“The beautiful white ruins / of America”: Surrealist Poetry and the Cold War Peter Roswell Henry Richmond, Virginia M.A., University of Virginia, 2007 M.F.A., University of Oregon, 1997 B.A., University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English University of Virginia December, 2013 Abstract This dissertation focuses on the rise and fall of American Surrealist poetry, a mid- twentieth century aesthetic movement that has been largely dismissed by the major critics, anthology-builders and literary historians of contemporary American poetics (Shetley, von Hallberg, Ramazani). Indeed, the prevalent narrative is that American Surrealism was an awkward adolescent moment in contemporary American poetry, falling between the birth of contemporary poetics in the 1950s and its maturity in the canon-opening and postmodernist work that began to bloom in the 1980s. This dissertation attempts two goals. Firstly, it seeks to tell a fuller story of this movement: by examining the poetic successes of the Surrealists—and the intense threat they posed to their more canonical peers—I argue that this movement played a far more significant role in the development of postwar American poetics than it is afforded. Secondly, this dissertation interrogates the cultural, historical and literary phenomena that allowed American Surrealism to emerge in the 1950s and, just as quickly, to disappear. Ultimately, I argue that American Surrealism was a poetic response to the Cold War, and the study of American Surrealism offers unique insight into the relationship between literature and politics during the Cold War. The Surrealists came at a moment when American poetry—and American culture— was roiling: amid the global expansion as a new postwar superpower; amid the post-GI Bill swelling of universities and the further democratization of education in general and literary study in particular; amid changing ideas (geographically, culturally, educationally) of what it meant to be American. In their history, we see a series of tensions at play in Cold War America and our collective memory of the Cold War. As the concluding chapters of this dissertation argue, the i disappearance of American Surrealism occurred as the academy became far more concerned with the Culture War than the Cold War, and American Surrealism was a casualty of this erasure. In the introduction, I provide a brief historical overview of the rise of Surrealism out of the Dadaist movement and follow its spread across three continents in the years between World War I and World War II. Chapter One examines the first generation of American Surrealists by looking at two Midwestern poets, Robert Bly and James Wright, and placing them in an era defined critically, politically, and popularly by Robert Frost. I argue that the emergence of Surrealism in their writing was both a political and a poetic response to American empire- building and the idea that the Midwestern heartland was the epicenter of essential American values. Chapter Two examines the links between the Cold War, American Surrealism, and poetic form by focusing on two 1967 responses to the emerging crisis in Southeast Asia, Robert Lowell’s Near the Ocean and W.S. Merwin’s The Lice. In comparing these volumes, I argue that Merwin’s volume established American Surrealism as the poetic mode of Cold War dissent. Chapter Three examines the pinnacle of the movement in the 1970s, focusing on the Surrealist volumes of a number of practitioners—James Tate, Charles Wright, Larry Levis, Charles Simic—and positioning them against the context of the “poetry wars” of the 1980s. In the Conclusion, I chronicle the disappearance of American Surrealism and argue that this was the result of two phenomena: the Culture Wars’ displacement of the Cold War at the center of American letters; and the embrace of literary theory in American poetry; finally, I suggest the ultimate costs of forgetting American Surrealism and suggest the possibility of the movement’s heirs. ii Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to thank my committee members Victor Luftig, Paul Cantor, and Stephen Cushman. Victor Luftig’s involvement in this project dates back to an informal conversation we had long ago at the conclusion of my oral exams a decade ago in which he said he’d be “chuffed” at the prospect of being my dissertation director. I am thankful for his support and stewardship of this project. Stephen Cushman, in addition to serving on my committee, has been an enduring model of an outstanding teacher. Indeed, the fact that many of the ideas that appear in this dissertation came indirectly from the Poetic Form course I took with him twelve years ago speaks to the quality of his teaching. Paul Cantor has been my teacher, advocate, mentor, and friend since I was eighteen years old. He has watched me grow up and been there to challenge and support me all along the way. I am deeply indebted to him. I am grateful to Gustavo Pellón for his willingness to serve as an outside reader on the defense and for his sincere engagement with the project. I am particularly lucky to have had him as an outside reader, in that he helped strengthen the sections of this dissertation that touched upon Spanish literature. I am thankful for the friendship of fellow students Peter Capuano, Elise Lauterbach, Melissa White, and Jason Goldsmith during my years in the English department. Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to the following people who supported me along this route: my parents, Molly and Larry Henry; John Stambaugh and Karina Bull; Karen iii Lyons; Robin Lollar; Ian Ayers; Dan Vivian; Ben Arthur; Ron Edwards; Steve Kramp; my colleagues in the Department of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University; the Metz family; and Sarah, Paul, and Barbara Murphy. iv Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgments iii Introduction: Surrealism, from Paris to the Dakotas 1 Chapter 1: Poetic Centers and Poetic Dissenters: Frost, Bly, Wright 28 Chapter 2: “Again again with its pointless sound”: Merwin, Lowell, Vietnam 92 Chapter 3: Levitating Friends, Grave-Robbing Nails, 139 and the Heyday of American Surrealism Conclusion: The Death (and Life?) of American Surrealism 179 Works Cited 197 v Introduction: Surrealism, from Paris to the Dakotas This dissertation provides a history of American Surrealist poetry, an aesthetic mode that traced its lineage to the French Surrealism of the 1920s.1 Arriving on the American poetry scene in the 1950s, Surrealism celebrated the nonsensical, the arbitrary, and the marvelous; it quickly rose to become perhaps the preeminent aesthetic mode of American verse by the 1970s, causing one critic to remark in 1974 that “to look for the influence of surrealism in American poetry today is like looking for references to aquatic animals in Moby Dick” (Zweig 314). Indeed, journals and literary magazines brimmed with American Surrealist verse, poets who embraced American Surrealism won award after award, and two generations of American poets turned their attention towards the French Surrealists and their South American, Spanish, and Eastern European protégés. American Surrealism’s arrival was explosive, and its disappearance was just as abrupt. During the 1980s, it all but vanished from American poetry and criticism. Though its poets continued to write, they adopted all sorts of new aesthetic identities, from eco-poetry to neo- Romanticism to deconstructionist “Ellipticism” to the men’s movement. American Surrealism 1 The correct term for this poetry—whether “Deep Image” or “American Surrealist”—is complicated. Both James Breslin and Paul Breslin use the term “Deep Image” to describe the generation of Bly and Wright; this term comes from Bly’s invocation of a poetry that draws upon “deep images of the unconscious” in his 1959 essay “On English and American Poetry” (47). In turn, W.S. Merwin, James Tate, Charles Simic, Charles Wright and Larry Levis (among many others) have been called “Surrealist” by Paul Zweig, Robert Pinsky and Paul Breslin. For the sake of consistency, I will use the terms “American Surrealism” and “American Surrealist.” Paul Breslin offers a useful discussion of the distinctions and correlations between “Deep Image” poetry and what he terms the “New Surrealism” (and what I believe to be “American Surrealism”) in The Psycho-Political Muse (118). Joron is also quite useful on this distinction (19-21). 1 has been largely dismissed by recent histories of American poetry, and it is entirely possible that future histories of twentieth-century American poetry will no longer even mention the movement. Such an omission would be a grave mistake. This dissertation advocates for the importance of the American Surrealist movement and to suggest that its disappearance is not, in fact, due to its irrelevance but, in fact, due to the larger political and cultural shifts taking place within the academy as the Cold War gave way to the Culture War. I argue that American Surrealism was a poetic response to the Cold War, and the study of American Surrealism offers unique insight into the relationship between literature and politics during the Cold War. The Surrealists came at a moment when American poetry—and American culture—was roiling: amid the global expansion as a new postwar superpower; amid the post-GI Bill swelling of universities and the further democratization of education in general and literary study in particular; amid changing ideas (geographically, culturally, educationally) of what it meant to be American. In their history, we see a series of tensions at play in Cold War America and our collective memory of the Cold War. An inevitable question follows: “If American Surrealism is so important, why did it fall out of favor during the 1980s and, furthermore, why has it disappeared from literary study?” As the concluding chapters of this dissertation argue, the disappearance of American Surrealism occurred as the academy became far more concerned with the Culture War than the Cold War, and American Surrealism was a casualty of this erasure.