick Miller Doctor of Philosophy in English with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory Professor C. D. Blanton, Chair A shadowy double to infrastructure expansion, resettlement, and urban development, the "transient" has long been a contradictory figure of permission and repression in imaginations of America, be it as Emerson's idealized "being-in-transience," the romantic freedoms of the "hobohemian," or the criminalized "stranger." What Public Enemies argues is that a crucial genealogy of thinking about transience and its antagonistic relationship to existing concepts of democracy has been carried out in the most local, seemingly private of scenes: lyric encounters between an “I” and a “you.” While Walt Whitman was the first to put serial pressure on the relation between transient persons and lyric formation, a long history of twentieth-century poetic interlocutors—Robert Frost, Hart Crane, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and Amiri Baraka—adapt his experiments in transient speech acts to challenge normative conceptions of personhood, masculinity, affiliation, publicity, and national belonging. To understand the social character and content of lyric speech, Public Enemies situates current debates in literary formalism and lyric theory within political, juridical, sociological, and queer theoretical accounts of transience in America. In turn, the project reframes a trajectory of modernist and postmodern American lyric poetry as both a critical and complicit interlocutor in defining who or what counts as a member of a democratic whole. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Transience and Democratic Culture :: 1–27 Whitman’s Vagrant Wager Lyric Address in Democratic Crisis :: 28–66 A Strangeness in Common Trespass, Drift, and Extravagance in Robert Frost :: 67–84 Hart Crane’s Tramps and Transient Gestures Crane, Charlie Chaplin, and the Sociology of Transience :: 86–103 Speaking Out of Place An Objectivist Genealogy of Sincerity :: 104–30 The Tragic Question of US Correspondence and Antagonism in “New American Poetry” :: 131–76 i INTRODUCTION: Transience and Democratic Culture [Vagabonds] have not committed any crimes. But their 'way of life' places them in a state that supposed eventual violation of laws: vagabonds are always virtual, anticipatory…. Their existence in 'virtuality' or 'potentiality' of misdeed makes them more threatening… than the more predictable criminal. Vagabonds are victims of dangerous heredity and carriers of the fatal germ of dégénérasence; 'contagious,' in both the medical and social sense of the term, they are the incarnation of a social illness that strikes not so much an individual as a family, a generation, a lineage. Kristin Ross, Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune1 When Kristin Ross refers to the vagabond as a virtual figure, she is characterizing not just the various instabilities—formal, experiential, epistemological—Rimbaud made synonymous with Western modernism. She is also echoing the juridical history of reading transient persons as potential criminals. Vagabonds, loiterers, panhandlers have been historically classed into a general category of malingerers judged not necessarily for crimes committed but what crimes they will likely commit based on their perceived "state of being." In short, I don't have to see you breaking into that car, I only need to see you loitering near it. Such “idle rogues” were condemned for failing to prove a “visible means of support”—perhaps the most consistent phrase across British poor laws and the American vagrancy statutes that were largely adapted from them—as if a transient person not only had to prove how they stood, in the present, but how they could continue to support themselves and, by implication, the presumed family or other lives who relied on their regular wages, productivity, and social standing. On the other side of this speculative mode of judgement is the fact of a rather risky life, a life lived in widening gaps between experience and appearance. If we read back farther into the economic and literary pre-histories of American settlement, too, we can see that transients were problematic not just because of their epistemological instability but because they were more prevalent during times of socio-economic transition. In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx noted how an enormous surge in vagrant populations occurred in early modern England during the shift from feudalism to a petty bourgeois economy, provoking the stringent application of poor laws in order to deal with a sudden excess of "free" yet placeless peoples: The proletariat created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this free and rightless proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of 1 Kristin Ross, Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 57. Aside from being one of the best monograph studies of Rimbaud, Kristin Ross's book is also pivotal in attempting to think through the relations between socio- historical imaginations, spatiality, and poetic form. Ross's analysis builds off the spatial experiments of the Situationist International as well as the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre. See: The Situationists and the City: A Reader, ed. Tom McDonough (New York: Verso, 2010) and the Marxist phenomenology of Henri Lefebvre in The Urban Revolution [1970], trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). 1 their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances. Hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as 'voluntary' criminals, and assumed that it was entirely within their own powers to go on working under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed.2 What stands out in Marx's description is this language of disciplining vagrants as willful anachronisms. They were not just out of step with existing modes of production but concepts of freedom that defined social and physical mobility. Since the intimate relationship between peasants and the "soil" they cultivated and resided upon had been severed legislation had to be created in order to force the redistribution of labor power, to produce transience. In rendering vagabondage as a matter of choice, poor laws also had the likely unintended effect of substantiating vagrancy as a rebellion against the rhythms of modern life. Vagabondage came to be seen as not just a fateful exclusion but a mode of resistance to abstract promises of freedom that didn't also address the material conditions in which freedom can be exercised, particular with others. Even the term used by such legislation to characterize the state of transience—vagabondage—presents a complicated picture of agency, as it raises the question of what is disciplining what. "Bondage" would suggest a subjection to some external power beyond one's control while the root, "vaga," comes from the latin vagari, meaning to wander or assume an indefinite shape or pattern (as in "vague"). A transient is, quite literally, hard to place. It is this perpetual placelessness that is occasionally reframed as a style of living or a physical permission to transgress the very limits that have led to their impoverishment or dislocation. Where transients are particularly useful to readers of literature and historical records are for indexing moments or places where existing descriptions of a social order break down. In The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (1991), Richard Halpern keeps running up against such images in the form of “the local rogues’ gallery” as he thinks together the logics of "primitive" accumulation with early modern British literary form. While vagabonds were treated as a worthy of charity in the Middle Ages, the public attitude shifted toward these "rogues" from moral responsibility to one of: "indifference, suspicion, or fear, and instead of being given charity they were frequently persecuted or punished. They became, in a sense, the quintessential 'other' of English society."3 Echoing Marx, Halpern describes the swelling populations of the vagrant poor following the shift from feudalism to mercantile capitalism as an "exaggerated image of modernity" itself: If merchant's capital brought about a primary decoding of late feudal production in order to recode it in the sphere of exchange,