BLOOM’S PERIOD STUDIES American Fiction Between the Wars American Naturalism The American Renaissance Edwardian and Georgian Fiction The Eighteenth Century English Novel Elizabethan Drama English Romantic Poetry Greek Drama The Harlem Renaissance The Italian Renaissance Literature of the Holocaust Modern American Drama Modern American Poetry The Victorian Novel BLOOM’S PERIOD STUDIES Modern American Poetry Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University ® ©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. ® www.chelseahouse.com Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Modern American poetry / [edited by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s period studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-8237-7 (alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)— United States. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PS374.M535M63 2005 811’.508—dc22 2005000754 Contributing editor: Jesse Zuba Cover design by Keith Trego Cover: Layout by EJB Publishing Services All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information on the first page of each article as well as in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 35 Kenneth Burke Mauberley 53 Hugh Kenner The Shadow of a Myth 71 Alan Trachtenberg Open to the Weather 89 Thomas R. Whitaker Douceurs, Tristesses 111 Helen Hennessy Vendler New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 143 Robert Langbaum Soundings for Home 167 Richard Poirier How Shall I Be Mirror to This Modernity?: 195 William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” James E. Miller, Jr. vi Contents Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 233 Eleanor Cook Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 253 Edward Hirsch Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 281 Langdon Hammer Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 311 Katherine Kearns T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 343 David Bromwich H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 363 Louis L. Martz Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: 395 The Poetry of Langston Hughes Anita Patterson Moore’s America 427 Bonnie Costello Chronology 459 Contributors 465 Bibliography 469 Acknowledgments 475 Index 477 Editor’s Note My Introduction comments upon eight poets: E.A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, who can be regarded as the major modern American poets who were born in the nineteenth century. Except for Moore, they are connected by the influence, sometimes concealed, of Emerson or Whitman, or both. Moore is the subject of the greatest American critic since Emerson, the great theorist of rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, who finds in her a radiant sensitivity, after which the late Huge Kenner, supreme antiquarian Modernist, celebrates Pound’s Mauberley sequence. Alan Trachtenberg balances redemption and evil in Hart Crane’s majestic myth of The Bridge, after which Thomas Whitaker praises an early group of the poems of W.C. Williams. Wallace Stevens, our strongest poet since Whitman and Dickinson, is read as an ironic pastoralist by Helen Vendler, while Robert Langbaum examines The Waste Land as a blend of dramatic monologues. Richard Poirier, Frost’s canonical critic, contrasts his poet with Stevens, preferring Frost for his realistic vision of limitations, after which James E. Miller, Jr. contemplates the epic of W.C. Williams, Paterson. The later poems of Stevens are regarded as those of his “whole being” by his best critic, Eleanor Cook, while the poet Edward Hirsch gives an overview of our poetry of the 1920s: Eliot, Millay, Cummings, Pound, Ransom, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Hart Crane, and a group including Bogan, Adams, Wylie, and Teasdale. The most gifted of all American poets, ever, was Hart Crane, but his suicide at thirty-two deprived us of what should have been his major phases. vii viii Editor’s Note Langdon Hammer traces the antithetical influences of William Blake and T.S. Eliot on the young Hart Crane. Katherine Kearns, in a brilliant feminist reading of Frost, shows us Frost’s obsession with visionary, mythical maidens, after which David Bromwich accurately depicts Hart Crane’s struggle with Eliot’s influence. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) is praised by L.L. Martz as a prophet who proclaimed a curious new religion that blended lesbianism and Sigmund Freud. The Harlem jazz poet, Langston Hughes, is realistically hailed by Anita Patterson for his authentic sense of the aesthetic achievement of jazz, while Bonnie Costello concludes this volume with an apotheosis of Marianne Moore as a poet of the American landscape. HAROLD BLOOM Introduction EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON Emerson himself was a product of New England and a man of strong moral habits.... He gave to American romanticism, in spite of its irresponsible doctrine, a religious tone which it has not yet lost and which has often proved disastrous.... there is a good deal of this intellectual laziness in Robinson; and as a result of the laziness, there is a certain admixture of Emersonian doctrine, which runs counter to the principles governing most of his work and the best of it. —YVOR WINTERS The Torrent and the Night Before (published late in 1896 by Robinson himself) remains one of the best first volumes in our poetry. Three of its shorter poems—“George Crabbe,” “Luke Havergal,” “The Clerks”—Robinson hardly surpassed, and three more—“Credo,” “Walt Whitman” (which Robinson unfortunately abandoned), and “The Children of the Night” (reprinted as title-poem in his next volume)—are memorable works, all in the earlier Emersonian mode that culminates in “Bacchus.” The stronger “Luke Havergal” stems from the darker Emersonianism of “Experience” and “Fate,” and has a relation to the singular principles of Merlin. It prophesies Robinson’s finest later lyrics, such as “Eros Turannos” and “For a Dead Lady,” and suggests the affinity between Robinson and Frost that is due to their common Emersonian tradition. In Captain Craig (1902) Robinson published “The Sage,” a direct hymn of homage to Emerson, whose The Conduct of Life had moved him profoundly at a first reading in August 1899. Robinson had read the earlier 1 2 Harold Bloom Emerson well before, but it is fascinating that he came to essays like “Fate” and “Power” only after writing “Luke Havergal” and some similar poems, for his deeper nature then discovered itself anew. He called “Luke Havergal” “a piece of deliberate degeneration,” which I take to mean what an early letter calls “sympathy for failure where fate has been abused and self demoralized.” Browning, the other great influence upon Robinson, is obsessed with “deliberate degeneration” in this sense; Childe Roland’s and Andrea del Sarto’s failures are wilful abuses of fate and demoralizations of self. “The Sage” praises Emerson’s “fierce wisdom,” emphasizes Asia’s influence upon him, and hardly touches his dialectical optimism. This Emerson is “previsioned of the madness and the mean,” fit seer for “the fiery night” of “Luke Havergal”: But there, where western glooms are gathering, The dark will end the dark, if anything: God slays Himself with every leaf that flies, And hell is more than half of paradise. These are the laws of Compensation, “or that nothing is got for nothing,” as Emerson says in “Power.” At the depth of Robinson is this Emersonian fatalism, as it is in Frost, and even in Henry James. “The world is mathematical,” Emerson says, “and has no casualty in all its vast and flowing curve.” Robinson, brooding on the end of “Power,” confessed: “He really gets after one,” and spoke of Emerson as walloping one “with a big New England shingle,” the cudgel of Fate. But Robinson was walloped too well, by which I do not mean what Winters means, since I cannot locate any “intellectual laziness” in Emerson. Unlike Browning and Hardy, Robinson yielded too much to Necessity.... Circumstances and temperament share in Robinson’s obsession with Nemesis, but poetic misprision is part of the story also, for Robinson’s tessera in regard to Emerson relies on completing the sage’s fatalism. From Emerson’s categories of power and circumstance, Robinson fashions a more complete single category, in a personal idealism that is a “philosophy of desperation,” as he feared it might be called. The persuasive desperation of “Luke Havergal” and “Eros Turannos” is his best expression of this nameless idealism that is also a fatalism, but “The Children of the Night,” for all its obtrusive echoes of Tennyson and even Longfellow, shows more clearly what Robinson found to be a possible stance: It is the crimson, not the gray, That charms the twilight of all time; Introduction 3 It is the promise of the day That makes the starry sky sublime; It is the faith within the fear That holds us to the life we curse; So let us in ourselves revere The Self which is the Universe! The bitter charm of this is that it qualifies so severely its too-hopeful and borrowed music.