Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism
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“My Life Is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046402 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA “My Life is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism A dissertation presented by Adam Nathaniel Scheffler to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2017 © 2017 Adam Nathaniel Scheffler All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Peter Sacks Adam Nathaniel Scheffler Stephen Burt “My life is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism Abstract Lyric poetry has the reputation of being solitary, hermetic, and focused exclusively on the experiences of the poet or first-person speaker. This reputation can make lyric poems seem self- involved and even solipsistic – uninterested in pressing social, historical, and ethical concerns. I contest this notion, and argue for lyric poetry’s social relevance, by drawing attention to the many poems written about other people. I argue that inherited New Critical ideas have guided the common false assumption that lyric poems must be solitary, and I make the case for an alternative non-New Critical kind of ‘lyric reading’ in which we pay more attention and attribute more significance to the myriad people and characters who appear in poems. I also provide a few general theoretical categories for thinking about others in lyric. In particular, I distinguish between ‘closed’ characters who don’t seem to resemble real people or to refer to real situations beyond the poems in which they appear, and ‘open’ characters who aren’t props or masks for the poet, but seem full of independent vitality, and to refer us to realistic, external lives outside the text. Finally, I argue that a generation of American poets in the 1950s and 60s broke from New Critical well-wrought solitude and autonomy by writing poems full of open characters. My dissertation examines four such poets – Thom Gunn, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara. I explore these poets’ works in depth, taking them as rich case studies in lyric representations of others and in the complex roles others can play in lyric poems. iii Page Left Intentionally Blank iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: That they are there! 1 Chapter 1: Lyric Character 35 Chapter 2: Thom Gunn I: Closed and Open 84 Chapter 3: Thom Gunn II: Mean Streets 143 Chapter 4: James Wright I: The Mill 193 Chapter 5: James Wright II: Only One Life 249 Chapter 6: Adrienne Rich: Flawed Heroines 283 Chapter 7: Frank O’Hara: A Party Full of Friends 354 Bibliography 431 v Page Left Intentionally Blank vi Acknowledgements: First and foremost I’d like to thank the members of my dissertation committee. Peter Sacks guided me through this long process with patience, warmth, and wisdom. His deeply humane scholarship inspired this project and made me believe it was possible. Stephen Burt greatly expanded my understanding of contemporary poetry. Their incredible generosity and energy have also given me a model to aspire to in my own teaching. Philip Fisher showed me the range, subtly, and power of good aesthetically-oriented scholarship; he also showed me that labels and categories, when they are used well, can help one to survey and appreciate the sheer abundance of literary treasures. Elisa New’s suggestions about how to be a better, more engaging writer have been invaluable, and I’m still learning from them. Lisa was also the first professor to show me that humor is an essential part of intelligence, and that one should never lose sight of the people who write the texts we analyze. I am incredibly grateful to have had such a brilliant and bighearted committee. I’d also like to thank all of the family members and friends without whose support finishing graduate school and writing this dissertation simply wouldn’t have been possible: Lindsay Mitchell; Kathryn, Gabe, Samuel, Laurie, and Roz Scheffler; Dan, Dave, and Miki Donoho; Leo, Sarah, Peter, and Deborah Goldberg; Darlene Mitchell, Sherry Reames, Sue Wilson, Dave Weimer, Stephen Tardif, Tom Roberts, Jim Pautz, Gabriel Houck, Emily Adams, Jay Deshpande, Alison Chapman, Daniel Williams, Kevin Holden, David Nee, Case Kerns, Jorie Graham, Kathryn Roberts, Mande Zecca, Gabe Katsh, Hannah Waight, Rafi Rosen, Brenden Millstein, Eric Idsvoog, Ori Fienberg, Yen Pham, Jess Lucey, Adrienne Raphel, Charlie Maule, Christopher Le Coney, Rebecca Graff, Martin Reames, Julia Bruce, and Christian Carrick. Thank you all for being in my life and helping me to make it this far! vii But what, without the social thought of thee, Would be the wonders of the sky and sea? –John Keats viii Introduction: That they are there! Lyric poetry has the reputation of being solitary, even hermetic: frequently, when new readers and students want to learn about the social world through literature they turn to plays and fiction. Poets and poems can seem aloof – so invested in private imaginative visions and uninterested in broader social phenomena that it’s unclear why non-specialists should care to read them. Many critics have amplified this impression by leaving ideas about the social out of discussions of poetry, while other scholars have directly attacked lyric for its isolation, which they often see as suggestive of a troubling disregard for historical and ethical concerns. As lyric poetry more than these other genres has become increasingly marginalized over the last century, and has come to seem increasingly difficult for even casual readers of good will to understand and appreciate, I think it’s more important then ever that we revisit the question of lyric’s aloofness. Contesting such aloofness might make poetry seem more welcoming and hospitable to readers, as well as of greater interest to contextually-oriented scholars. Since the many attempts thus far to re-examine the question of lyric’s sociality have overlooked the role of specific people in poems, this project begins by asking how interested modern American poets are not in lyric isolationism, in personas or in masks for the self, or even in riddling philosophical issues about society or about Otherness at large, but actually in portraying and describing encounters with specific tangible others. To answer this question, four poets have come to mind who were all born between 1926 and 1929 and came of age at the end of The Second World War. Where the New Critics championed impersonality and well-wrought autonomy, these poets stressed greater personality, and struggled to open up their poems to the outside world. Where modernists such as Eliot and Stevens turned away from others – Eliot from tormented cityscapes to isolated religious poems, and Stevens from marriage to interior paramour – these poets filled their poems with outsiders from depression era Ohio, New York artists and passers-by, counter-cultural San Franciscans, and women, ordinary and famous, struggling against the prescriptions of gender. Moreover, these four poets – James Wright, Frank O’Hara, Thom Gunn, and Adrienne Rich – frequently wrote poems based on real people as if to ensure that their poems would not just have characters in 1 them, but would actually bear the impress of other minds. This book will focus on these four poets as emblematic of a social shift within mid-to-late 20th century American poetry away from modernism, and especially away from the aloof, simplified version of modernist poetry found in the New Criticism of the 1940s and ‘50s. In contrast to these earlier periods, this new poetry has a serious and sustained interest in portraying particular others. This social turn doesn’t only involve writing poems with some named characters: there are, after all, people in Eliot and Stevens. But not all of these characters are equally lively or resistant to becoming mere masks and props. There is a world of difference between “De Bailhache, Fresca and Mrs Cammel, whirled/ Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear/ In fractured atoms” – or Ramon Fernandez appearing and vanishing through a single appeal – and the nuanced psychological portraits we find in Thom Gunn, or the surprisingly vital depictions of beleaguered family members in James Wright’s poems.1 Lyric characters need not be, as James Merrill says at one point, “figures like poor Fräulein von Kulp, frozen forever in a single telling gesture” (Eliot) or “John Adams wound like a mummy in a thousand ticker tape statistics” (Pound).2 They can also surprise, inspire, overtake: they can adopt a child when you aren’t looking (Gunn); make the history of art seem boring and inadequate by eating yoghurt (O’Hara); inspire regret decades after the fact by taking you on a date in a wheelchair (Rich); hold sixty- five cents in a hook and place it gently into your freezing hand (Wright). Exploring the work of my four main poets will not only help us recognize a historical turn away from more aloof forms of lyric poetry, it will also help us think about what lyric is like at its most other-directed. Yet before I can move on to discuss period or aesthetics I need briefly to describe our method of reading and thinking about lyric poems.