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to arrange his musical source material in ination, in our time and across centuries: neat hierarchies. Instead, he treated all “The purpose of lyric, as a genre, is to repre- music that expressed genuine human emo- sent an inner life in such a manner that it is tions as equal, applying the principles of assumable by others.” Her singular talent as a Progressive-era democracy to sound in a reader is to assume the inner life of poet after way that harks back to Louis Moreau poet, and to write precisely and eloquently Gottschalk and looks forward to Aaron about this merger of sensibilities. Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Gunther When Vendler was 17, lyric poetry Schuller. seemed to her “the voice of the soul itself.” It Like the American horizon, Ives’s oeuvre still does, by the evidence of her three latest remains open, unfinished, though not books: a volume of review essays and two vol- unexplored. Thanks to Swafford’s skillful umes of thematic lectures. The essays on 20 retelling, we can better understand why contemporary poets in Soul Says date from Ives’s music remains so fresh. Its jagged jux- the late 1980s and early 1990s, and general- tapositions, shifting moods, and eclectic ly mark the appearances of each author’s references may have baffled Ives’s contem- newest work. But time and again, a brief top- poraries. But they speak to an adventurous, ical essay is a map to the larger world of the inclusive conception of art that is widely poet’s achievement. felt, and much disputed, a century after his The Given and the Made (the 1993 T. S. greatest works were composed. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of —S. Frederick Starr Kent) considers how “an unasked-for don- née” shaped the work of four poets. Robert SOUL SAYS: Lowell’s donnée, given by his famous family, On Recent Poetry. was history. John Berryman’s, given by his By Helen Vendler. Harvard Univ. Press. alcoholic manic-depression, was the Freud- 256 pp. $24.95 ian concept of the id. Rita Dove’s, given by THE GIVEN AND THE MADE: birth, is her identity as a black American Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. woman. Jorie Graham’s, given by her trilin- By Helen Vendler. Harvard Univ. Press. gual upbringing, is the arbitrary attachment 160 pp. $29.95 cloth; $14 paper of word to thing, and the corresponding rela- THE BREAKING OF STYLE: tion of an invisible to a material world. Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. The Breaking of Style (the 1994 Richard By Helen Vendler. Harvard Univ. Press. Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature at 160 pp. $29.95 cloth, $14 paper Emory University) traces the process by When Helen Vendler describes the act of which three poets—Gerard Manley Hop- reading poetry, she makes it seem as straight- kins, Seamus Heaney, and (again) Jorie Gra- forward as understanding the newspaper or ham—shed an old style for a new: the equiv- humming a favorite tune: “The senses and alent, for Vendler, of casting off a material the imagination together furnish rhymes for body. These transformations permit Vendler the poet. The rhythms of the poet translate to explore the essential connection between themselves back, in the mind of the reader, style and substance in poetry, and to argue into the senses and the imagination.” (against interpretive fashion) for “the human But nowadays the space between poet and perceptual, aesthetic, and moral signals con- reader is often too clouded for such clear veyed...by such elements as prosody, passage. The contemporary reader at ease grammar, and lineation.” Hers is a method with Whitman but at sea with his successors of steady engagement with the poetry—with may, in distress, look to the contemporary line length, with images, with odd detail, critic for a compass. Alas, most criticism and overarching argument. There is a soul written today in the academy, by critics in the body of a poet’s successful disposition whose proprietary interest in literature has of words. yielded to a proprietary interest in self, will Not every page of these books is equally cause readers to jump ship and take their persuasive, and there is some repetition chances with the sharks. among the volumes—especially when the Vendler’s criticism is a saving exception. A same poets, and poems, are discussed. The university professor at Harvard, she responds books are best read not straight through but generously to the workings of the poetic imag- with time out to sample the poetry. Of living 84 WQ Spring 1996 poets, Vendler’s favorites seem to be Heaney prominent men and women of letters and and Graham; you will no sooner finish her ideas of the period 1830–80. Baker’s poten- essays about them than make your way to a tially dreary decade-by-decade organization bookstore. is relieved, at times brilliantly, by bringing And that may be the great achievement of Emerson’s friends to the forefront. This is a all Vendler’s criticism: its ease, assurance, biography of intertwined lives: Emerson and and clarity, set in a bedrock of careful schol- Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Bronson Alcott, arship, persuade diffident readers to tease Nathaniel and Sophie Hawthorne, Jones out the soul’s sense beneath a poem’s surface Very, Henry David Thoreau, Ellery Chan- puzzle. ning, Theodore Parker, and, in the farther —James Morris reaches of the circle, Walt Whitman, John Brown, and even Abraham Lincoln. These EMERSON AMONG THE and other figures in the 19th-century pan- ECCENTRICS: theon maintain vital connections, if not A Group Portrait. always friendship, through thick and thin, By Carlos Baker. Introduction and epi- agreement and disagreement, proximity and logue by James R. Mellow. Viking. 672 distance, joy and sorrow. pp. $34.95 Baker’s narrative shows how Emerson’s Ralph Waldo Emerson was a stern critic presence and correspondence, those twin of preachers. After hearing Barzillai Frost, complements to his lectures and essays, the junior associate of Ezra Ripley at the held this informal congregation together. First Church at Concord, preach an inter- Reviewing Emerson’s second book of minable, abstract sermon during a snow- essays for Horace Greeley’s New York storm in March 1838, Emerson wrote in his Tribune, Margaret Fuller wrote: “History journal: “He had no one word intimating will inscribe his name as a father of his that ever he had laughed or wept, was mar- country, for he is one who pleads her cause ried or enamoured, had been cheated, or against herself.” As this tribute suggests, voted for, or chagrined. If he had ever lived Emerson sought to discern the singular or acted we were none the wiser American nature of his fellow for it.” It was in response to the citizens’ shared language and aptly named Reverend Frost technology (the railroad is a that Emerson declared that “the theme running through this true preacher deals out to the biography), as well as their people his life,—life passed ideals and compromises— through the fire of thought.” whether personal, aesthetic, This was also Emerson’s stan- political, or moral. Emerson dard for the writer, the teacher, admired Lincoln as an apoth- the scholar, and the politician. eosis of the vernacular Amer- He expected the same immedi- ican, a man who “grew acy and vividness from his inter- according to the need.” Like course with friends—even Lincoln’s, Emerson’s struggle when it took the inspiriting for union and unity was both form of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “hospitable private and public: toward the end of his silence.” life, when mind and memory were failing, In this posthumous biography, the late the lecture platform was as much home to Carlos Baker, professor of English at him as his study. Princeton University, brings the “fire of Carlos Baker died in 1987, before he thought” to life through Emerson’s pursuit could write an introduction pondering of friendship. Despite an occasional cranky “Emerson’s philosophy of friendship.” misanthropy and a persistent resistance to According to James R. Mellow, a biograph- intimacy, Emerson over and over embraced er in his own right and the author of the friendship’s risk and vulnerability as the nec- book’s introduction and epilogue, death essary companion to solitude. also prevented Baker from writing “ ‘Exu- Emerson Among the Eccentrics (an unfor- ent Omnes,’ presumably a summary clo- tunate title that condescends to its subject) sure to the lives of the remaining cast of puts Emerson at the center of the lives of the characters.” Notwithstanding Baker’s origi- Current Books 85.

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